Routledge Library Editions: George Eliot, 5-Volume Set 9781138185449, 9781315644318, 9781138182004, 9781315646619

Table of contents :
Cover
Volume1
Cover
Half Title
Title
Copyright
Original Title
Original Copyright
Contents
George Eliot—Her Life and Works
Scheme of Extracts
Milieu
1: Adam Bede, Ch. 6
2: The Mill on the Floss, Bk. I, Ch. 12
3: The Mill on the Floss, Bk. VII, Ch. 2
4: Silas Marner, Ch. 3
5: Middlemarch, Ch. 45
6: Middlemarch, Ch. 84
7: Daniel Deronda, Ch. 5
8: Daniel Deronda, Ch. 50
The Approach to Character
9: Adam Bede, Ch. 26
10: The Mill on the Floss, Bk. IV, Ch. 3
11: The Mill on the Floss, Bk. V, Ch. 2
12: Middlemarch, Ch. 1
13: Middlemarch, Ch. 23
14: Middlemarch, Ch. 29
15: Daniel Deronda, Ch. 28
16: Daniel Deronda, Ch. 69
Dialogue
17: Adam Bede, Ch. 16
18: Adam Bede, Ch. 53
19: The Mill on the Floss, Bk. I, Ch. 7
20: Felix Holt, Ch. 1
21: Middlemarch, Ch. 12
22: Middlemarch, Ch. 45
23: Daniel Deronda, Ch. 22
24: Daniel Deronda, Ch. 48
Narrative
25: Adam Bede, Ch. 36
26: The Mill on the Floss, Bk. I. Ch. ii
27: Silas Marner, Ch. 12
28: Middlemarch, Ch. 42
29: Middlemarch, Ch. 70
30: Daniel Deronda, Ch. 40
31: Daniel Deronda, Ch. 54
Select Bibliography
Volume2
Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Original Title Page
Original Copyright Page
Dedication
Table of Contents
Preface
Acknowledgements
1: The Making and Remaking of George Eliot
2: Reconstructing George Eliot
3: Hetty and Dinah: The Battle for Predominance in Adam Bede
4: Demonism, Feminism, and Incest in The Mill on The Floss
5: Romola: Woman as History
6: Language and Desire in Felix Holt
7: Dialectic and Polyphony in Middlemarch
8: The Open-Endedness of Daniel Deronda
9: George Eliot and Twentieth-Century Feminist Perspectives
Notes
References
Index
Volume3
Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Original Title Page
Original Copyright Page
Dedication
Preface
Table of Contents
Introduction
Abbreviations
1: Poetry and Prose, From the Notebook of an Eccentric (4 December 1846-19 February 1847)
2: [The Progress of the Intellect] (January, 1851)
3: [The Life of Sterling] (January, 1852)
4: Woman in France: Madam de Sablé (October, 1854)
5: Three Months in Weimar (June, 1855)
6: Liszt, Wagner, and Weimar (July, 1855)
7: [Westward Ho! and Constance Herbert] (July, 1855)
8: Lord Brougham's Literature (7 July 1855)
9: The Morality of Wilhelm Meister (21 July 1855)
10: The Future of German Philosophy (28 July 1855)
11: Life and Opinions of Milton (4 August 1855)
12: Evangelical Teaching: Dr: Cumming (October, 1855)
13: [Tennyson's Maud] (October, 1855)
14: Margaret Fuller and Mary Wollstonecraft (13 October 1855)
15: Translations and Translators (20 October 1855)
16: Thomas Carlyle (27 October 1855)
17: German Wit: Heinrich Heine (January, 1856)
18: Introduction to Genesis (12 January 1856)
19: The Antigone and Its Moral (29 March 1856)
20: The Natural History of German Life (July, 1856)
21: Silly Novels by Lady Novelists (October, 1856)
22: [Three Novels] (October, 1856)
23: Worldliness and Other-Worldliness: The Poet Young (January, 1857)
24: A Word for the Germans (7 March 1865)
25: Servants' Logic (17 March 1865)
26: The Influence of Rationalism (15 May 1865)
27: Address to Working Men, By Felix Holt (January, 1868)
28: Notes on Form in Art (1868)
29: Leaves from a Note-Book
Appendices
Index
Volume4
Cover
Half Title
Title
Copyright
Original Title
Original Copyright
Contents
Introduction
I: 'Scenes of Clerical Life' : The Diagram and The Picture
II: 'Adam Bede'
III: 'The Mill on The Floss'
IV: 'Silas Marner'
V: 'Romola' as Fable
VI: 'Felix Holt The Radical'
VII: 'Middlemarch' : A Note on George Eliot's 'Wisdom'
VIII: 'Daniel Deronda' : George Eliot and Political Change
IX: Idea and Image in The Novels of George Eliot
X: The Pastoral of Intellect
Index
Volume5
Cover
Half
Title
Title
Page
Copyright
Page
Original Title
Page
Original Copyright
Page
Author’s Preface
Table of
Contents
Dedication
1: Preliminary
2: Art, Ideas, Aesthetics
3: A Study of Provincial Life
4: The Narrator
5: Character and Characterisation
6: Dorothea
7: The Parts and the Whole
8: Critical History
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

ROUTLEDGE LIBRARY EDITIONS: GEORGE ELIOT

Volume 1

GEORGE ELIOT

GEORGE ELIOT

IAN ADAM

First published in 1969 by Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd This edition first published in 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 1969 Ian Adam All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: ISBN: ISBN: ISBN:

978-1-138-18544-9 978-1-315-64431-8 978-1-138-18200-4 978-1-315-64661-9

(Set) (Set) (ebk) (Volume 1) (hbk) (Volume 1) (ebk)

Publisher’s Note The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this reprint but points out that some imperfections in the original copies may be apparent. Disclaimer The publisher has made every effort to trace copyright holders and would welcome correspondence from those they have been unable to trace.

George Eliot by Ian Adam

LONDON

ROUTLEDGE & KEGAN PAUL NEW YORK; HUMANITIES PRESS

First published 1969 by Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd Broadway House, 68-74 Carter Lane London E.C.4 Printed in Great Britain by Northumberland Press Ltd Gateshead © Jan Adam r969 No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except for the quotation of brief passages in criticism SBN SBN

7100

7100

6736 4 (c) 6735 6 (p)

Contents

GEORGE ELIOT-HER LIFE AND WORKS

I

SCHEME OF

8

EXTRACTS

9

MILIEU 1

2

3

4 5 6

7 8

Adam Bede, ch. 6 The Mill on the Floss, Bk. I, ch. 12 The Mill on the Floss, Bk. VII, ch. 2 Silas Marner, ch. 3 Middlemarch, ch. 45 Middlemarch, ch. 84 Daniel Deronda, ch. 5 Daniel Deronda, ch. 50

10

13

16 I9 2I

25 29 32

C H A R ACT E R

34

Adam Bede, ch. 26 The Mill on the Floss, Bk. IV, ch. 3 II The Mill on the Floss, Bk. V, ch. 2 I2 Middlemarch, ch. I I3 Middlemarch, ch. 23 14 Middlemarch, ch. 29 I5 Daniel Deronda, ch. 28 I6 Daniel Deronda, ch. 69

35 37 39

T H E AP P R 0 ACH

T0

9

IO

DIALOGUE

I7 I8

Adam Bede, ch. I6 Adam Bede, ch. 53

42

45 48 52 55 57

58 61

vii

CONTENTS

The Mill on the Floss, Bk. I, ch. 7 20 Felix Holt, ch. r 2r Middlemarch, ch. r2 22 Middlemarch, ch. 45 23 Daniel Deronda, ch. 22 24 Daniel Deronda, ch. 48 19

NARRATIVE

Adam Bede, ch. 36 The Mill on the Floss, Bk. I. ch. ii 27 Silas Marner, ch. r2 28 Middlemarch, ch. 42 29 Middlemarch, ch. 70 30 Daniel Deronda, ch. 40 31 Daniel Deronda, ch. 54 25 26

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

viii

85 86

88

94

97 roo 105 107

George Eliot-her life and works

George Eliot (whose real name was Mary Ann Evans) is very much a writer of ordinary human experience, whose works emphasize commonplace characters such as rural clergymen, peasants, villagers, or provincial businessmen, or commonplace situations of work, marriage, or family life, or the combination of these. Such emphases provide one reason (among several) why she is often described as a 'realistic' novelist, for one feature of realism in literature is the choice of the normal over the exceptional, the ordinary over the sensational in subject-matter. And while we must qualify the notion of George Eliot as a realist when we consider her techniques in different novels, especially the symbolic techniques of the later works, this realism of subject-matter remains a much more constant feature. Yet though her subject-matter may be ordinary, the significance derived from it is not. The reason, of course, lies in her far from ordinary mind, not only in its gifts of wit, observation and sympathy, which are shared with other major novelists, but also in its lucid and energetic intelligence: a gift much more her own. As a result she does more than vividly and sympathetically render her material: she also demonstrates its complexity and importance. George Eliot sees tragedy where others would I

GE 0 R GE

E L I 0 T-H E R

L I FE

AND

W 0 RK S

see a failed marriage, or a complex social organization where others would see a simple village, and she shows why the marriage is tragic, how the village is complex. Her imagination is obviously one which has been formed by sympathetic experience with other human beings, but it has also been formed by intellectual experience which can provide the deep insights of thought. It is perhaps this fusion of intellectual range and depth with a deep feeling for others which Henry James had in mind when he spoke of her as a 'philosophic' novelist-an accurate description if we put the emphasis equally on both words. The reconciliation of intellectual and emotional needs which we sense achieved in the works was not easily achieved in the life. She was born in 1819, in a rural environment in the midlands. Her childhood shows a deep affection for home, countryside, and family, especially for her father and brother. In adolescence, under the influence of evangelical doctrine, she became fervently religious and even, in a moment of extreme piety, rejected fiction as suitable reading. Her position was perhaps uncomfortable for a family whose religious doctrines were generally easygoing, but not impossible to accept. Real difficulty came in 1842, when the reading and discussion of historical criticism of the Bible with a free-thinking circle in Coventry led her to reject its supernatural content. There was a painful estrangement from her father, finally settled by a compromise which maintained her intellectual integrity without sacrificing her family ties. She agreed to attend church with her father, and he allowed her thoughts to go their own way. During the next twelve years George Eliot did intellectual work which contributed to the main currents of Victorian thought. In the Midlands and later London she completed translations of Strauss's Life of jesus and Feuerbach's Essence of Christianity from the German, and began 2

GE0 R GE

E L I 0 T-H E R

L I F E

AND

W 0 RK S

one of Spinoza's Ethics from the Latin. She also wrote for leading London journals, especially the liberal Westminster Review, which she also edited for two years. At the same time the need for a life of feeling was not dormant, a fact revealed not only in many sensitive and affectionate letters to friends, but also in the incomplete record we have of a love affair with another editor of the Westminster Review, John Chapman. Some years later, in 1854, came the action which was to scandalize her society, cast her out from her family, and open her career as a novelist. She eloped with George Henry Lewes, a married man, who could not divorce his wife because he had condoned her previous adultery. Lewes provided the combination of emotional security and intellectual stimulus she was always seeking. Mercurial, buoyant, and affectionate, he was a versatile talent who wrote books on acting, physiology, philosophy, and zoology, as well as two novels and a famous biography of the German poet Goethe. He provided a good counterbalance to her much more introspective nature. With Lewes' encouragement, she began to write fiction. The first fruit, three stories about rural clergymen, appeared in parts in Blackwood's Magazine, r857-58. She adopted the pseudonym, George Eliot, partly to avoid the prejudice against women writers, and partly, one suspects, to shield herself from direct criticism to which she was always hypersensitive. One year later her first novel, Adam Bede, appeared to great acclaim and popularity, and her reputation was established. Her identity was soon revealed, but she retained her pen-name for all her subsequent works : six novels, a verse-drama, one volume of poetry and one of essays. Her reputation remained high through her lifetime. She died in r88o, two years after Lewes, and six months after a second and orthodox marriage which finally won a communication from her brother Isaac, 3

GE0 R GE

E L I 0 T-H E R

L I F E AND W 0 R K S

silent since learning of her union with Lewes, twentythree years before. Like all major writers George Eliot works within a tradition, consolidating and building on the work of others. She is perhaps most obviously traditional in the Victorian form of her novels, which like those of her contemporaries are written on a larger scale than most written today, with an abundance of characters, incidents, details, and events. With such a scale the Victorian novelist was able to give a comprehensive picture of a society, in the variety of its groups and in the interaction among them. He was also left with room to comment on and interpret the characters, actions and themes of his presentations. Such comment is perhaps the most distinguishing feature of Victorian fiction, and reaches one of its highest points of development in George Eliot's work, where the author's presence contributes to an extraordinary range of ironic, comic and pathetic effects. This convention of omniscient authorial comment has been criticized as disrupting 'fictional illusion' by reminding us of the outside world, but this now seems too na"ive a view, a generalization based on examples which may indeed have been clumsy, obvious, or otherwise mismanaged. This book will provide several examples from which the reader may draw his own conclusions. George Eliot not only works within a tradition in adopting the novel form of her contemporaries, but also in drawing on specific writers who inspire or affect her work. There is her contemporary, John Ruskin, the third volume of whose Modern Painters she reviewed in 1856, noting particularly his emphasis on 'realism-the doctrine that all truth and beauty are to be attained by a humble and faithful study of nature'-an emphasis which we also find in her fiction. There is the work of the classical Greek tragedians, which influenced her conception of the tragic 4

GE0 RGE

E L I 0 T-H E R

L I F E

AND

W 0 R K S

form she was to adapt for the novel. And one may go back (as she does) to Cervantes' Don Quixote to see one source of a theme which she is to exploit in a particularly psychological manner, the problem of separating illusion from reality. But more significant influences are two writers, one romantic and one classical, whose major works were being completed only a few years before she was born. They are Wordsworth and Jane Austen. Wordsworth leaves his mark especially on the early works, Jane Austen on the late. Like many of Wordsworth's poems the stories of Scenes of Clerical Life and the novels Adam Bede and Silas Marner deal with humble and rustic life, and if George Eliot's rustics are the less idealized and more realistic, her aim is his : to show the dignity and worth of an unsophisticated society and people. As well, many passages in the early works show a Wordsworthian quality of luminescence in their style, the quality of 'emotion recollected in tranquillity'. This is especially true of The Mill on the Floss, a 'novel of memory', concerned, like Wordsworth's Prelude, with the psychological development of a human being from childhood, the formative power of the past on the present. Jane Austen's influence shows especially in the satiric note brought to bear on the more genteel society of the later novels, especially Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda. Here we see her fools and egoists, as well as George Eliot's version of her wise and humane figures. At times there are remarkably direct echoes : we see the ancestor of Gwendolen in Daniel Deronda in Jane Austen's Emma, like her, witty, egotistical and manipulative, like her, too unpleasant to be totally charming and too charming to be totally unpleasant. If Jane Austen seems to influence the late novels, and Wordsworth the early, there is one respect in which the influence of both is always present. It lies in George Eliot's 5

GE 0 R GE

E L I 0 T-H E R

L I FE

AND

W 0 RK S

moral ideas, which represent a fusion of the views of both authors. Of course, we should not interpret 'moral ideas' in any narrow sense, but rather in the sense of Matthew Arnold's phrase, the study of 'how to live'. For Wordsworth this meant the opposite of following an abstract code of human behaviour. Rather, the 'moral being' lay in the response of human being to human need, the extension of our fellow feeling. This too is George Eliot's view: the aim of her art is to 'enlarge our sympathies', and the demonstration of such enlargement is embodied in her novels, which always contain scenes which highlight the moving and restorative influence of one human being on another. But such a notion lacks a social dimension, which Jane Austen supplies. If we require sympathy to understand and live with our fellows, we also require judgement. Jane Austen sees the basis of that judgement in a moral order which will restrain, control, and reform the destructive impulses of the ego, and her emphasis is also George Eliot's. There are some differences in conception: Jane Austen tends to see the order in the established values of society, while George Eliot, less certain of those values, sees it more in general concepts of duty and selfsacrifice, but its function in both is the same : to implicitly and ironically comment on characters, and to provide the basis for their possible restoration. George Eliot works within a tradition and adds to that tradition. Her works point to the future as well as the past. Some of these advances have been suggested : she extends the novel's range of subject matter in emphasizing ordinary lives and situations as suitable subjects for fiction, and indeed for tragic treatment. Original too is her emphasis on the work which occupies most of mankind much of the time. George Eliot shows her characters at work, or wondering about the meaning of their work, or wondering about the work they should do. And she 6

GEOKGE

ELIOT-HER LIFE

AND WORKS

presents some larger issues arising out of that showing: how society may make creative work possible or impossible, or the role of that creative work in making a full human being. There are other issues raised of immediate relevance today, among them the social role of women (as with Dorothea in Middlemarch), the relation of education to individual and social need (as with Tom Tulliver in The Mill on the Floss) or the difficulty of maintaining a sense of human community in a growing and complex society (implicit or explicit in all the novels). And in terms of technical contribution we can point especially to the later novels, where passages rendering the inner lives of the characters are remarkably like the 'dramatized consciousness' of the novels of Henry James, and therefore one step away from the 'stream of consciousness' of the modern novels of Virginia Woolf or James Joyce. Similarly we can see another kind of emphasis on inner life-the inner life of memory-which, present in most of her fiction and especially in The Mill on the Floss, is developed from Wordsworth and is to leave its mark on the greatest modern novelist of memory, Marcel Proust. Or we can point to Daniel Deronda, with its use of flashback to bind together two parallel plots, its openness of beginning and ending, or its attempt in one of the plots to transform many of the conventions of the novel form. Like all major artists George Eliot leads us to new possibilities, for fiction and for life.

7

Scheme of extracts

This Profile emphasizes original and traditional sides to George Eliot's genius. The first two sections, on 'Milieu' and 'Approach to Character' illustrate especially the powers of sociological and psychological insight and analysis which are generally recognized as the distinctive features of her imagination. The second two sections, on 'Dialogue' and 'Narrative', illustrate especially more traditional (and somewhat neglected) novelistic strengths where we may see that imagination, literally, in action. Throughout, the analysis following the extracts will emphasize the artistic techniques which create the effects illustrated. In all sections the arrangement of extracts is chronological, so that there will be an incidental (though only incidental) outline of the novelist's development. I have given very full representation to the major novels most likely to be read by the student, especially to Adam Bede, The Mill on the Floss, Middlemarch, and Daniel Deronda, which may therefore be treated as individual profiles. There are no extracts from Romola or the early Scenes of Clerical Life. All references are to the definitive Cabinet Edition (Edinburgh, r878-8o). 8

Milieu

George Eliot's novels are set mainly in the rural community or village, or in the provincial town. There are exceptions in the historical novel Romola, set in sixteenthcentury Florence, and Daniel Deronda, unusual in its variety of English and continental settings, but that is the pattern. She is not a novelist of the major urban centre, as were her contemporaries, Dickens and Thackeray. To rural and provincial life she brings her novelist's version of the sociological imagination, so that we are constantly made aware of the economic and social forces which help determine individual lives. Her study of society is not, however, 'scientifically neutral', as that of a social scientist might be. It is rather informed by a moral imagination which is at once unpatronizing and unevasive, scrupulously rendering the strengths and limitations of any given society. Emphasis varies from novel to novel, but we may generally say that with the larger and more complex societies of the later novels there is both a greater emphasis on limitations, and a more critical tone in their presentation. The faults of the small centre, when stressed, are seen to be those of parochialism-narrow-mindedness and complacency-but those of the larger may include these and add some of its own. These are products of its 9

MILIEU

complexity: increasing individual alienation and social impersonality. To be sure, some sense of community persists, but one feels that it fights a losing battle. It is significant that in the later novels we are frequently forced to think of milieu in terms of social class rather than society, for the characters themselves have lost contact with the total social life. Below we will examine in detail the milieux of individual novels and the means by which we are given a sense of their changing quality. Adam Bede is a rural tragedy, showing the destructive impact on a stable farming community of the seduction of a milkmaid, Hetty Sorrel, by Arthur Donnithorne, son of the local squire. A major symbol of the vitality and stability of that community is the Hall Farm, leased from the squire by Mr and Mrs Poyser, Hetty's uncle and aunt. In a sense, too, the farm remains a symbol throughout George Eliot's fiction, for the duties and affections embodied in its way of life are never forgotten as values by which society is to be judged.

I

Plenty of life there! though this is the drowsiest time of the year, just before hay-harvest; and it is the drowsiest time of the day too, for it is close upon three by the sun, and it is half-past three by Mrs Poyser's handsome eightday clock. But there is always a stronger sense of life when the sun is brilliant after rain; and now he is pouring down his beams, and making sparkles among the wet straw, and lighting up every patch of vivid green moss on the red tiles of the cow-shed, and turning even the muddy water that is hurrying along the channel to the drain into a mirror for the yellow-billed ducks, who are seizing the opportunity of getting a drink with as much body in it as possible. There is quite a concert of noises : the great bullro

MILIEU

dog, chained against the stables, is thrown into furious exasperation by the unwary approach of a cock too near the mouth of his kennel, and sends forth a thundering bark, which is answered by two fox-hounds shut up in the opposite cow-house; the old top-knotted hens, scratching with their chicks among the straw, set up a sympathetic croaking as the discomfited cock joins them; a sow with her brood, all very muddy as to the legs, and curled as to the tail, throws in some deep staccato notes; our friends the calves are bleating from the home croft; and, under all, a fine ear discerns the continuous hum of human voices. For the great barn-doors are thrown wide open, and men are busy there mending the harness, under the superintendence of Mr Go by the 'whittaw', otherwise saddler, who entertains them with the latest Treddleston gossip. It is certainly rather an unfortunate day that Alick, the shepherd, has chosen for having the whittaws, since the morning turned out so wet; and Mrs Poyser has spoken her mind pretty strongly as to the dirt which the extra number of men's shoes brought into the house at dinnertime. Indeed, she has not yet recovered her equanimity on the subject, though it is now nearly three hours since dinner, and the house-floor is perfectly clean again; as clean as everything else in that wonderful house-place, where the only chance of collecting a few grains of dust would be to climb on the salt-coffer, and put your finger on the high mantel-shelf on which the glittering brass candle-sticks are enjoying their summer sinecure; for at this time of year, of course, every one goes to bed while it is yet light, or at least light enough to discern the outline of objects after you have bruised your shins against them. Surely nowhere else could an oak clock-case and an oak table have got to such a polish by the hand : genuine 'elbow polish', as Mrs Poyser called it, for she thanked God she never had any of your varnished rubbish in her house. Adam Bede, ch. 6 II

MILIEU

The passage is unusual in George Eliot's fiction but typical of Adam Bede in that the presentation of milieu is unanalytic. The language is that of total acceptance, all warmth and no irony. The presentation might be called 'idyllic' were it not for the toughening effect of its realism, a realism which should not be seen, however, as cool or disillusioned rendering, but rather as a kind of circumstantiality, what George Eliot calls the 'faithful representing of commonplace things'. That kind of realism is never to be quite the same in her fiction, and is to disappear almost altogether in the later works. Here we see it in such details as the 'yellow-billed ducks' and the 'old topknotted hens' of the barnyard, or the 'glittering brass candle-sticks' in the house. Such details are built up cumulatively, in a series of leisurely clauses, and both their abundance and the lazy manner of clausal procedure help to create our sense of the richness and stability of the farm and the way of life it represents. In the second section of the passage characters are introduced, notably Mrs Poyser, and the casual, almost anecdotal account of their activities has a similar effect. A sense of continuity through time is created as well by a variety of means, among them the reporting of customary farm activities as well as those at work on this particular occasion. Sometimes very commonplace stylistic details have functions too easily overlooked: one might consider, for example, the effect of the persistent choice of the definite over the indefinite article. The rich, anecdotal quality of background rendering seen in Adam Bede is still present in George Eliot's next novel, The Mill on the Floss, but it is mixed with a new note, analytic and more critical. The following passage might be contrasted with the one above; its quality is not just that of something recollected in rich detail, but also of something understood by an intelligence which tries 12

MILIEU

to see it in historical depth and assess it by historical comparison. St Ogg's is an old provincial town by the river Floss, and George Eliot has been talking about the floods which ravaged it in the past. Mrs Glegg is the aunt of the novel's heroine, Maggie Tulliver.

2

But the town knew worse troubles even than the floods -troubles of the civil wars, when it was a continual fighting-place where first Puritans thanked God for the blood of the Loyalists, and then Loyalists thanked God for the blood of the Puritans. Many honest citizens lost all their possessions for conscience' sake in those times and went forth beggared from their native town. Doubtless there are many houses standing now on which those honest citizens turned their backs in sorrow; quaint-gabled houses looking on the river, jammed between newer warehouses and penetrated by surprising passages which turn and turn at sharp angles till they lead you out on a muddy strand overflowed continually by the rushing tide. Everywhere the brick houses have a mellow look, and in Mrs Clegg's day there was no incongruous new-fashioned smartness, no plate-glass in shop windows, no fresh stucco-facing or other fallacious attempt to make fine old red St Ogg wear the air of a town that sprang up yesterday. The shop windows were small and unpretending, for the farmers' wives and daughters who came to do their shopping on market-days were not to be withdrawn from their re,gular, well-known shops, and the tradesmen had no wares intended for customers who would go on their way and be seen no more. Ah! Even Mrs Clegg's day seems far back in the past now, separated from us by changes that widen the years. War and the rumour of war had then died out from the minds of men, and if they were ever thought of by the farmers in drab greatcoats, who

13

MILIEU

shook the grain out of their sample-bags and buzzed over it in the full market-place, it was as a state of things that belonged to a past golden age, when prices were high. Surely the time was gone forever when the broad river could bring up unwelcome ships; Russia was only the place where the linseed came from-the more the better -making grist for the great vertical millstones with their scythelike arms, roaring and grinding and carefully sweeping as if an informing soul were in them. The Catholics, bad harvests, and the mysterious fluctuations of trade were the three evils mankind had to fear; even the floods had not been great of late years. The mind of St Ogg's did not look extensively before or after. It inherited a long past without thinking of it and had no eyes for the spirits that walk the streets. Since the centuries when St Ogg with his boat and the Virgin Mother at the prow had been seen on the wide water, so many memories had been left behind and had gradually vanished like the receding hill-tops! And the present time was like the level plain where men lose their belief in volcanoes and earthquakes, thinking tomorrow will be as yesterday and the giant forces that used to shake the earth are forever laid to sleep. The days were gone when people could be greatly wrought upon by their faith, still less change it; the Catholics were formidable because they would lay hold of government and property and burn men alive, not because any sane and honest parishioner of St Ogg's could be brought to believe in the Pope. One aged person remembered how a rude multitude had been swayed when John Wesley preached in the cattle-market, but for a long while it had not been expected of preachers that they should shake the souls of men. An occasional burst of fervour in Dissenting pulpits on the subject of infant baptism was the only symptom of a zeal unsuited to sober times when men had done with change. Protestantism sat at ease, unmindful of schisms, careless of proselytism; Dissent was an inheritance along with a superior pew and a business connection; and Churchmanship only wondered

I4

MILIEU

contemptuously at Dissent as a foolish habit that clung greatly to families in the grocery and chandlering lines, though not incompatible with prosperous wholesale dealing. The Mill on the Floss, Bk. L ch. 12 There are two main periods of time contrasted in this passage: the troubled past in which the town was subject to dangers from floods and civil and foreign war, and in which its citizens could be moved by issues of patriotism and faith, and the more stable present of self-satisfied business activity. The past is used to shed an ironic light on the present, whose comfortable self-sufficiency really derives from blindness to the larger forces that move nature and mankind, whose conservatism is seen not as an awareness of history, but as an attempt to escape from its processes. George Eliot is here dealing with what in other hands might have been an essay, but as a novelist her achievement is to make the abstract and concrete work hand in hand, so that the analysis of the town becomes inseparable from its imaginative recreation. So, for example, the general comment 'War and the rumour of war had then died out from the minds of men' is syntactically and logically linked with 'the farmers in drab greatcoats' and the detail of their activities, as well as with the echo of their speech in the final phrases of the sentence linking the golden age with high prices. Such echo of complacent local speech is common in the passage ('Russia was only the place where the linseed came from -the more the better'), falling somewhere between outright quotation and outright parody, and illustrating dramatically the provincial quality of mind elsewhere analysed. The whole passage is a good example of the use of the omniscient author convention; note, however, the one more personal comment within that convention: 'Ah! Even Mrs Clegg's day seems far back in the past now, 15

MILIEU

separated from us by changes that widen with the years.' The voice is that of the future, now seeing as history that time when 'men had done with change', and ironically judging it, but it is also a personal voice, not without a sense of loss. Maggie Tulliver, the novel's heroine, grows up near St Ogg's, and the novel is in good part the record of the conflict between her idealistic, yet ardent and romantic temperament and the conventionality of the town. Both her passion and idealism are seen in the final book of the novel, where Maggie is drawn into a compromising situation with her cousin's fiance, Stephen Guest, then chooses not to marry him. In the following passage George Eliot defines the community as she presents its reaction to these events in the chapter titled 'St Ogg's Passes Judgement'.

3 It was soon known throughout St Ogg's that Miss Tulliver was come back; she had not, then, eloped in order to be married to Mr Stephen Guest; at all events, Mr Stephen Guest had not married her, which came to the same thing so far as her culpability was concerned. We judge others according to results; how else, not knowing the process by which results are arrived at? If Miss Tulliver, after a few months of well-chosen travel, had returned as Mrs Stephen Guest with a post-marital trousseau and all the advantages possessed even by the most unwelcome wife of an only son, public opinion, which at St Ogg's, as elsewhere, always knew what to think, would have judged in strict consistency with those results. Public opinion in these cases is always of the feminine gender-not the world, but the world's wife -and she would have seen that two handsome young r6

MILIEU

people-the gentleman of quite the first family in St Ogg's-having found themselves in a false position, had been led into a course which, to say the least of it, was highly injudicious and productive of sad pain and disappomtment, especially to that sweet young thing, Miss Deane. Mr Stephen Guest had certainly not behaved well, but then, young men were liable to those sudden infatuated attachments; and bad as it might seem in Mrs Stephen Guest to admit the faintest advances from her cousin's lover (indeed it had been said that she was actually engaged to young Wakem; old Wakem himself had mentioned it), still she was very young. 'And a deformed young man, you know! And young Guest so very fascinating; and they say he positively worships her (to be sure, that can't last!) and he ran away with her in the boat quite against her will-and what could she do? She couldn't come back then; no one would have spoken to her; and how very well that maize-coloured satinette becomes her complexion! It seems as if the folds in front were quite come in; several of her dresses are made so; they say he thinks nothing too handsome to buy for her. Poor Miss Deane! She is very pitiable; but then, there was no positive engagement; and the air at the coast will do her good. After all, if young Guest felt no more for her than that, it was better for her not to marry him. What a wonderful marriage for a girl like Miss Tulliverquite romantic! Why, young Guest will put up for the borough at the next election. Nothing like commerce nowadays! That young Wakem nearly went out of his mind; he always was rather queer; but he's gone abroad again to be out of the way, quite the best thing for a deformed young man. Miss Unit declares she will never visit Mr and Mrs Stephen Guest. Such nonsense! Pretending to be better than other people. Society couldn't be carried on if we inquired into private conduct in that way, and Christianity tells us to think no evil; and my belief is that Miss Unit had no cards sent her.' The Mill on the Floss, Bk. VII, ch. 2 17

MILIEU

Here the revelation of society comes not through analysis but through an ironic representation of the collective community voice, or at least its female section : the 'world's wife', a phrase which itself neatly captures the presumption of those who think of themselves as guardians of the world's morals. By giving all the women one voice in a current of indirect speech George Eliot also makes another point: these firm assertive voices by speaking in chorus reveal themselves to be unthinkingly timid and conformist. The passage reveals two conceptions of morality, that of the idealist, Maggie, who sees it in terms of attitudes of heart and self-sacrifice, and that of the 'respectable', who see it in terms of keeping up appearances. George Eliot is a comic as well as tragic writer, and here we see some of her ironic comedy at its best. Some of the comedy comes from the author's own remarks ('public opinion, which at St Ogg's, as elsewhere, always knew what to think'), but even more comes from the selfrevelation of the speakers, whose lip service to feeling and morality is betrayed by shallowness of tone ('productive of sad pain and disappointment'), by phrases which let slip their real values ('young Guest will put up for the borough at the next election'), or by the rationalizations whose speciousness is transparent ('Society couldn't be carried on if we inquired into private conduct in that way'). With Silas Marner we return to a more genial though not uncritical presentation of milieu. The novel is set in the village of Raveloe at the time of the Napoleonic wars. In the following passage George Eliot uses the occasion of the introduction of Squire Cass, whose son Godfrey is the main figure in one of the novel's two actions, to develop a sense of the social structure of the village.

MILIEU

4 The greatest man in Raveloe was Squire Cass, who lived in the large red house, with the handsome flight of stone steps in front and the high stables behind it, nearly opposite the church. He was only one among several landed parishioners, but he alone was honoured with the title of Squire; for though Mr Osgood's family was also understood to be of timeless origin-the Raveloe imagination having never ventured back to that fearful blank when there were no Osgoods-still, he merely owned the farm he occupied; whereas Squire Cass had a tenant or two, who complained of the game to him quite as if he had been a lord. It was still that glorious wartime which was felt to be a peculiar favour of Providence towards the landed interest, and the fall of prices had not yet come to carry the race of small squires and yeomen down that road to ruin for which extravagant habits and bad husbandry were plentifully anointing their wheels. I am speaking now in relation to Raveloe and the parishes that resembled it; for our old fashioned country life had many different aspects, as all life must have when it is spread over a various surface, and breathed on variously by multitudinous currents, from the winds of heaven to the thoughts of men, which are forever moving and crossing each other, with incalculable results. Raveloe lay low among the bushy trees and the rutted lanes, aloof from the currents of industrial energy and Puritan earnestness: the rich ate and drank freely, and accepted gout and apoplexy as things that ran mysteriously in respectable families, and the poor thought that the rich were entirely in the right of it to lead a jolly life; besides, their feasting caused a multiplication of arts, which were the heirlooms of the poor. Betty Jay scented the boiling of Squire Cass's hams, but her longing was arrested by the unctuous liquor in which they were boiled; and when the seasons brought 19

MILIEU

round the great merrymakings, they were regarded on all hands as a fine thing for the poor. For the Raveloe feasts were like the rounds of beef and the barrels of ale-they were on a large scale, and lasted a good while, especially in the winter time. When ladies had packed up their best gowns and top knots in band boxes, and had incurred the risk of fording streams on pillions with the precious burden in rainy or snowy weather, when there was no knowing how high the water would rise, it was not to be supposed that they looked forward to a brief pleasure. On this ground it was always contrived in the dark seasons, when there was little work to be done, and the hours were long, that several neighbours should keep open house in succession. When Squire Cass's standing dishes diminished in plenty and freshness, his guests had nothing to do but to walk a little higher up the village to Mr Osgood's, at the Orchards, and they found hams and chines uncut, pork pies with the scent of the fire in them, spun butter in all its freshness-everything, in fact, that appetites at leisure could desire, in perhaps greater perfection, though not in greater abundance, than at Squire Cass's. Silas Marner, ch. 3 In Silas Marner, unlike Adam Bede or The Mill on the Floss, society is neither victim of nor agent in the main action. Yet the milieu is more than a mere context, for the village community with its weaknesses and strengths nourishes the individual, and the main story of the miser Silas is that of an individual's regaining of that nourishment. In this passage we get a balanced picture of community strengths and limitations, as the historian's sense of perspective gives us a notion of the complacencies, and the novelist's sympathy gives us a sense of the human life and warmth. The community is carefully placed in time and space: it is no idyllic place that never was, but rather one kind of parish existing in England at this time, 'aloof from the currents of industrial energy and Puritan 20

MILIEU

earnestness', which affected the character of others. Its self-satisfaction is defined by authorial irony ('that fearful blank when there were no Osgoods', that 'glorious wartime'-for whom?), but the stress is on warm human life as well, developed in the picture of feasting and abundance built up in the final paragraph. The balance and fairness are characteristic of George Eliot : one aspect of her 'realism' is a refusal to sacrifice truth to moral simplification. The most sustained confrontation between individual and community in George Eliot comes in Middlemarch, between Lydgate, a young doctor dedicated to furthering medical research, and the town of Middlemarch. Lydgate's up-to-date knowledge seems heretical to its established medical men, and his departures from time-honoured practices rouse a more general suspicion. Such credit as he does get seems hardly propitious, as the following passage indicates.

5

But in this doubtful stage of Lydgate's introduction he was helped by what we mortals rashly call good fortune. I suppose no doctor ever came newly to a place without making cures that surprised somebody-cures which may be called fortune's testimonials, and deserve as much credit as the written or printed kind. Various patients got well while Lydgate was attending them, some even of dangerous illnesses; and it was remarked that the new doctor with his new ways had at least the merit of bringing people back from the brink of death. The trash talked on such occasions was the more vexatious to Lydgate, because it gave precisely the sort of prestige which an incompetent and unscrupulous man would desire, and was sure to be imputed to him by the simmering dislike of the 21

MILIEU

other medical men as an encouragement on his own part of ignorant puffing. But even his proud outspokenness was checked by the discernment that it was as useless to fight against the interpretations of ignorance as to whip the fog; and 'good fortune' insisted on using those interpretations. Mrs Larcher having just become charitably concerned about alarming symptoms in her charwoman, when Dr Minchin called, asked him to see her then and there, and to give her a certificate for the Infirmary; whereupon after examination he wrote a statement of the case as one of tumour, and recommended the bearer Nancy Nash as an out-patient. Nancy, calling at home on her way to the Infirmary, allowed the staymaker and his wife, in whose attic she lodged, to read Dr Minchin's paper, and by this means became a subject of compassionate conversation in the neighbouring shops of Churchyard Lane as being afflicted with a tumour at first declared to be as large and hard as a duck's egg, but later in the day to be about the size of 'your fist'. Most hearers agreed that it would have to be cut out, but one had known of oil and another of 'squitchineal' as adequate to soften and reduce any lump in the body when taken enough of into the inside-the oil by gradually 'soopling', the squitchineal by eating away. Meanwhile when Nancy presented herself at the Infirmary it happened to be one of Lydgate's days there. After questioning and examining her, Lydgate said to the housesurgeon in an undertone, 'It's not tumour: it's cramp.' He ordered her a blister and some steel mixture, and told her to go home and rest, giving her at the same time a note to Mrs Larcher, who, she said, was her best employer, to testify that she was in need of good food. But by-and-by Nancy, in her attic, became portentously worse, the supposed tumour having indeed given way to the blister, but only wandered to another region with angrier pain. The staymaker's wife went to fetch Lydgate, and he continued for a fortnight to attend Nancy in her own home, until under his treatment she got quite well 22

MILIEU

and went to work again. But the case continued to be described as one of tumour in Churchyard Lane and other streets-nay, by Mrs Larcher also; for when Lydgate's remarkable cure was mentioned to Dr Minchin, he naturally did not like to say, 'The case was not one of tumour, and I was mistaken in describing it as such,' but answered, 'Indeed! ah! I saw it was a surgical case, not of a fatal kind.' He had been inwardly annoyed, however, when he had asked at the Infirmary about the woman he had recommended two days before, to hear from the housesurgeon, a youngster who was not sorry to vex Minchin with impunity, exactly what had occurred: he privately pronounced that it was indecent in a general practitioner to contradict a physician's diagnosis in that open manner, and afterwards agreed with Wrench that Lydgate was disagreeably inattentive to etiquette. Lydgate did not make the affair a ground for valuing himself or (very particularly) despising Minchin, such rectification of misjudgements often happening among men of equal qualifications. But report took up this amazing case of tumour, not clearly distinguished from cancer, and considered the more awful for being of the wandering sort; till much prejudice against Lydgate's method as to drugs was overcome by the proof of his marvellous skill in the speedy restoration of Nancy Nash after she had been rolling and rolling in agonies from the presence of a tumour both hard and obstinate, but nevertheless compelled to yield. Middlemarch, ch. 45 This passage resembles 'St Ogg's Passes Judgement' above, in that George Eliot is again suggesting, in compressed form, the irrational and self-flattering procedures of community judgement. Here, however, she is less displaying the conclusions drawn than the process by which they are reached, and for that reason chooses a different form : not the indirect collective speech of the ladies of St Ogg's, but narrative in which the growth of rumour can be traced, stage by stage. There remains, however, the

23

MILIEU

characteristic mimicry of community speech in all simplemindedness: Lydgate has 'at least the merit of bringing people back from the brink of death', or 'the oil by gradually "soopling", the squitchineal by eating away'. The passage is built on a contrast between such lazy and ignorant thinking and the disciplined knowledge implicit in Lydgate's careful handling of cases, a contrast in which the other medical man, Dr Minchin, must be seen as leaning to the community side. But the contrast is not just between knowledge and ignorance, but also between power and the lack of it. The power here belongs to ignorance, not knowledge: as Lydgate finds, he can no more fight rumour than 'whip a fog'. The image is characteristic of many in the novel which define his condition in terms of frustration and impotence, and both image and passage suggest the tragedy to come. In Middlemarch George Eliot gives us a picture of English provincial society at the time of the first reform bill of 1832. We have just seen one important section of that society. Another is the country gentry, of which the novel's heroine, Dorothea Brooke, is a member. But she is only uncomfortably so, her idealism often clashing with the settled values of her class, and, as she progresses morally, critically commenting on them. Here is one such comment from towards the novel's close. It is made through the reaction to Dorothea's engagement to Will Ladislaw, a young man of unfixed talents, who finds no real niche in Middlemarch society, and is clearly given some special status by the author for doing so. (Not all readers agree that he earns it.) There is reference throughout to a series of preceding events: Dorothea is now a widow, and her former husband Casaubon, intensely jealous of Ladislaw (his cousin), made provision in his will for Dorothea's disinheritance should she marry him. Any engagement, therefore, seems to confirm Casaubon's 24

MILIEU

imputations of Will's fortune-hunting and Dorothea's misconduct. Here Dorothea's uncle, Mr Brooke, breaks the news. 6

'Well, it's a very trying thing, you know,' said Mr Brooke. 'I'm glad you and the Rector are here; it's a family matter -but you will help us all to bear it, Cadwallader. I've got to break it to you, my dear.' Here Mr Brooke looked at Celia-'You've no notion what it is, you know. And, Chettam, it will annoy you uncommonly-but you see you have not been able to hinder it, any more than I have. There's something singular in things: they came round, you know.' 'It must be about Dodo,' said Celia, who had been used to think of her sister as the dangerous part of the family machinery. She had seated herself on a low stool against her husband's knee. 'For God's sake let us hear what it is!' said Sir James. 'Well, you know, Chettam, I couldn't help Casaubon's will: it was a sort of will to make things worse.' 'Exactly,' said Sir James, hastily. 'But what is worse?' 'Dorothea is going to be married again, you know,' said Mr Brooke, nodding towards Celia, who immediately looked up at her husband with a frightened glance, and put her hand on his knee. Sir James was almost white with anger, but he did not speak. 'Merciful heaven!' said Mrs Cadwallader. 'Not to young Ladislaw?' Mr Brooke nodded, saying, 'Yes; to Ladislaw,' and then fell into a prudential silence. 'You see, Humphrey!' said Mrs Cadwallader, waving her arm towards her husband. 'Another time you will admit that I have some foresight; or rather you will contradict me and be just as blind as ever. You supposed that the

25

MILIEU

young gentleman was gone out of the country.' 'So he might be, and yet come back,' said the Rector, quietly. 'When did you learn this?' said Sir James, not liking to hear any one else speak, though finding it difficult to speak himself. 'Yesterday,' said Mr Brooke, meekly, 'I went to Lowick. Dorothea sent for me, you know. It had come about quite suddenly-neither of them had any idea two days agonot any idea, you know. There's something singular in things. But Dorothea is quite determined-it is no use opposing. I put it strongly to her. I did my duty, Chettam. But she can act as she likes, you know.' 'It would have been better if I had called him out and shot him a year ago,' said Sir James, not from bloodymindedness, but because he needed something strong to say. 'Really, James, that would have been very disagreeable,' said Celia. 'Be reasonable, Chettam. Look at the affair more quietly,' said Mr Cadwallader, sorry to see his goodnatured friend so overmastered by anger. 'That is not so very easy for a man of any dignitywith any sense of right-when the affair happens to be in his own family,' said Sir James, still in his white indignation. 'It is perfectly scandalous. If Ladislaw had had a spark of honour he would have gone out of the country at once, and never shown his face in it again. However, I am not surprised. The day after Casaubon's funeral I said what ought to be done. But I was not listened to.' 'You wanted what was impossible, you know, Chettam,' said Mr Brooke. 'You wanted him shipped off. I told you Ladislaw was not to be done as we liked with : he had his ideas. He was a remarkable fellow-! always said he was a remarkable fellow.' 'Yes,' said Sir James, unable to repress a retort, 'it is rather a pity you formed that high opinion of him. We are indebted to that for him being lodged in this neighbour26

MILIEU

hood. We are indebted to that for seeing a woman like Dorothea degrading herself by marrying him.' Sir James made little stoppages between his clauses, the words not coming easily. 'A man so marked out by her husband's will, that delicacy ought to have forbidden her from seeing him again-who takes her out of her proper rank-into poverty-has the meanness to accept such a sacrificehas always had an objectionable position-a bad originand, I believe, is a man of little principle and light character. That is my opinion,' Sir James ended emphatically, turning aside and crossing his leg. 'I pointed everything out to her,' said Mr Brooke, apologetically-'! mean the poverty. and abandoning her position. I said, "My dear, you don't know what it is to live on seven hundred a-year, and have no carriage, and that kind of thing, and go amongst people who don't know who you are." I put it strongly to her. But I advise you to talk to Dorothea herself. The fact is, she has a dislike to Casaubon's property. You will hear what she says, you know.' 'No-excuse me-l shall not,' said Sir James, with more coolness. 'I cannot bear to see her again; it is too painful. It hurts me too much that a woman like Dorothea should have done what is wrong.' 'Be just, Chettam,' said the easy, large-lipped Rector, who objected to all this unnecessary discomfort. 'Mrs Casaubon may be acting imprudently: she is giving up a fortune for the sake of a man, and we men have so poor an opinion of each other that we can hardly call a woman wise who does that. But I think you should not condemn it as a wrong action, in the strict sense of the word.' 'Yes, I do,' answered Sir James. 'I think that Dorothea commits a wrong action in marrying Ladislaw.' Middlemarch, ch. 84 Middlemarch society at large tends to be conveyed through a panoramic authorial survey, but the milieu in which Dorothea moves is rendered much more through

27

MILIEU

a refraction into individual voices, through dialogue. This refraction of course makes us conscious of the differences of personality seen in the reactions above: Mr Brooke drifting between appeasement and protest, Mrs Cadwallader, knowing in hindsight, the Rector Cadwallader, comfortably good-humoured, Sir James, outraged, and Celia, uncomprehending but loyal to an eccentric sister. Yet if there are differences in personality there are also the respectable class values of propriety and property held in common, and challenged by Dorothea's romantic engagement. No one suggests that the reality of her honourable behaviour in her previous ·marriage is more important than the appearance of dishonour, nor that wealth and position might be legitimately sacrificed to love rather than the reverse. George Eliot tends throughout to avoid a truly satiric note, which might be achieved easily, too easily, by making the characters social stereotypes. Sir James and Mr Brooke are the only ones close to satiric portraiture, but the satire of Mr Brooke is less of him as a class representative than as the liberal mind run amok, while that of Sir James is given human dimension by such means as Mr Cadwallader's reference to his 'goodnatured friend', or by our awareness of the generous nature we have met elsewhere in the novel. Overall the passage is comic rather than satiric. It has been said that 'humour dissolves morality' : one might consider whether or not the social issues raised here are partly dissolved by the humorous context. Among the most brilliantly rendered scenes in George Eliot are those which take place among the English country aristocracy in Daniel Deronda : a higher and more influential class than the county gentry of Middlemarch. It is the main milieu of one of the novel's two actions, that involving the heroine, Gwendolen Harleth. Gwendolen is a newcomer to this society, and makes a striking impact, 28

MILIEU

which culminates in her marriage to the eminently eligible Henleigh Grandcourt. But there is a bitter moral price to her 'success': the marriage deprives Grandcourt's mistress and their children of any hope of legitimacy, and Grandcourt himself is a refinedly brutal man, whose emotional satisfactions come from a kind of psychological bullying. Here we see a typical English social scene, with Gwendolen (here unmarried) the centre of attention, as usual.

7 Gwendolen's reception in the neighbourhood fulfilled her uncle's expectations. From Brackenshaw Castle to the Firs at Wancester, where Mr Quallon the banker kept a generous house, she was welcomed with manifest admiration, and even those ladies who did not quite like her, felt a comfort in having a new, striking girl to invite: for hostesses who entertain much must make up their parties as ministers make up their cabinets, on grounds other than personal liking. Then, in order to have Gwendolen as a guest, it was not necessary to ask any one who was disagreeable, for Mrs Davilow always made a quiet, picturesque figure as a chaperon, and Mr Gascoigne was everywhere in request for his own sake. Among the houses where Gwendolen was not quite liked and yet invited, was Quetcham Hall. One of her first invitations was to a large dinner-party there, which made a sort of general introduction for her to the society of the neighbourhood; for in a select party of thirty and of wellcomposed proportions as to age, few visitable families could be entirely left out. No youthful figure there was comparable to Gwendolen's as she passed through the long suite of rooms adorned with light and flowers, and, visible at first as a slim figure floating along in white drapery, approached through one wide doorway after another into fuller illumination and definiteness. She had never had that

29

MILIEU

sort of promenade before, and she felt exultingly that it befitted her: any one looking at her for the first time might have supposed that long galleries and lackeys had always been a matter of course in her life; while her cousin Anna, who was really more familiar with these things, felt almost as much embarrassed as a rabbit suddenly deposited in that well-lit space. 'Who is that with Gascoigne?' said the archdeacon, neglecting a discussion of military manceuvres on which, as a clergyman, he was naturally appealed to. And his son, on the other side of the room-a hopeful young scholar, who had already suggested some 'not less elegant than ingenious' emendations of Greek texts-said nearly at the same time, 'By George! who is that girl with the awfully well-set head and jolly figure?· Daniel Deronda, ch. 5 The light satmc touch is typical of the rendering of many of the novel's scenes of 'society' and is a witty manifestation of a general criticism of its shallow commitments and superficial human relations. The first paragraph indicates such superficiality in a principle governing social life: not any deep or genuine feeling, but appearances. Gwendolen is 'new' and 'striking', and so invited for display, even if she is disliked. The image which follows puts such activity in satiric perspective : by implication, the hostesses think their party arrangements are as important as those of a government cabinet. The technique of juxtaposition of the serious with the trivial, each given equal rhetorical weight, is a mock-heroic technique not unlike that seen in Pope's Rape of the Lock, another satiric picture of 'society'. Satiric, too, are the cliches of the 'scholar' in the third paragraph : his learning does not seem to have rubbed his language into any freshness of perception. The serious theological matters discussed by the archdeacon speak for themselves. 30

MILIEU

It is not all satire, however. Mr Gascoigne, Gwendolen's uncle, a somewhat worldly rector, is genuinely and universally liked 'for his own sake', and the image of Anna, accompanying Gwendolen and feeling 'as much embarrassed as a rabbit' suddenly deposited in that 'welllit space' is comic, with a touch of pathos, not satiric. One might consider the position of Gwendolen herself. Many readers of the Rape of the Lock have noticed how Belinda, the heroine, is admired by the author for her beauty and style as well as criticized for her superficial values. One might ask whether there is any evidence of a similar treatment of Gwendolen in this passage. The critical comment on this important and influential section of English society is made not only satirically, but also by cultural contrast. The main contrast is with a milieu which the novelist, for obvious reasons, cannot present directly: the idea of a Jewish nation. The idea is embodied mainly in the prophetic vision of one character, Mordecai, and in the story of the hero, Deronda, an English gentleman who is to discover he is Jewish. There are, however, other and more indirect means of presentation. There are the scenes of domestic life, English and Jewish, where natural human relations and duties are in implicit contrast with the relatively artificial ones of sophisticated society. There is the liberating world of art. And there is the novel's geographical range, which suggests the insularity of this English culture by presenting foreign places (or characters) embodying alternative ways of life. Here is Deronda at Genoa, awaiting the first interview with his long-lost mother.

MILIEU

8 Day after day passed, and the very air of Italy seemed to carry the consciousness that war had been declared against Austria, and every day was a hurrying march of crowded Time towards the world-changing battle of Sadowa. Meanwhile, in Genoa, the noons were getting hotter, the converging outer roads getting deeper with white dust, the oleanders in the tubs along the wayside gardens looking more and more like fatigued holiday-makers, and the sweet evening changing her office-scattering abroad those whom the mid-day had sent under shelter, and sowing all paths with happy social sounds, little tinklings of mule-bells and whirrings of thrumbed strings, light footsteps and voices, if not leisurely, then with the hurry of pleasure in them; while the encircling heights, crowned with forts, skirted with fine dwellings and gardens, seemed also to come forth and gaze in fulness of beauty after their long siesta, till all strong colour melted in the stream of moonlight which made the streets a new spectacle with shadows, both still and moving, on cathedral steps and against the fa original is 'there'. 20 Scott, The Pirate, Ch. 4·

THE NATURAL HISTORY OF GERMAN LIFE

Science there is an advance from the general to the special, from the simple to the complex, analogous with that which is found in the series of the sciences, from Mathematics to Biology. To the laws of quantity comprised in Mathematics and Physics are superadded, in Chemistry, laws of quality; to these again are added, in Biology, laws of life; and lastly, the conditions of life in general, branch out into its special conditions, or Natural History, on the one hand, and into its abnormal conditions, or Pathology, on the other. And in this series or ramification of the sciences, the more general science will not suffice to solve the problems of the more special. Chemistry embraces phenomena which are not explicable by Physics; Biology embraces phenomena which are not explicable by Chemistry; and no biological generalization will enable us to predict the infinite specialities produced by the complexity of vital conditions. So Social Science, while it has departments which in their fundamental generality correspond to mathematics and physics, namely, those grand and simple generalizations which trace out the inevitable march of the human race as a whole, and, as a ramification of these, the laws of economical science, has also, in the departments of government and jurisprudence, which embrace the conditions of social life in all their complexity, what may be called its Biology, carrying us on to innumerable special phenomena which outlie the sphere of science, and belong to Natural History. 21 And just as the most thorough acquaintance with physics, or chemistry, or general physiology will not enable you at once to establish the balance of life in your private vivarium, so that your particular society of zoophytes, molluscs, and echinoderms may feel themselves, as the Germans say, at ease in their skin; so the most complete equipment of theory will not enable a statesman or a political and social reformer to adjust his measures wisely, in the absence of a special acquaintance with the section of society for which he legislates, with the peculiar characteristics of the nation, the province, the class whose wellbeing he has to consult. In other words, a wise social policy must be based not simply on abstract social science, but on the Natural History of social bodies. 21 In this analysis George Eliot follows the classification of the sciences set forth by Comte in his Cours de philosophie positive. Compare Lewes's brief account of Comte's hierarchy of the sciences in A Biographical History of Philosophy, IV (London, 1846), zs8-z6x. 290

THE NATURAL HISTORY OF GERl\lAN LIFE

Riehl's books are not dedicated merely to the argumentative maintenance of this or of any other position; they are intended chiefly as a contribution to that knowledge of the German people on the importance of which he insists. He is less occupied with urging his own conclusions than with impressing on his readers the facts which have led him to those conclusions. In the volume entitled Land und Leute, which, though published last, is properly an introduction to the volume entitled Die Biirgerliche Gesellschaft, he considers the German people in their physical-geographical relations; he compares the natural divisions of the race, as determined by land and climate, and social traditions, with the artificial divisions which are based on diplomacy; and he traces the genesis and influences of what we may call the ecclesiastical geography of Germany-its partition between Catholicism and Protestantism. He shows that the ordinary antithesis of North and South Germany represents no real ethnographical distinction, and that the natural divisions of Germany, founded on its physical geography, are threefold; namely, the low plains, the middle mountain region, and the high mountain region, or Lower, Middle, and Upper Germany; and on this primary natural division all the other broad ethnographical distinctions of Germany will be found to rest. The plains of North or Lower Germany include all the seaboard the nation possesses; and this, together with the fact that they are traversed to the depth of 6oo miles by navigable rivers, makes them the natural seat of a trading race. Quite different is the geographical character of Middle Germany. While the northern plains are marked off into great divisions, by such rivers as the Lower Rhine, the W eser, and the Oder, running almost in parallel lines, this central region is cut up like a mosaic by the capricious lines of valleys and rivers. Here is the region in which you find those famous roofs from which the rain-water runs towards two different seas, and the mountain-tops from which you may look into eight or ten German States. The abundance of water-power and the presence of extensive coal-mines allow of a very diversified industrial development in Middle Germany. In Upper Germany, or the high mountain region, we find the same symmetry in the lines of the rivers as in the north; almost all the great Alpine streams flow parallel with the Danube. But the majority of these rivers are neither navigable nor available for industrial objects, and instead of serving for communication, they shut off one great 291

THE NATURAL HISTORY OF GERMAN LIFE

tract from another. The slow development, the simple peasant life of many districts is here determined by the mountain and the river. In the south-east, however, industrial activity spreads through Bohemia towards Austria, and forms a sort of balance to the industrial districts of the Lower Rhine. Of course, the boundaries of these three regions cannot be very strictly defined; but an approximation to the limits of Middle Germany may be obtained by regarding it as a triangle, of which one angle lies in Silesia, another in Aix-la-Chapelle, and a third at Lake Constance. This triple division corresponds with the broad distinctions of climate. In the northern plains the atmosphere is damp and heavy; in the southern mountain region it is dry and rare, and there are abrupt changes of temperature, sharp contrasts between the seasons, and devastating storms; but in both these zones men are hardened by conflict with the roughnesses of the climate. In Middle Germany, on the contrary, there is little of this struggle; the seasons are more equable, and the mild, soft air of the valleys tends to make the inhabitants luxurious and sensitive to hardships. It is only in exceptional mountain districts that one is here reminded of the rough, bracing air on the heights of Southern Germany. It is a curious fact that, as the air becomes gradually lighter and rarer from the North German coast towards Upper Germany, the average of suicides regularly decreases. Mecklenburg has the highest number, then Prussia, while the fewest suicides occur in Bavaria and Austria. Both the northern and southern regions have still a large extent of waste lands, downs, morasses, and heaths; and to these are added, in the south, abundance of snowfields and naked rock; while in Middle Germany culture has almost overspread the face of the land, and there are no large tracts of waste. There is the same proportion in the distribution of forests. Again, in the north we see a monotonous continuity of wheat-fields, potato-grounds, meadow lands, and vast heaths, and there is the same uniformity of culture over large surfaces in the southern table-lands and the Alpine pastures. In Middle Germany, on the contrary, there is a perpetual variety of crops within a short space; the diversity of land surface and the corresponding variety in the species of plants are an invitation to the splitting up of estates, and this again encourages to the utmost the motley character of the cultivation.

THE NATURAL HISTORY OF GERMAN LIFE

According to this threefold division, it appears that there are certain features common to North and South Germany in which they differ from Central Germany, and the nature of this difference Riehl indicates by distinguishing the former as Centralized Land and the latter as Individualized Land; a distinction which is well symbolized by the fact that North and South Germany possess the great lines of railway which are the medium for the traffic of the world, while Middle Germany is far richer in lines for local communication, and possesses the greatest length of railway within the smallest space. Disregarding superficialities, the East Frieslanders, the Schleswig-Holsteiners, the Mecklenburghers, and the Pomeranians are much more nearly allied to the old Bavarians, the Tyrolese, and the Styrians, than any of these are allied to the Saxons, the Thuringians, or the Rhinelanders. Both in North and South Germany original races are still found in large masses, and popular dialects are spoken; you still find there thoroughly peasant districts, thorough villages, and also, at great intervals, thorough cities; you still find there a sense of rank. In Middle Germany, on the contrary, the original races are fused together or sprinkled hither and thither; the peculiarities of the popular dialects are worn down or confused; there is no very strict line of demarcation between the country and the town population, hundreds of small towns and large villages being hardly distinguishable in their characteristics; and the sense of rank, as part of the organic structure of society, is almost extinguished. Again, both in the north and south there is still a strong ecclesiastical spirit in the people, and the Pomeranian sees Antichrist in the Pope as clearly as the Tyrolese sees him in Doctor Luther; while in Middle Germany the confessions are mingled, they exist peaceably side by side in very narrow space, and tolerance or indifference has spread itself widely even in the popular mind. And the analogy, or rather the causal relation, between the physical geography of the three regions and the development of the population goes still further: For [observes Riehl], the striking connexion which has been pointed out between the local geological formations in Germany and the revolutionary disposition of the people has more than a metaphorical significance. Where the primeval physical revolutions of the globe have been the wildest in their effects, and the most multiform strata have been tossed together or thrown one upon the other, it is a very 293

THE NATURAL HISTORY OF GERMAN LIFE

intelligible consequence that on a land surface thus broken up, the population should sooner develop itself into small communities, and that the more intense life generated in these smaller communities, should become the most favourable nidus for the reception of modern culture, and with this a susceptibility for its revolutionary ideas; while a people settled in a region where its groups are spread over a large space will persist much more obstinately in the retention of its original character. The people of Middle Germany have none of that exclusive one-sidedness which determines the peculiar genius of great national groups, just as this one-sidedness or uniformity is wanting to the geological and geographical character of their land. This ethnographical outline Riehl fills up with special and typical descriptions, and then makes it the starting-point for a criticism of the actual political condition of Germany. The volume is full of vivid pictures, as well as penetrating glances into the maladies and tendencies of modern society. It would be fascinating as literature, if it were not important for its facts and philosophy. But we can only commend it to our readers, and pass on to the volume entitled Die Biirgerliche Gesellschajt, from which we have drawn our sketch of the German peasantry. Here Riehl gives us a series of studies in that natural history of the people, which he regards as the proper basis of social policy. He holds that, in European society, there are three natural ranks or estates: the hereditary landed aristocracy, the citizens or commercial class, and the peasantry or agricultural class. By natural ranks he means ranks which have their roots deep in the historical structure of society, and are still, in the present, showing vitality above ground; he means those great social groups which are not only distinguished externally by their vocation, but essentially by their mental character, their habits, their mode of life,-by the principle they represent in the historical development of society. In his conception of the 'Fourth Estate' he differs from the usual interpretation, according to which it is simply equivalent to the Proletariat, or those who are dependent on daily wages, whose only capital is their skill or bodily strength-factory operatives, artisans, agricultural labourers, to whom might be added, especially in Germany, the day-labourers with the quill, the literary proletariat. This, Riehl observes, is a valid basis of economical classification, but not of social classification. In his view, the Fourth Estate is a stratum produced by the perpetual abrasion of the other great social

294

THE NATURAL HISTORY OF GERMAN LIFE

groups; it is the sign and result of the decomposition which is commencing in the organic constitution of society. Its elements are derived alike from the aristocracy, the bourgeoisie, and the peasantry. It assembles under its banner the deserters of historical society, and forms them into a terrible army, which is only just awaking to the consciousness of its corporate power. The tendency of this Fourth Estate, by the very process of its formation, is to do away with the distinctive historical character of the other estates, and to resolve their peculiar rank and vocation into a uniform social relation founded on an abstract conception of society. According to Riehl's classification, the day-labourers, whom the political economist designates as the Fourth Estate, belong partly to the peasantry or agricultural class, and partly to the citizens or commercial class. Riehl considers, in the first place, the peasantry and aristocracy as the 'Forces of social persistence,' and in the second, the bourgeoisie and the 'fourth estate' as the 'Forces of social movement.' The aristocracy, he observes, is the only one among these four groups which is denied by others besides Socialists to have any natural basis as a separate rank. It is admitted that there was once an aristocracy which had an intrinsic ground of existence, but now, it is alleged, this is an historical fossil, an antiquarian relic, venerable because grey with age. In what, it is asked, can consist the peculiar vocation of the aristocracy, since it has no longer the monopoly of the land, of the higher military functions, and of government offices, and since the service of the court has no longer any political importance? To this Riehl replies that in great revolutionary crises, the 'men of progress' have more than once 'abolished' the aristocracy. But remarkably enough, the aristocracy has always re-appeared. This measure of abolition showed that the nobility were no longer regarded as a real class, for to abolish a real class would be an absurdity. It is quite possible to contemplate a voluntary breaking-up of the peasant or citizen class in the socialistic sense, but no man in his senses would think of straightway 'abolishing' citizens and peasants. The aristocracy, then, was regarded as a sort of cancer, or excrescence of society. Nevertheless, not only has it been found impossible to annihilate an hereditary nobility by decree; but also, the aristocracy of the eighteenth century outlived even the self-destructive acts of its own perversity. A life which was entirely without object, entirely destitute of 295

THE NATURAL HISTORY OF GERMAN LIFE

functions, would not, says Riehl, be so persistent. He has an acute criticism of those who conduct a polemic against the idea of an hereditary aristocracy while they are proposing an 'aristocracy of talent,' which after all is based on the principle of inheritance. The Socialists are, therefore, only consistent in declaring against an aristocracy of talent. 'But when they have turned the world into a great Foundling Hospital, they will still be unable to eradicate the "privileges of birth."' We must not follow him in his criticism, however; nor can we afford to do more than mention hastily his interesting sketch of the medireval aristocracy, and his admonition to the German aristocracy of the present day, that the vitality of their class is not to be sustained by romantic attempts to revive medireval forms and sentiments, but only by the exercise of functions as real and salutary for actual society as those of the medireval aristocracy were for the feudal age. 'In modern society the divisions of rank indicate division of labour, according to that distribution of functions in the social organism which the historical constitution of society has determined. In this way the principle of differentiation and the principle of unity are identical.' The elaborate study of the German bourgeoisie, which forms the next division of the volume, must be passed over, but we may pause a moment to note Riehl's definition of the social Philister (Philistine), an epithet for which we have no equivalent, not at all, however, for want of the object it represents. 22 Most people, who read a little German, know that the epithet Philister originated in the Burschen-leben, or Student-life of Germany, and that the antithesis of Bursch and Philister was equivalent to the antithesis of 'gown' and 'town;' but since the word has passed into ordinary language, it has assumed several shades of significance which have not yet been merged in a single, absolute meaning; and one of the questions which an English visitor in Germany will probably take an opportunity of asking is, 'What is the strict meaning of the word Philister?' Riehl's answer is, that the Philister is one who is indifferent to all social interests, all public life, as distinguished 12 Though there are scattered instances of the term in English, especially in Carlyle, before George Eliot wrote, it was Matthew Arnold's essay on Heine (1863) which gave currency to 'Philistine'. His introduction of the word recalls George Eliot's language: 'Philistinism!-we have not the expression in English. Perhaps we have not the word because we have so much of the thing'. (Essays in Criticism, First Series [London, 1921],

p. 162.)

THE NATURAL HISTORY OF GERMAN LIFE

from selfish and private interests; he has no sympathy with political and social events except as they affect his own comfort and prosperity, as they offer him material for amusement or opportunity for gratifying his vanity. He has no social or political creed, but is always of the opinion which is most convenient for the moment. He is always in the majority, and is the main element of unreason and stupidity in the judgment of a 'discerning public.' It seems presumptuous in us to dispute Riehl's interpretation of a German word, but we must think that, in literature, the epithet Philister has usually a wider meaning than this-includes his definition and something more. We imagine the Philister is the personification of the spirit which judges everything from a lower point of view than the subject demands-which judges the affairs of the parish from the egotistic or purely personal point of viewwhich judges the affairs of the nation from the parochial point of view, and does not hesitate to measure the merits of the universe from the human point of view. At least, this must surely be the spirit to which Goethe alludes in a passage cited by Riehl himself, where he says that the Germans need not be ashamed of erecting a monument to him as well as to Blucher; for if Blucher had freed them from the French, he (Goethe) had freed them from the nets of the Philister: Ihr mogt mir immer ungescheut Gleich Bliichern Denkmal setzen! Von Franzosen hater euch befreit, lch von Philister-netzen. 23 Goethe could hardly claim to be the apostle of public spirit; but he is eminently the man who helps us to rise to a lofty point of observation, so that we may see things in their relative proportions. The most interesting chapters in the description of the 'Fourth Estate,' which concludes the volume, are those on the 'Aristocratic Proletariat' and the 'Intellectual Proletariat'. The Fourth Estate in Germany, says Riehl, has its centre of gravity not, as in England and France, in the day labourers and factory operatives, and still less in the degenerate peasantry. In Germany, the educated proletariat is the leaven that sets the mass in fermentation; the dangerous classes there go about, not in blouses, but in frockcoats; they begin with the impoverished prince and end in the 23 Number II2 of Goethe's Sprilche (Hamburger Ausgabe, I, 322), slightly misquoted.

