Recently, I read George Eliot’s Middlemarch. The day after, June 19 to be precise, sitting at some table somewhere in the east of Spain, sipping sparkling water and cooling coffee, I wrote in my journal:
I’m feeling a bit melancholy. At the risk of coming off somewhat dramatic, I’m sad I finished Middlemarch. It kept me company for weeks, and it was good company. George Eliot is so apt at describing our inner mental and emotional lives. It’s helped me feel less lonely.
Existence is an isolating wonder. Each of us possess unbridled access to the messy and absurd movements of our thoughts, our senses, our emotions; however, beings around us appear as if surfaces — the fullness of their inward dramas cached from our curious eyes. So you ask, do they feel the fears, the doubts, the worries, or is it just me? Do they too feel this, that, and that, or is it just me? Or is it just me? Books are a salve for this sheepish egoism. Among many blessed consolations of reading is the discovery of mutual experience, whether it be trifles or trials.
The characters in Middlemarch aim for ideal conduct and quest for the ideal life yet regularly fall short. Redemption, however, appears to lie in the struggle, to continue trying to be what one wishes they could be, trying to live as one wishes they could live, even if these are eternally elusive targets. They experience internal divisions, come to be at odds with themselves, baffle themselves with some of their choices, surprise themselves, in good ways and bad ways, progress and regress, retreat and advance, corral passions, or give into passions, pursue saintly intentions, a pursuit constantly frustrated by the ever-looming probabilities of error and mistake, commit to deliberated action, with some success and a good bit of failure, believe the future to be set, so tranquil images settle, only for circumstances to upend all that seemed assured — in short, these characters are human. Eliot’s writing induces one to self-compassion; she grants a glimpse into the murky muddle of personal experience, and in so doing, shows that each one of us isn’t so unique after all, which to me feels akin to saying, “You’re not alone.”
Here are a few parts and passages of Middlemarch that come to mind, and that I’d like to share. It was a long, long book, so please forgive the high number of extracts I’ve included.
All Dorothea’s passion was transfused through a mind struggling towards an ideal life.
We mortals, men and women, devour many a disappointment between breakfast and dinner-time; keep back the tears and look a little pale about the lips, and in answer to inquiries say, ‘Oh, nothing!’ Pride helps us; and pride is not a bad thing when it only urges us to hide our own hurts — not to hurt others.
Poor Mr. Casaubon had imagined that his long studious bachelorhood had stored up for him a compound interest of enjoyment, and that large drafts on his affections would not fail to be honoured; for we all of us, grave or light, get our thoughts entangled in metaphors, and act fatally on the strength of them.
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 usual. That element 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 feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity.
[I]n these cases too we begin by knowing little and believing much, and we sometimes end by inverting the quantities.
… if he would have held her hands between his and listened with the delight of tenderness and understanding to all the little histories which made up her experience, and would have given her the same sort of intimacy in return, so that the past life of each could be included in their mutual knowledge and affection …
He was one of those rare men who are rigid to themselves and indulgent to others.
It is an uneasy lot at best, to be what we call highly taught and yet not to enjoy: to be present at this great spectacle of life and never to be liberated from a small hungrey shivering self — never to be fully possessed by the glory we behold, never to have our consciousness rapturously transformed into the vividness of a thought, the ardour of a passion, the energy of an action, but always to be scholarly and uninspired, ambitious and timid, scrupulous and dim-sighted. […] Doubtless some ancient Greek has observed that behind the big mask and the speaking-trumpet, there must always be our poor little eyes peeping as usual and our timorous lips more or less under anxious control.
I think his own feelings at that moment were perfect, for we mortals have our divine moments.
Will was not without his intentions to be always generous, but our tongues are little triggers which have usually been pulled before general intentions can be brought to bear.
Will not a tiny speck very close to our vision blot out the glory of the world, and leave only a margin by which we see the blot? I know no speck so troublesome as self.
The human soul moves in many channels.
The energy that would animate a crime is not more than is wanted to inspire a resolved submission, when the noble habit of the soul reasserts itself.
But he was not without contradictoriness and rebellion even towards his own resolve.
