BOOKS.
MIDDLEMARCH.—PART II.*
THE second book of Middlemareh is very tranquil reading ; there is but one interest in it that ever threatens to excite the warmer
sympathies, and that is, as yet, but gently strung. Poor Dorothea's woes as the wife of a man who has no place in his nature for the tenderer feelings, and who can neither give nor receive the sort of confidence without which there is no love in such a heart as hers, are commencing, and the picture, like all such pictures in George Eliot's pages, is full of truth and pathos, and all the more original that Dorothea Casaubon has a strong, though utterly unpractised intellect of her own, and is not the mere loving baby without power to see where she has made mis- takes and where the weakness of others lies, whom it is usual to sketch in such situations. The most delicate of the touches in this part is the terror which falls upon poor Dorothea on her husband's account when she is told that, from his ignorance of German, he cannot ever know what has been already achieved in reducing comparative mythology to a science, and that he is, in fact, "groping about in the woods with a pocket-compass," where the Germans "have made good roads" of which he knows nothing. The vague dismay with which this careless statement fills her, the dread she begins to feel that he may lose the reward of a life of steady labour from this unfortunate inability to study the best previous works on his own subjects, is the finest element in the disturbed relations between her and her arid husband. The conception of a young wife already travelling, by the aid of quick sympathies and a keen intellect, beyond those artificial limits to the sources of his special knowledge within which a learned student more than twice her age has half-wilfully shut himself up, trembling in her very heart for the disappointment to which he may be exposed after a life's useless labour, and again alarming him by her impatience for some immediate results of his efforts into a painful glimmer of self-consciousness that his ideas are not clear enough, and hardly likely ever to be clear enough, for success, is just such a one as only George Eliot could either conceive or execute, and so far as she deals with it in this volume, the story is both perfectly original and full of pathos. We think, however, that this fine author not unfrequently gives us a rude jar, which diminishes the effect of her own best conceptions by the satiric remarks—made from the ex- ternal point of view of pure observer—with which she studs her delineations. The following noble passage, for instance, begins with a very fine description of Dorothea's permanently and inex- plicably painful associations with Rome where she had first begun to feel the deep want of congeniality between her husband and herself, and it ends with a still finer observation on the tragedies in life of which we are fortunately unable to feel the depth by reason of their frequency ; but why is the harshly-expressed and inartistically inserted sentence we have printed in italics put in just to break the beauty and harmony of this very fine piece of writing ?—
" 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 g'gantie broken reve- Middlemarch. By George Eliot. Book IL Old and Young. London: William Blackwood and Sons, lations 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 preoccu- pation 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 defence 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 but 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 degrada- tion, at first jarred her as with an electric shock, and then urged them- selves on her with that ache belonging to a glut of confused ideas which check the flow of emotion. Forms both pale and glowing took posses- sion 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 forlorn- ness Dorothea all her life continued to see the vastness of St. Peter's, the hugo 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. Not that this inward amazement of Dorothea's was anything very exceptional : nany 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. Nor can I suppose that when Mrs. Casaubon is discovered in a fit of weeping six weeks after her wedding, the situation will be regarded as tragic. 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 ele- ment 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 bear much of it. If we had a keen vision and feel- ing of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart boat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other aide of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity."
We suppose the object of that harsh sentence is to carry out the thesis of the "prelude" that "these blundering lives are due to the inconvenient indefiniteness with which the Supreme Power has fashioned the natures of women," a thesis which requires the obtrusion of the notion of mistake and chance throughout the tale. For our own parts, we should have thought the art of this very beautiful passage far more perfect without this bitter paren- thetic laugh at the souls in their "young nudity" "tumbled out among incongruities." However, except for one or two apparently intentional sarcasms of this sort, the sketch of Mr. and Mrs. Casaubon and their troubles in Rome is amongst the moat beautiful of George Eliot's quieter pictures.
