Middlemarch (5+*)

Would I have had the patience to truly appreciate George Eliot's 1872 masterpiece as a younger man?  Probably not.  Reading Middlemarch, even just a chapter at a time, sometimes required machete-like skills to hack through the occasionally impenetrable thickets of archaically meandering language.  But now that I've finally finished a book begun in early November, which originally appeared in eight installments, I feel a lot like I did after scaling The Magic Mountain.  Eliot's incomparable understanding of human nature, and her acute sensitivity to our nuanced motivations, both good and bad, made the long effort completely satisfying.  

Despite the novel's enormous scope--it addresses social class, politics and medical practice through the life of a small English village where everyone literally knows everyone else--Eliot's primary subject is marriage, no doubt a reflection of the constricted roles Victorian women were forced to assume in the absence of other opportunities.  She charts the courses of three unions, initially focusing on the courtship of the very naive but highly principled Dorothea Brooke, of whom I will now speak as reverently as I once did of Isabel Archer, my favorite female fictional character up to now.

Dorothea, with all her eagerness to know the truths of life, retained very childlike ideas about marriage . . . The really delightful marriage must be that where your husband was a sort of father and could teach you even Hebrew if you wished it.

The young woman, barely out of her teens, stubbornly uses this criteria to make a loveless match with Mr. Casaubon, a much older "scholar" who is no more realistic about the challenges of co-habitation, even between two people who have been born with the proverbial spoons in their mouths.  But Eliot, to her credit, does not photograph her characters in black and white; she paints even this vengeful pedant in sly shades of satiric pastel:

Society never made the preposterous demand that a man should think as much about his own qualifications for making a charming girl happy as he thinks of hers for making himself happy.

(You go gurrrrl!)

Rosamond Vincy, the social climbing daughter of Middlemarch's mayor, seduces Tertius Lydgate, a brilliant, if unorthodox physician who has fled the strictures of his titled family, into another mismatch.  Their marriage enables Eliot to conduct master classes in Victorian economics and medical practice, when doctors were paid not for their services but only for the drugs they prescribed.  In an authorial tour de force occasioned by a meeting of local movers and shakers, Eliot vividly describes Lydgate's internal deliberations about whom to support for the position of chaplain at a hospital he and his patron, a banker with a shady past, plan to build.  His highly conflicted decision, which helps drive the novel's slow-burning plot, comes back to haunt him in ways he could not have anticipated.  In the meantime, Rosamond schemes.

She was oppressed by ennui and by that dissatisfaction which in women’s minds is continually turning into a trivial jealousy, referring to no real claims, springing from no deeper passion than the vague exactingness of egoism, and yet capable of impelling action as well as speech. 

Dorothea and Rosamond, opposite sides of the coin, eventually fall for the same man. Their behavior, dictated by long-since-vanished mores brings them into ultimately productive conflict as a result of Dorothea's determination to do the right thing.  “What do we live for if it is not to make life less difficult to each other?” she asks the local vicar, aptly named Farebrother.

The self-sacrifice of that vicar, who splits the difference between the scientific and spiritual worlds, enables the courtship of the third couple, Fred Vincy and Mary Garth, who have loved each other since childhood but who are the victims of poor circumstance.  Mary, as smart and ethical as she is plain, inspires this reflection by Farebrother:  “To think of the part one little woman can play in the life of a man, so that to renounce her may be a very good imitation of heroism, and to win her may be a discipline!” 

(Put that in your feminist pipe and smoke it!)

In essence, Middlemarch is soap opera of the highest intellectual order.  Each of 86 chapters begins with an epigraph from a wide range of classical literature including this one from the heretofore unfamiliar Henry Wotton, but which resonated strongly:

How happy is he born and taught

That serveth not another’s will;

Whose armour is his honest thought,

And simple truth his only skill!

•   •   •   •   •   •   •   •

This man is freed from servile bands

Of hope to rise, or fear to fall;

Lord of himself, though not of lands;

And having nothing, yet hath all.

