THE HUMOUR OF MIDDLEMARCH.
IN one of the many at once fascinating and irritating sarcasms which it was impossible not to look forward to and backward at, while Middlemarch was still incomplete, and life had still a literary object, George Eliot says,—"Some gentlemen 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,"—a sharp saying and a sample of many another with which every chapter in Middlemarch is plentifully strewn. But it is not to sarcasms such as these that we should appeal as illustrative of the humour of Middlemarch. They gave a poignant flavour to the book, and made the reader feel a little afraid of his author, as well as wide awake to the general drift of her remarks; but painfully as the barbs of her psychological criticisms make themselves felt, these criticisms have not half the humour or zest of her manipulations of the ludi- crous where her attitude is not critical, as it is here, but directly creative. What picture in English literature has ever had more of true humour in it than that of the slipshod good-nature of Mr. Brooke, with his inchoate aphorisms struggling into the purely suggestive existence of a cloudy hint for sharper-minded people ; his embryonic "documents" which never get even as far as that ; his shuffling, irresolute ambition ; his immense satisfaction in dwelling on the mere names of eminent persons or interesting places he had known,—as a species of shorthand memories the real significance of which to himself he never took the trouble to decypher ;—his fear of going too far, especially in the direction of expense ; and his habit of introducing unpleasant information " in the midst of a number of disjointed particulars," " as if it were a medicine that would get a milder flavour by mixing " ? And how the humour of the picture is enhanced by the admirable contrast with Mrs. Cadwallader, whose mind may be said to live only in the sharpness and detail of particulars, who never attempts an aphorism, and says precisely what she means with somewhat startling abrupt- ness and trenchant wit. A miscellaneous, desultory mind like Mr. Brooke's, of would-be enterprise well down at heels, that harks back before it has well committed itself to anything, is a true enough and a humorous enough conception in itself, but when brought on to the stage in close contrast with one like Mrs. Cadwallader's, which, without a trace of this uncertain haze of aspiration, is full of the sharp settled self-confidence, mingled of high birth and wit, that hits its mark with precision for every helpless shuffle of Mr. Brooke's, the humour of the picture is doubled. That good-natured fog of drifting purpose and incoherent thought called Mr. Brooke, makes his first appearance at his own dinner- table, introducing the conversation with his usual good-humonre I vague shuffling of desultory subjects :—" ' Sir Humphry Davy ? ' said Mr. Brooke, over the soup, in his easy, smiling way, taking up Sir James Chettam's remark that he was studying Davy's Agri- cultural Chemistry. '.Well, now, Sir Humphry Davy; I dined with him some years ago at Cartwright's, and Wordsworth was there too,—the poet Wordsworth, you know. Now there was some- thing singular. I was at Cambridge when Wordsworth was there, and I never met him,—and I dined with him twenty years after- wards at Cartwright's. There's an oddity in things now.' " Com- pare that with Mrs. Cadwallader, dark-eyed, high-coloured, driving simultaneously into Mr. Brooke's gates and the scene of the story, in her pony-phaeton, dressed in a shabby bonnet and very old Indian shawl, and doing her smart little stroke of business at the lodge-keeper's as she drives in, by asking Mrs. Fitchett how her fowls are laying, and on hearing that they eat their eggs, saying, " Oh the cannibals ! better sell them cheap at once. What will you sell them a couple? One can't eat fouls of a bad character at a high price." This contrast between Mr. Brooke's mind, good-naturedly " going to be created," as it were,—so it was that some old German play introduced Adam to its audience, —and Mrs. Cadwallader's keenly crystallised wit, runs through the whole story. One of Mr. Brooke's unhatched aphorisms is, as we have seen, that "there are oddities in things,—life isn't cast in a mould,—not cut by rule and line, that sort of thing." Mr. Brooke dwells on this "oddity in things" repeatedly, once, in the instance we have quoted, at his own dinner-table,—once in trying to make his niece see that life with Mr. Casaubon won't be exactly what sbe had fancied it,—and again in a feeble attempt to soothe down by anticipation the irritation of Dorothea's friends on the occasion of her second marriage,—which he does by opening to their vexed souls a prospective refuge in a species of philosophical predestination. " You see, Chettam, you have not been able to hinder it any more than I have ; there's something singular in things ; they come round, you know." But Mrs. Cad- wallader has no sympathy