297

THE NATURAL HISTORY OF GERMAN LIFE

hungriest litterateur. The custom that all the sons of a nobleman shall inherit their father's title, necessarily goes on multiplying that class of aristocrats who are not only without function but without adequate provision, and who shrink from entering the ranks of the citizens by adopting some honest calling. The younger son of a prince, says Riehl, is usually obliged to remain without any vocation; and however zealously he may study music, painting, literature, or science, he can never be a regular musician, painter, or man of science; his pursuit will be called a 'passion', not a 'calling', and to the end of his days he remains a dilettante. 'But the ardent pursuit of a fixed practical calling can alone satisfy the active man.' Direct legislation cannot remedy this evil. The inheritance of titles by younger sons is the universal custom, and custom is stronger than law. But if all government preference for the 'aristocratic proletariat' were withdrawn, the sensible men among them would prefer emigration, or the pursuit of some profession, to the hungry distinction of a title without rents. The intellectual proletaires Riehl calls the 'church militant' of the Fourth Estate in Germany. In no other country are they so numerous; in no other country is the trade in material and industrial capital so far exceeded by the wholesale and retail trade, the traffic and the usury, in the intellectual capital of the nation. Germany yields more intellectual produce than it can use and pay far. This over-production, which is not transient but permanent, nay, is constantly on the increase, evidences a diseased state of the national industry, a perverted application of industrial powers, and is a far more pungent satire on the national condition than all the poverty of operatives and peasants. . . . Other nations need not envy us th~~ preponderance of the intellectual proletariat over the proletaires of manual labour. For man more easily becomes diseased from overstudy than from the labour of the hands; and it is precisely in the intellectual proletariat that there are the most dangerous seeds of disease. This is the group in which the opposition between earnings and wants, between the ideal social position and the real, is the most hopelessly irreconcilable. We must unwillingly leave our readers to make acquaintance for themselves with the graphic details with which Riehl follows up this general statement; but before quitting these admirable volumes, let us say, lest our inevitable omissions should have left room for a different conclusion, that Riehl's conservatism is not

298

THE NATURAL HISTORY OF GERMAN LIFE

in the least tinged with the partisanship of a class, with a poetic fanaticism for the past, or with the prejudice of a mind incapable of discerning the grander evolution of things to which all social forms are but temporarily subservient. It is the conservatism of a cleareyed, practical, but withal large-minded man-a little caustic, perhaps, now and then in his epigrams on democratic doctrinaires who have their nostrum for all political and social diseases, and on communistic theories which he regards as 'the despair of the individual in his own manhood, reduced to a system,' but nevertheless able and willing to do justice to the elements of fact and reason in every shade of opinion and every form of effort. He is as far as possible from the folly of supposing that the sun will go backward on the dial, because we put the hands of our clock backward; he only contends against the opposite folly of decreeing that it shall be mid-day, while in fact the sun is only just touching the mountain-tops, and all along the valley men are stumbling in the twilight.

299

21 SILLY NOVELS BY LADY NOVELISTS Westminster Review, LXVI (October, 1856), 442-461 The origin of this article can be traced back to a letter from George Eliot to John Chapman on 5 July 1856 in which she wrote, 'I wonder what the story called "Compensation" is. I have long wanted to fire away at the doctrine of Compensation, which I detest, considered as a way of life'.1 The article that grew from this germ turned out to be not an attack on false moral doctrine but on the class of silly novels represented by Compensation. Two weeks after the first letter George Eliot noted in her Journal for 20 July that Chapman had invited her to contribute to the October number of the Westminster, and on the sam(: day she wrote to him saying, 'I think an article on "Silly Women's Novels" might be made the vehicle of some wholesome truth as well as of some amusement. I mentioned this to Mr. Lewes last night and h{: thought the idea a good one.' 2 The resulting article, 'Silly Novels', is of special interest as a record of George Eliot's thoughts about the writing of fiction made just at the time when she began her first story. Throughout the summer before she: wrote the article Lewes had been pressing her to try her hand at fiction, and when Chapman's request for a contribution arrived she had already resolved to make the attempt: the Journal entry noting Chapman's offer adds that 'I am anxious to begin my fiction writing and so am not 1 Letters, II, zs8. Cf. Theophrastus Such, 'Looking Inward', p. II (Cabinet Ed.): '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'. 2 Letters, II, 258.

JOO

SILLY NOVELS BY LADY NOVELISTS

inclined to undertake an article that will give me much trouble. . . .' 'Silly Novels' was completed on 12 September; 3 on 23 September George Eliot began The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton, the story she had been meditating throughout the time of writing her article. Since more than one attempt has been made to derive the critical views of 'Silly Novels' from Lewes's 'The Lady Novelists' (Westminster Review, July, 1852), it is worth pointing out that George Eliot's article is a restatement of the principles she applied in her very earliest reviewing for the Westminster. In January, 1852, she had complained that few women writers 'exhibit the subtle penetration into feeling and character, and the truthful delineation of manners which can alone compensate for the want of philosophic breadth in their views of men and things, and for their imperfect knowledge of life outside the drawing-room'. 4 And she condemned a whole class of religious novels for aiming 'at a didactic effect by an inflated style of reflection, and by melodramatic incident, instead of faithfully depicting life and leaving it to teach its own lesson, as the stars do theirs'. 5 'Silly Novels' reaffirms at the beginning of her novelist's career the position she had long since arrived at in her work as a reviewer. 'Silly Novels' has been reprinted in Nathan Sheppard, The Essays of 'George Eliot', Complete; in Mrs. S. B. Herrick, Essays and Reviews of George Eliot; and in Essays and Uncollected Papers.

*

*

*

novels by Lady Novelists are a genus with many species, determined by the particular quality of silliness that predominates in them-the frothy, the prosy, the pious, or the pedantic. But it is a mixture of all these-a composite order of feminine fatuity, that produces the largest class of such novels, which we shall distinguish as the mind-and-millinery species. The heroine is usually an heiress, probably a peeress in her own right, with perhaps a vicious baronet, an amiable duke, and an irresistible younger son of a marquis as lovers in the foreground, a clergyman and a poet sighing for her in the middle distance, and a crowd of SILLY

3 Journal, 12 September 1856; for the date on which Amos Barton was begun, see Letters, II, 407, note 3· 4 Westminster Review, LXII, 283. The attribution of this review to George Eliot was made by Gordon S. Haight 'on the basis of style alone' in 'George Eliot's Theory of Fiction', Victorian Newsletter, 10 (Autumn,

1956), 1-3. " Westminster Review, LXII, 284.

301

SILLY NOVELS BY LADY NOVELISTS

undefined adorers dimly indicated beyond. Her eyes and her wit are both dazzling; her nose and her morals are alike free from any tendency to irregularity; she has a superb contralto and a superb intellect; she is perfectly well-dressed and perfectly religious; she dances like a sylph, and reads the Bible in the original tongues. Or it may be that the heroine is not an heiress-that rank and wealth are the only things in which she is deficient; but she infallibly gets into high society, she has the triumph of refusing many matches and securing the best, and she wears some family jewels or other as a sort of crown of righteousness at the end. Rakish men either bite their lips in impotent confusion at her repartees, or are touched to penitence by her reproofs, which, on appropriate occasions, rise to a lofty strain of rhetoric; indeed, there is a general propensity in her to make speeches, and to rhapsodize at some length when she retires to her bedroom. In her recorded conversations she is amazingly eloquent, and in her unrecorded conversations, amazingly witty. She is understood to have a depth of insight that looks through and through the shallow theories of philosophers, and her superior instincts are a sort of dial by which men have only to set their clocks and watches, and all will go well. The men play a very subordinate part by her side. You are consoled now and then by a hint that they have affairs, which keeps you in mind that the working-day 6 business of the world is somehow being carried on, but ostensibly the final cause of their existence is that they may accompany the heroine on her 'starring' expedition through life. They see her at a ball, and are dazzled; at a flower-show, and they are fascinated; on a riding excursion, and they are witched by her noble horsemanship; at church, and they are awed by the sweet solemnity of her demeanour. She is the ideal woman in feelings, faculties, and flounces. For all this, she as often as not marries the wrong person to begin with, and she suffers terribly from the plots and intrigues of the vicious baronet; but even death has a soft place in his heart for such a paragon, and remedies all mistakes for her just at the right moment. The vicious 1 'Working day': the phrase, originally from As You Like It, I, iii, 12, is a key term in George Eliot's conception of realism. She uses it in the essays on 'Evangelical Teaching' and 'Three Months in Weimar'; in Adam Bede, Chs. 27 and so; Felix Holt, Introduction; and Middlemarch, Ch. 56. See also Letters, I, 44; 66. The OED, which cites the Middlemarch passage, glosses the term as equivalent to 'workaday' in the sense of 'ordinary humdrum everyday life'.

302

SILLY NOVELS BY LADY NOVELISTS

baronet is sure to be killed in a duel, and the tedious husband dies in his bed requesting his wife, as a particular favour to him, to marry the man she loves best, and having already dispatched a note to the lover informing him of the comfortable arrangement. Before matters arrive at this desirable issue our feelings are tried by seeing the noble, lovely, and gifted heroine pass through many mauvais moments, but we have the satisfaction of knowing that her sorrows are wept into embroidered pocket-handkerchiefs, that her fainting form reclines on the very best upholstery, and that whatever vicissitudes she may undergo, from being dashed out of her carriage to having her head shaved in a fever, she comes out of them all with a complexion more blooming and locks more redundant than ever. We may remark, by the way, that we have been relieved from a serious scruple by discovering that silly novels by lady novelists rarely introduce us into any other than very lofty and fashionable society. We had imagined that destitute women turned novelists, as they turned governesses, because they had no other 'lady-like' means of getting their bread. On this supposition, vacillating syntax and improbable incident had a certain pathos for us, like the extremely supererogatory pincushions and ill-devised nightcaps that are offered for sale by a blind man. We felt the commodity to be a nuisance, but we were glad to think that the money went to relieve the necessitous, and we pictured to ourselves lonely women struggling for a maintenance, or wives and daughters devoting themselves to the production of 'copy' out of pure heroism,perhaps to pay their husband's debts, or to purchase luxuries for a sick father. Under these impressions we shrank from criticising a lady's novel: her English might be faulty, but, we said to ourselves, her motives are irreproachable; her imagination may be uninventive, but her patience is untiring. Empty writing was excused by an empty stomach, and twaddle was consecrated by tears. But no! This theory of ours, like many other pretty theories, has had to give way before observation. Women's silly novels, we are now convinced, are written under totally different circumstances. The fair writers have evidently never talked to a tradesman except from a carriage window; they have no notion of the working-classes except as 'dependents'; they think five hundred a-year a miserable pittance; Belgravia and 'baronial halls' are their primary truth~ ; and they have no idea of feeling interest in any man who is not at 303

SILLY NOVELS BY LADY NOVELISTS

least a great landed proprietor, if not a prime minister. It is clear that they write in elegant boudoirs, with violet-coloured ink and a ruby pen; that they must be entirely indifferent to publishers' accounts, and inexperienced in every form of poverty except poverty of brains. It is true that we are constantly struck with the want of verisimilitude in their representations of the high society in which they seem to live; but then they betray no closer acquaintance with any other form of life. If their peers and peeresses are improbable, their literary men, tradespeople, and cottagers are impossible; and their intellect seems to have the peculiar impartiality of reproducing both what they have seen and heard, and what they have not seen and heard, with equal unfaithfulness. There are few women, we suppose, who have not seen something of children under five years of age, yet in 'Compensation', 7 a recent novel of the mind-and-millinery species, which calls itself a 'story of real life', we have a child of four and a half years old talking in this Ossianic fashion'Oh, I am so happy, dear gran'mamma;-I have seen,-I have seen such a delightful person: he is like everything beautiful,-like the smell of sweet flowers, and the view from Ben Lomond ;-or no, better than that-he is like what I think of and see when I am very, very happy; and he is really like mamma, too, when she sings; and his forehead is like that distant sea,' she continued, pointing to the blue Mediterranean; 'there seems no end-no end; or like the clusters of stars I like best to look at on a warm fine night .... Don't look so ... your forehead is like Loch Lomond, when the wind is blowing and the sun is gone in; I like the sunshine best when the lake is smooth.... So now-I like it better than ever ... it is more beautiful still from the dark cloud that has gone over it, when the sun suddenly lights up all the colours of the forests and shining purple rocks, and it is all reflected in the waters below.'

We are not surprised to learn that the mother of this infant phenomenon, who exhibits symptoms so alarmingly like those of adolescence repressed by gin, is herself a phrenix. We are assured, again and again, that she had a remarkably original mind, that she was a genius, and 'conscious of her originality,' and she was fortunate enough to have a lover who was also a genius, and a man of 'most original mind.' This lover, we read, though 'wonderfully similar' to her 'in 7

[Henrietta Georgiana Marcia Lascelles, Lady Chatterton], 'Compen2 vols., 1856.

sation'. A Story of Real Life Thirty Years Ago,

304

SILLY NOVELS BY LAllY NOVELISTS

powers and capacity,' was 'infinitely superior to her in faith and development,' and she saw in him the' "Agape"-so rare to find -of which she had read and admired the meaning in her Greek Testament; having, from her great facility in learning languages, read the Scriptures in their original tongues.' Of course! Greek and Hebrew are mere play to a heroine; Sanscrit is no more than a b c to her; and she can talk with perfect correctness in any language except English. She is a polking polyglott, a Creuzer 8 in crinoline. Poor men! There are so few of you who know even Hebrew; you think it something to boast of if, like Bolingbroke, you only 'understand that sort of learning, and what is writ about it;' 8a and you are perhaps adoring women who can think slightingly of you in all the Semitic languages successively. But, then, as we are almost invariably told, that a heroine has a 'beautifully small head,' and as her intellect has probably been early invigorated by an attention to costume and deportment, we may conclude that she can pick up the Oriental tongues, to say nothing of their dialects, with the same aerial facility that the butterfly sips nectar. Besides, there can be no difficulty in conceiving the depth of the heroine's erudition, when that of the authoress is so evident. In 'Laura Gay,' 9 another novel of the same school, the heroine seems less at home in Greek and Hebrew, but she makes up for the deficiency by a quite playful familiarity with the Latin classicswith the 'dear old Virgil,' 'the graceful Horace, the humane Cicero, and the pleasant Livy;' indeed, it is such a matter of course with her to quote Latin, that she does it at a pic-nic in a very mixed company of ladies and gentlemen, having, we are told, 'no conception that the nobler sex were capable of jealousy on this subject. And if, indeed,' continues the biographer of Laura Gay, 'the wisest and noblest portion of that sex were in the majority, no such sentiment would exist; but while Miss Wyndhams and Mr. Redfords abound, great sacrifices must be made to their existence.' Such sacrifices, we presume, as abstaining from Latin quotations, of extremely moderate interest and applicability, which the wise and noble minority of the other sex would be quite as willing to 8 Georg Friedrich Creuzer, author of Symbolik. See 'The Progress of the Intellect', note I 1. sa Pope's answer to the question whether Bolingbroke knew Hebrew, reported in Spence, Anecdotes, ed. S. W. Singer (r8zo), p. 178. 9 2 vols., x8s6.

SILLY NOVELS BY LADY NOVELISTS

dispense with as the foolish and ignoble majority. It is as little the custom of well-bred men as of well-bred women to quote Latin in mixed parties; they can contain their familiarity with 'the humane Cicero' without allowing it to boil over in ordinary conversation, and even references to 'the pleasant Livy' are not absolutely irrepressible. But Ciceronian Latin is the mildest form of Miss Gay's conversational power. Being on the Palatine with a party of sightseers, she falls into the following vein of wellrounded remark: 'Truth can only be pure objectively, for even in the creeds where it predominates, being subjective, and parcelled out into portions, each of these necessarily receives a hue of idiosyncrasy, that is, a taint of superstition more or less strong; while in such creeds as the Roman Catholic, ignorance, interest, the bias of ancient idolatries, and the force of authority, have gradually accumulated on the pure truth, and transformed it, at last, into a mass of superstition for the majority of its votaries; and how few are there, alas! whose zeal, courage, and intellectual energy are equal to the analysis of this accumulation, and to the discovery of the pearl of great price which lies hidden beneath this heap of rubbish.' We have often met with women much more novel and profound in their observations than Laura Gay, but rarely with any so inopportunely long winded. A clerical lord, who is half in love with her, is alarmed by the daring remarks just quoted, and begins to suspect that she is inclined to free-thinking. But he is mistaken; when in a moment of sorrow he delicately beg1s leave to 'recal to her memory, a depot of strength and consolation under affliction, which, until we are hard pressed by the trials of life, we are too apt to forget,' we learn that she really has 'recur·rence to that sacred depot,' together with the tea-pot. There is a certain flavour of orthodoxy mixed with the parade of fortunes and fine carriages in 'Laura Gay', but it is an orthodoxy mitigated by study of the humane Cicero,' and by an 'intellectual disposition to analyse.' 'Compensation' is much more heavily dosed with doctrine, but then it has a treble amount of snobbish worldliness and absurd incident to tickle the palate of pious frivolity. Linda, the heroine, is still more speculative and spiritual than Laura Gay, but she has been 'presented,' and has more, and far grander, lovers; very wicked and fascinating women are introduced--even a French lionne; and no expense is spared to get up as exciting a story as you 306

SILLY NOVELS BY LADY NOVELISTS

will find in the most immoral novels. In fact, it is a wonderful pot pourri of Almack's, Scotch second-sight, Mr. Rogers's breakfasts,

Italian brigands, death-bed conversions, superior authoresses, Italian mistresses, and attempts at poisoning old ladies, the whole served up with a garnish of talk about 'faith and development,' and 'most original minds.' Even Miss Susan Barton, the superior authoress, whose pen moves in a 'quick decided manner when she is composing,' declines the finest opportunities of marriage; and though old enough to be Linda's mother (since we are told that she refused Linda's father), has her hand sought by a young earl, the heroine's rejected lover. Of course, genius and morality must be backed by eligible offers, or they would seem rather a dull affair; and piety, like other things, in order to be comme il jaut, must be in 'society,' and have admittance to the best circles. 'Rank and Beauty' 10 is a more frothy and less religious variety of the mind-and-millinery species. The heroine, we are told, 'if she inherited her father's pride of birth and her mother's beauty of person, had in herself a tone of enthusiastic feeling that perhaps belongs to her age even in the lowly born, but which is refined into the high spirit of wild romance only in the far descended, who feel that it is their best inheritance.' This enthusiastic young lady, by dint of reading the newspaper to her father, falls in love with the prime minister, who, through the medium of leading articles and 'the resume of the debates,' shines upon her imagination as a bright particular star, which has no parallax for her, living in the country as simple Miss Wyndham. But she forthwith becomes Baroness Umfraville in her own right, astonishes the world with her beauty and accomplishments when she bursts upon it from her mansion in Spring Gardens, and, as you foresee, will presently come into contact with the unseen objet aime. Perhaps the words 'prime minister' suggest to you a wrinkled or obese sexagenarian; but pray dismiss the image. Lord Rupert Conway has been 'called while still almost a youth to the first situation which a subject can hold in the universe,' and even leading articles and a resume of the debates have not conjured up a dream that surpasses the fact. The door opened again, and Lord Rupert Conway entered. Evelyn gave one glance. It was enough; she was not disappointed. It seemed as if a picture on which she had long gazed was suddenly instinct with life, and had stepped from its frame before her. His tall figure, the 10 Rank and Beauty, or the Young Baroness, 3 vols., 1856. 307

SILLY NOVELS BY LADY NOVELISTS

distinguished simplicity of his air-it was a living Vandyke, a cavalier, one of his noble cavalier ancestors, or one to whom her fancy had always likened him, who long of yore had, with an Umfraville, fought the Paynim far beyond sea. Was this reality?

Very little like it, certainly. By-and-by, it becomes evident that the ministerial heart is touched. Lady Umfraville is on a visit to the Queen at Windsor, and, The last evening of her stay, when they returned from riding, Mr. Wyndham took her and a large party to the top of the Keep, to see the view. She was leaning on the battlements, gazing from that 'stately height' at the prospect beneath her, when Lord Rupert was by her side. 'What an unrivalled view!' exclaimed she. 'Yes, it would have been wrong to go without having been up here. You are pleased with your visit?' 'Enchanted! A Queen to live and die under, to live and die for!' 'Hal' cried he, with sudden emotion, and with a eureka expression of countenance, as if he had indeed found a heart in unison with his own.

The 'eureka expression of countenance,' you see at once to be prophetic of marriage at the end of the third volume; but before that desirable consummation, there are very complicated misunderstandings, arising chiefly from the vindictive plotting of Sir Luttrell Wycherley, who is a genius, a poet, and in every way a most remarkable character indeed. He is not only a romantic poet, but a hardened rake and a cynical wit; yet his deep passion for Lady Umfraville has so impoverished his epigrammatic talent, that he cuts an extremely poor figure in conversation. When she rejects him, he rushes into the shrubbery, and rolls himself in the dirt; and on recovering, devotes himself to the most diabolical and laborious schemes of vengeance, in the course of which he disguises himself as a quack physician, and enters into general practice, foreseeing that Evelyn will fall ill, and that he shall be called in to attend her. At last, when all his schemes are frustrated, he takes leave of her in a long letter, written, as you will perceive from the following passage, entirely in the style of an eminent literary man: 'Oh, lady, nursed in pomp and pleasure, will you ever cast one thought upon the miserable being who addresses you? Will you ever, as your gilded galley is floating down the unruffled stream of pros-

J08

SILLY NOVELS BY LADY NOVELISTS

perity, will you ever, while lulled by the sweetest music-thine own praises,-hear the far-off sigh from that world to which I am going?' On the whole, however, frothy as it is, we rather prefer 'Rank and Beauty' to the other two novels we have mentioned. The dialogue is more natural and spirited; there is some frank ignorance, and no pedantry; and you are allowed to take the heroine's astounding intellect upon trust, without being called on to read her conversational refutations of sceptics and philosophers, or her rhetorical solutions of the mysteries of the universe. Writers of the mind-and-millinery school are remarkably unanimous in their choice of diction. In their novels, there is usually a lady or gentleman who is more or less of a upas tree: the lover has a manly breast; minds are redolent of various things; hearts are hollow; events are utilized; friends are consigned to the tomb; infancy is an engaging period; the sun is a luminary that goes to his western couch, or gathers the rain-drops into his refulgent bosom; life is a melancholy boon; Albion and Scotia are conversational epithets. There is a striking resemblance, too, in the character of their moral comments, such, for instance, as that 'It is a fact, no less true than melancholy, that all people, more or less, richer or poorer, are swayed by bad example;' that 'Books, however trivial, contain some subjects from which useful information may be drawn;' that 'Vice can too often borrow the language of virtue;' that 'Merit and nobility of nature must exist, to be accepted, for clamour and pretension cannot impose upon those too well read in human nature to be easily deceived;' and that, 'In order to forgive, we must have been injured.' There is, doubtless, a class of readers to whom these remarks appear peculiarly pointed and pungent; for we often find them doubly and trebly scored with the pencil, and delicate hands giving in their determined adhesion to these hardy novelties by a distinct tres vrai, emphasized by many notes of exclamation. The colloquial style of these novels is often marked by much ingenious inversion, and a careful avoidance of such cheap phraseology as can be heard every day. Angry young gentlemen exclaim-"Tis ever thus,methinks;' and in the half-hour before dinner a young lady informs her next neighbour that the first day she read Shakspeare she 'stole away into the park, and beneath the shadow of the greenwood tree, devoured with rapture the inspired page of the great magician.' M+E.G.E. 309

SILLY NOVELS BY LADY NOVELISTS

But the most remarkable efforts of the mind-and-millinery writers lie in their philosophic reflections. The authoress of 'Laura Gay,' for example, having married her hero and heroine, improves the event by observing that 'if those sceptics, whose eyes have so long gazed on matter that they can no longer see aught else in man, could once enter with heart and soul into such bliss as this, they would come to say that the soul of man and the polypus are not of common origin, or of the same texture.' Lady novelists, it appears, can see something else besides matter ; they are not limited to phenomena, but can relieve their eyesight by occasional glimpses of the noumenon, and are, therefore, naturally better able than any one else to confound sceptics, even of that remarkable, but to us unknown school, which maintains that the soul of man is of the same texture as the polypus. The most pitiable of all silly novels by lady novelists are what we may call the oracular species-novels intended to expound the writer's religious, philosophical, or moral theories. There seems to be a notion abroad among women, rather akin to the superstition that the speech and actions of idiots are inspired, and that the human being most entirely exhausted of common sense is the fittest vehicle of revelation. To judge from their writings, there are certain ladies who think that an amazing ignorance, both of science and of life, is the best possible qualification for forming an opinion on the knottiest moral and speculative questions. Apparently, their recipe for solving all such difficulties is something like this: Take a woman's head, stuff it with a smattering of philosophy and literature chopped small, and with false notions of society baked hard, let it hang over a desk a few hours every day, and serve up hot in feeble English, when not required. You will rarely meet with a lady novelist of the oracular class who is diffident of her ability to decide on theological questions,-who has any suspicion that she is not capable of discriminating with the nicest accuracy between the good and evil in all church parties,-who does not see precisely how it is that men have gone wrong hitherto,-and pity philosophers in general that they have not had the opportunity of consulting her. Great writers, who have modestly contented themselves with putting their experience into fiction, and have thought it quite a sufficient task to exhibit men and things as they are, she sighs over as deplorably deficient in the application of their powers. 'They have solved no great questions' -and she is ready to 310

SILLY NOVELS BY LADY NOVELISTS

remedy their omission by setting before you a complete theory of life and manual of divinity, in a love story, where ladies and gentlemen of good family go through genteel vicissitudes, to the utter confusion of Deists, Puseyites, and ultra-Protestants, and to the perfect establishment of that particular view of Christianity which either condenses itself into a sentence of small caps, or explodes into a cluster of stars on the three hundred and thirtieth page. It is true, the ladies and gentlemen will probably seem to you remarkably little like any you have had the fortune or misfortune to meet with, for, as a general rule, the ability of a lady novelist to describe actual life and her fellow-men, is in inverse proportion to her confident eloquence about God and the other world, and the means by which she usually chooses to conduct you to true ideas of the invisible is a totally false picture of the visible. As typical a novel of the oracular kind as we can hope to meet with, is 'The Enigma: a Leaf from the Chronicles of the Wolchorley House.' 11 The 'enigma' which this novel is to solve, is certainly one that demands powers no less gigantic than those of a lady novelist, being neither more nor less than the existence of evil. The problem is stated, and the answer dimly foreshadowed on the very first page. The spirited young lady, with raven hair, says, 'All life is an inextricable confusion;' and the meek young lady, with auburn hair, looks at the picture of the Madonna which she is copying, and-'There seemed the solution of that mighty enigma.' The style of this novel is quite as lofty as its purpose; indeed, some passages on which we have spent much patient study are quite beyond our reach, in spite of the illustrative aid of italics and small caps; and we must await further 'development' in order to understand them. Of Ernest, the model young clergyman, who sets every one right on all occasions, we read, that 'he held not of marriage in the marketable kind, after a social desecration;' that, on one eventful night, 'sleep had not visited his divided heart, where tumultuated, in varied type and combination, the aggregate feelings of grief and joy;' and that, 'for the marketable human article he had no toleration, be it of what sort, or set for what value it might, whether for worship or class, his upright soul abhorred it, whose ultimatum, the self-deceiver, was to him THE great spiritual lie, "living in a vain show, deceiving and being 11 The title according to the English Catalogue is The Enigma: A Leaf from the Archives of Wolchorley House, r8s6.

311

SILLY NOVELS BY LADY NOVELISTS deceived;" since he did not suppose the phylactery and enlarged border on the garment to be merely a social trick.' (The italics and small caps are the author's, and we hope they assist the reader's comprehension.) Of Sir Lionel, the model old gentleman, we are told that 'the simple ideal of the middle age, apart from its anarchy and decadence, in him most truly seemed to live again, when the ties which knit men together were of heroic cast. The first-born colours of pristine faith and truth engraven on the common soul of man, and blent into the wide arch of brotherhood, where the primrevallaw of order grew and multiplied, each perfect after his kind, and mutually inter-dependent.' You see clearly, of course, how colours are first engraven on a soul, and then blent into a wide arch, on which arch of colours-apparently a rainbow-the law of order grew and multiplied, each-apparently the arch and the law -perfect after his kind? If, after this, you can possibly want any further aid towards knowing what Sir Lionel was, we can tell you, that in his soul 'the scientific combinations of thought could educe no fuller harmonies of the good and the true, than lay in the primreval pulses which floated as an atmosphere around it!' and that, when he was sealing a letter, 'Lo! the responsive throb in that good man's bosom echoed back in simple truth the honest witness of a heart that condemned him not, as his eye, bedewed with love, rested, too, with something of ancestral pride, on the undimmed motto of the family-"LOIAUTE" .' The slightest matters have their vulgarity fumigated out of them by the same elevated style. Commonplace people would say that a copy of Shakspeare lay on a drawing-room table; but the authoress of 'The Enigma,' bent on edifying periphrasis, tells you that there lay on the table, 'that fund of human thought and feeling, which teaches the heart through the little name, "Shakspeare.''' A watchman sees a light burning in an upper window rather longer than usual, and thinks that people are foolish to sit up late when they have an opportunity of going to bed; but, lest this fact should seem too low and common, it is presented to us in the following striking and metaphysical manner: 'He marvelled-as man will think for others in a necessarily separate personality, consequently (though disallowing it) in false mental premise,-how differently he should act, how gladly he should prize the rest so lightly held of within.' A footman-an ordinary Jeames, with large calves and aspirated vowels-answers the door-bell, and the opportunity is 312

SILLY NOVELS BY LADY NOVELISTS

seized to tell you that he was a 'type of the large class of pampered menials, who follow the curse of Cain-"vagabonds" on the face of the earth, and whose estimate of the human class varies in the graduated scale of money and expenditure .... These, and such as these, 0 England, be the false lights of thy morbid civilization!' We have heard of various 'false lights,' from Dr. Cumming to Robert Owen,U from Dr. Pusey to the Spirit-rappers, but we never before heard of the false light that emanates from plush and powder. In the same way very ordinary events of civilized life are exalted into the most awful crises, and ladies in full skirts and manches ala Chinoise, conduct themselves not unlike the heroines of sanguinary melodramas. Mrs. Percy, a shallow woman of the world, wishes her son Horace to marry the auburn-haired Grace, she being an heiress; but he, after the manner of sons, falls in love with the raven-haired Kate, the heiress's portionless cousin; and, moreover, Grace herself shows every symptom of perfect indifference to Horace. In such cases, sons are often sulky or fiery, mothers are alternately manreuvring and waspish, and the portionless young lady often lies awake at night and cries a good deal. We are getting used to these things now, just as we are used to eclipses of the moon, which no longer set us howling and beating tin kettles. We never heard of a lady in a fashionable 'front' behaving like Mrs. Percy under these circumstances. Happening one day to see Horace talking to Grace at a window, without in the least knowing what they are talking about, or having the least reason to believe that Grace, who is mistress of the house and a person of dignity, would accept her son if he were to offer himself, she suddenly rushes up to them and clasps them both, saying, 'with a flushed countenance and in an excited manner' -'This is indeed happiness; for, may I not call you so, Grace?-my Grace-my Horace's Grace!-my dear children!' Her son tells her she is mistaken, and that he is engaged to Kate, whereupon we have the following scene and tableau: Gathering herself up to an unprecedented height,(!) her eyes lightning forth the fire of her anger:'Wretched boy!' she said, hoarsely and scornfully, and clenching her hand, 'Take then the doom of your own choice! Bow down your miserable head and let a mother's-' 12

See 'Lord Brougham's Literature', note 8.

313

SILLY NOVELS BY LADY NOVELISTS

'Curse not!' spake a deep low voice from behind, and Mrs. Percy started, scared, as though she had seen a heavenly visitant appear, to break upon her in the midst of her sin. Meantime, Horace had fallen on his knees at her feet, and hid his face in his hands. Who, then, is she-who t Truly his 'guardian spirit' hath stepped between him and the fearful words, which, however unmerited, must have hung as a pall over his future existence ;-a spell which could not be unbound-which could not be unsaid. Of an earthly paleness, but calm with the still, iron-bound calmness of death-the only calm one there,-Katherine stood; and her words smote on the ear in tones whose appallingly slow and separate intonation rung on the heart like the chill, isolated tolling of some fatal knell. 'He would have plighted me his faith, but I did not accept it; you cannot, therefore-you dare not curse him. And here,' she continued, raising her hand to heaven, whither her large dark eyes also rose with a chastened glow, which, for the first time, suffering had lighted in those passionate orbs,-'here I promise, come weal, come woe, that Horace Wolchorley and I do never interchange vows without his mother's sanction-without his mother's blessing' t Here, and throughout the story, we see that confusion of purpose which is so characteristic of silly novels written by women. It is a story of quite modern drawing-room society-a society in which polkas are played and Puseyism discussed; yet we have characters, and incidents, and traits of manner introduced, which are mere shreds from the most heterogeneous romances. We have a blind Irish harper 'relic of the picturesque bards of yore,' startling us at a Sunday-school festival of tea and cake in an English village; we have a crazy gipsy, in a scarlet cloak, singing snatches of romantic song, and revealing a secret on her deathbed which, with the testimony of a dwarfish miserly merchant, who salutes strangers with a curse and a devilish laugh, goes to prove that Ernest, the model young clergyman, is Kate's brother; and we have an ultra-virtuous Irish Barney, discovering that a document is forged, by comparing the date of the paper with the date of the alleged signature, although the same document has passed through a court of law, and occasioned a fatal decision. The 'Hall' in which Sir Lionel lives is the venerable country-seat of an old family, and this, we suppose, sets the imagination of the authoress flying to donjons and battlements, where 'lo! the warder blows his horn;' for, as the inhabitants are in their bedrooms on a night certainly 314

SILLY NOVELS BY LADY NOVELISTS

within the recollection of Pleaceman X., and a breeze springs up, which we are at first told was faint, and then that it made the old cedars bow their branches to the greensward, she falls into this medireval vein of description (the italics are ours): 'The banner unfurled it at the sound, and shook its guardian wing above, while the startled owl flapped her in the ivy; the firmament looking down through her "argus eyes,"'Ministers of heaven's mute melodies'. And lo! two strokes tolled from out the warder tower, and "Two o'clock" re-echoed its interpreter below.' Such stories as this of 'The Enigma' remind us of the pictures clever children sometimes draw 'out of their own head', where you will see a modern villa on the right, two knights in helmets fighting in the foreground, and a tiger grinning in a jungle on the left, the several objects being brought together because the artist thinks each pretty, and perhaps still more because he remembers seeing them in other pictures. But we like the authoress much better on her medireval stilts than on her oracular ones,-when she talks of the Ich and of 'subjective' and 'objective', and lays down the exact line of Christian verity, between 'right-hand excesses and left-hand declensions.' Persons who deviate from this line are introduced with a patronizing air of charity. Of a certain Miss Inshquine she informs us, with all the lucidity of italics and small caps, that 'function, not form, AS the inevitable outer expression of the spirit in this tabernacled age, weakly engrossed her.' And apropos of Miss Mayjar, an evangelical lady who is a little too apt to talk of her visits to sick women and the state of their souls, we are told that the model clergyman is 'not one to disallow, through the super crust, the undercurrent towards good in the subject, or the positive benefits, nevertheless, to the object.' We imagine the double-refined accent and protrusion of chin which are feebly represented by the italics in this lady's sentences! We abstain from quoting any of her oracular doctrinal passages, because they refer to matters too serious for our pages just now. The epithet 'silly' may seem impertinent, applied to a novel which indicates so much reading and intellectual activity as 'The Enigma;' but we use this epithet advisedly. If, as the world has long agreed, a very great amount of instruction will not make a wise man, still less will a very mediocre amount of instruction make 31 5

SILLY NOVELS BY LADY NOVELISTS

a wise woman. And the most mischievous form of feminine silliness is the literary form, because it tends to confirm the popular prejudice against the more solid education of women. When men see girls wasting their time in consultations about bonnets and ball dresses, and in giggling or sentimental love-confidences, or middle-aged women mismanaging their children, and solacing themselves with acrid gossip, they can hardly help saying, 'For Heaven's sake, let girls be better educated; let them have some better objects of thought-some more solid occupations.' But after a few hours' conversation with an oracular literary woman, or a few hours' reading of her books, they are likely enough to say, 'After all, when a woman gets some knowledge, see what use she makes of it! Her knowledge remains acquisition, instead of passing into culture; instead of being subdued into modesty and simplicity by a larger acquaintance with thought and fact, she has a feverish consciousness of her attainments; she keeps a sort of mental pocket-mirror, and is continually looking in it at her own "intellectuality"; she spoils the taste of one's muffin by questions of metaphysics; "puts down" men at a dinner table with her superior information; and seizes the opportunity of a soiree to catechise us on the vital question of the relation between mind and matter. And then, look at her writings! She mistakes vagueness for depth, bombast for eloquence, and affectation for originality; she struts on one page, rolls her eyes on another, grimaces in a third, and is hysterical in a fourth. She may have read many writings of great men, and a few writings of great women; but she is as unable to discern the difference between her own style and theirs as a Yorkshireman is to discern the difference between his own English and a Londoner's: rhodomontade is the native accent of her intellect. No-the average nature of women is too shallow and feeble a soil to bear much tillage; it is only fit for the very lightest crops.' It is true that the men who come to such a decision on such very superficial and imperfect observation may not be among the wisest in the world; but we have not now to contest their opinion-we are only pointing out how it is unconsciously encouraged by many women who have volunteered themselves as representatives of the feminine intellect. We do not believe that a man was ever strengthened in such an opinion by associating with a woman of true culture, whose mind had absorbed her knowledge instead of being 316

SILLY' NOV!' THE

]\"O\'EL~

OF GEORGE ELIOT

effect, 'You read me as mere fiction. But look in your own hearts and if you are honest you will have to admit, dear reader, that you are no better and no worse than the characters I contain.' If all the world is a stage, then actors and audience are united in the community of human virtues and failings. Thus, far from being an intrusive flaw, Thackeray's performance as stage manager is necessary for the success of his art and of his moral purpose. By his deliberate, self-regarding showmanship he does directly what Shakespeare does obliquely through a character like Jacques; he opens the frontiers between the worlds of literature and life so that actor and audience, character and reader, may more easily communicate and interact. I have discussed Thackeray's use of omniscient narration at some length, partly because I did not wish to repeat what I have said elsewhere about this aspect of George Eliot, partly because I wished to stress that there was a tradition of narration which she inherited and modified, a tradition which had already made use of the anlogy between life and drama. Surely we can say that her use of the convention is strikingly like that of Thackeray? In both cases, like the speech of Jacques, it expands, radiates, involves both author and reader in the fiction world. Thackeray envied Henry Fielding for his freedom and George Eliot echoes that envy in an image drawn from the life of the theatre. Fielding, she says: glories in his copious remarks and digressions as the least imitable parts of his work, and especially in those initial chapters to the successive books of his history, where he seems to bring his arm-chair to the proscenium. (Middlemarch, ch. 15)

It is the 'showman at the edge of his stage' all over again. Moreover, the stoicism and the melancholy inherent in the life-stage analogy would accord naturally with George Eliot's temperament. The role of the actor contained within the play of life would adapt very well to George Eliot's vision of man as both free and yet determined. To this point I will return later. We must, first of all, deal with the more obvious and local ways in which the life-drama analogy manifests itself in George Elio~'s fiction. For, like Thackeray's, her novels are full of imagery and other linguistic patterns which depend on the basic idea, 'All the world's a stage'. These linguistic patterns naturally vary a great 189

w. J.

HARVEY

deal in importance and function. At one end of the scale they may become part of the literal narrative, enacting what images can only suggest, just as the conclusion of The Mill on the Floss enacts the proleptic images of flood and natural catastrophe. The most important example of this is perhaps Lydgate's youthful infatuation with the actress, Madame Laure. They may take the form of allusion, in which the sense of similitude or disparity, or a mixture of both, may be the important factor. Thus Mr. Tulliver is linked with Hotspur; Maggie with Sir Andrew Aguecheek; Dorothea with Antigone and Imogen. They may take the form of fully developed images (and here, I think, we must allow in as a reinforcing-thread images which refer to other areas of the imaginative life - to life seen as romantic fiction, for example). And, finally, they may reside in very quiet, neutral words - words like scene or theatre or tragic - which in themselves have no great analogical potential, but which may gain a quasi-metaphoric charge from being put into relation with cognate but more sophisticated linguistic patterns. One need hardly do more than cite a representative example of what I have called neutral words. They generally indicate one of three things - the perturbations of the mind, the liveliness of the imagination, or the implication of the characters in the great general course of human nature and society. Thus, of the first, 'Maggie was ... intensely conscious of some drama going forward in her father's mind' (The Mill on the Floss, III. 9); of the second, 'Hetty, her cheeks flushed and her eyes glistening from her imaginary drama' (Adam Bede, ch. 15); of the third, 'the tragedy of human life' (Adam Bede, ch. 33, but a frequently-repeated phrase) or 'War, like other dramatic spectacles might possibly cease for want of a public' (The Mill on the Floss, II. 4). Such instances as these have a double function: as we shall see, they may serve to extend the lifedrama analogy to even more neutral terms - words that, taken in isolation, might be thought to have nothing to do with the analogy. And they also provide a base from which George Eliot can slide unobtrusively into rather more developed images illustrating the same point. Thus: 'the stranger who had been interested in the course of her sermon, as if it had been the development of a drama - for there is this sort of fascination in all sincere unpremeditated eloquence, which opens to one the inward drama of the speaker's emotions' (Adam Bede, ch. 2); 'There were passions at war in Maggie at that moment to have made a tragedy, if tragedy were 19°

IDEA AND IMAGE IN THE NOVELS OF GEORGE ELIOT

made by passion only, but the essential n fLEydJoc; which was present in the passion was wanting in the action' (The Mill on the Floss, 1. 10); , his mind seemed as passive as a spectator at a diorama; scenes of the sad past, and probably sad future, floating before him' (Adam Bede, ch. 4); 'inartistic figures crowding the canvas of life without adequate effect ... play no small part in the tragedy of life' (Adam Bede, ch. 5); 'plotting covetousness and deliberate contrivance, in order to compass a selfish end, are nowhere abundant but in the world of the dramatist; they demand too intense a mental action for many of our fellow-parishioners to be guilty of them' (The Mill on the Floss, 1. 3). It will be obvious from this last example that I consider the life-drama analogy works in terms of distinctions as well as similitude. George Eliot is careful to point out the ways in which all the world is not a stage. This is important in several ways - for example, some of her characters come to grief because they think of life wrongly in terms of this analogy. But when she points out the ways in which life is not a stage, she brings to our minds those points where the analogy is valid and, because of her careful discrimination, convinces us the more easily of their validity. In isolation, such images as these would be of little significance. But, like Thackeray, George Eliot uses the life-drama analogy to point one of her main moral themes. Appearance and reality is a well-nigh universal tension in fiction, but George Eliot is particularly concerned to point out the dangers in the self-dramatizing, narcissistic nature of her egoists. These characters see life as conforming to their own wishes and imagine themselves at the centre of the stage. The novel in which this plays least part is Silas Marner; the most important instance - which I have analysed elsewhere - is the role of Gwendolen Harleth in Daniel Deronda. But the idea and its associated imagery are fairly consistent throughout George Eliot's fiction. One remembers Hetty Sorrel spinning her romantic dreams; she finds a fit partner in Arthur Donnithorne: 'It's a little drama I've got up in honour of my friend Adam. He's a fine fellow and I like the opportunity of Letting people know that I think so.' 'A drama in which friend Arthur piques himself on having a pretty part to play,' said Mr Irwine, smiling. (Adam Bede, ch. 22)

w. J.

HARVEY

Throughout the novel Arthur is 'too much preoccupied with the part he was playing' (Adam Bede, ch. 27). Again, one remembers that even in the ardour of Maggie's renunciation 'her own life was still a drama for her, in which she demanded that her part should be played with intensity' (The Mill on the Floss, IV. 3)' Or one thinks of that 'charming stage Ariadne', Rosamond Vincy: 'she even acted her own character, and so well, that she did not know it to be precisely her own' (Middle march , ch. 12). In this one may perhaps link her with Madame Laure, in whose murder of her husband intention is not to be distinguished from theatrical performance. (If Madame Laure murders her husband quickly, then Rosamond's marriage to Lydgate is a slow-motion murder, as Lydgate comes close to recognizing in Chapter 8I). The distinguishing feature of this analogy as it is used in Middlemarch is that it is applied impartially to all the characters. Thus Casaubon is uneasily aware of the 'cold, shadowy, unapplausive audience of his life' (ch. 20) and much the same thing - though the effects are opposite - applies to Fred Vincy: Even much stronger mortals than Fred Vincy hold half their rectitude in the mind of the being they love best. 'The theatre of all my action is fallen,' said an antique personage when his chief friend was dead; and they are fortunate who get a theatre where the audience demands their best. The analogy is even used to check any idealization of hero and heroine. There is more than a grain of truth in Mrs. Cadwallader's remark about Dorothea's propensity for martyrdom, 'playing tragedy queen and taking things sublimely' (ch. 54). As for Will Ladislaw, he is one of those 'characters which are continually creating collisions and modes for themselves in dramas which nobody is prepared to act with them' (ch. I9). He is 'without any neutral region of indifference in his nature, ready to turn everything that befell him into the collisions of a passionate drama' (ch.82). It is here that the life-drama analogy begins to tangle with the thread of Nature in George Eliot's fiction. For if characters dramatize themselves then, as we saw earlier, Nature is 'that great tragic dramatist' (Adam Bede, ch. 4). And if characters, because of their impulse to dramatize, deceive both themselves and others, so I9 2

IDEA

A~D

I~AGE

IN THE NOVELS OF GEORGE ELIOT

Nature may deceptively blend appearance and reality. When the stranger at Dinah's sermons thinks' nature never meant her for a preacher', George Eliot comments: Perhaps he was one of those who think that Nature has theatrical properties, and, with the considerate view of facilitating art and psychology, 'makes up' her characters, so that there may be no mistake about them. (Adam Bede, ch. 4) Something like a pun is operating here. Nature does, in one sense, make us up, endow us with hereditary attributes, compound what we really are. But the reality of our natural make-up is not to be confused with mere appearance, with 'make-up' in the theatrical, grease-paint sense of the phrase. George Eliot's novels are full of similar warnings about the deceptions of the surface: Every man under such circumstances is conscious of being a great physiognomist. Nature, he knows, has a language of her own, which she uses with strict veracity, and he considers himself an adept in the language. . . . Nature has her language, and she is not unveracious; but we don't know all the intricacies of her syntax just yet, and in a hasty reading we may happen to extract the very opposite of her real meaning. (Adam Bede, ch. IS) When I discussed earlier this sense of Nature in George Eliot's novels, I asserted that 'it is no convenient abstraction but rather the icon of that mysterious complexity of things which she enacts so concretel y in the body of her fiction'. One way in which she 'enacts concretely' is by linking the thread of Nature with other threads (e.g. the life-drama analogy) in her 'tangled skein'. But clearly, her use of apparent abstractions demands further justification. The problem is obviously sharpened when we meet a cognate example like this: Destiny stands by sarcastic with our dramatis personae folded in her hand. (Middlemarch, ch. II) The problem in a case like this is that the abstraction may be felt to be philosophically intrusive, blatantly suggesting a crude determinism. One answer to this might seem to be in Hardy's terms: he constantly protested that the readers of his novels took literally I9~

W.

J.

HARVEY

what was meant figuratively, that they mistook rhetorical tropes for assertions of belief : I should have to remind him . . . of the vast difference between the expression of fancy and the expression of belief. My imagination may have often run away with me; but all the same, my sober opinion so far as I have any definite one - of the Cause of Things, has been defined in scores of places, and is that of a great many ordinary thinkers; that the said Cause is neither moral nor immoral, but unmoral. . .. I have of course called this Power all sorts of names never supposing that they would be taken for more than fancies. I have even in prefaces warned readers to take them as such - as mere impressions of the moment, exclamations in fact. But it has always been my misfortune to presuppose a too intelligent reading public, and no doubt people will go on thinking that I really believe the Prime Mover to be a malignant old gentleman, a sort of King of Dahomey - an idea which, so far from my holding it, is to me irresistibly comic. 4 Hardy's answer sounds convincing, but it is hardly sufficient. If we feel uneasy about George Eliot's introduction of a sarcastic Destiny, we surely feel even more uneasy about a similar trope by Hardy - this, for example, from The Mayor of Casterbridge: The ingenious machinery contrived by the gods for reducing human possibilities of amelioration to a minimum - which arranges that wisdom to do shall come pari passu with the departure of zest for doing - stood in the way of all that. He had no wish to make an arena a second time of a world that had become a mere painted scene for him. (ch. 44) The case is thus: both George Eliot and Hardy make frequent use of the life-drama analogy; both push this analogy beyond the pointing of a moral theme into the area of metaphysical speculation; both use it to suggest those aspects of man's life in which he figures as a determined creature. Why, then, should the nature and expression of George Eliot's determinism be felt to be more acceptable than Hardy's? On a local level it is partly a matter of tact in expression. In its context we respond to George Eliot's remark about destiny as a trope, whereas Hardy's takes on the assertive force of a statement, seeming to command our assent or disbelief. On a larger scale, it is partly a matter of plot and structure. George Eliot disperses her Determinism over a wide range of characters we do not feel that anyone of them is singled out. But in The 194

IDEA AND IMAGE IN THE NOVELS OF GEORGE ELIOT

Mayor of Casterbridge every twist and turn of the narrative leads us back to a single figure, Henchard, so that he seems a doomed and predestined man. But ultimately - despite Hardy's protestations - I believe it is a matter of philosophy, of the way the life-drama analogy is informed by the author's controlling vision of the world. We may figure the difference between the two novelists in this way; Hardy is content simply to write:

But most probably luck had little to do with it. Character is Fate, said Navalis, and Farfrae's character was just the reverse of Henchard's, who might not inaptly be described as Faust has been described - as a vehement gloomy being who had quitted the ways of vulgar men without light to guide him on a better way. Contrast this with George Eliot's formulation and the differences are obvious: But you have known Maggie a long while, and need to be told, not her characteristics, but her history, which is a thing hardly to be predicted even from the completest knowledge of characteristics. For the tragedy of our lives is not created entirely from within. 'Character,' says Navalis in one of his questionable aphorisms - 'character is destiny.' But not the whole of our destiny. Hamlet, Prince of Desmark, was speculative and irresolute, and we have a great tragedy in consequence. But if his father had lived to a good old age, and his uncle had died an early death, we can conceive Hamlet's having married Ophelia, and got through life with a reputation of sanity notwithstanding many soliloquies, and some moody sarcasms towards the fair daughter of Polonius, to say nothing of the frankest incivility to his father-in-law. (The Mill on the Floss, VI. 6) It is not enough to say that where Hardy merely accepts Novalis, George Eliot questions his dictum. The point is that The Mayor of Casterbridge as a whole contradicts Hardy'S acceptance of Navalis. Granted that a great deal depends upon the character of Henchard, nevertheless the twists and turns of the plot, with its manifold coincidences, suggest some external Fate or Destiny working upon him. George Eliot is much more careful to allow for the reciprocal action of character and circumstance. 'Our deeds determine us as much as we determine our deeds' (Adam Bede, ch. 29). As much, but no more; the very syntax suggests how scrupulously the balance of forces is preserved. Throughout her novels she

195

w. J.

HARVEY

stresses the intermeshing of the human will with all those forces she sometimes sums up as Nature or Destiny: 'Our life is determined for us - and it makes the mind very free when we give up wishing, and only think of bearing what is laid upon us, and doing what is given us to do.' 'But I can't give up wishing,' said Philip impatiently. 'It seems to me we can never give up longing and wishing while we are thoroughly alive.' (The Mill on the Floss, V. I) One reason why George Eliot can successfully exploit the lifedrama analogy to suggest the nature of man's conditional freedom is that this analogy is not isolated, but is linked up with all those other images of natural process which we analysed earlier. We are thus brought back to the way in which at a linguistic level her images and ideas intersect and interact; we see how the different threads are woven together into her 'tangled skein'. The intersection may be at the level of those neutral terms, so casual and brief that we never notice them at their cumulative work. Thus the one word scene may point in two directions, towards the natural scene and towards the stage. 'Marty and Tommy, who saw a perpetual drama going on in the hedgerows' (Adam Bede, ch. 18); 'the drama that was going on was almost as familiar as the scene' (Adam Bede, ch. 21); 'a green hollow almost surrounded by an amphitheatre of the pale pink dog-roses' (The Mill on the Floss, V. I); 'he did not live in the scenery of such an event' (Middlemarch, ch. 4) - such phrases are literal or have the barest metaphorical charge. But they form the unobtrusive background to rather more developed images of the same thing. Thus we can move gradually from neutrality to something like this: Scenes which make vital changes in our neighbours' lots are but the background of our own, yet like a particular aspect of the fields and trees, they become associated for us with the epochs of our own natural history, and make a part of that unity which lies in the selection of our keenest consciousness. (Middle march , ch. 34) Here scene gains a quasi-dramatic force from its context; the gentry are looking down on the tableau-like procession at Featherstone's funeral: 'the country gentry of old time lived in a rarefied social air: dotted apart on their stations up the mountain they 196

IDEA AND IMAGE IN THE NOVELS OF GEORGE ELIOT

looked down with imperfect discrimination on the belts of thicker life below' . We move from this to something slightly more developed. George Eliot describes St. Oggs society in terms I have already quoted; comparing them with deserted Rhone villages, she says: I have a cruel conception that these lives those ruins are the traces of were part of a gross sum of obscure vitality that will be swept into the same oblivion with the generations of ants and beavers. (The Mill on the Floss, IV. I)

And immediately she applies this to the Dodsons and the Tullivers, switching from the imagery of recapitulation to the image of the stage; 'this old-fashioned family life on the banks of the Floss, which even in sorrow hardly suffices to life above the level of the tragi-comic' . This linking of Nature and stage can be far more emphatic; thus within one paragraph Mr. Tulliver is described in these terms: And Mr. Tulliver, you perceive, though nothing more than a superior miller and maltster, was as proud and obstinate as if he had been a very lofty personage, in whom such dispositions might be a source of that conspicuous, far-echoing tragedy, which sweeps the stage in regal robes, and makes the dullest chronicler sublime.... There are certain animals to which tenacity of position is a law of life - they can never flourish again after a single wrench; and there are certain human beings to whom predominance is a law of life .... (The Mill on the Floss, III. I)

The rest of this paragraph, which modulates between these two views of Tulliver as tragedy king and as tenacious animal, states a very common theme in George Eliot's novels: The pride and obstinacy of millers, and other insignificant people, whom you pass unnoticingly on the road every day, have their tragedy too; but it is of that unwept, hidden sort, that goes on from generation to generation, and leaves no record ....

This is one of George Eliot's main emphases - that tragedy is to be found not merely in high-life romance or in extreme situations, but in homely and monotonous existence, in the great, ordinary course of everyday human life. All the world is a stage; George Eliot frequently uses the life-drama analogy to generalize her theme, to implicate her readers, to appeal to common human nature. Thus

197

w. J.

HARVEY

she speaks, for example, of 'that partial, divided action of our nature which makes the tragedy of the human lot' (The Mill on the Floss, VII. 3); such appeals are common in her fiction. And she can involve us in her vision of humdrum tragedy by linking the lifedrama analogy with imagery drawn from Nature: Some discouragement, some faintness of heart at the new real future which replaces the imaginary, is not unusual, and we do not expect people to be deeply moved by what is not unusual. That element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of frequency, has not yet wrought itself into the coarse emotion of mankind; and perhaps our frames could hardly hear much of it. If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity. (Middlemarch, ch. 20) It is natural that life should be tragic; to have said that calmly, without undue emphasis, to have given this recognition its proper place and proportions within our total awareness of life, in all its mysterious complexity - this is one of George Eliot's greatest achievements. It is part of the moral nature of her fiction; she strips away a little of our 'wadded stupidity' and enables us a little better to bear the burden of human reality. And she does more than merely say this - she enacts it, incarnates it in the structure of her stories, the nature of her characters and, ultimately, in the complex patterns of her language. Her words reverberate, her ideas expand and mutate, her images intersect and interact; all combining in one 'tangled skein' which is the very stuff of life itself. The few threads I have unravelled in this essay are, indeed, a representativE: 'sample of an even web' . NOTES I. Had he lived, W. J. Harvey would have revised and shortened this essay. [Editor's note.] 2. U. C. Knoepflmacher, Religious Humanism and the Victorian Novel (Princeton University Press, 1965). 3. In fact, Knoepflmacher has made a mistake here - due to depending on secondary sources: Huxley's relevant essays date from 1868 not 1864 (i.e. two years after Haeckel). 4.F. E. Hardy, The Later Years of Thomas Hardy, 1892-1928 (Macmillan, 1930), ch. XVII, pp. 216-18.

198

x THE PASTORAL OF INTELLECT

John Bayley

GEORGE ELIOT'S genius as a novelist lies, it seems to me, in the ways in which she explored and individualized that peculiarly nineteenth-century fictional form which might be called historic pastoral. She did not of course invent it. Balzac, whom she admired, and who - though with all the differences in the French tradition comes closest to her, had already consciously set himself to do for the present what Scott had done for the past. The scope and grandeur of the enterprise consists not only in creating and characterizing the present as if it were the past, but of framing the one in terms of the other; and by insulating a prospect or a retrospect to establish a continuum in which the novelist's process can cope with the largest issues and the most diverse scenes and people; can distinguish and contemplate them so as to produce a panorama of social process, of case, type, and idea. Behind George Eliot's own development of this creative method there are two important premises. One is that immensely serious and conscious search for the meaning of history and for an understanding of its process which we associate with the nineteenthcentury heirs of Vico, with Hegel, Proudhon, and Marx. The other, closely intertwined with it, is the search for a moral system based on idea, which shall replace the received historic truths of religion. The fact of Jesus and his divinity is dubious or exploded: the idea of Jesus is timelessly valuable. Writing to Miss Sara Hennell in 1863, George Eliot remarks that Renan's Life of Jesus 'has so much artistic merit that it will do a great deal towards the culture of ordinary minds, by giving them a sense of unity between that 199

JOHN BAYLEY

far-off past and our present'. That shows very clearly the two connected premises behind her method; and shows us, too, how history becomes for her kind of creative intelligence a timeless present, the source and inspiration of culture and morals that would otherwise have to be built on vacancy. The paradox is that when history is so consciously felt as idea, it is in one sense abolished as fact. The past is always with us, and not only reassures our present consciousness, but is identified with it. This explains the remarkable confidence with which George Eliot and other novelists embarked on historical subjects, a confidence which reminds us of Matthew Arnold's contention that' the future of poetry is immense' because it immortalizes ideas, so that such a line as La sua Voluntade e nostra pace expresses for us, and will express for future generations, not something specific about Dante's God and Dante's sense of God, but something which we feel as part of the culture which bequeaths us our moral consciousness. The achievement of Romola is erected on the same premise. What is potentially embarrassing about the dissolution of the fact in the all-embracing idea is that the actuality of other beings and other worlds, as separate and distinct from our own today, can become unrecognized or unimportant. And this is a danger that George Eliot, as we might expect, is fully aware of. She must therefore strive for exactitude, for detail, for distinction. 'The psychological causes', she writes to R. H. Hutton, 'which prompted me to give such details of Florentine life and history as I have given, are precisely the same as those which determined me in giving the details of English village life in Silas Marner, or the "Dodson" life, out of which were developed the destinies of poor Tom and Maggie.' And she indicates in the same letter what those causes were: 'It is the habit of my imagination to strive after as full a vision of the medium in which a character moves as of the character itself.' With this comment we are at the centre of the most weighty theoretical preoccupation of historic pastoral. It is clear, and it is also immensely impressive, that George Eliot did not see any need to distinguish between the process by which she hoped to actualize Romola, Guido, and Baldassarre and the process she brought to bear on the young Tullivers, Adam Bede, Silas Marner, or Dorothea. What that process entailed was 'the severe effort of trying to make certain ideas thoroughly incarnate, as if they had revealed them200

THE PASTORAL OF INTELLECT

selves to me first in the flesh and not in the spirit'. In the same letter she also writes of her excitement over her 'attempt at a drama' The Spanish Gypsy - and how it is still 'in that stage of creation in which the idea of the characters predominates over the incarnation'.l We do not, it may be, find this emphasis wholly reassuring, not because it implies too abstract and intellectual a tendency, but because, on the contrary, the need to clothe her projections in the flesh, to give them a local habitation and a name, strikes us as too devotional, too loving. This over-insistence is the Nemesis of the pastoral process of the great nineteenth-century realists, of Balzac as of George Eliot. It is a process, above all, of making things and people lovingly characteristic of themselves, but the very minuteness and care in the externalization reveals all too clearly its origins in the pictured world of historical idea, of pondered subject. It is for this reason that Dr. Leavis was less than fair to Professor Elton's comment that 'in exhaustively describing life, George Eliot is apt to miss the spirit of life itself'. 'For anyone whose critical education has begun', fumed Dr. Leavis, 'this must be breathtaking in its absurdity.' Not necessarily. Professor Elton's only fault was not to have gone on to say what he meant here by 'life'. What he had in mind, I would guess, is that George Eliot's comprehension of life cannot allow for the contingent, the incongruous, the unframed, the indefinitely questioned and receding aspects of experience, which are not only what we have round us all the time, but which writers as various as Jane Austen, Shakespeare, and Tolstoy are able without apparent effort to represent in and through the artificiality of their forms. It is not artifice that threatens 'life' in this sense, but the pastoral attempt to secure too characteristic and comprehensive a picture of it. In making its ideas 'thoroughly incarnate' the intellect makes a picture. George Eliot herself courts the pictorial analogy, as if it afforded a proof of successful incarnation, emphasizing the 'Flemish' realism she strove for, in the scenes at the Rainbow Inn in Silas Marner, and more studiously still in the Poysers and the Dodsons. Perhaps a closer resemblance, however, is with the Victorian genre painters, with Bastien-Lepage and Leibl, Rossiter and Holman Hunt, even with the historical Weltgeschichtliche Bilder of Kaulbach, though she did not admire them. Flemish genre in fact makes an impression very different from hers, an impression 201

JOHN BAYLEY

in which objects and people appear to have been left over, as if by accident, in the created area of isolation and tranquillity. Be that as it may, it is the pictorial art of her own time, and not that of any earlier period, which lays such emphasis on what is characteristic for its own sake. (Martineau's picture, Kit's Reading Lesson, could well illustrate The Mill on the Floss. Hans Meyrick's projected picture in Daniel Deronda, of Titus sending away Berenice, invitus invitam, would have belonged to a rather grander form of the same genre. It is dearly intended to point to the Gwendolen-Deronda relation, a reference to history as meaningful as the references to Greek tragedy in Adam Bede and Felix Holt.) And, like that art, she uses our image of what was typical in the past to body forth her more contemporary incarnations. Quattrocento man casts his shadow over Stephen Guest: He might have been sitting for his portrait, which would have represented a rather striking young man of five-and-twenty, with a square forehead, short dark-brown hair standing erect, with a slight wave at the end, like a thick crop of corn, and a half-ardent, half· sarcastic glance from under his well-marked horizontal eyebrows. (The Mill on the Floss, VI. 5) And even more emphatically over the Grandcourts as they appear before their fatal boating expedition: This handsome, fair-skinned English couple manifesting the usual eccentricity of their nation, both of them proud, pale and calm, without a smile on their faces, moving like creatures who were fulfilling a supernatural destiny - it was a thing to go out and see, a thing to paint. The husband's chest, back, and arms showed very well in his close-fitting dress, and the wife was declared to be like a statue. (Daniel Deronda, VII. 54) Of course her groupings and dialogues, even when executed with what she called 'the subdued colouring, the half-tints, of real life', are always richly animated: to borrow the distinction of Lukacs, they are realistic, not naturalistic; in the spirit of Balzac and not that of Flaubert and Zola. Yet the devotional insistence on these incarnations leaves them no room not to be typical of what she had in mind; her love for them is inevitably a total possessiveness. This possessiveness is most obvious when she is surveying the character who has no formed consciousness: 202

THE PASTORAL OF INTELLECT

Hetty had never read a novel; if she had ever seen one I think the words would have been too hard for her; how then could she find a shape for her expectations? (Adam Bede, ch. 13)

One must be found for her, and the 'finding of a shape' under these conditions exactly illustrates the technique of intellectual pastoral. This appeal to it makes Hetty seen more completely in her frame, as a character in a novel, precisely because it is claimed she cannot feel herself as one. And when possessiveness veers towards knowingness - the knowingness, that is, which comes from the author's assuming an absence of any self-knowledge in the character - the result can be not so far from Kipling's knowing emphasis on the framing environment to which the individual owes his recognizable self. Indeed, Kipling's pictorial analogies for his creative process the 'overlaid tints and textures', etc. - are oddly reminiscent of George Eliot's, and may make us wonder whether this kind of picture vocabulary goes with a kind of art in which the individual is carefull y 'shaped by the wider public life', though in such a comparison every advantage in scope and feeling, of calmness and generosity of temper, is of course, on George Eliot's side. One can compare, too, a certain kind of dialogue, heard as unmistakably in the carpenter's shop at the beginning of Adam Bede as among the officials in one of Kipling's best stories, Without Benefit of Clergy, and designed to instruct us in an environmental set-up at the expense of any actual and individual probability. Carpenters do not chat so as to reveal the workings of their calling to one another, and neither do civil servants. I observed that George Eliot's confidence in recreating and refeeling history as a part of her own mental life is something she shares with the other serious novelists of her age who make use of history. But there are some important exceptions. Flaubert worked as laboriously on the setting of Carthage for Salammbo as George Eliot did on that of Florence for Romola, and it is instructive to compare them: both, I think, are undervalued now after being overpraised in their own day ..F1aubert may be said to have succeeded, ingeniously, in turning the very weakness of Naturalism its appearance of unfeeling objectivity - into a historical truth. His Carthaginians are too remote in their meticulously barbaric world for us to understand them or feel anything for them (though as Saint-Beuve pointed out, this alienation is compromised by the 203

JOHN BAYLEY

palpably romantic amour fatal of the heroine). None the less, Flaubert's treatment implies a kind of truth that most of us today would accept. History can be reconstructed, after a fashion, but not re-felt: whereas George Eliot's history is coterminous with her own culture and her own being. Like her contemporaries, she admired the insipid Esmond, while ignoring Thackeray's much better first novel, Barry Lyndon, which was a deliberate attempt to debunk the sentimentalization of the past and to reconstruct an eighteenthcentury hero in a literary genre of that time. War and Peace is closer to her vision, for Tolstoy takes over his epoch as completely as she does hers - indeed, he insists on the essential sameness of human life throughout history. But Tolstoy totally rejects any labour on the characteristic. An extraordinary feature of War and Peace is the absence throughout its great length of any local colour, any account of houses, clothes, places, features, any striving for' as full a vision of the medium in which a character moves as of the character himself'. Tolstoy goes further, and specifically disclaims any interest in many aspects of his apparently enormous world, in anything that is 'incomprehensible and strange' to him. Such an admission could only be made by a writer with immense experience and immense natural privileges, although - bizarrely enough - its tone reminds us of Jane Austen's mock-modest disinclination to leave her small world for the adventurous undertaking of a historical novel on the Saxe-Coburg family. The fact is that Tolstoy knew his world as Jane Austen knew hers, and not by anything approaching the process by which George Eliot united her childhood with her re-creation of the past and her vision of the future. A confidence in not knowing would have been impossible to her. Her details so laboriously acquired, so lovingly collected, must be all harmonized and shaped together. By contrast, Tolstoy's innumerable details all distinguish and disunite; they are, as it were, details of finger and hand, of voice and gesture, details that are not characteristic of the setting but contingent in the person. Though War and Peace and Middlemarch share a sense of the past that is also the present, a majestic grasp of a culture that is in both cases the summation of a sense of history, Tolstoy succeeds in abolishing history as pastoral where George Eliot confirms it. I should perhaps make clear at this point, since the last comparison may seem particularly invidious, that I have nothing but admiration for the way in which George Eliot employs what I 204