She might have compared her experience at that moment to the vague, alarmed consciousness that her life was taking on a new form, that she was undergoing a metamorphosis in which memory would not adjust itself to the stirring of new organs. Everything was changing in its aspect: her husband’s condcut, her own duteous feeling towards him, every struggle between them — and yet more, her whole relation to Will Ladislaw. Her world was in a state of convulsive change; the only thing she could say distinctintly to herself was, that she must wait and think anew.
‘Why has he not done more?’ said Dorothea, interested now in all who had slipped below their own intention.
‘No; though perhaps wisdom is not his strong point, but rather affection and sincerity. However, wisdom lies more in those two qualities than people are apt to imagine.’
‘Sorrow comes in many ways. Two years ago, I had no notion of that — I mean the unexpected way in which trouble comes, and ties our hands, and makes us silent when we long to speak.’
But indefinite visions of ambition are weak against the ease of doing what is habitual or beguilingly agreeable; and we all know the difficulty of carrying out a resolve when we secretly long that it may turn out to be unnecessary. In such states of mind the most incredulous person has a private leaning towards miracle: impossible to conceive how our wish could be fulfilled, still — very wonderful things have happened!
… the happy freedom that comes with mutual understanding …
Some gentlemen have made an amazing figure in literature by general discontent with the universe as a trap of dulness into which their great souls have fallen by mistake; but the sense of a stupendous self and an insignificant world may have its consolations. Lydgate’s discontent was much harder to bear: it was the sense that there was a grand existence in thought and effective action lying around him, while his self was being narrowed into the miserable isolation of egoistic fears, and vulgar anxieties for events that might allay such fears.
He had no longer free energy enough for spontaneous research and speculative thinking, but by the bedside of patients the direct external calls on his judgment and sympathies brought the added impulse needed to draw him out of himself. It was not simply that beneficient harness of routine which enables silly men to live respectably and unhappy men to live calmly — it was a perpetual claim on the immediate fresh application of thought, and of another’s need and trial.
[B]ut fear was stronger than the calculation of probabilities.
‘I would injure no man if I could help it,’ said Caleb; ‘even if I thought God winked at it. I hope I should have a feeling for my fellow-creature.’
‘What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult to each other?’
‘But my dear Mrs Causabon,’ said Mr Farebrother, smiling gently at her ardour. ‘character is not cut in marble — it is not something solid and unalterable. It is something living and changing, and may become diseases as our bodies do.’
‘Then it may be rescued and healed,’ said Dorothea.
‘People glorify all sorts of bravery except the bravery they might show on behalf of their neares neighbours.’
There are episodes in most men’s lives in which their highest qualities can only cast a deterring shadow over the objects that fill their inward vision: Lydgate’s tender-heartedness was present just then only as a dread lest he should offend against it, not as an emotion that swayed him to tenderness.
Men and women make sad mistakes about their own symptoms, taking their vague and uneasy longings, sometimes for genius, sometimes for religion, and oftener still for a mighty love.
The presence of a noble nature, generous in its wishes, ardent in its charity, changes the light 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.
The childlike grave-eyed earnestness with which Dorothea said all this was irresistible — blent into an adorable whole with her ready understanding of high experience. (Of low experience such as plays a great part in the world, poor Mrs Causabon had a very blurred shortsighted knowledge, little helped by her imagination.)
… and would have thought it very sinful in her to keep up an inward wail because she was not completely happy …
[A]nd it seemed to him as if he were beholding in a magic panorama a future where he himself was sliding into that pleasureless yielding to the small solicitudes of circumstance, which is a commoner history of perdition than any single momentous bargain.
She yearned towards the perfect Right, that it might make a throne in her, and rule her errant will.
Her immediate consciousness was one of immense sympathy without check.
[A]nd as to the suspicious friends who kept a dragon watch over her — their opinions seemed less and less impportant with time and change of air.
‘I don’t think either of us could spare the other, or like any one else better, however much we might admire them. It would make too great a difference to us — like seeing all the old places altered, and changing the name for everything.’
They were bound to each other by a love stronger than any impulses which could have marred it.
[F]or the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric 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.
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