Middlemarch

1

The column exists, above all, to retain reading experiences like George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871-2). I was recommending it before I finished, feeling only a little temerity doing so. (A leettle.) It fills in a large gap in my knowledge of the 19^th century novel and lives up to its status as one of the greatest in English. My first comparison was to another famous writer of intimidatingly thick fictions who lived and died in the same century, Charles Dickens. His books are action-packed, move with seemingly boundless energy, and teem with characters that generally don’t reveal anything that isn’t known from the outset. Eliot is almost his opposite.

The setting is Middlemarch, a sleepy village in rural England where everyone knows each other. There are too few villagers for the novel to teem. As for what they spend the novel doing, it’s about as ordinary as it gets: A carriage ride. Sitting before the fire. Sitting in the library. Sitting down to a meal. I don’t mean a richness of the ordinary either, as in Chekhov or Carver or Munro. Externally, one can even say, a somewhat melodramatic plot development notwithstanding, it’s banal. And, at about 800 pages in the Oxford University Press edition, it’s a well-known challenge. Summarizing it, however, unlike say Don Quixote or Moby-Dick, presents another, less well-known challenge, since reducing Middlemarch to a single sentence would banalize rather than tantalize. A fellow student once asked a teacher why she liked a movie so much and she responded: “It’s about…life.” One can imagine an enthusiastic reader, at a loss for how to describe the novel’s appeal, settling, perhaps defeated, for a similar line: it’s about lives. To get more specific: It’s primarily about a group of young people, their hopes and fears and expectations, as well as the relationships they form with each other, about how their lives unfold as they age and how, in one way or another, they fail to be who they’d wanted to be. I’ll borrow the emphasis too: it’s about lives. Little may happen externally but that’s because the novel is largely concerned with what’s going on internally—not with the mind of an individual, difficult enough to present persuasively for the reader, but a group of minds, a group of distinct people, including their most tortuous and, as Cynthia Ozick describes them, gossamer thoughts with stunning precision. It’s one of the reasons why George Eliot is the sort of writer who gets deified.

 

2

Searching the archives of the New York Review of Books, I found an old piece by Harold Bloom in which he praises Middlemarch as highly as everyone seems to. Though there’s more to like in it than not, when he says she lacks a “comic sense,” I must disagree. One of the novel’s most memorable side characters is the good Mr. Brooke, who could never figure out the puzzle of woman. His conversation, rambling and littered with verbal tics, is a reliable source of amusement throughout:

‘Young ladies don’t understand political economy, you know,’ said Mr. Brooke, smiling towards Casaubon. ‘I remember when we were all reading Adam Smith. There is a book, now. I took in all the new ideas at one time—human perfectibility, now. But some say, history moves in circles; and that may be very well argued; I have argued it myself. The fact is, human reason may carry you a little too far—over the hedge, in fact. It carried me a good way at one time; but I saw it would not do. I pulled up; I pulled up in time. But not too hard. I have always been in favor of a little theory: we must have Thought; else we shall be landed back in the dark ages.’

The narrator refers to these contributions as “motes from the magistrate’s mind” and his style as “scrappy slovenliness.” Not only does Eliot create a comic figure, the novel has a surfeit of tart lines of commentary.

A man’s mind—what there is of it—has always the advantage of being masculine,—as the smallest birch-tree is of a higher kind than the most soaring palm,—and even his ignorance is of a sounder quality. Sir James might not have originated this estimate; but a kind Providence furnishes the limpest personality with a little gum or starch in the form of tradition.

Indeed, she herself was accustomed to think that entire freedom from the necessity of behaving agreeably was included in the Almighty’s intentions about families.

There are characters which are continually creating collisions and nodes for themselves in dramas which nobody is prepared to act with them. Their susceptibilities will clash against objects that remain innocently quiet.

In fact, Eliot seems to imbue a character, Mary, with, among other shared qualities, her comic sense:

At the age of two-and-twenty Mary had certainly not attained that perfect good sense and good principle which are usually recommended to the less fortunate girl, as if they were to be obtained in quantities ready mixed, with a flavour of resignation as required.

The second comparison I made is to Jane Austen, who Eliot admired. The earlier canonical figure has a quality that’s typically associated with the true comic writer: she’s merciless. In Middlemarch, Eliot proves that she could satirize if she wanted to. But her starting point takes an entire novel for Emma to even consider momentarily: she has mercy and exercises restraint.