THE PASTORAL OF INTELLECT

would call 'pastoral' as her chosen and yet inevitable form, the form in which - in G. K. Chesterton's words - 'culture becomes entirely conscious'. It is the form which preferably embodies both her intellect and her power of love, her scientific analysis and her devotional piety. It suits her, it is her, in the same way that Lawrence's most characteristic form (seen at its best in the 'bitty' elementals of Kangaroo) most surely and superbly conveys his essentiality. Indeed, we can concur wholeheartedly with Dr. Leavis's assumption of the affinity between the two. Both are intensely conscious of the traditions of their literature and race, but both are cut off, by that consciousness, from the involuntary participation in tho~e things which produces another kind of art. Dr. Leavis's comparison of George Eliot's sense of rural life with Shakespeare and Hardy is surely quite misleading, for this reason: Nothing could be less like Shakespearian dialogue than that rustic perfection of the Poysers, in which every confirming touch rings just too typical to be true. By contrast, the speech of Shallow, Dogberry, or Bottom, of Doll Tearsheet and Mistress Overdone shoots off into peculiarity and contingency: it continually suggests the presence of a world elsewhere, of an uninsulated oddity that is outside the immediate scope of artful presentation. This is surely an aspect of what we mean by the power of primary creation, and we are doing George Eliot no disservice in emphasizing that she does not and cannot exhibit it. Hardy'S is a different case, for he admired George Eliot and was influenced by her; and no less than she he was an intellectual, with all that the word implies. But he was also, as a novelist, something else, and we can see what it is if we compare the way he makes use of Tess with George Eliot's handling of Hetty Sorrel. Tess eludes Hardy's proclaimed vision of her. Her figure implies a more ambivalent and a more genial awareness than does Hardy's overt presentation of her story. Similarly, Hardy's rustics escape from their immediate and sometimes ponderously ironic typicality into a world of being that seems less specified and more instinctive. 'I never cared for life: life cared for me' - his poem well illustrates the saving contradiction in Hardy'S process. Life does indeed care for his creations, while George Eliot cares for hers too much for life the larger and less congruous totality - to be given the same chance. We learn another lesson about her mode, and the kind of 20 5

JOHN BAYLEY

appreciation it requires, if we compare her didacticism with Tolstoy's. The clue to our acceptance of Tolstoy's purely didactic interludes in his great novels - if we do accept them, and I think most of his readers come to do so - is our growing sense that their kind of assertion is modified and even contradicted by the totality of the work, a totality which they help to expand and with which they ultimately harmonize. Tolstoyan contradiction simply enlarges: it neither muddles nor contracts. Events, families, the story, individuals such as Stiva and the old Prince Bolkonsky counterpoise the pressure of Tolstoy's views on history and family life: they embody the objections and exceptions and complete the whole. George Eliot's didacticism invariably echoes her story and is an aspect of it, so that if a rift occurs, as in Middlemarch, between what she asserts and what certain implications of the tale suggest, the upshot can only be weakening and diminishing. When she shows us over a consciousness - her comment reinforcing and echoing what plot and 'incarnation' have already arranged and destined - the thing succeeds in relation to her confidence and authority, and our assent to them. In other words, the more she 'uses' a character the more impressive her performance can be. This is again an aspect of historic pastoral - the inner life of her most effective beings framed and typified as she frames her genre scenes. The inner life is seen, accumulated, and reconstructed like the interior of Silas Marner's cottage or the streets and houses of medieval Florence. It is precisely her strength that she can do this, but we are not to consider her folk as living among the contingencies of the non-pastoral world any more than we are to consider their minds not being open, like those streets and houses, to an accurate and painstaking scrutiny. Human motivation, like human history, is a matter of laborious but essentially feasible reconstruction. All the more remarkable that her structuring of mind has a warmth and illumination, an understanding brooded in something like the medium of poetry. The clou that establishes Silas as particularly moving, showing, as it does, all the author's power of sympathetic reconstruction of a social phenomenon in the past now silted over by others of a different kind: Such colloquies have occupied many a pair of pale-faced weavers whose unnurtured souls have been like young winged things, fluttering forsaken in the twilight. (Silas Marner, I. I) 206

THE PASTORAL OF INTELLECT

We see here the best kind of use of historical imagination combined with the author's personal sense of identification with the weavers' mode of being, and with their sterile preoccupation about election and' assurance of salvation', in a cramped solitude which has neither the wholesome thoughtlessness of rural routine nor the intellectually fructifying atmosphere of scepticism and analysis. She knew it herself; and by knowing it she can render it in a historical setting. Romola, though far more 'deeply studied and elaborately justified', rests on the same foundation. One of the best things in it, and already implicit in her first conception, is the killing power of highmindedness and penetration (George Eliot's own qualities) on the accommodating man whose virtues depend on an equivalent accommodation in others. With an uninsistent but very conscious justice, she shows how Romola destroyed Tito where Tessa would have preserved him: Poor Romola, with all her self-sacrificing effort, was really helping to harden Tito's nature by chilling it with a positive dislike which had beforehand seemed impossible in him; but Tessa kept open the fountains of kindness. (Romola, III. 50)

Tito is as much at home in Tessa's placidity as James's Gilbert Osmond is in Madam Merle's worldliness. Both are undone by the supposition that their wives will acquiesce in the limits which enable them to be good to themselves and to others.2 I should argue that it is the pure historic-pastoral artifice in which Tito is enclosed which makes him a more successful character - in terms of George Eliot's kind of genius - than is Lydgate in Middlemarch. We, and George Eliot, know where we are with Tito. The sticky end to which he comes is perfectly proper, and the coincidences necessary to push him toward it are equally acceptable in terms of her pastoral form. But she does not quite possess Lydgate. He is, or should be, too complex a figure, too involved in contemporary uncertainties to be made a pastoral case and held in the frame of her studious intentness. As a case history of a nineteenthcentury gentleman-surgeon he is superb: as an accepted being he barely exists. The young enjoy Lydgate, as they enjoy Middlemarch as a novel, because the psychology of his case both instructs and flatters their inexperience: he gives them a valued sense of grasping the development of a life in literary terms, and hence of exercising a

7

20

JOHN BAYLEY

certain prognostic power over their own future and that of their friends. But at each re-reading Lydgate surely becomes less and less responsive and suggestive. He shares with Dorothea and with Ladislaw the prime defect of an unmanageable pastoral conception the possibilities of life in him seem actually inimical to the kind of life that George Eliot can compass and create. What I have in mind here can perhaps be demonstrated best by reference to the kind of character who seems to owe its success to precisely those elements which in George Eliot's treatm~nt constitute failure. Of this order of being, I think, are Dolokhov in War and Peace and Jane Fairfax in Emma. Both are characters whose authors seem uncertain about what they have done, and who fall back - perhaps for that reason - on seeing them through the eyes of characters with whom they feel more at home and in whom they have a more instinctive confidence: Emma in the case of Jane Austen, and the Rostov family in that of Tolstoy. None the less, the pair unmistakably endorse their creator's gift in that they are both immensely and harmoniously suggestive: they offer themselves to the reader's own powers of query and exploration. Nor do we, as readers, feel that our exploration is inhibited or made superfluous by the author's intention: we feel, in fact, our contribution as an allowed aspect of the novel's scope. But in Middlemarch this is not the case. Separately and in their relation to one another, Dorothea and Lydgate promote a muddle out of which the reader can do nothing to help the author. Even Rosamond Vincy is disconcertingly unframed by her author's unadmitted animosity towards her. Such an animosity can be a positive asset to Jane Austen, as we can see in her superb admission - via Emma - of her feelings toward the sort of paragon who is talked about as Jane Fairfax is talked about. Generous - solicitously generous as she is, George Eliot tries to make amends for her feelings about Rosamond, a very different thing. Just how different we can see from the sybilline emphasis with which she assured a correspondent that her pen seemed to take on its own life when she described the confrontation of Rosamond and Dorothea, and that she wrote the scene straight out in a state of intense emotional excitement. This suggests something too near the intimacies of the unconscious for her method to master and make clear, and indeed I think we feel on re-readings that the famous scene is without true psychological justness and resonance; that it is a scene a faire, stopping short - in 208

THE PASTORAL OF INTELLECT

our reception of it - at a superficially dramatic and sentimental level. The emotional working of amends and animosities, and the muddle it makes, is very different here from that analysis which is so engaging in the portrait of Maggie; so coolly perceptive in the relations of Romola and Tito; and so initially promising in the dialogues of Dorothea and Celia. George Eliot drew on her elder sister for Celia, as she had drawn on her own youthful self for Maggie, and this may be why Middlemarch opens with a more sophisticated version of the confidence sustained throughout The Mill on the Floss. But Middlemarch goes on to break the pastoral mould, and though in doing so it becomes George Eliot's most diverse and ambitious novel, it also incurs weaknesses which reveal how much that mould suited her kind of creative intelligence. George Eliot could put herself into her fictional form with triumphant ease - Maggie shows that. But Dorothea shows that she cannot afford to be disingenuous about it. Middlemarch contains her most moving moments - Dorothea and Casaubon walking hand in hand in their mutual disillusionment down the bleak corridor is one of many such. They are much more memorable than the safe, pastoral themes: the Bulstrodes, Mrs. Bulstrode's forgiveness. They are things we associate with the best in another kind of novelist, Trollope or Dickens, who appear to compose on the same level as their creations and who are not dependent, as George Eliot is, on total possession from above. But George Eliot cannot achieve such moments without a corresponding loss of control. Her relation to Dorothea, and through Dorothea to Casaubon, is very close. Herbert Spencer and Lewes himself are on the threshold, and she must draw back: honesty and amplitude of demonstration are no longer possible. There is something much more intimate here than anything in the legend of Mark Pattison - it is as if she seized on what is tellingly characteristic in the make-up of the male scholar in order to protect herself from actualities to which she could not come closer. But in this case even the characteristic lands her in the area of the unmanageable. If we leave Mark Pattison out of it, there remains at the back of the Casaubon theme something more complex and incongruous than George Eliot can allow for; an unexplored dimension which threatens her balance and meaning, instead of enhancing the total effect of the work as I have suggested it can do in Tolstoy or Jane Austen. While if we let Mark Pattison in, we must admit, I think, that the motivation of his marriage and the 20 9

JOHN BAYLEY

complexity of his nature is much more interesting in itself, and in what it might offer another kind of novelist, than it becomes in George Eliot's treatment. Her handling of the clou here is thus the reverse of how Henry James thought its process should go. Art is not refining and completing the voiceless complications and full-stops of life, but schematizing and suppressing them, even as it claims to give them a faithful and meticulous recording. Almost as if she had sensed that there were elements in Middlemarch that were too intractable for her natural mode, George Eliot returned in Daniel Deronda to the historic pastoral. Like Felix Holt, it presents a human drama coupled with an historical vision, and Zionism is peculiarly well fitted to George Eliot's pastoral in that it unites past with future in one embracing ideal. 8 The relations of Deronda and Gwendolen are similarly felicitous, as those of Lydgate and Dorothea are not, for both are characters completely insulated in a device for emotional and cultural inquiry, undisturbed by the disconcerting personal echoes heard in Middlemarch. The accepted view that the novel divides in two, and that the Gwendolen part is good, the Deronda part bad, seems to me to ignore the homogeneity of the themes here, and their successful harmonization Middlemarch is much more radically divided. The coming to awareness of Gwendolen - the universe pressing in upon her - parallels Deronda's discovery of his historic fate and duty: both are equally cut off from any perspective of individuality; both exemplify their author's preoccupation with the development of social and cultural consciousness. The process is set off by the absolute unreality, in ordinary fictional terms, of Grandcourt, which makes him as effective in the role required of him as is the Mephistopheles of Goethe's Faust. And yet Daniel Deronda, unlike Middlemarch, is surely a novel which increases in intellectual interest when we reread it and measure it against the growth of our own awareness of historical and cultural developments; showing us, as it does, a graphic model of typically modern kinds of sexual and national emancipation. These two themes are united by the mode in which both are drawn, the personal case - as in all good pastoral fiction becoming one with the cultural. The more we understand George Eliot's method and mind, the less we feel that one half of the book is somehow' real' and the other half not. The same, with some reservation, might be said about Felix Holt, in which the Aeschylean tragedy of the Transomes is very much a 210

THE PASTORAL OF INTELLECT

part of George Eliot's cultural dream, emerging out of that solitary and immensely impressive self-education of hers, even more evident in the borrowed Greek motif in the story of Arthur Donnithorne. The Transome story may strike us as more effective than the idealization of the young Radical, but there is no doubt that both have the same kind of inspiration and represent the same order of imaginative construction. Though he emphasizes the influence on the Transome side of her reading of Greek tragedy, Dr. Leavis is surely misleading when he goes on to suggest that Felix himself shows the same traces of an over-indulgent handling that disturbs us in Dorothea. The two cases are very different. Felix is right in his place and according to the formula of the book: he is an adequately incarnated ideal. And though his speech and the language of his mind are as much made up as those of Tito Melema in Romola, they are equally unsentimentalized, executed with that rigour of perception which is not only built into the author's method, but is the most interesting aspect of her contemplative powers. Felix is purely a creature of her imagination, but for that very reason he can be seen with its corresponding clarity - that clarity that traces his relation to Esther (for example, his determination to let her know, however much more miserable it may make her, what it costs him to give her up). With Dorothea, on the other hand, George Eliot is divided between her clou of a 'later-born Teresa' (who might in practice be something like a Florence Nightingale) and her more confusingly autobiographical and intimate claim for a womanly woman: a muddle fatally accentuated by the solution of Ladislaw. It is true that she effectively wishes the division on to the character ('these blundering lives') but the real blunder is further back-in the author. Clarity and certainty are the virtues of characterization in the pastoral mode, and the final proof of George Eliot's superiority in this mode is surely given by Maggie Tulliver. For obvious reasons, Maggie is the most completely known of all George Eliot's characters, a triumph of 'the contemporary culture and emancipation becoming conscious of itself'. She is perfect, and her perfection means, among other things, that the book resolves her potentiality completely in its form. Like the death of Tito and the marriage of Felix and Esther, her drowning is a perfectly satisfactory denouement, because it is wholly in keeping with the mode that determines her presentation. Such a character cannot be allowed to escape into the merely suppositious, the possibilities of continued existence: the fact 2II

JOHN BAYLEY

that Dorothea is allowed to escape in this way shows that her author is not so wholly in control of her, and for George Eliot this can only be a weakness. Because of Casaubon, she cannot quite bring herself to face what constitutes the attractiveness of Ladislaw; and the true outline she draws of her men is blurred in the consequence; but Stephen Guest is the perfect foil for Maggie. Their physical attraction for each other is rendered with intensity and complete assurance, because it is far enough back in George Eliot's life to be recollected in honesty; and the same assurance disposes of them. Her letters show her sensitive about her endings, and the arbitrary bounds to her subjects which they assert. But though they are the endings of popular and traditional fiction they are also, at a deeper level, in complete harmony with the more intellectual part of her process. Because she made such good use of her characters she had to finish them off. Her high intelligence is always on the best terms with humble fictional device. To say this is not a depreciation - on the contrary. George Eliot's novels are about the coming of the kind of consciousness which Freud hoped for the human race. 'Where Id was shall Ego be.' And therefore we have no subterranean connection with her or with her characters, except the ones we have noticed in Middlemarch, which are, as it were, an embarrassment to all parties. We feel instead about her art, as Mrs. Carlyle did when she read Scenes from Clerical Life, that 'it makes us feel friends at once and always with the man or woman who wrote it'. Yet with other great authors we wish to have the connections that are other than friendly, and to have experience with them in modes of being which George Eliot could not analyse or approve: Don't you agree with me that much superfluous stuff is written on all sides about purpose in art? A nasty mind makes nasty art, whether for art or any other sake; and a meagre mind will bring forth what is meagre. And some effect in determining other minds there must be, according to the degree of nobleness or meanness in the selection made by the artist's soul. (Letter to Edward Burne-Jones, March 1873.) That puts the matter, as she saw it, very trenchantly. However much we rejoice to concur in the principle, we none the less have to admit - with however many complex qualifications - that it is the 'nasty mind' of Dickens and Dostoevsky, of Proust and Henry James. 212

THE PASTORAL OF INTELLECT

even of Tolstoy, that we respond to in their creations. The contradictions in their natures are not only a prime source of creative energy, but also of their many-sidedness, their 'negative capability'. And it is the glory of George Eliot that all her capabilities are positive ones. NOTES 1. Extracts from these letters are taken from George Eliot's Life as Narrated in Her Letters and Journals, edited by J. W. Cross, pp. 372, 366 and 402. 2. It is usually taken for granted that James's Portrait of a Lady owes much to the Middlemarch situation, but in fact it possibly owes even more to the triangular pattern of Romola, with Tessa oddly but very effectively transmuted into Madame Merle. 3. She was a great admirer of Lessing's Nathan der Weise - 'dear Lessing whose great spirit lives immortally in this crowning work of his' (Berlin Recollections).

2I3

INDEX

Adam Bede. viii. x. 19-41. 60. 81. 83. 84.153.154. 16Iff.• 166. 168. 173.180. 190ff.. 195. 196. 202. 203 Aeschylus. 210 alienation. 27ff.• 37ff.• 60. 133 altruism. see sympathy. doctrine of American Civil War. 142 Anglicanism. 21 Arkwright. Richard. 36 Armstrong. Isobel. viii. 116 (essay) Arnold. Matthew. 100. 114. 200; Culture and Anarchy. 99. 113 Austen. Jane. 79. 120. 201. 204; Emma. 208

Bagehot. Walter. 64. 122; English Constitution. 99 Balzac. Honore de. 199. 201. 202 Barth. Karl. II Bastien-Lepage. Jules. 201 Bayley. John. vii. ixff.• 199 (essay) Belinsky. 36 Bennett. Joan. 45. 62. 78• 79 Blackwood. John. 2. 8. 13. 59. 60. 66 Blake. William. 6 Blanc. Louis. 139 Bodichon. Barbara. 156 Bradley. F. H.. 159 Bray. Cara. 5 Bray. Charles. 3. 156 Bronte. Charlotte. 120; Jane Eyre. 43ff.• 48. 50-1 Browning. Robert. 62. 169 Bunyan. John. 58 Burke. Edmund. 137 Burne-Jones. Edward. 212 Carlyle. Mrs. 212 Carlyle. Thomas. 17.35. 145; Past and Present. 21. 34

Chambers. Robert. The Vestiges of Creation. 156. 157 Chapman. George. Revenge of Bussy drAm bois. 167 Chapman. John. 4 Chartism. lloff.• 139-40 Chaucer. Geoffrey. 62 Chesterton. G. K.. 205 children. 65. 69ff.• 165-6. 174ff.• 181ff. Clough. Arthur Hugh. 66 Coleridge. S. T.. 44; The Ancient Mariner. 24 Comte. Auguste. 37. 160 Conrad. Joseph. viii convention. sodal. 23. 34. 37. 40. 51; see also natural law Coveney. Peter. 65. 70 Crabbe. George. 62. 66 Craik. Mrs. John Halifax. Gentleman. 10 Cross. John. 46 Dallas. E. 5.• 52 Daniel Deronda. x. 37. 81. 89. 91ff.• 96. 133-50. 191. 202. 210 Dante Alighieri. 200 Darwin. Charles. 53. 156ff.• 164. 172; Origin of Species. 156. 157 determinism. social. 49. 91. 116. 137. 158. 160ff.• 185. 194; see also evolution development theory. see determinism dialogue. use of. 63ff. Dickens. Charles. viii. 114. 209. 212; Bleak House. 107; David Copperfield. 43ff. didacticism. 20. 116ff.• 149. 206 Disraeli. Benjamin. 103 Dostoevsky. Feodor. 212 Dowden. Edward. 149

21 5

INDEX

education, 139 egoism, see personality Eliot, T. S., 159 Elton, Professor Oliver, 201 Evangelicalism, 5,8, 17,48 Evans, Isaac, 46 Evans, Marian (real name of George Eliot), 5 evolution, 22, 28, 33, 36, 153, 156ff., 171, 185; see also determinism fantasy, 42ff., see also imagination Felix Holt the Radical, x, 94, 99-115, 136, 137, 139ff., 150, 202, 210, 211 Feuerbach, Ludwig, ix, 2ff., 7ff., 11, 17, 32, 37, 38, 48, 133ff., 138, 159, 160; Essence of Christianity, 2, 134 Fielding, Henry, 116, 189; Tom Jones, 24 Haubert, Gustave, 139, 202ff. Forster, E. M., 8 Franklin, Benjamin, Poor Richard's Almanack, 36 Freud, Sigmund, 153, 212. Frye, Northrop, 87 Gaskell, Mrs, x, 37; Mary Barton, 108 110; Ruth, 10, 29; Sylvia's Lovers, 34 Goethe, J. W., von, Faust, 210 Golding, William, Lord, of the Flies, 176 Gombrich, E. H., 22 Goode, John, viii, x, 19 (essay) Gregor, Ian, 19, 34 Haddakin, Lilian, viii, 59 (essay) Haeckel, Ernst Heinrich, 153 Haight, Gordon, 48, 157, 164 Hardy, Barbara, vii (introduction), 12., 39, 42 (essay), 79, 82; The Novels of George Eliot, 103 Hardy, Thomas, 100, 193, 205; Far from the Madding Crowd, 28, 47; The Mayor of Casterbridge, 194-5; The Return of the Native, 47 Harrison, Frederic, 107, 111 Harvey, W. J., viiff., 65, 104, 108, 117, 118, 151 (essay) Hazlitt, William, 1 Hegel, G. W. F., 199 Hennell, Sara, 82, 85, 160, 199

history, x, xi, 17, 20, 21, 37, 79, 99ff., 142, 148ff., 168ff., 185, 199ff. Holloway, John, The Victorian Sage, 74,75 humanism, 2, 5, 7, 9, 14,36, 51, 69, 76, 134ff., 199 humour, 16, 52, 65, 144; see also irony Hunt, Holman, 201 Hutton, R. H., 80, 95, 200; Studies in Parliament, 99 Huxley, T. H., 151, 152, 155, 157, 160 Ibsen, Henrik, Ghosts, 107 idealism, 136ff., 147ff. imagery, 151-98; animal, 12., 22, 28, 151-2, 162ff., 173ff.; birds and reptiles, 12, 151, 152; blindness, 43-4, 83; child, 65, 69ff. (see also children); cross, 87, 89; death's head, 89; drama, 189ff.; gold, 65, 72-3; ring, 84ff.; river, 46, 47, 134, 169; skein, mesh or web, 137, 160, 180, 193; tabernacle, 87, 88; trees, 164, 165 imagination, 44, 49, 154, 182, 183, 185, 190ff. Industrial Revolution, 100 irony, 162ff., 169ff. James, Henry, viii, 45, 46, 78, 81, 85, 93, 119, 149, 159, 207, 210, 212.; Portrait of a Lady, 47, 50, 12.6, 213n. Janet's Repentance, see Scenes of Clerical Life Jews, 142, 144, 14fo· Kaulbach, 201 Keats, John, 44, 118 Kenner, Hugh, 159 Kettle, Arnold, x, 99 (essay) Kingsley, Charles, Alton Locke, 110 Kipling, Rudyard, Without Benefit of Clergy, 203 Knoepfimacher, U. c., 155; Religious Humanism and the Victorian Novel, 151, 152 Lamartine, Alfonse de, 138 Lawrence, D. H., xi; Kangaroo, 205; The Rainbow, 100; Sons and Lovers, 56 Leavis, F. R., 45, 52, 109, 201, 205, 211; The Great Tradition, vii Leibl, 201

216

INDEX

Protestantism, 21 Proudhon, Pierre Joseph, 199 Proust, Marcel, 212 Providence, 45, 47, 49, 172, 174, 183

Lerner, Laurence, The Truthtellers, 49 Levine, George, xi, 78 (essay) Lewes, G. H., 2, 5, 10, 13, 51, 62, 79, 157, 160, 209 liberalism, middle-class, ll2-14, 138 love, 4, 9, 32, 52, 66-7, 134 Lowe, Robert, 100 Lukacs, 202 Lyrical Ballads, I, 24; see also Coleridge, S. T.; Wordsworth, William

Quaker Girl, 109

Main, Alexander, ll6 Martin, Graham, x, 133 (essay) Martineau, Harriet, 202 Marx, Karl, 38, 133, 135, 136, 138, 170, 199; Theses on Feuerbach, 38, 133, 135 materialism, 35-6, 135-6 memory, personal integration and, 67, 153, 180ff., 199-200 Methodism, 19, 21, 23, 25, 35, 37, 39 Middlemarch, viii, xi, 13, 37, 55, 60, 81, 83, 85, 89, 91ff., 95, ll6-p, 13 6, 140, 141, 149ff., 163, 169ff., 177, 192, 193, 198, 204, 206ff. Mil! on the Floss, The, xiff., 42-58, 60, 79,81,154, 155, 157, 161, 163ff., 168, 172, 173ff., 179ff., 190ff., 195ff., 202, 209, 2ll Miller, Hillis, viii mob, fear of, ll3, 139 Mr. Gil/i!'s Love-Story, see Scenes of

Clerical Life

narrator, intrusion of, 12-13, 32, 171, 186ff; see also sayings natural law, 23, 27, 29, 34, 37, 40 Nature, 68, 69, 166ff., 174, 181, 183, 192ff. Oldfield, Derek and Sybil, ix, I (essay) organicism, x, 16-17, 20ff.; see also determinism pastoral, 19ff., 199-213 Pattison, Mark, 209 Paul, St, 169, 170 personality, whole, 7; egoism, 141ff., 175, 177, 183; memory and integration, 67,153; outward symbols, 84ff.; search for identity, 148 Plato, 185, 187 Pope, Alexander, Essay on Man, 24 Preyer, Robert, ll6

radicalism, x, 17, 101ff., 137ff. reader, attitude to, 12off., 185ff. realism, problem of, xi, 10, 18ff., 50, 79; characters defined empirically, 52; humour and, 62; ideological shaping of, 26, 29, 34, 36ff. Reform Bill, (1832) 99, llO, 140; (1867) 100, 140 religion, 38-9, 47ff., 52, 53, 71- 2, 75, 133, 172, 199 Renan, Ernest, Life of Jesus, 199 Revolution, French, 1848, 137ff., 150 Riehl, Wilhelm Heinrich, The Natural History of German Life, 20 Ritchie, Lady, Blackstick Papers, 53 Robinson, H. Crabb, 5 Romola, xi, 51, 60, 78-98, 169, 200, 203, 207, 2ll Rossiter, Thomas Pritchard, 201 Rutherford, Mark, 109

Sad Fortunes of Amos Barton, see Scenes of Clerical Life

Sainte-Beuve, C. A., 203 sayings, ll6ff., 171 Scenes of Clerical Life, ix, 1-18, 212; Janet's Repentance, 5, 8-9, II, 12, 15, 94; Mr. Gil/i!'s Love-Story, 7-8, I1ff.; Sad Fortunes of Amos Barton, Iff., 10, ll, 13, 15, 135 Scott, Walter, 17, 54, 55, 199 secularism, see humanism, idealism, religion self-denial, 48ff.; see also sympathy sexual choice, 46, 50, 51 Shakespeare, William, 44, 201, 205; As You Like It, 185; King Lear, 5; The Tempest, 186, 187 Sibree, John, 137 Silas Marner, viii, xi, 52, 56, 59-77, 79ff., 161, 167, 191, 200, 201, 206 sociology, 16-17, 23ff., 29, 33, 34, 37, 102, 109ff., 145

Spanish Gypsy, The,

201

Spencer, Herbert, 26, 36, 37, 155, 157ff., 209; First Principles, 157ff.;

21 7

INDEX

Spencer, Herbert (cont.) Principles of Psychology, 154, 155, 157 Steiner, George, II7 Stephen, Leslie, 107 Stoicism, 167, 185, 189 suffrage, 99,100, Ill, 139 Svaglic, Martin J., 47, 48 sympathy, doctrine of, I, 8-9, 29, 30, 134, 146, 159, 182, 183 Tennyson, Alfred Lord, Idylls of the King, 169 Thackeray, W. M., 121ff., 131, 186ff.; Barry Lyndon, 204; Esmon&, 204; The Newcomes, 187; Vanity Fair, 186-7 Thomas Kempis, 48, 54, 55, 183 Tillotson, Geoffrey, 121; Thackeray the Novelist, 186 Tolstoy, Leo, 201, 206, 213; War and Peace, 204, 208 Trollope, Anthony, 209 Turgenev, Ivan, 149

a

Utilitarians, 26 Vermeer, Jan, 22 verse, use of, 62ff. Vico, 199 Willey, Basil, 6, 134 Williams, Raymond, 113, 137 Wilson, Edmund, viii Wise, Witty and Tender Sayings, II6 wish-fulfilment, see fantasy Wordsworth, William, 44, 62, 66, 67, 69ff.; 'Michael', 62, 65; 'Old Cumberland Beggar', 66; The Thorn, 24 Yeats, W. B., 170 Yonge, Charlotte, The Heir of Redc!ytfe, 10 Young, Arthur, 24 Zionism, 142, 148, 149, 210 Zola, Emile, 202

218

ROUTLEDGE LIBRARY EDITIONS: GEORGE ELIOT

Volume 5

MIDDLEMARCH

MIDDLEMARCH

KERRY MCSWEENEY

First published in 1984 by George Allen & Unwin (Publishers) Ltd This edition first published in 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 1984 Kerry McSweeney All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: ISBN: ISBN: ISBN: ISBN:

978-1-138-18544-9 978-1-315-64431-8 978-1-138-18519-7 978-1-138-18530-2 978-1-315-64433-2

(Set) (Set) (ebk) (Volume 5) (hbk) (Volume 5) (pbk) (Volume 5) (ebk)

Publisher’s Note The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this reprint but points out that some imperfections in the original copies may be apparent. Disclaimer The publisher has made every effort to trace copyright holders and would welcome correspondence from those they have been unable to trace.

Middlemarch KERRY McSWEENEY

London GEORGE ALLEN & UNWIN Boston

Sydney

© K erry McSweeney, 1984. This book is copyright under the Berne Convention. No reproduction without permission. All rights reserved.

George Allen & Unwin (Publishers) Ltd, 40 Museum Street, London WC1A 1LU, UK George Allen & Unwin (Publishers) Ltd, Park Lane, Hemel Hempstead, Herts HP2 4TE, UK Allen & Unwin Inc., 9 Winchester Terrace, Winchester, Mass. 01890, USA George Allen & Unwin Australia Pty Ltd, 8 Napier Street, North Sydney, NSW 2060, Australia

First published in 1984

B ritish Library Cataloguing in Publication Data McSweeney, Kerry Middlemarch.—(Unwin critical library) 1. Eliot, George. Middlemarch I. Title 823\8 PR4662 ISBN 0-04-800031-0 ISBN 0-04-800032-9 Pbk

Library o f Congress Cataloging in Publication Data McSweeney, Kerry, 1941— Middlemarch. (Unwin critical library) Bibliography: p. Includes index. I. Eliot, George, 1819-1880. Middlemarch. I. Title. II. Series. PR4662.M39 1984 823'.8 84-2982 ISBN 0-04-800031-0 ISBN 0-04-800032-9 (pbk.)

Set in 10 on 12 point Plantin by V & M Graphics Ltd, Aylesbury, Bucks and printed in Great Britain by Biddles Ltd, Guildford, Surrey

PREFACE

George Eliot once observed that ‘it is often good to consider an old subject as if nothing had yet b t n said about it; to suspend one’s attention even to revered authorities’. This was the procedure followed by David Daiches in his fine little book on Middl^nnarch of twenty years ago, but it has not been my procedure. The novel has the subject of informed critical commentary ever since the copious reviews that followed its publication in 1871-2; and in the past two decade it has received an enormous amount of attention. There was far too much of value in this material to make its neglect appropriate, though it is fair to say that 1 am less indebted to revered authorities than to the excellent work of a number of less eminent commentators, which I hope my study will make better known. I am grateful to Professor Claude Rawson of the University of Warwick for the opportunity to contribute to the discussion of one of the greatest English novels. It is a pleasure to acknowledge once again the support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of this time for the award of a leave fellowship during 1982-3. I am also grateful to Baroness Faithfull of Wolvercote, Dr Roy Park of University College, Oxford, M r Paul Turner ofLinacre College, Oxford, and my daughters Lucy and Kendra. A l of them helped to make the circumstances in which thes book was wrinen most pleasant. My greatest debt is to my wife Susanne for her good-humour and expert assistance. Quotations from Midd/emaxch are from the Riverside edition by Gordon S. Haight (Boston, Mass.: Houghton M if in , 1956). For quotations from Eliot’s other works of fiction I have used the editions in the Penguin English Library. Oxford April 1983

CONTENTS

Author’s Preface 1 Preliminary

vi 1

2 Art, Ideas, Aesthetics

15

3 A Study of Provincial Life

40

4 The Narrator

60

5 Character and Characterisation

75

6 Dorothea

98

7 The Parts and the Whole

119

8 Critical History

133

Notes

151

Bibliography

159

Index

165

In memory o f my uncle John McSweeney

CHAPTER 1

Preliminary I shudder a little to think what a long book it will be.

George Eliot, letter of 4 August 1872

Middlemarch is an extraordinarily rich novel. It depicts the life of a segment of English provincial society in the second quarter of the nineteenth century with an abundance of circumstantial detail that includes over one hundred characters. The novel’s four major plots connect at innumerable points both with each other and with the rest of the novel’s world; the central characters are presented with a wealth of moral and psychological notation; and the thematic complex of which they are part includes the relation of the individual to society and of character to circumstance, the problem of vocation, the possibilities for heroic action in the modern world, the search for the ‘minute processes which prepare human misery and joy’ (ch. 16), and the importance of fellow-feeling rather than ideas or doctrines as the basis of a postChristian religion of humanity. Its comprehensive examinations of character in its social and historical setting and of society itself in its manifold interconnections make Middlemarch one of the classic texts of nineteenth-century realistic fiction. Its thematic richness and intellectual sweep make it even more than that. In one of his digressions, the novel’s narrator pays tribute to his great predecessor Henry Fielding, contrasting Fielding’s ‘copious remarks’ and leisurely expansiveness with the belated diminution of the narrator’s concentration on a ‘particular web’ rather than ‘that tempting range of relevancies called the universe’ (ch. 15). The modesty is engaging, but false: in its breadth of moral and philosophical vision Middlemarch is unsurpassed not only by Tom Jones but also by any other English novel. The achievement of Middlemarch was apparent even to contempo­ raries. Henry James, for example, spoke of the contrasting histories of the two central characters having ‘that supreme sense of the vastness and variety of human life, under aspects apparently similar, which it belongs only to the greatest novels to produce’;1and Emily Dickinson answered the question ‘What do I think of Middlemarch?’ with ‘What do I think of glory ... The mysteries of human nature surpass the “mysteries of redemption” .’2 For Edith Silcox, a woman of letters, social reformer, and passionate admirer of George Eliot:

2

Middlemarch Middlemarch marks an epoch in the history of fiction in so far as its incidents are taken from the inner life, as the action is developed by the direct influence of mind on mind and character on character, as the material circumstances of the outer world are made subordinate and accessory to the artistic presentation of a definite passage of mental experience, but chiefly as giving a background of perfect realistic truth to a profoundly imaginative psychological study. The effect is as new as if we could suppose a Wilhelm Meister written by Balzac.3

And, in trying to account for ‘why I rate Middlemarch so high’, Lord Acton, the great historian, came to this conclusion: My life is spent in endless striving to make out the inner point of view, the raison d'etre, the secret of fascination for powerful minds, of systems of religion and philosophy, and of politics, the offspring of the others, and one finds that the deepest historians know how to display their origin and their defects, but do not know how to think or to feel as men do who live in the grasp of the various systems. And if they sometimes do, it is from a sort of sympathy with the one or the other, which creates partiality and exclusiveness and antipathies ... George Eliot seemed to me capable not only of reading the diverse hearts of men, but of creeping into their skin, watching the world through their eyes, feeling their latent background of conviction, discerning theory and habit, influences of thought and knowledge, of life and of descent, and having obtained this experience, recovering her independence, stripping off the borrowed shell, and exposing scientifically and indifferently the soul of [her characters] without attraction, preference, or caricature. And each of them should say that she displayed him in his strength, that she gave rational form to motives he had imperfectly analysed, that she laid bare features in his character he had never realised.4 One of the reviewers of Middlemarch predicted that future critics would point back to the novel ‘as registering the low-tide mark of spiritual belief among the literary class of the nineteenth-century’.5 This has not turned out to be the case, of course: it is in the novels of Thomas Hardy, only one of which had been published when Middlemarch began to appear, that future critics have found this low-tide mark. The reviewer was right enough, however, in sensing that Middlemarch was an exemplary text and an important piece of evidence in the case of the disappearance of God in the nineteenth century. The major precipitates of the Victorian

Preliminary

3

crisis of belief were the Higher Criticism of the Bible and the demythologised version of Christianity that had grown up in Germany, and the rise of modern evolutionary modes of thought and investigation in the earth sciences, the life sciences and the social sciences. It is hardly surprising to find that these currents of thought circulate in Middlemarch, for in the decades before she came to write her great novel George Eliot had translated into English both David Friedrich Strauss’s Leben Jesu and Ludwig Feuerbach’s Wesen des Christenthums, and been closely associated with some of the most advanced British thinkers of the day, including Herbert Spencer and George Henry Lewes, with both of whom she was at different times in love. This intellectual side of George Eliot is most directly reflected in her essays, the bulk of which were written during the 1850s for the Leader and the Westminster Review. The rest of her work before Middlemarch consists of a long poem and the six works of prose fiction, beginning with Scenes of Clerical Life in 1857, that established her as one of the leading novelists of the day. Since the greatest influence on any mature writer is always his own past work (as John Fowles has remarked), the following chapters contain numerous references to both George Eliot’s essays and her other novels. In contrast, there will be no later opportunity to discuss the experiences and relationships in Eliot’s private life that have a bearing on Middlemarch. The world of the novel is that of north-east Warwickshire where her childhood, adolescence and youth were spent, and the profusion of social notation in the novel is principally owing to her formidable memory. Like Adam Bede, the title character of her first novel, Caleb Garth in Middlemarch is modelled on George Eliot’s beloved father Robert Evans. The religious intensities of the adolescent Dorothea Brooke, who behaved ‘as if she thought herself living in the time of the Apostles’ (ch. 1), have their source in the Evangelical excesses of Mary Ann Evans during her own late teens. And perhaps, as Richard Ellmann has interestingly speculated, Casaubon’s ‘sexual inadequacy was a version of her struggles with adolescent sexuality’. If so, this would add a poignancy to the report of F. W. H. Myers that, when asked about the original of Casaubon, ‘with a humorous solemnity, which was quite in earnest, nevertheless, she pointed to her own heart’. And Ellmann has also argued that Will Ladislaw, whom he calls ‘the first character of either sex in her novels to be irresistibly handsome and at the same time good’, is a reflection of Eliot’s romanticised response to John Walter Cross, the young American whom she met in Rome a few months before she began Middlemarch, and who later became her second husband.6 Other connections between specific episodes and persons in

4

Middlemarch

Middlemarch and those in Eliot’s life can and have been made, but the tracing out of such point-for-point correspondences quickly becomes both dubious and unprofitable, and does not take one far towards understanding the novel and accounting for its power. It is of more value to investigate its genesis and gestation. A good deal of information on these subjects is contained in Eliot’s letters and journals, in the notebooks into which she copied extracts from the many books she read just before and during the novel’s composition, in another notebook that she called the ‘Quarry for Middlemarch’, and in the manuscript of the novel. A survey of this material will no more uncover a genetic key or an originating principle in the light of which the whole of Middlemarch can be understood than any of several characters in the novel can find the true beginning for which they are searching. But the chips from the workshop (to use Tennyson’s phrase) can nevertheless tell one a good deal about the finished product. In March 1867, with Felix Holt behind her and The Spanish Gypsy, a book-length dramatic narrative in verse, beginning to take shape, Eliot mentioned in passing to her publisher John Blackwood that ‘I also have my private projects about an English novel, but I am afraid of speaking as if I could depend on myself.7 Nothing more was heard of this new ‘English novel’ for over a year and a half, until, on New Year’s Day 1869, Eliot recorded in her journal as one of her ‘tasks for the year - I wonder how many will be accomplished? - A Novel called Middlemarch’. Minimal progress had been made on the new novel by 19 February when she told Blackwood: ‘I mean to begin my novel at once, having already sketched the plan. But between the beginning and the middle of a book I am like the lazy Scheldt; between the middle and the end I am like the arrowy Rhone ... The various elements of the story have been soliciting my mind for years - asking for a complete embodiment.’8 But by late summer she had completed only an introduction and three chapters. What this material consisted of can be inferred from detailed study of the manuscript, particularly of chapters 11-16. The introduction was apparently a background account of Lydgate’s intellectual awakening, vocational choice, education, and professional ambitions. The three chapters appear to have been mainly concerned with Fred Vincy, including a breakfast scene in his family’s home and a visit to Stone Court, where Fred’s sister Rosamond meets Lydgate while Feather stone capriciously demands that Fred obtain a note from Bulstrode saying he does not believe certain rumours concerning the young man’s conduct of his financial affairs.9 All this material appears,

Preliminary

5

mutatis mutandis, in the finished novel, but it seems clear that at this point, despite the plan she had sketched, Eliot still did not know how the narrative should develop. Between September 1869 and May 1870 she made little progress, and for almost half a year after that there is no mention of ‘Middlemarch’ in her letters or journals. Composition may have been stalled, but Eliot’s prodigious background reading continued unchecked. Between the beginning of 1868 and the end of 1871 she read over 290 works, ranging from single poems and articles to multi-volume works of literature, biography, philosophy and history.10 From this vast body of material Eliot copied into two notebooks passages that she felt might be of use in connection with her novel. A good deal of verse was transcribed, as well as information on medical subjects. But the great majority of the notes come from historical works biographies, studies of mythology and philology, historical fiction, literary history, social and political history, classical history. These many entries show George Eliot to be - in the words of the first sentence of Middlemarch - one of those ‘who cares much to know the history of man, and how the mysterious mixture behaves under the varying experiments of Time’. The editors of these notebooks consider the works most important to the evolution of Middlemarch to be Thomas Warton’s History of English Literature (where Eliot probably found the name Lydgate), Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura (read in the original), George Grote’s History of Greece, John Thomson’s Life, Lectures, and Writings of William Cullen, MD, W. E. H. Lecky’s History of European Morals, Maine’s Ancient Law: Its Connection with the Early History of Society, and Its Relation to Modem Ideas, John Lubbock’s The Origin of Civilization and the Primitive Condition of Man, John Mayor’s essay on ‘Latin-English Lexicography’, and Max Muller’s Lectures on the Science of Language. The editors further observe that the passages Eliot transcribed show that she was ‘repeatedly impressed ... with the relativity of so-called truths and definitive statements’ and that she ‘became increasingly preoccupied with the question of how human behavior was determined and how change in the human condition was effected. Did great men and “noble natures” really affect the course of history? How free was any man to shape his own destiny and that of others?’11 All this note-taking, however, seems to have done little to kindle Eliot’s creative fires. One may even suspect that the labour of transcription was in part a surrogate for the task of original composition, for there seems something Casaubon-like in her accumulation of learned data, a connection Eliot herself hinted at in an 1872 letter to Harriet Beecher

6

Middlemarch

Stowe when she remarked that ‘the Casaubon-tints [in Middlemarch] are not quite foreign to my own mental complexion’.12Certainly Casaubon has a point when he observes in chapter 9 of the novel that ‘for the achievement of any work regarded as an end there must be a prior exercise of many energies or acquired faculties of a secondary order, demanding patience’. Unlike Ladislaw, to whom Casaubon is referring, George Eliot had no difficulty in making these ancillary exertions; but they proved no substitute for creative ardour and apparently no stimulus to it. The state of the ‘Middlemarch’ manuscript had not improved by the end of 1870 and, in early December, Eliot turned to other creative work: ‘I am experimenting in a story’, she recorded in her journal, ‘which I began without any very serious intention of carrying it out lengthily. It is a subject which has been recorded among my possible themes ever since I began to write fiction, but will probably take new shapes in the development. I am today at p. 44. ’ This piece of fiction went very well and by the last day of the year she had a hundred pages of manuscript and a title - ‘Miss Brooke’.13 There is no difficulty in discovering from the manuscript of Middlemarch of what ‘Miss Brooke’ consisted: it forms the first nine and a half chapters of the finished novel, during which the story of Dorothea Brooke unfolds in a crisp and straightforward manner that bespeaks the relative ease and fluency with which it was composed. Nor were any notebook transcriptions needed as background to the introduction of Dorothea, the development of her relation to Casaubon, the mention of Mr Brooke’s political ambitions, the brief appearance of Ladislaw, and the other narrated events prior to the departure of Dorothea and her new husband on their wedding journey to Rome. What happened next is that, sometime between the beginning of 1871 and the middle of March, George Eliot decided to fuse the ‘Miss Brooke’ manuscript, which was going so well, with the ‘Middlemarch’ manuscript that had lain more or less dormant for so long. On 19 March she noted in her journal that ‘I have written about 236 pages ... of my Novel ... My present fear is that I have too much matter, too many “ momenti” .’14 By ‘my Novel’ she now means the combined manuscripts o f ‘Middlemarch’ and ‘Miss Brooke’, and by ‘too many “ momenti” ’ she means that she now has the problem of abundance, not of scarcity. From this point until its completion in September 1872, Eliot worked on the novel steadily and with a clear sense of direction. The ‘arrowy Rhone’ sometimes threatened to overflow its banks. ‘However it will not be longer than Thackeray’s books, if so long,’ she reassured Blackwood. ‘And I don’t see how the sort of thing I want to do could have been done briefly.’15

Preliminary

7

It would be of great interest to know the precise circumstances and reasons that led George Eliot to fuse the two stories into one. Unfortunately, she left no comment on the linkage, and the only basis for conjecture is the manuscript. The person most qualified to give an opinion is the one who has studied the manuscript most carefully. Jerome Beaty points to the similarity between the careers of Lydgate and Dorothea, as well as to the similarity of‘the time element and scene’ in the two stories, and reasonably suggests that ‘the two separate works were joined when it became apparent to the author that their themes were similar’. He is perhaps less reasonable when he speaks of ‘a flash of inspiration’ and ‘the sudden flash of insight’; for what is inspiration to one critical eye may be cold-blooded carpentry to another.16 The join that remains most visible occurs in the middle of chapter 10 - the place where the narrative for the first time shifts from the ‘Miss Brooke’ material to the ‘Middlemarch’ material. One paragraph ends in a supernal glow as Dorothea is likened to ‘a picture of Santa Barbara looking out from her tower into the clear air’; the next paragraph begins a description of a dinner party at which a number of Middlemarchers - all distinctly sublunar - are introduced to the reader. This is followed by two awkward intrusions by the narrator, who goes out of his way to alert the reader to the fact that Lydgate, who is one of the dinner guests, will figure prominently in what is to follow and that his and Dorothea’s stories will become intertwined. It is excellent that our first glimpse of the twocentral characters together should be out of the corner of Lady Chettam’s eye and that as Lydgate leaves the party he reflects that it would have been ‘altogether tedious but for the novelty of certain introductions, especially the introduction to Miss Brooke’, who none the less seems to him ‘a little too earnest’ and not to look at things in an appropriately feminine way. What is not excellent is the heavy underlining in the narrator’s too knowing comment that Lydgate ‘might possibly have experience before him which would modify his opinion as to the most excellent things in woman’ and the portentous comment at the beginning of the following chapter that, although at present nothing could seem ‘much less important to Lydgate than the turn of Miss Brooke’s mind, or to Miss Brooke than the qualities of the woman [Rosamond Vincy] who had attracted this young surgeon’, the ‘stealthy convergence of human lots’, nay, ‘Destiny’ herself, would prove both of them wrong. Eliot worked very hard to weave the different strands of her novel together effectively. A record of her labours is contained in the ‘Quarry for Middlemarch’, another notebook that she kept during the novel’s composition. The first of this notebook’s two parts consists of entries on

8

Middlemarch

medical and scientific subjects that relate only to the Lydgate story and show how thoroughly Eliot went into the questions of the state of medical knowledge and practice and the status of its practitioners during the time the novel is set. (There are also lists of quotations for possible use as chapter epigraphs.) It is the entries in the second half of the ‘Quarry5that show Eliot trying to shape and blend together the different parts of her story. There are lists of public and private dates, outlines of certain scenes and a detailed ‘sketch5 of the Bulstrode-Raffles-Ladislaw connection, lists of ‘motives5, of ‘relations to be developed5, of ‘elements5, of ‘scenes5 and ‘conditions5to be included, and of ‘how to end the parts5.17 On the whole these labours were notably successful, as were Eliot’s attempts to work into the text certain parallels and contrasts between the various story­ lines (Featherstone’s and Casaubon’s manipulative wills are one example). By the third book of Middlemarch Eliot was firmly in control of the alternating story-lines; and by the novel’s climax in the seventh and eighth books she had become something of a virtuoso at interweaving the principal story-lines. Particularly impressive is the way in which the cir­ cumstances and repercussions of Bulstrode’s disgrace are made to involve other characters and the way in which the private lives of Dorothea and Lydgate are drawn together through the brilliant stroke of developing a connection between the beloved of one and the wife of the other. But one is here speaking of successful interweaving only at the level of narrative. That the story in the main flows smoothly does not necessarily imply that Middlemarch is a unified work of art in any significant way. And it is quite another question whether or not at the level of characterisation and theme the novel’s central plots have genetic characteristics that make them incompatible. To take one example: there is evidence to suggest that when ‘Middlemarch’ and ‘Miss Brooke’ were initially linked the common thematic thread was the need for Fred, Lydgate and Dorothea to discover and realise their vocations. It has been argued that as Middlemarch grew the theme of high aspiration versus domestic reality replaced vocation as the dominant link and that in conse­ quence Fred Vincy, the principal character in ‘Middlemarch’, became a distinctly subordinate character in Middlemarch, as Lydgate ‘began to emerge as a major character moving in tandem with Dorothea Brooke’.18 But does not this evidence imply that in Middlemarch Fred Vincy is to a degree a vestigial character and that the flash of inspiration was not hot enough, or the carpentry cold-blooded enough, to make his story as quantitatively subordinate in the novel as it is thematically or qualitatively subordinate? Even before the manuscript of Middlemarch was finished the question

Preliminary

9

of the best way to present the novel to the reading public of the early 1870s was being considered. Eliot’s husband George Henry Lewes was also her agent and business manager. In May of 1871 he wrote to Blackwood with a bold proposal: Mrs. Lewes finds that she will require 4 volumes for her story, not 3 .1 winced at the idea at first, but the story must not be spoiled for want of space, and as you have more than once spoken of the desirability of inventing some mode of circumventing the Libraries and making the public buy instead of borrowing I have devised the following scheme, suggested by the plan Victor Hugo followed with his long Miserables namely to publish it in half-volume parts either at intervals of one, or as I think better, two months. The eight parts at 5 /- could yield the 2£ for the four volumes, and at two month intervals would not be dearer than Maga. Each part would have a certain unity and completeness in itself with separate title. Thus the work is called Middlemarch. Part I will be Miss Brooke. If in a stiff paper cover - attractive but not bookstallish - (I have one in my eye) this part ought to seduce purchasers, especially if Mudie were scant in supplies. It would be enough to furnish the town with talk for some time, and each part thus keep up and swell the general interest. Tristram Shandy you may remember was published at irregular intervals; and great was the desire for the continuation. Considering how slowly the public mind is brought into motion, this spreading of the publication over 16 months would be a decided advantage to the sale - especially as each part would contain as much as one ought to read at a time. Ponder this: or suggest a better plan!19 Lewes’s proposal was commercially shrewd, and Blackwood could not suggest a better plan. Four-volume novels had not proved popular with the public, and circulating libraries like Mudie’s had been demanding what Blackwood regarded as unacceptably high discounts. In addition, the comparatively poor sales of Eliot’s previous novel, Felix Holt (which had first appeared in three volumes), meant that the libraries could not be expected to place large orders for the author’s next novel. For her part, Eliot was anxious for aesthetic reasons not to have her work appear serially in a magazine - a common publication format for a lengthy novel. The eight-part publication proved a commercial success. Eliot must have thought it an aesthetic success as well, for when Middlemarch was republished in volume form she let the eight-book division stand. As J. A.

10

Middlemarch

Sutherland remarks: ‘to keep the physical divisions of the serial in this way was extremely unusual, if not unique. Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope, and others would always dissolve then regroup the parts of their serials into new wholes when they reprinted in volumes.’20Was anything gained by the retention of the eight-part book division? I would say not and would have preferred it if at least the titles of the books were dropped, for they either suggest a more naive kind of novel (‘Waiting for Death’, ‘Three Love Problems’, ‘The Dead Hand’) or else seem factitious (‘Old and Young’, ‘The Widow and the Wife’, ‘Sunset and Sunrise’). This is, however, a minor matter compared with the question of the chapter mottoes or epigraphs, which for Henry James indicated ‘a want of tact’ on the author’s part.21 These epigraphs are present in the text not because of the conventional expectations of Victorian readers. Scott had established the practice in his Waverley novels, but Dickens and Thackeray had done without them, as had George Eliot herself in her first four novels. The epigraphs are of two kinds: quotations from the works of past writers, the sources of which are indicated; and unattributed mottoes written by Eliot herself. More than occasionally the epigraphs taken from the works of others have a witty or ironic aptness, a pithiness that encapsulates the implications of the chapters they precede, or a resonance that amplifies them. The epigraph of the second chapter, for example, is from Cervantes: to Sancho Panza an approaching rider seems ‘nothing but a man on a grey ass like my own, who carries something shiny on his head’. But Don Quixote sees on a dapple-grey steed a cavalier wearing the golden helmet of Mambrino (Don Quixote, I, iii, 7). This epigraph transposes into a wry key the Brooke sisters’ different perceptions of Mr Casaubon, qualifies the implications of the prelude’s association of Dorothea and the heroic St Theresa of Avila by suggesting a parallel with a very different Spanish quester, and adumbrates the novel’s serious epistemological concern with the relativity of truth to point of view. The epigraph to chapter 74 is from the Book of Tobit’s ‘Marriage Prayer’: ‘Mercifully grant that we may grow aged together.’ This underlines the deep seriousness of the chapter’s content, which ends with Harriet Bulstrode uniting herself in sorrow with her disgraced husband as she prepares to share his wretched exile from the one place on earth where she would like to grow old. The quotation from Wordsworth’s ‘Ode to Duty’ at the beginning of chapter 80, which includes the climax of Dorothea’s spiritual development, may seem unduly portentous. But the poem epitome of the moral imperative of renunciation that became a characteristic feature of Victorian literature - is the perfect literaryhistorical gloss for Dorothea’s dark night of the soul.

Preliminary

11

On the other hand, the epigraphs from other writers are equally likely to be related to the chapters they precede only in an abstract, generalised way that is not suggestive or telling, and frequently overstates the chapter’s implications - ‘more pretentious than really pregnant’ in Henry James’s phrase.22 This, alas, is almost invariably true of the unascribed epigraphs - all but one of the twenty-eight in metrical form - that Eliot supplied when nothing appropriate from her reading came to mind to fill in the blank space between chapter number and text. Eliot was a barely competent writer of verse and there is nothing stylistically felicitous in the great majority of these epigraphs to mitigate their overtly and tendentiously moralising tone. These metrical dicta compete unneces­ sarily, and compare very unfavourably, with many of the in-the-text aphorisms of the narrator of Middlemarch - a subject to be discussed in a later chapter. The auto-epigraphs are a recurrent eyesore in Middlemarch, and one is hard put to think of a good reason why readers should not be dissuaded from skipping them.23 In 1873, the year after the eight-part publication of Middlemarch had been completed, Eliot noted in her journal that ‘No former book of mine has been received with more enthusiasm - not even Adam Bede\ A short time later, however, she returned to the subject of the contemporary reception of her novel in a mood more typical of her hypersensitive and hypercritical response to criticism of her work: ‘Though Middlemarch seems to have made a deep impression in our own country, and though the critics are as polite and benevolent as possible to me, there has not, I believe, been one really able review of the book in our newspapers and periodicals.’24 Both remarks are overstatements. The numerous reviews well over twenty - had been on the whole enthusiastic but they had hardly been uncritical. And a number of them had been very able indeed - had in fact both accurately gauged the magnitude of Eliot’s achievement and called attention to most of the places in the novel that pose critical problems. Of course, as with all contemporary reviews of Victorian novels, the primary emphasis was on character and characterisation. Middlemarch proved most satisfying in this regard: ‘The book is like a portrait gallery,’ one reviewer exclaimed; ‘all are photographed from life ... what a ceaselessly busy observation, what nicety of penetration’. There was much to savour and applaud, from the humour characters and the amusing sketches of ordinary people that readers always looked forward to from the pen of the creator of Mrs Poyser in Adam Bede, to the major figures in the novel that displayed the full range of Eliot’s talents. ‘For no

12

Middlemarch

writer’, as another reviewer observed, ‘uses so many instruments in riveting the interest of the cultivated reader about her characters, and springs of character, which she is exhibiting.’25 A number of reviewers, however, were confused by the novel’s depiction of the relation of the individual to society and of character to circumstance. As A. V. Dicey observed at the beginning of his review in the Nation: ‘There is a well-known remark of Novalis that character is destiny, which George Eliot criticises severely in The Mill on the Floss, on the ground that destiny depends rather on circumstances than on disposition. Middlemarch might well have been written to illustrate at once the truth of the dictum and of the criticism.’26 Several reviewers took particular exception to the concluding generalisation about Dorothea Brooke’s destiny in the novel’s penultimate paragraph: Certainly those determining acts of her life were not ideally beautiful. They were the mixed result of young and noble impulse struggling under prosaic conditions. Among the many remarks passed on her mistakes, it was never said in the neighbourhood of Middlemarch that such mistakes could not have happened if the society into which she was born had not smiled on propositions of marriage from a sickly man to a girl less than half his own age - on modes of education which make a woman’s knowledge another name for motley ignorance - on rules of conduct which are in flat contradiction with its own loudly-asserted beliefs. While this is the social air in which mortals begin to breathe, there will be collisions such as those in Dorothea’s life ... R. H. Hutton was one of the reviewers who found in this passage a discontinuity between the teller and the tale. He observed that it ‘really has no foundation at all in the tale itself... We hardly see how Dorothea could have been better protected against her first mistake ... we find in this passage a trace that George Eliot is ... a little dissatisfied with her own picture of the “prosaic conditions” to which she ascribes Dorothea’s misadventures, and that she tries to persuade herself that they were actually more oppressive and paralyzing than they really were.’27 Eliot wisely came to agree with her commentators on this important point; in the 1874 edition of Middlemarch she removed this reductive and misleading passage and replaced it with a generalised and unexceptionable comment on the perennial situation of ‘young and noble impulse struggling amidst the conditions of an imperfect social state’. Another point on which there was wide agreement among reviewers may surprise readers today. Rightly noting that Middlemarch was more

Preliminary

13

philosophical than Eliot’s early novels, they went on to observe with regret that the novel was informed by a melancholy vision of human existence which emphasised failure and disillusionment. Unhappiness was detected in the narrator’s commentary, which at times was said to intensify into sarcasm. Most important, there seemed to be no spiritual or religious dimension to the characters’ existence or the author’s vision. To quote R. H. Hutton again: The whole tone of the story is so thoroughly noble, both morally and intellectually, that the care with which George Eliot excludes all real faith in God from the religious side of her religious characters, conveys the same sort of shock with which, during the early days of eclipses, men must have seen the rays of light converging towards a centre of darkness ... in all these cases the province chosen for the religious temperament is solely the discharge of moral duty, and the side of these minds turned towards the divine centre of life, is conspicuous only by its absence, especially in Dorothea’s case. In reading the description of the night of Dorothea’s darkest trial one feels a positive sense of vacancy; so dramatic a picture of such a one as she is, going through such a struggle without a thought of God, is really unnatural.23 Fine as many of the reviews of Middlemarch were, one of them stands out above the others for its insight, authority, rigorous sympathy, and shrewd identification of almost all of the fundamental critical points. The early years of the writing career of Henry James coincided with the time during which Eliot’s pvc-Middlemarch novels appeared and they were an important influence on the young American, who when he reviewed Middlemarch at the age of thirty still had before him his illustrious career as the principal founder and principal theoretician of the modern novel in English. James’s major reservation concerning the novel is announced at the opening of his review: while a ‘treasure-house of details’, Middlemarch was ‘an indifferent whole’ - more a ‘chain of episodes, broken into accidental lengths’, than ‘an organized, moulded, balanced composition’. The novel was diffuse because the natural manner of its creator was ‘discursive and expansive’. Eliot’s aim was to be a ‘generous rural historian’ and she succeeded splendidly. The novel was ‘not compact, doubtless; but when was a panorama compact?’ Indeed, ‘this very redundancy of touch, born of abundant reminiscence’, was one of its ‘greatest charms’. Yet nominally Middlemarch had a definite subject: the depiction of ‘an obscure St Theresa’. Dorothea Brooke was ‘certainly the great

14

Middlemarch

achievement of the book’. But her career was only one of its episodes and she was ‘of more consequence than the action of which she [was] the nominal centre’. Unfortunately, too much time was devoted to the ‘relatively trivial’ question of whether she would marry Ladislaw, whose characterisation was ‘the only eminent failure in*the book’. He did not have ‘the concentrated fervor essential in the man chosen by so nobly strenuous a heroine. The impression once given that he is a dilettante is never properly removed.’ Lydgate was the real hero of the story, and ‘the balanced contrast’ of his history and Dorothea’s was the novel’s finest compositional felicity. Its most ‘perfectly successful passages’ were perhaps the scenes between Lydgate and ‘his miserable little wife’. There was ‘nothing more powerfully real than these scenes in all English fiction, and nothing certainly more intelligent’. The novel’s secondary characters offered ample evidence of ‘the superabundance of the author’s creative instinct’. The only infelicity among them was Mr Bulstrode. His story and its complex ramifications had ‘a slightly artificial cast, a melodramatic tinge, unfriendly to the richly natural coloring of the whole’. In conclusion, James praised the ‘deeply human’ world of the novel and located its particular distinction in the fusion of realism and intelligence. George Eliot had ‘commissioned herself to be real, her native tendency being that of an idealist, and the intellectual result is a very fertilizing mixture. The constant presence of thought, of generalizing instinct, of brain, in a word, behind her observation, gives the latter its great value and her whole manner its high superiority.’ But at times there was perhaps an excessive amount of brain, for Middlemarch was ‘too often an echo of Messrs Darwin and Huxley’. Its panoramic richness also seemed to border on excess, for ‘if we write novels so, how shall we write history?’ These were the reasons for James’s thinking that Middlemarch set ‘a limit ... to the development of the old-fashioned English novel’ even as it made a contribution of the first importance to the rich imaginative department of our literature’.29 We must now begin to consider in detail the nature and the possible limitations of this splendid contribution.

CHAPTER 2

Art, Ideas, Aesthetics A r t . .. is a mode of amplifying experience and extending our contact with our fellow-men beyond the bounds of our personal lot.

‘The Natural History of German Life’

George Eliot came late to the writing of fiction. She was over 35 when she began work on Scenes of Clerical Life, having spent most of the previous decade engaged in activities - translating, editing, reviewing - that would today be called those of a left-of-centre literary intellectual. It is therefore not surprising that even before she became a novelist Eliot had clear and distinct views on the role of the artist and the nature and purpose of art. These views first found extended expression in a series of review essays written for the Westminster Review in the mid-1850s. One of them was on the third volume of Modern Painters and contained an emphatic endorsement of the central tenet of Ruskin’s aesthetic: ‘The truth of infinite value that he teaches is realism - the doctrine that all truth and beauty are to be obtained by a humble and faithful study of nature, and not by substituting vague forms, bred by imagination on the mists of feeling, in place of definite substantial reality. The thorough acceptance of this doctrine would remould our life.’1 This same insistence on truth to nature - this time to human nature and man’s social existence - runs through Eliot’s excoriation of ‘Silly Novels by Lady Novelists’. These genteel writers were strictly limited in both knowledge of society and intellectual competence - ‘inexperienced in every form of poverty except poverty of brains’. In their religious novels, for example, they ignore ‘the real drama of Evangelicalism [which] lies among the middle and lower classes’ and instead ‘nauseate us with novels which remind us of what we sometimes see in a worldly woman recently “converted”; - she is as fond of a fine dinner table as before, but she invites clergymen instead of beaux; she thinks as much of her dress as before, but she adopts a more sober choice of colours and patterns; her conversation is as trivial as before, but the triviality is flavoured with gospel instead of gossip’. As for ideas, these ladies apparently thought ‘that an amazing ignorance, both of science and of life, [was] the best possible qualification for forming an opinion on the knottiest moral and speculative questions’. But perhaps their most serious deficiency was ‘the want of those moral qualities that contribute to literary excellence -

16

Middlemarch

patient diligence, a sense of the responsibility involved in publication, and an appreciation of the sacredness of the writer’s art’.2 An even more acid attack on artistic insincerity is found in the essay on ‘Worldliness and Otherworldliness: The Poet Young’. The cause of the ‘radical insincerity’ of the author of Night Thoughts was that he habitually treats of abstractions, and not of concrete objects or specific emotions ... Now, emotion links itself with particulars, and only in a faint and secondary manner with abstractions ... The most untheoretic persons are aware of this relation between true emotion and particular facts, as opposed to general terms, and implicitly recognise it in the repulsion they feel towards any one who professes strong feeling about abstractions ... In Young we have the type of that deficient human sympathy, that impiety towards the present and the visible, which flies for its motives, its sanctities, and its religion, to the remote, the vague, and the unknown.3 It was not only minor writers who furnished examples of unrealistic and insincere art. In the finest of the Westminster Review essays - ‘The Natural History of German Life’ - Eliot turned her attention at one point to the work of Dickens, ‘the one great novelist’ of the mid-Victorian period who was ‘gifted with the utmost power of rendering the external traits of our town population’. If Dickens could render the psychological side of his characters - ‘their conceptions of life, and their emotions - with the same truth as their idiom and manners, his books would be the greatest contribution Art has ever made to the awakening of social sympathies’. But Dickens rarely passed from the external to the internal ‘without becoming as transcendent in his unreality as he was a moment before in his artistic truthfulness’. In the same essay George Eliot makes her most forceful and succinct statement of the positive value of art: The greatest benefit we owe to the artist, whether painter, poet, or novelist, is the extension of our sympathies. Appeals founded on generalizations and statistics require a sympathy ready-made, a moral sentiment already in activity; but a picture of human life such as a great artist can give, surprises even the trivial and the selfish into that attention to what is apart from themselves, which may be called the raw material of moral sentiment.4 Three years later, having herself become an artist, Eliot was to restate this belief with explicit reference to her own work:

Art, Ideas, Aesthetics

17

If Art does not enlarge man’s sympathies, it does nothing morally ... opinions are a poor cement between human souls; and the only effect I ardently long to produce by my writings, is that those who read them should be better able to imagine and to feel the pains and joys of those who differ from themselves in everything but the broad fact of being struggling erring human creatures.5 Exactly the same passionately expressed views on realism, sincerity and sympathy, together with an insistence on the superior moral and pathetic potential of low subject-matter, are heard in the reflexive comments of the narrators of Eliot’s first three works of fiction. At the beginning of the fifth chapter of T he Sad Fortunes of the Rev. Amos Barton’, the first of the three Scenes of Clerical Life, the narrator pauses to point out that Barton is ‘in no respect an ideal or exceptional character’; he is, rather, ‘palpably and unmistakably commonplace ... Yet these commonplace people - many of them - bear a conscience, and have felt the sublime prompting to do the painful right’; there is ‘a pathos in their very insignificance’. The reader is assured that ‘you would gain unspeakably if you would learn with me to see some of the poetry and the pathos, the tragedy and the comedy, lying in the experience of a human soul that looks out through dull grey eyes, and that speaks in a voice of quite ordinary tones’. Another example is the famous seventeenth chapter of Adam Bede, ‘In Which the Story Pauses a Little’. Again the narrator is at pains to explain what he is doing in the novel, and why. His task is ‘the faithful representing of commonplace things’, the purpose of which is to deepen the reader’s capacity for fellow-feeling by making him recognise that the common people of his story are ‘fellow-mortals’ whom ‘it is needful you should tolerate, pity, and love’. The ‘quality of truthfulness’ he aspires to is like that of many Dutch paintings with their faithful renditions o f‘a monotonous homely existence’ despised by ‘loftyminded people’. Finally, in Eliot’s second novel, The Mill on the Floss, the narrator on several occasions points out that his story is realistic, not romantic. Like the ruined villages along the Rhone described in the thirtieth chapter, which are so different from the picturesque ruins on the castled Rhine, the story oppresses ‘with the feeling that human life - very much of it - is a narrow ugly, grovelling existence, which even calamity does not elevate’. But in other passages, in the fifth and fourteenth chapters, the narrator holds out the hope that the ugliness and calamities of life can be mitigated, even transcended, and the affections nourished by an experience common to all men: the perceptual freshness and richness of

18

Middlemarch

childhood, when ‘the outer world seemed only an extension of our own personality’. This ‘home-scene’ of the childhood past becomes ‘the mother tongue of our imagination’ and the ‘loves and sanctities’ of childhood can continue to sustain us in later life when they have ‘deep immovable roots in memory’. In both the review essays of the mid-1850s and her first three works of fiction, the dominant influence on Eliot’s ideas about art was that of Wordsworth (both directly and through the mediation of Ruskin, another Victorian disciple of the poet). Wordsworth was George Eliot’s favourite poet at least from her twenty-first year when she reported in a letter that ‘I never before met with so many of my own feelings, expressed just as I could like them’.6 The passages in ‘Amos Barton’ an&Adam Bede on the results of close observation of common humanity, for example, read like a prose rescoring of a passage in book 13 of the 1850 Prelude (the last three of the quoted lines were in fact underlined in Eliot’s copy of the poem): When I began to enquire, To watch and question those I met, and speak Without reserve to them ... There saw into the depth of human souls, Souls that appear to have no depth at all To careless eyes.

