GEORGE ELIOT'S MIDDLEMARCH."*

WHATEVER the value of "the higher criticism," it can hardly be denied that criticism of a mere commencement cannot very easily be criticism of " the higher " kind,—that it must at least be ten- tative and provisional,—that the most sharp-sighted critic can hardly be able to see all that a really great author like George Eliot intends by suggestions of which the development is still in reserve, and characters of which only the first outlines are dis- played. Yet this volume deserves, if not the full criticism which can only be in place when the work is complete, such notice as may draw the attention of the public to the great wealth of insight and humour which it contains ; nor need we hold back such mention of faults of manner as it is impossible that any future development of the tale can turn into beauties. On the character of Miss Brooke, which is the main subject of this introductory part of Illiddlenzarch, we shall offer as yet no comment. The first sketch is full of power and originality, but so much must depend on the melancholy working-out which George Eliot's not very pleasant, and for her somewhat pedantic, " prelude" hints at, that it is impossible to say whether it would be most unfair to the author or to the critic to deal with the augury as if it were the event. It seems to us somewhat unnatural that a girl of Dorothea Brooke's depth and enthusiasm of nature should fall in love with a man of so little vital warmth and volume of character as Mr. Casaubon in spite of the twenty-seven years' difference in age, without any apparent reason beyond her thirst for an intellectual and moral teacher. That want is usually very distinctly separ- able from love, and only glides into it, we should have thought, when there is nature enough in the object of reverence to exercise a fascination of a warmer kind. It is true that we are told, by way of explanation, that " Miss Brooke argued from words and dispositions not less unhesitatingly than other young ladies of her age. Signs are small measurable things, but interpretations are illimitable, and in girls of sweet, ardent nature every sign is apt to conjure up wonder, hope, belief, vast as a sky, and coloured by a diffused thimbleful of matter in the shape of knowledge," (by the way, should George Eliot assume in the mind of her readers a knowledge of the results of Professor Tyndal's speculations as to the cause of the blueness of the sky ?) But we should have said that, liable as all signs are to be interpreted by young and- ardent natures into something infinitely larger than they mean, the signs of sufficiency or deficiency of life itself would be particularly easy to interpret truly, and be pre- cisely those which would be most likely to be truly interpreted by " a girl of sweet ardent nature" like Miss Brooke. However, we freely admit that George Eliot knows a hundred times as much of young ladies as most women or men, the present writer certainly included, and we are therefore disposed to take Miss Brooke's sen- timent of love for Mr. Casaubon,—without which such a girl would never have dreamt of marriage,—on her authority, though with some surprise, as a matter of fact. It is, however, hardly adequately accounted for, and certainly leaves the impression of something slightly unnatural and repellent on the reader (who is let into the secret reasons of the matter), no less than on her sister Celia, the lover Sir James Chettam, and the Rector's wife, Mrs. Cad- wallader, who are not. Though quite prepared to admire the drawing of Miss Brooke's character as a whole when fully deve- loped, we are sure there is some artistic deficiency in leaving the motive of her engagement and:marriage to a dry and formal scholar like Mr. Casaubon so inadequately apprehended by the reader.

The great triumphs of the completed part of Middlemarch are the rich and admirable pictures of the bachelor uncle, Mr. Brooke, and the aforesaid Rector's wife, Mrs. Cadwallader. In each there is humour enough as well as truth of drawing enough for a reputa- tion. Mr. Brooke is a perfect type of shambling culture, and of such vagueness of modern enlightenment as is consistent with a country gentlemen's position, or as our author describes him, is a man " of acquiescent temper, miscellaneous opinions, and uncertain vote," who had travelled in his younger days, and acquired a rambling * Middleman& 3y George Eliot. Book I.—" Alias BloAe." London and Edin- burgh: Blackwood. frame of mind by so doing, in short, a person of whom it was safe to predict nothing, except that 44 he would act with benevolent intentions, and that he would spend as little money

as possible in carrying them out." His good-natured, conversa- tional slouch that is always picking itself up by referring back to his last remark,—" the tendency to say what he had said before," which our author, with one of her most delicate touches of humour and insight, calls that " fundamental tendency of human

speech," was, she tells us, " markedly exhibited in Mr. Brooke,"— his helpless reference to celebrities he had known, as if their mere, names were a consolatory r6sunz6 of interesting ideas ; his desultory

habit of collecting documents on any interesting point and falling

back on them as.a kind of strength in reserve, a potential knowledge in some respects less fatiguing than actual knowledge, his easy,

slovenly way of broaching oven serious proposals, are characteristics which make his pleasure in dabbling in great subjects and dread of going too far, which would otherwise be hackneyed features, entirely fresh and vivid. It is hardly possible to draw a character in more

distinct relief than Mr. Brooke is drawn, for instance, in the, following short passage:— "He [Mr. Casaubon] stayed a little longer than he had intended, on a. slight pressure of invitation from Mr. Brooke, who offered no bait except his own documents on machine-breaking and rick-burning. Mr.. Casaubon was called into the library to look at these iu a heap, while his host picked up first one and then the other to read aloud from in a skipping and uncertain way, passing from one unfinished passage to another with a Yes, now, but hero!' and finally pushing them all aside to open the journal of his youthful Continental travels.

Look here—here is all about Greece. Rhamnue, the ruins. of Rhamnus—you are a great Grecian, now. I don't know whether you have given much fitudy to the topography. I spent no and of time in making out those things—Helioan, now. Here,. now !—' We started the next morning for Parnassus, the double-peaked Parnassus.' All this volume is about Greece, you know,' Mr. Brooke wound up, rubbing his thumb transversely along the edges of the leaves as he held the book forward. Mr. Casaubon made a dignified though somewhat sad audience ; bowed in the right place, and avoided looking at anything documentary as far as possible, without showing disregard or impatience ; mindful that this desultoriness was associated with the. institutions of the country, and that the man who took him on this. severe mental scamper was not only an amiable host, but a landholder. and custos rota/erten. Was his endurance aided also by the reflection that Mr. Brooke was the uncle of Dorothea ?"