with that sort of generalisation of help- lessness. She doesn't think there's anything "singular in things." They wouldn't " have come round," as Mr. Brooke calls it, if people hadn't acted like idiots. As for Dorothea's second mar- riage, "the only wonder to me is that any of you are surprised. You did nothing to hinder it. If you would have had Lord Triton down here to woo her with his philanthropy, he might have carried her off before the year was over. There was no safety in anything but that. Mr. Casaubon had prepared the way as beautifully as possible. He made himself disagreeable,—or it pleased God to make him so,—and then he dared her to contradict him. It's the way to make any trumpery tempting, to ticket it at a high price in that way." The collisions between Mr. Brooke and Mrs. Cadwallader are triumphs of humour, as when she attacks him for his electioneering propensities on the Radical side, and says to him, "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 humming and hawing ;" or when she advises his friends to play upon his dislike of spending money by making him feel sharply the expense of electioneering. "It's no use plying him with wide words like expenditure,'—I wouldn't talk of phlebotomy, I would empty a pot of leeches upon him. What we good, stingy people don't like is having our sixpences sucked away from us ;" or when deprecating Mr. Brooke's ill-judged par- simony on his own estate, she says, "Oh, stinginess may be abused like other virtues ; it will not do to keep one's own pigs lean." The humour of the running contrast between the needle- point of Mrs. Cadwallader's criticism and the fermenting yeast of Mr. Brooke's helpless mixture of ambition, indolence, and good sense, is all the more telling because of the parsimony common to both, which, when joined with precision of purpose and wit, somehow becomes a new talent in Mrs. Cadwallader, or at least a new field of success and distinction, but joined with Mr. Brooke's hesitation of thought and intention becomes in him a new incapa- city. After all, Mr. Brooke is the more humorous figure of the two ; the election speech at Middlemarch is one of the most humorous passages in English literature ; but the peculiar blur of thought and purpose in his mind would never have been adequately appreciated without the keen foil of the companion picture.
There is nothing in which George Eliot's humour shows itself with more power than the fine shades with which she dis- criminates the different kinds of mental and moral haze. Mr. Brooke's haze is haze of purpose, chiefly due to indolence. He is not by any means without the yolk of sagacity, only it never gets devekped into active life, in consequence of the native desultoriness
of his character. But George Eliot paints haze of prejudice at least as well as she paints haze of purpose, and she paints it where there is no haze of purpose at all, but the clearest possible purpose looming red through a fog of dull notions, mixed up of creed and cunning, like the red-hot surface of Jupiter through his great belts of cloud. What, for instance, can be fuller of grim humour than the picture of Mrs. Waule, Peter Featherstone's sister, who inveighs against the Vincys " not at all with a defiant air, but in a low, muffled, neutral tone, as of a voice heard through cotton wool," and who asks, in ease Fred Vincy is to get her brother's, Peter Featherstone's, property, " what did God Almighty make families for ?" and this though she quite agrees with her dying brother, who
dismisses her curtly in the words, " Mrs. Waule, you'd better go,"—
that "entire freedom from the necessity of behaving agreeably was included in the Almighty's intention about families." Of course, the evidence of humour here consists not in the accurate copying of the trait just as it would have been seen in a real Mrs. Waule, but in the indications that the conception of Mrs. Waule's family feelings and creed was even more due to the author's humour than to her mere power of observation,— that it was due at least to a power of observation inspired and guided by humour. The merely faithful painter would have given Mrs. Waule's remark, and might even have added that Mrs. Waule was not specially annoyed by her abrupt dismissal, but he would not have brought the two together as helping to interpret her view of the Providential purpose of a family. That could be only the work of a great humorist, just as the contrast between Mrs. Cadwallader and Mr. Brooke could only be the work of a great humorist. And in the same way the train of thought which is described as passing through the mind of the Middlemarch inn- keeper, Mrs. Dollop, in relation to the asserted poisoning of Raffles, could only be the picture of a great humorist. Not that this