Similarly, the emphasis on human sympathy and the superiority of fellow-feeling to abstractions repeats Wordsworth’s insistence on the primacy of ‘the human heart by which we live’. And the stress on the fundamental importance of childhood experiences and the later memory of them is of course quintessential^ Wordsworthian. From the point of view of Middlemarch, what is most striking about Eliot’s early aesthetic is how small a part it plays in the novel, which began to appear more than a decade after the publication of The Mill on the Floss. Memory and the special perceptual intensities of childhood, for example, are the subject of only two brief passages in the entire novel. One is the sonnet that supplies the epigraph for chapter 57. It describes the ‘wonder, love, belief with which Sir Walter Scott’s novels enhance ‘the little world [of] childhood’. Childhood - of whom? Presumably Mary Ann Evans and her brother Isaac; for the poem was almost certainly written at the same time as, and was probably intended to be a part of, the suite of ‘Brother and Sister’ sonnets which celebrate the intensities of the childhood sibling bond, through which are developed a ‘root of piety’ and a ‘primal passionate store,/Whose shaping impulses make manhood whole’. The sonnets were composed in July 1867, when Middlemarch was germinating

Art, Ideas, Aesthetics

19

and (as Gordon Haight, Eliot’s biographer, suggests) ‘intensive meditation on the Warwickshire of 1830 revived poignant memories of her childhood with Isaac’.7 Only one other poignant early memory has found its way into the novel, however. This splendid passage - the opening paragraph of chapter 12 - is more sharply focused, less abstract and, because its emotion is linked to concrete particulars, much more evocative and affecting than the sonnet. (The difference epitomises the superiority of Eliot’s prose to her verse.) With a nostalgic intensity that recalls comparable passages in The Mill on the Floss, the narrator describes a pretty bit of midland landscape, almost all meadows and pastures, with hedgerows still allowed to grow in bushy beauty and to spread out coral fruit for the birds. Little details gave each field a particular physiognomy, dear to the eyes that have looked on them from childhood: the pool in the corner where the grasses were dank and trees leaned whisperingly; the great oak shadowing a bare place in mid­ pasture; the high bank where the ash-trees grew; the sudden slope of the old marl-pit making a red background for the burdock; the huddled roofs and ricks of the homestead without a traceable way of approach; the grey gate and fences against the depths of the bordering wood; and the stray hovel, its old, old thatch full of mossy hills and valleys with wondrous modulations of light and shadow such as we travel far to see in later life, and see larger, but not more beautiful. These are the things that make the gamut of joy in landscape to midland-bred souls - the things they toddled among, or perhaps learned by heart standing between their father’s knees while he drove leisurely. It is not fortuitous that this passage introduces the episode in which Fred Vincy rides into the country to visit Mary Garth, or that the epigraph to chapter 57 introduces a pleasant family scene in the Garths’ garden, for the other parts of Middlemarch that recall Eliot’s early novels and their Wordsworthian preoccupations are the Fred-Mary relation­ ship and the presentation of the Garths, particularly Caleb and his daughter Mary. The father is not only painted in the warmest of colours; in chapter 23 the narrator echoes the gauche intrusions of the early fiction when he cannot forbear to exclaim parenthetically, ‘pardon these details for once - you would have learned to love them if you had known Caleb Garth’. And the conventions of the ‘solid Dutch sort of realism’8 used in the early novels are re-employed in the depiction of Mary. At one point

20

Middlemarch

the reader is told to go down into the street, find an unexceptionallooking young woman and ‘take that ordinary but not disagreeable person for a portrait of Mary Garth’ (ch. 40). Lest he fail to grasp what kind of portraiture the narrator has in mind, the reader is told in another place that ‘Rembrandt would have painted her with pleasure, and would have made her broad features look out of the canvas with intelligent honesty’ (ch. 12). In the love of Fred and Mary their shared childhood past and its ‘root of piety’ are dominant. When they were little, ‘the children drank tea together out of their toy tea-cups, and spent whole days together in play. Mary was a little hoyden, and Fred at six years old thought her the nicest girl in the world, making her his wife with a brass ring which he had cut from an umbrella’ (ch. 23). To the suggestion that he may come to outgrow his love for her, Fred answers: ‘I have never been without loving Mary. If I had to give her up, it would be like beginning to live on wooden legs’ (ch. 52). For Mary’s part, her feeling for Fred has ‘taken such deep root’ in her that she ‘cannot imagine any new feeling coming to make that weaker’ (ch. 52). For them to give each other up, says Mary, ‘would make too great a difference ... like seeing all the old places altered, and changing the name for everything’ (ch. 86). As the narrator observes: ‘When a tender affection has been storing itself in us through many of our years, the idea that we could accept any exchange for it seems to be a cheapening of our lives’ (ch. 57). In the novel’s penultimate chapter Mary is made to reaffirm the childhood bond that unites her and Fred; and at the end of the scene Fred’s recollection of their first engagement with the umbrella ring is interrupted when Mary’s young brother Ben and his dog bound into the room. While this scene has an undeniable charm, there is no greater emotional charge to be got from it or from any other part of the story of Fred and Mary. Their relationship is a good deal thinner and less weighty than the other principal relationships in the novel, and a little out of phase with them. Like the wholly lovable Caleb Garth and his immacu­ late honesty, Fred and Mary’s early love seems to belong to a different world from that of the other characters in Middlemarch, a world in which George Eliot seems to be no longer passionately interested. This is why it is so hard to regard Mary and/or Caleb Garth as the moral centre of the novel that they have been taken to be by some commentators.9 It is true that the father is a leading spokesman for his creator’s belief in the importance of fellow-feeling and of work. But both are too peripheral to the central concerns of Middlemarch to be regarded as in any important way the novel’s centre. They belong to a different and less complex world - the world of Eliot’s early novels.

Art, Ideas, Aesthetics

21

We must now consider the ways in which the aesthetic concerns informing Middlemarch differ from those of the Westminster Review essays and the early novels. The differences, however, must not be thought to suggest that the values and aims of the later novel are opposed to those of the earlier ones. They are different more in degree than in kind and represent an extension and maturation of Eliot’s earlier artistic concerns, not their supersession. The end remains the same: to depict human life in a way that will amplify the reader’s experience and extend his sympathies. What changes are the means by which this is to be achieved. One important difference is that in Middlemarch Eliot is less interested in the past - in traditional values and the roots of personal and social piety - and more interested in history, in the processes of social change. The focus of interest is the relation of the individual to society. This relationship had of course already been memorably explored in The Mill on the Floss, but in Middlemarch the question is not tied to the claims of the past and is examined in a much wider context. Since the relationship of private to public life is dominant, a landscape of opinion replaces a natural landscape and makes exceptional a passage like the one that opens chapter 12. For the same reason the principal characters in Middlemarch are defined by their present circumstances and their longings and aspirations (that is, by their vision of the future) rather than by their pasts. Unlike Maggie Tulliver in The Mill on the Floss, for example, Dorothea Brooke, the central female character in Middlemarch, has no parents and no past. It also follows that the two central characters of Middlemarch, Lydgate and Dorothea, are not ‘commonplace things’ but persons of unusual potential whose gifts set them apart from society. For these individuals, the presentational devices of Dutch realism will not do. They were appropriate to the depiction of Amos Barton, who looked out at the world through dull grey eyes, and spoke in a voice of quite ordinary tones. But through his eyes and his microscope Lydgate looks deeply into the secret processes of living organisms, and Dorothea’s voice, which reminds one character of ‘bits in the “Messiah” ’ (ch. 56), is the aural correlative of her exalted spiritual nature, which is ‘enamoured of intensity and greatness’ (ch. 1). It is not the art of Teniers or Rembrandt that is used in her depiction but the idealising art of the Italian Renaissance. At the opening of the first chapter Dorothea’s sleeve is said to recall those ‘in which the Blessed Virgin appeared to Italian painters’; later she is compared by the narrator to Palma Vecchio’s picture of Santa Barbara (ch. 10); and later still her face after a sleepless night is said to have the ‘pale cheeks and pink eyelids of a mater dolorosa’ (ch. 80). And Naumann, an artist who

22

Middlemarch

specialises in ‘the idealistic in the real’, wants to paint her as Santa Clara (ch. 22). The ideal aspects of Dorothea and the intellectual distinction of Lydgate both point to the most significant difference between Eliot’s early novels and Middlemarch: the increased importance of ideas. During the 1860s Eliot had become interested in poetry as a medium of artistic expression precisely because it could accommodate ideas and abstractions more directly than realistic prose fiction could. She had become less interested in the ‘faithful representing of commonplace things’ and more interested in what in a letter of 1866 she calls ‘aesthetic teaching [which] is the highest of all teaching because it deals with life in its highest complexity’.10 For the later Eliot, as for the later Wordsworth, the years were bringing a ‘philosophic mind’. If the arousal of sympathy still remains her goal as an artist, the reader will be stirred in a more reflective and intel­ lectual, and a less intense and emotional, way than he was in the early novels. What were these ideas? The 1866 letter quoted above was addressed to Frederic Harrison, one of the leading British exponents of Positivism, that is, of the teachings of the nineteenth-century French thinker Auguste Comte, who was an important influence on the thought of many liberal Victorian intellectuals, including John Stuart Mill, Herbert Spencer, George Henry Lewes and George Eliot. Indeed, during the last three decades of her life ‘it is no exaggeration to say that [Eliot’s] intellectual life was lived in an atmosphere saturated with Comte’s influence through her own study and through her close association with the most prominent of Comte’s admirers in England’. On the intellectual level it is Comte’s religion of humanity that more than anything else is responsible for making recessive the Wordsworthian strain in Eliot’s fiction.11 There are two principal doctrines in Comte’s thought. The first is that the history of human societies passes through three stages: the theological, the metaphysical, and the positivist or scientific. In the first, events are thought to be governed by the volitions of superior beings of some sort - a single God in the case of traditional Christian theology. In the second phase, abstractions or what Bentham called fictitious entities, like the Ideas of Plato or the essences and quiddities of Aristotelians, are thought to explain all phenomena. In the third stage, the Positivist, it is recognised that man has no knowledge of anything but phenomena, that the knowledge is relative and not absolute and is derived solely from experience. The other major Comtean idea is that, like human history, the sciences pass through the same three stages and that once this is recognised and they are placed on a proper empirical foun­ dation the highest of the sciences, the social science, can begin to

Art, Ideas, Aesthetics

23

yield authoritative, verifiable information about man in society.12 There is no doubt that the author of Middlemarch was deeply influenced by Positivist ideas concerning the scientific study of man in society. The novel’s narrator may even be described as a social biologist studying the structure of a society, investigating the relationship of an individual organism to its surrounding environment (or medium). For this study a ‘careful telescopic watch’ would be of no avail; what is needed, as the narrator puts it in chapter 6, is a microscope with a strong lens that will show the ‘play of minute causes’. In this investigation vocabu­ lary drawn from biology is often employed: ‘living substance’, ‘organ’, ‘fibres’, ‘nerves’, ‘muscular movement’, ‘pulse’, ‘throbs’, ‘shock’, ‘laceration’, ‘bruise’, ‘medium’, ‘assimilation’, ‘nourishment’. Even the intrusion of the narrator into the action can be seen as scientific - as a reflection of the increased awareness of the importance of the witness’s participation in empirical observation.13 Finally, the goal of the narrator’s investigation into the structure of society may be seen as analogous to those of several real-life scientists mentioned in Middlemarch who sought through the systematic observation of particulars to discover interconnections and reveal an underlying unity: Sir Humphry Davy, whose Elements of Agricultural Chemistry (discussed at a dinner party in chapter 2) attempted to create a regular and systematic form for its subject; Robert Brown, whose Microscopic Observations on the Particles Contained in the Pollen of Plants (offered to Farebrother by Lydgate in chapter 17) is concerned to illuminate the structure of pollen; Vesalius, one of Lydgate’s heroes, who in the sixteenth century began a new era in anatomy through the close examination of bodies; Pierre-Charles Louis, whom Lydgate is said to have known in Paris, and whose researches into typhoid led - as Eliot noted in the ‘Quarry for Middlemarch’ - to a complete and connected view of the disease; and finally Marie-Frangois Bichat, of whose conception of the ‘intimate relations of living structure’ (ch. 15) Lydgate was enamoured.14 Comte’s other major doctrine - the three historical states - figures less centrally in Middlemarch, though it is true that there are interesting similarities between the novel and the specific suggestions Frederic Harrison made to Eliot in 1866 concerning a work he hoped she would write that would dramatise the Positivist conception of historical change. (His advice was to take as her subject a rural society in France surrounding ‘a secluded manufacturing village’, in which ‘strictly dogmatic religion’ had declined. A capitalist from the village and a new type of leader, preferably a ‘physician ... a man of the new world with complete scientific and moral cultivation’, would enter into alliance,

24

Middlemarch

gradually pushing ‘the actual church... into the background’.)15Of much more importance to Middlemarch than specific Positivist doctrines is the general similarity that the author of Middlemarch has with Comte and a number of other nineteenth-century writers who could no longer accept traditional Christian beliefs and assurances and sought some this-worldly equivalent for lost supernatural absolutes. The pattern of George Eliot’s religious development is, in fact, typical of the period: ‘the whole predicament she represents’, as Basil Willey put it, ‘was that of the religious temperament cut off by the Zeitgeist from the traditional objects of veneration, and the traditional intellectual formulations’.16 The religion of Eliot’s father Robert Evans had been practical, undogmatic Anglicanism of a traditional sort, one suspicious of any emotional excess. But through two of her teachers the young Mary Ann Evans was exposed to Evangelical Christianity, which became the dominant influence in her life between her sixteenth and twenty-third years. Piety, good works, a keen eye for opportunities for renunciation, rigorous introspection, the sense that life was a pilgrimage, and the longing for spiritual exaltation were the hallmarks of her existence. During a visit to London in 1838 she refused to go to the theatre with her brother and spent her evenings reading Josephus’History of theJews. Her comment on a musical programme that included Haydn’s Creation and Handel’s Jephtha was that it was ‘not consistent with millennial holiness’: ‘nothing can justify the using of an intensely interesting and solemn passage of Scripture as a rope dancer uses her rope’.17 As her nineteenth birthday approached she prayed that ‘the Lord give me such an insight into what is truly good, and such realizing views of an approaching eternity, that I may not rest contented with making Christianity a mere addendum to my pursuits, or with tacking it as a fringe to my garments. May I seek to be sanctified wholly.’18And her first publication was a poem in the January 1840 Christian Observer, in which the speaker, in the evening of her life, says goodbye to all the things of this world except her Bible; and from her ‘dear kindred, whom the Lord to me has given’,, she parts ‘only till we meet in heaven’.19 By 1842, however, George Eliot had rejected Christian belief so emphatically that even though it deeply hurt her father she refused to attend church. The turning-point had been her reading during the previous year of a work by one of a small circle of gifted friends she came to know after she and her father had moved to Coventry. It was Charles Hennell’s Inquiry Concerning the Origin of Christianity (1838), which offered a historical, psychological and literary explanation of the supposed supernatural and miraculous events recounted in scripture.

Art, Ideas, Aesthetics

25

The devastating effect of Hennell’s arguments on George Eliot was comparable to the effect that the Leben Jesu of the great German scholar David Friedrich Strauss (who admired Hennell’s work and arranged for its translation into German) was to have on many British readers when an English translation was published in 1846. The translator was Mary Ann Evans, who eight years later turned into English another key work of German religious thought, Ludwig Feuerbach’s Wesen des Christenthums. In it, Feuerbach passionately argued that all of the enormous positive value of traditional Christianity could be recovered for the modern age once it was recognised that what earlier ages had regarded ‘as objective, is now recognized as subjective; that is, what was formerly contemplated and worshipped as God is now perceived to be something human ... The divine being is nothing else than the human being, or rather the human nature purified, freed from the limits of the individual man [and] contemplated and revered as another, a distinct being. All the attributes of divine nature are, therefore, attributes of human nature.’20 Feuerbach’s subjective, humanised Christianity powerfully appealed to Eliot because it offered a way of healing the split between her intellect, which could no longer accept the existence of a supernatural god, and her deepest emotions, which were inextricably linked with the religious culture of her early life. Furthermore, it widened the channels of sympathy and fellow-feeling between the agnostic intellectual and ordinary humanity. ‘I begin to feel for other people’s wants and sorrows’, Eliot wrote in 1853, ‘a little more than I used to do. Heaven help us! said the old religions - the new one, from its very lack of that faith, will teach us all the more to help one another.’21 Far from being anti-religious, Eliot (as she explained in a letter of 1859) had come to have no antagonism towards any faith in which human sorrow and human longing for purity have expressed themselves; on the contrary, I have a sympathy with it that predominates over all argumentative tendencies. I have not returned to dogmatic Christianity - to the acceptance of any set of doctrines as a creed, and a superhuman revelation of the Unseen - but I see in it the highest expression of the religious sentiment that has yet found its place in the history of mankind, and I have the profoundest interest in the inward life of sincere Christians in all ages.22 For George Eliot, then, the replacement for traditional Christianity was to be a religion of humanity. Like all her books, Middlemarch has as its ‘main bearing a conclusion ... without which I could not have cared to write any representation of human life - namely, that the fellowship

26

Middlemarch

between man and man which has been the principle of development, social and moral, is not dependent on conceptions of what is not man: and that the idea of God, so far as it has been a high spiritual influence, is the ideal of a goodness entirely human (i.e., an exaltation of the human).’ 23 In Middlemarch, Eliot presents a non-theological and non-metaphysical body of beliefs that she believes capable of providing a basis for nonegotistic values and other-regarding actions, and of performing for gifted members of the modern social organism the same ennobling function that traditional religious ideals had performed for St Theresa of Avila, who lived in a society still in its theological phase. These beliefs form the doctrinal core of Middlemarch, since they are directly articulated by the narrator, as well as reflected in character and action, it is not difficult to extrapolate them from the text. The fundamental epistemological tenet in Middlemarch is the relativity of truth to point of view, and the subjectivity, partiality and fallibility of human perception. It is frequently expounded and exemplified: ‘Signs are small measurable things, but interpretations are illimitable’ (ch. 3); ‘Probabilities are as various as the faces to be seen at will in fretwork or paper hangings: every form is there, from Jupiter to Judy, if you only look with creative inclination’ (ch. 32); changing the lens in a microscope will lead to a different interpretation of exactly the same observed phenomenon (ch. 6); ‘In watching effects, if only of an electric battery, it is often necessary to change our place and examine a particular mixture’ from more than one perspective (ch. 40); ‘who can represent himself just as he is, even in his own reflections?’ (ch. 70). Sir James Chettam naturally interprets a change in Dorothea’s complexion ‘in the way most gratifying to himself (ch. 3); when Dorothea looks into Casaubon’s mind, she sees ‘reflected there in vague labyrinthine extension every quality she herself brought’ (ch. 3); her sister Celia has a ‘marvellous quickness in observing a certain order of signs generally preparing her to expect such outward events as she had an interest in’ (ch. 5); and Fred Vincy ‘fancied that he saw to the bottom of his uncle Featherstone’s soul, though in reality half of what he saw there was no more than the reflex of his own inclinations’ (ch. 12). In short, we all .belong to ‘the fellowship of illusion’ (ch. 34). Egotism is the moral correlative of the subjectivity of all perception. A ‘pier-glass or extensive surface of polished steel [may be] multitudinously and randomly scratched in all directions; but place now against it a lighted candle as a centre of illumination, and lo! the scratches will seem to arrange themselves in a fine series of concentric circles around that little sun’. This is a ‘parable’, as the narrator explains at the beginning of chapter 27: ‘the scratches are events, and the candle is the egoism of any

Art, Ideas, Aesthetics

27

person now absent’. The comparison is ingenious and elegant, but calls attention to the universality of egotism less tellingly than does the narrator’s raw and abrupt exclamation at the end of chapter 21: ‘We are all of us born in moral stupidity, taking the world as an udder to feed our supreme selves.’ This inherited stupidity has the same importance in Eliot’s religion of humanity as does the doctrine of original sin in traditional Christian belief. The antidote to this primal taint is strong feeling, particularly fellow-feeling, the only certain stimulus to nonegotistical action. As early as 1843, Eliot had realised what other Victorian writers - Tennyson in In Memoriam is one example - were also discovering: ‘Speculative truth begins to appear but a shadow of individual minds, agreement between intellects seems unattainable, and we turn to the truth of feeling as the only universal bond of union.’24 This quality is often referred to in Middlemarch: Dorothea’s ardent feelings are repeatedly called attention to; Caleb Garth is a person who knows his duty because of ‘a clear feeling inside me’ (ch. 56); the narrator’s final comment on Bulstrode’s appalling inhumanity is that ‘there is no general doctrine which is not capable of eating out our morality if unchecked by the deep-seated habit of direct fellow-feeling with individual fellow-men’ (ch. 61). (This is a more abstract and generalised restatement of the principle that the title character of Adam Bede enunciates in simpler and more pragmatic terms in his novel’s seventeenth chapter: ‘It isn’t notions sets people doing the right thing it’s feelings.’) And, finally, the narrator remarks of Casaubon that his wounded egotism and withdrawal from life ‘is only to be overcome by a sense of fellowship deep enough to make all efforts at isolation seem mean and petty instead of exalting’ (ch. 42).It is not that any person’s egotism can be fully eradicated, any more than subjectivity can be removed from human perception. If elimination of egotism were the goal, then Farebrother, Caleb Garth and Mary Garth would be the moral exemplars of Middlemarch. It is, rather, the case that an individual’s egotism should be modified by the awareness of ‘an equivalent centre of self (ch. 21) in others and of the ‘involuntary, palpitating life’ (ch. 80) of ordinary humanity. For George Eliot, then, ardent feeling and a sense of human fellowship are the humanistic equivalents of, and replacement for, the Christian conception of grace. But if ‘our good depends on the quality and breadth of our emotion’, as the narrator of Middlemarch insists in chapter 47, how does a person come to possess this saving capacity? Depending on how it is put, this question can be a difficult, even embarrassing, one to ask of Middlemarch, for in some cases the answer would seem to be that either

28

Middlemarch

you have it or you don’t. Take the cases of Ladislaw and Lydgate, who by the climax of the novel have both arrived at a ‘perilous margin’ (ch. 79) in their life-joumeys, but whose lots turn out to be quite different. Ladislaw finds private and public fulfilment, while Lydgate, ‘pitifully’ carrying the ‘burthen’ (ch. 81) of his appalling wife, ends as a failure in both his private and professional life. A contemporary reviewer was among the first to find it difficult to see the appropriateness of these contrasting fates: [Ladislaw] does what he likes, whether right or wrong, to the end of the story; he makes no sacrifices; even his devotion to Dorothea does not preserve him from an unworthy flirtation with his friend Lydgate’s wife. He is happy by luck, not desert... while poor Lydgate - ten times the better man - suffers not only in happiness, but in his noblest ambitions, and sinks to the lower level of a good practice and a good income because he marries and is faithful to the vain selfish creature whom Ladislaw merely flirts with.25 In terms of Eliot’s humanistic religion, the reason for their different lots would seem to be that intense feeling and emotional depth are naturally present in Ladislaw (though they need Dorothea’s nurture in order to flourish) and naturally absent in Lydgate, the outward sign of which is his socially nurtured ‘spots of commonness’ (ch. 15). But, if neither is responsible for the presence or absence in himself of these saving qualities, how can it be morally appropriate that one is rewarded and the other punished? The answer is that their lots are not morally appropriate; but they are necessary to the exposition of Eliot’s doctrine which, like any general doctrine, is ‘capable of eating out our morality’. This difficult question and its subversive implications can be sidestepped if one follows Eliot’s own practice in Middlemarch and focuses attention not on the origin of the secular grace of intense feeling but on the beneficent effect that one human being who possesses it can have on the egotism of another. As the narrator puts it in one of the novel’s most florid passages: ‘There are natures in which, if they love us, we are conscious of having a sort of baptism and consecration: they bind us over to rectitude and purity by their pure belief about us; and our sins become the worst kind of sacrilege which tears down the invisible altar of trust’ (ch. 77). This central tenet of George Eliot’s faith, which might in less sentimental terms be called the humanistic economy of salvation, is not only asserted by the narrator. It is also shown in operation in the climactic sections of Middlemarch, when it becomes an important part of the resolution of the novel’s principal plots. The turning-point in Fred

Art, Ideas, Aesthetics

29

Vincy’s love for Mary, for instance, comes when Farebrother lays down his own possible happiness for another’s and warns Fred that he is once again slipping into a way of living that may cost him Mary’s love. This fine act - Farebrother himself, despite his habitual self depreciation, calls it ‘a very good imitation of heroism’ - has a powerful effect on Fred, producing ‘a sort of regenerating shudder through the frame’ and making him ‘feel ready to begin a new life’ (ch. 66). Dorothea has a similar effect on Lydgate when she comes to his assistance in his hour of greatest need. He feels ‘something very new and strange’ entering his life and tells Dorothea that ‘you have made a great difference in my courage by believing in me’. The narrator underlines the doctrinal point: ‘The presence of a noble nature, generous in its wishes, ardent in its charity, changes the lights for us: we begin to see things again in their larger, quieter masses, and to believe that we too can be seen and judged in the wholeness of our character’ (ch. 76). This same ‘saving influence of a noble nature, the divine efficacy of rescue that may lie in a self subduing act of fellowship’ (ch. 82), is also seen in operation in Dorothea’s meeting with Rosamond in chapter 81, a crucial scene in which the two central female characters in the novel talk together for the first time. Indeed, so powerful is Dorothea’s outwardflowing fellow-feeling that it moves Rosamond, the novel’s most complete egotist, to the performance of her first unselfish act when she tells Dorothea what had actually transpired during her interrupted conversation with Ladislaw and thereby makes possible the final coming together of Dorothea and Will. Rosamond is said to be ‘taken hold of by an emotion stronger than her own’, to be urged by ‘a mysterious necessity’, and to deliver ‘her soul under impulses which she had not known before’. Rosamond’s unselfish act has been called a moral surprise; but it is better placed in a religious rather than an ethical perspective. The ‘mysterious necessity’ is the amazing grace of intense fellow-feeling, and Rosamond’s act is a secular version of the Christian etiam peccata paradox: even the most self-centred character in Middlemarch is shown to be capable of contributing to the humanistic economy of salvation. It is these acts that ultimately provide Eliot’s secular religion of humanity with a certain eschatological dimension. They contribute to what in the last paragraph of Middlemarch is called ‘the growing good of the world’ that makes the noble spirits who have gone before parts of the mystical body of evolving humanity, and, if their deeds have made them widely known, members of what in her Positivist hymn Eliot calls

30

Middlemarch the choir invisible Of those immortal dead who live again In minds made better by their presence.

No wonder that Emily Dickinson could say of Middlemarch that ‘the mys­ teries of human nature surpass the “mysteries of redemption’” . In the 1866 letter in which Eliot speaks of ‘aesthetic teaching’ she also speaks of her continuing effort to make ‘certain ideas thoroughly incarnate, as if they had revealed themselves to me first in the flesh and not in the spirit’. She insists that if aesthetic teaching ‘ceases to be purely aesthetic - if it lapses anywhere from the picture to the diagram - it becomes the most offensive of all teaching’. The presentation of ideas has to ‘lay hold on the emotions as human experience’; the aim of the work of art devoted to aesthetic teaching is not to showcase ideas, however attractively, but to ‘ “flash” conviction on the world by means of aroused sympathy’.26 Ardent emotion and strong feeling could not simply be described or dramatised; they had to be communicated to the reader otherwise the teaching was pointless. As Dorothea tells Celia in explaning her refusal to describe how her union with Ladislaw came about: ‘you would have to feel with me, else you would never know’ (ch. 84). George Eliot did not restrict her thinking about aesthetic teaching to her correspondence; it is also reflected in the text of Middlemarch to a degree sufficient to make the reflexive concern with its own intentions and meanings a subsidiary theme of the novel. These concerns find expression in three different ways: in comments about art and aesthetics made by certain characters; in the reflexive comments of the intrusive omniscient narrator; and in places where something in the text may be taken to refer at another level to the creative process or aesthetic goals of the author. Part of Dorothea Brooke’s development in the first two-fifths of Middlemarch involves her aesthetic sense. At the beginning of the novel she knows little about art; the aesthetic part of her education has been as neglected as the other parts, and has left her, as the narrator wryly observes, with ‘a slight regard for domestic music and feminine fine art [that] must be forgiven her, considering the small tinkling and smearing in which they chiefly consisted at that dark period’ (ch. 7). She can appreciate the fineness of a miniature portrait, and the sound of the great organ at Freiberg makes her sob; but she is not responsive to very much in between. Certainly not to the pictures and casts that her uncle had brought back from his Continental travels, for Dorothea cannot see a

Art, Ideas, Aesthetics

31

relationship between them and her own existence. To her ‘these severe classical nudities and smirking Renaissance-Correggiosities were painfully inexplicable, staring into the midst of her Puritanic conceptions:she had never been taught how she could bring them into any sort of relevance with her life’ (ch. 9). Landscape sketches are similarly blank to her: ‘They are in a language I do not understand. I suppose there is some relation between pictures and nature which I am too ignorant to feel’ (ch. 9). The sketch that has prompted Dorothea’s comment is by Will Ladislaw and it is he who begins to improve her aesthetic understanding during their meetings in Rome. In the first of them (in chapter 21) she confesses that when she enters a room full of pictures she first feels herself ‘in the presence of some higher life than my own. But when I begin to examine the pictures one by one, the life goes out of them ... It must be my own dulness ... It is painful to be told that anything is very fine and not be able to feel that it is very fine.’ Ladislaw answers by pointing out that ‘Art is an old language with a great many artificial affected styles’ and that it is helpful to know the conventions. But Dorothea seems less interested in learning these languages than in learning more about Ladislaw; and she ends their conversation by observing with a degree of ‘Puritanic’ severity that in Rome, the squalor and human degradation of which have deeply affected her, there are ‘so many things... more wanted ... than pictures’. She begins to learn something of the conventions of art when Ladislaw takes her to visit the studio of his German painter friend, Naumann: ‘some things which had seemed monstrous to her were gathering intelligibility and even a natural meaning’ (ch. 22). What the reader learns from this visit, and from an earlier discussion between Ladislaw and Naumann at which Dorothea was not present, is that language is a finer medium than painting or the plastic arts because it can give a fuller and more suggestive image of what it represents, and that a work of art can suffer from an excess of meaning likely to occur when the representation is made subservient to the symbolic expression of the creator’s ideas or ideals (that is, when the art work lapses from the picture to the diagram). Their last interview in Rome in chapter 22 shows that Dorothea is still preoccupied with the question of the relation of art to common humanity. Art should make ‘everybody’s life’ beautiful; but it seemed to ‘lie outside life' and her enjoyment of it was spoiled when she reflected ‘that most people are shut out from it’. And later she will again sound like an early-Victorian anti-Romantic when she makes the same point more bluntly to her uncle: ‘I used to come from the village with all that dirt and coarse ugliness like a pain within me, and the simpering pictures in the drawing-room seemed to me like a wicked attempt to find

32

Middlemarch

delight in what is false, while we don’t mind how hard the truth is for the neighbours outside our walls’ (ch. 39). Dorothea’s spiritual and emotional maturation is just beginning during her stay in Rome. But her aesthetic development ends there, for after her return to England the subject of her learning the language of art is dropped. At the same time Ladislaw, who during their final meeting in Rome had been more interested in Dorothea’s dismal future than in her views on art, turns his attention from the arts to public affairs. This change of direction is disappointing, for in themselves the discussions of art in Rome throw less light on the aesthetic principles of Middlemarch than, say, the Italian scenes in nmz K a rim a throw on those ofTolstoy’s novel. It is regrettably difficult to agree with critics who point to these chapters as evidence that the novel contains its own aesthetic theory.27 One does note the preference for a realistic art that is not distorted by excessive idealising and the imposition of symbolic meanings; and for an art that takes into account the unpleasant facts of ordinary life. The implication is equally clear: the realistic depiction of ordinary life including its sordidness - is the key to the sympathetic involvement of the reader, which is the sine qua non for the communication of emotion and the arousal of feeling. These same matters are gone into more penetratingly by the narrator in some of his reflective comments. It is here more than anywhere else that the aesthetics of Middlemarch are adumbrated. One of the first things one notices about the narrator is his concern with the transmission and control of meaning: ‘signs are small measurable things’, he observes early on, ‘but interpretations are illimitable’ (ch. 3); and two chapters later the reader is warned that ‘the text, whether of prophet or of poet, expands for whatever we can put into it’. Both of these remarks are instances of the novel’s pervasive epistemological concern with the relativity of truth to point of view. But they also have a particular application to what the author is trying to achieve in Middlemarch. The novel’s major characters are concerned to find a significance in their lives and actions, though quotidian reality often seems to deny the possibility of any resonant action or radiant meaning.28 His reflexive comments suggest that the narrator is in the similar position of trying to find meaning and a bonafide significance in the mundane reality of his subject-matter without imposing arbitrary interpretations or symbolic meanings. To do so successfully would heal the breach between art and life ‘outside the walls’. Living in the nineteenth century, Dorothea cannot lead a heroic life as could St Theresa of Avila in the sixteenth century. But the narrator of Middlemarch, who also lives in the nineteenth century, may be able to

Art, Ideas, Aesthetics

33

avoid the lot of Dorothea through the heroic act of writing a major work of literature that would adapt to a modern prose idiom and a realistic subject-matter the two traditionally highest literary genres, epic and tragedy. This attempt is the subject of most of the narrator’s comments on the work he is presenting. The possibility of writing an epic work in the nineteenth century - a subject of consuming interest to most of the major creative artists of the Romantic and Victorian periods - is raised at the very beginning of Middlemarch. In the* sixteenth century, St Theresa’s ‘passionate, ideal nature’ demanded, and found, ‘an epic life’. But ‘many Theresas’ born into the modern world have found ‘no epic life wherein there was a constant unfolding of far-resonant action’; their ‘spiritual grandeur [was] ill-matched with the meanness of opportunity’ (prelude). The point is again underlined in the finale: ‘A new Theresa will hardly have the opportunity of reforming a conventual life, any more than a new Antigone will spend her heroic piety in daring all for the sake of a brother’s burial: the medium in which their ardent deeds took shape is for ever gone.’ Since the necessary subject-matter is lacking, Middlemarch cannot be an epic work in the traditional sense. For Dorothea Brooke, the central female character, there proves no way to ‘lead a grand life here now - in England’ (ch. 3). There is, however, a modern equivalent to epic action that the narrator calls ‘the home epic’; he explains in the finale that its ‘great beginning’ is marriage, which leads to ‘the gradual conquest or irremediable loss of that complete union which makes the advancing years a climax, and age the harvest of sweet memories in common’. This definition is incomplete, however, for it makes no mention of what might be called the home-epic prelude of attraction and desire that figures prominently in the novel’s story of several young lives. When Rosamond meets Lydgate in chapter 12, the attraction is mutual and she is perfectly correct in thinking that ‘the great epoch of her life’ is beginning. As a literary subject, the home epic has the advantage of freshness. Even though marriage has been ‘the bourne of so many narratives’ (finale), Lydgate is never more victimised by his spots of commonness than when he thinks that ‘the complexities of love and marriage’ are subjects on which he has been ‘amply informed by literature, and that traditional wisdom which is handed down in the genial conversation of men’ (ch. 16). The literature from which Lydgate has picked up his information has presumably included poetry and romance, but for the subject of modern love and marriage the appropriate literary vehicle is realistic prose fiction - or so the narrator seems to imply in a cryptic aside in chapter 37 concerning Will Ladislaw’s impatience to see Dorothea

34

Middlemarch

alone: ‘However slight the terrestrial intercourse between Dante and Beatrice or Petrarch and Laura, time changes the proportion of things, and in later days it is preferable to have fewer sonnets and more conversation.’ Furthermore, the home epic requires no epic machinery or supernatural causation: ‘the cloud of good or bad angels’ that fill the air in chapter 37 is simply a simile for Dorothea Brooke’s memories of the ‘spiritual struggles [and] spiritual falls’ of her inner life that have been brought on by her marriage to Casaubon. Such struggles have an intensity, a profundity and a perilousness that make marriage and its prelude a uniquely testing human experience: ‘Marriage is so unlike anything else,’ says Dorothea. ‘There is something even awful in the nearness it brings’ (ch. 81). Mr Brooke puts it more bluntly: Marriage 'is a noose’ (ch. 4). The narrator speaks more dispassionately when he observes that its conditions ‘demand self-suppression and tolerance’ (ch. 75). That is to say, they demand a movement away from egotistic self­ absorption and towards fellow-feeling. As such, marriage is for the author of Middlemarch what the university was for her older contemporary Newman - a great but ordinary means to a great but ordinary end; the end in this case being the mitigation of the moral stupidity into which we are all bom. Just as there is a modern form of epic, so the narrator argues that there is also a viable modern form of tragedy. Not everyone in the nineteenth century thought so. Some Victorian critics felt that there were insuperable difficulties in extracting tragic effects from contemporary life, and that tragedy was incompatible with the dominant literary form of the day, the realistic novel. For the tragic emotions of pity and fear to become operative, so the arguments ran, a certain distance was needed between the audience and the hero, who should be elevated, larger than life, and involved in undertakings of high moral seriousness. If the hero were not exalted, he could not be a representative figure, his fall could have no wide significance, and the end of his story could not convey a sense of finality. As R. H. Hutton remarked of Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native, it treated ‘tragedy itself as hardly more than a deeper tinge of the common leaden-colour of the human lot, and so [made] it seem less than tragedy - dreariness, rather than tragedy’.29 One of the critics who felt differently was George Henry Lewes. As early as 1842 he had made a strong case for there being ‘stuff for tragedy in the age of civilization’: The [modern] tragedy, in its treatment, must be different from that of one placed in a distant era. Instead of being poetical, it must be prose

Art, Ideas, Aesthetics

35

... it must not endeavour to thrust this age into a poetical region which stands in contradiction to it, but diving deep down into the realities of this present time, reproduce it in its truth and passion, instead of idealizing it by beauty and dignity. It must not blink any mean or ludicrous associations which may be inseparable from its subject, but make them necessary, though subordinate to its effect. To take an instance, no one doubts that the life of an author affords materials for a very deep tragedy - his blighted hopes - his misunderstood aspirations - his wrung heart - the contrast of his faith and earnestness with the scepticism and despair around him - these afford tragic materials ... But in such a work, if correctly conceived, all that is petty, mean, or ludicrous, instead of marring its effect, would but conduce to its vivid reality, and feather the arrow of its pathos. On the other hand, should the author attempt to make it poetical... he must fail, because he would thereby deprive it of its real strength, its truth, and could not succeed in giving it beauty and dignity, owing to the tyranny of that law of association which cannot be eluded; the very facts of hats, coats, gloves, and general habits, would contradict the poetical language.30 In reading this passage, it is hard not to think of Middlemarch and to substitute Eliot’s aspiring medical researcher for Lewes’s author. Eliot certainly agreed that the essence of modem tragedy lay not in the exceptional nature of the action or the idealisation of its participants but in its very commonness, even sordidness. One justification for her belief was Wordsworthian: ‘a common tale/An ordinary sorrow of man’s life’ (as its narrator describes the story of Margaret in the first book of The Excursion) had an affective power which could touch the quick of fellowfeeling. A second justification was provided not by Wordsworth but by science, not by the emotions but by the intellect. As the narrator of The Mill on the Floss explains in that novel’s thirtieth chapter: ‘does not science tell us that its highest striving is after the ascertainment of a unity which shall bind the smallest things with the greatest? In natural science, I have understood, there is nothing petty to the mind that has a large vision of relations, and to which every single object suggests a vast sum of conditions. It is surely the same with the observation of human life.’ In this perspective, Eliot’s humanistic economy of salvation and her aesthetic theory become one. Just as modern science gives to each aspect of the visible world, however common, a function and a dignity similar to that with which they were formerly endowed by the Christian cosmology, so, too, in the historical advance of mankind every human struggle, however prosaic, acquires a significance that makes no longer tenable the

36

Middlemarch

traditional aesthetic distinctions between high and low subject-matter and the prescription that tragedy must involve exalted persons. In Middlemarch, it is Lydgate, the scientist who aspires to discover a unity binding the smallest things with the highest, who is the protagonist of the modern tragedy. The narrator is at pains to have the reader recognise this. In order to do so, he must learn to overcome aesthetic spots of commonness similar to Lydgate’s social ones that might cause him to find ‘beneath his consideration’ details like the cost of keeping two horses and of supplying a dinner table without stint, the price paid for life insurance, and the high rent for house and garden (ch. 58). Since the ‘element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of frequency, has not yet wrought itself into the coarse emotion of mankind’, as the narrator puts it at one point (ch. 20), he is at pains in several places in the novel to help the reader to recognise the tragic dimension in Lydgate’s ordinary history. A ‘commoner’, and therefore more realistic, ‘history of perdition than any single momentous bargain’ is the ‘pleasureless yielding to the small solicitations of circumstance’ (ch. 79). Other protagonists have made an amazing figure in literature by general discontent with the universe as a trap of dullness into which their great souls have fallen by mistake; but the sense of a stupendous self and an insignificant world may have its consolations. Lydgate’s discontent was much harder to bear: it was the sense that there was a grand existence in thought and effective action lying around him, while his self was being narrowed into the miserable isolation of egoistic fears, and vulgar anxieties for events that might allay such fears. His troubles will perhaps appear miserably sordid, and beneath the attention of lofty persons who can know nothing of debt except on a magnificent scale. Doubtless they were sordid; and for the majority, who are not lofty, there is no escape from sordidness but by being free from moneycraving, with all its base hopes and temptations, its watching for death, its hinted requests, its horse-dealer’s desire to make bad work pass for good, its seeking for function which ought to be another’s, its compulsion often to long for Luck in the shape of a wide calamity, (ch. 64) These reflections of the narrator do not perhaps go very much beyond the familiar lofty-ordinary, Rhine-Rhone contrasts made by the narrators of Eliot’s early novels. But in the most important of the passages in which the narrator reflects on the nature of Lydgate’s history a more distinctive

,

Art Ideas, Aesthetics

37

note is struck. The passage occurs in chapter 15 when we are first given an inside view of Lydgate: Is it due to excess of poetry or of stupidity that we are never weary of describing what King James called a woman’s ‘makdom and her fairnesse’, never weary of listening to the twanging of the old Troubadour strings, and are comparatively uninterested in that other kind of ‘makdom and fairnesse’ which must be wooed with industrious thought and patient renunciation of small desires? In the story of this passion, too, the development varies: sometimes it is the glorious marriage, sometimes frustration and final parting. And not seldom the catastrophe is bound up with the other passion, sung by the Troubadours. For in the multitude of middle-aged men who go about their vocations in a daily course determined for them much in the same way as the tie of their cravats, there is always a good number who once meant to shape their own deeds and alter the world a little. The story of their coming to be shapen after the average and fit to be packed by the gross, is hardly ever told even in their consciousness; for perhaps their ardour in generous unpaid toil cooled as imperceptibly as the ardour of other youthful loves, till one day their earlier self walked like a ghost in its old home and made the new furniture ghastly. Nothing in the world more subtle than the process of their gradual change. Lydgate’s great passion and its gradual frustration is not like the ennobling but unrequited love sung of by the troubadours during the Middle Ages. Like St Theresa of Avila’s epic life or Faustian bargains with the devil, this kind of literary subject-matter belongs to an earlier stage of historical evolution. Lydgate’s story belongs to the modern age and can only be properly told by using empirical techniques that are closely similar to the ones Lydgate brings to his own scientific investigations and that will enable the artist to bring into focus the subtle process of gradual change. The appropriate instrument for this revelation is not a telescope scanning the tempting ‘range of relevencies called the universe’ but a microscope concentrated on ‘this particular web’. The similarity between Lydgate’s scientific method of investigation and the creative method of the author of Middlemarch is memorably expressed in the splendid description in chapter 16 of the arduous invention that enamours the young doctor, which is at the same time a celebration of the imaginative power of his creator: Fever had obscure conditions, and gave him that delightful labour of

38

Middlemarch the imagination which is not mere arbitrariness, but the exercise of disciplined power - combining and constructing with the clearest eye for probabilities and the fullest obedience to knowledge; and then, in yet more energetic alliance with impartial Nature, standing aloof to invent tests by which to try its own work. Many men have been praised as vividly imaginative on the strength of their profuseness in indifferent drawing or cheap narration: reports of very poor talk going on in distant orbs; or portraits of Lucifer coming down on his bad errands as a large ugly man with bat’s wings and spurts of phosphorescence; or exaggerations of wantonness that seem to reflect life in a diseased dream. But these kinds of inspiration Lydgate regarded as rather vulgar and vinous compared with the imagination that reveals subtle actions inaccessible by any sort of lens, but tracked in that outer darkness through long pathways of necessary sequence by the inward light which is the last refinement of Energy, capable of bathing even the ethereal atoms in its ideally illuminated space. He for his part had tossed away all cheap inventions where ignorance finds itself able* and at ease: he was enamoured of that arduous invention which is the very eye of research, provisionally framing its object and correcting it to more and more exactness of relation; he wanted to pierce the obscurity of those minute processes which prepare human misery and joy, those invisible thoroughfares which are the first lurking-places of anguish, mania, and crime, that delicate poise and transition which determine the growth of happy or unhappy consciousness.

The reference to the tawdry and exaggerated effects of inferior artists, rather than to the work of inferior medical researchers, signals that this account is as much about the narrator of Middlemarch as about Lydgate; so does the removal of the normal distance that is kept between the narrator and his protagonist. Indeed, the ambition to discover the sources of human misery and joy and of the growth of happy or unhappy consciousness is not - as it has sometimes been taken to be - an indication of Lydgate’s superbia and his flawed knowledge of human beings. It is, rather, the one expression in all of Middlemarch of the confident ambition that, together with the passion and excitement that the passage also communicates, must have sustained George Eliot during the composition of her great novel of provincial life. But the passage also exemplifies the same quality of ‘patient diligence’ that fifteen years before in ‘Silly Novels by Lady Novelists’ Eliot had identified as one of the ‘moral qualities that contribute to literary excellence’. It is this combination of

Art, Ideas, Aesthetics

39

high ambition and patient diligence that makes for the disciplined power with which in Middlemarch George Eliot penetrates beneath the surface of her subject-matter - not in order to implant symbolic meanings that will inflate it to lofty dimensions but in order to reveal the ‘minute processes’ that are the source of tragic misery to some and of home-epic happiness for others.

CHAPTER 3

A Study of Provincial Life but there is no private life which has not been determined by a wider public life. Felix Holt, ch. 3

In the previous chapter’s discussion of the influence of Positivist ideas on Middlemarch, the narrator was compared to a social scientist. Since the society being studied is removed in time, and since he is concerned not only to understand its ‘minute processes’ but also to re-create and re­ present them to the reader, the narrator may equally well be considered a social historian. At one point he refers to his work as ‘provincial history’ and several times in the novel speaks of himself as a ‘historian’. This was of course a common self-designation for the narrators of nineteenthcentury novels from Sir Walter Scott on - as the reader of Middlemarch is reminded in chapter 32 when Borthrop Trumbull picks up a copy of Scott’s Anne ofGeierstein and intones its opening sentence: ‘The course of four centuries has well-nigh elapsed since the series of events which are related in the following chapters took place on the Continent.’ One reason for the novelist calling his work a history was to suggest that his representation was worthy of more serious consideration than that implied in Rosamond Vincy’s comment on her brother’s reading-matter: ‘Fred’s studies are not very deep, he is only reading a novel’ (ch. 11). The point was forcefully made by Henry James in his essay on Trollope: ‘It is impossible to imagine what a novelist takes himself to be unless he regards himself as an historian and his narrative as a history. It is only as an historian that he has the smallest locus standi. As a narrator of fictitious events he is nowhere; to insert into his attempt a backbone of logic, he must relate events that are assumed to be real.’1 In the case of Middlemarch, the claim of the narrator to be a historian is more than a rhetorical strategy. The novel really is what its subtitle calls it: ‘a study of provincial life’. The setting is Middlemarch (that is, Coventry) and the surrounding country in the north-east corner of Loamshire (that is, of Warwickshire) around the time of the First Reform Bill - to be more precise, the period between 30 September 1829 and May 1832.2 The historical re-creation is richly detailed, and its accuracy and usefulness to social historians have been attested by professionals.3 But its

A Study of Provincial Life

41

verifiable accuracy (with only the place-names changed) is much less important to the experience of reading Middlemarch than the felt, selfauthenticating sense the novel everywhere conveys of the way it was in a particular time and place. As one of a large number of possible examples, take the description in chapter 39 of the dilapidated farmhouse in which the Dagley family lives: It is true that an observer, under that softening influence of the fine arts which makes other people’s hardships picturesque, might have been delighted with this homestead called Freeman’s End: the old house had dormer-windows in the dark-red roof, two of the chimneys were choked with ivy, the large porch was blocked up with bundles of sticks, and half the windows were closed with grey worm-eaten shutters about which the jasmine-boughs grew in wild luxuriance; the mouldering garden wall with hollyhocks peeping over it was a perfect study of highly-mingled subdued colour, and there was an aged goat (kept doubtless on interesting superstitious grounds) lying against the open back-kitchen door. The mossy thatch of the cow-shed, the broken grey barn-doors, the pauper labourers in ragged breeches who had nearly finished unloading a waggon of corn into the barn ready for early thrashing; the scanty dairy of cows being tethered for milking and leaving one half of the shed in brown emptiness; the very pigs and white ducks seeming to wander about the uneven neglected yard as if in low spirits from feeding on a too meagre quality of rinsings - all these objects under the quiet light of a sky marbled with high clouds would have made a sort of picture which we have all paused over as a ‘charming bit’, touching other sensibilities than those which are stirred by the depression of the agricultural interest, with the sad lack of farming capital, as seen constantly in the newspapers of that time. A sense of verisimilitude and the sympathetic involvement of the reader is nicely achieved through the rhetorical device of having the narrator distinguish between a distanced, aesthetic view of the scene and his own first-hand, close-up view. This sense is intensified by the easy fullness of specific visual detail and the quiet display of a working knowledge of farm life - the corn being readied for early thrashing, the cows being tethered for milking, the insufficiency of the pigs’ and ducks’ diet. The appeal to a verifiable source at the end of the passage is included because newspapers are on Mr Brooke’s mind as he arrives at the farmhouse to visit his tenant. Their citation is hardly needed to authenticate the passage. Similarly, it may be true that the description has a meaning beyond itself because of its

42

Middlemarch

association with the romantic-realist contrast that is so important in the aesthetics of Middlemarch. But it is the description itself, not the thematic overlay, that gives the passage its sparkle and its principal interest. This ‘amplification of experience’, as George Eliot called it in ‘The Natural History of German Life’, is one of the great satisfactions that nineteenth-century realistic fiction has to offer, and few novels satisfy as fully as Middlemarch. But since the provincial England of over a century and a half ago was a far different place from the advanced capitalist democracies of the last quarter of the twentieth century some sorting out of the social-historical world represented in the novel is helpful for a full understanding of its principal characters and themes. The most important social division in Middlemarch is that between country and town. In the former there are clear distinctions of rank based on birth. They and their corresponding emoluments have traditional sanctions and justifications; one of the gentry calls them ‘providential arrangements’ (ch. 37), while the views of someone at the other end of the rural social spectrum are guided by his ‘farming conservatism, which consisted in holding that whatever is, is bad, and any change is likely to be worse’ (ch. 39). The principal country characters belong to the small group of landed gentry, a social rank just below the lower fringes of the aristocracy (which is unrepresented in the novel). Those who live in this ‘rarefied social air’ (ch. 34) include Mr Brooke of Tipton Grange, whose connections, if ‘not exactly aristocratic, were unquestionably good’ (ch. 1) and whose estate is worth around £3,000 a year - a considerable sum at the time, as the narrator explains. Mr Brooke has the additional social distinction of being a magistrate with responsibility for the preservation of law and order in his district. This position involves him in two cases mentioned in passing: that of Trapping Bass, the poacher, and of Bunch, the sheep-stealer, who is to be hanged despite Mr Brooke’s intercession. With Mr Brooke live his two orphaned nieces, who have been privately educated, first with an English, then with a Swiss family. Each marries as she is expected to: into another family of the gentry. Celia weds the young baronet who is the heir of Freshitt, the Chettam estate; Dorothea marries Mr Edward Casaubon, who is both the rector of Lowick (though a curate lives in the parsonage and does all the duty except preaching the morning sermon) and the owner of the prosperous estate where ‘not a cottager in those double cottages at a low rent but kept a pig, and the strips of garden at the back were well tended. The small boys wore excellent corduroy, and the girls went out as tidy servants, or did a little straw plaiting at home: no looms here, no Dissent’ (ch. 9). This social circle is completed by the Cadwalladers. He is the rector of Tipton and Freshitt and has a

A Study of Provincial Life

43

study filled with fishing tackle. She is of aristocratic background and exceptionally keen on distinctions of rank, though her impecuniousness and companionable manner give a neighbourliness to both rank and religion, and mitigate ‘the bitterness of [the] uncommunicated tithe’ that provides her husband’s income (ch. 6). The lower social orders of the country are less fully represented. They include Mr Featherstone of Stone Court in Lowick parish, ‘a gentleman farmer’ (ch. 12) who belongs to the inferior county society who fill the gap between the landed gentry and their tenants, as does Mr Tucker, Casaubon’s curate, who is one of the ‘inferior clergy’ (ch. 9). The tenants include the agricultural labourers who live in the hamlet of Frick on the Lowick estate. One of them is old Timothy Cooper, ‘a type lingering in those times - who had his savings in a stocking-foot and lived in a lone cottage’ (ch. 56). He is as set in his ways as Dagley, the hereditary farmer who lives at Freeman’s End and whose immemorial ignorance is disturbed neither by the gentry who live nearby, nor by proximity to the town of Middlemarch, only three miles away. The society of Middlemarch is much more variegated and fluid than that of the country and far more characters and social types are represented. Near the lower end of the spectrum is the salty Mrs Dollop, landlady of the Tankard in Slaughter Lane, and her customers - Mr Limp, the shoemaker; Mr Crabbe, the glazier; Mr Dill, the barber; Mr Baldwin, the tax-gatherer; and Mr Jonas, a dyer with crimson hands. Higher up the social scale are Borthrop Trumbull, a ‘prosperous provincial auctioneer keenly alive to his own jokes and sensible of his encyclopaedic knowledge’ (ch. 60); Mr Mawnsey, a grocer in the Top Market and ‘a chief representative in Middlemarch of that great social power, the retail trader’ (ch. 51); Caleb Garth, estate agent and failed contractor, who lives with his family ‘a little way outside the town [in] a homely place with an orchard in front of it, a rambling, old-fashioned, half-timbered building, which before the town had spread had been a farmhouse, but was now surrounded with the private gardens of the townsmen’ (ch. 24); and the patrons of the Green Dragon, who include Mr Horrock, the vet, and Mr Bambridge, the horse-dealer. The vivid character sketch of the latter in chapter 23 is a good example of the quantity and quality of the social notation given to even minor town characters: Mr Bambridge had more open manners, and appeared to give forth his ideas without economy. He was loud, robust, and was sometimes spoken of as being ‘given to indulgence’ - chiefly in swearing, drinking,

44

Middlemarch

and beating his wife. Some people who had lost by him called him a vicious man; but he regarded horse-dealing as the finest of the arts, and might have argued plausibly that it had nothing to do with morality. He was undeniably a prosperous man, bore his drinking better than others bore their moderation, and, on the whole, flourished like the green baytree. But his range of conversation was limited, and like the fine old tune, ‘Drops of brandy’, gave you after a while a sense of returning upon itself in a way that might make weak heads dizzy. But a slight infusion of Mr Bambridge was felt to give tone and character to several circles in Middlemarch; and he was a distinguished figure in the bar and billiard-room at the Green Dragon. He knew some anecdotes about the heroes of the turf, and various clever tricks of Marquesses and Viscounts which seemed to prove that blood asserted its pre­ eminence even among blacklegs; but the minute retentiveness of his memory was chiefly shown about the horses he had himself bought and sold; the number of miles they would trot you in no time without turning a hair being, after the lapse of years, still a subject of passionate asseveration, in which he would assist the imagination of his hearers by solemnly swearing that they never saw anything like it. In short, Mr Bambridge was a man of pleasure and a gay companion. Since the central male character in the novel is a young doctor who has settled in Middlemarch, the reader learns a good deal about the town’s other medical practitioners. The least fully presented is Mr Gambit, who is also the lowest in social standing; he has little education, though ‘he made none the worse accoucheur for calling the breathing apparatus “longs” ’ (ch. 45). Mr Toller and Mr Wrench are surgeon-apothecaries, a category of medical practitioner socially lower than that of physician. Both are long established, but while the former keeps a good house and belongs to an old Middlemarch family the latter - ‘a small neat bilious man, with a well-dressed wig... a laborious practice, an irascible temper, a lymphatic wife and seven children’ (ch. 26) - lives in a house with ‘the doors all open, the oil-cloth worn, the children in soiled pinafores, and lunch lingering in the form of bones, black-handled knives and willowpattern’ (ch. 36). The two physicians are Dr Sprague and Dr Minchin. They may be called ‘D r’ because they are graduates of Oxford or Cambridge, where the curriculum was primarily designed to produce educated gentlemen, not competent practitioners. Dr Minchin, for example, can quote from Pope’s Essay on Man, but he diagnoses a cramp as a tumour.4 The town inhabitants with whom the novel is principally concerned

A Study of Provincial Life

45

belong to the ‘Middlemarch gentry’ (ch. 27). Although town society is more fluid than that of the country, there are nevertheless ‘nice distinctions of rank’, which are ‘defined with great nicety in practice, though hardly expressible theoretically’ (ch. 23). These distinctions are, however, at least partially based on income rather than on birth, which means that there is the possibility, as there is the desire, of rising socially. For this reason readers today would tend to call the social distinctions in Middlemarch ones of class rather than of rank. One example of the importance of money is the relations between the Vincys and the Garths. The slight connection between the two families through Mr Featherstone’s two marriages (first to Mr Garth’s sister, then to Mr Vincy’s) had led to an acquaintance and to Fred Vincy and Mary Garth becoming intimate during childhood. But the Garths have come down in the world owing to the father’s business failure, and social intercourse between the families has ceased. Mr Garth may be noted for his probity, ‘but in no part of the world is genteel visiting founded on esteem, in the absence of suitable furniture and complete dinner-service’ (ch. 23). Although she herself is an innkeeper’s daughter with ‘a tinge of unpretentious, inoffensive vulgarity’ (ch. 16), Mrs Vincy now feels no longer at ease with the better-educated Mrs Garth, ‘and frequently spoke of her as a woman who had to work for her bread - meaning that Mrs Garth had been a teacher before her marriage’ (ch. 23). Even Mr Farebrother, an exemplary clergyman, gives witness to the difference income makes to the social lives of the two families: ‘He used to the full the clergyman’s privilege of disregarding the Middlemarch discrimination of ranks, and always told his mother that Mrs Garth was more of a lady than any matron in the town. Still, you see, he spent his evenings at the Vincys, where the matron, though less of a lady, presided over a well-lit drawing­ room and whist’ (ch. 40). Another example of the importance of money in Middlemarch is the dominant position of Mr Bulstrode, the philanthropic banker, which he has achieved despite the handicaps of being both an outsider - ‘a man not born in the town, and altogether of dimly known origin’ (ch. 11) - and a religious zealot of a particularly unpleasant type. The latter quality also makes Bulstrode a conspicuous example of the importance of religion in the socio-historical picture painted in Middlemarch. Almost all of the characters in the novel are Anglicans, that is, members of the Established Church. There are some Roman Catholics in the Middlemarch area, as one learns from a passing reference to an acre of land Mr Brooke has sold ‘the Papists’ for a chapel; but none is introduced to the reader. Methodists and other dissenting groups are similarly unrepresented,

46

Middlemarch

though one is aware of their existence, as in Mr Brooke’s droll story about Flavell, the Methodist preacher, and the hare that came across his path when he and his wife were out walking. It is true that as a young man Bulstrode had belonged to a Calvinistic dissenting church in the London area, but before settling in Middlemarch he had already taken the major social step of joining the Established Church. As Raffles, the nemesis from his past, observes: ‘You’ve taken to being a nob, buying land, being a country bashaw. Still in the Dissenting line, eh? Still godly? Or taken to the Church as more genteel?’ (ch. 53) And as Bulstrode’s wife implicitly believes: ‘true religion was everywhere saving [but] to be saved in the Church was more respectable’ (ch. 61). The wing of the Established Church to which Bulstrode belongs is the Evangelical. Like George Eliot herself during her late teens, he embodies in exaggerated form certain Evangelical characteristics, including the view of the world as a battleground between flesh and spirit, the sense of sacred accountableness for the smallest acts, and an intense preoccu­ pation with personal spiritual hygiene. The other wing of the Established Church was that of traditional undogmatic, plain-speaking Angli­ canism, which was more interested in conduct than in faith, in community rather than in intense spiritual struggle. (It must be remembered that Middlemarch is set in provincial England in the early nineteenth century; there is no evidence in the social world of the novel of the tripartite division of High (Tractarian or Anglo-Catholic), Broad (liberal) and Low (Evangelical) that became a marked feature of the Anglican Church during the Victorian period.) Traditional Anglicanism has a number of representatives in the novel, who come from both town and country. Mr Vincy is one of them. ‘I’m a plain Churchman now’, he insists in chapter 13, ‘just as I used to be before doctrines came up. I take the world as I find it, in trade and everything else. I’m contented to be no worse than my neighbours.’ Mrs Farebrother is another. In chapter 17 she proudly recalls that in her youth ‘there never was any question about right and wrong. We knew our catechism, and that was enough: we learned our creed and our duty. Every respectable Church person had the same opinions.’ Her father, a clergyman, had preached ‘plain moral sermons without arguments, and was a good m an... When you get me a good man out of arguments, I will get you a good dinner with reading you the cookery-book.’ Two other representatives provide glimpses of an unattractive side of plain-church Anglicanism. One of them is Mr Crowse, a clergyman whose ‘empty face and neat umbrella, and mincing little speeches’ are recalled with scorn by Mary Garth in chapter 52. ‘What right’, she asks, ‘have such men to represent Christianity - as if it

A Study of Provincial Life

47

were an institution for getting up idiots genteelly.’ The other is Mr Cadwallader, whose conscience does ‘only what it could do without any trouble’. As his wife remarks of him: ‘as long as the fish rise to his bait, everybody is what he ought to be’ (ch. 8). A final example of traditional Anglicanism is found in the warm description in chapter 47 of ‘the group of rural faces which made the congregation from year to year within the white-washed walls and dark old pews’ of the little church at Lowick. With the passing of time they show hardly ‘more change than we see in the boughs of a tree which breaks here and there with age, but yet has young shoots’. One of the names put forward to be the new rector of Lowick is Mr Tyke, a fervent Evangelical who wants to use Dissenting hymn-books in his church (ch. 74), and whose sermons are all doctrine, a good deal of which, according to Lydgate, ‘is a sort of pinching hard to make people uncomfortably aware of him’ (ch. 50). The office is in the gift of Dorothea Brooke, and her reflections on the matter provide the clearest indication in Middlemarch of on which side of the Anglican divide the sympathies of the author lie. In Dorothea’s view, the doctrinal preoccupations of Tyke, who gives sermons about ‘imputed righteousness and the prophecies in the Apocalypse’, would be of no use to the farmers, labourers and village artisans of Lowick: ‘I have always been thinking of the different ways in which Christianity is taught, and whenever I find one way that makes it a wider blessing than any other, I cling to that as the truest - I mean that which takes in the most good of all kinds, and brings in the most people as sharers in it. It is surely better to pardon too much than to condemn too much’ (ch. 50). The appointment goes instead to Mr Farebrother, whose character is known to be less than spotless, but who gives plain moral sermons without arguments (like his grandfather before him), has a deep, undoctrinal concern for the welfare of his flock, and regards the group to which Tyke and Bulstrode belong as ‘a narrow ignorant set [who] do more to make their neighbours uncomfortable than to make them better. Their system is a sort of worldly-spiritual cliqueism: they really look on the rest of mankind as a doomed carcass which is to nourish them for heaven’ (ch. 17). Let us come back to Middlemarch society. The Vincys are the principal town family in the novel. They are ‘old manufacturers, and had kept a good house for three generations’ (ch. 11). They live ‘in an easy profuse way, not with any new ostentation, but according to the family habits and traditions .. Mr Vincy himself had expensive Middlemarch habits - spent money on coursing, on his cellar, and on dinner-giving, while [Mrs Vincy] had those running accounts with trades-people, which