The earlier portion of this part of Middlemarch, though quite equal in ability to the Roman episode, is not its equal in interest. The sketch of the Middlernarch banker, Mr. Bulstrode, and .his struggle with his trading brother-in-law, Mr. Vincy, the Mayor, is admirable of its kind, as is also the account of the ambitious and able young surgeon, Mr. Lydgate, his difficulties in choosing between the rival candidates for the hospital chaplaincy, and his succumb- ing to a political motive in the matter which he knows to be not the highest. But of all this portion of the tale the interest is as yet very mild, and the enjoyment we have in reading it, which is great, is almost purely intellectual ; not of that kind which springs from any particular wish to follow the story, as a story, into its develop- ments. Whether Mr. Lydgate is to marry Rosamond Vincy or not, what is the secret object for which the Rev. Camden Farebrother,—admirably painted, by the way,—is so anxious to obtain funds, how far Fred Vincy succeeds in getting his crabbed old uncle, Mr. Featherstone, to leave him his property, are all questions on which the most enthusiastic of readers will be able to bear suspense with perfect equanimity. The pleasure in the earlier portion and, indeed, the greater portion of this volume is rather in the fine drawing than in the flow of the narrative, and this though some of the best of the Midellemarch characters do not appear at all. Mrs. Cadwallader, our special favourite, does not once appear on the scene, and Mr. Brooke, our second favourite, only appears for half a page or so to make a short speech on the chaplaincy question, the banker, Mr. Bulstrode, being evidently in possession of the particular wire to which he responds. The smooth, keen, common-place Celia, too, is off the stage. Notwithstanding this absence of several of our favourites, and slight as the interest of this volume to the novel-reader's mind is, the pleasure it has given is not leas, perhaps even more, than we received from the first. The thread of criticism on life which always runs through George Eliot's stories is in this portion extremely fine and full of striking points, and these not so often harshly interpolated as they sometimes are, but for the most part natural and effective. Take this, for instance, as a criticism on the deferential mannerism which some men affect or fall into :—" Mr. Bulstrode had also a deferential bending attitude in listening, and an apparently fixed at- tentiveness in his eyes which made those persons who thought them- selves worth hearing infer that he was seeking the utmost improve- ment 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." The implicit flattery of that mannerism has often been remarked upon before, but not the sting it conveys to those who are conscious that their remarks are, as George Eliot elsewhere rather uncomfortably describes them, "spotted with commonness." Or take this descrip- tion of the injured vanity of a provincial Mayor,—a politically important personage,—at his brother-in-law's criticisms :—" To point out other people's errors was a duty that Mr. Bulstrode rarely shrank from, but Mr. Vincy was not equally prepared to be patient. When a man has the immediate prospect of being mayor, and is prepared, in the interests of commerce, to take up a firm attitude on politics generally, he has naturally a sense of his importance to the framework of things which seems to throw questions of private conduct into the background." Or again, how good is this remark on the philosophic phrase "the fitness of things," in relation to Fred Vincy's hope that the five notes his uncle Featherstone had just given him would cover his debts and something more, for which end they ought to have been five fifty pound notes :—" Fred was not so happy, however, after he had counted them. For they actually presented the absurdity of being less than his hopefulness had decided that they must be. What can the fitness of things mean, if not their fitness to a man's expectations ? Failing this, absurdity and atheism gape behind him. The collapse for Fred was severe when he found that he held no more than five twenties, and his share in the higher education of this country did not seem to help him." That is witty and very good, though George Eliot added a somewhat needless sneer when she said that unless "fitness of
things" means "fitness to a man's expectations," "absurdity and atheism" gape behind him. Why is she always harping on this
discordant string? Another clever, and in its way quite fair, satirical hit at philosophical controversies rather beyond the view of most of her readers (though, of course, George Eliot herself does not mean it to go for anything more than a laugh at the more extravagant forms of the " intuitive " philosophy), is contained in the happy account of the rival systems of the Mid cilemarch medical practitioners ;—
" There was a general impression, however, that Lydgate was not altogether a common country doctor, and in Middlemarch at that time such an impression was significant of great things being expected from him. For everybody's family doctor was remarkably clever, and was understood to have immeasurable skill in the management and training of the most skittish or vicious diseases. The evidence of his cleverness was of the higher intvitive order, lying in his lady-patients' immovable conviction, and was unassailable by any objection except that their in- tuitions were opposed by others equally strong ; each lady who saw medical truth in Wrench and the strengthening treatment' regarding Toiler and the lowering system 'as medical perdition."
Equally shrewd is the comment on the enhanced medical esteem which Dr. Sprague derived in Middlemarch from the reputation for religious scepticism which he had acquired :--
"The Doctor [Dr. Sprague] was more than suspected of having no religion, but somehow Middlemarch tolerated this deficiency in him as if ho had been a Lord Chancellor ; indeed it is probable that his profes- sional weight was the more believed in, the world-old association of cleverness with the evil principle being still potent in the minds even of lady-patients who had the strictest ideas of frilling and sentiment. It was perhaps this negation in the Doctor which made his neighbours call him hard-headed and dry-witted ; conditions of texture which were also held favourable to the storing of judgments connected with drugs. At all events, it is certain that if any medical man had come to Middle- march with the reputation of having very definite religious views, of being given to prayer, and of otherwise showing an active piety, there would have been a general presumption against his medical skill."
The whole book is full of running commentary on life of this sharp, sagacious kind,—somewhat more sharp and sagacious than trustful or hopeful, it is true,—but full of noble though too often melan- choly sentiment. If all Middlemarch is as good as its first two
parts, it will be full of a wisdom somewhat too acid at times for our taste, but always truthful, and full also of fine and delicate por- traiture. How far the story will weld these elements into any true artistic unity, it would be quite premature as yet even to consider.
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