And Mr. Brooke is not only a delicious and perfect sketch in him- self,—an exquisite representative of the indolent pleasure in loose- culture and the dream of second-hand knowledge, though a country gentleman every inch of him, but his figure is a delightful'• companion to that of Mrs. Cadwallader, the rector's wife, a woman with a mind " as active as phosphorus, biting everything that: came near into the form that suited it," as frugal as Mr. Brooke, with more reason for it, of much higher birth, of sharp wit and keen interfering instinct, who furnishes the chief interest of the- country-side in which she lives, both by her sarcastic sayings and her vigorous and brilliant strokes of economical policy. Mrs. Cadwallader hardly knew probably (though equally probably. George Eliot did) that she was popularizing Dr. Newman's theory about "private judgment," when she says in her sharp way to Mr.. Brooke, " Now, do not let them lure you to the hustings, my dear Mr. Brooke. A man always makes a fool of himself, speechifying ;. there's no excuse but being on the right side, so that you can ask a. blessing on your hunzming and hawing." But oven that hardly brings her out as fully in a few words as her bitter remarks to the common-- sense sister Celia, on Dorothea's engagement,—" Young people- should think of their families in marrying. I set a bad example,—

married a poor clergyman and made myself a pitiable object among the De Bracys,—obliged to get my coals by stratagem and pray to Heaven for my salad oil. However, Casaubon has money enough ; I must do him that justice. As to his blood, I suppose the family

quarterings are three cuttle-fish sable, and a commentator ram- pant. By the by, before I go, my dear, I must speak to your Mrs. Carter about pastry. I want to send my young cook to learn of her. Poor people with four children, like us, you know,. can't afford to keep a good cook. I have no doubt Mrs. Carter will oblige me. Sir James's cook is a perfect dragon." Her economy is combined too with religious hatred of the vulgar rich.. " They had probably made all their money out of high retail prices, and Mrs. Cadwallader detested high prices for every- thing that was not paid in kind at the rectory." But her great• trial is her husband's imperturbable easiness of temper and good opinion of everybody ; " he will even," she says, in her rightous, indignation, " speak well of the Bishop, though 1 tell him it is. unnatural in a beneficed clergyman."

The characters introduced towards the end of the volume, the Vincys, Mr. Featherstone, and his sister Mrs. Waulo, promise almost equally well, but the sketch of them is too unfinished to speak of with any certainty, and we shall therefore conclude with our only complaint of the volume,—the number of rather acrid and, it seems to us, disagreeable and not unfrequently heavy sarcasms which the author introduces, after Thackeray's manner, into her own running comments. Thackeray was a satirist, and it was quite of a piece with his whole style, as a man of the world, to interpose these little sarcasms from time to time, though even he overdid it ; but George Eliot's style as a painter of human character and life is a much larger and more sympathetic one than 'Thack- eray's, and it suits that style far better to let human feelings and weaknesses speak for themselves, without a constant run of jarring little laughs at them. Such remarks as the following—and there are plenty more of them—put us out of the mood in which George Eliot's books are enjoyed most :—

" Certainly such elements in the character of a marriageable girl tended to interfere with her lot, and hinder it from being decided ac- cording to custom, by good looks, vanity, and merely canine affection."

"All people, young or old (that is, all people in those ants-reform times), would have thought her an interesting object if they had referred the glow in her eyes and checks to the newly-awakened ordinary images of young love : the illusions of Chloe about Strephon have been suffi- ciently consecrated in poetry, as the pathetic loveliness of all spontaneous trust ought to be. Miss Pippin adoring young Pumpkin and dreaming along endless vistas of unwoarying companionship, was a little drama which never tired our fathers and mothers, and had been put into all costumes. Lot but Pumpkin have a figure which would sustain the disadvantages of the abort-waisted swallow-tail, and overvbedy felt it not only natural but necessary to the perfection of womanhood, that sweet girl should be at once convinced of his virtue, his exceptional ability, and above all, his perfect sincerity."

"Something certainly gave Celia unusual courage ; and she was not sparing the sister of whom she was occasionally in awe. Who can tell what just criticisms Murr the Oat may be passing on us beings of wider speculation ?"

"No speech could have been more thoroughly honest in its intention ; the frigid rhetoric at the end was as sincere as the bark of a dog, or the cawing of an amorous rook, Would it not he rash to conclude that there was no passion behind those sonnets to Bolin which strike us as the thin music of a mandolin'?"

"Let any lady who is inclined to bo hard on Mrs. Cadwallader inquire into the comprehensiveness of her own beautiful views, and be quite sure that they afford accommodation for all the lives which have the honour to co-oxist with hers."

To us one of George Eliot's great charms consists in her largo friendly way of letting the light fall on human weakness; and these mannered sarcasms—which have always haunted her books —seem altogether out of keeping with that way, seem like broken lancet-points in a living body. Something of the cruelty of vivi- section is natural in Thackeray's style, and very unnatural in George Eliot's. She gains her ascendancy over the imagination without inflicting these little superfluous wounds, and they only diminish it. It is the one and almost the only respect in which we prefer her poetry to her prose,—that in her poetry she does

not put forth, at least in her own person, the biting power of this acid criticism. For the rest, we shall look to the continuation of this fascitsating book with hearty delight.