48

Middlemarch

give [their children] a cheerful sense of getting everything one wants without any question of payment’ (ch. 23). The family business is the manufacture of silk ribbons, for which is needed the handlooms of the cottagers in Tipton and Freshitt, who do the work because they are less well off than the pig-keeping cottagers of Lowick. Mr Vincy is not only mayor of Middlemarch; his worldly success is also indicated by his having the means to realise what he calls ‘a good British feeling [:] to try and raise your family a little’ (ch. 13). He has sent his son Fred to university - Omnibus College would have been at either Oxford or Cambridge - where the young man has acquired the manners, speech, habits and debts of a gentleman. His father intends Fred to be a clergyman, one of the three established professions (law and medicine were the other two) that conferred gentility as well as offering opportunities for material advance. Mr Vincy’s daughter Rosamond has also been given a genteel education. It has served to make her dissatisfied with Middlemarch society, whose two most eligible young men ‘had not a notion of French, and could speak on no subject with striking knowledge, except perhaps the dyeing and carrying trades, which of course they were ashamed to mention; they were Middlemarch gentry, elated with their silver-headed whips and satin stocks, but embarrassed in their manners, and timidly jocose’ (ch. 27). She has even come to feel that ‘she might have been happier if she had not been the daughter of a Middlemarch manufacturer’ (ch. 15), and she dislikes anything that reminds her that her maternal grandfather had been an innkeeper. Rosamond’s interest in the newcomer Lydgate is whetted by the fact that his family connections with the gentry of another county give him ‘rank’, which is Rosamond’s ‘middle-class’ ideal of ‘heaven’ (ch. 12), a state where ‘she would have nothing to do with vulgar people’ (ch. 16). When she had once seen Mr Brooke’s nieces seated among the aristocracy at the county assizes her reaction had been envy; and when she and Dorothea Brooke first meet in chapter 43 the contrast in their dress and demeanour - Dorothea’s ‘plain dressing’, which bespeaks the ‘well-bred economy’ of good birth (ch. 2), versus Rosamond’s ‘infantine blondness and wondrous crown of hairplaits ... her pale blue dress of a [perfect] fit and fashion ... and that controlled self-consciousness of manner which is the expensive substitute for simplicity’ - has important moral overtones. But it is first and foremost a social contrast of a sort ‘not infrequent’ in provincial life ‘when the habits of the different ranks were less blent than now’. As the rarity of their meeting suggests, there is little social intercourse between the two enclaves. To further his political aims, Mr Brooke does

A Study of Provincial Life

49

invite some Middlemarchers to his dinner parties, but Rosamond is not among them, for he ‘would not have chosen that his nieces should meet the daughter of a Middlemarch manufacturer, unless it were on a public occasion’ (ch. 10). There is even a certain antagonism between the two groups. Mr Hawley, a town lawyer, is not alone in resenting the attempt of Mr Brooke, ‘an old county man’ (ch. 37), to curry favour with the electors of Middlemarch; Featherstone’s dislike of Bulstrode is owing in part to the fact that he is ‘a speckilating fellow’ whose wealth comes from business, not from land (ch. 12); and Mrs Cadwallader believes that ‘the people in manufacturing towns are always disreputable’ (ch. 62), finds ‘their accent an affliction to the ears’ (ch. 6), and prefers joining ‘the farmers at the tithe dinner, who drank her health unpretentiously, and were not ashamed of their grandfathers’ furniture’ (ch. 10). There is none the less a certain amount of social mixing, for the society of north-east Loamshire is not static, as the narrator makes clear in a colourful generalisation in chapter 11: Old provincial society had its share of this subtle movement: had not only its striking downfalls, its brilliant young professional dandies who ended by living up an entry with a drab and six children for their establishment, but also those less marked vicissitudes which are constantly shifting the boundaries of social intercourse, and begetting new consciousness of interdependence. Some slipped a little downward, some got higher footing: people denied aspirates, gained wealth, and fastidious gentlemen stood for boroughs; some were caught in political currents, some in ecclesiastical, and perhaps found themselves surprisingly grouped in consequence; while a few personages or families that stood with rocky firmness amid all this fluctuation, were slowly presenting new aspects in spite of solidity, and altering with the double change of self and beholder. Municipal town and rural parish gradually made fresh threads of connection gradually, as the old stocking gave way to the savings-bank, and the worship of the solar guinea became extinct; while squires and baronets, and even lords who had once lived blamelessly afar from the civic mind, gathered the faultiness of closer acquaintanceship. Settlers, too, came from distant counties, some with an alarming novelty of skill, others with an offensive advantage in cunning. Historical change is the name for the long-term results of these subtle movements, political and ecclesiastical currents, and fresh threads of connection. It is this process that is the principal interest of the historian-

50

Middlemarch

narrator of Middlemarch. In studying the subject the narrator is not, on the one hand, simply a collector of miscellaneous information and documents casually arranged, like M r Brooke. On the other hand, he is not a taxonomist like Farebrother, whose interests in natural history led him to make an exhaustive classification of the entomology of north-east Loamshire. And he is hardly like Casaubon, who studied certain historical phenomena with a view to demonstrating their supernatural origin. The narrator is much more like the modern professional historian described by J. H. Plumb, who is ultimately concerned with a detailed study of a salient portion of man’s past because of what it can tell him about the present: The aim of [the historian] is to understand men both as individuals and in their social relationships in time. Social embraces all of man’s activities - economic, religious, political, artistic, legal, military, scientific - everything, indeed, that affects the life of mankind. And this, of course, is not a static study but a study of movement and change. It is not only necessary to discover, as accurately as the most sophisticated use of evidence will allow, things as they actually were, but also why they were so, and why they changed; for no human societies, not one, have ever stood still ... The historian’s purpose, therefore, is to deepen understanding about men and society, not merely for its own sake, but in the hope that a profounder knowledge, a profounder awareness will help to mould human attitudes and human actions.5 As Eliot herself remarked in a late note on the ‘historic imagination’: ‘the exercise of a veracious imagination in historical picturing ... might help the judgement greatly with regard to present or future events... For want of such real, minute vision of how changes come about in the past, we fall into ridiculously inconsistent estimates of actual movements.’6 It does not take much knowledge of nineteenth-century British history to see that the external precipitates of change in the Middlemarch world are microcosmic reflections of some of the principal forces that shaped the century’s history. The ‘infant struggles of the railway system’, which when full-grown would transform the social and commercial life of Victorian Britain, help to determine ‘the course of this history’ with regard to two of the novel’s principal characters. In and around Middlemarch railways were as exciting a topic as the Reform Bill or ‘the imminent horrors of Cholera’ (ch. 56) - that is, as two other important historical forces: the movement for political reform and the complex of

A Study of Provincial Life

51

related movements during ‘that unsanitary period’ (ch. 23) that led to the reform of the medical profession, the better understanding of disease, and the improvement of public health. It is important, however, not to overestimate the role that the infant stages of these forces for change play in the novel. This is particularly true of political reform. Jerome Beaty has shown that there are numerous references in the novel to events and personalities involved in the struggle for the passage of the First Reform Bill, but that they are all obliquely introduced and never call attention to themselves.7These allusions add to the historical verisimilitude of Middlemarch, but the events themselves impinge very little on the society of the novel or even on the consciousness of its characters. This is underlined in several places: ‘even in 1831 Lowick was at peace, not more agitated by Reform than by the solemn tenor of the Sunday sermon’ (ch. 47); ‘even the rumour of Reform had not yet excited any millennial expectations in Frick, as of gratuitous grains to fatten Hiram Ford’s pigs, or of a publican at the “Weights and Scales” who would brew beer for nothing’ (ch. 56); the scandal concerning Bulstrode and Lydgate gives to ‘all public conviviality’ in Middlemarch ‘a zest which could not be won from the question whether the Lords would throw out the Reform Bill’ (ch. 71); and even among the landed gentry interest in the action of the Lords runs a poor second to interest in Dorothea’s impending second marriage. Middlemarch, then, can hardly be taken to be what Frank Kermode thinks it is - ‘a novel of ... crisis’, set in ‘earlier crisis-years’ when civilisation seemed ‘on the brink of radical change’; ‘a novel concerned with the end of a world’.8 There is no sense of historical crisis to be found in the commentary of the novel’s narrator, who is, like George Eliot herself, a gradualist and a uniformitarian, not a catastrophist or a believer in apocalypse.9 Change is seen as a process occurring slowly over a long period of time, the result of innumerable small causes which it takes a real, minute vision to discern. There is nothing in Middlemarch to gainsay Eliot’s own description of its design: ‘to show the gradual action of ordinary causes rather than exceptional’.10 What does preoccupy the historian-narrator of Middlemarch is not the end of a world but the relationship of the individual to society. As he remarks in the finale: ‘there is no creature whose inward being is so strong that it is not greatly determined by what lies outside it’. That this relationship was a matter of particular concern to liberal Victorian intellectuals is clear from John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, which was published in the same year (1859) as Eliot’s first novel. The subject of Mill’s classic monograph is ‘the nature and limits of the power which can

52

Middlemarch

be legitimately exercised by society over the individual’. The tendency of modem society was ‘to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them; to fetter the development and, if possible, prevent the formation of any individuality not in harmony with its ways, and compel all characters to fashion themselves upon the model of its own’. For Mill, when tradition or custom dictated conduct there was wanting ‘one of the principal ingredients of human happiness, and quite the chief ingredient of individual and social progress’. Human advancement depended on the ‘disposition to aim at something better than customary’; for it was only from the ‘strong natures’ of individuals that ‘the initiation of all wise or noble things’ would come.11 This encapsulation of the central argument of On Liberty could serve almost equally well for the social-historical analysis of Middlemarch. But what Mill argues logically, the narrator of Eliot’s novel attempts to show through his real, minute vision of characters living in the early 1830s, whose struggles help to bring into being the world that his readers in the 1870s inhabit. The struggle is most clearly seen in the case of Lydgate. Middlemarch is not quite the first Victorian novel to have a practising medical doctor in an important role. As Q. D. Leavis pointed out, there are earlier examples in Dickens’s Bleak House (1852), Charles Kingsley’s Two Years Ago (1857) and Mrs Oliphant’s Miss Majoribanks (1865).12 But Eliot’s protagonist differs from these predecessors in that his professional life is an essential aspect of his story and that he is put back in time into ‘a dark period’, ‘the heroic time of copious bleeding and blistering’ (ch. 15), when provincial society was untouched by modern scientific notions of medical practice. As Lady Chettam observes: ‘I like a medical man more on a footing with the servants. [Hicks] was coarse and butcher-like, but he knew my constitution’ (ch. 10). With his superior scientific training and informed interest in both public health and medical research, Lydgate had almost nothing professionally in common with his fellow medical practitioners and is in fact out of place in early nineteenth-century society. He belongs to the future and is in the vanguard of modern medical practice (an early example of what came to be called the general practitioner) and of ‘the better understanding of disease’ which George Eliot regarded as a leading example in the lifetime of her contemporaries of the ‘mutual determination of each other’s life’.13 The details of Lydgate’s practice would certainly have had this resonance for the first readers of Middlemarch: his correct diagnosis and/or treatment of cholera, erysipelas, cramp, pneumonia, delirium tremens, the pink­ skinned stage of typhoid fever, and fatty degeneration of the heart; his

A Study of Provincial Life

53

prescribing drugs rather than dispensing them; his views on post-mortem examinations and the appointment of coroners; his use of the stethoscope and microscope; and his avoidance of bleeding, patching and blistering. Lydgate, then, exemplifies George Eliot’s belief that the -application of the principles of science was the only way of increasing man’s store of knowledge and happiness. But what Middlemarch shows in detail is how destructive of this potential is the petty medium in which Lydgate must realise his ideals. When he arrives in Middlemarch, Lydgate is full of confidence in his powers and integrity; but he has yet to realise what it is like to live and practise medicine in a community where ‘sane people did what their neighbours did’ (ch. 1), and where ‘it was dangerous to insist on knowledge as a qualification for any salaried office’ (ch. 16). Lydgate is made to run a gauntlet beginning with the business of the appointment of a chaplain to the new hospital, in which he first feels the grasp of petty alternatives, through the conspiracy of the other medical practitioners to undermine the new hospital’s work, the spectrum of contrary public opinion in which every social shade in the town is represented, the financial pressures that leave him without the energy for research or speculative thought, to the ‘malignant effect’ (ch. 71) on his reputation of his rumoured involvement in the Bulstrode-Raffles affair, which leads to a ‘general black-balling’ (ch. 73). It is all a sorry business; but one might reflect that at least Lydgate had a vocation - ‘something particular in life ... to do for its own sake and not because [one’s father] did it’ (ch. 15) - through which he is able to actualise his talents and do good work in the world. The problem of vocation is an important aspect of the relation of the individual to society not only in Middlemarch in particular but also in nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature in general. The appearance of the concern is itself a reflection of historical change, for as society becomes more shifting and fluid and comes to be increasingly based on class distinctions rather than on traditional distinctions of inherited rank the choice of a career becomes increasingly important for the many young men of ability ‘whose only capital was in their brains’ (ch. 30). The classic statement of the problem is found in the second book of Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus (1834), one of the seminal works of Victorian literature: ‘To each is given a certain inward Talent, a certain outward Environment of Fortune; to each, by wisest combination of these two, a certain maximum of Capability. But the hardest problem were ever this first: To find by study of yourself, and of the ground you stand on, what your combined inward and outward Capability specially is.’14 In Middlemarch vocation is defined by Ladislaw (though he calls it

54

Middlemarch

genius): ‘a power to make or do, not anything in general, but something in particular’ (ch. 10). It is exemplified not by Lydgate (who is too complex a character to be emblematic) but by Caleb Garth, who speaks in muted Carlylean and ‘deeply religious’ tones of the importance of work and of business (which are his words for vocation): ‘You must be sure of two things: you must love your work, and not be always looking over the edge of it, wanting your play to begin. And the other is, you must not be ashamed of your work’ (ch. 56). Like Lydgate’s vocation, Caleb’s had ‘laid hold of his imagination in boyhood’ with the force of a religious calling. Business has made a wholesome ‘philosophy for him without the aid of philosophers, a religion without the aid of theology’ (ch. 24), and given him ‘the chance of getting a bit of the country into good fettle ... that those who are living and those who come after will be the better for. I ’d sooner have it than a fortune ... It’s a great gift of God’ (ch. 40). But Caleb Garth is an idealised character - a pastoral type, as we have already seen in a different connection. He lives in a simpler world than that of the novel’s other characters, a world where business never meant money transactions or handling capital, but ‘the skilful application of labour’ (ch. 56). The choice of career is a much more difficult matter for several characters in the novel who have no God or inherited social position to bestow the gift of vocation. Ladislaw and Fred Vincy are two of these characters: another is Farebrother, though he is seen from a different point of view because he is older and his vocational choice is behind him, not in front of him. Early on, Farebrother observes to Lydgate that ‘you are in the right profession, the work you feel yourself most fit for. Some people miss that, and repent too late ... I am not a model clergyman - only a decent makeshift’ (ch. 17). And one feels sure he is speaking from experience when he tells the Garths that ‘I would do anything I could to hinder a man from the fatal step of choosing the wrong profession’ (ch. 40). As we shall see in a later chapter, there is around Farebrother’s character a certain aura of self­ suppression and incompleteness; it is hard not to associate this with his dubious vocational choice. For Fred Vincy, the choice of clergyman would not be dubious; it would clearly be wrong. Having been ‘born the son of a Middlemarch manufacturer’, Fred is ‘inevitable heir to nothing in particular’ (ch. 12) and has difficulty in imagining ‘what secular avocation on earth was there for a young man (whose friends could not get him an “appointment”) which was at once gentlemanly, lucrative, and to be followed without special knowledge’ (ch. 56). The only answer seems to be to go into the church; but, as Mary Garth caustically points out, this would make him ridiculous: ‘His being a clergyman would be only for

A Study of Provincial Life

55

gentility’s sake, and I think there is nothing more contemptible than such imbecile gentility’ (ch. 52). The man chosen by the daughter of Caleb Garth must be made of sterner stuff, for Mary, too, has a Victorian ideal of vocation that involves useful activity. ‘How can you bear’, she tells Fred, ‘to be so contemptible, when others are working and striving, and there are so many things to be done - how can you bear to be fit for nothing in the world that is useful?’ (ch. 25). The choice of career is as pressing a concern for Ladislaw as it is for Fred. None of the traditional professions ‘civil or sacred’ (ch. 9) - that is, law, medicine or the church - initially appeals to Ladislaw, who prefers to explore artistic avenues for the expression of his particular ‘genius’. But this pursuit only makes him into a dilettante and it eventually becomes clear to him that his vocation does not lie in creative directions. When he returns to England and becomes a newspaper editor, the reader begins to see the truth of Dorothea’s shrewd prediction: ‘people may really have in them some vocation which is not quite plain to themselves ... They may seem idle and weak because they are growing’ (ch. 9). What is growing in Will is an ‘ardent’ interest in the political situation, to which his ‘sense of duty’ is finally beginning to respond. This sense ‘must often wait for some work which shall take the place of dilettanteism and make us feel that the quality of our action is not a matter of indifference’ (ch. 46). It is in the offstage world of public affairs in London - the city that was the final destination of the protagonist of Sartor Resartus - that Ladislaw finds his vocation. The silent partner in Ladislaw’s post-Middlemarch public life is Dorothea Brooke. The question of whether this young woman of heroic potential finds appropriate vocational fulfilment in this role has long been mooted by readers of Middlemarch, many of whom have agreed with the ‘many who knew her [who] thought it a pity that so substantive and rare a creature should have been absorbed into the life of another, and be known only in a certain circle as a wife and mother’ (finale). I propose to defer consideration of this contentious issue to a later chapter; what should be considered here is the social context in which Dorothea attempts to realise her maximum of capability. There are two passages early in Middlemarch which heavily underline the ill-effects of provincial society on the aspiring 19-year-old Dorothea. The first speaks of her ‘altogether ardent, theoretic, and intellectually consequent’ nature ‘struggling in the bands of a narrow teaching, hemmed in by a social life which seemed nothing but a labyrinth of petty courses, a walled-in maze of small paths that led no wither’ (ch. 3). The second concerns Dorothea’s reluctance to admit ‘any error in herself. She

56

Middlemarch

was disposed rather to accuse the intolerable narrowness and the purblind conscience of the society around her’ (ch. 4). It is important not to make too much of these rhetorical passages, for the most salient aspect of both is that they represent Dorothea’s own views of her situation in provincial society, and not necessarily the narrator’s. On the other hand, the views expressed in the prelude and the finale to the novel are clearly the narrator’s. They raise a crucial question: the extent to which Middlemarch is a contribution to what Victorians called the Woman Question - more precisely, the extent to which the novel suggests that Dorothea’s unheroic lot is the result of the position of women in nineteenth-century society. Although it does so vaguely, the prelude speaks of ‘the social lot of women’, ‘the common yearning of womanhood’, and the ‘inconvenient indefiniteness’ which ‘some’ consider characteristic of woman’s nature. And we have already seen that the original version of the penultimate paragraph of the finale enumerated specific aspects of society’s treatment of women that were said to be negative determinants in Dorothea’s life. This question has been debated ever since Middlemarch was published. R. H. Hutton, for example, complained in his review that the prelude and the finale mistakenly attempted ‘to represent the book as an elaborate contribution to the “Woman’s” question; [for] the creative power of the author is yoked to no specific doctrine’.15 Even in the light of recent feminist commentary on Middlemarch,16 it is hard not to feel that Hutton had a point - as Eliot herself presumably realised when she changed the controversial passage in the finale. On the other hand, it is unquestionably the case that the dictation of custom and male assumptions concerning women’s inferiority are fundamentally impor­ tant aspects of the stories of the novel’s female characters; and what the narrator of Felix Holt says of Esther Lyon, that novel’s central character, is equally true of the females in Middlemarch: ‘After all she was a woman, and could not make her own lo t... her lot is made for her by the love she accepts’ (ch. 43). The key to resolving this question is to make a distinction between social criticism and social notation. On the thematic level the prelude does seem to overemphasise the importance of the Woman Question. But on the level of social-historical observation of the real, minute processes that cumulatively shape a person’s lot there is abundant evidence of society’s unenlightened assumptions and attitudes concerning the nature of women. Consider first the views expressed by characters in the novel. For Sir James Chettam, ‘a man’s mind ... has always the advantage of being masculine ... and even his ignorance is of a sounder quality’ (ch. 2); he

A Study of Provincial Life

57

further asserts that it is a woman’s duty ‘to be cautious and listen to those who know the world better than she does’ (ch. 72). Mr Brooke believes that ‘there is a lightness about the feminine mind’ that made it suitable for ‘music, the fine arts, that kind of thing’ (ch. 7); but as for the love of knowledge, it ‘doesn’t often run in the female line; or it runs underground like the rivers in Greece you know - it comes out in the sons’ (ch. 5). Lydgate considers women appropriate companions for hours of light relaxation, not for serious pursuits. Caleb Garth accurately reflects the social and legal realities of the period when he tells Mary that ‘a woman, let her be as good as she may, has got to put up with the life her husband makes for her’ (ch. 25). Borthrop Trumbull observes that ‘a man whose life is of any value should think of his wife as a nurse’ (ch. 32). Casaubon expresses a common nineteenth-century view when he speaks of the ‘characteristic excellence’ and ‘great charm’ of woman’s nature being ‘its capability of an ardent self-sacrificing affection’ (ch. 5).* With this assumption, it would never occur to him to ‘think as much about his own qualifications for making a charming girl happy as he thinks of hers for making himself happy’ (ch. 29). And even more telling are the views of two of the most attractive and intelligent women in the novel: Mrs Garth, who believes that her sex ‘was framed to be entirely subordinate’ (ch. 24); and Dorothea Brooke herself, who even when a little girl had as her great desire ‘to help some one who did great works, so that his burthen might be lighter’ (ch. 37) rather than to do great works herself. And while she ‘used to despise women a little for not shaping their lives more, and doing better things’ (ch. 54), Dorothea becomes more tolerant after her marriage gives her fuller experience of a woman’s lot. It is also important to notice that the unusually gifted Dorothea is not the only character in Middlemarch shown to be affected by cultural assumptions concerning female inferiority. There is Letty Garth, the young sibling of Mary, for example, ‘whose life was much checkered by resistance to her depreciation as a girl’ (ch. 57), the depredator being her brother Ben, whose insistence that ‘it was clear girls were good for less than boys’ (finale) makes him a prepubescent epitome of the Middlemarch male in his attitude to the female. Another example is Rosamond Vincy, who is in her own way as hemmed in by petty circumstances as Dorothea - the difference being that what the latter attempts to overcome the former incarnates. Rosamond is admitted to be ‘the flower of Mrs Lemon’s school, the chief school in the county, where the teaching included all that was demanded in the accomplished female even to extras, such as the getting in and out of a carriage’ (ch. 11). As a result of this conventional education, Rosamond ‘never showed any

58

Middlemarch

unbecoming knowledge, and was always that combination of correct sentiments, music, dancing, drawing, elegant loveliness, which made the irresistible woman for the doomed man of that date’ (ch. 27). This glossy finish has made Rosamond superficially attractive but inwardly vacuous: she aspires only to the middle-class heaven of rank, and after her marriage discovers that flirtations are necessary to satisfy her vanity and to fill her days. But even then she finds herself ‘oppressed by [an] ennui’ (ch. 59) that - so limited are her inner resources for all her superficial attainments - she can only think to assuage by ‘the agreeable titillation of vanity and sense of romantic drama’ that comes with intensified flirtation (ch. 75). A similarly inadequate education - the codification of society’s attitude to women - afflicts Dorothea in a different but equally serious way. The narrator observes in chapter 3 that, had she been a less exceptional person with ‘some endowment of stupidity and conceit’, she might have thought that a Christian young lady of fortune should find her ideal of life in village charities, patronage of the humbler clergy, the perusal of ‘Female Scripture Characters’, unfolding the private experience of Sara under the Old Dispensation, and Dorcas under the New, and the care of her soul over her embroidery in her own boudoir - with a background of prospective marriage to a man who, if less strict than herself, as being involved in affairs religiously inexplicable, might be prayed for and seasonably exhorted. But Dorothea is not such a limited and stupid person, though she is an inadequately educated one. That ‘toy-box history of the world adapted to young ladies, which had made the chief part of her education’ (ch. 10), provides as scant nourishment for her intellect or altruistic yearnings as her deficient aesthetic training does for her feelings. Indeed, the social reason Dorothea is drawn to Casaubon is that he is the only man in her acquaintance who eschews the ‘small-talk of heavy men’ (ch. 3) and who seems to offer her understanding, sympathetic guidance and intellectual stimulation. Similarly, one reason she is later drawn to Ladislaw is simply that - unlike the other men in her society - he listens to her, seems to understand her and thereby offers some alleviation of ‘the stifling oppression of that gentlewoman’s world ... that had been her brief history since she had left off learning morning lessons and practising silly rhythms on the hated piano’ (ch. 28). But of course there is a great deal more to Dorothea’s relations with Casaubon and Ladislaw than what can be gathered under the heading of the Woman Question, just as there is a great deal more involved in the

A Study of Provincial Life

59

story of Lydgate’s professional failure than determination by public opinion. In Middlemarch George Eliot is not solely concerned to study the influence of society on the individual. She is not only a social historian, but also a moralist, a psychologist and an aesthetic teacher. To get below the social surface of her characters and to enlarge on the ethical and philosophical implications of her history she needed to develop a fictional persona who would be a surrogate of herself within the text. It is to this pervasive and fundamentally important presence in Middlemarch that we must now turn our attention.

CHAPTER 4

The Narrator The middle-aged, who have lived through their strongest emotions, but are yet in the time when memory is still half passionate and not merely contemplative, should surely be a sort ofnaturalpriesthood... The Mill on the Floss, ch. 48 Middlemarch employs one of the principal conventions of nineteenthcentury fiction, that of the omniscient narrator. Eliot uses the convention in all of her novels, and it is hard not to think that the god’s-eye view was for her the natural and proper way to tell a story. The naturalness is of course illusory, as J. Hillis Miller’s helpful description of this sophisticated and complex device makes clear: The term ‘omniscient narrator’ has tended to obscure clear understanding of the narrating voice in Victorian fiction. The theological overtones of the word ‘omniscient’ suggest that such a narrator is like a God, standing outside the time and space of the action, looking down on the characters with the detachment of a sovereign spectator who sees all, knows all, judges all, from a distance. The narrators of Victorian novels rarely have this sort of omniscience. This perfect knowledge is rather that of pervasive presence than that of transcendent vision. When Dickens, George Eliot, and Trollope move to the other side of the mirror and enter into the role of the personage who tells the story they do not take up a position outside the world of the novel, as a watchtower of vision down on it. They move within the community. They identify themselves with a human awareness which is everywhere at all times within the world of the novel. This awareness surrounds and permeates each individual human mind and therefore is able to know it perfectly from the inside, to live its life ... There is relatively little of what has come to be called the ‘antinovel’ in Victorian fiction. There are few places where the narrator explicitly confesses that the novel is a novel, though many aspects of the narrative language may implicitly recognize this. For the most part, the narrators of Victorian novels talk as if they were confronting directly or in historical retrospect a world independent of their knowledge of it, but a world over which they happen to have extraordinary powers. The novelist

The Narrator

61

himself knows that the world is an invented one, that it exists only in the words he makes up and puts down on the page. The narrator whose role he plays exists as much on the other side of the mirror as any of the characters. He takes the story as authentic history. He is like an immanent God who has perfect knowledge not of his own creation, but of the creation of another God, an externally existing world which he has somehow been able to penetrate, flowing into it like an ubiquitous sea or like a pervasive perfume which can pierce the most hidden recesses, entering freely everywhere.1 Narrators can be omniscient in three ways: temporally, spatially and psychologically.2 In Middlemarch the last two modes are the most important, but the first is also employed. One aspect of the narrator’s temporal omniscience is his knowledge of the past and his ability to place the characters in historical perspective. Dorothea Brooke is contrasted with St Theresa of Avila, for example, and the reader is informed that in Mr Brooke ‘the hereditary strain of Puritan energy was clearly in abeyance’ (ch. 1). The narrator also has the power, though it is equally seldom exercised, to know the personal pasts of his characters: of Lydgate, for example, whose ‘moment of vocation’ in childhood is recounted, as is the peculiar episode of his infatuation with the French actress Laure and its abrupt termination when she reveals that she had meant to stab her unwanted actor husband during a performance. The reader is also given an authoritative recapitulation of Bulstrode’s early days as a member of the Calvinist dissenting church at Highbury, his business association with Mr Dunkirk, and the cruol deception practised on his widow. Just as he has the power to know the past of his characters, the narrator also knows their future - what lies in store for them beyond the 1829-32 present time of the narrative. Until the finale, however, this power is almost never used. One of the rare exceptions is in chapter 20 when we are told that ‘in certain states of dull forlornness’ Dorothea all her life continued to see in her mind’s eye the oppressive vastness of St Peter’s, which like the rest of Rome has had a destabilising effect on her. Another facet of this kind of omniscience is seen in the narrator’s comments on the present-time action of the novel from the point of view and the knowledge available in the late 1860s. As Steven Marcus has noted of Eliot’s novels: ‘both writer and audience share a modern sensibility and consciousness, and ... are engaged in common in reflecting upon the immediately pre­ modern’.3 In chapter 19, for example, the narrator comments on the paucity of information about Christian art then available to travellers on

62

Middlemarch

the Continent, and in chapter 3 he notes that Dorothea is wearing a straw bonnet ‘which our contemporaries might look at with conjectural curiosity as at an obsolete form of basket’. Most often, this perspective is used to make modestly telling ironic points of a plus qa change variety: ‘in those days the world in general was more ignorant of good and evil by forty years than it is at present’ (ch. 19); ‘in those days human intercourse was not determined solely by respect’ (ch. 40); and in chapter 1 mention of the value of Mr Brooke’s estate draws forth the ponderously sarcastic reflection that the well-to-do society of that earlier day was innocent ‘of that gorgeous plutocracy which has [since then] so nobly exalted the necessities of genteel life’. None of these examples, however, is particularly salient or important, and on the whole it is fair to say that the narrator’s explicit then-now contrasts do not figure significantly in Middlemarch. The principal exception to this generalisation is the way in which Dorothea Brooke is associated with the future: ‘But perhaps no persons then living’, the narrator observes early in the novel, ‘- and certainly none in the neighbourhood of Tipton - would have had a sympathetic understanding for the dreams of a girl whose notions about marriage took their colour entirely from an exalted enthusiasm about the ends of life, an enthusiasm which was lit chiefly by its own fire’ (ch. 3). Dorothea’s distinction gives her a privileged position in the reader’s eye and further suggests that there is a special bond between them - as there clearly is between the narrator and Dorothea. By the last paragraph of Middlemarch the reader has a deeper understanding of the nature of this bond and of its place in the novel’s humanistic economy of salvation. For Dorothea’s ‘unhistoric acts’ have been ‘incalculably diffusive’, and one indication of their contribution to ‘the growing good of the world’ is that contemporaries of the narrator in the 1870s can now recognise the special distinction of Dorothea’s nature that her contemporaries were unable to appreciate forty years earlier. The powers of spatial omniscience, which enable the narrator to know what is going on in different places at the same time, are fully exploited in Middlemarch. Their frequent exercise is essential to the conduct of the narrative, which moves back and forth among several groups of characters, shifting from business office to parlour, public house to boudoir, from the library at Lowick to the drawing-room in Lydgate’s too expensive house, from the lawn near the great conservatory at Freshitt Hall to the Garths’ pleasant garden; and so on. The same powers are also essential to the novel’s social-historical panorama and the principal way through which Eliot is able to indulge ‘the habit of my imagination to

The Narrator

63

strive after as full a vision of the medium in which a character moves as of the character itself - a habit in the exercise of which Eliot went on to admit of a ‘tendency to excess’.4 (It was her name for what Henry James politely called her ‘redundancy of touch’.) Through these powers the reader is taken into the scruffy room at the Red Lion in Houndsley where Fred Vincy dines with Mr Horrock and Mr Bambridge, into Mrs Dollop’s public house in Slaughter Lane, and under the archway of the Green Dragon where, on seeing Bulstrode ride by, Mr Bambridge is reminded of a story he picked up about him in another town. It enables the reader to learn what Mrs Bulstrode and Mrs Plymdale talk about during a morning visit; how Farebrother’s mother, aunt and sister receive his guests; how Featherstone’s blood-relations get on together in the kitchen and parlour at Stone Court; how Borthrop Trumbull conducts an auction; and so on. Finally, spatial omniscience is also thematically important. Its comprehensive overview shows the interplay of private life and public life and makes visible ‘the play of minute causes’ (ch. 6) that precipitates events and helps to determine the futures of the characters. In chapter 11 it is not so much a weakly personified Destiny as it is the narrator himself who holds the script: ‘But any one watching keenly the stealthy convergence of human lots, sees a slow preparation of effects from one life on another, which tells like a calculated irony on the indifference or the frozen stare with which we look at our unintroduced neighbour. Destiny stands by sarcastic with our dramatis personae folded in her hand.’ The third kind of omniscience is psychological: the power to penetrate the consciousness of the characters and provide authoritative accounts and analyses of their motives and emotions. For all the central characters in Middlemarch, outside views are complemented by extended inside views. The narrator’s usual practice is first to show a character from the outside and then to move within. Casaubon, for example, is first seen from the point of view of Dorothea and the country gentry, but it is not long before the narrator is suggesting that he may not be ‘fairly represented in the minds of those ... personages who have hitherto delivered their judgments concerning him’, and inviting the reader to ‘turn from outside estimates of [Casaubon] to wonder, with keener interest, what is the report of his own consciousness about his doings or capacity’ (ch. 10). Nor is it long after the reader has been introduced to Lydgate that the narrator announces that he now has ‘to make the new settler ... better know to anyone interested in him than he could possibly be even to those who had seen the most of him since his arrival in Middlemarch’ (ch. 15).

64

Middlemarch

George Eliot is a master of psychological omniscience, and for many readers it is the exercise of this many-splendoured power that more than any other single factor makes Middlemarch a great novel. It is certainly the case that the combination and alternation of outside and inside views, public life and private life, the landscape of opinion and the paysage interieur, the social web and the ‘subtle muscular movements’ of consciousness (ch. 68), provide the organising principle of many of the novel’s chapters and give to the narrative as a whole its basic rhythm - the ‘systole and diastole’ that Lydgate insists are essential to all inquiry, in which a person’s mind ‘must be continually expanding and shrinking between the whole human horizon and the horizon of an object-glass’ (ch. 63). Lydgate makes this observation just before a New Year’s party at the Vincys’; the scene affords a perfect illustration of the systole and diastole of the narrator’s fictional inquiry. In the middle of his account of what guests are saying to and about each other, he suddenly switches to a closeup view of the face of Lydgate’s wife, which is then followed by a brief but equally penetrating psychological notation: Rosamond was perfectly graceful and calm, and only a subtle observation such as the Vicar had not been roused to bestow on her would have perceived the total absence of that interest in her husband’s presence which a loving wife is sure to betray, even if etiquette keeps her aloof from him. When Lydgate was taking part in the conversation, she never looked towards him any more than if she had been a sculptured Psyche modelled to look another way: and when, after being called out for an hour or two, he re-entered the room, she seemed unconscious of the fact, which eighteen months before would have had the effect of a numeral before cyphers. In reality, however, she was intensely aware of Lydgate’s voice and movements; and her pretty good-tempered air of unconsciousness was a studied negation by which she satisfied her inward opposition to him without compromise of propriety. The range and depth of the narrator’s powers of psychological omniscience will be abundantly instanced in the following chapter’s discussion of the character and characterisation of the novel’s principal players. For the present, two general points may be made. The first is that one can have too much of a good thing, and just as there is a tendency to excess in the narrator’s use of spatial omniscience, so, too, there is a certain redundancy of touch in the exercise of his powers of psychological omniscience. One example involves Joshua Rigg, Featherstone’s

The Narrator

65

illegitimate son who unexpectedly sells Stone Court soon after he has inherited the estate and subsequently leaves Middlemarch for good. Rigg is a strictly peripheral character and his selling of the property could have been satisfactorily reported in a sentence by any of a number of characters. Instead we are given this: as Warren Hastings looked at gold and thought of buying Daylesford, so Joshua Rigg looked at Stone Court and thought of buying gold. He had a very distinct and intense vision of his chief good, the vigorous greed which he had inherited having taken a special form by dint of circumstance: and his chief good was to be a money-changer. From his earliest employment as an errand-boy in a seaport, he had looked through the windows of the money-changers as other boys look through the windows of the pastry-cooks; the fascination had wrought itself gradually into a deep special passion; he meant, when he had property, to do many things, one of them being to marry a genteel young person; but these were all accidents and joys that imagination could dispense with. The one joy after which his soul thirsted was to have a money-changer’s shop on a much-frequented quay, to have locks all around him of which he held the keys, and to look sublimely cool as he handled the breeding coins of all nations, while helpless Cupidity looked at him enviously from the other side of an iron lattice. The strength of that passion had been a power enabling him to master all the knowledge necessary to gratify it. And when others were thinking that he had settled at Stone Court for life, Joshua himself was thinking that the moment now was not far off when he should settle on the North Quay with the best appointments in safes and locks. The analysis is not implausible, but to what end is it made? The reader has seen far too little of Rigg to be interested in what makes him tick or to be able to assess the accuracy of the analysis. Nor can this little portrait of obsession be usefully related to other material in the novel. No wonder the narrator himself finally breaks off, exclaiming ‘Enough. We are concerned with looking at Joshua Rigg’s sale of his land from Mr Bulstrode’s point of view’ (ch. 53). This passage is also a negative example of another general point. Psychological omniscience is most tellingly and helpfully used in the presentation of characters who unfold during the course of the novel rather than static characters. With Caleb Garth, Mary Garth and Mr Brooke, for example, the narrator’s use of psychological omniscience is wisely limited to an introductory character sketch, after which the

66

Middlemarch

character’s speech and actions are in the main left unglossed. Among characters who do unfold - the expression is the narrator’s psychological omniscience is most tellingly used in the presentation of those among them who are morally flawed. The climactic engagement scene between Dorothea and Ladislaw in chapter 83 has its felicities, as we shall see, but quality of psychological notation is not among them. From this point of view the episode cannot hold a candle to the one-page scene at the end of chapter 31 in which Lydgate and Rosamond become engaged, a virtuoso display of psychological omniscience on the narrator’s part in which there is only one line of dialogue. The explanation of the difference between these two engagement scenes is that Dorothea and Ladislaw are too unflawed, the quality and breadth of their emotion too pure and too encompassing, to allow for psychological complexity. Conversely, psychological omniscience has its limitations as an instrument of characterisation when the subject is too flawed or too morally corrupt. Inside views of Bulstrode can do little more than detail his metronomic debates with his conscience and his programmatic rationalisations of bis selfish actions. To reveal Bulstrode’s depths, George Eliot had to employ what for her were most unusual means, as we shall later see. The narrator of Middlemarch is not only omniscient. Like Thackeray’s and Trollope’s third-person narrators he is also intrusive. In Middlemarch, as we have seen, Eliot is primarily concerned to offer a vivid representation of her realistic subject. But this by no means precludes the addition of intrusive narratorial comment, including judgements on characters, remarks on how the story is being told, direct addresses to the reader, and generalisations and miscellaneous observations on a variety of subjects. This conspicuous feature of the omniscient narration of nineteenth-century novels became quite unfashionable during the heyday of modernist aesthetic criteria deriving from the dicta and the practice of Flaubert and Henry James. The former had insisted that ‘great Art is scientific and impersonal’ and that the author/narrator ‘must be in his work as God is in creation, invisible yet all powerful; we must sense him everywhere but never see him.’5For James, ‘the only reason for the existence of a novel’ was that it attempted ‘to represent life’. When the attempt was relinquished, as when Trollope allowed his narrators asides and digressions that broke the representational illusion, the result was ‘a terrible crime’, a betrayal of the novelist’s ‘sacred office’.6 In time James even came to cast a cold eye on impersonal omniscient narration (‘the mere muffled majesty of irresponsible “authorship” ’), preferring an ‘indirect and oblique’ third-person point of view limited to what was

The Narrator

67

experienced, thought and observed by a single character or a very small number of characters.7 These criteria were a principal reason for the neglect of Middlemarch during the 1920s and 1930s, and even today the narrator’s intrusions can be a considerable obstacle to the reader’s engagement with the text. The intrusions may be divided into three groups: the direct comments on characters; the generalisations, sententiae and dicta; and the direct addresses to ‘you’, the reader. In the first two groups there are unquestionable examples of what might be called narratorial spots of commonness. The comments on his characters sometimes seem occasioned by the narrator’s intermittent inability to leave well enough alone. Signposting unnecessarily supplements showing, and the reader’s involvement with the character is interrupted. For example, just before Mr Brooke makes an ass of himself addressing the electors of Middlemarch from the balcony of the White Hart in chapter 51, the narrator prolixly interpolates: ‘Pray pity him; so many English gentlemen make themselves miserable by speechifying on entirely private grounds: whereas Mr Brooke wished to serve his country by standing for Parliament - which indeed may also be done on private grounds, but being once undertaken does absolutely demand some speechifying.’ Perhaps the narrator thought he was being witty? In another example, the problem is his indulgent affection for a character, which spills gauchely on to the page: ‘pardon these details for once’, he says parenthetically, ‘you would have learned to love them if you had known Caleb Garth’ (ch. 23). But no reader of Middlemarch can know Caleb Garth in the flesh and the only way he can come to approximate the narrator’s love is through suggestive details - not through interpolated testimonials. There are also some infelicitous asides concerning Casaubon; but it is Rosamond Vincy who brings out the worst in the narrator. At the beginning of chapter 75, for example, the subject is the vanity of Rosamond, who is said to be ‘one of those women who live much in the idea that each man they meet would have preferred them if the preference had not been hopeless’. She is shown titillating both her ‘vanity and sense of romantic drama’ by day-dreaming about her relationship with Will Ladislaw: ‘He would have made, she thought, a much more suitable husband for her than she had found in Lydgate.’ At this point the narrator should have stopped; but he cannot forbear to provide in the following sentence a censorious and totally unnecessary gloss for Rosamond’s self-indulgent musings: ‘No notion could have been falser than this, for Rosamond’s discontent in her marriage was due to the conditions of marriage itself.’ In another passage, the narrator’s animus is

68

Middlemarch

so pronounced as to make one doubt his reliability, which is based on the reader’s sense of the absolute compatibility of the teller and the tale. The passage is in chapter 31. The narrator has been describing Rosamond’s increasing unhappiness because Lydgate, to whom she considers herself virtually engaged, has ceased to visit her: ‘Poor Rosamond lost her appetite and felt as forlorn as Ariadne - as a charming stage Ariadne left behind with all her boxes full of costumes and no hope of a coach.’ As R. H. Hutton observed: ‘that is palpably an unkind author’s criticism not founded on truth. Rosamond is thin, and selfish, and self-occupied, but she is not stagey. Her grief,such as itwas,thoughofafeebleand thready kind, was perfectly genuine. The prick of the needle was due to literary malice. ’8 One must be careful, however, not to make too much of these intrusive infelicities, for their effect is not seriously damaging to the verisimilitude of the characters in the novel. Surely no serious reader was ever in danger of regarding the superbly drawn Rosamond as a ‘charming stage Ariadne’. Indeed, even F. R. Leavis failed entirely to notice that there was ‘animus in the presentment’.9 Moreover, in the case of the most notorious example of the narrator’s intrusive remarks it is even possible to be downright positive. It occurs at the beginning of chapter 29: ‘One morning, some weeks after her arrival at Lowick, Dorothea - but why always Dorothea? Was her point of view the only possible one with regard to this marriage? I protest...’ This outburst is certainly abrupt, and it has been thought ill-considered and gauche; but its intention (and, for readers like myself, its effect) is just the opposite of making Dorothea and her husband appear puppets. It rather signals the narrator’s commitment to a comprehensive and impartial depiction of the inner life of both characters, neither of whom is allowed to remain a one-dimensional figure with whom the reader can remain uninvolved. The intrusion further suggests that the narrator is aware of the special bond between himself and Dorothea and determined to minimise its effect on the narrative. His doing so involves the overcoming of a form of self-absorption (for Dorothea is unquestionably the character with whom the narrator most closely identifies) and the recognition of ‘an equivalent centre of self (ch. 21) in others. Since these are the very things that Dorothea must herself learn to overcome and recognise during the course of the novel, the narrator’s determination to see a complex emotional situation not only from Dorothea’s point of view becomes a prolepsis of Dorothea’s impressive mental act during her night of suffering in chapter 80: ‘She began now to live through that yesterday morning deliberately again, forcing herself to dwell on every detail and its possible meaning. Was she alone in that scene? Was it her event only?’

The Narrator

69

The second group of narratorial intrusions in Middlemarch consists of the discursive generalisations and aphorisms with which the text is peppered. Here, too, there are infelicities and embarrassments. It is not hard to compile a list of sayings that are either stilted, simplistic, bloated, run-of-the-mill, gratuitous, or clumsily ironic. To cite only a few examples: Mortals are easily tempted to pinch the life out of their neighbour’s buzzing glory, and think that such killing is no murder, (ch. 21) We mortals, men and women, devour many a disappointment between breakfast and dinner-time; keep back the tears and look a little pale about the lips, and in answer to inquiries say, ‘Oh, nothing!’ Pride helps us; and pride is not a bad thing when it only urges us to hide our own hurts - not to hurt others, (ch. 6) When the animals entered the Ark in pairs, one may imagine that allied species made much private remark on each other, and were tempted to think that so many forms feeding on the same store of fodder were eminently superfluous, as tending to diminish the rations. (I fear the part played by the vultures on that occasion would be too painful for art to represent, those birds being disadvantageously naked about the gullet, and apparently without rites and ceremonies.) (ch. 35) to most mortals there is a stupidity which is unendurable and a stupidity which is altogether acceptable - else, indeed, what would become of the social bonds, (ch. 58) It was presumably to clinkers like these that Walter Allen was referring when he made some harshly critical comments about George Eliot’s ‘intrusive, indeed obtrusive’ narratorial comment. Fielding persuades the reader ‘of the truth of his interpretation of what he is narrating by his appeal both to sweet reasonableness and to worldly experience’. Eliot, in contrast, ‘lectures us and sometimes even hectors us. She lacks tact, as she lacks wit, except a ponderous irony. She gives the impression, in fact, of not quite knowing whom she is addressing. Her style is not subtle or easy enough; she is too self-conscious.’10 Put differently, what Allen is saying is that the key to success in the deployment of intrusive comment is the creation of a distinctive persona and voice. The narrator himself seems aware of this when in his brief digression on Fielding’s digressions he speaks of Fielding’s bringing ‘his arm-chair to the proscenium [to] chat

70

Middlemarch

with us in all the lusty ease of his fine English’ (ch. 15). Lusty ease is not a quality of the voice of the narrator of Middlemarch, and neither on the whole is wit. George Eliot is no Thackeray. The voice of Middlemarch is more serious and sombre than that of Fielding’s or Thackeray’s narrators. It is the voice of a person whose eye, like the mature eye of George Eliot’s favourite poet, has long kept watch on man’s mortality. The voice belongs to a persona that was first described by the Victorian critic Edward Dowden, who distinguished between George Eliot ‘the actual historical person’ and the ‘second self who narrates her novels. The latter was ‘a great nature, which has suffered and has now attained, which was perplexed and has now grasped the clue - standing before us not without tokens on lip and brow of the strife and the suffering, but resolute, and henceforth possessed of something which makes self-mastery possible’. To none of his characters is he ‘cold or indifferent’; he is ‘present in the midst of them, indicating, interpreting’. The reader learns of ‘those abstractions from the common fund of truth which the author has found most needful to her own deepest life. We feel... in the presence of a soul and a soul which has had a history.’11 Dowden’s impressionistic description is heavy and portentous and as such nicely suggests the sententious and moralising qualities in the narrator’s voice that tend to come out when he clears his throat to generalise or that, when he attempts wit, often result only in an elephantine lightness. It would be unfair and distinctly misleading, however, to end discussion at this point. The first thing to be said in the narrator’s defence is that his sayings tend to bring out the worst qualities in his style and voice and as such are unrepresentative. For example, if the italicised bit of generalisation in the following sentence from the beginning of chapter 45 were removed, the notation would be much sharper (though, to be fair, it would make one notice that it would be better if tone replaced shade): ‘What the opposition in Middlemarch said about the New Hospital and its administration had certainly a great deal of echo in it, for heaven has taken care that everybody shall not be an originator, but there were differences that represented every social shade ...’ Or consider the shrewd observation made about Farebrother in chapter 17: ‘The Vicar’s frankness seemed not of the repulsive sort that comes from an uneasy consciousness seeking to forestall the judgment of others, but simply the relief of a desire to do with as little pretence as possible.’ This is crisp and telling because it is specific. Were the same notation inflated into an aphorism, it is hard to imagine it not becoming soggy. As a final example, consider the fine simile in chapter 61 concerning Bulstrode’s tormented consciousness: ‘he felt the scenes of his earlier life coming between him

The Narrator

71

and everything else, as obstinately as when we look through the window from a lighted room, the objects we turn our backs on are still before us, instead of the grass and the trees’. The tendency of the narrator towards generalisation is present in the references to ‘we’ and ‘us’, but not strongly enough to cause the notation to swell into an aphorism that would surely have weakened the striking comparison of Bulstrode’s oppressive anxieties to a common optical occurrence. The other point to be made is that by no means all of the discursive generalisations in the novel fall into the same categories as the examples quoted above. Those are more than compensated for by the many sayings in the text that are apt, striking, penetrating, moving, and/or profound, some of which can even - so Isobel Armstrong has urged in a spirited defence - withstand comparison with those of Samuel Johnson.12 Let us begin with the generalisation in chapter 36 that is prompted by an account of Mr Vincy’s less than firm resolution: ‘a disagreeable resolve formed in the chill hours of the morning had as many conditions against it as the early frost, and rarely persisted under the warming influences of the day’. Out of context the reflection would be trite, if nicely turned; in context it works well because it is suited to its subject, Mr Vincy’s character being hardly out of the ordinary. And the aphorism might even be thought to be making a knowing wink back at him in its closing reference to ‘the warming influences of the day’, which can refer not only to the sun but also to the strong drink of which Mr Vincy is fond. Another minor felicity is the following: ‘the early months of a marriage often are times of critical tumult - whether that of the shrimp-pool or of deeper waters - which afterwards subsides into a cheerful peace’ (ch. 20). What gives this saying its froth is of course shrimp-pool; if shallows were substituted, it would subside into platitude. Now let us look at some of what I take to be the best of the discursive generalisations in Middlemarch: There are characters which are continually creating collisions and nodes for themselves in dramas which nobody is prepared to act with them. (ch. 19) the egoism which enters into our theories does not affect their sincerity; rather, the more our egoism is satisfied, the more robust is our belief, (ch. 53) We are on a perilous margin when we begin to look passively at our future selves, and see our own figures led with dull consent into insipid misdoing and shabby achievement, (ch. 79)

72

Middlemarch If we know how to be candid, we shall confess [that self-discontent makes] more than half our bitterness under grievances, wife or husband included, (ch. 58) If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence, (ch. 20) He was simply a man whose desires had been stronger than his theoretic beliefs, and who had gradually explained the gratification of his desires into satisfactory agreement with those beliefs. If this be hypocrisy, it is a process which shows itself occasionally in us all, to whatever confession we belong, and whether we believe in the future perfection of our race or in the nearest date fixed for the end of the world; whether we regard the earth as a putrefying nidus for a saved remnant, including ourselves, or have a passionate belief in the solidarity of mankind, (ch. 61)

The first two examples might be said to offer only worldly wisdom; but such wisdom is hardly common coin and both sayings are sharply focused and trenchant. The third example bites deeper, as does the more straightforwardly articulated fourth example, the last phrase of which, seemingly an afterthought, in fact drives home the painful home-epic truth. The fifth example is not so much a distillation of mature experience as the residue of the intense perceptual experiences of youth - more Wordsworthian than Johnsonian. It recalls some similarly ravishing reflections in Eliot’s early novels and is evidence that the narrator of Middlemarch has a memory that is still half passionate and not merely contemplative. Much would have been lost if the narrator had attempted to point a moral to adorn his piercing notation. Alas, this is just what he does. The sentence about ‘the other side of silence’ is followed by a gratuitous bellow: ‘As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity.’ The final example is especially interesting because in it the narrator’s moral scrutiny is indirectly brought to bear on himself. We have seen that he is not a catastrophist concerned with the end of the world; but he does have a uniformitarian belief in the gradual improvement of the race and certainly has ‘a passionate belief in the solidarity of mankind’. In her article on the sayings in Middlemarch, Isobel Armstrong argued that they serve to increase the reader’s participation in the novel: ‘Eliot’s procedure depends upon the constant corroboration and assent of the

The Narrator

73

reader to her sayings, [which become] the growing-point of imaginative involvement in the novel.’13 This aspect of the sayings relates them to the third and last cluster of intrusive comments: the direct addresses to ‘you’, the reader, and the similar references to ‘our’ and ‘we’. Examples abound: ‘this trait is not quite alien to us, and ... claims some of our pity’ (ch. 10); ‘we all of us ... get our thoughts entangled in metaphors, and act fatally on the strength of them’ (ch. 10); ‘Mr Casaubon ... was spiritually ahungered like the rest of us’ (ch. 29); ‘irritated feeling with him, as with all of us, seeks rather for justification than for self-knowledge’ (ch. 34); ‘is it not rather what we expect in men, that they should have numerous strands of experience lying side by side and never compare them with each other?’ (ch. 58); ‘that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs’ (finale). The relationship of narrator to reader, of ‘I’ to ‘you’, is not simply a rhetorical one, nor is it essentially preceptorial - though there are good many things the narrator wants us to know. The relationship is rather based on a similar range of experience, shared beliefs and a shared fund of human wisdom. This relationship provides the explanation of a seeming discrepancy in the novel that has been separately noted by two philosophical critics, Peter Jones in his Philosophy and the Novel and K. M. Newton in his George Eliot, Romantic Humanist: A Study of the Philosophical Structure of her Novels. To cite the former: ‘the omniscient author appears immune from precisely those obstacles to knowledge encountered by her characters, and to which we are all alleged to be subject in everyday life’.14 The wrong way for a non-philosophical critic to explain this apparent discontinuity would be to say that epistemological relativism is a characteristic of the world of the novel, but the convention of a god’s-eye narrator is for good reason used to present this world and one must simply accept this convention of omniscience, just as one must accept the convention of divine intervention in the Iliad. The right way to explain the matter would begin by noting that just as on the historical level Middlemarch is told from the viewpoint of looking back after forty years on an earlier state of social development, so on the personal level the novel is narrated from the point of view of middle-age looking back on youth. Middlemarch is primarily about ‘young lives’ (finale), about ‘the season of hope’ during which youth is apt ‘to think its emotions, partings, and resolves are the last of their kind. Each crisis seems final, simply because it is new’ (ch. 55). The omniscience of the narrator is not so much god-like as generational. There are no ex cathedra pronouncements; there is, rather, a constant appeal to a shared fund of human experience and a

74

Middlemarch

consensus of human wisdom that is the closest possible approximation to the now superseded divine wisdom. Virginia Woolfs famous comment was perfectly correct: Middlemarch is a novel for grown-up people, for members or would-be members of what the narrator of The Mill on the Floss called ‘the natural priesthood’ of the middle-aged, their knowledge different in degree but not in kind from the fallible, struggling young men and women whose stories are told in the novel. There is no discrepancy between the limited knowledge of the characters and the omniscient knowledge of the narrator. There is, rather, a gradualist distinction - in Middlemarch as in In Memoriam - between knowledge and wisdom, a wisdom that is not transcendent but ‘the empiricism of the inner life’, which is ‘grounded in sorrow’ and has as its precondition what Tennyson calls love and Eliot calls fellow-feeling.15

CHAPTER 5

Character and Characterisation for character too is a process and an unfolding. Middlemarch, ch. 15 In recent years it has become increasingly difficult for literary critics to talk about fictional characters as if they were ‘real’ persons having a psychological existence independent of the novel that contains them, rather than (as one deconstructive critic puts it) ‘powerful phantasms of personalities’ generated by the text. Critics are now clearly aware of the dangers involved in such discourse: for example, the risk of co-option - of the critic unwittingly speaking ‘as though he were one of the invented characters in the novel, the narrator’.1The danger is particularly acute in discussing a novel like Middlemarch in which, as we have seen, the narrator is concerned to create a community of interest and a consensus of judgement between himself and his readers. The risks can, however, be considerably reduced if character is considered in tandem with characterisation - with the ways in which, and the adequacy with which, the fictional personage is presented. Dangers will doubtless remain, but the attempt nevertheless has to be made, for any adequate consideration of Middlemarch must include discussion of the characters in which one’s disbelief in their reality is suspended. Not to make this act of fictional faith would impoverish any account of Eliot’s novel, one of the most impressive and deeply satisfying aspects of which is the depiction of character. It is here that George Eliot’s philosophical, social-historical and moral concerns are fused with her abundant natural gifts as a novelist - for dialogue and characterisation by speech, for social and psychological notation, for the interplay of inside and outside views and the enriching mixture of showing and telling. Of course, not all of the characters who figure in Middlemarch in more than a passing way are fully characterised. Such figures are minor not only because they are cast in supporting roles but also because they do not unfold during the novel and are mainly presented from the outside. Victorian reviewers, for whom character was pretty much everything, delighted in these fictional personages for their own sakes, and it would be well if contemporary commentators could recover some of this capacity for enjoyment, for too often the novel’s minor characters are

76

Middlemarch

noticed only to the extent that they have a perceived thematic or structural role to play or are able to become grist for some interpretative mill. Tact and discretion are needed to avoid making either too much or too little of them. Some of these characters are more interesting and more satisfactorily rendered than others. Sir James Chettam, for example, has a place in the novel’s social panorama and a small role in Dorothea’s story, but in his own right he is a weak characterisation, ‘a blooming Englishman of the red-whiskered type’ (ch. 2) and little else. A pleasant disposition and loyal-hearted nature seem the sum of his personal qualities, while the wish that ‘people would behave like gentlemen’ is his ‘comprehensive programme for social well-being’ (ch. 38). Even the impercipient Mr Brooke can adequately sum him up: ‘Chettam is a good fellow, a good sound-hearted fellow, you know; but he doesn’t go much into ideas’ (ch. 4). The one time in the novel when he does become of more interest is when the narrator, whose favourite subject is egotism, pauses for a paragraph to analyse his ‘amiable vanity’. Celia Brooke, whom Chettam marries, is an equally thin characterisation. Some inside information about her is provided in two places early on, but after that Celia becomes tedious almost as soon as she begins to speak. As her sister playfully but tellingly observes, she is ‘fit hereafter to be an eternal cherub and [is] hardly more in need of salvation than a squirrel’ (ch. 4). Borthrop Trumbull is much better done. He is frankly and unapologetically a humour character and bit of local colour, with no significant function to perform. He is nicely deployed: his four appearances are at widely spaced intervals and in each case touch on a different one of the novel’s major story-lines. In Trumbull’s first appearance in Featherstone’s kitchen in chapter 32 the narrator alerts the reader to his ‘sincere sense of his own merit’ and to the fact that ‘his admiration was far from being confined to himself, but was accustomed professionally as well as privately to delight in estimating things at a high rate. He was an amateur of superior phrases ... If anyone had observed that Mr Borthrop Trumbull, being an auctioneer, was bound to know the nature of everything, he would have smiled and trimmed himself silently with the sense that he came pretty near that.’ Amusing illustrations of these qualities are then provided, as Trumbull reads aloud from a Scott novel, the title of which he mispronounces, offers an assessment of its author and of the ham that he swallows ‘with alarming haste’, and in taking his leave volunteers some insights into why he has never married: ‘Some men must marry to elevate themselves a little, but when I am in need of that, I hope someone will tell me so - 1 hope some individual will apprise me of the fact.’ In his next appearance, in chapter 45, Trumbull is

Character and Characterisation

77

treated for pneumonia by Lydgate, whom he assures: ‘you are not speaking to one who is altogether ignorant of the vis medicatrix\ But his big scene is the Larcher auction over which he presides in chapter 60. It reaches its high point when Trumbull waxes particularly eloquent over ‘a painting of the Italian school - by the celebrated Guydo, the greatest painter in the world, the chief of the Old Masters, as they are called’. Two other humour characters excellently hit off are Mrs Cadwallader, the Mrs Poyser of Middlemarch, and Mr Brooke. The former is almost wholly characterised through her distinctive voice - rightly so since she is the finest wit in the novel, compelling attention through the biting candour of her worldly wisdom and the sparkle of her pitiless banter as she scatters her bad words for everyone. She is appropriately introduced in the sixth chapter not by a character sketch but through a page of dialogue with Mrs Fitchett, the lodge-keeper at Tipton, during which she successfully barters a pair of tumble pigeons for a brace of fowl - a brief scene that economically illustrates Mrs Cadwallader’s impecuniousness, shrewdness, free-speaking, and knowledge of country manners. Mr Brooke, the most prominent humour character in Middlemarch, is also given a wholly distinctive voice, but in addition the narrator supplies an initial character sketch to establish his well-meaning but ineffectual nature, his ‘tpo rambling habit of mind ... acquiescent temper, miscellaneous opinions, and uncertain vote’ (ch. 1). And from time to time throughout the novel he will provide bits of information about what is going on inside his head. Henry James described Mr Brooke as being drawn ‘with the touch of a Dickens chastened and intellectualized’.2This seems just right: Mr Brooke never quite becomes the comic caricature he sometimes seems close to becoming and would have become in Dickens’s hands. His voice is immediately recognisable, from his first appearance in chapter 2, through his address to the Middlemarch electors from the balcony of the White Hart, to the close of the novel when with characteristic indirection he leads up to the subject of Dorothea’s impending remarriage by first speaking of poaching and then summing up his genial sense of human affairs: ‘There’s something singular in things; they come round, you know’ (ch. 84). In the finale, Mr Brooke’s prolixity is neatly made the agent of the genial sense or comic vision with which the story of the country gentry families comes round. Just as his loquacity in letter-writing had been responsible for the invitation that brought Ladislaw to Lowick and planted the seeds of Chettam-Brooke disruption, so a similarly overfluent missive leads to the invitation to Dorothea and her new husband to visit Tipton and hence to their reconciliation with the Chettams. In a novel as philosophically and

78

Middlemarch

morally serious as Middlemarch, there is perhaps too much over­ simplification in this comic resolution. One might similarly reflect that on the whole the narrator’s presentation of the gentry is rather too uncritical, even indulgent. Mr Cadwallader is an unsatisfactory clergyman even by the undemanding standards of traditional Anglicanism; his wife’s endless sarcasms are at everyone’s expense but her own; and it would be difficult to gainsay A. O. J. Cockshut’s description of Mr Brooke’s moral character as laziness masquerading as moderation and strong practical sense.3 What these reflections point towards is a certain generic discontinuity in Middlemarch: in the presentation of the country gentry conventions of comedy are used that are not employed in the presentation of other groups from lower down the social scale. The implications of this discontinuity raise questions concerning the unity and cohesiveness of Eliot’s novel that will be considered in a later chapter. There is also a degree of oversimplification in the characterisation of Caleb Garth, whom James also described as being drawn with the touch of a chastened and intellectualised Dickens, though in this case he must have been referring not to Dickens’s comic characters but to his idealised ones. There is no hint of base metals in the sterling figure of Caleb Garth, the personification of probity and fellow-feeling, who is as colourfully emblematic of the positive value of work as the labourers in Ford Madox Brown’s exemplary Victorian painting. Caleb Garth’s daughter Mary has inherited much of her father’s wholesomeness and is given something of his emblematic quality. But she is a less simplified and therefore more interesting character because of her acuteness of perception and trenchancy of judgement - ‘she gauges everybody’, as Farebrother remarks in chapter 17. When coupled with her plainness and narrowed prospects, these qualities give her the potential for resentment. Unfortunately, this interest is not allowed to develop; the narrator chooses to keep Mary’s story and her character strictly subservient both to that of Fred Vincy and to those of Dorothea and Rosamond, the two central female characters. To ensure that her role remains minor and interest in her limited, Mary is made middle-aged before her time. When the novel opens this young lady has already learned to make ‘no unreasonable claims’ on life (ch. 33) and is already in possession of the admirable mature qualities needed to overcome her potential for resentment. And her love for Fred is said to have something ‘maternal’ in it (ch. 25). Her character is fully unfolded; since it is also unflawed there is no need for Mary to be the subject of extended inside views as Dorothea and Rosamond are. A one-paragraph sketch on her first appearance in

Character and Characterisation

79

chapter 12 is sufficient, though it is supplemented by an additional paragraph twenty-one chapters later. Farebrother is also middle-aged; but not prematurely. He does not unfold either, and his sole function in the novel might be said to be instrumental; to be a wise counsellor to Lydgate and Fred Vincy, to help resolve Fred and Mary’s story, and to provide variations on the themes of vocation and the humanistic economy of salvation. But Farebrother, ‘the keen-faced handsome little Vicar in his well-brushed threadbare clothes’ (ch. 40), is an extremely interesting characterisation in his own right. I do not refer to the fineness of the notation - his way of speaking, his manner, his percipience, tact, and delicacy of feeling. Of greater interest is the way in which, despite his sterling qualities, the reader is made to feel that there is something incomplete or missing, not quite right or possibly deficient, in Farebrother’s character. There are one or two places in the novel where he is seen in a negative light. In chapter 72, for example, where Dorothea for the first time feels ‘rather discontented’ with him because of his reluctance to come to Lydgate’s aid - a reluctance that one feels is owing to his seeing Lydgate through the prism of his own flawed character. But of itself this would not adequately explain how a sense of Farebrother’s incompleteness is communicated to the reader. It is difficult to explain how unless one is prepared to risk what used to be called the fallacy of imitative form and say that this feeling is owing to a corresponding indefiniteness and incompleteness in Farebrother’s characterisation. The narrator, one notes upon reflection, seems peculiarly reluctant to provide authoritative comment on Farebrother in the form of either a character sketch or an extended inside view. There is an analysis and assessment of the vicar’s character in chapters 17 and 18, but this is done from the point of view not of the narrator but of Lydgate, who is young and new to Middlemarch and who has yet to learn what a difference ‘want of money’ and the hampering, thread-like pressure of small social conditions can make to a man’s conduct. Lydgate’s final judgement at this point of the novel is that there is ‘some pitiable infirmity of will’ in Farebrother. But Lydgate had recently voted for Bulstrode’s candidate rather than for his friend Farebrother to be chaplain of the new hospital, and one cannot be at all sure that there is not a degree of rationalisation, even of displacement, in his judgement. And after this episode there are no further attempts by anyone to explore the vicar’s character. Perhaps the narrator was reluctant to do so because he might have found that Farebrother’s deficiency and incompleteness were due to an insufficient degree of egotism, a quality which elsewhere in Middlemarch is shown to contaminate by its presence, not by its absence. Whatever the reason,

80

Middlemarch

Farebrother has the distinction of remaining the one imperfectly comprehended character in a novel otherwise bathed in omniscience. The last minor character I want to examine is Mr Bulstrode’s wife Harriet. There is no better example in Middlemarch of the narrator’s economy of means in both portrayal of character and management of the narrative. Until very late in the novel Harriet Bulstrode receives little attention. It is clear that she is an affectionate and loving wife who reveres her husband, even believing him to be ‘one of those men whose memoirs should be written when they died’ (ch. 36). It is equally clear that she is fully at home in the town she has lived in all her life. This point is made in the few sentences of generalisation about her in chapter 61, where one is also told that her ‘imitative piety and native worldiness were equally sincere’. This narratorial judgement tempers what one has learned about Mrs Bulstrode from Lydgate’s passing reflection earlier in the novel about the mixed delights of visiting the Bulstrodes: ‘Mrs Bulstrode’s naive way of conciliating piety and worldliness, the nothingness of this life and the desirability of cut glass, the consciousness at once of filthy rags and the best damask, was not a sufficient relief from the weight of her husband’s invariable seriousness’ (ch. 27). And one again notes her love of finery four chapters later when she visits Rosamond to discuss her niece’s non-engagement to Lydgate. Even while she is speaking of this serious matter, Mrs Bulstrode cannot keep her eyes from rolling around the ‘ample quilled circuit’ of Rosamond’s charming bonnet. It might initially seem that none of this crisp but meagre notation prepares one adequately for chapter 74, the only time in the novel in which Mrs Bulstrode is the centre of attention. In the chapter she is shown learning of her husband’s public disgrace, going to give him comfort, resigning herself with difficulty to a diminished sorrowful life, and making herself one with her suffering and broken spouse. The unexpectedness of her noble action might be thought to suggest that she is being pressed into the service of the novel’s thematic and organisational needs. It is part of the narrator’s habitual practice not to present any character in a wholly negative light and Mrs Bulstrode’s act does stimulate some sympathy for her appalling husband. Her act also makes for several threads of associative connection between the Bulstrode story and the novel’s other central characters. It recalls Dorothea’s selfless devotion to her husband Casaubon earlier in the novel and contrasts with Rosamond’s chilling response to the plight of her husband Lydgate, who is also involved in the town’s suspicions concerning the death of Raffles. And her putting aside her usual fine clothes and jewellery in favour of plain garments more appropriate to her ‘new life’ will be repeated by Dorothea

