Mrs. Bulstrode's naïve way of conciliating piety and worldliness, the nothingness of this life and the desirability of cut glass, the consciousness at once of filthy rags and the best damask, was not a sufficient relief from the weight of her husband's invariable seriousness.
Such a turning of sentiment into satire as the following is rather jarring, and is a good specimen of that "laborious smartness," as Mr. R.H. Hutton justly calls it, which is found in all of George Eliot's books:—
Young love-making—that gossamer web! Even the points it clings to—the things whence its subtile interlacings are swung—are scarcely perceptible: momentary touches of finger-tips, meetings of rays from blue and dark orbs, unfinished phrases, lightest changes of cheek and lip, faintest tremors. The web itself is made of spontaneous beliefs and indefinable joys, yearnings of one life toward another, visions of completeness, indefinite trust. And Lydgate fell to spinning that web from his inward self with wonderful rapidity, in spite of experience supposed to be finished off with the drama of Laure—in spite, too, of medicine and biology; for the inspection of macerated muscle or of eyes presented in a dish (like Santa Lucia's), and other incidents of scientific inquiry, are observed to be less incompatible with poetic love than a native dulness or a lively addiction to the lowest prose. [Footnote: Middlemarch, chapter XXXVI.]
This introduction of a scientific illustration will serve to bring another tendency of George Eliot's to our attention. She makes a frequent use of her large learning and culture in her novels. In the earlier ones a Greek quotation is to be found here and there, while in the later, German seems to have the preference. In The Mill on the Floss she describes Bob Jakin's thumb as "a singularly broad specimen of that difference between the man and the monkey." Such references to recent scientific speculations are not unfrequent. If they serve to show the tendencies of her mind towards knowledge and large thought, they also indicate a too ready willingness to imbibe, and to use in a popular manner, what is not thoroughly assimilated truth. The force of such an illustration as the following must be lost on most novel-readers:—
Although Sir James was a sportsman, he had some other feelings toward women than toward grouse and foxes, and did not regard his future wife in the light of prey, valuable chiefly for the excitements of the chase. Neither was he so well acquainted with the habits of primitive races as to feel that an ideal combat for her, tomahawk in hand, so to speak, was necessary to the historical continuity of the marriage tie. [Footnote: Middlemarch, chapter VI.]
It is doubtful whether any reader will quite catch the meaning of this sentence:
Has any one ever pinched into its pilulous smallness the cobweb of
prematrimonial acquaintanceship? [Footnote: Ibid, chapter II.]
Many of her critics have asserted that this use of the language of science, and the adoption of the speculative ideas of the time, had largely increased upon George Eliot in her later books; but this is not true. In her Westminster Review essays both tendencies are strongly developed. In one of them she says, "The very chyme and chyle of a rector are conscious of the gown and band." Again, she says,—
The woman of large capacity can seldom rise beyond the absorption of ideas; her physical conditions refuse to support the energy required for spontaneous activity; the voltaic pile is not strong enough to produce crystallization.
It is not just to George Eliot, however, to refer to such mere casual blemishes, without insisting on the largeness of thought, the wealth of knowledge, and the comprehensive understanding of human experience with which her books abound. She often turns aside to discuss the problems suggested by the experiences of her characters, to point out how the effect of their own thoughts and deeds re-act upon them, and to inculcate the highest ethical lessons. In one of her "asides" she seems to reject this method, in referring to Fielding.