I just figured out that I’ve turned around approximately 150 student assignments already this term. No wonder my own wit and wisdom feel a bit strained and it’s so refreshing to spend time with someone whose fund of both seems inexhaustible. And so, without further ado, some more treats from this year’s reading of Middlemarch.

Wit

Another candidate for high honours in this category is Uncle Featherstone, though he’s another who furnishes us with amusement without altogether intending to do so. One of the best such occasions, I think, is Chapter 34, in which we get our own chuckle out of his perversely gleeful anticipation of his own funeral:

We are all of us imaginative in some form or other, for images are the brood of desire [there’s a nice little bit of wisdom tossed in for good measure]; and poor old Featherstone, who laughed much at the way in which others cajoled themselves, did not escape the fellowship of illusion. In writing the programme for his burial he certainly did not make clear to himself that his pleasure in the little drama of which it formed a part was confined to anticipation. In chuckling over the vexations he could inflict by the rigid clutch of his dead hand, he inevitably mingled his consciousnss with that livid stagnant presence, and so far as he was preoccupied with a future life, it was with one of gratification inside his coffin. Thus old Featherstone was imaginative, after his fashion.

His whole family is actually a barrel of laughs and provides many opportunities for the narrator’s sly wit. Here they are heading in to hear his will read (and to discover that his ‘dead hand’ does indeed distribute unexpected ‘vexations’):

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.)

The same sort of temptation befell the Christian Carnivora who formed Peter Featherstone’s funeral procession; most of them having their minds bent on a limited store which each would have liked to get the most of. (Ch. 35)

That’s a good point about the vultures, just btw.

Wisdom and Tenderness

One of the ways in which I think George Eliot is wisest is in her insight about the moral consequences of the kind of sympathetic understanding her novels all (and Middlemarch most particularly) both model and inspire. The famous pier glass passage from Chapter 27 cautions us that our egocentric perceptions of the world are just ‘flattering illusions,’ but reaching the crucial insight that everyone else has an “equivalent centre of self, whence the lights and shadows must always fall with a certain difference” brings us not into a condition of liberated enlightenment but into a much more complicated realm of duty and obligation. Through the first half of the novel, Dorothea moves from the youthful and idealistic, but still self-centred, illusion that Mr. Casaubon has arrived on the scene to fulfill her own dream of leading “a grand life here–now–in England,” through the inevitable process of disillusionment that is the essence, in many ways, of George Eliot’s realism. On their honeymoon, poor thing, she discovers that “the large vistas and wide fresh air which she had dreamed of finding in her husband’s mind were replaced by anterooms and winding passages which seemed to lead nowhither” (Ch. 20). The crucial question is, will she be able to move from this more realistic perspective to sympathy, following, for instance, the narrator’s pressure to consider

what is the report of his own consciousness about his doings or capacity: with what hindrances he is carrying on his daily labours; what fading of hopes, or what deeper fixity of self-delusion the years are marking off within ihim; and with what spirit he wrestles against universal pressure, which will one day be too heavy for him, and bring his heart to its final pause? (Ch. 10)

Will she be capable of her own “but why always Dorothea?” moment? By Chapter 42 (which is about where I’ve tried to bring my class up to this week), we can’t be sure, but we do see signs that she is struggling to turn her own hard-won wisdom into tenderness. For instance, here she is in Chapter 37, listening to Will take another careless “pinch at the moth-wings of poor Mr. Casaubon’s glory”:

But Dorothea was strangely quiet–not immediately indignant, as she had been on a like occasion in Rome. And the cause lay deep. She was no longer struggling against the perception of facts, but adjusting herself to their highest perception; and now when she looked steadily at her husband’s failure, still more at his possible consciousness of failure, she seemed to be looking along the one track where duty became tenderness.

Still, Mr. Casaubon (albeit unintentionally) does what he can to turn her aside from that track, as when he rebuffs her offered comfort after his interview with Lydgate in Chapter 42. To Dorothea, there is “something horrible” in his “unresponsive hardness,” and in the throes of a “rebellious anger stronger than any she had felt since her marriage,” she retreats to her boudoir and struggles with her feelings of rejection and resentment. “In such a crisis as this,” the narrator points out, “some women begin to hate,” but she thinks hard about his feelings, convinced “that he had been asking about the possible arrest of all his work”–“the answer must have wrong his heart.” Thus “the resolved submission did come,” and she goes out once more to meet him as he comes upstairs from the library. Her tenderness here is a kind of wisdom, and does finally elicit a sympathetic connection, beautiful in its understated simplicity:

‘Dorothea!’ he said, with a gentle surprise in his tone. ‘Were you waiting for me?’

‘Yes, I did not like to disturb you.’

