BOOKS.

MIDDLEMARCH.*

You hear people say, with a sort of virtuous assumption of artistic feeling, that they will not read novels published in parts ;—that they are content to wait till the fragments are pieced into a whole.. The present reviewer at least abjures all such withetic doctrine. Whether an author who has any claims to such high artistic power as George Eliot should begin to publish till the whole is complete,—and most likely the author of Middlemarch did not do, so, at least there is no sign of a half-completed or altered design anywhere,—is one question ; and whether the reader should study the instalments as they are doled out, is quite another. We are disposed to maintain that no story gets so well apprehended,. so completely mastered in all its aspects, as one which, written as a- whole, is published in parts. There is, at all events, this to be said in its favour,—that it is the only way in which human life it- self, of which fiction is supposed to ba the mirror, can be studied. There, you are not allowed to see the beginning, middle, and end' at a sitting, like the springing-up, budding, and blowing of a flower beneath the bidding of an Egyptian conjuror, but must, usually become perfectly familiar with the human elements of a- story before you see them even begin to combine into a plot. And in the case of Middlemarch, we are perfectly sure that,. other things being equal, those will understand it best and' value it most who have made acquaintance slowly during the past year with all its characters, and discussed them eagerly with their friends, in all the various stages of their growth and fortune. The book is called "A Study of Provincial Life," and answers to its title. Round the central characters are grouped at greater or leas distance all tha elements of country society—the country gentry, the surveyor, the clergymen of" various types, the country doctors, the banker, the manufac- turers, the shopkeepers, the coroner, the auctioneer, the veteri- nary surgeon, the horse-dealer, the innkeepers, all drawn with' a force and yet a perspective which it takes time, and a graduation of feeling not easily commanded in the few hours. usually devoted to a novel, to apprehend. Middlemarch and its various sets have now been growing familiar to us for many months, and a large part of the appreciation with which we have read the later chapters, is due to those frequent discus- sions of the various Middlemarch personages by which their exact- social function and position have been fixed in our minds, and' the apologies for their various questionable actions have been familiarised. George Eliot has, no doubt, often smiled in reading the criticisms passed on her drift and purpose by those who had but part of her design before them. Bet so would any one who could see the end from the beginning often smile at the- partial and fragmentary criticisms passed on human life. Not the- less are such partial and fragmentary criticisms, however false they may prove in the end, of the greatest use in helping those- who make them to understand the end in relation to the beginning,. when at length the end is attained.

In the only passage throughout the book, which is some- what artificially, not to say stiltedly written,—and which in called not a preface, bat a 'prelude,'—it is hinted that George Eliot's object is to depict the life of a woman of deep and generous enthusiasm, who might have been a St. Theresa if she- had been born in an age when society and faith worked together in unison with generous individual aspirations, but whose life is to-be actually jarred and spoiled by the incongruity between the

