The longest of all the novels, "Middlemarch," is the most interesting in its characters, its isolated scenes, its moral meaning and philosophic extension; but it is also the most inartistic and the most encumbered with subordinate interests and personages. The canvas is as crowded as one of George Cruikshank's etchings; and the work would have gained by what George Eliot would have called fission—a division into two. The stories of Dorothea and Casaubon and of Rosamond and Lydgate are essentially separate entities; and though they are brought together at the last by an intermingled interest, the result is no more true unification than the Siamese twins or the Double-headed Nightingale represented one true human being. The contrast between the two beautiful young wives is well preserved, and the nicer shades of difference are as clearly marked as are the more essential; for George Eliot was far too good a workman to scamp in any direction, and the backs of her stories are as well wrought as the fronts. But if one-third of the book had been cut out—failing that fission, which would have been still better—the work would have gained in proportion to its compression.
The character of Dorothea marks the last stage in the development of the personality which begins with Maggie Tulliver, and is in reality Marian Evans's own self. Maggie, Romola and Dorothea are the same person in progressive stages of moral evolution. All are at cross corners with life and fate—all are rebellious against things as they find them. Maggie's state of insurgency is the crudest and simplest; Romola's is the most passionate in its moral reprobation of accepted unworthiness; Dorothea's is the widest in its mental horizon, and the most womanly in the whole-hearted indifference to aught but love, which ends the story and gives the conclusive echo. In its own way, her action in taking Will Ladislaw is like Esther's in marrying Felix Holt; but it has not the unlikelihood of Esther's choice. It is all for love, if one will, but it runs more harmoniously with the broad lines of her character, and gives us no sense of that dislocation which we get from Esther's decision. And in its own way it is at once a parallel and an apology.
The most masterly bits of work in "Middlemarch" are the characters of Rosamond and Casaubon. Rosamond's unconscious selfishness, her moral thinness, and the superficial quality of her love are all portrayed without a flaw in the drawing; while Casaubon's dryness, his literary indecision following on his indefatigable research, and his total inability to adjust himself to his new conditions, together with his scrupulous formality of politeness combined with real cruelty of temper, make a picture of supreme psychologic merit. They who think that Casaubon was meant for the late Rector of Lincoln know nothing about George Eliot's early life. They who do know some of those obscurer details, are well aware of the origin whence she drew her masterly portrait, as they know who was Mrs. Poyser, who Tom Tulliver, and who Hetty Sorrel. Hetty, indeed, is somewhat repeated in that amazingly idiotic Tessa, who is neither English nor Italian, nor, indeed, quite human in her molluscous silliness; but there are lines of relation which show themselves to experts, and the absence of the "cherry stone" does not count for more than the dissimilarity always to be found between two copies.
No finer bit of work was ever done than the deep and subtle but true and most pathetic tragedy of Lydgate's married life. The character of Rosamond was a difficult one to paint, and one false touch could have been fatal. To show her intense selfishness and shallowness and yet not to make her revolting, was what only such a consummate psychologist as George Eliot could have done. And to show how Lydgate, strong man as he was and full of noble ambition and splendid aims, was necessarily subdued, mastered and ruined by the tenacious weakness and moral unworthiness of such a wife, yet not to make him contemptible, was also a task beyond the power of any but the few Masters of our literature. All the scenes between this ill-assorted pair are in George Eliot's best manner and up to her highest mark; and the gradual declination of Rosamond's love, together with Lydgate's gradual awakening to the truth of things as they were, are portrayed with a touch as firm as it is tender.
That scene on the receipt of Sir Godwin's letter is as tragic in its own way as Othello or a Greek drama. It has in it the same sense of human helplessness in the presence of an overmastering fate. Rosamond was Lydgate's Fate. Her weakness, tenacity and duplicity—his stronger manhood, which could not crush the weaker woman—his love, which could not coerce, nor punish, nor yet control the thing he loved—all made the threads of that terrible net in which he was entangled, and by which the whole worth of his life was destroyed. It is a story that goes home to the consciousness of many men, who know, as Lydgate knew, that they have been mastered by the one who to them is "as an animal of another and feebler species"—who know, as Lydgate knew, that their energies have been stunted, their ambition has been frustrated, and their horizon narrowed and darkened because of that tyranny which the weaker woman so well knows how to exercise over the stronger man.