‘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 tha tmight 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.

In 1871 an enthusiastic young reader named Alexander Main received George Eliot’s permission to publish a collection of inspirational excerpts from her works; the volume was put out in 1872 by her usual publisher, John Blackwood (who nicknamed Main “the Gusher”), under the title Wise, Witty, and Tender Sayings of George Eliot. As I make my way through Middlemarch yet again, I sympathize with his project: I am, as always, struck repeatedly by the sheer pleasure the novel affords, precisely because it is so wise, witty, and tender. It’s endlessly tempting to grab anyone who happens to be nearby and say, “just listen to this bit!” Alas, too often there’s nobody nearby, or at least nobody with time and attention to spare. But on the internet, there’s always somebody around–or at least so I can fondly imagine. So, as a self-indulgent supplement to my teaching posts, I’m going to do a little series of favorite “wise, witty, and tender” excerpts as I go along. I hope that they will give you, too, some pleasure, whether by reminding you of your own experience of reading Middlemarch or by introducing you to some more of the reasons why so many people love this novel. The challenge will be choosing just one or two excerpts for each category!

Wisdom

I’m overwhelmed by choices here, from the epigrammatic to the philosophical and reflective. For now, here are passages representing each of those extremes:

Mr Bulstrode had also a deferential bending attitude in listening, and an apparent fixed attentiveness in his eyes which made those persons who thought themselves worth hearing infer that he was seeking the utmost improvement from their discourse. Others, who expected to make no great figure, disliked this kind of moral lantern turned on them. If you are not proud of your cellar, there is no thrill of satisfaction in seeing your guest hold up his wine-glass to the light and look judicial. Such joys are reserved for conscious merit. (Ch. XIII)

We are not afraid of telling over and over again how a man comes to fall in love with a woman and be wedded to her, or else be fatally parted from her. 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 ardor in generous unpaid toil cooled as imperceptibly as the ardor 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! In the beginning they inhaled it unknowingly: you and I may have sent some of our breath towards infecting them, when we uttered our conforming falsities or drew our silly conclusions: or perhaps it came with the vibrations from a woman’s glance. (Ch. XV)

Wit

One of the great delights of reading Middlemarch aloud is that for some reason doing so really brings out the humour of the novel, which ranges from laugh-out-loud funny to wryly acerbic, from rueful to pointedly cruel. First honours in this category has to go to Mrs Cadwallader, who has the privilege of delivering most of the novel’s best one-liners. Here she is, with her straight man, Sir James Chettam, on the Reverend Mr Casaubon (whose ‘family quarterings,’ she earlier proposes, must be ‘three cuttle-fish sable and a commentator rampant’):

‘He has got no good red blood in his body,’ said Sir James.

‘No. somebody put a drop under a magnifying-glass, and it was all semicolons and parentheses,’ said Mrs Cadwallader.

‘Why does he not bring out his book, instead of marrying?’ said Sir James, with a disgust which he held warranted by the sound feeling of an English layman.

‘Oh, he dreams footnotes, and they run away with all his brains. They say, when he was a little boy, he made an abstract of “Hop o’ My Thumb,” and he has been making abstracts ever since.’ (Ch. VIII)

Mr Brooke runs her a close second, though his comedy is largely inadvertant and thus puts us in a more Austen-like attitude of knowing superiority (which, of course, is entirely compatible with warm affection). Who could resist the picture of his talking theology with the erudite Mr Casaubon, telling him ‘that the Reformation either meant something or it did not, that he himself was a Protestant to the core, but that Catholicism was a fact; and as to refusing an acre of your ground for a Romanist chapel, all men needed the bridle of religion, which, properly speaking, was the dread of a Hereafter’? The narrator is relentless about Mr Brooke’s vagaries, but never harsh. After all, aren’t we all foolish and inconsistent in our own ways? Here is her commentary, for instance, on Mr Brooke’s cheerful anticipation that Casaubon is likely to be made a bishop:

And here I must vindicate a claim to philosophical reflectiveness, by remarking that Mr. Brooke on this occasion little thought of the Radical speech which, at a later period, he was led to make on the incomes of the bishops. What elegant historian would neglect a striking opportunity for pointing out that his heroes did not foresee the history of the world, or even their own actions? — For example, that Henry of Navarre, when a Protestant baby, little thought of being a Catholic monarch; or that Alfred the Great, when he measured his laborious nights with burning candles, had no idea of future gentlemen measuring their idle days with watches. Here is a mine of truth, which, however vigorously it may be worked, is likely to outlast our coal.