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Middlemarch. A Study of Provincial Life. 4 vols. Edinburgh and London : Blackwood. spirit within her and the age into which she is born. In the con- cluding passage of the book, where the same idea is taken up again, George Eliot remarks that the determining acts of her heroine's life "were not ideally beautiful." " They were the mixed result," she says, "of young and noble impulse struggling under prosaic conditions," and to the taint in the social air which her heroine breathed, George Eliot ascribes the cross-purposes of her life, where "great feelings took the aspect of error and great faith the aspect of illusion." "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 doing all for the sake of a brother's burial; the medium in which these ardent deeds took shape is for ever gone. But we insignificant people, with our daily words and acts, are preparing the lives of many Dorotheas, some of which may present a far sadder sacrifice than that of the Dorothea whose story we know ;"—in other words, we are moulding a bad public opinion about women, which must be held responsible for such failures in ideal beauty as the two marriages by which Dorothea showed at once her self-forgetfulness, and her helplessness to work out in practice the high ideal by which she was possessed. If this was really George Eliot's drift, we do not think it particularly well worked out. Dorothea's mistake in devoting herself to Mr. Casau- bon,—a clergyman more than double her age, eaten up by un- healthy egoism and a cobwebby kind of intellectual ambition,— may be due to defective education, and the unsatisfactory state of public opinion as to what sacrifices elderly men may legitimately ask of girls, as George Eliot intimates ; but there is little or no attempt to trace the connection in this book. In fact the attempt of the 'prelude' and the final chapter to represent the book as an -elaborate contribution to the "Woman's "question, seems to us a mistake, meting out unjust measure to the entirely untrammelled imaginative power which the book displays. The creative power of the author is yoked to no specific doctrine in this, if not her com- pletest, yet in many respects her freest and greatest work, and we re-read both the ' prelude ' and the conclusion with a faint surprise when we are familiar with the story. It is true, indeed, that not only is the heroine's (Dorothea) life all but wrecked by a marriage due to misdirected enthusiasm, but the life of the true hero of the story,—though not that of him who eventually gains the heroine, —Lydgate, is still more completely wrecked by his marriage with a shallow-hearted girl of superficial refinement and gentle- ness, disguising the most absolute selfishness and coldness of heart beneath. But here, again, there is no carefully drawn-out rela- tion between the perverted public opinion of the day about women, and the fatal mistake which Lydgate commits. It is intimated, indeed, that he was misled through sharing the blundering notion of an age in which men and women have few intellectual interests in common,—the notion, namely, that all which intellectual men need in a wife is that soft- ness or feminineness of manner which is supposed to be indica- tive of pliancy of nature,—a supposition the blunder of which is exposed in Middlernarch with the most terrible and almost redundant force. No doubt George Eliot means Lydgate's -and Rosamond's history to teach men that if they are to be happy in marriage, they must secure something of positive moral and in- tellectual sympathy in their wives, and not that mere semblance of tenderness which is called feminine grace. And she does teach us that there is no hardness like the hardness of a narrow mind polished into superficial charm, taught to avoid contentiousness as unfeminine, and hence only the fonder of pursuing its private pur- poses without the least relation to the reasons and objections of -others. But then the type of women represented by Rosamond is far too unique to be much of a contribution towards the 'woman' ques- tion. It is her disguised selfishness, not her ignorance, which ruins Lydgate's life. Had she known as little as she does of his intellec- tnal aims, and yet been what Lydgate thought her, a tender, devoted woman, his life would not have been wrecked as it is. Had Rosamond inherited her mother's or her aunt's nature, instead of her father's, there would have been nothing of the tragedy which George Eliot depicts so powerfully in this wonder- ful book. Rosamond is a most originally-drawn character, but i,p is not the ignorant admiration which men feel for what she seems to be, but the discrepancy between what she seems to be and what she is, which is chargeable with the wreck of Lydgate's life. Hence we cannot accept George Eliot's apparent wish to make of Middlemarch a contribution to the formation of a better opinion • as to the education of women, as fairly representing either the actual drift of her story or the scope of the genius it displays. The real power of Middlemarch is, however, no doubt spent on the delineation of two ill-assorted unions, both of them mainly due to the spontaneous preference of the woman for the man,—unions for neither of which, so far as we can see, is a perverted public opinion at all specially responsible. Nothing could be received with less favour by her friends than Dorothea's resolve to marry Mr. Casaubon, the would-be author of The Key to all Mytho- logies ; ' and Rosamond's wish to marry the ambitious young

surgeon, Mr. Lydgate, on account of his distinguished bearing and connection with the Lydgates of Quallinghain, also receives scant favour from her family and friends. But whatever the motive of George Eliot in choosing these marriages for her theme, it is itnpossible to rate too highly the power with which the misery they cause is delineated. Mr. Casaubon, looking not so much for a wife, as for a gentle secre- tary with a melodious voice who will read to him, write for him, and admire him to his heart's content without expecting anything from him more than he himself is,—one, in abort, who will "ob- serve his abundant pen-scratches and amplitude of paper with the uncritical awe of a delicate-minded canary,"—finds himself, instead, married to a woman of imperious impulses and devoted character, who craves a part both in his heart and in his aims, making him feel the former somewhat dry and cold, and the latter obscure and dim. He finds himself brought to a kind of daily judgment where he expected only to receive a new and agreeable stimulus to ambition, and withers rapidly under the demand—to which he is quite unequal—made alike upon his love and his in- tellectual life. But that here and there the author a little carica- tures Mr. Casaubou,—the over-pompous letter in which he makes his offer, for instance, could hardly have been written by a scholar at all, using as it does the word dissimulate ' in a sense for which we can find no sort of apology, and if it bad been so written, would surely have so far disgusted Dorothea as to make her hesitate, —and that she attributes to him in his last codicil an ungentlemanly act for which the reader is not prepared,—nothing could be finer than the account of the unhappiness his marriage causes, and its slow growth. The painful sense of finding an acute critic instead of a worshipper, the feverish dread he feels of exciting his wife's pity, the irritable consciousness that he in no way imposes upon her judgment, and the consequent growth of self-distrust in him- self, the soreness and jealousy with which he notices her tendency to interfere, however delicately, in his family arrangements, and to take under her protection a young cousin whom he had never liked, his inability to ask or even accept her sympathy when his life is threatened, and his wish to dictate her future life to her even from his grave, are all presented with a clear intellectual outline and vividness that nothing in any of the author's previous works has surpassed. Especially the last scenes of Mr. Casaubon's life, where he shuts himself up in his own wounded sensitiveness so completely as to repel Dorothea's sympathy for his physical sufferings for fear it should be pity, and where he finally breaks through his reserve only to ask for a pledge that she will govern her life after his death by the wishes he expresses, are painted with a sombre force, and an insight into the bitterness of sore pride, which add some of the greatest of all its treasures to the stores of English literature. And it is impossible to say whether Mr. Casaubon's or his wife's feelings are painted with most power. Dorothea's yearning to devote herself to a great ideal work, and her gradual discovery that in becoming Mr. Casaubon's wife she has entered into no such work, that she has found a dried- up formalist where she expected a loving guide and teacher, that she has devoted herself to a pedant instead of a man of original and masterly intellect, are quite as finely painted as Mr.