train of thought is in any way, as far as we can tell, deflected from the truth of real life by the humour of the novelist, but that it re- quired her strongly humorous imagination for incongruities to supply the place of the manifold confusions of association which would stand for thought and knowledge with Mrs. Dollop. Mrs. Dollop is the person who leads opinion in Middlemarch against post-mortem examinations at the hospital. She said that " Doctor Lydgate
meant to let the people die in the Hospital, if not to poison them, for the sake of cutting them up, without saying by your leave or with your leave ; for it was a known ' fac ' that he had wanted to cut up Mrs. Goby, as respectable a woman as any in Parley Street, who had money in trust before her marriage—a poor tale for a doctor who, if he was good for anything, should know what was the matter with you before you died, and not want to pry into your inside after you were gone." This irrefragable argument for Mr. Lyd- gate's murderous intentions—that he had wanted to cut up a woman who had money in trust before her marriage,—would never have reproduced itself in a mind in which the humour involved in the anarchy of ideas had not replaced, like a second nature, the ignorance which rendered such an anarchy possible. And the humour is still more delightful in the picture of Mrs. Dollop's second great attack on Lydgate,—the attack founded on his supposed complicity in the poisoning of Raffles :-
"' Why shouldn't they dig the man up, and have the Crowner ? ' said the dyer. 'It's been done many and many's the time. If there's been foul play they might find it out.'—' Not they, Mr. Jonas ! ' said Mrs. Dollop, emphatically. I know what doctors are. They're a deal too cunning to be found oat. And this Doctor Lydgate that's been for cut- ting up everybody before the breath was well out o' their body—it's plain enough what use he wanted to make o' looking into respectable people's insides. He knows drugs, you may be sure, as you can neither smell nor see, neither before they're swallowed nor after. Why, I've seen drops myself ordered by Doctor Gambit as is our club doctor and a good charikter, and has brought more live children into the world nor ever another r Middlemarch—I said I've seen drops myself as made no difference whether they was in the glass or out, and yet have griped you the nest day, So I'll leave your own sense to judge. Don't tell me All I say is, it's a mercy they didn't take this Doctor Lydgate on to our club. There's many a mother's child might ha' rued it.'" Mrs. Dollop's abject veneration for the latent power of drugs which " made no difference whether they was in the glass or not, and yet griped you the next day," is just such a touch of humour
as Shakespeare delighted in. Indeed, perhaps the only other writer in fiction besides Shakespeare who could have created Juliet's nurse is George Eliot.
And even now we have but touched on the chief centres of the wealth of humour of Middlemarch. From little Benjamin Garth, who, when informed, while at his lessons, that his father is sent for again by employers who had previously abruptly dispensed with his services, cries out, "Hooray! just like Cincinuatus," with a sense of discipline being relaxed, to Bubtrode, the Evangelical banker who could not admit that Joshua Rigg's destiny was the concern of Providence, holding that " it belonged to the unmapped regions not taken under the Providential government, except in an imperfect, colonial way," there is hardly a character in the book which is not described from the humorous, as well as the merely pictorial point of view. From Mr. Bambridge, the horse-dealer, who says that Raffles was the kind of man who bragged so much that " he'd brag of a spavin as if it 'ad fetch money," to Mrs. Toft, the knitter, who was always catching up misleading fragments of con- versation in the intervals of counting her stitches, every one of the slightest sketches is put in with a touch of humour that makes it bright and vivid. Without counting George Eliot's bitterer sar- casms,—which are only too numerous, though hardly so numerous, we think, as in former. books, and sometimes not altogether pleasant,—the wealth of genuine humour in Middlemarch is astonishing. And it is, so far as this, of the Shakespear- ian kind,—that it proceeds out of a fullness of insight into the commonest modes of thought and feeling which brings them before us to the very life ; only it does not usually proceed from any considerable measure of sympathy with that mode of thought and feeling, as it does in Shakespeare even where, in an intellectual point of view, the popular way of looking at things is most indefensible. On the contrary, George Eliot laughs at the common modes of thought and feeling much more than with them, and it is only astonishing that, this being so, it seldom or never leads her to exaggerate common people's sayings into pure farce, or to starve them into pure inanity. She has always moderation enough to give to the absurdities and incongruities which she exposes the tone of absolute fidelity to life.
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