 

3

Most every piece of writing I’ve encountered on Middlemarch reserves a few words of distaste, and only distaste, for Mr. Casaubon. His main offense is his total inadequacy as a husband, his cold treatment of his younger wife, Dorothea. Their relationship, in an image: “Mr. Casaubon kept his hands behind and allowed her pliant arm to cling with difficulty against his rigid arm.” There doesn’t seem to be a trace of sexual attraction between them and the marriage is probably never even consummated:

With all her yearning to know what was afar from her and to be widely benignant, she had ardour enough for what was near, to have kissed Mr Casaubon’s coat-sleeve, or to have caressed his shoe-latchet, if he would have made any other sign of acceptance than pronouncing her, with his unfailing propriety, to be of a most affectionate and truly feminine nature, indicating at the same time by politely reaching a chair for her that he regarded these manifestations as rather crude and startling.

He’s a stiff with no warm feelings to spare for her. He never thinks about what it’d take to be a good companion or at least to make the mismatch tolerable. What he wants is a loyal assistant with no opinions of her own for a wife. And he seems to have no idea what sort of man and husband that would make him.

But the narrator, it must be recalled, doesn’t share the common reaction: “For my part I am very sorry for him.” Though he isn’t a young person when the reader first meets him, he’s another character that represents the theme of a failed life but of a particular kind: the writer who can’t write. This, despite living in a theoretically ideal situation for such work, with no financial worries, no housekeeping or childcare responsibilities, a well-stocked library, and peace and quiet on a fine property. (In reality, a life of perfect comfort is unlikely to be conducive to a writer’s best work.) After 30! YEARS! AH! of lonely joyless toil (or “preparation”), he’s got nothing but an enormous mess to show for it. To escape this dire situation, take stock of it honestly and decide whether writing is something one really wants to do. If not, as awfully disappointing as ending nowhere near the goal may be, one can accept the loss with the dignity of honest effort and lessons learned while starting—and enjoying and even feeling grateful for—the search for more suitable work. Or, since it may be too late for someone of Mr. Casaubon’s age and he can afford it, a relaxing retirement. But if one must press on with the writing despite the impasse, being open to criticism and experimenting with a new approach would be necessary to make real progress on that front, the old approach having proven, to anyone thinking clearly, sub-optimal. Instead, Mr. Casaubon chooses doom: aversion to criticism, undue paranoid defensiveness, stubborn pride, blindness. His health suffers, and not merely from old age, one suspects. He has no friends and his enemies grow in number (in his mind though perhaps, as a result, in reality too). And he gets married only for it to be another source of self-inflicted torment: harder to cling to delusions around a witness to one’s vain gestures.

He’s spent his life shut away, laboring himself dull over an ostensibly intellectual endeavor. One piece of evidence: his twisted logic, his last, desperate hope as he approaches death, is to suddenly thrust his life’s work onto a woman he barely spoke to—actually, a woman he could barely stand speaking to—about his work or anything else, assigning her the task of somehow making sense of The Key to All Mythologies and organizing it into a final form. Eliot has mercy on him by not piling on more of the evidence that would surely be obtainable in his decades-long, utterly futile pursuit. And Middlemarch is capacious and multiform enough to contain an unforgettable glimpse into a writer’s hell without getting bogged down. Mr. Casaubon could easily be satirized—think of Max Beerbohm’s story, “Enoch Soames”—but Eliot takes him seriously and makes his fate sad, not in the condescending way the word is regularly employed today, as a synonym for “pathetic,” but truly sad. And she merely suggests that it goes further, otherwise it’d be excruciating, scary, and possibly would bog down the novel. She doesn’t plunge the reader into his hell. (There are other books for that.)

I waited to see what would become of the mess he left for his wife to clean up but, kind as Dorothea is, even she forgets about it. Turns out the narrator never mentions the fate of Mr. Casaubon’s work at all. 30 years into the trash heap, presumably. Initially thinking it was a glaring oversight, now I think of it as another act of polite discretion. Thus, the unloved Mr. Casaubon’s failure is the novel’s most complete and silently poignant. 