Casaubon's troubles. The rising, but quickly suppressed scorn with which she observes Mr. Casaubon's distrust both of her and of himself, the generous passion of her sympathy, and the despairing resentment with which she meets the rebuffs inflicted by his proud, thin-skinned reserve, the blundering generosity of her intercessions for the very man whom Mr. Casaubon most dis- likes, and the profound dread with which she hears her husband's request that she will take up and pursue after he is gone, the dreary

task in which she has lost all faith, are all painted in colours whose glow is all the more striking for the dreary and pallid tone of the wasting and wasted nature with which her lot is linked. A very fine Shelleyan sort of motto (evidently original) prefixed to

one of the chapters, which is to describe the tenacious ambition of Mr. Casaubon still clinging eagerly to the hope that his wife will redeem his promises to the world by editing his unfinished work, and the dread with which Dorothea hears the request, runs as follows :—

"Surely the golden hours are turning grey, And dance no more and vainly strive to run: I see their white locks streaming in the wind— Each face is haggard as it looks at me,—" and we cannot give greater praise to the picture which that chapter contains than by saying that it is worthy of the lines pre- fixed,—that we feel the full haggardness of those hours to both Dorothea and her husband ; the recoil of life from life, which ought to be union ; the mutual dread and distrust, which ought to be confidence ; the tyrannical wish and the instinct of rebellion, which ought to be eagerness on the one side not to impose a yoke, on the other, to accept it by anticipation. There is hardly a finer touch of genius in English literature than Dorothea's reply, as we may call it, after her husband's death, to his wish that she should complete the confused and pedantic work on which he had built his hopes of fame. "One little act of hers," says the author, "may perhaps be smiled at as a superstition. The Synoptical Tabulation for the use of Mrs. Casaubon she carefully enclosed and sealed, writing within the envelope, 'I could not use it. Do you not see now that I could not submit my soul to yours, by work- ing hopelessly at what I have no belief in ?_Dorothea.' Then she deposited the paper in her own desk." Such is the final touch which describes the breaking in pieces of poor Dorothea's effort after an ideal work. We do not think the affection which takes the place of this misdirected one quite worthy of her. Will Ladislaw is altogether uninteresting, and but for very fine fragments of political remark,—which evidently are not his, but the author's,—has nothing but his admiration and his youth to recommend him to Dorothea. He is petulant, small, and made up of spurts of character, without any wholeness and largeness, and except his goodness to little Miss Noble (by the way, is she Miss Winifred or Miss Henrietta Noble ? she is called by both names), and his disposition to lie on the hearth-rug, which is certainly praiseworthy, there is not a fascinating touch about him.

The picture of the ambitious and robust-minded Lydgate's com- plete subjugation by the constant attrition of his wife's soft, selfish obstinacy, of his total inability to govern her, and his utter defeat by her, even when Rosamond is so completely in the wrong that she is detected in all sorts of underhand proceedings—of all respon- sibility for which she divests herself by simply not feeling it,—is a picture second, of course, in moral and intellectual interest, to the higher picture of Dorothea's shipwreck with Mr. Casaubon, but certainly not second in originality or power. Rosamond, though she is guilty of one deliberate lie,—which is, we fancy, too great a sin against the conventional standard of conduct which she herself admitted to be quite consistent with the idea of the character,—is by far the finest picture of that shallowness which constitutes absolute incapacity for either deep feeling or true morality, we have ever met with in English literature. When she conceals her fixed intentions of deceit and disobedience by a turn of her slender neck, or a gentle patting of her own hair, one turns away from the picture in real dismay, so true is it and so terrible. Nor can anything be more powerful than the picture of the deadening effect pro- duced by her on Lydgate's gusty tenderness and impulsive nobility. In the scene where Dorothea's disinterestedness, force, and depth of feeling carry away even Rosamond for a moment, we are re- minded powerfully of some of the great scenes between Dinah and Hetty in Adam Bede. It is in kind the same victory won in a dif- ferent sphere of life and a different plane of feeling, but we are less prepared to believe in Rosamoud's capacity for being thus touched than in Betty's. The author has so steeled us against Rosamond by her previous pictures, that we lay down this fine and moving scene with a certain hesitation as to its fidelity to the character previously sketched, though George hot does prepare us for it by suggesting that even Lydgate might have made more impression on his wife, if he had not allowed his nature to be chilled into distrust of itself by her irresponsiveness, but had thrown his whole heart into the effort to take possession of his wife, and infuse a sort of second-nature into her out of the depths of his own earnestness and love.