Character and Characterisation

81

after her night of sorrow in chapter 80 - both women seeming to know of ‘the tradition that fresh garments belonged to all initiation’ (ch. 80). But chapter 74 is more than simply functional. It is important in its own right because one has learned just enough of Harriet Bulstrode to feel what a desolating blow to her her husband’s disgrace is. It perforce destroys the admiration she had felt for him; it will separate her from the town where she has lived all her life and hoped to end her days; and, as she instinctively senses and expresses by her change of clothes, it means the end of her ingenuous pleasure in the things of this world. It is because the reader has a felt sense of her desolation as she sobs out farewell to all the gladness and pride of her life that he can find believable and moving the corresponding intensity of the ‘leap of her heart’ towards her husband and the ‘great wave’ of new compassion and tenderness that courses through her. It is the most simply affecting instance in all of Middlemarch of the operation of the humanistic economy of salvation and the transforming potential of intense fellow-feeling. The seven major characters in Middlemarch are all subjects of extended inside views and penetrating analyses of character and motivation, which complement what one learns of them through their speech and actions, and their interaction with other characters. The reader’s knowledge of each is further assisted by implicit or explicit comparison with the others. All the central characters exist within the same ideological and thematic frameworks examined in earlier chapters. For example, the moral character of each can be focused and assessed by gauging the degree of egotism or self-absorption as opposed to the degree of fellow-feeling and altruistic concern, and by applying George Eliot’s favourite litmus-paper tests of a good character: the ability to see connections between and relate different strands of experience; and the quality and breadth of emotion. The seven characters are Ladislaw and Fred Vincy, Casaubon and Bulstrode, Lydgate and Rosamond, and Dorothea. The last is the dominant presence in Middlemarch and will be discussed in a separate chapter not only because her importance to the novel warrants it, but also because the character-characterisation lens is not the appropriate one for bringing her most clearly into focus. The first pair are weakly characterised and do not have the depth and richness of the other two pairs, the latter of which - Lydgate and Rosamond - are the novel’s greatest characterisations. The weakness of the characterisations of Ladislaw and Fred Vincy is related to their lack of vocation during almost all of the time period covered by the novel. To flesh out her characters, George Eliot’s narrator needs a good deal of circumstantial notation

82

Middlemarch

which is much better supplied by characters who are in a state of being rather than a state of becoming. (The exception is Dorothea - another reason for treating her separately.) When the character of her fictional creations is not in a state of being, is ‘abundant in uncertain promises’ (ch. 47) - the phrase is used of Ladislaw and fits Fred Vincy equally well uncertainty and vagueness are likely to be found in their characterisations as well. When the narrator speaks of character as an ‘unfolding’, he may be said to be making an implicit distinction between those whose characters are in the process of formation (growing) and those whose characters are already essentially complete but will be more fully revealed by changes in the environment (unfolding). The characters of Casaubon, Bulstrode, Lydgate and Rosamond are all in a state of being rather than of becoming and do not really grow or change much during the course of the novel. But the character of each is more and more fully revealed as his or her circumstances change. The point is worth emphasising, for a number of commentators have taken Farebrother to be the author’s mouthpiece when, smiling gently at Dorothea’s ardent assertion of Lydgate’s innocence in the matter of Raffles’s death, he tells her: ‘character is not cut in marble - it is not something solid and unalterable. It is something living and changing, and may become diseased as our bodies do’ (ch. 72). Since Farebrother is wrong about Lydgate, and would be equally incorrect if, mutatis mutandis, he were to apply his generalisation to himself, it would seem distinctly dubious to assume that he is here speaking for George Eliot. It is true that Lydgate does change somewhat during the course of the novel. As we shall see, he learns to compare different strands of his experience and to bring to bear on his personal life some of his scientific rigour. He also learns to recognise Dorothea’s exceptional qualities. But these are comparatively minor matters. The essence of Lydgate’s story and the precondition both of the depth of his characterisation and of the reader’s involvement in his lot is not that his character changes but that it is laid bare. As the novelist Brian Moore has shrewdly observed: ‘failure is a more interesting condition than success. Success changes people ... whereas failure leaves you with a more intense distillation of that self you are.’4 There has long been a consensus that Ladislaw is the most inadequately drawn of the novel’s principal characters. ‘The author,’ observed Henry James, ‘who is evidently very fond of him, has found for him here and there some charming and eloquent touches; but in spite of these he remains vague and impalpable to the end.’5This insubstantiality is accentuated by the fact that Ladislaw is idealised or romanticised

Character and Characterisation

83

(either positively or negatively) or his character in some other way exaggerated by everyone in the novel who comments on him. Lydgate describes his appearance as ‘a sort of Daphnis in coat and waistcoat’ (ch. 50). Mr Brooke is undecided whether he is ‘a kind of Shelley’ (ch. 37) or ‘a sort of Burke with a leaven of Shelley’ (ch. 51). To his detractors Ladislaw is even more exotic. Mr Hawley describes him as being o f‘any cursed alien blood, Jew, Corsican, or Gypsy’ (ch. 71); Mrs Cadwallader’s memorable epithets include ‘a sort of Byronic hero - an amorous conspirator’ (ch. 38) and (best of all) ‘an Italian with white mice’ (ch. 50); and Mr Keck, editor of The Trumpet, calls him a Polish spy and an energumen (ch. 46). What is most damaging to Ladislaw’s presentation is that the narrator idealises him. In one place his smile is described as being ‘pleasant to see as the breaking of sunshine on the water’ (ch. 47) and in another as ‘a gush of inward light illuminating the transparent skin as well as the eyes, and playing about every curve and line as if some Ariel were touching them with a new charm’ (ch. 21). Elsewhere the narrator notes that his hair and eyes also seem to be ‘sending out light’ (ch. 28) and that when his hat is off and his head thrown backward, showing his delicate throat as he sang, he looked ‘like an incarnation of the spring’ (ch. 47). Will’s internal qualities are equally filigreed and equally ethereal: his delicate generosity is said to be only one ‘among the more exquisite touches in nature’s modelling of him’ (ch. 79); his emotions are of such ‘very impressible stuff [that] the bow of a violin drawn near him cleverly, would at one stroke change the aspect of the world for him’ (ch. 39). And, worst of all, his feelings at a certain moment are described as ‘perfect, for we mortals have our divine moments, when love is satisfied in the completeness of the beloved object’ (ch. 37). Ladislaw’s self-image early in the novel is similarly romanticised and, though his creative posturings are presently dropped, ‘the impression ... that he is a dilettante’, as Henry James observed, ‘is never properly removed’,6 not even by his growing concern with vocation and the public good. And certainly not by the notations that point up his fey side: leading ‘a troop of droll children ... out on gypsy excursions to Halsell Wood at nutting-time’ or improvising a ‘Punch-and-Judy drama’ for them while they feast on gingerbread around a bonfire; stretching himself at full length on the rug while conversing in the houses that receive him; and treating quaint little Miss Noble with extravagant courtesy (ch. 46). A more complex and interesting side of Ladislaw is suggested when he becomes Rosamond’s confidant, but because of thematic necessity this relationship is never developed beyond the needs of the converging story­ lines. Since ‘our good depends on the quality and breadth of our

84

Middlemarch

emotion’, Will’s emotions must be unflawed in order to make appropriate the great good of his final union with the equally idealised Dorothea. It is this necessity that accounts for Will being virtually untouched by the moral stupidity into which the narrator assures us we are all born. He is too much the exemplar of quality and breadth of emotion to be an interesting characterisation in his own right. The outward and visible sign of his emotional quality is the purity and intensity of his feeling for Dorothea, and this is the only aspect of him in which the narrator is deeply interested. For all its social-historical interest, almost all of Ladislaw’s vocational development takes place offstage. His central scenes are the seven private ‘interviews’ (as Eliot called them in the ‘Quarry for Middlemarch) with Dorothea, which mark the stages of their relationship from first acquaintance to their final coming together, never more to part. But in these scenes, which will be closely examined in the next chapter, the splendid Dorothea is the dominant character and rightly receives the lion’s share of the reader’s attention and interest. Fred Vincy is a more rounded and a more realistically presented character than Ladislaw; but this does not make him more interesting. Two genetic reasons for the weakness of this character have been suggested earlier: the change of direction in the ‘Middlemarch’ manuscript after it was joined to ‘Miss Brooke’; and the fact that in Middlemarch Eliot no longer seemed deeply interested in the Words­ worthian piety that is the root of Fred and Mary’s relationship. But the visible reason for Fred’s insufficiency as a central character in Middlemarch is that all his qualities - including his weaknesses, aspirations and potential strengths - are so routine and unexceptional that it is hard for the reader to become interested in him. The young man’s egotism is of a wholly run-of-the-mill sort, as is his particular spot of commonness: the implicit conviction ‘that he at least... had a right to be free from anything disagreeable. That he should ever fall into a thoroughly unpleasant position - wear trousers shrunk with washing, eat cold mutton, have to walk for want of a horse, or to “duck under” in any sort of way - was an absurdity irreconcilable with those cheerful intuitions implanted in him by nature’ (ch. 23). Equally commonplace is his callow self-pity, his trusting in his luck and his feeling that only the love of a good woman can save him. Godfrey Cass in Silas Marner is a good example of how much richer a characterisation George Eliot can make out of these same character traits when they are pitched in a more intense key and belong to a character in a state of being rather than of becoming. Fred Vincy is most like a young man in a Trollope novel. The comparison was first suggested in general terms by R. H. Hutton, who

Character and Characterisation

85

nicely defined the essential difference between Eliot’s powers of characterisation and those of her contemporary: Mr Trollope scours a still greater surface of modern life with at least equal fidelity; but then how much less is the depth of drawing behind his figures! One would know all his characters if one met them in actual life, and know a great deal more of them than we do of ninety-nine out of every hundred of our actual acquaintances, but then he seldom or never picks out a character that it is not perfectly easy to draw in the light fresco of our modern-society school. He gives you where it is necessary the emotions proper to the situations, but rarely or never the emotions which lie concealed behind the situations and which give a kind of irony to them. His characters are carved out of the materials of ordinary society; George Eliot’s include many which make ordinary society seem a sort of satire on the life behind it.7 That is to say, it is not that there is very much wrong with the character/characterisation of Fred Vincy; it is rather that, for a principal figure in Middlemarch, there is not nearly enough that is right with it. With the next pair of characters to be considered, George Eliot is strikingly successful in giving ‘the emotions which lie concealed behind the situations’. But in each case she uses a different method to achieve this. For all practical purposes Casaubon and Bulstrode do not figure in the novel at the same time. Only after the former’s death halfway through does the latter begin to emerge as a central figure. The reason is obvious: the characters are too alike in their atrophied capacity for fellow-feeling, their costive nature, and their intense fear of disclosure of information about their deepest selves. And, as we saw in the previous chapter, both are so repugnant that the narrator resorts to intrusions in order to compel a little sympathy for them. The shrivelled selves of Casaubon and Bulstrode pose another problem for the narrator: how to avoid having a desiccated characterisation because of the character’s desiccation. This is avoided by treating each character intensively over a relatively short span of time during which each is made to undergo a situation of unprecedented stress that becomes the climactic, indeed the climacteric, experience in each life, and which is only resolved by death for one and total humiliation for the other. An abundance of telling external notation is used to suggest Casaubon’s inner nature: his smile ‘like pale wintry sunshine’ (ch. 3); his house, with the suggestive connotations of its name - Lowick - and its ‘air of autumnal decline’ (ch. 9); his habitual refusal to offer an opinion of his

86

Middlemarch

own; his dislike of physical contact; his way of saying ‘yes’ with ‘that peculiar pitch of voice which makes the word half a negative’ (ch. 20); and so on. But the principal entrance to the icy core of Casaubon’s inner being is through the extended inside views of his character and thoughts that the narrator offers at several points. They are, however, inside views that are subtly different in effect from those accorded the other central characters. While on the one hand the narrator makes intrusive comments in order to stir up sympathy for Casaubon’s blighted character, on the other hand he creates the opposite effect through keeping a certain distance from him even while offering inside views. This is done by avoiding the use of style indirect litre (or free indirect style), the narratorial device which reports a character’s thoughts and words in a mixture of oratio recta (direct speech) and oratio obliqua (indirect speech) and tends to collapse the distance between narrator and character. Roy Pascal explains: Free indirect speech occurs frequently [in Middlemarch] in longer passages and short snatches, within the framework of the narratorial material. It is used for any character, though of course more frequently for the main character ... Dorothea, since it necessarily implies a special concern for and intimacy with the character. The frequency of its incidence must affect the reader’s response, since it tends to establish bonds not only of familiarity but also sympathy. It is significant that it is hardly used at all for Mr Casaubon, whom we get to know almost entirely through narratorial description and comment [i.e. through extended inside views], through his occasional contribu­ tions to conversation, and through the medium of the other characters. The effect is a feeling that his inner life is secretive and alien, and perhaps hollow and unworthy of the reader’s respect. Will Ladislaw, by contrast, is through the use of free indirect style recommended to our sympathetic attention from his first appearance, long before we have any grounds for believing he has an important part to play in the story.8 The reader is first introduced to Casaubon’s point of view in the tenth chapter, when it is learned that as the date of his marriage approached Casaubon ‘did not find his spirits rising’. The condition is puzzling since ‘there was nothing external by which he could account for a certain blankness of sensibility which came over him just when his expectant gladness should have been most lively’. One’s awareness of ‘hidden

Character and Characterisation

87

conflicts’ (ch. 20) in Casaubon increases during the scenes in Rome when several intemperate words suggest ‘a sort of jealousy which needs very little fire; it is hardly a passion, but a blight bred in the cloudy, damp despondency of uneasy egoism’ (ch. 21). This is not ‘the common jealousy of a winter-worn husband: it [is] something deeper, bred by his lifelong claims and discontents’ (ch. 37). What Casaubon is jealous of is Dorothea’s opinion of him, which he is convinced is put in jeopardy by her conversations with Ladislaw. The most sustained inside view of Casaubon comes in chapter 29 when it is revealed through the narrator’s masterful analysis that the source of his malaise is a deficiency in the quality and breadth of his emotion, which manifests itself most pitiably in his shrinking from pity. Casaubon’s ‘small hungry shivering self is ‘sensitive without being enthusiastic’ and too languid ‘to thrill out of selfconsciousness into passionate delight’. His greatest fear is that his shrunken inner self should be known for what it is: ‘that proud narrow sensitiveness which has not mass enough to spare for transformation into sympathy, and quivers thread-like in small currents of self-preoc­ cupation or at best of an egoistic scrupulosity’. Marriage, ‘the new bliss [that] was not blissful to him’, is consequently fated to become what religion and erudition and even authorship itself have already become for him - not a living activity but a simulacrum, an ‘outward requirement [that he] was bent on fulfilling unimpeachably’. But Casaubon has married Dorothea Brooke, his spiritual and psychological opposite, in whom runs ‘a current into which all thought and feeling were apt sooner or later to flow - the reaching forward of the whole consciousness towards the fullest truth, the least partial good’ (ch. 20). As this warm current continues to flow around his frigid reserve, Casaubon’s ‘proud suspicious reticence’ (ch. 29) and ‘hidden alienation’ (ch. 50) make his wife’s shows of compassion ‘necessarily intolerable’. He lives in a state of ‘perpetual suspicious conjecture’ that Dorothea’s opinions of him are ‘not to his advantage’ and as time passes becomes more and more certain ‘that she judged him, and that her wifely devotedness was like a penitential expiation of unbelieving thoughts’ (ch. 42). Only once before his death is Dorothea able to pierce her husband’s morbid self-consciousness. The moment comes unexpectedly at the end of chapter 42: as he wearily climbs the staircase from his desk to his bed Casaubon is surprised to see Dorothea waiting up for him: “ Dorothea!” he said, with a gentle surprise in his tone. ‘Were you waiting for me?’ ‘Yes, I did not like to disturb you.’

88

Middlemarch ‘Come, my dear, come. You are young, and need not to extend your life by watching.’ When the kind quiet melancholy of that speech fell on Dorothea’s ears, she felt something like the thankfulness that might well up in us if we had narrowly escaped hurting a lamed creature. She put her hand into her husband’s, and they went along the broad corridor together.

It is an exceptionally delicate moment that is all the more affecting because the narrator is wise enough not to try to explain Casaubon’s unprecedented openness to compassion and even to a human’s touch. It is this moment, rather than any of the narrator’s intrusive asides, that most stirs the reader’s sympathy for Casaubon. While Henry James considered Casaubon ‘an excellent invention’, he was unhappy with Bulstrode, in whose story he found ‘a slightly artificial cast, a melodramatic tinge, unfriendly to the richly natural coloring of the whole’. Bulstrode was ‘too diffusely treated; he never grasps the reader’s attention’.9 A melodramatic tinge there undeniably is; but, as we shall see, it is precisely because of the unusual coloration that the reader’s attention is forcefully grasped. The brief character sketch of Bulstrode given early in the novel does include some inside information: ‘It was a principle with Mr Bulstrode to gain as much power as possible, that he might use it for the glory of God. He went through a great deal of spiritual conflict and inward argument in order to adjust his motives, and make clear to himself what God’s glory required’ (ch. 16). This information, however, does not take one below the surface of Bulstrode’s inner self and in fact might even be considered a summary account of how he regards his transactions with his conscience. It is not until much later in the novel that a deeper and more accurate picture of his inner nature begins to unfold. Bulstrode’s thought processes must seem to most readers of Middlemarch what they seemed to Lydgate, who found his opinions contemptible, his metaphors broken, his logic bad, and his motives ‘an absurd mixture of contradictory impressions’ (ch. 67). This is presumably the reason that Eliot found it necessary to have her narrator insist that, although the specifics of the way Bulstrode’s mind works may be attributable to distortions ‘peculiar to Evangelical belief (more particularly to the Calvinistic strain of it), in its generic aspect his psychology illustrates the universal tendency of general doctrine to corrupt morality if unchecked by fellow-feeling (ch. 61). On the one hand, Bulstrode is ‘doctrinally convinced that there [is] a total absence of merit in himself (ch. 57), that he is a sinful vessel to be consecrated by whatever use it pleases God to make of it. He further believes that human

Character and Characterisation

89

events, if properly interpreted, can give indications of the use to which Providence wishes its instrument to be put. On the other hand, Bulstrode’s nature is characterised by ‘selfish passions’ (ch. 70), a ‘tenacious nerve of ambitious self-preserving will, which had continually leaped out like a flame’ (ch. 71), and ‘an immense need of being something important and predominating’ (ch. 61). At the crucial turningpoints in his life general doctrine and individual egotism have collaborated in a series of self-serving rationalisations in which the glory of God, God’s sake, God’s service, and the cause of true religion have been made to justify the immoral and inhuman acts that have served to make Bulstrode wealthy and powerful and thereby given him the wherewithal to fulfil his desire of ‘being an eminent Christian’ (ch. 53). At the beginning of chapter 53, Bulstrode is at the height of his worldly success and self-satisfaction. Of course he is doctrinally convinced of his worthlessness; ‘but that doctrinal conviction may be held without pain when the sense of demerit does not take a distinct shape in memory’. And Bulstrode’s memories are of far-off evenings when ‘he was a very young man and used to go out preaching beyond Highbury’. He has as yet no cause to remember quite different aspects of his Highbury life - his dubious business partnership with Mr Dunkirk and his gaining the Dunkirk fortune for himself by withholding from his widow information concerning the existence and whereabouts of her lost daughter - an act characteristically rationalised by aligning his motives with a grotesque distortion of what ‘God’s glory required’. It is just at this high point of felicity that Raffles comes back into Bulstrode’s life. This ‘loud red figure’ (ch. 53), ‘very florid and hairy’, with ‘the air of a swaggerer’ and ‘the stale odour of travellers’ rooms in the commercial hotels of the period’ (ch. 41), notes sarcastically that his return is ‘what you might call a providential thing’ and ‘perhaps ... a blessing to both of us’. But it is a very different providence from the one Bulstrode has long been invoking. The authorial providence that brings Raffles back involves a note stuck in a brandy-flask and an excessive amount of coincidence. These contrivances have usually been regarded as comprising a serious artistic defect in Middlemarch, damaging to its seriousness, its realism and its claim to show the gradual action of ordinary rather than exceptional causes. The note stuck in the brandy-flask certainly seems Dickensian in the pejorative sense of being an unrealistic, implausible manipulation of plot for melodramatic purposes. But, when placed in context, it can be seen as part of a more thoughtful and serious use of Dickensian motifs. If the end of chapter 41 - where the paper gets stuck in the flask - is looked at closely, more evidence of Eliot’s indebtedness to her older contemporary can be seen.

90

Middlemarch

Raffles’s presence in the ‘moist rural quiet’ is there said to be as incongruous ‘as if he had been a baboon escaped from a menagerie’. And his social manner is described as follows: ‘Mr Raffles on most occasions kept up the sense of having been educated at an academy, and being able, if he chose, to pass well everywhere; indeed, there was not one of his fellow-men whom he did not feel himself in a position to ridicule and torment.’ If the startling and artificial figure of speech in the first passage suggests the Dickensian motif of evil invading a country sanctuary (like Fagin at the window of the house where Oliver Twist has found succour), the second passage even more strongly recalls the specific figure of Rigaud, the swaggering evil force in Little Dorrit who also ludicrously thinks of himself as a gentleman. What these similarities suggest is that the return of Raffles is not simply Dickensian in the superficial melodramatic sense; it is, rather, part of an appropriation of what David Carroll calls an ‘essential method of Dickens’s later novels [in which] two characters intimately tied together by exploitation seek their independence through further exploitation’.10 To put it more simply, Raffles the tormentor is Bulstrode’s Doppelganger. Once this is realised the whole brilliant sequence involving Bulstrode and Raffles comes into focus. The loud red figure of Raffles has risen before Bulstrode ‘as if by some hideous magic’ (ch. 53), and seems the residue of ‘a loathsome dream’ - like ‘a dangerous reptile’ leaving ‘slimy traces’ on all ‘the pleasant surroundings of his life’ (ch. 68). This figure, ‘worse than a nightmare’ and seemingly sent by ‘the spirit of evil’, is Bulstrode’s hidden self, his ‘incorporate past’ (ch. 53) and the personification of the morally polluted underside of his present life. The introduction of a full-fledged psychological double into a realistic study of provincial life is by far the riskiest chance taken by George Eliot in Middlemarch. It is unquestionably unfriendly to the richly natural colouring of the whole. But on its own terms the symbiotic relationship is handled with impressive boldness and assurance. And it does enable the author both to have her cake and to eat it. While one of Eliot’s cardinal tenets is that all her characters must be presented in a sympathetic light, another is her belief in the operation of an implacable nemesis which punishes serious moral transgressions (it is the offshoot of Eliot’s Victorian sense of the ‘peremptory and absolute’ nature of duty).11 In Adam Bede, her first novel, the former tenet had been grossly breached because the nemesis that pitilessly pursued and punished Hetty Sorrel was obviously endorsed - if it was not fuelled - by the narrator.12 But in Middlemarch the function of nemesis is assigned to Raffles, a character within the novel, leaving the narrator free to be the compassionate

Character and Characterisation

91

moralist who insists that Bulstrode’s rationalisations were ‘a process which shows itself occasionally in us all’ (ch. 61). When Raffles first reappears in Middlemarch, Bulstrode gives him money so that he will go away and promises regular sums if he will stay away. But of course Raffles returns, for ‘his eagerness to torment was almost as strong in him as any other greed’. His manner upsets Harriet Bulstrode and makes her husband realise that ‘the loss of high consideration from his wife, as from everyone else who did not clearly hate him out of enmity to the truth, would be as the beginning of death to him’. He also realises ‘with cold certainty at his heart’ that Raffles will continue his torments ‘unless providence sent death to hinder him’. To propitiate this ‘threatening Providence’, Bulstrode attempts to make belated financial restitution to Ladislaw for what he had done to his mother, but an expected ‘scene of self-abasement’ (ch. 61) becomes more painful when Ladislaw scornfully refuses his money. As time passes, Bulstrode’s imagination continually intensifies ‘the anguish of an imminent [public] disgrace’ (ch. 68). Release from his torment seems a possibility when Raffles returns to Middlemarch with delirium tremens, which Bulstrode interprets as ‘a sort of earnest that Providence intended his rescue from worse consequences’. If so, then ‘the will of God might be the death of that hated man’ (ch. 69). This train of thought continues until Bulstrode is virtually plotting Raffles’s murder. When it is clear that ‘the enemy of his peace’ is in fact about to expire because of his contrivings, Bulstrode feels ‘more at rest than he had done for many months. His conscience is soothed by the enfolding wing of secrecy, which seemed just then like an angel sent down for his relief (ch. 70). But his providence has not delivered him; not even the death of his dark double, ‘the haunting ghost of his earlier life’ (ch. 71), can stop Bulstrode’s descent into the black tunnel of total humiliation. The only light at its end is not that of providence, nor is it some prepubescent embodiment of the good, which is with what Dickens counters the evil force of Rigaud in Little Dorrit. It is, rather, the warmly human figure of Harriet Bulstrode, who when she takes her broken husband into her arms makes him once again friendly to the richly natural colouring of the novel. Tertius Lydgate and Rosamond Vincy are the two most subtly and vividly realised characters in Middlemarch and the scenes between them the novel’s most brilliant, nuanced and intelligent passages. As we have already seen, Lydgate is an exceptional person of rare potential: his professional goals of scientific discovery and improvement in public health give him the dual distinction of devotion to ‘intellectual conquest

92

Middlemarch

and the social good’ (ch. 15). We have also seen that the emotional intensity of his nature is forcefully conveyed through Eliot’s substituting an account of her own creative passion for his similar intellectual passion. But when the novel’s most important standard of judgement - the quality and breadth of emotion on which one’s good depends - is applied to Lydgate his character is found to be seriously flawed. The standard is rigorously - perhaps one should even say ruthlessly - applied. Lydgate’s pro­ fessional life ends in failure and his private life in unhappiness not because of some vicious mole of nature in him but simply because of a deficiency or impercipience that the narrator claims is commonly found in men. The flaw is observable even on Lydgate’s first appearance in the novel. His reaction to Dorothea Brooke, whom he meets at her uncle’s dinner party in chapter 10, is that ‘she is a good creature... but a little too earnest. It is troublesome to talk to such women ... She did not look at things from the proper feminine angle. The society of such women was about as relaxing as going from your work to teach the second form, instead of reclining in a paradise with sweet laughs for bird-notes, and blue eyes for a heaven’ (ch. 11). When this flaw is placed under the microscope in chapter 15, during the narrator’s first extended inside view of Lydgate, it is identified as ‘spots of commonness’. They are found in ‘the complexion of his prejudices, which, in spite of noble intention and sympathy, were half of them such as are found in ordinary men of the world: that distinction of mind which belonged to his intellectual ardour, did not penetrate his feeling and judgment about furniture, or women’, or the desirability of his good birth being known. Put simply, there is a discontinuity between the fineness of mind and intensity of emotion that distinguish Lydgate’s professional work and the comparative coarseness, even vulgarity, of his views on other subjects. In a subsequent analysis of Lydgate’s social views in chapter 36, the narrator returns to the subject: But it had never occurred to him that he should live in any other than what he would have called an ordinary way, with green glasses for hock, and excellent waiting at table. In warming himself at French social theories he had brought away no smell of scorching. We may handle even extreme opinions with impunity while our furniture, our dinnergiving, and preference for armorial bearings in our own case, link us indissolubly with the established order. And Lydgate’s tendency was not towards extreme opinions: he would have liked no barefooted doctrines, being particular about his boots: he was no radical in relation to anything but medical reform and the prosecution of

Character and Characterisation

93

discovery. In the rest of practical life he walked by hereditary habit; half from that personal pride and unreflecting egoism which I have already called commonness, and half from that naivete which belonged to preoccupation with favourite ideas. Lydgate’s ‘unreflecting egoism’ makes him particularly susceptible to the considerable charms of Rosamond Vincy. Their first meeting is at Stone Court where Rosamond has come with her brother in the hope of becoming acquainted with the handsome and well-connected young doctor. When she rises to leave, Lydgate follows her with his eyes: ‘Every nerve and muscle in Rosamond was adjusted to the consciousness that she was being looked at. She was by nature an actress of parts that entered into her physique: she even acted her own character, and so well, that she did not know it to be precisely her own’. As Lydgate hands Rosamond her riding whip, their eyes meet in that unmistakable way that signifies mutual attraction. He turns a little paler than usual; she blushes deeply and feels ‘a certain astonishment’ even though what has happened ‘was just what [she] had contemplated beforehand’ (ch. 12). The notation in this brief meeting is superb: Rosamond’s consuming egotism is shown to be both calculating and yet, like Lydgate’s (though in a more complicated way), unreflecting - for the character that she is acting is not someone else’s but her own. Since almost all of what we later learn of Rosamond is seminally present in this scene, it is not surprising to learn that ‘of all the characters she had attempted [George Eliot] found Rosamond’s the most difficult to sustain’.13 The difficulty, however, is not apparent in the text. Despite a few heavy-handed and dispensable narratorial intrusions, Rosamond’s character unfolds magnificently as the novel goes on. There are, for example, the precise notations of her accomplished role-playing ^nd ‘quick imitative perception’ (ch. 36). She ‘could say the right thing; for she was clever with that sort of cleverness which catches every tone except the humorous. Happily she never attempted to joke, and this perhaps was the most decisive mark of her cleverness.’ When Lydgate asks what she saw while in London, she answers that she has seen very little: ‘A more naive girl would have said, “Oh, everything!” But Rosamond knew better’ (ch. 16). And when Lydgate is unexpectedly called in from the street to attend her ill brother, she leaves the room as he enters, ‘waiting just long enough to show a pretty anxiety conflicting with her sense of what was becoming’ (ch. 26). She is on stage even when alone: ‘now more than ever she was active in sketching her landscapes and market-carts and portraits of friends, in practising her music, and in being from morning till night her own

94

Middlemarch

standard of a perfect lady, having always an audience in her own consciousness’ (ch. 17). The musical performance is particularly good, for with ‘her executant’s instinct’ Rosamond has perfectly copied her teacher’s manner of playing, and gives forth ‘his large rendering of noble music with the precision of an echo. It was almost startling, heard for the first time. A hidden soul seemed to be flowing forth from Rosamond’s fingers’ (ch. 16). With the help of the narrator’s omniscient perspective, the reader can see Rosamond’s performance at the piano for what it is. Lydgate’s reaction is different: he was ‘taken possession of, and began to believe in her as something exceptional’ rather than something essentially hollow. His illusion intensifies as their relationship develops, his spots of commonness making him confident that Rosamond would be the perfect wife, having ‘that feminine radiance, and distinctive womanhood which must be classed with flowers and music’. As the narrator notes, Lydgate has never applied to ‘the complexities of love and marriage [the] testing vision of details and relations’ that he brings to his scientific work (ch. 16). His involvement soon reaches the stage of ‘that peculiar intimacy which consists in shyness’: They were obliged to look at each other in speaking, and somehow the looking could not be carried through as the matter of course which it really was. Lydgate began to feel this sort of consciousness unpleasant, and one day looked down, or anywhere, like an ill-worked puppet. But this turned out badly: the next day, Rosamond looked down, and the consequence was that when their eyes met again, both were more conscious than before, (ch. 27) This leads on to an ‘intimacy of mutual embarrassment’ which forces the frank recognition of ‘mutual fascination’. The result is the lively intercourse of flirtation. But this in turn leads to a complication caused by the different value that the egotism of each places on flirtation. For Lydgate, who does not want to marry, ‘the play at being a little in love was agreeable, and did not interfere with graver pursuits’: ‘the primitive tissue was still his fair unknown’. But Rosamond, who does want to marry, does not distinguish ‘flirtation from love, either in herself or in another’ (ch. 27). When he realises the perceived seriousness of his flirtation, Lydgate decides to stop seeing Rosamond; but they nevertheless become engaged during their next meeting eleven days later. The psychological nuance in this brief scene is important. Lydgate has decided to call at the Vincys rather than leave a message for Mr Vincy because of his unreflecting egotism: he imagines how gratifying to

Character and Characterisation

95

himself it will be to have a few playful words with Rosamond on the subject of his resolve to put flirtation behind him. But Rosamond has been deeply hurt by Lydgate’s avoidance of her and when he rises to leave she cannot quite sustain the role of ‘self-contented grace’. Her manner betrays a ‘certain helpless quivering’ and as her tears rise she momentarily becomes ‘as natural as she had ever been when she was five years old’. Lydgate had merely flirted with the artificial role-playing Rosamond; but he now falls in love with the ‘natural’ Rosamond, being completely mastered by ‘the onrush of tenderness at the sudden belief that this sweet young creature depended on him for her joy’ (ch. 31). It is paradoxically at the very moment when Lydgate’s spots of commonness have been overwhelmed by the outflow of powerful feeling that his sad fate is sealed, for never again in his presence will Rosamond fail to act out the artificial character that she does not realise is precisely her own. The period of their engagement is a time of egotistic satisfaction to both parties as they together spin the ‘gossamer web’ of ‘young love-making... the things whence its subtle interlacings are swung are scarcely perceptible: momentary touches of the finger-tips, meetings of rays from blue and dark orbs, unfinished phrases, lightest changes of cheek, faintest tremors’. Rosamond’s state is that of ‘the water-lily’s expanding wonderment at its own fuller life’, while Lydgate is assured that he has found the woman who can ‘create order in the home and accounts’ and yet keep the ability to ‘transform life into romance at any moment’, and who is ‘instructed to the true womanly limit and not a hair’s-breadth beyond docile, therefore, and ready to carry out behests that come from beyond the limit’. In short, he foresees ‘the innate submissiveness of the goose as beautifully corresponding to the strength of the gander’ (ch. 36). But what he does not see is Rosamond as she really is. When she says that her need of wedding clothes may mean that the date of their wedding cannot be moved forward as much as he would like, Lydgate thinks that she is either ‘tormenting him prettily’ (ch. 36) or really does shrink from speedy marriage. But Rosamond has spoken the complete truth: it is only her trousseau that is on her mind. She does employ dissimulation, however, in connection with her keen desire to visit Lydgate’s relations at Quallingham during their wedding tour. She would like, she says, to see where her husband-to-be grew up, and to imagine him there when he was a boy. But what she really wants is the chance to display herself in a more exalted social circle than any she has yet known. The early days of their marriage are as idyllic as Lydgate and Rosamond have imagined them. But the husband’s mounting debts soon make him begin to feel ‘the biting presence of a petty degrading care, such

96

Middlemarch

as casts the blight of irony over all higher effort’. Around the same time he begins to realise that his wife’s nature is far from being innately submissive. It is in chapter 58 that ‘the terrible tenacity of this mild creature’ and their ‘total missing of each other’s mental track’ fully come home to him. Because she is gratified to be seen in public with a baronet’s son, Rosamond goes out riding with the visiting cousin of Lydgate despite his insistence that she give up the exercise during her pregnancy. Rosamond does not waste her energy ‘in impetuous resistance’, for ‘what she liked to do was to her the right thing, and all her cleverness was directed to getting the means of doing it’. A miscarriage is the result. It rouses Lydgate, who has hitherto walked by habit, not by self-criticism, to ‘discern consequences which he had never been in the habit of tracing’ as he begins to apply to his private life ‘some of the rigour (by no means all) that he would have applied in pursuing experiment’. He also begins for the first time to compare the different ‘strands of experience’ in his life. He wonders if his wife has the capacity to murder, as did Laure, the French actress; and, as the reader has been doing for some time, he contrasts Dorothea’s treatment of her husband with Rosamond’s treatment of him. In the chapter’s final pages husband and wife sit down together to talk. As she comes towards him ‘in her drapery of transparent, faintly-tinted muslin, her slim yet round figure never looked more graceful’. Lydgate is also moved by the ‘untarnished beauty’ of her face, which stirs the memory of the early moments of his love, and brings a ‘roused tenderness’. But the subject of their talk must be the urgent need to economise and the husband’s need of wifely assistance in the hour of financial crisis. ‘What can I do, Tertius?’ is Rosamond’s answer: the words fall ‘like a mortal chill’ on Lydgate’s reawakened tenderness and make him look forward with dread to their future discussions about money. For her part, Rosamond sits perfectly still: ‘the thought in her mind was that if she had known how Lydgate would behave, she would never have married him’. And she is ‘quite sure that no one could justly find fault with her’. Lydgate’s ‘creeping self-despair which comes in the train of petty anxieties’ intensifies as a result of subsequent scenes with Rosamond in chapters 64 and 65. His ‘bitter and moody state’ is by now continually widening his wife’s alienation from him. When he does make efforts to repair the relationship Rosamond welcomes ‘the signs that her husband loved her and was under control. But this was something quite different from loving him.’ The distinction is not lost on Lydgate, who comes to perceive that, if his marriage is not to be ‘a yoked loneliness’, he must find the will ‘to go on loving without too much care about being loved’ (ch.

Character and Characterisation

97

66). In short, Rosamond has mastered her husband. She is able to do this because she draws a terrible strength from having no real character of her own, ‘her nature [being] inflexible in proportion to its negations’. Lydgate, however, has nothing comparable within him from which to draw strength and to protect him from Rosamond’s ‘torpedo contact’. The metaphor is scientific, not ballistic - a torpedo fish has electric apparatus for numbing or killing its prey - and nicely suggests the quiet but deadly effect on Lydgate of his wife’s ‘negative character’. As his financial situation deteriorates, Lydgate becomes more and more desperate. The man who had once found a ‘pitiable infirmity of will’ in the whist-playing Farebrother now himself gambles to raise money. The ambitious professional man who had chosen to practise in the provinces rather than in London in order to stay clear of time-wasting entanglements is now ‘ready to curse the day on which he had come to Middlemarch’ (ch. 73). When it becomes clear that he will have to leave, his bleak future is already in his mind’s eye: ‘I must do as other men do, and think what will please the world and bring in money; look for a little opening in the London crowd, and push myself; set up in a wateringplace, or go to some southern town where there are plenty of idle English, and get myself puffed, - that is the sort of shell I must creep into and try to keep my soul alive in’ (ch. 76). This ‘narrowed Lot’ Lydgate accepts with ‘sad resignation. He had chosen this fragile creature, and had taken the burthen of her life upon his arms. He must walk as he could, carrying that burthen pitifully’ (ch. 81). That is the last one hears of Lydgate except for the brief report in the finale that he died early, always considered himself a failure, and once found a striking metaphor for the black hole of Rosamond’s negative character that had absorbed his energies and ideals: ‘He once called her his basil plant; and when she asked for an explanation, said that basil was a plant which had flourished wonderfully on a murdered man’s brains.’

CHAPTER 6

Dorothea In these delicate vessels is borne onward through the ages the treasure of human affections. Daniel Deronda, ch. 11 From one point of view, that of the prelude to Middlemarch, Dorothea Brooke is an exceptional figure of heroic capabilities and radiant goodness, a latter-day Saint Theresa, a quester after ‘some illimitable satisfaction, some object which would never justify weariness, which would reconcile self-despair with the rapturous consciousness of life beyond self. In her exalted spiritual nature, Dorothea may be associated with the rare breed of Protestant heroines in post-Reformation English literature, who include the Lady in Milton’s Comus, Richardson’s Clarissa, Browning’s Pompilia, James’s Isabel Archer and Shaw’s Saint Joan. From another point of view, however, that of the historian of the English novel, Dorothea may be seen as a less exceptional character belonging to a less exalted lineage - that of the heroines of many eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novels by women writers, including Jane Austen’s Emma Woodhouse and Fanny Price, and Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre and Lucy Snowe. Margaret Doody has described the paradigm: It is the story of a woman gifted with some talents and a deep capacity both for affection and responsibility who is to some important degree at odds with the world in which she finds herself. Unlike Clarissa, she is not called upon to make archetypal choices, and may be moving towards some kind of happiness or at least partial fulfillment; she desires to understand the world and to contribute something to it, but her abilities are often frustrated by poverty of education and incomplete experience. Her life is manifestly an affair of irritation and anxiety, though the reader is taught to measure society against her good will. She desires to move outward into society, but it will not respond to her. She is frequently an orphan or half-orphan, and parents or parent substitutes are inadequate or unsympathetic, overconventional or hostile. The heroine is often presented with the foil of a female character of her own age who is smaller-minded and, through greed or

Dorothea

99

timidity, more willing to act a conventional female role. The heroine herself tries to be both just and generous, but her intentions are often balked by her own ignorance or defects, and by the nature of her world. She desires above all the love of a man who is her equal, but such love is very hard to come by.1 For a proper understanding of Dorothea’s development during the course of Middlemarch, it is important to recognise that her story fits the second schema at least as well as it does the first. These different schemata also have a bearing on the question of whether Dorothea is an idealised character or a realistically drawn one. This question has occasioned a good deal of critical debate and it would be well at the outset of our discussion to see if it can be satisfactorily answered. Those who wish to deny that Dorothea’s character is idealised usually talk about the irony in her presentation and point to those places in the text where a deflating or wry tone is found, and where there is evidence of a distance between what Dorothea thinks about herself or what another character thinks about her, and what the narrator says or implies. Certainly there are a number of places in which Dorothea’s innocence, youthful intensities, lack of experience and self-knowledge, shortsighted­ ness and even wilfulness are directly or indirectly pointed up, and where there is a discrepancy between what she says and what she feels. There are a number of instances in the opening chapter of Middlemarch.; for example: ‘Riding was an indulgence which she allowed herself in spite of conscientious qualms; she felt that she enjoyed it in a pagan sensuous way, and always looked forward to renouncing it.’ Similar notations occur periodically as the novel progresses. In chapter 34, Dorothea watches Featherstone’s funeral from an upper window at Lowick ‘with the interest of a monk on his holiday tour’; when Will Ladislaw recounts his family history three chapters later, she listens keenly, looking with serious intentness before her, ‘like a child seeing a drama for the first time’; in chapter 44 she is said to look ‘at the affairs of Middlemarch by the light of the great persecutions’; and in chapter 39, when she ardently describes her religion to Ladislaw, he may exclaim ‘God bless you for telling me’, but the narrator is sufficiently uninvolved in their conversation to be able to note that they ‘were looking at each other like two fond children who were talking confidentially of birds’. It is also the case that these notations are supplemented by the observations of Dorothea’s sister Celia and Mrs Cadwallader. The former notes that ‘Dorothea is not always consistent’ (ch. 1); that ‘she likes giving up’ (ch. 2); that ‘it is impossible to satisfy

100

Middlemarch

you; yet you never see what is quite plain’ (ch. 4); and that ‘you are wanting to find out if there is anything uncomfortable for you to do . ..’ (ch. 50). The worldly wisdom of the rector’s wife is equally blunt. In chapter 6 she observes that ‘there is a great deal of nonsense in her - a flighty sort of methodistical stuff, and that ‘Miss Brooke [is] a girl who would have been requiring you to see the stars by daylight’. And after Casaubon’s death she notes Dorothea’s tendency to be ‘playing the tragedy queen and taking things sublimely’ (ch. 54). On the other hand, the narrator far more frequently speaks of Dorothea in tones reminiscent of those of the prelude: there are numerous references to her ‘ardent’ nature and repeated reminders of the purity and elevation of her inner being, which is characterised by ‘the reaching forward of the whole consciousness towards the fullest truth, the least partial good’ (ch. 20). And the witness of Celia and Mrs Cadwallader would carry more weight if the former were less scatter-brained and the latter less predictably sarcastic. Even then, however, they would be far outweighed by the remarks of a number of characters in the novel who see Dorothea as an exalted, unique being. Even if Ladislaw’s many comments are not cited (on the grounds that he is hardly impartial), there is abundant testimony in Middlemarch to Dorothea’s exceptional nature: Sir James Chettam believes that ‘it is a pity she was not a queen’ (ch. 54) and that a second marriage would be ‘a sort of desecration’ for her (ch. 55); and Tantripp, Dorothea’s maid, at one point feels ‘an irrepressible movement of love towards the beautiful, gentle creature’ whom she serves (ch. 48). Rosamond at first assumes that animosity is the reason Dorothea returns to see her in chapter 81. But by the time the visit is over Rosamond has come to feel that she ‘must be better than any one’. Lydgate, as we have seen, was initially unimpressed by Dorothea; but by the climax of the novel he, too, has come to idealise her: ‘This young creature has a heart large enough for the Virgin Mary’ (ch. 76). And Caleb Garth’s rapturous description of Dorothea’s voice - ‘it reminds me of bits in the “Messiah” - “and straightway there appeared a multitude of the heavenly host, praising God and saying’” (ch. 56) - is only one of a number of testimonials to the splendour of the most intangible of Dorothea’s physical characteristics. For the Shelleyesque Ladislaw, it is ‘like the voice of a soul that had once lived in an Aeolian harp’ (ch. 9); for Lydgate it is the voice ‘of deep-souled womanhood’ (ch. 58); and for the narrator ‘her speech [is] like a fine piece of recitative’ (ch. 5), and ‘as clear and unhesitating as that of a young chorister chanting a credo’ (ch. 39). The two different lenses - the idealised and the ironic - through which Dorothea is alternately seen are both present in the climactic scene

Dorothea

101

between her and Lydgate in chapter 76. The narrator first speaks of Dorothea’s ‘noble nature, generous in its wishes, ardent in its charity’. But he also speaks of Dorothea’s description of what she will do for Lydgate as a ‘childlike picture’. And when the narrator speaks of Dorothea’s ‘ready understanding of high experience’ a parenthetical qualification immediately follows: ‘Of lower experience such as plays a great part in the world, poor Mrs Casaubon had a very blurred shortsighted knowledge, little helped by her imagination.’ On the evidence of this scene, it would not be difficult to argue that the presentation of Dorothea is either inconsistent or ambivalent. The truth of the matter is less complex; it is summarised in the narrator’s generalisation about Dorothea in the following chapter, which may be regarded as a synthesis of the irony and the idealising that both figure in her presentation. In ‘Dorothea’s nature’, the reader is told, her ‘passionate faults lay along the easily counted open channels of her ardent character; and while she was full of pity for the visible mistakes of others, she had not yet any material within her experience for subtle constructions and suspicions of hidden wrong. But that simplicity of hers, holding up an ideal for others in her believing conception of them, was one of the great powers of her womanhood’ (ch. 77). That is to say, Dorothea’s faults are superficial, the result of her outward-flowing, ardent, but not yet fully matured goodness. If she is ‘childlike’, it is for the reason given early in the novel: her nature is ‘entirely without hidden calculation either for immediate effects or for remoter ends’ (ch.5). As for the parenthetical reference to Mrs Casaubon’s ‘very blurred shortsighted knowledge’ of ‘lower experience’, the comment is too clumsy (especially in the substitution of the formal ‘Mrs Casaubon’ for Dorothea’s Christian name, which is used by the narrator elsewhere in the chapter), too gratuitous, and too inappositely intrusive to carry much weight. Like it or not, then, Dorothea is in the main an idealised character. She does exist on a different spiritual plane from the other characters in the novel (with the partial exception of Ladislaw). But, having said this, one must go on to note with surprise that in a novel by a master psychologist and explorer of the depths of the human personality no attempt at all is made to explain how Dorothea Brooke, the novel’s central character, came to have her ardent nature - her insatiable thirst and quenchless burning. In chapter 21 the narrator insists that ‘we are all of us born in moral stupidity, taking the world as an udder to feed our supreme selves: Dorothea had early begun to emerge from that stupidity’. But the reader has to take the narrator’s word on this important matter, for despite the length and comprehensiveness of Middlemarch one learns virtually

102

Middlemarch

nothing about Dorothea’s life before she was 19 (her age when the novel opens). All one can glean from over 600 pages is that ‘when she was a child she believed in the gratitude of wasps and the honourable susceptibility of sparrows’ (ch. 22); that even when she was a little girl she thought she would like to devote her life to helping someone who did great works (ch. 37); that her parents had died around the time of her puberty (ch. 1); that since childhood she had been concerned about her religious beliefs (ch. 39) and had at some point prayed frequently and as ‘fervidly as if she thought herself living in the time of the Apostles’ (ch. 1). All of these scattered details tally with the idealised picture of Dorothea in the present time of the novel and not one of them suggests the least tincture of moral stupidity in her. For just as in Catholic theology the Virgin Mary (to whom Dorothea is more than once compared) is said to have been untouched by the stain of original sin, so Dorothea Brooke in Middlemarch seems untouched by the otherwise universal (‘all of us’) primal taint of moral stupidity. Of the psychological roots of this immaculately conceived character the reader learns nothing. In the case of Lydgate, the novel’s other central character, the reader was given early on an extended flashback which convincingly described his moment of vocation, and a detailed analysis of the genesis of his determining characteristic, the spots of commonness. And in the case of the visionary Daniel Deronda, the title character of George Eliot’s next novel, there is an elaborate attempt to account for his exalted spiritual nature. Deronda, like Dorothea, has ‘the imaginative need of some far-reaching relation to make the horizon of his immediate, daily acts’ and longs ‘for some ideal task’ (ch. 63). But, as is not the case with Dorothea, the roots of Deronda’s yearnings are convincingly explored. The ‘main lines’ of his character (ch. 16) are shown to be determined by the early pain of ‘his first sorrow’ (ch. 35). It occurred around the time of his puberty, when he began to suspect that he was illegitimate and that a secret surrounded his birth. This impression gives him ‘something like a new sense in relation to all the elements of his life’, intensifies his ‘inward experience’, makes his imagination ‘tender’, and gives him ‘an acute sympathy’ (ch. 16). Perhaps something analogous happened to Dorothea Brooke about the age of her puberty and her parents’ death to account for her distinctive, visionary nature. The speculation is of course wholly idle, for in Middlemarch George Eliot is uninterested in Dorothea’s ideal or spiritual nature per se, and it cannot be said that its depiction is an impressive achievement. What Eliot is interested in doing is stylising and simplifying Dorothea’s character in order to be able to illustrate with exemplary

Dorothea

103

clarity two of the principal themes of Middlemarch: the relation of the gifted individual to modern society; and the workings of the humanistic economy of salvation. But there is in Dorothea’s story another key thematic thread which is distinct from, though closely related to, the social theme and the secular religious theme, and in which her ideal qualities play little part. It concerns what the prelude rather obscurely calls ‘the common yearning of womanhood’. Its subject is the development of a young woman as she journeys towards a degree of selfknowledge and a recognition of her true emotional needs. In the depiction of this development there is a richness, a complexity and a power that justifies Dorothea’s position as not only the thematic centre of Middlemarch, but also its premier character. It is this development that will now be examined as we chart the stages by which the ‘girl whose notions about marriage took their colour entirely from an exalted enthusiasm about the ends of life, and did not include even the honours and sweet joys of the blooming matron’ (ch. 3), dwindles into a wife and mother. The general shape of Dorothea’s passage will not be surprising to students of nineteenth-century literature. It is a re-enactment of the movement - from youth to maturity, from subjectivity to objectivity, from egotism (‘a tumultuous preoccupation with her personal lot’, ch. 20) to the realisation of an ‘equivalent centre of self in others, from isolation to community - that is commonly found in the central works of the Victorian period. Teufelsdrockh, for example, the central figure in Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus, moved from egotism and visionary bafflement through indifference and a ‘Divine Depth of Sorrow’ to a renewal founded on renunciation (with which alone ‘Life, properly speaking, can be said to begin’) and the abandonment of the quest for happiness in order to do the duty that lay nearest.2 The same kind of passage was vigorously schematised in Matthew Arnold’s 1849 poem ‘Resignation’, which contrasts romantic questers enthralled with ‘self-ordained’ labours, who flee ‘the common life of men’, to other natures who through experience have come to replace passionate intensity with a ‘sad lucidity of soul’, to unite themselves with ‘the general life’, and to ‘bear rather than rejoice’. There is a difference, however, between these versions of the Victorian rite of passage into adult life and the progression of Dorothea Brooke in Middlemarch. The difference lies in Eliot’s greater emphasis on the importance of emotional fulfilment. Unlike those of Carlyle’s Teufelsdrockh or the speaker of Arnold’s poem, Dorothea’s development involves a recognition of her sensual nature. This subject is important but its

104

Middlemarch

presentation oblique, and before proceeding it will be well to consider carefully the place of sexuality in Dorothea’s development. Indirection and inference are George Eliot’s characteristic methods of presenting sexual subject-matter. Steven Marcus, for example, has admitted that it took him a long time to grasp what Eliot’s first work of fiction, ‘The Sad Fortunes of the Rev. Amos Barton’, ‘was so mutedly trying to say’. Only when he realised that Milly Barton, the mother of six, died as a result of yet another miscarriage did Marcus become aware of ‘the presence of some extraordinary sexual rapport’ between her and her husband which, he reasonably claimed, was the basis of their ‘passionately happy marriage’ and to what the terminally overworked Milly was referring in her dying words to her husband: ‘You - have made me - very - happy.’3 And, in a tour d ’horizon of all the fiction, Juliet McMaster has shown that ‘Eliot made it her business to be full and explicit about sensuous experience’ and that, although ‘the restrictions of her day precluded the direct and literal description of sexual relations, George Eliot is nonetheless able to convey all she needs by shifting to the figurative level’.4 At the beginning of Middlemarch, Dorothea’s ideas about marriage seem unconnected with passion or sexuality. It is, she says, ‘a state of higher duties. I never thought of it as mere personal ease’ (ch. 4). As the narrator observes: Dorothea, with all her eagerness to know the truths of life, retained very childlike ideas about marriage. She felt sure that she would have accepted the judicious Hooker, if she had been born in time to save him from that wretched mistake he made in matrimony; or John Milton when his blindness had come on; or any of the other great men whose odd habits it would have been glorious piety to endure; but an amiable handsome baronet, who said ‘Exactly’ to her remarks even when she expressed uncertainty, - how could he affect her as a lover? The really delightful marriage must be that where your husband was a sort of father, and could teach you even Hebrew, if you wished it. (ch. 1) These notions are a droll index of the intensity of Dorothea’s religious disposition and a reflection of her ardent yearning for some ideal ‘life beyond self to which she can devote her energies. But other things that one learns about her in the opening chapters suggest that there is a strong sensuous streak in Dorothea’s nature that goes against the grain of her desire to explore the high places of the via negativa. The often-remarkedon scene with the jewels at the end of chapter lis a case in point. Dorothea first declares a complete lack of interest in the gems that Celia is eager to

Dorothea

105

divide between them. But a ‘new current of feeling, as sudden as the gleam’ from the fine emerald and diamond ring that has caught her eye, leads her to exclaim how very beautiful the gems are and to reflect that ‘it is strange how deeply the colours seem to penetrate one, like scent. I suppose that is the reason why gems are used as emblems in the Revelation of St John. They look like fragments of heaven.’ She then puts the ring and a matching bracelet on her beautiful finger and wrist. ‘And all the while’, the narrator shrewdly notes, ‘her thought was trying to justify her delight in the colours by merging them in her mystic religious joy.’ The point is no less telling for being patent: there is a sensuous emotional side as well as an ascetic side to Dorothea’s nature, but she instinctively tries to suppress the former because she wishes to have her consciousness wholly filled with the ‘visionary future’ (ch. 3) rather than the physical present. There is a similar contrast - a boldly emblematic one - in chapter 19 when Dorothea, dressed not unlike a nun in ‘Quakerish grey drapery’ with her long cloak fastened at the neck, is seen in the Vatican standing near where the statue of ‘the reclining Ariadne, then called the Cleopatra, lies in the marble voluptuousness of her beauty, the drapery folding around her with a petal-like ease and tenderness’. It is, as Ladislaw’s German friend Naumann observes, ‘a fine bit of antithesis’. He goes on to make the same conceptual transference that George Eliot wants the reader to make: the voluptuous Ariadne stands for the physical and sensuous nature of the ‘breathing blooming’ Dorothea, whose form, ‘not shamed’ by that of Ariadne, lies concealed beneath her grey drapery: ‘antique form animated by Christian sentiment’, as Naumann puts it, ‘sensuous force controlled by spiritual passion’. In chapter 20 the same point that was made dramatically with the jewels and symbolically with the statue is made through detailed psychological notation. In an analysis of the growing strain in Dorothea’s relations with her new husband, the narrator notes that Casaubon’s dislike of any physical contact or intimacy frustrates Dorothea’s natural tendency to express her ‘girlish and womanly feeling’ through ‘those childlike caresses which are the bent of every sweet woman’. Dorothea’s frustration is compounded by her sense of humiliation at finding ‘herself a mere victim of feeling, as if she could know nothing except through that medium: all her strength was scattered in fits of agitation, of struggle, of despondency, and yet again in visions of more complete renunciation, transforming all hard conditions into duty’. The mere in the phrase ‘a mere victim of feeling’ is an instance of style indirect libre: it registers Dorothea’s undervaluation of feeling at this point in her development,

106

Middlemarch

not that of her creator, who believes that there is little of human value that is not grounded in the truth of feeling. The rest of the quotation shows Dorothea practising the same suppression of feeling as in the scene with the jewels: she struggles to reach the visionary path of renunciation and duty, and to leave behind the low and vexatious road of feeling. Casaubon’s dislike of physical contact, including even the hand of his beautiful young bride, comes as no surprise to the reader of Middlemarch, who by chapter 20 has developed a perfectly understandable interest in learning as much as he can about the physical relations between the newly­ weds. In his letter proposing marriage, Casaubon had spoken of ‘an affection hitherto unwasted’ (ch. 5) and later, in commenting on another instance of his recoil from the touch of the affectionate Dorothea, the narrator notes that ‘There was something horrible to Dorothea in the sensation which this unresponsive hardness inflicted on her. That is a strong word, but not too strong: it is in these acts called trivialities that the seeds of joy are for ever wasted’ (ch. 42). The striking imagery of unwasted affection and wasted seed is suggestive, even if we do not choose to be as blunt as Richard Ellmann: ‘Mr Casaubon chooses self­ isolation like choosing self-abuse. The image of Onan is invoked to symbolize his spirit, which in turn is reflected in his physical denial.’5 Other details concerning Casaubon’s emotional life have similarly unwholesome connotations and similarly suggest an unconsummated union. At the beginning of chapter 7, for example, the narrator observes that while in offering marriage to Dorothea he had ‘determined to abandon himself to the stream of feeling’ he was surprised to discover ‘what an exceedingly shallow rill it was’. This leads him to speculate that ‘the poets had much exaggerated the force of masculine passion’, though it also crosses his mind that ‘there was some deficiency in Dorothea to account for the moderation of his abandonment’. From his marriage he both expects to ‘receive family pleasures’ and to ‘leave behind him that copy of himself which seemed so urgently required of a man - to the sonneteers of the sixteenth century’ (ch. 29). But for Casaubon any procreative urgency seems merely cerebral or bookish, and as the day of his marriage approaches he does not ‘find his spirits rising’ (ch. 10) and is in other ways presumably untumescent. It is details such as these that should be kept in mind in approaching one of the two most spectacular passages in Middlemarch (the other is the description of Lydgate’s scientific passion in chapter 16): the account of Dorothea’s ‘oppressed heart’ and consciousness as she cries bitterly to herself in Rome at the opening of chapter 20, the ‘dream-like strangeness of her bridal life’ having been intensified by the ‘stupendous

Dorothea

107

fragmentariness’ of the ancient city and its ‘oppressive masquerade of ages, in which her own life too seemed to have become a«masque with enigmatical costumes’: To those who have looked at Rome with the quickening power of a knowledge which breathes a growing soul into all historic shapes, and traces out the suppressed transitions which unite all contrasts, Rome may still be the spiritual centre and interpreter of the world. But let them conceive one more historical contrast: the gigantic broken revelations of that Imperial and Papal city thrust abruptly on the notions of a girl who had been brought up in English and Swiss Puritanism, fed on meagre Protestant histories and on art chiefly of the hand-screen sort; a girl whose ardent nature turned all her small allowance of knowledge into principles, fusing her actions into their mould, and whose quick emotions gave the most abstract things the quality of a pleasure or a pain; a girl who had lately become a wife, and from the enthusiastic acceptance of untried duty found herself plunged in tumultuous preoccupation with her personal lot. The weight of unintelligible Rome might lie easily on bright nymphs to whom it formed a background for the brilliant picnic of Anglo-foreign society; but Dorothea had no such defense against deep impressions. Ruins and basilicas, palaces and colossi, set in the midst of a sordid present, where all that was living and warm-blooded seemed sunk in the deep degeneracy of a superstition divorced from reverence; the dimmer yet eager Titanic life gazing and struggling on walls and ceilings; the long vistas of white forms whose marble eyes seemed to hold the monotonous light of an alien world: all this vast wreck of ambitious ideals, sensuous and spiritual, mixed confusedly with the signs of breathing forgetfulness and degradation, at first jarred her as with an electric shock, and then urged themselves on her with that ache belonging to a glut of confused ideas which check the flow of emotion. Forms both pale and glowing took possession of her young sense, and fixed themselves in her memory even when she was not thinking of them, preparing strange associations which remained through her after-years. Our moods are apt to bring with them images which succeed each other like the magic-lantern pictures of a doze; and in certain states of dull forlomness Dorothea all her life continued to see the vastness of St Peter’s, the huge bronze canopy, the excited intention in the attitudes and garments of the prophets and evangelists in the mosaics above, and the red drapery which was being hung for Christmas spreading itself everywhere like a disease of the retina.