 

4

Compassion is indispensable to anyone seeking to live a humane life. And it comes up often in relation to literature. Some writers claim to want to be compassionate, piously at times, and, one gathers, only on the page and maybe only with the intention of being perceived as wise and highminded. The exact meaning, however, hasn’t been settled, and it’s always at risk of becoming a husk. One dubious form of compassion is a rule that says with enough attention to an individual’s background and circumstances, anyone can be raised or lowered and finally brought to near parity with everyone else. Disobey and one is to be admonished as biased, cynical, insensitive, superficial, cheaply satirical, unforgiving. I reject this—too indiscriminate, lazy and misleading in its overreliance on gray shades, potentially neglectful of those who are vigilant about overcoming the worst of themselves, too close to that dangerous precept, “love thine enemies.” Eliot evinces another, more realistic, more congenial form of compassion: attention to the individual paired with discernment, which results in grades of sympathy. She loves Caleb Garth. It isn’t hard to see why. He has a legitimate fault, though as is sometimes the case with such people, it’s bound up with what makes him lovable, hardly diminishing one’s esteem and affection for him. Mr. Casaubon certainly has his unpleasant side but, familiar with the difficulties of the intellectual life as a writer herself, especially as a woman of this period, and without scanting his flaws, Eliot emphasizes his fruitless, solitary, all-consuming struggle, his stunted existence. After all, he harms himself far more than anyone else and gets less than nothing out of it. Words of opprobrium from readers are justified but may be gratuitous. With Mr. Brooke, Eliot has her fun but it’s not harsh because, though he amiably conveys some noxious views, he’s unintentionally clownish and doesn’t mean harm. But characters like Peter Featherstone or Mr. Raffles live to test everyone’s patience, delight in causing harm, which is also true of certain people. One may call them one-dimensional but they’re not broadly sketched and, moreover, there are aspects of a person so repugnant that they drown out nearly everything else about them. Still Eliot finds an alternative angle from which to view them: their vulnerability in the face of death.

Compassion is taking care to think about how other people live, notice and feel something of their pain and suffering, and weigh everything about the whole person or, if further information is unavailable, assume that there’s more to the story. It’s sufficient to be considered compassionate for honestly giving everyone a fair chance in this way. However, that doesn’t mean, in the final analysis, that a person, once given that chance, will overcome his or her worst side, his or her most heinous crimes, or that he or she should automatically be forgiven. The reader isn’t forced into an awkward embrace.

So Eliot exemplifies real compassion. She expands her interest to a crowd of lives, without sacrificing discrimination. Occasionally she interjects to insist on our own fallibility. And, like Dorothea, she’s understanding:

The presence of a noble nature, generous in its wishes, ardent in its charity, changes the lights for us: we begin to see things again in their larger, quieter masses, and to believe that we too can be seen and judged in the wholeness of our character.

Eliot is no goddess: she doesn’t set a standard beyond the reach of mere mortals, isn’t oppressively holy and unreasonably or dangerously or impossibly objective. Better yet, she’s human and intelligently subjective.

           

4.5

Easy to throw the word “compassion” around, quite hard to practice. The many guises of human weakness together constitute one explanation why there is and always will be a dearth. Diabolism is another. Putting it at a further disadvantage are defensible modes of thinking that are difficult to reconcile with it: Reasonable suspicion, earned contempt, due paranoia. I’m not revealing much by saying I’m less inclined to search for or stress extenuating information if someone gets hostile with me for no good reason or makes my life needlessly harder. Seems only fair.

