MIDDLEMARCH AND FLEURANGE.
Between the world of Middlemarch and the world of Fleurange there yawns as wide a moral gulf as that which nature has set between the continents. The one is a world with God, the other without. It is not that George Eliot’s story partakes of the characteristics which usually attach to female novelists, with their vague interpretations of the Sixth and Ninth Commandments; nor, on the other hand, that Fleurange is in any sense a goody-goody book. But the authors occupying essentially different stand-points, all things naturally wear a different aspect; their characters are subject to a different order; all life has a different meaning; so that, though the subject of each is humanity, its crosses and loads of sorrow and pain, rather than its laughter and gladness; though the men and women breathe the same air, are warmed by the same sun their, faces wet with human tears, their hearts sore with human sorrows; nevertheless, through either book runs an abiding tone felt rather than heard, like an unseen odor pervading the atmosphere, which affects the reader differently throughout. The characters in the one believe in, pray to, love, obey, or rebel against a definite, personal God; the presiding spirit in the other veils his face, and it is not for man to say who he is. The author only sees men and women gathered together in this world—how, they know not; why, it is difficult to conceive—and all we know for certain is that here they are, coming in contact one with the other, increasing, multiplying, and dropping out after each one has added his necessary mite to the immensity of the universe.
There are books and writings which seem rather the production of an age than of any particular author; which seem to take up and gather into one voice the long inarticulate breathing of a portion of humanity, dumb hitherto for want of an oracle. Such were the writings previous to the first French Revolution; such are the songs of Ireland; such, after a certain fashion, is Middlemarch. It is measuring daily life by the favorite doctrines of the day, whose holders profess to see things as they are, and to judge of them purely and solely by what they see, explaining them as best they may. To remind such people that often the visible is the appearance only, the invisible the reality, is to speak to them a language they will not understand.
Middlemarch is a story of English provincial life as English provincial life obtained fifty years ago; at the dawn, that is, practically speaking, of this wonderful XIXth century; before California and Australia had discovered their golden secret, when steam was still in its infancy, electric telegraphs unknown, and the sciences just beginning to take a bolder flight. In England, O’Connell was thundering for Catholic emancipation, and the nation clamoring for that vague thing in the mouth of the masses—reform.
Just as matters were in this chrysalis state, whilst the masses were still undisturbed by the wonders of the century, or, if the phrase is better, not educated up to them, George Eliot settles down in that dullest of places, an English provincial district, to give us
“The story of its life from year to year.”
The story covers very extensive ground; all Middlemarch, in fact, with its parishes and towns, its churches and taverns, its clergy and magistrates, its physicians and shopkeepers, its gentry and its yokels, its good men and its rascals, its maidens young and old, its loves and its hates, its hopes and its fears, its marriages and deaths, its thoughts, words, and deeds, from high to low—such is the broad scope of the book, and the author has gathered all in in a manner to make the reader wonder. Nothing has escaped her eye. One seems to have been living in Middlemarch all his life, and every character comes and goes with the face of an old acquaintance. It is not the author’s fault if the district be a narrow one—narrow, that is, in ideas, in knowledge, in faith, in all that ennobles man. It is not her fault if its great ideas take the shape of “keys to all mythologies”; if its religion is a poor affair at the best; if its leading men are religious hypocrites like Mr. Bulstrode, or philanthropic asses like Mr. Brooke, who “goes in” for everything, and talks the broadest and vaguest philanthropy whilst he pinches his tenants. It is not the author’s fault if generosity find no place in Middlemarch; if honesty is misunderstood or at a discount; if the local physicians throw discredit upon Lydgate with his youth, his burning desire to achieve, his cleverness, and his genuine enthusiasm; if they call his ideas quackery, because they threaten their pockets, as the yokels in turn look upon the railway as destruction, and hold that steam takes the handle from the plough and the pitchfork; as Middlemarch receives Dorothea Brooke’s generous aspirations after a higher life than that which, in response to the question of an ardent nature, “What can I do?” says, “Whatever you please, my dear”—as “notions” which are wrong in themselves, because undreamed of in Middlemarch philosophy, which, in Miss Brooke are odd, and which, if carried a little farther, would find their fitting sphere of action in the lunatic asylum.
It is not the author’s fault if all this be so; if there be nothing in Middlemarch beyond the common good, and very little even of that, whilst all the rest is mean, sordid, crooked, narrow, and outspokenly wicked. Such is Middlemarch, and such is it given to us. The only question is, How far does Middlemarch extend? Is it restricted to the English county, or is it a miniature photograph of the world as seen by George Eliot?
In the keynote to the whole book, the prelude, the author cries out bitterly that in this world and in these days there is no place for a S. Teresa. In this assertion, in this wail rather, the author does not limit her district to Middlemarch. It is a doctrine meant to apply to the broad world. Throughout the book the same thing is to be observed. Though with wonderful consistency and truth of local coloring, and continual recurrence of petty local questions and local ideas, the author keeps the reader in Middlemarch from beginning to end, nevertheless, whether with or without intention, from time to time she strikes out with broader aim, and flings her sarcasm, or her observation, or her moral, such as it may be, in the face of humanity.