108

Middlemarch

The paragraph begins dispassionately with the erudite and welltravelled narrator setting out a striking ‘historical contrast’. But the passage soon begins to re-enact, not simply to describe, the impact of Rome on Dorothea’s consciousness. And just as she has no ‘defense against deep impressions’, so the narrator becomes increasingly unable to control the powerful impressions and jarring images that the passage has begun to generate. In the reference to ‘weight of unintelligible Rome’ there is a strong echo of ‘the heavy and the weary weight/Of all this unintelligible world’ of Wordsworth’s ‘Tintern Abbey’, which is lightened only by transporting moods equal in intensity but antithetical in nature to the mood that has gripped Dorothea. There is the oppressive and minatory juxtaposition of artefacts from the alien past and the warm­ blooded, degenerate present (an almost lurid transmogrification of the Ariadne-Dorothea contrast in the previous chapter); there is the startling image of an electric shock which, when it is used elsewhere in the novel in connection with Dorothea, refers to the intensity of her emotional reaction to Ladislaw or of his to her; there is the abrupt flash-forward to the states of ‘dull forlomness’ in Dorothea’s later life as the passage reaches its climax; and finally there is the red drapery being hung for Christmas in St Peter’s spreading itself everywhere ‘like a disease of the retina’ - at which point the passage has become wholly expressive of Dorothea’s disturbed consciousness and not at all representational. White is the liturgical colour for Christmas; as in a painting by Munch, the red is supplied, so to speak, by a disease of the inner eye.6 That Eliot was not fully in control of this torrential passage is suggested by the narrator’s weak recoil from its implications at the beginning of the following paragraph, which offers as explanation a reductive generalisa­ tion concerning Dorothea’s ‘n o t... very exceptional’ inner state: ‘many souls in their young nudity are tumbled out among incongruities and left to “find their feet” among them, while their elders go about their business’.7 But, if culture shock seems an inadequate explanation of Dorothea’s hypersensitive revulsion, what is the reason for it? The key to the answer lies in the collocation of the ‘stupendous fragmentariness’ of Rome and the ‘dream-like strangeness of [Dorothea’s] bridal life’. Her vision of Rome, we may say, is a ‘masque with enigmatical costumes’ which expresses obliquely what even so strait-laced a critic as Gordon Haight calls the ‘violent and painful’ nature of Dorothea’s ‘initiation into matrimony’.8 In the light of the evidence we have reviewed, then, it is difficult not to conclude that Dorothea and Casaubon’s marriage was either frustratingly unconsummated or unsatisfactorily consummated, that Casaubon was in

Dorothea

109

any case sexually inadequate and emotionally petrified, that there was consequently sexual friction between cold husband and affectionate wife, and that the acute degree of Dorothea’s destabilisation indicates that sexual currents run deep in her.9 Thus, although the narrator avers in chapter 28 that ‘No one would ever know what [Dorothea] thought of a wedding journey to Rome’, the reader in fact knows a fair amount about what has transpired. And even before Casaubon’s death midway through the novel the reader might well be asking himself the same question that Lydgate wonders about only much later in the novel: ‘Casaubon must have raised some heroic hallucination in her. I wonder if she could have any other sort of passion for a man?’ (ch. 76). The man in question is of course Ladislaw, and ever since Middlemarch was first published commentators have found the depiction of Dorothea’s relationship with him unsatisfactory. Among the most interesting and impressive analyses is that of Barbara Hardy, who argues that ‘Middlemarch is only restrictedly truthful in its treatment of sexuality’. The ‘important thing’ is not ‘the absence of sexual realism achieved through a detailed clinical report, but the absence or presence of that psychological realism which makes the characters appear as sexual beings’. George Eliot is reticent but not silent about the sexual side of the Dorothea-Casaubon relationship, but ‘she leaves things out in her treatment of Dorothea and Will’. The omission is ‘an unrealistic element in an unusually realistic novel’. The ‘unhappy consequences of restricted treatment of sex’ in their relationship is ‘the psychological and structural flaw in Middlemarch' . Sensibility replaces sexuality in the DorotheaLadislaw relationship, and ‘when they are together, physically or in the thoughts of each other ... the romantic glow seems false and the childlike innocence implausible and inappropriate’.10 It is difficult to quarrel directly with this shrewd analysis. The principal problem, as I see it, is that like most of the other characters in Middlemarch Ladislaw idealises Dorothea and seems happiest when warming himself in the radiant glow of her childlike ardour. Dorothea’s inner life is, however, a good deal richer and more complex than Ladislaw realises. It can best be brought into focus if Dorothea’s development during the novel is examined with minimal reference to Ladislaw’s idealised perceptions of her. If this is done, an instinctively affectionate nature and a powerful desire, in neither of which there is any reason to think that sexuality does not have a part, can be seen to characterise Dorothea’s long-germinating love for Ladislaw. There are two strands in Dorothea’s development during the course of

110

Middlemarch

Middlemarch. One involves the passage from subjectivity to objectivity through sorrow, sad experience and the recognition of an equivalent centre of self in others. The second is composed of the stages by which she comes to recognise the primacy of the feelings and the importance of emotional fulfilment. Let us begin with Dorothea’s reaction in chapter 5 to Casaubon’s letter proposing marriage. She trembles and sobs, casts herself, ‘with a childlike sense of reclining’, on what she takes to be ‘the lap of a divine consciousness which sustained her own’; her ‘whole soul was possessed by the fact that a fuller life was opening before her’. The reader trembles as well, but for a different reason. Casaubon’s letter, which Dorothea reads in the subjective light of ‘the radiance of her transfigured girlhood’, is in fact a chilling missive, in the circumlocutions and stiff formality of which there is no hint of ardour, strong emotion or noble purpose. It is important, however, not to make too much of the ironic discrepancy; to do so could lead to a simplistic relegation of Dorothea’s intense emotions to the category of the preposterously immature. If the object towards which she channels her spiritual energies is wholly unworthy of her, her choice is not bizarre or inexplicable. It is ultimately one of the results of the disappearance of God during the nineteenth century. As the narrato r explains in chapter 10: ‘som ething she

yearned for by which her life might be filled with action at once rational and ardent; and since the time was gone by for guiding visions and spiritual directors, since prayer heightened yearning but not instruction, what lamp was there but knowledge? Surely learned men kept the only oil; and who more learned than Mr Casaubon.’ It is a penetrating and prescient analysis which must strike a responsive chord in university teachers of literature who annually observe young persons - usually female - bringing to the acquisition of knowledge and the study of literature expectations that neither can properly satisfy. But if knowledge is not the lamp, what illumination is there for an intense young woman seeking fulfilment and a ‘life beyond self? As we have already seen, the word ‘childlike’ is again used about Dorothea in the passage where she is ‘humiliated to find herself a mere victim of feeling’ (ch. 20). The subject of feeling comes up again two chapters later during her second private interview with Will Ladislaw. For Will the ideal human condition is not that of self-suppression, of the ‘martyrdom’ that he accuses Dorothea of practising, but that of the poet, in whose soul ‘knowledge passes instantaneously into feeling, and feeling flashes back as a new organ of knowledge’. Dorothea rightly points out that this is an incomplete description of the poet, for it leaves out the writing of poems. It is also a most dubious description, for it seems to

Dorothea

111

assign feeling only a secondary or reactive, not a primary and initiating, role. This part of the description is none the less endorsed by Dorothea, who says she understands ‘what you mean about knowledge passing into feeling, for that seems to be just what I experience’. What Dorothea is saying might seem close to George Eliot’s remark in a late notebook that ‘Feeling is a sort of knowledge’.11Close - but not identical; at this point in Dorothea’s development, it is important to note that in what she thinks about feeling (which is not necessarily the same as what she actually feels) there is an overemphasis on the head (knowledge) and an insufficient emphasis on the heart (emotions). In the same interview, Ladislaw uses the imagery of sacrifice and imprisonment to describe the nature of Dorothea’s life with Casaubon: ‘I suspect you have some false belief in the virtues of misery, and want to make your own life a martyrdom ... you will go and be shut up in that stone prison at Lowick: you will be buried alive.’ The same imagery is deployed by the narrator in his first description of Dorothea after her return to Lowick at the beginning of chapter 28. It is, as Frank Kermode has said, a ‘wonderful moment’. 12 From her window Dorothea sees the ‘uniform whiteness’ of the snow-covered ‘distant flat’ and the equally monotonous and monochromic ‘low-hanging uniformity of cloud’. The furnishings of her room seem comparably dismal, even ghostly. But Dorothea herself is vividly alive, even dazzling: ‘She was glowing from her morning toilette as only healthful youth can glow: there was a gem­ like brightness on her coiled hair and in her hazel eyes; there was warm red life in her lips; her throat had a breathing whiteness above the differing white of the fur.’ The startling contrast, which recalls the early scene with the jewels and the juxtaposition of Dorothea and the statue of Ariadne, is powerfully suggestive: while Dorothea’s life at Lowick and her devotion to her husband bespeak self-sacrifice, renunciation and the acceptance of duty, her wonderful body bespeaks throbbing life, and has a sensual, not a supernal, glow which is totally out of place in her present surroundings. It is of essential importance to charting Dorothea’s development to note that this scene is set in her blue-green boudoir at Lowick, the room in which most of the key episodes in her inner life are to take place. The room is first described in chapter 9: its furniture of faded blue; the group of family miniatures on the wall; the tapestry showing a peculiar ‘bluegreen world with a pale stag in it’. Most important, there is in this upper room a bow window that looks down on the avenue of limes on the south­ west front of the house, ‘with a sunk fence between park and pleasureground, so that ... the glance swept uninterruptedly along a slope of

112

Middlemarch

greensward till the limes ended in a level of corn and pastures, which after seemed to melt into a lake under the setting sun’. As the glowing Dorothea in her ‘blooming full-pulsed youth5stands in this room in chapter 28, she feels a sense o f‘moral imprisonment which made itself one with the chill, colourless, narrowjed landscape, with the shrunken furniture, the never-read books, and the ghostly stag in a pale fantastic world that seemed to be vanishing from the daylight5and that recalls nothing so much as one of the enigmatical costumes of Dorothea’s weird reverie in Rome. In this ‘disenchanted’ chamber, ‘deadened as an unlit transparency’, in which ‘all existence seemed to beat with a lower pulse than her own’ and ‘every object was withering and shrinking away from her’, there is one object that, when her glance falls on it, finally cancels Dorothea’s ‘nightmare’ and provides the chapter’s second wonderful moment. The object is a miniature of Casaubon’s aunt Julia, who was Will Ladislaw’s grandmother. As Dorothea gazes at the picture its colours deepen, the lips and chin of the dead woman seem to get larger, and the hair and eyes seem to be sending out light. It is as if Dorothea has transferred to the miniature something of her own vibrant blooming life, just as she had earlier transferred to the Vatican draperies something of her inner turmoil. She has also communicated to the miniature her own unconscious desire for Will Ladislaw, for under the power of her observation the face of the long dead Julia is transformed into the smiling face of the young man who in turn makes Dorothea smile. Perhaps we should call the transformation effected by Dorothea a creative, even a poetic act. (‘We are all of us imaginative in some form or other’, as the narrator remarks in another connection in chapter 34, ‘for images are the brood of desire.’) If so, we must also say that it has nothing to do with knowledge passing into feeling; it is, rather, the power of intense feeling and emotional need creating not an idea or an ideal, but a representation of the object of its desire. In chapter 37 there is another scene between Dorothea and Will and another scene in which she meditates alone in the blue-green boudoir. The former instances the ‘sense of young companionship’ that is an aspect of Dorothea’s delight in seeing Will. It is said to be ‘like a lunette opened in the wall of her prison, giving her a glimpse of the sunny air’. During their meeting Ladislaw is pleased to perceive ‘what Dorothea was hardly conscious of - that she was travelling into the remoteness of pure pity and loyalty towards her husband’. After their conversation, during which she has learned Ladislaw’s family history, there are ‘fresh images’ that gather round the miniature of aunt Julia as Dorothea sits alone in her boudoir. She has by now - it is late in the summer following her January

Dorothea

113

return to the snow-covered estate - grown fond of the ‘pallid quaintness’of the room that is now filled with memories of her inner struggles to find the spiritual resolve to discharge the duties of her marriage. She is particularly helped by looking along the avenue of limes ‘toward the arch of western light’. This sunset vision, with its transcendent connotations, is said to have gained a communicating power with her. But what most helps to ‘concentrate her feelings’ is that ‘delicate miniature of aunt Julia, so like a living face that she knew’. It is in gazing at this picture that Dorothea has a ‘vision’ that is ‘like a sudden letting in of daylight’ - that is, a vision that is the opposite of the sunset vision of higher duties. The second vision tells her that she must persuade her husband to share their wealth with the impecunious Ladislaw. But the only result of her intercession is a deepened estrangement between husband and wife. The narrator calls Dorothea’s purpose innocent and pure, but the reader may be forgiven for doubting whether her naivete and altruism were wholly responsible for her so completely misjudging her husband’s reaction, and for wondering if the imperfect sublimation of her powerful emotional attraction to Ladislaw has not been a contributing factor. The conscious expression of this emotion takes the form of an act of seeming disinterest. But for the careful reader the source and motive of Dorothea’s act may seem as different from her other unselfish acts as her daylight vision is from her sunset vision. The next time that Dorothea meditates in the blue-green boudoir occurs in chapter 42, just after she has been struck by a sense of something horrible in her husband’s ‘unresponsive hardness’. She is too absorbed with her own emotions to notice that the bow window opens on to a glorious afternoon, or to be bothered by the dazzling sun rays: ‘if there were discomfort in that, how could she tell that it were not part of her inward misery?’ Dorothea’s anger and resentment are intense: ‘in such a crisis’, the narrator remarks, ‘some people begin to hate’. But the result of Dorothea’s ‘meditative struggle’ shows that the ideal or spiritual side of her nature is still dominant: ‘resolved submission’ finally does come to supersede resentment and potential hatred as ‘the noble habit of the soul reasserts itself. This psychological process seems credible, even though it is insufficiently dramatised to be fully convincing. But it does not cover the full range of Dorothea’s inner life - as the next chapter makes clear. As Dorothea drives away from Lydgate’s home, where she has been startled to find Ladislaw alone with Rosamond, the only matter ‘explicitly in her mind’ is the errand concerning her unwell husband. But it is not what is in her mind, but what is in her feelings, that brings tears and ‘a vague discomfort’, and makes her ‘confusedly unhappy’: it is that the clear

114

Middlemarch

‘image’ she has had of her desire now seems ‘mysteriously spoiled’. It is the following spring when Dorothea is next found in her boudoir, now become a compartment of the ‘virtual tomb’ in which she lives (ch. 48). She is reading inspirational literature to fuel her resolved submission to her shrunken life; but ‘the sustaining thoughts which had become habits’ are cold comfort. They seem ‘to have in them the weariness of long future days in which she would still live with them for her sole companions’. It is ‘another and a fuller sort of companionship’ that she is ‘hungering for’, as well as for ‘objects who could be dear to her, and to whom she could be dear’. It comes as no surprise that the only ‘object’ of her desire specifically named is Will Ladislaw. Two chapters later Casaubon has died and Dorothea learns for the first time of the codicil to his will. She is deeply affected by what she learns and feels a ‘vague alarmed consciousness that her life was taking on a new form, that she is undergoing a metamorphosis’. At the same time - it is a striking notation - she feels ‘a sudden strange yearning of heart towards Will Ladislaw’. The reason given is that before learning of the codicil ‘it had never ... entered her mind that he could, under any circumstances, be her lover’. The narrator’s explanation is correct, but incomplete; while it may not have entered Dorothea’s conscious mind that Ladislaw could be her lover, he had sometime before been entered on her emotions as the object of her desire. In chapter 54, after a three-month stay with her sister at Freshitt, Dorothea resolves to satisfy her ‘great yearning’ and ‘deep longing’ to return to live at Lowick. The reason she gives Celia is the wish to know the Farebrothers better, and to talk with Mr Farebrother about what needs to be done in Middlemarch. But the real reason is her longing to see Will Ladislaw: ‘her soul thirsted to see him’. Before her husband’s death Dorothea had noticed Ladislaw in the church at Lowick one Sunday. So intense is her desire for his presence that as she is about to enter the church for the first time after her return she has a hallucination, believing that he is sitting in the pew where he had sat before. In the same chapter Dorothea is once again found alone in her boudoir. The time is late morning; a map of her property and other documents are spread before her. But she is looking out along the avenue of limes to the distant fields. The familiar scene seems changeless to her and ‘to represent the prospect of her life, full of motiveless ease - motiveless, if her own energy could not seek out reasons for ardent action’. The reason for her lack of energy is suggested in the next sentence, which notes the contrast between her ‘heavy solemnity of clothing’ - the widow’s cap and black crape dress that Tantripp later calls her mistress’s ‘hijeous weepers’ (ch. 80) - and her

Dorothea

115

young face ‘with its recovered bloom’. This is a deliberate repetition and conflation of the earlier pictorial contrasts between grey-clad Dorothea and voluptuous Ariadne in chapter 19 and frozen landscape and blooming youth in chapter 28. It suggests that Dorothea’s sensuous emotional nature is still suppressed, and that she is still without a channel through which her longings can flow towards their desired object. Dorothea’s reverie is interrupted by her maid’s announcement that Ladislaw is below and would like to see her. As they greet each other, a ‘deep blush which was rare in her’ comes upon Dorothea ‘with painful suddenness’. Will has come to announce that he is leaving Middlemarch, and before their brief interview is terminated by the arrival of Sir James Chettam she has time to ask him if he would like to take with him the miniature of his grandmother that hangs in the blue-green boudoir. Since he declines, the miniature is in its accustomed place when in the next chapter Dorothea takes it down from the wall, places it in her palm, makes a bed for it there, and leans her cheek against it. The narrator’s comment is that ‘she did not know then that it was Love who had come to her briefly, as in a dream before awaking’. There is another telling repetition in chapter 62. As Dorothea is driving in her carriage, tears again begin to roll down her cheeks just as they had done in chapter 43. The reason is the same, Mrs Cadwallader having just informed her that ‘Mr Orlando Ladislaw is making a sad dark-blue scandal by warbling continually with your Mr Lydgate’s wife’. This comes just before the crucial sixth meeting alone between Dorothea and Will, at the climax of which Dorothea realises in ‘one flash’ that Ladislaw loves her and not someone else. Her first emotions are joy and a tremendous sense of release: ‘it was as if some hard icy pressure had melted, and her consciousness had room to expand: her past was come back to her with larger interpretation’. But part of Dorothea’s joy is disinterested, for she now knows that Ladislaw is not demeaning himself through a sordid entanglement with another man’s wife. And her joy is not lessened but ‘perhaps’ made ‘more complete’ by what she feels certain is their ‘irrevocable parting’. That is to say, even at this late point Dorothea’s deepest emotions are sufficiently suppressed to keep her from fully realising that she loves and desires Ladislaw. Indeed, she is later said to entertain ‘no visions of their ever coming into nearer union, and yet she had taken no posture of renunciation. She had accepted her whole relation to Will very simply as part of her marriage sorrows’ (ch. 77). Such passive resignation is not the whole story of Dorothea’s inner life, however, as she herself finally comes to realise when she again visits Lydgate’s house and again discovers Ladislaw alone with Rosamond, this

116

Middlemarch

time in what appears a distinctly compromising situation. Thus is precipitated Dorothea’s night of sorrow in chapter 80. When she is once again alone, presumably in her blue-green boudoir, she is shaken by ‘waves of suffering’. (In Middlemarch passion and sexual attraction come as electric shocks, while suffering and sorrowful compassion come in waves, as they did to Harriet Bulstrode in chapter 74.) She feels ‘the clutch of inescapable anguish’, presses her hands hard on the top of her head, and moans out: ‘Oh, I did love him.’ It is only now, ‘with a full consciousness which had never awakened before’, that ‘she discover [s] her passion to herself. Since Dorothea is now aware of her passion for Ladislaw she must assume a ‘posture of renunciation’. This she successfully does and after a night of anguish, during which she looks ‘into the eyes of sorrow’ and is sustained by her store of ‘vivid sympathetic experience’ of the troubles of others, which returns to her now ‘as a power’. By this time there is daylight in her room and Dorothea goes to the window: She opened her curtains, and looked out towards the bit of road that lay in view, with fields beyond, outside the entrance-gates. On the road there was a man with a bundle on his back and a woman carrying her baby; in the field she could see figures moving - perhaps the shepherd with his dog. Far off in the bending sky was the pearly light; and she felt the largeness of the world and the manifold wakings of men to labour and endurance. She was a part of that involuntary, palpitating life, and could neither look out on it from her luxurious shelter as a mere spectator, nor hide her eyes in selfish complaining. This scene is of course emblematic. It is in fact a set piece that has close affinities with other key moments in nineteenth-century literature which describe or signify the transition from subjectivity to objectivity, from self-consciousness to the awareness of a life beyond self, of what Wordsworth in book 13 of The Prelude called the ‘temperate show/Of objects that endure’. To cite only two examples: there is the climactic moment at the end of Tennyson’s ‘Holy Grail’ idyll in which the unsought vision of an agricultural labourer, ‘Who may not wander from the allotted field/Before his work be done’, is presented as the positive alternative to the destructive spiritual quests of Arthur’s knights; and there is the closing section of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, in which a casual remark by a peasant changes the course of Levin’s life and brings to at least a temporary end his fruitless speculations concerning the meaning of life.

Dorothea

117

For some readers of Middlemarch, what Dorothea sees when she opens the curtains is more stagey than emblematic and too contrived to be effective. It is certainly the case that Dorothea’s epiphany (as it has been called) lacks the poetic intensity of the end of T h e Holy Grail’ and the dramatic immediacy of the close of Anna Karenina. But those who find the moment forced have perhaps failed to notice how carefully George Eliot has prepared for it through the detailed notations in earlier chapters of what at different times and in different moods Dorothea has seen from the same window. What she sees in chapter 80 is significantly different, for her vision is no longer coloured by her mental state, as it was in the sunset vision of chapter 37, which was suffused with her spiritual yearnings, or in her view of the ‘changeless prospect’ in chapter 54, when Dorothea had projected into the landscape the sense of her own stagnant life. The landscape in chapter 80 rather contains human figures representative of the general life of ordinary humanity that instil in Dorothea a felt awareness of a meaning and purpose in ordinary human existence, and of a ‘life beyond self achieved through labour and endurance rather than through what have been called ‘heroic exertions of the ego’.13 Dorothea’s vision in chapter 80 is the climax of one strand in her development. The climax of the other - her learning the importance of feeling and emotional fulfilment - comes three chapters later in her final meeting with Ladislaw. The scene is not nearly as powerful and satisfying as many readers (including myself) would have liked it to be. This is because George Eliot has scripted the scene to point up the childlike qualities of Dorothea and Will. As the chapter opens, for example, the former has discovered that she has ‘O dear! Nothing’ to do in the village and turns to ‘her particular little heap of books on political economy and kindred matters’, on which she is entirely unable to concentrate. Then Ladislaw is announced by quaint little old Miss Noble, who fingers the tortoise-shell lozenge-box he had given her, thus assuring that his Peter Pan qualities will be foremost in the reader’s mind. In addition, the script fails to include any detailed notation of Dorothea’s thoughts and feelings. Her passion is suggested only indirectly through the too theatrical device of the vivid flashes of lightning. One reason for playing down this scene must have been to avoid suggesting that there was any active desire in Dorothea’s coming together with Will, for any such suggestion would have run counter to the implications of her selfless vision in chapter 80. Thus, Eliot has the two stand ‘with their hands clasped, like two children, looking out on the storm’, and when they kiss ‘tremblingly’ has the narrator report that ‘it was never known which lips were the first to move

118

Middlemarch

towards the other lips’. Another reason is to underline the home-epic simplicity of Dorothea and Will’s union. The childlike qualities are not pointed up for ironic purposes, as they were early in the novel, but rather to help emphasise that the young woman of heroic spiritual ambition has dwindled into someone more like her sister Celia than like St Theresa of Avila. At the end of the scene, Dorothea declares her willingness to embrace what she thinks of as poverty, announcing in ‘a sobbing childlike way, “We could live quite well on my own fortune - it is too much - seven hundred a year - I want so little - no new clothes - and I will learn what everything costs’” . It is all quite charming and in its way affecting, but one does regret that the scene is pitched in so minor a key, for it tends to obscure the importance to Dorothea’s story of her physical union with the man she loves and desires. It was perhaps for this reason that in the finale George Eliot was at pains to emphasise the fundamental importance of Dorothea’s emotional fulfilment. Dorothea and Will, the narrator says, ‘were bound to each other by a love stronger than any impulses which could have marred it. No life would have been possible to Dorothea which was not filled with emotion, and now she had a life filled also with ... beneficent activity.’ The beneficent activity is the afterglow of Dorothea’s vision in chapter 80 and the realisation of her distinctively Victorian belief that ‘if we had lost our own chief good, other people’s good would remain’ (ch. 83). But Dorothea’s ‘chief good’ is emotional fulfilment, which she reaches through union with the object of her desire, not through its renunciation. That is the deepest reason why ‘the many who knew her [who] thought it a pity that so substantive and rare a creature should have been absorbed into the life of another’ were never able to state exactly ‘what else that was in her power she ought rather to have done’.

CHAPTER 7

The Parts and the Whole M iddlem arch is a treasu re-h ou se o f d etails, bu t it is an in differen t whole.

H enry James

In March 1873, Henry James wrote a long letter to his American friend Grace Norton. At one point he brought up the subject of George Eliot’s recently published novel. No, James had not written the review of Middlemarch in the Nation. His had been displaced at the eleventh hour by one ‘which is doubtless better as going more into details’; but he hoped his review would appear elsewhere. The letter then continued: I wondered whether you were hearing anything about George Eliot. Her book, with all its faults, is, it seems to me, a truly immense performance. My brother William lately wrote me that he was ‘aghast at its intellectual power’. This is strong - and what one says of Shakespeare. But certainly a marvellous mind throbs in every page of Middlemarch. It raises the standard of what is to be expected of women - (by your leave!) We know all about the female heart; but apparently there is a female brain, too ... I have read very little else this winter and written little, though something ... criticism of all kinds seems to me overdone, and I seriously believe that if nothing could be ‘reviewed’ for fifty years, civilization would take a great stride. To produce some little exemplary works of art is my narrow and lowly dream. They are to have less ‘brain’ than Middlemarch; but (I boldly proclaim it) they are to have more form.1 James’s review did appear in a different periodical and, as we have seen, it contained high (but not unqualified) praise for Middlemarch. James’s admiration remained high. According to Leon Edel, his biographer, the greatest tribute that James paid Eliot’s novel was the writing of his own novel The Portrait of a Lady (1881), the single subject of which is a young American woman possessed of ‘a certain nobleness of imagination’ and of a ‘finer mind’ and ‘larger perception’ than ‘most of the persons among whom her lot was cast’ - in other words, a New World Dorothea Brooke.2 In a certain sense, says Edel, the story of Isabel Archer affronting her

120

Middlemarch

destiny can be called a ‘George Eliot novel’ written in the way Janies believed she should have written.3 Another of James’s ‘little exemplary works of art’ was The Tragic Muse (1890). In the preface he added when the novel was republished in the New York Edition of his works, James recalled its genesis and reviewed the artistic decisions he had had to make. These reflections throw much light on his notions of fictional form and his attitude to sprawling novels like Middlemarch. James remembered debating with himself whether to attempt to bring together into one work two separate stories or ‘cases’ one political, the other theatrical - that he had had in the back of his mind for some time. He feared that ‘the joining together of these interests, originally seen as separate, might, all disgracefully, betray the seam, show for mechanical and superficial. A story was a story, a picture a picture, and I had a mortal horror of two stories, two pictures in one.’ It was true that he had on occasion seen two or more pictures in one, in ‘certain sublime Tintorettos at Venice’, for example, one of which ‘showed without loss of authority half a dozen actions separately taking place’. But this had clearly required ‘a mighty pictorial fusion, so that the virtue of composition had somehow thereby come all mysteriously into its own’. Of course there would be no difficulty in bringing his two cases together ‘if composition could be kept out of the question’. But this James could not bring himself to do, for ‘a picture without composition slights its most precious chance for beauty’. In the absence of composition there may ... be life, incontestably, as [Thackeray’s] ‘The Newcomes’ has life, as [Dumas’s] ‘Les Trois Mousquetaires’, as Tolstoi’s ‘Peace and War’, have it; but what do such large loose baggy monsters, with their queer elements of the accidental and the arbitrary, artistically mean? We have heard it maintained, we well remember, that such things are ‘superior to art’; but we understand least of all what that may mean, and we look in vain for the artist, the divine explanatory genius, who will come to our aid and tell us. There is life and life, and as waste is only life sacrificed and thereby prevented from ‘counting’, I delight in a deep-breathing economy and an organic form. My business was accordingly to ‘go in’ for complete pictorial fusion, some such common interest between my two first notions as would, in spite of their birth under quite different stars, do them no violence at all.4 With these preoccupations, it is no wonder that James found Middlemarch ‘an indifferent whole’. Was he entirely fair to George Eliot’s ‘truly immense performance’? Middlemarch unquestionably has ‘brain’ and has ‘life’, and just as certainly does not have ‘a deep-breathing

The Parts and the Whole

121

economy’ or a ‘complete pictorial fusion’ of its elements. But it does not necessarily follow that it lacks a distinctive form, that the whole is not greater than the sum of its parts, or that it should be added to the list of ‘large loose baggy monsters’ whose artistic meaning was obscure. After all, for a Victorian novelist, George Eliot was unusually concerned with the question of artistic form and with the design and wholeness of her compositions. There is, for example, her intriguing little essay of 1868, ‘Notes on Form in Art’. In it Eliot is explicitly concerned with poetry, not with prose fiction. But poetry is considered ‘in its wider sense as including all literary production’ in which ‘the choice & sequence of images & ideas - that is, of relations & groups of relations - are more or less not only determined by emotion but intended to express it’. This being so, it is not unreasonable to regard the essay as relevant to Eliot’s theory of the novel and as containing ‘important modifications of her earlier conceptions of realism in fiction’.5 For our present purpose the essay is particularly interesting because it addresses itself to the question of the fusion of two or more different stories, subjects or cases. ‘Fundamentally, form is unlikeness’; it is that quality which makes something distinct from everything else. One could even say that ‘every difference is form’. But with this ‘fundamental discrimination is born in necessary antithesis the sense of wholeness or unbroken connexion’. Just as knowledge grows ‘by its alternating processes of distinction & combination’ (like the systole and diastole of Lydgate’s scientific inquiry), so form grows through simultaneous additions o f‘unlikenesses’ and recognitions at a higher level of likenesses until one arrives at the conception of a whole ‘composed of parts more & more multiplied & highly differenced, yet more & more absolutely bound together by various conditions of common likeness or mutual dependence’. Form was basically ‘the limit of that difference by which we discriminate one object from another’; the ‘highest Form’ was found in that object (biological or artistic) in which ‘the most varied group of relations [is] bound together in a wholeness’. ‘Consensus’ was the word used to describe the mutually dependent relationships among the parts of which the whole was composed. In Eliot’s scientific terminology, the word expressed ‘that fact in a complex organism by which no part can suffer increase or diminution without a participation of all other parts in the effect produced & a consequent modification of the organism as a whole’. In this view, ‘forms of art can be called higher or lower only on the same principle as that on which we apply these words to organisms; viz. in proportion to the complexity of the parts bound up into one indissoluble whole’.6

122

Middlemarch

Whether or not Eliot was thinking of her ‘private projects about an English novel’ when she wrote her ‘Notes on Form in Art’ in 1868, the essay does provide a terminology and a context that could be usefully employed by someone wishing to sort out the question of whether Middlemarch was or was not an indifferent whole. Since the essay was not published until 1963, Henry James did not have an opportunity to think about the novel in terms of it. It is unlikely that he would have altered his views, however, for in James’s thinking about artistic form the analogy of visual art is dominant and it is not hard to imagine him saying disapprovingly of Eliot’s essay and its dominant scientific model just what he said of Middlemarch in his review: that it is ‘too often an echo of Messrs Darwin and Huxley’. Certainly one would never suppose from the ‘Notes’ alone that its author was a major creative artist, any more than after reading his Poetics one would suppose that Aristotle was. What is conspicuously absent in the ‘Notes’ is what is so excitingly present in James’s writings on aesthetics: their intimate relation to his creative processes. James could also not have read the several letters in which George Eliot expresses not a theoretical interest in artistic form but a practical concern with the shape and the wholeness of Middlemarch. In July 1871, for example, while still at work on the novel, she wrote to her publisher: ‘I hope there is nothing that will be seen to be irrelevant to my design, which is to show the gradual action of ordinary causes rather than exceptional, and to show them in some directions which have not been from time immemorial the beaten track - the Cremorne walks and shows of fiction. But the best intentions are good for nothing until execution has justified them.’ Over a year later, with her great labour finally completed, she observed: One healthy condition at least for me is that I have finished my book and am thoroughly at peace about it - not because I am convinced of its perfection, but because I have lived to give out what it was in me to give and have not been hindered by illness or death from making my work a whole, such as it is. When a subject has begun to grow in me I suffer terribly until it has wrought itself out - become a complete organism; and then it seems to take wing and go away from me. In February 1873, at the end of a letter commenting on reviews of the novel, Eliot spoke o f ‘her ideal - to make matter and form an inseparable truthfulness’. And later the same year she reflected that

The Parts and the Whole

123

If it were true [that her novels fragmented easily], I should be quite stultified as an artist. Unless my readers are more moved towards the ends I seek by my works as wholes than by an assemblage of extracts, my writings are a mistake. I have always exercised a severe watch against anything that could be called preaching, and if I have ever allowed myself in dissertation or in dialogue [anything] which is not part of the structure of my books, I have there sinned against my own laws.7 While the degree of Eliot’s concern with the design, wholeness and organic completeness of her novel was unusual in a Victorian novelist, it is commonly found in modern commentators on Middlemarch, for many of whom it seems axiomatic that unity is a prerequisite for artistic success and a sine qua non for a great work of literary art. As John Bayley has observed: ‘The usual critical instinct is to show that the work under discussion is as coherent, as aware, as totally organised, as the critic desires his own representation of it to be.’8 A flagrant example is found in W. J. Harvey’s introduction to his widely used Penguin English Library edition of Middlemarch. Behind the patter of the following passage one can just see the critic rolling up his shirtsleeves and settling down to the skilled, no-nonsense performance of his ritual office, the demonstration of unity: with George Eliot, thanks largely to her philosophic power, all is disciplined to the demands of the whole. Certainly we enjoy the liveliness of individual characters - Casaubon, Mr Brooke, Mrs Cadwallader, Featherstone are all vivid creations - but they are only strands in a total pattern. Henry James was certainly right when he called Middlemarch a ‘treasure-house of detail’ [sic]; certainly wrong when he judged it ‘an indifferent whole’. The novel’s greatness lies in its overall design; in discussing this I shall break it down into what may be called the unities of narration, theme, society, and vision. But these categories, though convenient, must do less than justice to so well integrated a novel; George Eliot’s philosophic vision is expressed through the fineness and sureness of her artistic powers.9 A transatlantic example of the same itch to establish the unity of Middlemarch is found in U. C. Knoepflmacher’s Religious Humanism and the Victorian Novel: George Eliot, Walter Pater and Samuel Butler. Although his subject did not require any such commentary, Knoepflmacher none the less began his chapter on the novel with the following:

124

Middlemarch

Middlemarch is the most organic of George Eliot’s novels. Its Carlylean plot-‘filaments’ are so skillfully woven together that the critic who wants to unravel them is almost forced to echo Tertius Lydgate’s complaint: ‘I find myself that it’s uncommonly difficult to make the right thing work: there are so many strings pulling at once.’ The novel’s ‘strings’ interlace into a three-dimensional web. Its scope, which produces the inevitable comparison with War and Peace, is achieved through the controlled motions of an unusually large number of characters, linked either by genealogical ties or by those intricate causal ‘relations’ George Eliot calls ‘the irony of events’. Its depth, however, is produced through the creation of three concentric orbits or spheres of action. In the innermost sphere, four separate, yet complementary, plots are set in motion... In the next sphere the movement of these four plots is connected with the more slack ‘provincial life’ of the Middlemarch community. In the outermost sphere, the progression of the Middlemarchers is related to the advancement of the English nation as a whole through allusions to the social, religious, and scientific reforms of the period, and associated with the history of Western civilization through references to past events and discoveries, as well as to figures of tradition and m yth... In Middlemarch the ‘pulling strings’, which even baffle the morphological expert Lydgate, are woven into a construct of which the final texture is different from and weightier than the mere sum of its parts.10 As these examples suggest, there are dangers and embarrassments involved in the critical preoccupation with unity - at least when the subject is Middlemarch. One of the principal dangers is the tendency to overemphasise form and design at the expense of content. The danger was warned against long ago by E. M. Forster in his Aspects of the Novel. (Forster was speaking specifically of the aesthetic principles and practice of Henry James, but his remarks apply equally well to the practice of the many modern critics who are the heirs of James’s aesthetics.) ‘A pattern must emerge’, noted Forster, and ‘anything that emerged from the pattern must be pruned off as wanton distraction. Who so wanton as human beings?’ Can a rigid pattern ‘be combined with the immense richness of material which life provides’? The answer was no, for ‘the novel is not capable of as much artistic development as the drama: its humanity or the grossness of its material (use whichever phrase you like) hinder it. To most readers of fiction the sensation from a pattern is not intense enough to justify the sacrifices that made it.’11 Another danger is that a preoccupation with unity can lead to

The Parts and the Whole

125

programmatic discourse, to the ignoring of patent discontinuities and of clear qualitative distinctions, and even to what might be called interpretative totalitarianism as the critic attempts to justify the presence of all features in a text and to demonstrate how they are significant and related to some putative totality - be it the organic whole of establishment criticism or the black hole of deconstructive criticism. Two small examples of the sometimes barbarous results of such critical operations are provided by the narrator of Middlemarch himself. One of them occurs in chapter 41 when he attempts to finesse a patently inorganic contrivance which is used to link two of the novel’s principal plots. That the lost grandson of Mrs Dunkirk, Bulstrode’s first wife, should have come to stay in the same Midlands town where Bulstrode himself has settled after leaving London is implausible enough. The coincidence is compounded when it is further revealed that Bulstrode’s second wife, the sister of Mr Vincy, has a relation (Mr Featherstone) whose illegitimate son (Joshua Rigg) has had a stepfather (Raffles) who had many years before been a London associate of Bulstrode’s and had connived with him to keep Mrs Dunkirk from learning of the existence of her daughter and grandson (Will Ladislaw). No wonder that George Eliot found it necessary to summarise the connections for herself in the ‘Quarry for Middlemarch'. That she was keenly aware of the negative implications of this mishmash for the organic completeness of her novel is clear: at the beginning of the chapter in which Raffles makes his first appearance Eliot has her narrator make a pre-emptive intrusion:

Who shall tell what may be the effect of writing? If it happens to have been cut in stone, though it lie face downmost for ages on a forsaken beach, or ‘rest quietly under the drums and tramplings of many conquests’, it may end by letting us into the secret of usurpations and other scandals gossiped about long empires ago: - this world being apparently a huge whispering-gallery. Such conditions are often minutely represented in our petty lifetimes. As the stone which has been kicked by generations of clowns may come by curious little links of effect under the eyes of a scholar, through whose labours it may at last fix the date of invasions and unlock religions, so a bit of ink and paper which has long been an innocent wrapping or stop-gap may at last be laid open under the one pair of eyes which have knowledge enough to turn it into the opening of a catastrophe. To Uriel watching the progress of planetary history from the Sun, the one result would be just as much of a coincidence as the other.

126

Middlemarch

The arch and laboured quality of this ‘rather lofty comparison’ makes it similar in kind to the unsuccessful intrusive generalisations examined in an earlier chapter. Particularly infelicitous is the tabloid sensationalism of the fourth sentence (‘As the stone ...’). But since the particular piece of ‘writing’ in question turns out to be the note with Bulstrode’s name on it that Raffles sticks in his brandy-flask the passage may be more particularly regarded as an example of factitious literary critical discourse in which the attempt is made to supply awkward features of a text with a significance and a ‘meaning’. One notes particularly the flashy but non­ substantive displays of erudition: the unidentified quotation about drums and tramplings; the references to acoustic effects like those in the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral; and the allusion to another literary work - Milton’s Paradise Lost, in the third book of which the angel Uriel, the ‘regent of the sun’, is described as having ‘the sharpest sighted spirit of all in heaven’. None of this clumsy razzle-dazzle, however, can stop the recognition that the note in the brandy-flask is the node of a complex of coincidence glaringly out of place in a novel devoted to showing ‘the gradual action of ordinary causes rather than exceptional’. And the figure of Uriel watching from the sun is additionally disruptive. In order to watch the earth from the sun the angel’s sharp sight must have been endowed with telescopic powers. But, as we have seen, it is not telescopic but microscopic observation that makes possible the immanent (not transcendent) omniscience of the narrator’s god’s-eye view. That is to say, in the attempt to disguise one inorganic feature of Middlemarch, the narrator has introduced another. The other passage in which through her narrator George Eliot supplies a literary critical gloss for an extraneous feature of the text is in chapter 35. It concerns Featherstone’s droll blood-relations, his death and the reading of his two wills, to which matters chapters 32, 33 and 35 are devoted. The relatives have a small contribution to make to the social panorama side of Middlemarch, and are entertaining in their own right. In case the reader is slow to realise this, the narrator supplies cues, noting how often Mary Garth’s lips curled with amusement as she remembered the relatives’ ‘drollery’, and how Fred Vincy gave way to helpless laughter after observing two of them in the kitchen at Stone Court. Duration, however, is the enemy of amusement. Left on stage too long, the relatives become a conspicuous example of what Eliot admitted was her tendency to excess. Here is the passage in which she tries to turn a perceived sow’s ear into a silk purse: And here I am naturally led to reflect on the means of elevating a low

The Pans and the Whole

127

subject. Historical parallels are remarkably efficient in this way. The chief objection to them is, that the diligent narrator may lack space, or (what is often the same thing) may not be able to think of them with any degree of particularity, though he may have a philosophical confidence that if known they would be illustrative. It seems an easier and shorter way to dignity, to observe that - since there never was a true story which could not be told in parables where you might put a monkey for a margrave, and vice versa - whatever has been or is to be narrated by me about low people, may be ennobled by being considered a parable; so that if any bad habits and ugly consequences are brought into view, the reader may have the relief of regarding them as not more than figuratively ungenteel, and may feel himself virtually in company with persons of some style. Thus while I tell the truth about loobies, my reader’s imagination need not be entirely excluded from an occupation with lords; and the petty sums which any bankrupt of high standing would be sorry to retire upon, may be lifted to the level of high commercial transactions by the inexpensive addition of proportional ciphers. Again the tone is forced, arch and self-conscious, and again the narrator strains to impute meaning and significance. The attempt this time involves a symbolic interpretation in which through conceptual transference something is made to stand for something else, as in pastoral or romance. But what this passage perhaps most resembles (surprising as it may initially seem) is one of the many digressions in Melville’s MobyDick. Ishmael, its retrospective narrator, is committed to the principle that a certain significance lurks in all things, else all things are of little worth, and is continually attempting, sometimes through trial and error, to discover the meaning of the events and scenes he has observed and to find the right literary schema through which to re-present them to the reader. These attempts are an integral part of the movement of MobyDick, which was a self-conscious modernist novel long before its time. The case is quite different with Middlemarch, however. George Eliot’s novel postulates a different relationship between narrator and subject and operates on very different principles, perhaps the most important of which is that the narrator is a historian describing ‘real’ events which are significant because they are part of the life of a particular time and place, not because they stand for something other than themselves. Again, one finds that, in the attempt to integrate extraneous material into her desired whole, George Eliot has only compounded the problem through her narrator’s inept critical legerdemain.12

128

Middlemarch

Few of the modern critical attempts to show that Middlemarch is a unified whole are as crude as the narrator’s discourse in these two passages, but some of them are no more convincing. In thinking about these attempts it is useful to keep in mind Austin M. Wright’s description of the ‘four common ways’ in which critics have attempted to describe the wholeness of a literary text. In the first, the assertive, ‘unity is described if at all - by metaphors and analogies, figures emphasizing the integrity of the whole but not usually distinguishing it from other wholes’. In the second, the aggregative way, ‘unity is described by the enumeration of a series of recurring or limiting features found in the work’. Patterns of images, themes, motifs, point of view, setting, even language can all be regarded as ‘unifying principles’; the critic tries to identify as many of these strands as possible in order to ‘build a composite picture’. The third way is reductive: ‘some relatively simple element with an obviously indivisible structure is abstracted from the work and is postulated as its unifying prin­ ciple, which the critic then shows to be inherent in the work, connecting the element to as many details as possible’. The fourth way is the hierarchical: this method uses the second and third ways but ‘arranges them in some order’.13 An example of the assertive way has already been seen in Knoepflmacher’s fusillade of metaphors and analogies, and of the aggregative way in W. H. Harvey’s synopsis of what he proposed to demonstrate concerning Middlemarch. An example of the reductive way is David Carroll’s article, ‘Unity through analogy: an interpretation of Middlemarch’. For Carroll, Dorothea Brooke’s ‘quest for a unifying principle’ (ultimately found ‘in the nature of one’s relations with one’s fel­ low human beings’) is also the unifying principle of the novel. It is said to reappear in different guises in other places. The ‘first analogy’ is Casaubon’s search for his Key to all Mythologies; a second is said to be pro­ vided by ‘the workings of the historical imagination’. A third is Lydgate’s search for ‘unity in plurality in his anatomical investigations’. And, if one looks carefully enough, it is said that one can discover that the ‘ramifica­ tions’ of the novel’s central theme are ‘extensive’, for ‘almost every character in the novel has his or her own cosmology which serves as a guide or a warning to the central search’. The ‘final analogy’ is said to be provin­ cial society ‘becoming aware of its organic unity’ and seeking a ‘unity in plurality’.14 The unsatisfactory attempts of Harvey, Knoepflmacher and Carroll (all of whom were/are among the foremost contemporary commentators on Eliot’s work) to demonstrate the unity of Middlemarch suggest that, for those for whom unity is the measure of greatness, Middlemarch presents a difficult problem. To make a cogent case for the unity of the novel a critic

The Parts and the Whole

129

of exceptional skills is required. Mark Schorer was such a critic; his two discussions of unifying elements in Middlemarch, both examples of the hierarchical method, comprise perhaps the most compelling case yet made for the novel’s wholeness. For Schorer, the novel ‘creates a powerful effect of unity’; although ‘the dramatic structure ... is not very taut, yet one feels, on finishing the book, that this is a superbly constructed work’. There are, says Schorer, four ways in which this effect is achieved. The most obvious is the introduction into nearly every one of its eight books of ‘one large social scene, where representatives of the five stories are allowed to come together’. Of more importance is the fact that ‘the major characterizations depend on a single value ... the quality and kind of social idealism as opposed to self-absorption; the minor characterizations create the stuff on which this idealism must operate’. The third means towards unity were the developments by which the major characters became enmeshed in social circumstances. This was the ‘true plot’ of Middlemarch and gave the novel its movement. The fourth and most important means to unity was found in the language and style of the novel, which ‘externalizes a mind and shows that mind to be one’. Of particular importance are the novel’s images and metaphors. There were the many metaphors of unification and the many metaphors of antithesis (‘the first represent yearnings, the second a recognition of fact’). These were connected with metaphors of appearance versus reality, order versus chaos, shape versus shapelessness, inner versus outer, freedom versus restraint. Another large group of figures related to progress: ‘everyone and everything in this novel is moving on a “way” ’. Another group were composed o f‘complementary metaphors of hindrance to progress’. A fourth were metaphors having to do with purpose, shaping, forming, making, framing. Finally there were the metaphors that Schorer in an excellent phrase identified as those of ‘muted apocalypse’: the images of light, fire and burning, the frequent metaphors in which things are gloriously transformed, transfused or transfigured, and finally the many instances of George Eliot’s ‘unquestionably favorite word’ - vision.15 Schorer’s witness to the ‘powerful effect of unity’ in Middlemarch is admirable, but he is none the less much too partial and one-sided in his account of what one experiences in reading the novel. There is far too much detail in the text and far too many generic, genetic and qualitative discontinuities or incompatibilities for the novel to be considered in any meaningful way as a unified composition, a superbly constructed work, or a complete organism. The background noise in the novel includes an appreciable amount of what the narrator has to say directly to the reader.

130

Middlemarch

The ‘tempting range of relevancies called the universe’ is never completely eschewed in the interests of concentration on ‘this particular web’. The language of the narrator, moreover, is not only replete with clusters of images and metaphors; it is also full of a variety of impedimenta - learned allusions, scientific terminology, ponderous witticisms, uniquely penetrating observations, and a great deal of miscellaneous sparkle and dross - that so distracts one’s attention from the images and metaphors that it takes a critic of great patience and subtlety first to cull them and then to call them tellingly to one’s attention. But Middlemarch is simply too long and too dense for image patterns to have much cumulative effect on one’s experience of the text. And the central metaphors tend to be deployed so frequently and predict­ ably that they lose their suggestiveness and resonance. After the thirtieth or so appearance of ‘ardour’ or ‘ardent’, for example, what reader remem­ bers, however subliminally, that there is fire at the root of the words? Other examples of disunity in the novel include those features of the text that serve one of the novel’s diverse purposes but not others. Much of the material that is excellently deployed for the purpose of filling in the picture of provincial life is to a greater or lesser extent inert when it is looked at from the point of view of theme or idea. In other places there is too much of a good thing, too many divergent points of interest. Take, for example, the Laure episode in chapter 15, which calls attention to a key aspect of Lydgate’s character by revealing that before he came to Middlemarch his passionate nature had led him to make a serious misjudgement concerning the nature of women and that he had had first­ hand experience of the fact that beautiful women who look as if they need the protection and support of a man can in fact be dangerous. Confusion is created because the three-page episode calls too much attention to itself and is too full of suggestive detail with divergent implications. There is the too striking juxtaposition of Lydgate one night leaving the frogs and rabbits used in his ‘galvanic experiments’ to go to the theatre at the Porte Saint Martin because of the electric effect on him of an actress ‘with dark eyes, a Greek profile, and rounded majestic form’. There is the chilling nonchalance of Laure (the actress) who coolly explains that she meant to kill her husband - ‘he wearied me; he was too fond’ - and who dismisses Lydgate by observing: ‘You are a good young man. But I do not like husbands. I will never have another.’ For this Laure has received from some feminist critics a quite disproportionate amount of attention and admiration. One is also distracted by the fact that the melodrama during which she kills her husband is part of an episode which is itself stagey - an implausible and sensationalistic vignette out of keeping with its realistic

The Parts and the Whole

131

context. (To realise this one has only to imagine Laure as an English actress whom Lydgate tracks down in Birmingham or Liverpool instead of Avignon.) Finally, and most important, there is the confusion created by the episode’s effect on the reader’s subsequent reaction to Lydgate’s disastrous marriage and harsh fate. The Laure episode encourages the reader to feel that what happens to Lydgate is his own fault. Through his experience in France he had been forewarned about women like Laure and when he made the same mistake a second time he could be said to deserve what he got. A judgement along these lines would help a reader accept rather than criticise the iron law that one’s good depends on the quality and breadth of one’s emotion, which results in treasure for Ladislaw and the black spot for Lydgate. But it would do so at the heavy cost of increasing the distance between the reader and Lydgate, thereby lessening the intensity of one’s sympathetic involvement in his unfolding fate and diluting an affective experience that the narrator believes is comparable to that of traditional tragedy. Most of the principal discontinuities in the text of Middlemarch have been identified and discussed under different headings in earlier chapters: Fred Vincy, whose story sometimes gives the reader the sense of having been transported from Loamshire to Trollope’s Barsetshire; the ‘loud red figure’ of Raffles, the Doppelganger of Bulstrode; the ethereal Ladislaw, who never takes on flesh as do the other major characters; the rosy lens through which the gentry is viewed; and so on. Most important, there are the contrasting studies of Dorothea and Lydgate. Certainly their stories connect at many points and certainly there are many telling thematic counterpoints between them. But each figure nevertheless fills his or her own canvas, and if a pictorial analogy is called for it must be that of a diptych (on each panel of which a different representational style is used), not that of the ‘mighty pictorial fusion’ of a sublime Tintoretto. When Lydgate and Rosamond are conversing in the little house he rented for them to be so happy in, one forgets all about Dorothea; when she is meditating in her blue-green boudoir or looking from its window down the avenue of limes, the reader is concentrating solely on Dorothea and her inner life, and not at all on Lydgate and his. In chapter 30, Dorothea implores Lydgate to advise her concerning her husband’s health. For years after he remembers this ‘cry from soul to soul, without other consciousness than their moving with kindred natures in the same embroiled medium, the same troublous fitfully-illuminated life’. One would like to say that Middlemarch gave one the same consciousness of Dorothea and Lydgate as kindred natures moving in the same embroiled medium. But it does not.

132

Middlemarch

Yet no ‘loss of authority’ (James’s phrase) is involved in the incomplete fusion of the novel’s materials. The histories of Dorothea and Lydgate may not be unified in an aesthetically satisfying way, but they none the less convey what James himself called ‘that supreme sense of the vastness and variety of human life... which it belongs only to the greatest novels to produce’. This same sense is further conveyed by the copious circumstantial detail with which Eliot filled her novel. Its purpose, as she explained in a letter, was to provide ‘a sufficiently real back-ground’ for a ‘presentation’ that would ‘lay hold on the emotions as human experience’.16 It was the felt representation of human experience, not the production of exemplary fictional artefacts, that was George Eliot’s goal as an artist. In Middlemarch this goal was only attained at the cost of the novel’s remaining what James quite correctly called an indifferent whole. Since this condition is the unavoidable result of the novel’s historical, philosophical, psychological and moral richness, who would have it otherwise?

CHAPTER 8

Critical History S ig n s are sm a ll m easurable things, b u t in terp reta tio n s are illim itable. M id d lem a rch , c h .3

Anthony Trollope’s autobiography, published in 1883, three years after George Eliot’s death, included a chapter ‘On English Novelists of the Present Day’. Trollope did not hesitate to rank Thackeray as the first of his contemporaries. Eliot was placed second and Dickens, ‘the most popular novelist of my time’, came third. Thackeray’s pre-eminent ranking would not have been considered unusual if it had been made a quarter of a century earlier. George Eliot, for example, had said in 1857 that she regarded him, ‘as I suppose the majority of people with any intellect do, on the whole the most powerful of living novelists’.1 But that was at the beginning of her own career as a novelist. By the time Trollope came to do his sorting out he noted that ‘at the present moment’ it was George Eliot who was ‘the first of English novelists’. He nevertheless ranked her second and gave the following reasons: the nature of her intellect is very far removed indeed from that which is common to the tellers of stories. Her imagination is no doubt strong, but it acts in analysing rather than in creating. Everything that comes before her is pulled to pieces so that the inside of it shall be seen, and be seen if possible by her readers as clearly as by herself. This searching analysis is carried so far that, in studying her latter writings, one feels oneself to be in company with some philosopher rather than with a novelist. I doubt whether any young person can read with pleasure either Felix Holt, Middlemarch, or Daniel Deronda. I know that they are very difficult to many that are not young. Her personifications of character have been singularly terse and graphic, and from them has come her great hold on the public, though by no means the greatest effect which she has produced. The lessons which she teaches remain, though it is not for the sake of the lessons that her pages are read. Seth Bede, Adam Bede, Maggie and Tom Tulliver, old Silas Marner, and much above all, Tito, in Romola, are characters which, when once known, can never be forgotten. I

134

Middlemarch

cannot say quite so much for any of those in her later works, because in them the philosopher so greatly overtops the portrait-painter, that, in the dissection of the mind, the outward signs seem to have been forgotten ... It is not from decadence that we do not have another Mrs Poyser, but because the author soars to things which seem to her to be higher than Mrs Poyser. It is, I think, the defect of George Eliot that she struggles too hard to do work that shall be excellent. She lacks ease. Latterly the signs of this have been conspicuous in her style, which has always been and is singularly correct, but which has become occasionally obscure from her too great desire to be pungent. It is impossible not to feel the struggle, and that feeling begets a flavour of affectation.2 Trollope was not alone in recognising that at the time of her death Eliot was regarded as the first of English novelists, nor in drawing a distinction between the early and later work and preferring the former. Leslie Stephen made the same points in the obituary article in the Comhill in 1881. No one, Stephen felt sure, would disagree with his saying ‘that the work of her first period, the Scenes of Clerical Life, Adam Bede, Silas Marner, and The Mill on the Floss, have the unmistakable mark of high genius’. But when in her later period Eliot returned to the Midland settings of her earlier work she did not regain the old magic. Middlemarch is undoubtedly a powerful book, but to many readers it is a rather painful book, and it can hardly be called a charming book to any one. The light of common day has most unmistakably superseded the indescribable glow which illuminated the earlier writings ... nobody can read [Middlemarch] without the sense of having been in contact with a comprehensive and vigorous intellect, with high feeling and keen powers of observation. Only one cannot help regretting the loss of that early charm. In reading Adam Bede, we feel first the magic, and afterwards we recognise the power which it implies. But in Middlemarch we feel the power, but we ask in vain for the charm. Some such change passes over any great mind which goes through a genuine process of development. It is not surprising that the reflective powers should become more predominant in later years; that reasoning should to some extent take the place of intuitive perception; and that experience of life should give a sterner and sadder tone to the implied criticism of human nature. We are prepared to find less spontaneity, less freshness of interest in the little incidents of life, and we are not surprised that a mind so reflective and

Critical History

135

richly stored should try to get beyond the charmed circle of its early successes, and to give us a picture of wider and less picturesque aspects of human life. But this does not seem to account sufficiently for the presence of something jarring and depressing in the later work.3 The same qualitative distinction between Eliot’s early and later work was commonly made in the decades following her death. There is a certain irony here, for while the high regard in which Eliot’s novels were held during her life had reached its zenith with the publication of Middlemarch, the same novel, differently perceived and coupled with Romola and Daniel Deronda, contributed to the marked downswing in her posthumous reputation. So did the publication in 1885 of the three volumes of John Walter Cross’s official biography, George Eliot's Life as Related in Her Letters and Journals. Cross was Eliot’s second husband and had known her only during the last decade of her life - her sibylline years. Just as a decade later Hallam Tennyson would preseht a marmoreal image of Victoria’s Laureate in his two-volume Memoir, so Cross offered a sombre, idealised portrait of a sententious moralist. For Gladstone, it was ‘not a Life at all’, but ‘a Reticence in three volumes’. To William Hale White (‘Mark Rutherford’), who had worked with Eliot at Chapman’s for two years in the early 1850s and lived in the same house in the Strand, Cross’s portrait was a serious distortion of the young woman he had known: To put it very briefly, I think he has made her too ‘respectable’. She was really one of the most sceptical, unusual creatures I ever knew, and it was this side of her character which to me was the most attractive... I can see her now, with her hair over her shoulders, the easy chair half sideways to the fire, her feet over the arms, and a proof in her hands, in that dark room at the back of No. 142, and I confess I hardly recognize her in the pages of Mr. Cross’s - on many accounts - most interesting volumes. I do hope that in some future edition, or in some future work the salt and spice will be restored to the records of George Eliot’s entirely unconventional life. As the matter now stands she has not had full justice done to her, and she has been removed from the class - the great and noble church, if I may so call it - of the Insurgents, to one more genteel, but certainly not so interesting.4 The influence of Cross’s life, however, should not be overrated. The literary history of the last decades of the nineteenth century is to a considerable degree the story of the negative reaction of a younger

136

Middlemarch

generation to their high Victorian forebears, and even without an official biography it was inevitable that Eliot’s reputation, together with the esteem in which Middlemarch was held by her contemporaries, would decline as Victoria’s long reign entered its closing phase. The handwriting was on the wall as early as 1873 when the young Samuel Butler told Miss Savage: ‘I am reading Middlemarch and have got through two-thirds. I call it bad and not interesting: there is no sweetness in the whole book, and, though it is stuffed full of epigrams, one feels that they are lugged in to show the writer off. The book seems to me to be a long-winded piece of studied brag, clever enough I daresay, but to me at any rate singularly unattractive.’5 During the next three decades literary men seemed to go out of their way to give assurances that Eliot was not a novelist worth reading. In one of his earliest surviving letters, for example, William Butler Yeats explained why he would not even attempt Middlemarch. Having read four of Eliot’s books (Silas Marner, Romola, The Spanish Gypsy, and a volume of selections) he had determined not to read another. His seven reasons included these: ‘She understands only the conscious nature of man. His intellect, his morals, - she knows nothing of the dim unconscious nature, the world of instinct’; ‘Her beloved analysis is a scrofula of literature. All the greatest books of the world are synthetic, homeric’; ‘She has morals but no religion. If she had more religion she would have less morals’; ‘She is too reasonable. I hate reasonable people.’6 There was very little on which Yeats and George Bernard Shaw agreed, but a letter written in 1899 shows that (for quite different reasons) Shaw was equally certain that Eliot had little to offer. Her gift was to make ‘pictures of English life in the Midlands’. This gift had been ‘paralyzed by the fatalism which was the intellectually morallysnobbishly correct thing among advanced people in her day’. Decades later, Shaw returned to the subject in a postscript to Back to Methuselah: George Eliot ... who, incredible as it now seems, was during my boyhood ranked in literature as England’s greatest mind, was broken by the fatalism that ensued when she discarded God. In her most famous novel Middlemarch, which I read in my teens and almost venerated, there is not a ray of hope: the characters have no more volition than billiard balls: they are moved only by circumstances and heredity. ‘As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods: they kill us for their sport’ was Shakespeare’s anticipation of George Eliot.7 It was Eliot’s moralising rather than her fatalism which set William Ernest Henley’s teeth on edge: ‘It was thought that with George Eliot the

Critical History

137

Novel-with-a-Purpose had really come to be an adequate instrument for the regeneration of humanity. It was understood that Passion only survived to point a moral or provide the materials of an awful tale, while Duty, Kinship, Faith were so far paramount as to govern Destiny and mould the world.’8 Yet another cocky animadversion came from George Moore. In the first edition of his breezy autobiographical memoir, Confessions of a Young Man (1888), Moore recalled that as a ‘really young’ man he had ‘hungered after great truths: Middlemarch, Adam Bede, The Rise and Fall of Rationalism, The History of Civilisation, were momentous events in my life’. He also had flattering things to say about Eliot’s novels in comparison with Hardy’s. Moore, however, always knew which way the winds of literary fashion were blowing. When he came to write a preface to the revised 1904 edition of his Confessions he observed that he would have had ‘nothing to regret, nothing to withdraw’, were it not ‘for a silly phrase about George Eliot, who surely was no more than one of those dull clever people, unlit by any ray of genius’9. There was a comparable ebbing of Eliot’s reputation among critics. In his Corrected Impressions (1895), George Saintsbury identified The Mill on the Floss as Eliot’s best novel; Felix Holt and Middlemarch were ‘elaborate studies of what seemed to the author to be modern characters and society - studies of immense effort and erudition not unenlightened by humour, but on the whole dead’.10 And in his Short History of English Literature, which first appeared in 1898 and was often reprinted during the next three decades, Saintsbury gave Eliot only two paragraphs. He did, however, observe that her present reputation was too low and thought that it was ‘probable that her four first books in fiction, with passages in all her later, will gradually recover for her, and leave her safely established in, a high position among the second class of English novelists, those who have rather observed than created, rather unlocked a hoard of experience than developed a structure of imagination, who have no very good or attractive style, but write clearly and with knowledge’.11 In his Makers of English Fiction (1905), W. J. Dawson endorsed the view that after Eliot’s first four works of fiction there was a steep decline: ‘Romola marks her decadence as an artist, and betrays exhaustion. In Middlemarch this decadence is still more pronounced, and it is complete in the utterly tedious Daniel Deronda. The reason for this decadence is plain ... George Eliot took herself too seriously as a teacher to maintain for any long period the true freshness and spontaneity of the artist.’12 It is true that other commentators were more positive and more insightful. In his Victorian Prose Masters (1901), W. C. Brownell began by trying to account for ‘one of the most curious of current literary

138

Middlemarch

phenomena’: the neglect into which ‘so little negligible a writer ... has indubitably fallen’. Middlemarch was, after all, a novel ‘anyone can praise’. In fact, it was ‘probably the “favourite novel” of most “intellectual” readers among us - at least those who are old enough to remember its serial appearance’. The reason seemed to be that, while Eliot stood ‘at the head of the psychological novelists’, the novelty of the psychological form had worn off, revealing her limitations and defects. Her intellectual preoccupations were ‘fatal to action’. Very little happened in her novels, certainly less ‘than in the world of any other writer of fiction of the first rank’. Her characters tended to be products of intellect, not of imagination, ‘the result of the travail of the mind, the incarnation of an idea, not the image of a vision’. They consequently had less vitality and less reality than they would otherwise have had. As for her style, one spoke of it ‘as of the snakes of Ireland. She has no style ... No one will ever read her for the sensuous pleasure of the process.’13 Eliot’s intellectual preoccupations were also seen as a limitation by two other sympathetic commentators, both of whom felt that Middlemarch somehow fell short of real greatness. For Leslie Stephen, whose English Men of Letters volume on Eliot came out in 1902, the reason was 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.14 The same note was later struck by Oliver Elton in his Survey of English Literature, 1830-1880 (1920). For Elton the novel was ‘almost one of the great novels of the language. A little more ease and play and simplicity, a little less of the anxious idealism which ends in going beyond nature, and it might have been one of the greatest... There is no plan, but there is no confusion ... Middlemarch is a precious document for the provincial life of that time, vaguely astir with ideas, but promptly sinking back into its beehive routine.’15 In 1922, Edmund Gosse published a collection of Aspects and

Critical History

139

Impressions. The first was of George Eliot and may be regarded as the swansong of the turn-of-the-century depreciations of her work. Gosse began less than gallantly by recalling the glimpses he had caught of the novelist during the late 1870s: ‘a large, thickset sybil [sic], dreamy and immobile, whose massive features, somewhat grim when seen in profile, were incongruously bordered’ by a fashionable Parisian hat, a contrast that had ‘something pathetic and provincial about it’. He went on to assert that Eliot’s fame during the last decades of her life had been ‘a solemn ... portentous thing ... supported by the serious thinkers of the day, by the people who despised mere novels, but regarded her writings as contributions to philosophical literature’. Gosse’s contemporaries, however, were ‘sheep that look up to George Eliot and are not fed by her ponderous moral aphorisms and didactic ethical influence’. The predictable discrimination between the early and the later novels was made: ‘her failure ... began when she turned from passive acts of memory to a strenuous exercise of intellect’. As for Middlemarch, it was constructed with unfailing power, and the picture of commonplace English country life which it gives is vivacious after a mechanical fashion, but all the charm of the early stories has evaporated, and has left behind it merely a residuum of unimaginative satire. The novel is a very remarkable instance of elaborate mental resources misapplied, and genius revolving, with tremendous machinery, like some great water-wheel, while no water is flowing underneath it.16 It was not until 1919, the centenary of her birth, that the qualitative distinction between George Eliot’s early novels and her later ones, and the consequent devaluation of Middlemarch, which had been reiterated by critics ever since Leslie Stephen’s obituary article, was finally challenged by a critic of distinction and authority. Virginia Woolf, the daughter of Leslie Stephen, had agreed to do a centenary article on George Eliot for The Times Literary Supplement and for that purpose had undertaken a reading of all the novels. The doyenne of Bloomsbury was surprised by what she found. ‘Do you ever read George Eliot?’ she asked a correspondent in October. ‘Whatever one may say about the Victorians, there’s no doubt they had twice our - not exactly brains - perhaps hearts. I don’t know quite what it is; but I’m a good deal impressed.’ In her splendid essay, which appeared the following month, Virginia Woolf had high praise for the early novels: ‘Over them all broods a certain romance, the only romance that George Eliot allowed herself - the romance of the past. These books are astonishingly readable and have no trace of

140

Middlemarch

pomposity or pretense.’ But, while the early books had a ‘ruddy light’, the later ones had a ‘searching power and reflective richness’: to the reader who holds a large stretch of her early work in view it will become obvious that the mist of recollection gradually withdraws. It is not that her power diminishes, for, to our thinking, it is at its highest in the mature Middlemarch, the magnificent book which with all its imperfections is one of the few English novels written for grown-up people.17 Despite this encomium, Eliot’s reputation, and that of her principal novel, remained in eclipse during the 1920s and 1930s. As David Cecil observed in his 1934 study, Early Victorian Novelists: Essays in Revaluation: she is not admired so much as Charlotte Bronte; she is not even admired so much as Trollope. In spite of the variety of her talents and the width of her scope, in spite of the fact that she is the only novelist of her time who writes on the scale of the great continental novelists, the only novelist who holds the same conception of her art which is held to­ day, her reputation has sustained a more catastrophic slump than that of any of her contemporaries. It is not just that she is not read, that her books stand on the shelves unopened. If people do read her they do not enjoy her. It certainly is odd. The reason for this oddity was said to be Eliot’s too ‘exclusively moral point of view’, which made her ‘confront human nature a little like a schoolteacher; kindly but just, calm but censorious... Victorian ethical rationalism is the least inspiriting of creeds.’ As this suggests, Cecil’s discussion of Eliot was not only a diagnosis of her diminished reputation; it was also a symptom of it. Cecil did praise Middlemarch warmly: it was George Eliot’s ‘masterpiece’ and had the biggest subject of any English classical novel. Like Tolstoy in War and Peace, she shows us the cosmic process, not just in a single drama but in several; not only in an individual but in a whole society. The principles of moral strength and weakness which in her view are the determining forces of life, exhibit themselves at their work in the lives of four diverse and typical representatives of the human race. None the less, he did not think that Eliot’s ‘loss of reputation was wholly undeserved’:

Critical History

141

Even if we do strain ourselves to acquiesce in her point of view, we do not feel her the supreme novelist that her contemporaries did. Her books never give us that intense unalloyed pleasure we get from the greatest masters. Though like Tolstoy she is an interesting critic of life, though she constructs well like Jane Austen, though like Dickens she creates a world, yet when we set her achievement in any of these lines beside those of these famous competitors, we feel something lacking. Somehow we are dissatisfied. It is easy to see why she fails to stand a comparison with Tolstoy. Her vision of life is smaller. She knows about life in provincial nineteenthcentury England, life in Middlemarch, the life of merchants and doctors and squires and humble clergymen and small town politicians: she does not know about the savage or sophisticated, about artists and adventurers and the world of fashion and affairs. Even in Middlemarch, there are certain things she does not see. Her assiduously intellectual view made her oblivious of the irrational instinctive aspects of human nature. She can enter into its deliberate purposes and its conscientious scruples, but not into its caprices, its passions, its mysticism ... Moreover, like all Victorian rationalists, she is a Philistine. She pays lip-service to art, but like Dorothea Brooke confronted with the statues of the Vatican, she does not really see why people set such a value on it. Constructed within so confined an area of vision, it is inevitable that her criticism of life is inadequate. Compared to Tolstoy’s it seems petty, drab, provincial. Middlemarch may be the nearest English equivalent to War and Peace, but it is a provincial sort of War and Peace.18 It was not until after the Second World War that Eliot’s reputation, and that of Middlemarch, began to rise to its present level. The upswing was part of a general return to favour of the Victorians. In 1948, Humphry House cited the ‘present popularity’ of George Eliot as one of a number of examples of renewed interest in the period. One reason for the revival was said to be that information about the lives of the ‘thinkers, artists, poets, novelists, architects, churchmen’ of the period was finally becoming available. Such knowledge was ‘necessary for understanding a whole personality; and with the Victorians ... the whole personality does need understanding before the work can be properly understood’.19 In the case of George Eliot, however, substantial new information about the person behind the work only became available in 1954-5 with the publication of seven volumes of Gordon S. Haight’s monumental edition of The George Eliot Letters.