Such are the main threads of interest in this great book. But the wealth of the secondary life which adds so much to the effect of these great delineations, it is impossible even to indicate in such a review as this. Dorothea's good-natured, slip-shod uncle, Mr. Brooke, whose conversation is so humorous a mosaic of kindli- ness, scatterbrainedness, niggardliness, and helpless desultory ambi- tion; her good-natured, prosaic brother-in-law, Sir James Chettam, the very incarnation of English high-feeling and narrow, com- monplace intellect ; her shrewd, commonplace sister Celia, and the exquisitely witty worldly-minded rector's wife, Mrs. Cadwallader, are all figures which bring out the ardent romance and depth of Dorothea's nature in strong relief. The groups of Middlemarch townspeople are not less carefully fitted to bring out in strong relief the pictures of Rosamond and her husband. The tyrannical old miser, Rosamond's uncle,

her spendthrift, but warm-hearted brother, her selfish father, her- cosy, loving mother ; the grim, half-sincere, half-hypocritic evan- gelical banker Balstrode, and his ostentation-loving but devoted' wife, with the various groups of gossiping townspeople, all serve to throw into relief the thin refinement, the petty vanity, the cold' amiability of her nature ; and the connection between Lydgate and' his unhappy patron Bulstrode is exceedingly finely conceived for the purpose of fully trying the mettle of the former's character. We- cannot help thinking that George Eliot makes a mistake in repre- senting a man of Bulstrode's type of mind as entirely unoppressed by the guilt of what be well knew to be, morally, murder, until' disgrace comes upon him. The description of the crime itself is wonderfully fine ; but the complete equanimity with which he- looks back upon it, after the great struggle which preceded it. we cannot accept as true. Of the wonderful humour of the book we must speak on another occasion.

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 char-

acters, 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. Mr. larebrother,—a favourite type- with George Eliot, the rector in Adam Bede was another variety- of him—Caleb Garth, the noble land agent, and Dorothea, are al?

in the highest sense religious in temperament ; two of them go, through very keen temptations, and the struggles of one, Dorothea, are minutely and most powerfully described ; but 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 or vacancy ; ao dramatic a picture of such a one as she is, going through such a struggle without a thought of God, is really un-

natural. The omission is owing no doubt to the very natural dislike of the author to attribute, out of pure dramatic instinct, to- her highest and noblest character an attitude of spirit with which she could not herself sympathise. The nearest we approach to any- thing like a positive faith in Dorothea is in the following fine passage:

"' Oh! my life is very simple,' said Dorothea, her lips curling with an exquisite smile, which irradiated her melancholy. am always at- Lowick.'—' That is a dreadful imprisonment,' said Will, impetuously.— 'No, don't think that,' said Dorothea. 'I have no longings.' He did_ not speak, but she replied to some change in his expression. 'I mean, for myself. Except that I should like not to have so much more than my share without doing anything for others. But I have a belief of my- own, and it comforts me.'—' What is that ?' said Will, rather jealous of the belief.—' That by desiring what is perfectly good, even when we don't quite know what it is and cannot do what we would, we are part of the divine power against evil—widening the skirts of light and making the struggle with darkness narrow.— That Is a beautiful mysticism —it is a—'—' Please not to call it by any name,' said Dorothea, patting out her hands entreatingly. You will say it is Persian, or something else geographical. It is my life. I have found it out, and cannot part with it. I have always been finding out my religion since I was a little girl. I used to pray so much—now I hardly ever pray. I try not to have desires merely for myself because they may not be good for others, and I have too much already. I only told you, that you might know quite well how my days go at Lowick.' "

And there is, it will be observed, a careful vagueness in the phrase 'divine power,' which leaves it quite open to the reader to interpret it as meaning either the collective goodness of the human

world, or something higher and better which comes from a purer source. In reading the highest scenes in Middlemarch we have o feeling as if the focus of all light and beauty were dark and cold. Yet, say what we may, it is a great book. Warwickshire has certainly given birth to the greatest forces of English literature, for

we are indebted to it not only for by far the greatest of English authors, but also for by far the greatest of English authoresses ; and though it would be too mach to say that the latter ranks next to the former in our literature, even with a whole firmament of power between, it is not too much to say that George Eliot will take her stand amongst the stars of the second magnitude, with the cluster which contains Scott and Fielding, and indeed all but Shakespeare, on a level of comparative equality with them,—or at least without any distance between her and the greatest of them which can compare for a moment with the distance which divides all of them from Shakespeare.