But of Mr. Brooke I make a further remark perhaps less warranted by precedent — namely, that if he had foreknown his speech, it might not have made any great difference. To think with pleasure of his niece’s husband having a large ecclesiastical income was one thing — to make a Liberal speech was another thing; and it is a narrow mind which cannot look at a subject from various points of view.

Finally, I have to make a little room for Celia, who has cracked me up several times already, on her own or with the narrator’s help. Here’s Celia discovering that even Mr Casaubon has his human side (she’s contemplating the miniatures of Mr Casaubon’s mother and Aunt Julia):

‘The sister is pretty,’ said Celia, implying that she thought less favourably of Mr Casaubon’s mother. It was a new opening to Celia’s imagination, that he came of a family who had all been young in their time–the ladies wearing necklaces. (Ch. IX)

Doesn’t that capture perfectly the solipsistic attitude of the young towards their elders? I remember my grandmother once saying, quite tartly, that what young people don’t realize when they look at ‘some old man’ on the bus is that he has already done everything they are doing, or are dreaming of doing–‘sex and everything!’ (Whether Mr Casaubon has sex is a topic for another post.)

Tenderness

Though Middlemarch is full of tenderness towards its people, one feature of George Eliot’s writing for which she was justly beloved in her own time was her evocation of the English landscape. Her descriptions of the countryside are suffused with the affection her characters, too, feel for the places that are bound up with our most precious memories, “dear,” as she says here, “to the eyes that have looked on them from childhood”:

The ride to Stone Court, which Fred and Rosamond took the next morning, lay through 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 gray 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. (Ch. XII)

Putting together some introductory notes for next week’s Middlemarch lectures, I was reminded (by Rosemary Ashton’s excellent biography) that Marian Evans’s 1855 essay “Evangelical Teaching: Dr. Cumming” was the piece that convinced her ‘husband,’ George Henry Lewes, “of the true genius of her writing.” Ashton suggests the essay “has one of the most arresting openings in all periodical literature–though she acknowledges it lacks the devastating brevity of Francis Jeffrey’s “This will never do” (about Wordsworth’s The Excursion). What it lacks in “succinctness” it makes up in venom:

Given, a man with moderate intellect, a moral standard not higher than the average, some rhetorical affluence and great glibness of speech, what is the career in which, without the aid of birth or money, he may most easily attain power and reputation in English society? Where is that Goshen of mediocrity in which a smattering of science and learning will pass for profound instruction, where platitudes will be accepted as wisdom, bigoted narrowness as holy zeal, unctuous egoism as God-given piety? Let such a man become an evangelical preacher; he will then find it possible to reconcile small ability with great ambition, superficial knowledge with the prestige of erudition, a middling morale with a high reputation for sanctity.

The essay’s conclusion does little, if anything, to soften the sting of her analysis, though it does return us to something more like the meliorative tone we expect from the novelist who would later anatomize the troubled conscience of the evangelical Mr. Bulstrode so much more compassionately, if no less stringently:

Before taking leave of Dr. Cumming, let us express a hope that we have in no case exaggerated the unfavourable character of the inferences to be drawn from his pages. His creed often obliges him to hope the worst of men, and to exert himself in proving that the worst is true; but thus far we are happier than he. We have no theory which requires us to attribute unworthy motives to Dr. Cumming, no opinions, religious or irreligious, which can make it a gratification to us to detect him in delinquencies. On the contrary, the better we are able to think of him as a man, while we are obliged to disapprove of him as a theologian, the stronger will be the evidence for our conviction, that the tendency towards good in human nature has a force which no creed can utterly counteract, and which ensures the ultimate triumph of that tendency over all dogmatic perversions.

Much as I enjoy the pungency of her rhetoric, I like even better the idea of a romance nourished on such intellectual substance. I’m not the only one (though perhaps I am rare in appreciating it without irony?)–from Cynthia Ozick’s “Puttermesser Paired,” we get this picture of modern lovers inspired by “the two Georges”:

They read until they were dried up. They read until their eyes skittered and swelled. The strangeness in it did not elude them: where George Eliot and George Lewes in their nighttime coziness had taken up Scott, Trollope, Balzac, Turgenev, Daudet, Sainte-Beuve, Madame d’Agoult (Lewes recorded all this in his diary), she and Rupert read only the two Georges. Puttermesser discussed what this might mean. It wasn’t for “inspiration,” she pointed out–she certainly wasn’t mixing herself up with a famous dead Victorian. She was conscious of her Lilliputian measur: a worn-out city lawyer, stunted as to real experience, a woman lately secluded, eaten up with loneliness, melancholia ground into the striations of her face. The object was not inspiration but something sterner. The object was just what it had been for the two Georges: study. What Puttermesser and Rupert were studying was a pair of heroic boon companions. Boon companions! It was fellowship they were studying; it was nearness.