Perspective matters: If I were peering from the outside with no connection to anyone at my job and being highly generous, I could present the reader with a balanced view of my current boss—his amenable moments, the fact that he's on the clock many more hours than should be tolerated in our society for this line of work to support his kids, the way he usually seems dazed he’s so tired. But then he’s in no way similarly considerate of my situation as an underpaid essential worker whose job is doing everything (since there isn’t a janitor or a security guard). When pressed directly about questionable things he does and says or doesn’t say, he tends to respond unwaveringly with irrelevancies and fatuities (when he responds at all). Point this out, rudely or not, and he stares blankly (he may as well have his mouth open and drool running down his chin). He has an opinion about how many times the bathroom should be used during a shift. He’ll complain about an employee moving too slowly and, in the same breath, moving too quickly. He’s incompetent, irresponsible, and “well wadded with stupidity.”  One of the worst managers I’ve ever had, who creates problems where most others know not to and will never take a share of the blame for himself. He does his part to make this a shit job and there’s little chance he’ll be held accountable and formally punished, much less fired, though he has the authority to do so to others. In fact, his mediocrity will probably be rewarded by the (proudly anti-union) company. Fantastic job, warm body. By treating him gently, I’d be inaccurately describing my experience as an employee for the sake of sparing an undeserving person with power (miniscule though it may be). Or to take another, different example from work: A former coworker is capable of being polite and friendly and doing his job adequately. But by refusing to weigh everything about him properly, with a sense of urgency, including all the times he displays erratic, wildly inappropriate behavior, the manager ignored the potential danger he is to himself and others. Being clear about who someone is and responding properly isn’t merely an abstract literary consideration. It can be a matter of safety, of life and death.

In the aftermath of Donald Trump’s election as president, one common criticism against the left was that it lost because it failed to think about—to have compassion for—the problems that most affected Trump voters. Does the most loyal Trump voter give any thought to the struggles faced by leftwing voters? Policy proposals from the left include: Universal healthcare. Demanding an increase in the federal minimum wage. Better regulation of drug prices. Treating climate collapse as a grave threat demanding sensible emergency measures. And so on, all of which would apply to and benefit everyone, Trump voters included. A meaningful argument can and should be had about the policy details. But if the proposals themselves should be rejected, an argument against them and for another set of policy proposals that address those issues, backed up by fact and sound reasoning, similarly taking everyone’s well-being into account, and able to withstand scrutiny as a viable alternative, would be the expectation from the opposition. However, since such arguments don’t exist on the right, what the US voter gets from them instead is: some mention of the routinely discredited theory that giving handouts to needy millionaires and billionaires will eventually heal the nation, otherwise known as trickle-down economics, vilification of LGBTQ+ people and immigrants, attacks on basic rights, climate change denialism, cheers for political violence, and significant support for a Republican frontrunner for president whose grand alternative is vowing “retribution” for an election he has no evidence was stolen from him and, on that basis, committed an act of treason against the country he wants to lead, which he still congratulates himself for. On the state and federal level: Will the system hold? Will democracy, our semblance of it, survive? There’s no such thing as compassionate authoritarianism.

Sigmund Freud, in Civilization and Its Discontents, rages bitterly (and humorously) against the Christian precept "thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself”:

"Not merely is this stranger in general unworthy of my love; I must honestly confess that he has more claim to my hostility and even my hatred. He seems not to have the least trace of love for me and shows me not the slightest consideration. If it will do him any good he has no hesitation in injuring me, nor does he ask himself whether the amount of advantage he gains bears any proportion to the extent of the harm he does to me. Indeed, he need not even obtain an advantage; if he can satisfy any sort of desire by it, he thinks nothing of jeering at me, insulting me, slandering me and showing his superior power; and the more secure he feels and the more helpless I am, the more certainly I can expect him to behave like this to me. If he behaves differently, if he shows me consideration and forbearance as a stranger, I am ready to treat him the same way, in any case and quite apart from any precept. Indeed, if this grandiose commandment had run 'Love thy neighbor as thy neighbour loves thee,' I should not take exception to it. And there is a second commandment, which seems to me even more incomprehensible and arouses still stronger opposition in me. It is 'Love thine enemies.' If I think it over, however, I see that I am wrong in treating it as a greater imposition. At bottom it is the same thing."

He wrote these words as the Nazis ascended to power.

 

5

Middlemarch provides more evidence that the flaws of the total novel are inherent to the form. For a while there I thought Eliot might pull it off but, alas, there’s a noticeable drop in quality in the final book of the novel, which includes a climactic scene of powerful cheesiness. (The aroma suggests Berkswell but the taste contains strong notes of Cornish Yarg.) With that number of pages, such novels are part records of waning stamina. I don’t have as much of an issue with Eliot’s interjections: at times she explains her approach, coming off as slightly too eager to defend herself, but on the whole I find them illuminating and lightly metafictional (as opposed to emphatically or strenuously metafictional). Allow me to add this. But these are quibbles. I recommend it again with the confidence that comes with having actually finished the book.