Therefore, though it would be unfair to infer that George Eliot’s views of the world, its possibilities, its hopes, its all that makes it what it is, are confined to the cramped, narrow, provincial district chosen as the subject of her story; to allege that she believes in nothing nobler now in humanity than what Middlemarch affords; yet so wide is the district embraced, so various the subjects entered into, not merely touched upon—religion, politics, the bettering of the poor, marriage, preparation for the married state, and the effect of such preparation on married life, the thousand conflicts that meet, and jostle, and combine to make everyday life what it is—it is not unfair to say that the author, in drawing within this somewhat narrow circle the main elements which compose humanity, has taken Middlemarch up as a scientist would take a basin of water from the sea to examine it—not for the sake of that sample only, but with a view to the whole.
The chief interest of the story, if story it can be called, lies in this: From the outstart, the author warns you that a S. Teresa has no place in the world now; and, to prove that her warning is correct, she takes up a character, Dorothea Brooke, endows her with the aspirations after a great life, fits her naturally, as far as she can, with every attribute, physical and moral, which she considers a S. Teresa ought to possess; with religious feelings, with the continual desire to do good, with charity, with purity, with the spirit of self-sacrifice, with simplicity, and truth, and utter unconsciousness of self, with wealth enough even, as the author says of Mr. Casaubon, “to lend a lustre to her piety,” and sets her down in the narrow Middlemarch set, where everything runs in a groove, and life is measured by all the pettinesses, to see what will become of her.
The result may as well be told at once. S. Teresa proves a miserable failure in Middlemarch. Instead of marrying, as the world—that is to say, Mrs. Cadwallader—had ordained she should do, the handsome, florid, conventional English baronet, Sir James Chettam, a sort of aristocratic “Mr. Toots,” who is so amiable and admires her so much that he brings her triumphs of nature in the shape of marvellous Maltese puppies as presents, and says “exactly” to all her observations, even when she desires him to say the contrary—out of a spirit of religion, self-sacrifice, and veneration, and honestly because she admires the man, or rather the being dressed out to suit by her own imagination, she marries Mr. Casaubon, with his sallow complexion, his moles, his blinking eyes, and his age, which is more than double her own. Unsympathetic to the loving nature of the girl as a wooden doll whose complexion has suffered and whose form is battered by age, but which notwithstanding the girl invests with all the qualities and beauty of a Prince Charming—a deception that time alone and that ugly thing, common sense, can remove—S. Teresa speedily discovers that her “divine Hooker,” as she fondly imagined him, is after all only “a poor creature,” and she is probably saved from the divorce court only by the timely death of the “divine Hooker.” She discovered that she had married the wrong man—exactly what Middlemarch told her; and there lies the provoking part of the story. Middlemarch was right in its degree, and the woman, whose ideas soared so high above it, was all the worse off for not taking its advice at the outstart. S. Teresa repents of her sin, and characteristically atones for it by marrying the right man—at least, the man she loves and who loves her—and is dismissed in the following remarks, which close the book:
“Certainly those determining acts of her life were not ideally beautiful. They were the mixed result of young and noble impulse struggling under prosaic conditions. Among the many remarks passed on her mistakes, it was never said in the neighborhood of Middlemarch that such mistakes could not have happened if the society into which she was born had not smiled on propositions of marriage from a sickly man to a girl less than half his own age, on modes of education which make a woman’s knowledge another name for motley ignorance, on rules of conduct which are in flat contradiction with its own loudly asserted beliefs. While this is the social air in which mortals begin to breathe, there will be collisions such as those in Dorothea’s life, where great feelings will take the aspect of error, and great faith the aspect of illusion; for there is no creature whose inward being is so strong that it is not greatly determined by what lies outside it. A new Teresa will hardly have the opportunity of reforming a conventual life any more than a new Antigone will spend her heroic piety in daring all for the sake of a brother’s burial; the medium in which their ardent deeds took shape is for ever gone. But we insignificant people, with our daily words and acts, are preparing the lives of many Dorotheas, some of which may present a far sadder sacrifice than that of Dorothea whose story we know.
“Her finely touched spirit had still its fine issues, though they were not widely visible. Her full nature, like that river of which Alexander broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive; for 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.”
George Eliot writes too earnestly to laugh at. Besides, she is not a Catholic—very far from it; and therefore her views of what a S. Teresa is or ought to be must be radically different from those of the church from which S. Teresa sprang, in which she lived, labored, became Saint Teresa, and died. Were a Catholic to have written certain portions of the extract quoted, he would only provoke laughter; but with this author, the case is different.
It never seems to have occurred to her that S. Teresas are not self-made; as little as the prophets were self-made prophets, or the apostles self-made apostles. Neither were they made by the society which surrounded them. The supernatural state of sanctity in its fulness does not spring from humanity merely; else might we have had eras of sanctity as there have been other eras, and there might be truth in George Eliot’s words that there will be no place for a “new Teresa.” Saints are the very opposite to that growing class so glibly dubbed “providential men,” who seem to come from that vast but rather undefined region which goes by the name of “manifest destiny.” The individuals forming that happy class are set willy-nilly by “Providence” in this world to accomplish some destiny—a theory laughed at long ago by one of Mr. Disraeli’s worldly-wise characters in the words, “We make our fortunes, and we call them fate.” What the saints do they do very consciously. Sanctity consists in not being merely blameless in life, but in devoting life to God, and turning every thought, word, and action to him for his sake. The feeling that produces this state of life may be influenced at the beginning by earthly surroundings, may be shaped by good example or wise teachings, but is essentially independent of them. Sanctity comes from a direct call, as direct as the call of the apostles. It knows neither time nor place, and is therefore as possible in the XIXth as in the XVIth or the Ist century. But it is unknown outside of the church, because the head of the church, “Christ Jesus our Lord,” alone has the power to call his children to the sanctified state in this life. And if it be asked, Why, then, does he not call all to be saints here? it is as though one asked, Why did he not call all men to be apostles directly?
George Eliot’s difficulty springs from not knowing precisely what constitutes a saint.
If she only reads the life of S. Teresa, she will find that the saint of her admiration had to encounter a Middlemarch circle even in Catholic Spain. She will find her “young and noble impulse struggling under prosaic conditions”; that she had to stand the brunt of being misunderstood and misrepresented; her schemes of reform, of good works, her noble aspirations and ardent self-sacrifice, set down as “notions.” In fact, the opposition which meets her heroine at every step in her desire to do good and to be perfect, not only to herself but to others, is puny compared with that which S. Teresa had to sustain all through her life.
As a matter of fact, S. Teresa was much more of the ordinary woman than George Eliot, with a novelist’s love, makes her heroine. In her youth, she was subject to all the ordinary fancies of “the sex,” and has left us the record of her vanities, which were neither more nor less than those of ten thousand very excellent ladies living at this moment, who are no more S. Teresas than they are Aspasias; but good Christian women, girls with a happy future before them, or smiling mothers of families. It was not her surroundings which made Teresa a saint: it was her clear conception of duty, which no “prosaic conditions” could dim, and her profound and very definite faith, not in that obscure creation which George Eliot calls “the perfect Right,” but in Jesus Christ, her God.