Aphorisms abound, too, the kind that beg to be recorded and shared, and remain as relevant today as they did 150 years ago.

Pride helps us, and pride is not a bad thing when it only urges us to hide our own hurts—not to hurt others.

* * * *

Among all forms of mistake, prophecy is the most gratuitous.

* * * *

But oppositions have the illimitable range of objections at command, which need never stop short at the boundary of knowledge, but can draw forever on the vasts of ignorance.

* * * *

For there is no creature whose inward being is so strong that it is not greatly determined by what lies outside it.

* * * *

There is no general doctrine which is not capable of eating out our morality if unchecked by the deep-seated habit of direct fellow-feeling with individual fellow-men.

The modern reader may be just as delighted as I to recognize yet again that no matter how much things have changed, they remain the same in so many ways.  Who, for instance, would have expected to encounter opiate use or anti-Semitism in a rural English village? And there may not have been any social media in the 19th century, but "fake news" still went "viral" in taverns and at dinner parties by face-to-face word of mouth in the wake of the scandal that nearly destroys Lydgate and seriously curtails his ambitions.

But this vague conviction of indeterminable guilt, which was enough to keep up much head-shaking and biting innuendo even among substantial professional seniors, had for the general mind all the superior power of mystery over fact. Everybody liked better to conjecture how the thing was than simply to know it, for conjecture soon became more confident than knowledge and had a more liberal allowance for the incompatible.

In the end, what I admired most about Middlemarch is Eliot's conviction that an individual like Dorothea Brooke, a woman with no real power, can lead by example, no matter how hemmed-in her life.

But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive, for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on un-historic acts, and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life and rest in unvisited tombs.

It's a lesson worth remembering at a self-aggrandizing time when "What's in it for me?" seems to be top of mind for most people. 

The Mill on the Floss (5+*)

According to a recent article by Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker, Marcel Proust's favorite novel was The Mill on the Floss.  Now that's what I call a recommendation, especially since I've never read George Eliot, and in spite of the fact that I've never completed Remembrance of Things Past.

Quelle surprise, I couldn't put it down despite its early embrace of capitalism.  Some young actor in Hollywood looking for an Oscar should commission a screenplay quick so he can play Bob Jakin who, along with his pooch Mumps, is one of the funniest, smartest and sweetest characters I've ever encountered in fiction.

Eliot has it all going on:  plot, structure, character, acute psychological insight (her children, on whom she spends way more time than most novelists, actually think and act like them) and occasionally meandering but always right-on humanistic philosophy.  For example:

For there is nothing more widely misleading than sagacity if it happens to get on a wrong scent; and sagacity, persuaded that men usually act and speak from distinct motives, with a consciously proposed end in view, is certain to waste its energies on imaginary game.

* * * * *

 . . . moral judgments must remain false and hollow, unless they are checked and enlightened by a perpetual reference to the special circumstances that make the individual lot.

Eliot more than satisfies as a proto-feminist, an important credential which she demonstrates by contrasting Maggie, her spitfire but extraordinarily conscientious protagonist, with prevailing 19th century attitudes:

an over-‘cute woman’s  no better nor a long-tailed sheep,—she’ll fetch none the bigger price for that.

* * * * *

So it has been since the days of Hecuba,  and of Hector, tamer of horses; inside the gates, the women with streaming hair and uplifted hands offering prayers, watching the world’s combat from afar, filling their long, empty days with memories and fears; outside, the men, in fierce struggle with things divine and human, quenching memory in the stronger light of purpose, losing the sense of dread and even of wounds in the hurrying ardor of action.

* * * * *

“We don’t ask what a woman does. We ask whom she belongs to.”

There's also quite possibly the most sensitive love letter ever written,  penned by a sensitive hunchback, no less, if that term is allowed.  Unrequited, of course.  It had me bawling.

And did I mention that Eliot is hilarious AND her book has a killer ending that seems contemporary in its form if not resolution?