Casaubon is as masterly in drawing as is Rosamond or Lydgate. We confess to a sadly imperfect sympathy with Dorothea in her queer enthusiasm for this dry stick of a man. Learned or not, he was scarcely one to whom a young woman, full of life's strong and sweet emotions, would care to give herself as a wife. One can understand the more impersonal impulse which threw Marian Evans into an attitude of adoration before the original of her dry stick; but when it comes to the question of marriage, the thing is simply revolting as done by the girl, not only of her own free-will but against the advice and prayers of her friends. Tom was to be excused for his harshness and irritation against Maggie; and Celia's commonplaces of wisdom for the benefit of that self-willed and recalcitrant Dodo, if not very profound nor very stimulating, nor yet sympathetic, were worth more in the daily life and ordering of sane folk than Dorothea's blind and obstinate determination. Beautiful and high-minded as she is, she is also one of those irritating saints whose virtues one cannot but revere, whose personal charms one loves and acknowledges, and whose wrongheadedness makes one long to punish them—or at least restrain them by main force from social suicide. And to think that to her first mistake she adds that second of marrying Will Ladislaw—the utter snob that he is! Where were George Eliot's perceptions? Or was it that in Ladislaw she had a model near at hand, whom she saw through coloured glasses, which also shed their rosy light on her reproduction, so that her copy was to her as idealised as the original, and she was ignorant of the effect produced on the clear-sighted? Yet over all the mistakes made by her through defective taste and obstinate unwisdom, the beauty of Dorothea's character stands out as did Romola's—like a "white lily" in the garden. She is a superb creature in her own way, and her disillusionment is of the nature of a tragedy. But what could any woman expect from a man who could write such a love-letter as that of Mr. Casaubon's?
The canvas of "Middlemarch" is overcrowded, as we said; yet how good some of the characters are! The sturdy uprightness, tempered with such loving sweetness, of Cabel Garth; the commonplace negation of all great and all unworthy qualities of the Vincys—Celia and Sir James—Mr. Farebrother and Mr. and Mrs. Cadwallader—all are supreme. We confess we do not care much for the portraiture of Mr. Bulstrode and his spiteful delator Raffles—George Eliot is not good at melodrama; also the whole episode of Mr. Featherstone's illness, with his watching family and Mary Garth, too vividly recalls old Anthony Chuzzlewit and all that took place round his death-bed and about his will, to give a sense of truth or novelty. George Eliot's power did not lie in the same direction as that of Charles Dickens, and the contrast is not to her advantage. Great humorists as both were, their humour was essentially different, and will not bear comparison.
No book that George Eliot ever wrote is without its wise and pithy aphorisms, its brilliant flashes of wit, its innumerable good things. Space will not permit our quoting one-tenth part of the good things scattered about these fascinating pages. Celia's feeling, which she stifled in the depths of her heart, that "her sister was too religious for family comfort. Notions and scruples were like spilt needles, making one afraid of treading or sitting down, or even eating:"—(But, farther on, what an unnecessary bit of pedantry!—"In short, woman was a problem which, since Mr. Brooke's mind felt blank before it, could be hardly less complicated than the revolutions of an irregular solid.")—Mrs. Cadwallader's sense of birth, so that a "De Bracy reduced to take his dinner in a basin would have seemed to her an example of pathos worth exaggerating; and I fear his aristocratic vices would not have horrified her. But her feeling towards the vulgar rich was a sort of religious hatred:"—"Indeed, she (Mrs. Waule) herself was accustomed to think that entire freedom from the necessity of behaving agreeably was included in the Almighty's intentions about families:"—"Strangers, whether wrecked and clinging to a raft, or duly escorted and accompanied by portmanteaus, have always had a circumstantial fascination for the virgin mind, against which native merit has urged itself in vain:"—"Ladislaw, a sort of Burke with a leaven of Shelley:"—"But it is one thing to like defiance, and another thing to like its consequences"—an observation wrung out of her own disturbed and inharmonious experience:—"That controlled self-consciousness of manner which is the expensive substitute for simplicity:"—These are a few picked out at random, but the wealth that remains behind is but inadequately represented by stray nuggets.
Before we close the volume we would like to note the one redeeming little flash of human tenderness in Mr. Casaubon when he had received his death-warrant from Lydgate, and Dorothea waits for him to come up to bed. It is the only tender and spontaneous moment in his life as George Eliot has painted it, and its strangeness makes its pathos as well as its truth.