142

Middlemarch

A more specialised reason for the increased interest in Eliot and her novels was the recognition of their usefulness to historians, both historians of ideas and social historians. In his Nineteenth-Century Studies: Coleridge to Matthew Arnold (1949), Basil Willey included two substantial chapters on Eliot’s intellectual development. The first began with a sketch of her exemplary status: Probably no English writer of the time, and certainly no novelist, more fully epitomizes the century; her development is a paradigm, her intellectual biography a graph, of its most decided trend. Starting from evangelical Christianity, the curve passes through doubt to a reinterpreted Christ and a religion of humanity: beginning with God, it ends in Duty. George Eliot’s representative quality is due largely to her unique position, amongst imaginative writers, as a focus for the best (and the worst) that was being said and thought in her time, in Europe as well as at home. No one was more thoroughly abreast of the newest thought, the latest French or German theory, the last interpretations of dogma, the most up-to-date results in anthropology, medicine, biology, or sociology.20 On the social history side, Asa Briggs’s important article on ‘Middlemarch and the doctors’ (1948) argued that there were cogent reasons for the serious examination of Eliot’s novel by students of nineteenth-century society. Eliot had ‘the gifts of an historian. Her return to sources was followed by a faithful reconstruction.’ For a proper understanding of the ‘vital forces in the making of Victorian society ... the historian will find George Eliot’s novels of far more value than many other well-established sources’. The treatment of ‘the effect of our “imperfect social state” on young and noble impulses makes Middlemarch the great novel that it is’; ‘in exploring Middlemarch, we [social historians] shall be learning how to explore England as well’.21 with V. S. Pritchett’s essay on George Eliot in The Living Novel (1946). For Pritchett, ‘no Victorian novel approaches Middlemarch in its width of reference, its intellectual power, or the imperturbable spaciousness of its narrative’. Its great scenes were ‘exquisite, living transpositions of real moral dilemmas ... there is a humane breadth and resolution in this novel which offers neither hope nor despair to mankind, but simply the necessity of fashioning the moral life’.22 A more decisive critical event was the publication in 1948 of F. R. Leavis’s famous revaluation, The Great Tradition, which identified Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James, Joseph Conrad and D. H. Lawrence as the great novelists in English. A

Critical History

143

good part of Leavis’s section on George Eliot was devoted to Middlemarch. The keynote was Eliot’s ‘genius’ as manifested ‘in a profound analysis of the individual’. The treatment of Casaubon, for example, was ‘wholly strong’ and ‘could have been done only by someone who knew the intellectual life from the inside’. The same was true of the treatment of Lydgate, another ‘complete success’. In praising the character of Rosamond, it was ‘tribute enough to George Eliot to say that the destructive and demoralizing power of [her] triviality wouldn’t have seemed so appalling to us if there had been any animus in the presentment’. As for Bulstrode, his treatment involved ‘some of the finest analysis any novel can show; [it] is a creative process; it is penetrating imagination, masterly and vivid in understanding, bringing the concrete before us in all its reality’. But Leavis’s panegyric ceased abruptly when he turned to the treatment of Dorothea Brooke, the ‘weakness’ in Middlemarch. The problem was a certain residual immaturity in George Eliot that led to her ‘unqualified self-identification’ with her heroine, who was ‘a product of George Eliot’s own “soul-hunger” - another day­ dream ideal self. This complaisant indulgence was ‘disconcerting in the extreme. We have an alternation between the poised impersonal insight of a finely tempered wisdom and something like the emotional confusions and self-importances of adolescence.’23 In his 1951 Introduction to the English Novel, Arnold Kettle disagreed with Leavis’s analysis: ‘in spite of all our reservations it is Dorothea who, of all the characters in the novel, most deeply captures our imagination’. The reason was that it is she ‘alone who, with Ladislaw, successfully rebels against the Middlemarch values’. The remark indicates Kettle’s Marxist perspective and points towards his principal reservation about Middlemarch: ‘though in some respects the most impressive novel in our language and one which it is not ridiculous to compare with the novels of Tolstoy, [it] is not in any sense a revolutionary work’. There was in addition ‘a contradiction at the heart of Middlemarch, a contradiction between the success of the parts and the relative failure of the whole ... The total effect is immensely impressive but not immensely compelling. Our consciousness is modified and enriched but not much changed.’ Middlemarch ultimately lacked ‘the most important thing of all, that final vibrant intensity of the living organism’. This deficiency was said to have the same root as the novel’s lack of a revolutionary dimension: in Eliot’s ‘philosophy, her consciously formulated outlook, there is no place for the inner contradiction’. She had ‘an absorbing sense of the power of society but very little sense of the way it changes. Hence her moral attitudes, like her social vision, tend to be static.’ Eliot’s ‘high-minded moral

144

Middlemarch

seriousness ... does have an unfortunate effect on the novel, not because it is moral or serious, but because it is mechanistic and undialectical’.24 Kettle’s provocative reading appeared three years after Joan Bennett’s George Eliot: Her Mind and Her Art (1948). Given the priorities indicated in the subtitle, it was not surprising to find her claiming that Eliot’s later works appealed to ‘the modern reader’ more than the early ones, nor to find her endorsing the ‘opinion ... shared by most modern critics’: that Middlemarch was the author’s masterpiece. But Joan Bennett became vaguely assertive when she attempted to explain why the novel was Eliot’s ‘supreme achievement’: while its characters are at least as various and as deeply studied as any she has created, they are more perfectly combined into a single whole than those in any other of her novels. Nothing here is irrelevant or over-elaborated. Each character reveals itself in the sequence of events with such consistency with its own nature as wins the reader’s complete assent. The imagination of the author seems to be wholly engaged in discovering what each one would be doing or saying in the special circumstances of each scene or episode. And yet every one of them has a function in the whole design.25 Walter Allen was altogether more professional, and more telling, in his judgement of Middlemarch in his excellent The English Novel: A Short Critical History (1954), though the moral gymnasium reference (borrowed from W. E. Henley) does smack of the genteel impressionism of David Cecil: George Eliot is seen at her greatest in Middlemarch. Not all her qualities are manifest in it; it lacks the charm of the first part of The Mill on the Floss and Silas Mamer, and the humour is much more severely controlled. But it expresses, as the earlier books do not, a complete experience of life, experience in the widest sense, imaginative and intellectual alike. The view of life expressed is a sombre one, and one that cannot be wholly accepted: much of value is lost if, as George Eliot seems to conceive it, life is seen as primarily a gymnasium for the exercise of the moral faculties. Perhaps this is not much more than to say that George Eliot has to pay the price of her earnestness. One says it is excessive, yet, fused with her remarkable imagination and her intellectual power, it made her the great novelist she is. It meant that she had a comprehensive view of life, a view that could take in every variety of experience that she knew.

Critical History

145

And, like an ardently held religious belief, it made every action of her characters important. Agnostic though she was, it isn’t going too far to say that in this sense she is a religious novelist, as Bunyan is, or Mauriac today. In consequence, the characters themselves achieve a new importance in her novels, almost as though their eternal well-being is constantly in the balance. And one of the signs of this new importance of the characters is her relentless and scrupulous analysis of them: when we meet Dorothea, Casaubon, and Lydgate we realize that it is the very thoroughness and intensity of her analysis that creates them. This is something new in English fiction, which later novelists, such as Gissing and Henry James, Conrad and Lawrence, were to take up. It is indeed precisely here that her essential modernity lies.26 At the end of the 1950s two complementary studies of George Eliot’s art appeared: Barbara Hardy’s The Novels of George Eliot: A Study in Form (1959) and W. J. Harvey’s The Art of George Eliot (1961). The aim of both was to make a case for seeing Eliot as a ‘great formal artist’. As Barbara Hardy explained in her introduction, modernist notions of narrative form derived from the dicta and examples of Flaubert and Henry James (which emphasised ‘showing’ as opposed to ‘telling’). This aesthetic had been in the ascendant for the past thirty years; Percy Lubbock’s influential The Craft of Fiction (1921), for example, did not even mention George Eliot. The time had come to show that Eliot was not a writer of what Henry James called ‘large loose baggy monsters’, but a sophisticated and accomplished artist whose composition, for example, ‘is usually as complex and as subtle as the composition of Henry James or Proust or Joyce, but it is very much less conspicuous because of the engrossing realistic interest of her human and social delineation’.27 Hardy’s and Harvey’s influential books, both of which had much to say about Middlemarch, were part of a new climate of critical opinion that regarded the novel not only as George Eliot’s masterpiece, but also as more than any other text the great English novel. In 1958, for example, Angus Wilson began an important analysis of the state of postwar English fiction by observing: if English critics of the novel and English novelists to-day were asked to list in order of excellence the English novels of the past, I imagine that, although Middlemarch might not appear at the top of every list, it would secure a high place in all entries. Thirty years ago, of course, it might well have been entirely omitted ... there is a quality about Middlemarch which permits it alone of great English novels to pass all but very few

146

Middlemarch

contemporary tests, and this despite its obvious and widely recognized weaknesses.28 Four years later, David Daiches spoke of George Eliot as ‘one of the very greatest of English novelists and Middlemarch in particular as one of the supreme classics of European fiction’.29 And, in 1967, Barbara Hardy echoed Angus Wilson when she observed in the introduction to a collection of essays on the novel: ‘if a poll were held for the greatest English novel there would probably be more votes for Middlemarch than for any other work’. One of her contributors reflected that given ‘our present-day enthusiasm for the work[,] it is not without reason that we are reproached, as a modern critic has said, for thinking that every novel would be Middlemarch if it could’.30 And, in 1970, Raymond Williams could find little to add to the chorus of critical praise: ‘Middlemarch as a whole is a superb presentation, a superb analysis ... As a way of seeing, it is so powerfully composed that it creates its own conditions, enacts and re-enacts its own kind of achievement. It has been praised so often in just that sense that I don’t need to add any other tributary adjectives.’31 Barbara Hardy’s collection may be taken to mark the high point of the modern reputation of Middlemarch. But the novel still continues to have exalted and exemplary status. As David Lodge remarked in 1981: Middlemarch has achieved a unique status as both paradigm and paragon in discussion of the novel as a literary form. If a teacher or critic wishes to cite a representative example of the nineteenth-century English novel at its best, the chances are that it will be Middlemarch. Indeed it is scarcely an exaggeration to say that, for many critics, Middlemarch is the only truly representative, truly great Victorian novel - all other candidates, including the rest of George Eliot’s fiction, being either too idiosyncratic or too flawed.32 Lodge made these observations in an essay in which he took issue with Colin MacCabe’s description of the novel (in his James Joyce and the Revolution of the Word, 1978) as a ‘classic realist text’ which purports to represent experience through language. In such a text there is ‘a specific hierarchy of discourses which places the reader in a position of dominance with regard to the stories and characters’. At the apex of discourses is a narrative ‘meta-language’, which interprets and controls the other discourses, ensures that interpretations are not illimitable, and creates the illusion that it is providing ‘a window on reality’.33 The point of Lodge’s essay was to show that the surface of Middlemarch is a good

Critical History

147

deal less controlled and unproblematic than MacCabe suggested. In his conclusion, in an idiom borrowed from reader-response criticism, Lodge adumbrated another way in which the greatness of Eliot’s novel could be accounted for: ‘it is precisely because the narrator’s discourse is never entirely unambiguous, predictable, and in total interpretative control of the other discourses in Middlemarch that the novel survives, to be read and re-read, without ever being finally closed or exhausted’.34 In recent years Middlemarch has begun to draw the fire of some of the loudest guns on the contemporary critical front: feminist criticism on the one hand; post-structuralist and deconstructive criticism on the other. Since neither battery has ceased fire it would be premature to attempt an assessment of the damage. But the pyrotechnics have been dazzling and in their light long-familiar features of Eliot’s novel have looked very different. I shall take the feminist criticism first. In her provocative 1970 study, Sexual Politics, Kate Millett had dismissed George Eliot as one who had lived the feminist revolution but had not written about it: ‘Dorothea’s predicament in Middlemarch is an eloquent plea that a fine mind be allowed an occupation; but it goes no further than petition. She married Will Ladislaw and can expect no more of life than the discovery of a good companion whom she can serve as secretary.’35Two years later, in a critical cri de coeur, Lee R. Edwards announced that Eliot’s novel ‘can no longer be one of the books of my life’. When she had read the novel as an adolescent she had thought its ending offered the hopeful possibility of ‘combining marriage with intellectual aspiration’. But she subsequently came to see matters in a different light: The objection is not that Dorothea should have married Will but that she should have married anybody at all, that she should ultimately be denied the opportunity given Will to find her own paths and forge her energies into some new mold ... We could perhaps have had this vision [of a new and bigger world] if the author had held the mirror to reflect not only the world both she and Dorothea knew and left behind but also that one she forced into existence when she stopped being Mary Ann Evans and became George Eliot instead. In Middlemarch, however, George Eliot refuses this option and accepts a safety not entirely celebrated but rather tinged with resignation, ambivalently regarded.36 In 1976, in an article entitled ‘Why feminist critics are angry with George Eliot’, Zelda Austen cast a cool eye on the complaints of Millett and Edwards. The source of their anger was obvious: Eliot’s ‘failure to allow

148

Middlemarch

her heroines any happy fulfillment other than marriage’ - for example, the freedom that she had herself achieved. When Eliot depicted ‘the misery of the unconventional heroine and the placidity of conventional wives and mothers, she was also sanctioning the norm and making it normative’. Nevertheless, ‘to reject Middlemarch out of hand because it does not portray the possibility of an independent life for women is absurd’. The feminist critics ‘who reject George Eliot have defined liberation for women in terms of intellectual and economic independence - in other words separate self-fulfillment’. But this was too limited a vision in itself as well as being foreign to Eliot’s view of human existence.37 As these examples suggest, for some feminist commentators Middlemarch can be more a pretext for the airing of their own passionately intense convictions and aspirations than a text to be rigorously analysed from a fresh methodological perspective. This is not true of the copious interpretative discourse of Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, whose enormous study, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (1979), includes an extremely fresh and interesting reading of Middlemarch. For Gilbert and Gubar, the novel is ‘fundamentally concerned with the potential for violence in the two conflicting sides of [George Eliot] that she identifies as the masculine mind and the feminine h e a rt... the novel is centrally concerned with the tragic complicity and resulting violence of men and women inhabiting a culture defined as masculine’. Dorothea Brooke’s first husband was Casaubon, in whom is said to be found a demonstration of ‘the inextricable link between male culture and misogyny’. Similar links are discovered in the other male characters in the novel, even Mr Brooke: ‘with his smattering of unconnected information, his useless classicism, and his misogynistic belief in the biological inferiority of Dorothea’s brain, Jlrooke is a dark parody of Casaubon’. As for Dorothea’s ‘female renunciation’, George Eliot ‘does not countenance [it] because she believes it to be appropriately feminine, but because she is intensely aware of the destructive potential of female rage’. Eliot knew there was ‘bad faith involved in Christian resignation’ and emphasised the point through Bulstrode, who is ‘a demonic parody of Dorothea, one who reveals both the deathly implications and the potential bad faith of this heroine’s saintly renunciation’. As for Rosamond, ‘in spite of the narrator’s condemnation of her narrow narcissism ... it is clear that [she] enacts Dorothea’s silent anger against a marriage of death’. Rosamond is the ‘demonic center’ of Middlemarch and the climax of the novel occurs neither in chapter 80 (Dorothea’s night of sorrow and her morning

Critical History

149

epiphany) nor in chapter 83 (the union of Dorothea and Will). It rather comes in the meeting between Dorothea and Rosamond in chapter 81: this ‘brief moment of sisterhood’ was the showing forth o f‘the heroism of sisterhood within patriarchy’. As for Dorothea’s second husband: Ladislaw was ‘Eliot’s radically anti-patriarchal attempt to create an image of masculinity attractive to women ... in his romance with Dorothea, Eliot substitutes the equality of a brother/sister model for the hierarchical inadequacy of father/daughter relationships’.38 J. Hillis Miller was perhaps the first, and is certainly the best known, critic to analyse Middlemarch from a deconstructive point of view. In his 1974 article ‘Narrative and history’ he began by noting the ‘curious tradition, present in the middle-class novel from its sixteenth-century beginnings on, whereby a work of fiction is conventionally presented not as a work of fiction but as some other form of language’. The most common displacement was for the novelist to present his work as a form of history. By doing so he avoided the connotations of gratuitousness and mendacity involved in the word ‘fiction’ and at the same time affirmed ‘that verisimilitude, that solid basis in pre-existing fact which is associated with the idea of history’. Middlemarch was solidly within this tradition ‘and in fact might be taken as the English masterpiece’ of the genre of realistic fiction. But within the realistic tradition there was an inherent tendency for the text to undermine its own ground and deconstruct the very assumptions on which it was built. Middlemarch itself was an example: ‘for those who have eyes to see it’, the novel ‘pulls the rug out from under itself and... deprives itself of its ground in history by demonstrating that ground to be a fiction too’. Middlemarch ‘elaborately deconstructed]’ not only the belief that history is ‘progressive, teleological’, but also the notion that ‘a human life gradually reveals its destined meaning’, and even the concept of the work of art as ‘an organic unity’.39 In a second article, which studies the novel’s metaphors and imagery, Miller found further evidence of subsidence: ‘a pervasive figure for the human situation in Middlemarch is that of the seer who must try to identify clearly what is present before him. This metaphor contaminates the apparently clear-cut objectivist implications of the metaphor of the flowing web.’ So does ‘the metaphor of vision’. And the pluralist and relativist view of signs and interpretation, which runs ‘like Ariadne’s thread through the labyrinthine verbal complexity’ of Middlemarch, ‘contaminates and ultimately subverts the optical model in the same way that the optical model contaminates and makes more problematic the images of the web or of the current’.40 One might observe of the dazzling discourse of Miller and the authors

150

Middlemarch

of The Madwoman in the Attic that it is excessively engage and ideological, too concerned with its own premisses, methods and self-delighting excruciations, and insufficiently disinterested in Eliot’s novel. But to suggest this is of course to reveal something of my own critical premisses and predispositions, and who is to say that in its more mild-mannered way my own discourse is not as parti pris as more aggressive and revisionist discourses? There are, however, two points on which all commentators can surely agree. One is the central and exemplary status of Middlemarch in literary history - both the history of the novel and the history of nineteenth-century English literature. It is as big a literary landmark as The Prelude or Madame Bovary, In Memoriam or Ulysses. The other area of unanimous agreement, to which the very diversity of contemporary critical commentary attests, would be the extraordinary richness of George Eliot’s study of the way it was in a part of provincial England in the early nineteenth century.

NOTES CH APTER 1 1 Unsigned review, Galaxy (March 1873); reprinted in David Carroll (ed.), George Eliot: The Critical Heritage , p. 357. (Hereafter cited as CH.) 2 T. H. Johnson (ed.), The Letters of Emily Dickinson (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1958), Vol. 2, p. 506. 3 C H , p. 323. 4 ibid., pp. 461-2. 5 Quoted in W. J. Harvey, ‘Criticism of the novel: contemporary reception’, in Barbara Hardy (ed.), ‘Middlemarch ': Critical Approaches to the Novel , p. 145. 6 F. W. H. Myers, ‘George Eliot’, Essays Classical and M odem (London: Macmillan, 1921), p. 489; Richard Ellmann, ‘Dorothea’s husbands’, in his Golden Codgers: Some Biographical Speculations, pp. 27, 31. 7 Gordon S. Haight (ed.), The George Eliot Letters (London: Oxford University Press/ New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1954-5), Vol. 4, p. 355. (Hereafter cited as Letters.)

8 Letters , Vol. 5, pp. 3, 16. 9 See Jerome Beaty, ‘Middlemarch ' from Notebook to Novel: A Study of George Eliot 's Creative Method , pp. 3, 39. 10 See ‘Appendix: a checklist of George Eliot’s reading January 1868 to December 1871’, in John Clark Pratt and Victor A. Neufeldt (eds), George Eliot's *M iddlemarch' Notebooks: A Transcription , pp. 279-88. 11 ibid., p. xxviii. 12 Letters , Vol. 5, p. 322. 13 ibid., pp. 124, 127. 14 ibid., p. 137. 15 ibid., p. 237. 16 Beaty, ‘Middlemarch* from Notebook to N ovel , pp. 9-11. 17 Anna Theresa Kitchel (ed.), Quarry fo r ‘Middlemarch '. 18 Stanton Millet, ‘The union of “ Miss Brooke” and “Middlemarch” : a study of the manuscript’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology , vol. 79, no. 1 (1980), pp. 33,57. 19 Letters , Vol. 5, pp. 145-6. 20 J. H. Sutherland, Victorian Novelists and Publishers, p. 204. 21 This remark is made about the chapter epigraphs in Eliot’s next novel by one of the speakers in James’s ‘Daniel Deronda: a conversation’, p. 427. 22 ibid. 23 For a different opinion, see David Leon Higdon, ‘George Eliot and the art of the epigraph’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction , vol. 25, no. 2 (1970), pp. 127-51. 24 Letters , Vol. 5, pp. 357, 374. 25 CH , pp. 319, 332. 26 ibid., p. 339. 27 Quoted in Harvey, ‘Criticism of the novel: contemporary reception’, p. 133. 28 CH , p. 313. 29 ibid., pp. 353-9.

CH APTER 2 1 ‘Art and belles lettres’; reprinted in Joseph Wiesenfarth (ed.), George Eliot: A W riter's Notebook 1854-1879 and Uncollected Writings , p. 273.

152

Middlemarch

2 Thomas Pinney (ed.), Essays of George E liot, pp. 304, 318, 319, 310, 323. (Hereafter cited as Essays.) 3 Essays , pp. 366, 367, 371, 385. 4 ibid., pp. 270-1. 5 Letters, Vol. 3, p. 111. 6 ibid., Vol. 1, p. 34. 7 Gordon S. Haight, George Eliot: A Biography , p. 421. 8 ‘[Three Novels]’, Essays, p. 331. 9 See especially David Daiches, George Eliot: ‘Middlemarch ’, pp. 47, 54, 56-7. 10 Letters , Vol. 4, p. 300. 11 Thomas Pinney, ‘More leaves from George Eliot’s notebook’, Huntington Library Q uarterly , vol. 29, no. 4 (1966), p. 360. And see Pinney’s ‘The authority of the past in George Eliot’s novels’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction , vol. 21, no. 2 (1966); reprinted in George R. Creeger (ed.), George Eliot: A Collection o f Critical Essays, p. 49. 12 This summary account draws on John Stuart Mill, Auguste Comte and Positivism (Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan Press, 1961; reprint). 13 See Michael York Mason, ‘Middlemarch and science: problems of life and mind’, Review of English Studies , vol. 22, no. 86 (1971), pp. 154, 157. 14 See Robert A. Greenberg, ‘Plexuses and ganglia: scientific allusions in Middlemarch ’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction , vol. 30, no. 1 (1975), pp. 33-51. 15 Letters , Vol. 4, pp. 287-8. See James F. Scott, ‘George Eliot, Positivism, and the social vision of Middlemarch’, Victorian Studies , vol. 16, no. 1 (1972), pp. 59-76. 16 Basil Willey, Nineteenth-Century Studies: Coleridge to M atthew Arnold , p. 238. 17 Letters , Vol. 1, p. 9. 18 ibid., p. 12. 19 ibid., p. 28. 20 Quoted in Willey, Nineteenth-Century Studies , p. 242. 21 Letters , Vol. 2, p. 82. 22 ibid., Vol. 3, p. 231. 23 ibid., Vol. 6, p. 98. 24 ibid., Vol. 1, p. 162. 25 CH , pp. 318-19. 26 Letters , Vol. 4, pp. 300-1. Eliot made the same point to another correspondent twelve years later: ‘My function is that of the aesthetic , not the doctrinal teacher - the rousing of the nobler emotions, which make mankind desire the social right, not the prescribing of special measures, concerning which the artistic mind, howeverstrongly moved by social sympathy, is often not the best judge. It is one thing to feel keenly for one’s fellow-beings; another to say, “This step, and this alone, will be the best to take for the removal of particular calamities’” (ibid., Vol. 7, p. 44). 27 For a different view, see Joseph Wiesenfarth, ‘M iddlemarch : the language of art’, P M L A , vol. 97, no. 3 (1982), pp. 363-77. 28 See D. A. Miller, N arrative and Its Discontents: Problems of Closure in the Traditional N ovel , pp. 130-5. 29 Review in the Spectator , 8 February 1879; quoted in Jeannette King, Tragedy in the Victorian N ovel: Theory and Practice in the Novels of George Eliot , Thomas H ardy and H enry Jam es, p. 9. My generalisations about common attitudes to modern tragedy in Victorian critics are indebted to King’s opening chapter. 30 George Henry Lewes, ‘Recent tragedies’, Westminster Review, vol. 37 (1842), p. 338.

CHAPTER 3 1 Henry James, P artial Portraits (London: Macmillan, 1888), pp. 116-17. 2 For the identification of Middlemarch as Coventry, see John Prest, The Industrial Revolution in Coventry (London: Oxford University Press, 1960), pp. 143-5. For the

Notes

3

4

5 6 7 8 9

10 11 12 13 14

153

precise dating of the action see Jerome Beaty, ‘History by indirection: the era of Reform in Middlemarch ’, Victorian Studies, vol. 1, no. 2 (1957), pp. 173-9; reprinted in Gordon S. Haight (ed.), A Century of George Eliot Criticism. See Prest, Industrial Revolution in Coventry ; Beaty, ‘History by indirection’; and Asa Briggs, ‘Middlemarch and the doctors’, Cambridge Journal, vol. 1, no. 12 (1948), pp. 749-62. For a more specialised example of scholarly witness to the historical fidelity of Middlemarch , see Elizabeth Jay, The Religion of the Heart: Anglican Evangelicalism in the Nineteenth-Century N ovel (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979). See C. L. Cline, ‘Qualifications of the medical practitioners in M iddlemarch ’, in Clyde de L. Ryals (ed.), Nineteenth-Century Literary Perspectives: Essays in Honor of Lionel Stevenson (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1974), pp. 277-8. J. H. Plumb, The Death of the Past (London: Macmillan, 1964), pp. 105-6. Essays , pp. 446-7. Beaty, ‘History by indirection’, pp. 306-13. Frank Kermode, ‘D. H. Lawrence and the apocalyptic types’, Continuities (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968), pp. 137, 139, 142. For the distinction between uniformitarianism and catastrophism, see Charles Coulston Gillispie, Genesis and Geology: A Study of the Relations of Scientific Thought, N atural Theology, and Social Opinion in Great Britain, 1790-1850 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1951). On the usefulness of the distinction to the study of nineteenth-century literature see A. Dwight Culler, The Poetry of Tennyson (New Haven, Conn./London: Yale University Press, 1977), p. 15. Letters, Vol. 5, p. 168. J. S. Mill, On Liberty, ed. Curran V. Shields (Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobbs-Merrill, 1956), pp. 3, 7, 68, 85, 73, 81. Q. D. Leavis, ‘The symbolic function of the doctor in Victorian novels’, in F. R. Leavis and Q. D. Leavis, Dickens the Novelist (London: Chatto & Windus, 1970), pp. 179-83. Quoted in Pinney, ‘More leaves from George Eliot’s notebook’, pp. 371-2. Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus, ed. Charles Frederick Harrold (New York: Odyssey, 1937), p. 119. In 1855, Eliot observed that ‘there is hardly a superior or active mind of this generation that has not been modified by Carlyle’s writings; there has hardly been an English book written for the last ten or twelve years that would not have been different if Carlyle had not lived. The character of his influence is best seen in the fact that many of the men who have the least agreement with his opinions are those to whom the reading of Sartor Resartus was an epoch in the history of their minds. The extent of his influence may best be seen in the fact that ideas which were startling novelties when he first wrote them are now become common-places’ (Essays, pp. 213-14). On the importance of vocation in Middlemarch see Alan Mintz, George Eliot and the N ovel of Vocation.

15 CH, p. 307. 16 See especially Kathleen Blake, ‘Middlemarch and the Woman Question’, NineteenthCentury Fiction, vol. 31, no. 3 (1976), pp. 285-312.

CH APTER 4 1 J. Hillis Miller, The Form of Victorian Fiction (Notre Dame/London: University of Notre Dame Press, 1968), pp. 63-6. 2 Daiches, George Eliot: ‘Middlemarch ’, pp. 12-13, was the first to apply this useful threefold distinction to the novel. 3 Steven Marcus, ‘Literature and social theory: starting with George Eliot’, in his Representations: Essays on Literature and Society, p. 186. 4 Letters , Vol. 4, p. 97.

154

Middlemarch

5 Quoted in Miriam Allott (ed.). Novelists on the N ovel (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1959), p. 271. 6 James, P artial Portraits , pp. 378-9. 7 Preface to The Golden Bowl', The New York Edition of the Novels and Tales of Henry James (New York: Scribner’s, 1907-9), Vol. 23, pp. vi, v. 8 CH , p. 304. 9 F. R. Leavis, The Great Tradition: George Eliot, Henry James, Joseph Conrad , p. 67. 10 Walter Allen, George Eliot (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1964), pp. 83-4. 11 CH , p. 321. And see Quentin Anderson’s description of ‘the voice of the wise woman’ in the novel; ‘George Eliot in M iddlemarch ’, in Boris Ford (ed.), The Pelican Guide to English Literature, Vol. 6, From Dickens to H ardy, revised edn, pp. 274-93; reprinted in Creeger, George Eliot: A Collection of Critical Essays, pp. 141-60. 12 Isobel Armstrong, ‘M iddlem arch : a note on George Eliot’s wisdom’, in Barbara Hardy (ed.), Critical Essays on George Eliot, pp. 116-32. 13 ibid., pp. 118, 126. 14 Peter Jones, Philosophy and the N ovel (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), p. 27. 15 The quoted phrases are from Culler’s discussion of In Memoriam in his Poetry of Tennyson, pp. 185-6.

C H A PTER 5 1 J. Hiilis Miller, ‘Character in the novel: a real illusion’, in Samuel T. Mintz and others (eds), From Sm ollett to James: Studies in the N ovel and Other Essays Presented to Edgar Johnson (Charlottesville, Va: University Press of Virginia, 1981), pp. 279, 278. 2 CH, p. 358. 3 A. O. J. Cockshut, ‘Middlemarch' , pp. 40-2. 4 Quoted in Rochelle Girson, ‘Asphalt is bitter soil’, Saturday Review, 13 October 1962, p. 20. 5 CH , p. 356. 6 ibid., p. 356. 7 ibid., p. 302. 8 Roy Pascal, The D ual Voice: Free Indirect Speech and Its Functioning in the NineteenthCentury European N ovel (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1977), p. 79. 9 CH, p. 358. 10 David Carroll, ‘Middlemarch and the externality of fact’, in Ian Adam (ed.), This Particular Web: Essays on ‘M iddlem arch ’, p. 82. 11 See Myers, Essays Classical and M odem , p. 495. 12 See Graham Martin, ‘The M ill on the Floss and the unreliable narrator’, in Anne Smith (ed.), George Eliot: Centenary Essays and an Unpublished Fragment, p. 39: ‘Hetty is the character, as most readers now agree, who radically questions the author’s claims to impartiality. What else could account for the judicial savagery of that “rancored poisoned garment” ...’ 13 J. W. Cross, George Eliot's Life as Related in Her Letters and Journals (Edinburgh/ London: Blackwood, 1885), Vol. 3, p. 425.

CH A PTER 6 1 Margaret Doody, ‘George Eliot and the eighteenth-century novel’, in U. C. Knoepflmacher and George Levine (eds), Nineteenth-Century Fiction (special issue: George Eliot, 1880-1980), vol. 35, no. 1 (1980), p. 268. 2 Carlyle, Sartor Resartus, pp. 189, 191, 196. 3 Marcus, ‘Literature and social theory: starting with George Eliot’, pp. 210-12. Milly Barton’s last words come in ch. 8.

Notes

155

4 Juliet McMaster, ‘George Eliot’s language of the sense’, in Gordon S. Haight and Rosemary T. VanArsdel (eds), George Eliot: A Centenary Tribute , pp. 13, 25. 5 Ellmann, Golden Codgers, p. 20. 6 Gordon S. Haight notes that, in 1860, George Eliot had been in Rome during Holy Week, ‘and may have assumed that the red draperies symbolizing the Passion would also be used at Christmas. But such a mistake is unusual in her books.’ See his ‘Poor Mr Casaubon’, in Ryals (ed.), Nineteenth-Century Literary Perspectives, pp. 259-60. Of the whole passage, Q. D. Leavis observed: it is ‘impossible to paraphrase [it] without changing and diminishing its meanings, for it is a complex kind of poetry, working on several different planes at once’ (‘A note on literary indebtedness: Dickens, George Eliot, Henry James’, Hudson Review, vol. 8, no. 3 (1955), p. 426). 7 A. L. French, who was perhaps the first to call attention to the sexual substratum in Dorothea’s reverie, also finds the paragraph weak and unsatisfactory; see his ‘A note on Middlemarch ’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction, vol. 26, no. 3 (1971), pp. 339-47. And see Neil Hertz, ‘Recognizing Casaubon’, Glyph: Textual Studies, vol. 6 (1979), pp. 35-8. 8 Haight, ‘Poor Mr Casaubon’, p. 260. 9 Juliet McMaster has even found suggestions in the novel’s imagery of ‘abnormal sexual relations’ and the combination of ‘deprivation and exploitation’: ‘we are presented with the almost monstrous, a copulation of pen and ink with living human flesh to produce an inhuman offspring. Mr Casaubon’s blood, as Mrs Cadwallader reports, examined under a microscope, turns out to be “all semicolons and parentheses” (ch. 8). As a conscientious husband he recognizes his duty to leave after him “a copy of himself’; but the copy he has in mind is “of his mythological key” (ch. 29). By feverish midnight activity in the bedroom he does what he can to impregnate his wife with his key, working with “bird-like speed” (ch. 48) like a lecherous sparrow. The posthumous offspring of this coupling, an “embryo of truth” (ch. 48), will result for Dorothea in “a ghastly labour producing what would never see the light” (ch. 48), “a theory which was already withered in the birth like an elfin child’” (ch. 48). McMaster does, however, go on to say that ‘the imagery of coition, labour and parturition here suggests something more than the literal and the physical, evoking the terrified fantasies of a tormented psyche’ (‘George Eliot’s language of the sense’, p. 25). 10 Barbara Hardy, ‘Implication and incompleteness: George Eliot’s Middlemarch ’, in her The Appropriate Form, pp. 106, 107, 108, 121, 128. 11 Pinney, ‘More leaves from George Eliot’s notebook’, p. 364. 12 Kermode, ‘D. H. Lawrence and the apocalyptic types’, p. 146. 13 Martin Price, ‘The sublime poet: pictures and powers’, Yale Review, Vol. 58, no. 2 (1969), p. 213.

CH A PTER 7 1 Leon Edel (ed.), Henry James Letters, Vol. 1 , 1843-1875 (London: Macmillan, 1974), p. 351. 2 The New York Edition of the Novels and Tales of Henry James, Vol. 3, pp. 68,66, xii. 3 Leon Edel, H enry James: The Conquest o f London, 1870-1883 (London: Rupert HartDavis, 1962), p. 373. 4 The New York Edition, Vol. 7, pp. ix-x. 5 Thomas Pinney, headnote to ‘Notes on Form in Art’, Essays, p. 431. 6 ibid., pp. 432-6. 7 Letters, Vol. 5, pp. 168-9, 324, 374, 458-9. 8 John Bayley, The Uses of Division: Unity and Disharmony in Literature (London: Chatto & Windus, 1976), p. 11. 9 Middlemarch, ed. W. J. Harvey (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1965), p. 9. 10 U. C. Knoepflmacher, Religious Humanism and the Victorian Novel, pp. 72-4.

156 11

Middlemarch E. M. Forster, Aspects of the N ovel (London: Edward Arnold, 1927), pp. 206-7, 209, 210 .

12 13 14 15 16

For a quite different analysis of this passage, see Kermode, ‘D. H. Lawrence and the apocalyptic types’, pp. 139-41. Austin M. Wright, The Formal Principle in the N ovel (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982), pp. 19-21. David Carroll, ‘Unity through analogy: an interpretation of Middlemarch', Victorian Studies, vol. 2, no. 4 (1959), pp. 305-16. Mark Schorer, ‘Fiction and the “matrix of analogy’” , Kenyon Review , vol. 11, no. 4 (1949), pp. 550-9; ‘The structure of the novel: method, metaphor and mind’, in Hardy (ed.), ‘Middlemarch Critical Approaches to the N ovel, pp. 12-24. Letters , Vol. 4, pp. 300-1.

C H A PTER 8 1 Letters , Vol. 2, p. 349. 2 Anthony Trollope, A n Autobiography, ed. Frederick Page (London: Oxford University Press), pp. 245-7. 3 CH , pp. 479,481-2; cf. Mrs Oliphant and F. R. Oliphant, The Victorian Age of English Literature (London: Percival, 1892), Vol. 2, p. 172: ‘The works of this great writer divide themselves naturally into sections: The first containing the Scenes o f Clerical Life, the M ill on the Floss, A dam Bede, and Silas Marner. This was her first method and it contained, we think, the best of her books, the unaffected, genuine, and natural utterance of her genius.’ 4 Gladstone’s and White’s comments are quoted by Haight in his preface to The George Eliot Letters, Vol. 1, pp. xiv-xvi. 5 Letters between Samuel Butler and M iss E. M . A . Savage, 1871-1885 (London: Cape, 1935), p. 40. 6 The Letters o f W. B. Yeats, ed. Allan Wade (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1954), p. 31. 7 G. B. Shaw, Collected Letters, 1898-1910, ed. Dan H. Laurence (London: Max Reinhardt, 1972), p. 77; Collected P lays with Their Prefaces, ed. Dan H. Laurence, Vol. 5 (London: Max Reinhardt/Bodley Head, 1972), p. 702. 8 W. E. Henley, Views and Reviews: Essays in Appreciations (London: Macmillan, 1921), p. 118. 9 George Moore, Confessions o f a Young M an, ed. Susan Dick (Montreal: McGillQueen’s University Press, 1972), pp. 54, 41. 10 George Saintsbury, Corrected Impressions: Essays on Victorian W riters (London: Heinemann, 1895), p. 166. 11 George Saintsbury, Short H istory of English Literature (London: Macmillan, 1937), p. 753. 12 W. J. Dawson, The M akers o f English Fiction (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1905), p. 134. 13 Brownell’s discussion of Eliot is reprinted in Gordon S. Haight (ed.), A Century of George Eliot Criticism , pp. 170-9. 14 Leslie Stephen, George E liot, p. 184. 15 Oliver Elton, S urvey of English Literature, 1830-1880 (London: Arnold, 1920), Vol. 2, pp. 264-5. 16 Edmund Gosse, Aspects and Impressions (London/New York: Cassell, 1922), pp. 1,2, 15, 4, 14. 17 The Question of Things Happening: The Letters of Virginia Woolf, Vol. 2 , 1912-1922, ed. Nigel Nicolson (London: Hogarth Press, 1976), p. 391; ‘George Eliot’, The Common Reader, first series (London: Hogarth Press, 1925), pp. 213, 216, 213. In his 1919 review of Virginia Woolfs N ight and D ay, Ford Madox Ford made an interesting

Notes

18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27

28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36

37 38 39 40

157

observation: ‘in reading Mrs Woolf... one seems to h ear... the voice of a George Eliot who, remaining almost super-educated, has lost the divine rage to be didactic’; quoted in David Dow Harvey (ed.), Ford M adox Ford, 1873-1939: A Bibliography of Works and Criticism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1962), p. 217. David Cecil, Early Victorian Novelists: Essays in Revaluation (London: Constable, 1934), pp. 318-19, 304, 321-2. Humphry House, ‘Are the Victorians coming back?’, in his A ll in Due Time (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1955), pp. 79, 78. Willey, Nineteenth-Century Studies , pp. 204-5. Briggs, ‘Middlemarch and the doctors’, pp. 750-1, 762, 758. V. S. Pritchett, ‘George Eliot’, in his The Living N ovel (London: Chatto & Windus, 1946), pp. 88, 92, 94. Leavis, The Great Tradition , pp. 61, 65, 67, 69, 72, 74, 75. Arnold Kettle, An Introduction to the English Novel (London: Hutchinson, 1951), Vol. 1, pp. 188, 171, 180, 183, 185, 187. Joan Bennett, George Eliot: H er M ind and A r t , pp. xi, 160, 174. The English Novel: A Short Critical H istory , p. 223. Henley ( Views and Reviews , p. 118) imagined a reader who went to Eliot’s novels ‘in much the same spirit and to much the same purpose that he went to the gymnasium and diverted himself with parallel bars’. Barbara Hardy, The Novels of George Eliot: A Study in Form, pp. 1-5. Twenty-three years later Barbara Hardy reiterated her belief that ‘George Eliot’s imaginative achievement shows itself in triumphs of structure and language which can be examined without constant reference to post-Jamesian models of fictional art’. But she went on to note that ‘the fact of artistry can now be taken for granted’ and further observed that Tike many critics I have moved away from concepts of realism; rather, my emphasis would be placed on the novelist’s investigation of life, made through the particularities of a literary genre’; introduction to Particularities: Readings in George Eliot, p. 10. Angus Wilson, ‘Diversity and depth’, The Times Literary Supplement, 15 August 1958, p. viii. David Daiches, ‘The return of George Eliot’, Nation, 9 June 1962, p. 518. Hardy (ed.), ‘Middlemarch ’; Critical Approaches to the Novel, pp. 3, 94-5. Raymond .Williams, The English N ovel from Dickens to Lawrence, pp. 90-1. David Lodge, ‘Middlemarch and the idea of the classic realist text’, in Arnold Kettle (ed.), The Nineteenth-Century Novel: Critical Essays and Documents, revised edn, p. 218. Colin MacCabe, James Joyce and the Revolution of the Word (London: Macmillan, 1978), pp. 15-16. Lodge, ‘Middlemarch and the idea of the classic realist text’, p. 236. Kate Millett, Sexual Politics (New York: Doubleday, 1970), p. 139. Lee R. Edwards, ‘Women, energy and Middlemarch ’, Massachusetts Review, vol. 13, nos 1-2 (1972); reprinted in Hornbeck (ed), Middlemarch, Norton Critical Edition, pp. 692, 685, 690. Zelda Austen, ‘Why feminist critics are angry with George Eliot’, College English, vol. 37, no. 6 (1976), pp. 550, 555, 561. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the A ttic, 500, 501, 507, 513, 514, 516, 520, 519, 517, 528-9. J. Hillis Miller, ‘Narrative and history’, ELH , vol. 41, no. 3 (1974), pp. 455-73. J. Hillis Miller, ‘Optic and semiotic in Middlemarch ’, in Jerome H. Buckley (ed.), The Worlds of Victorian Fiction, pp. 136-7, 143. For another deconstructive reading that follows along the lines laid down by Miller, see Jan Gordon’s ‘Origins, Middlemarch, endings: George Eliot’s crisis of the antecedent’, in Smith (ed.), George Eliot: Centenary Essays, pp. 124-51. Jan Gordon argues that during the course of Middlemarch ‘an ardent willingness to believe in some pure Origin of events prior to the corruption by “circumstances’” gradually gives way to the emergence of ‘the awful

158

Middlemarch truth’; that ‘Origins, “ Keys”, primitive tissues, sources, historical “background” - the Ur-texts of an epoch - are arbitrary and fictional rather than real, mere attempts to individually appropriate that metaphysical absence which is every Origin’ (pp. 124-5).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

(1)

TEX TS OF M ID D LEM ARC H

Middlemarch was first published in eight book-length instalments between

December 1871 and December 1872. The text was set from the manuscript in Eliot’s hand which is now in the British Library. Two other editions from the same sheets were issued in four volumes in 1872 and 1873. A one-volume edition, the last to be corrected by the author, was published in 1874. Good modem editions of Middlemarch (all based on the 1874 edition) include the following: Gordon S. Haight’s Riverside edition (Boston, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin, 1956) W. J. Harvey’s Penguin English Library edition (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1965) Bert G. Hornback’s Norton Critical Edition (New York: Norton, 1977). For scholarly purposes these editions will be superseded by that being prepared by David Carroll for the Clarendon Edition of the Novels of George Eliot. Carroll’s copy-text will be the one-volume edition of 1874; all substantive variants from the manuscript and the first edition will be recorded, as will all of the several thousand decipherable deletions in the manuscript. The manuscript of Middlemarch has been studied by Jerome Beaty, ‘Middlemarch ’from Notebook to Novel: A Study of George Eliot 's Creative Method

(Urbana, 111.: University of Illinois Press, 1960), and Stanton Millet, T he union of “Miss Brooke” and “Middlemarch” : a study of the manuscript’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, vol. 79, no. 1 (1980), pp. 32-57.

(2)

O TH ER W ORKS BY G EO RG E E L IO T

Good editions of Eliot’s seven novels, and of Scenes of Clerical Life , are available in the Penguin English Library. Her two volumes of verse and the Impressions of Theophrastus Such are included in various collected editions, for example the Cabinet Edition (Edinburgh/London: Blackwood, [1877-80]) and the Standard Edition (Edinburgh/London: Blackwood, [1895]). So are two pieces of shorter fiction, ‘The Lifted Veil’ and ‘Brother Jacob’.

(A)

W ORKS P U B L IS H E D D U R IN G E L IO T ’S L IF E

The Life of Jesus Critically Examinedby D. F. Strauss. Translated from the fourth

German edition [by Marian Evans] (1846). Reprinted, ed. Peter Hodgson (London: SCM, 1972). The Essence of Christianity by L. Feuerbach. Translated from the second German edition by Marian Evans (1854). Reprinted, introduction by Karl Barth, foreword by H. Richard Niebuhr (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1957). Scenes of Clerical Life , 2 vols (1858). The three stories were originally published separately in Blackwood's Magazine in 1857. Adam Bede, 3 vols (1859).

160

Middlemarch

The M ill on the Floss, 3 vols (1860). Silas M amer: The Weaver of Raveloe (1861). Romola, 3 vols (1863). Originally published in the Cornhill Magazine, 1862-3. Felix Holt, the Radical, 3 vols (1866). The Spanish Gypsy: A Poem (1868). Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life, 4 vols (1872). Originally published in

eight instalments, 1871-2. The Legend of Jubal and Other Poems (1874). Daniel Deronda, 4 vols (1876). Originally published in eight monthly parts in

1876. Impressions of Theophrastus Such (1879). Essays.

(B)

O T H E R W R IT IN G S

Haight, Gordon S. (ed.), The George Eliot Letters, Vols 1-7 (London: Oxford University Press/New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1954-5); Vols 8-9 (New Haven, Conn./London: Yale University Press, 1978). Kitchel, Anna Theresa (ed.), Quarry for M iddlemarch ' (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1950). Pinion, F. B. (ed.), A George Eliot Miscellany: A Supplement to Her Novels (London: Macmillan, 1982). Reprints selections from the essays and some poems, plus ‘The Lifted Veil’ and ‘Brother Jacob’. Pinney, Thomas (ed.), Essays of George Eliot (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul/New York: Columbia University Press, 1963). An appendix lists all of Eliot’s periodical essays and reviews. Pinney, Thomas (ed.), ‘More leaves from George Eliot’s notebook’, Huntington Library Quarterly, vol. 29, no. 4 (1966), pp. 353-76. Pratt, John Clark, and Neufeldt, Victor A. (eds), George Eliot's Middlemarch' Notebooks: A Transcription (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1979). Wiesenfarth, Joseph (ed.), George Eliot: A Writer's Notebook 1854-1879 and Uncollected Writings (Charlottesville, Va: University Press of Virginia, 1981). Includes a number of essays not in Pinney’s edition.

(3) B IO G R A PH IC A L Cross, J. W., George Eliot's Life as Related in Her Letters and Journals, 3 vols (Edinburgh/London: Blackwood, 1885). Act of piety by Eliot’s second husband. Haight, Gordon S., George Eliot: A Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968). The standard life. Laski, Marghanita, George Eliot and Her World (London: Thames & Hudson/New York: Scribner’s, 1973). Good short account of the life, with many illustrations. Redinger, Ruby V., George Eliot: The Emergent Self (New York: Knopf, 1975/ London: Bodley Head, 1976). Stephen, Leslie, George Eliot, English Men of Letters (London: Macmillan, 1902). Biographical-critical study.

Bibliography (4)

161

C R IT IC IS M

For an annotated list of published critical material from 1858 to 1971, see Constance Marie Fulmer, George Eliot: A Reference Guide (Boston, Mass.: G. K. Hall, 1977). More recent work is listed in David Leon Higdon, ‘A bibliography of George Eliot criticism 1971-1977’, Bulletin of Bibliography, vol. 37, no. 2 (1980), pp. 90-103, and in the annual listings in the Modern Language Association’s International Bibliography and in Victorian Studies. For guides through this material, see Jerome Beaty, ‘George Eliot’, in A. E. Dyson (ed.), The English Novel: Select Bibliographical Guides (London: Oxford University Press, 1974), pp. 246-63; and U. C. Knoepflmacher, ‘George Eliot’, in George H. Ford (ed.), Victorian Fiction: A Second Guide to Research (New York: Modern Language Association, 1978), pp. 234-73. (A)

G EN ERA L ST U D IE S

Allen, Walter, The English Novel: A Short Critical History (London: Phoenix House, 1954). Ashton, Rosemary, George Eliot, Past Masters (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983). Bedient, Calvin, Architects of the Self: George Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, E. M. Forster (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1972). Bennett, Joan, George Eliot: Her M ind and A rt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1948). Carroll, David (ed.), George Eliot: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971). Includes seven contemporary reviews of Middlemarch. Cecil, David, Early Victorian Novelists: Essays in Revaluation (London: Constable, 1934). Cox, C. B., The Free Spirit: A Study of Liberal Humanism in the Novels of George Eliot, Henry James, E. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf and Angus Wilson (London: Oxford University Press, 1963). Creeger, George R. (ed.), George Eliot: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1970). Reprints ten essays, including Thomas Pinney’s ‘The authority of the past in George Eliot’s novels’ and Darrel Mansell’s ‘George Eliot’s conception of “form” .’ Emery, Laura Comer, George Eliot's Creative Conflict: The Other Side of Silence (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1976). A psychoanalytic perspective. Gilbert, Sandra M., and Gubar, Susan, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven, Conn./ London: Yale University Press, 1979). Haight, Gordon S. (ed.), A Century of George Eliot Criticism (Boston, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin, 1970). Wide-ranging selections, from contemporary reviews to the early 1960s. Haight, Gordon S., and VanArsdel, Rosemary T. (eds), George Eliot: A Centenary Tribute (London: Macmillan, 1982). Thirteen original essays. Hardy, Barbara (ed.), Critical Essays on George Eliot (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970). Hardy, Barbara, The Novels of George Eliot: A Study in Form (London: Athlone Press, 1959).

162

Middlemarch

Hardy, Barbara, Particularities: Readings in George Eliot (London: Peter Owen, 1982). Reprints ten essays, five of them on Middlemarch. Harvey, W. J., The A rt of George Eliot (London: Chatto & Windus, 1961). Holloway, John, The Victorian Sage: Studies in Argument (London: Macmillan, 1953). Holmstrom, John, and Lemer, Laurence (eds), George Eliot and Her Readers: A Selection of Contemporary Reviews (London: Bodley Head, 1966). Jones, R. T., George Eliot (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970). King, Jeannette, Tragedy in the Victorian Novel: Theory and Practice in the Novels of George Eliot, Thomas Hardy and Henry James (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978). Knoepflmacher, U. C., Religious Humanism and the Victorian Novel: George Eliot, Walter Pater and Samuel Butler (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1965). Knoepflmacher, U. C., and Levine, George (eds), Nineteenth-Century Fiction (special issue: George Eliot, 1880-1980), vol. 35, no. 3 (1980), pp. 253-455. Kroeber, Karl, Studies in Fictional Structure: The A rt of Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte and George Eliot (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971). Interesting statistical data. Leavis, F. R., The Great Tradition: George Eliot, Henry James, Joseph Conrad (London: Chatto & Windus, 1948). Lerner, Laurence, The Truthtellers: Jane Austen, George Eliot, D. H. Lawrence (London: Chatto & Windus, 1967). Marcus, Steven, ‘Literature and social theory: starting with George Eliot’, in his Representations: Essays on Literature and Society (New York: Random House, 1975), pp. 183-213. Milner, Ian, The Structure o f Values in George Eliot (Prague: Universita Karlova, 1968). A Marxist perspective. Mintz, Alan, George Eliot and the Novel o f Vocation (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978). Newton, K. M., George Eliot, Romantic Humanist: A Study of the Philosophical Structure of Her Novels (London: Macmillan, 1981). Paris, Bernard J., Experiments in Life: George Eliot's Quest for Values (Detroit, Mich.: Wayne State University Press, 1965). Pinion, F. B., A George Eliot Companion (London: Macmillan, 1981). Price, Martin, Forms of Life: Character and Moral Imagination in the Novel (New Haven, Conn./London: Yale University Press, 1983). Roberts, Neil, George Eliot: Her Beliefs and Her A rt (London: Elek, 1975). Showalter, Elaine, A Literature o f Their Own: British Women Novelists from Bronte to Lessing (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977). Smith, Anne (ed.), George Eliot: Centenary Essays and an Unpublished Fragment (London: Vision Press, 1980). Speaight, Robert, George Eliot (London: Arthur Barker, 1954). Stang, Richard, The Theory of the Novel in England, 1850-1870 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1959). Thale, Jerome, The Novels of George Eliot (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959). Willey, Basil, Nineteenth-Century Studies: Coleridge to Matthew Arnold (London: Chatto & Windus, 1949).

Bibliography

163

Williams, Raymond, The English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence (London: Chatto & Windus, 1970). Witemeyer, Hugh, George Eliot and the Visual Arts (New Haven, Conn./London: Yale University Press, 1979). (B)

S T U D IE S OF M ID D L E M A R C H

Adam, Ian (ed.), This Particular Web: Essays on Middlemarch 9 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1975). Five original essays. Anderson, Quentin, ‘George Eliot in Middlemarch', in Boris Ford (ed.), The Pelican Guide to English Literature , Vol. 6, From Dickens to Hardy , revised edn (Harmondsworth/New York: Penguin Books, 1966), pp. 274-93. Reprinted in George R. Creeger (ed.), George Eliot: A Collection ofCritical Essay 5,pp. 141-60. Armstrong, Isobel, Middlemarch : a note on George Eliot’s wisdom’, in Barbara Hardy (ed.), Critical Essays on George Eliot , pp. 116-32. Ashton, Rosemary D., ‘The intellectual “medium” of Middlemarch ’, Review of English Studies, vol. 30, no. 118 (1979), pp. 154-68. Austen, Zelda, ‘Why feminist critics are angry with George Eliot’, College English, vol. 37, no. 6 (1976), pp. 549-61. Beaty, Jerome, ‘History by indirection: the era of Reform in Middlemarch, Victorian Studies, vol. 1, no. 2 (1957), pp. 173-9. Reprinted in Gordon S. Haight (ed.), A Century of George Eliot Criticism, pp. 306-13, and in Bert G. Hornback’s Norton Critical Editiofi, pp. 700-6. Blake, Kathleen, Middlemarch and the Woman Question’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction, vol. 31, no. 3 (1976), pp. 285-312. Briggs, Asa, Middlemarch and the doctors’, Cambridge Journal, vol. 1, no. 12 (1948), pp. 749-62. Carroll, David, ‘Unity through analogy: an interpretation of Middlemarch’, Victorian Studies, vol. 2, no. 4 (1959), pp. 305-16. Cockshut, A. O. J., Middlemarch ’, Notes on English Literature (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1966). Daiches, David, George Eliot: M iddlemarch', Studies in English Literature (London: Edward Arnold, 1963). Edwards, Lee R., ‘Woman, energy and Middlemarch’, Massachusetts Review , vol. 13, nos 1-2 (1972), pp. 223-38. Reprinted in Bert G. Hornback’s Norton Critical Edition, pp. 683-93. Ellmann, Richard, ‘Dorothea’s husbands’, in his Golden Codgers: Some Biographical Speculations (London/New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), pp. 17-38. French, A. L., ‘A note on Middlemarch', Nineteenth-Century Fiction, vol. 26, no. 3 (1971), pp. 339-47. Gordon, Jan, ‘Origins, Middlemarch, endings: George Eliot’s crisis of the antecedent’, in Anne Smith (ed.), George Eliot: Centenary Essays, pp. 124-51. Hardy, Barbara, ‘Implication and incompleteness: George Eliot’s Middlemarch', in her The Appropriate Form (London: Athlone Press, 1964), pp. 105-31. Hardy, Barbara (ed.), M iddlem archC ritical Approaches to the Novel (London: Athlone Press, 1967). Eight original essays, including Mark Schorer’s ‘The structure of the novel: method, metaphor and mind’. Hertz, Neil, ‘Recognizing Casaubon’, in Glyph: Textual Studies, vol. 6,

164

Middlemarch

(Baltimore, Ma/London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), pp. 22-41. Hornback, Bert G. (ed.), Middlemarch , Norton Critical Edition (New York: Norton, 1977). Includes reprints of nine pieces of modern criticism. Jones, Peter, ‘Imagination and egoism in Middlemarch', in his Philosophy and the Novel (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), pp. 9-69. Kettle, Arnold, ‘George Eliot: Middlemarch ’, in his A n Introduction to the English Novel (London: Hutchinson, 1951), Vol. I, pp. 171-90. Kiely, Robert, ‘The limits of dialogue in Middlemarch', in Jerome H. Buckley (ed.), The Worlds of Victorian Fiction (Cambridge, Mass./London: Harvard University Press, 1975), pp. 103-23. Knoepflmacher, U. C., ‘Middlemarch : affirmation through compromise’, in his Laughter and Despair: Readings in Ten Novels of the Victorian Period (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1971), pp. 168-201. Knoepflmacher, U. C., ‘Middlemarch : an avuncular view’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction, vol. 30, no. 1 (1975), pp. 53-81. Leavis, Q. D., ‘A note on literary indebtedness: Dickens, George Eliot, Henry James’, Hudson Review, vol. 8, no. 3 (1955), pp. 423-8. Lodge, David, ‘Middlemarch and the idea of the classic realist text’, in Arnold Kettle (ed.), The Nineteenth-Century Novel: Critical Essays and Documents, revised edn (London: Heinemann, 1981), pp. 218-36. Mason, Michael York, ‘Middlemarch and history’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction, vol. 25, no. 4 (1971), pp. 417-31. Mason, Michael York, ‘Middlemarch and science: problems of life and mind’, Review of English Studies, vol. 22, no. 86 (1971), pp. 151-69. Miller, D /A ., ‘George Eliot: “the wisdom of balancing claims’” , in his Narrative and Its Discontents: Problems o f Closure in the Traditional Novel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981), pp. 107-94. Miller, J. Hillis, ‘Narrative and history’, ELH , vol. 41, no. 3 (1974), pp. 455-73. Miller, J. Hillis, ‘Optic and semiotic in Middlemarch', in Jerome H. Buckley (ed.), The Worlds of Victorian Fiction (Cambridge, Mass./London: Harvard University Press, 1975), pp. 125-45. Schorer, Mark, ‘Fiction and the matrix of analogy’, Kenyon Review, vol. 11, no. 4 (1949), pp. 539-60. Scott, James F., ‘George Eliot, Positivism, and the social vision of Middlemarch', Victorian Studies, vol. 16, no. 1 (1972), pp. 59-76. Sutherland, J. H., ‘Marketing Middlemarch ’, in his Victorian Novelists and Publishers (London: Athlone Press, 1976), pp. 188-205. Swindon, Patrick (ed.), George Eliot: ‘Middlemarch ', Casebook Series (London: Macmillan, 1972). Reprints selections from contemporary reviews, ‘some opinions and criticism 1874-1968’, and five modern critical essays. Wiesenfarth, Joseph, ‘Middlemarch: the language of art’, M PLA, vol. 97, no. 3 (1982), pp. 363-77.

INDEX Acton, Lord 2 Adam Bede 3, 11, 17, 18, 27, 90, 133, 134,

137 Allen, Walter 69, 144 Aristotle 22; Poetics 122 Armstrong, Isobel 71, 72 Arnold, Matthew, ‘Resignation’ 103 Austen, Jane 141, 142; Emma 98; M ansfield Park 98 Austen, Zelda 147-8 Balzac, Honore de 2 Bayley, John 123 Beaty, Jerome 7, 51 Bennett, Joan 144 Bentham, Jeremy 22 Bichat, Marie-Frangois 23 Blackwood, John 4, 6, 9 Book of Tobit 10 Briggs, Asa 141 Bronte, Charlotte 140; Jayne Eyre 98; Villete 98 ‘Brother and Sister’ 18 Brown, Ford Madox 78 Brown, Robert, Microscopic Observations on the Particles Contained in the Pollen of Plants 23

Brownell, W. C. 137 Browning, Robert, The Ring and the Book 98 Bunyan, John 145 Burke, Edmund 83 Butler, Samuel 136 Carlyle, Thomas 54, 124, 153; Sartor Resartus 53, 55, 103, 153 Carroll, David 90, 128 Cecil, David 140-1, 144 Cervantes, Miguel de, Don Quixote 10 Characters in Middlemarch Mr Brooke 41,42,45,46,48-9,50,57,61, 62, 65-6, 67, 76, 77-8, 83, 123, 148 Celia 26, 41, 76, 99-100, 118 Bulstrode 8, 14,27,45,46,47,49,61,63, 65, 66, 70, 81, 82, 85, 88-91, 125, 131, 143, 148 Bulstrode, Harriet 46, 80-1, 91, 116 Mr Cadwallader 42-3, 78 Mrs Cadwallader 42-3, 49, 77, 83, 99, 115, 123 Casaubon 3, 5-6, 10, 26, 27, 34, 41, 50, 57, 58, 63, 67, 80, 81, 82, 85-8, 105, 106, 108-9, 123, 128, 143, 145, 148

Chettam, Sir James 26, 56, 76, 100 Dorothea 3, 6, 7, 8, 10, 12, 13-14, 21-2, 26, 27, 29, 30-2, 33, 34, 41,47,48, 51, 55-6, 57, 58-9, 61, 62, 63, 66, 68, 78, 79,80, 81,82,84,86,87,92,96,98-118, 131-2, 141, 143, 145, 147, 148 Farebrother 27, 29,45,47, 50, 54,63, 70, 78, 79-80, 82, 97, 114 Featherstone 4, 43, 45, 49, 63, 123, 125, 126 Garth, Caleb 3, 19-20, 27,43,45,54,57, 65-6, 67, 78, 100 Garth, Mary 19-20, 27, 29, 45, 46-7, 54-5, 57, 78-9, 84, 126 Garth, Mrs 45, 47 Ladislaw 3, 14,27, 31-2, 33, 53-4,55,58, 66, 81, 82-4, 86, 91, 99, 100, 101, 109, 110-11,112,114-15,117-18,125,131, 143, 147, 149 Laure 61, 96, 130-1 Lydgate 4, 7, 8, 14, 21, 27, 29, 33, 36-8, 48, 52-3, 54, 57, 59, 61, 63, 64, 66, 79, 80,81,82,83, 91-7,100,101,102,121, 128, 130-2, 143, 145 Naumann 21, 31, 105 Raffles 46, 80, 82, 89-91, 125, 131 Trumbull, Borthrop 40, 43, 57, 63, 76-7 Vincy, Fred 4, 8, 19,20,26,28-9,40,45, 48, 54-5, 63, 78, 79, 81, 82, 84-5, 126, 131 Vincy, Mr 46, 47-8, 71 Vincy, Mrs 45, 47 Vincy, Rosamond 4, 29, 33, 40, 48, 49, 57-8, 64, 66, 67-8, 78, 80, 81, 82, 83, 91, 93-7, 100, 131, 143, 148 Christian Observer 24 Cockshut, A. O. J. 78 Comte, Auguste 22 Conrad, Joseph 142, 145 Cross, John Walter 3, 135 Daiches, David 146 Daniel Deronda 98, 102, 133, 135, 137

Dante 34 Darwin, Charles 14, 122 Davy, Sir Humphry, Elements of Agri­ cultural Chemistry 23 Dawson, W. J. 137 Dicey, A. V. 12 Dickens, Charles 10, 16, 60, 77, 78, 89-90, 91, 133, 141; Bleak House 52; Little Dorrit 90, 91; Oliver Twist 90

166

Index

Dickinson, Emily 1, 30 Dowden, Edward 70 Dumas, Alexandre, Les Trois Mousquetaires 120 Edel, Leon 119-20 Edwards, Lee R. 147 Ellmann, Richard 3, 106 Elton, Oliver 138 Evans, Isaac 18-19 Evans, Robert 3, 24 Felix H olt 4, 9, 56, 133 Feuerbach, Ludwig, Wesen des Christen thums 3, 25 Fielding, Henry 1, 69-70; Tom Jones 1 Flaubert, Gustave 66,145; M adame B ovary

150 Forster, E. M. 124 Fowles, John 3 Gilbert, Sandra M. 148-9 Gissing, George 145 Gladstone, William E. 135 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, Wilhelm M eister 2

Gosse, Edmund 138-9 Grote, George, H istory o f Greece 5 Gubar, Susan 148-9 Haight, Gordon S. 19, 108, 141 Handel, George Frideric, Jephtha 24 Hardy, Barbara 109, 145, 146 Hardy, Thomas, 2, 137; The Return o f the N a tive 34 Harrison, Frederic 22, 23 Harvey, W. J. 123, 128, 145 Haydn, Joseph, Creation 24 Henley, William Ernest 136, 144 Hennell, Charles, Inquiry Concerning the Origin o f Christianity 24 House, Humphry 141 Hugo, Victor, Les Miserables 9 Hutton, R. H. 12, 13, 34, 56, 68, 84-5 Huxley, Thomas Henry 14, 122 James, Henry 1,10, 11,13-14,40,63,66-7, 77, 78, 82, 83, 88, 119-20, 122, 123, 124, 132, 142, 145; The P ortrait o f a L ady 98, 119-20; The Tragic Muse 120 James, William 119 Johnson, Samuel 71, 72 Jones, Peter 73 Josephus, H istory o f the Jew s 24 Joyce, James 145, 146; Ulysses 150

Kermode, Frank 51, 111 Kettle, Arnold 143 Kingsley, Charles, Two Years Ago 52 Knoepflmacher, U. C. 123-4, 128 Lawrence, D. H. 142, 145 Leader 3

Leavis, F. R. 68, 142 Leavis, Q. D. 52 Leaky, W. E. H ., History of European M orals 5 Lewes, George Henry 3, 9, 21, 34 Lodge, David 146-7 Louis, Pierre-Charles 23 Lubbock, John, The Origin o f Civilization and the Prim itive Condition o f M an 5 Lubbock, Percy 145 Lucretius, De Rerum N atura 5 MacCabe, Colin 146-7 McMaster, Juliet 104 Maine, Sir Henry, Ancient Law 5 Marcus, Steven 61, 104 Mauriac, Francois 145 Mayor, John, ‘Latin-English Lexicography* 5 Melville, Herman, M oby-Dick 127 ‘Middlemarch* 4-5, 6, 7, 8, 84 The M ill on the Floss 12, 17-18, 19, 21, 35, 60, 74, 133, 134, 137, 144 Mill, John Stuart 22; On Liberty 51-2 Miller, J. Hillis 60-1, 75, 149-50 Millett, Kate 147 Milton, John, Comus 98; Paradise Lost 126 ‘Miss Brooke’ 6-7, 8, 9, 84 Moore, Brian 82 Moore, George 137; Confessions of a Young M an 137 Muller, Max, Lectures on the Science o f Language 5 Munch, Edvard 108 Myers, F. W. H. 3 Narrator (of Middlemarch) 32-9, 60-74,86, 90-1, 125-7 Nation 119 ‘The Natural History of German Life* 15, 16,42 Newman, John Henry 34 Newton, K. M. 73 Norton, Grace 119 ‘Notes on form in art’ 121-2 Novalis 12 ‘O may I join the choir invisible’ 29

Index Oliphant, Mrs, Miss Majoribanks 52 Palma Vecchio 21 Pascal, Roy 86 Petrarch 34 Plato 22 Plumb, J. H. 50 Positivism 22-4, 29-30 Pritchett, V. S. 142 Proust, Marcel 145 ‘Quarry for Middlemarch’ 4, 7-8,23,84,125 Rembrandt 20, 21 Richardson, Samuel, Clarissa 98 Romola 133, 135, 136, 137 Ruskin, John 15, 18; Modern Painters 15 ‘The Sad Fortunes of the Rev. Amos Barton’ 17, 18, 21, 104 Saintsbury, George 137 Scenes of Clerical Life 3, 15, 17, 134 Schorer, Mark 129-30 Scott, Sir Walter 10, 18, 40; Anne of Geierstein 40 Shakespeare, William 119, 136 Shaw, George Bernard 136; Back to Methuselah 136; Saint Joan 98 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 83 Silas M am er 84, 133, 134, 136, 144 Silcox, Edith 1-2 ‘Silly Novels by Lady Novelists’ 15, 38 Sophocles, Antigone 33 The Spanish Gypsy 4, 136 Spencer, Herbert 3, 22 Stephen, Leslie 134-5, 138, 139 Sterne, Laurence, Tristram Shandy 9 Stowe, Harriet Beecher 5-6 Strauss, David Friedrich, Leben Jesu 3, 25 Sutherland, J. A. 9-10

167

Teniers 21 Tennyson, Alfred 4, 135; ‘The Holy Grail’ 116-17; In Memoriam 27, 74, 150 Tennyson, Hallam 135 Thackeray, William Makepeace 6, 10, 66, 70, 133; The Newcomes 120 Theresa of Avila, St 32, 33, 37, 61, 98, 118 Thomson, John, Life , Lectures and Writings of William Cullen M D 5 Tintoretto 120, 131 Tolstoy, Leo 141, 143; Anna Karenina 32, 116-17; W ar and Peace 120, 124, 140, 141 Trollope, Anthony 10,40,60,66,84-5,131, 133-4, 140

Vesalius 23

Warton,

Thomas, History Literature 5 Westminster Review 3, 15, 16

of

English

White, William Hale [Mark Rutherford] 135 Willey, Basil 24, 141 Williams, Raymond 146 Wilson, Angus 145-6 Woolf, Virginia 74, 139-40 ‘Worldliness and Otherworldliness: the Poet Young’ 16 Wordsworth, William 18, 19, 22, 35, 70, 72, 84; The Excursion 35; The Prelude 18,116,150; ‘Ode to Duty’ 10; ‘Tintern Abbey’ 108 Wright, Austin M. 128

Yeats, William Butler 136 Young, Edward, Night Thoughts 16