When the lady who is pleased to assume the name of George Eliot first startled the English reading world, there was great doubt as to the sex of the new author. Certainly all such doubt, if any still existed, would be set at rest for ever by the portrait of Rosamond Vincy. No man could ever have executed that. No man could ever have gone down into the very fibres of a woman’s nature, and drawn them all out one by one, and laid them bare before us, to show what constitutes “that best marble of which goddesses are made.” If Dorothea, with the strong touch of Calvinism leading her noble nature astray, prove a failure, what shall be said of “the flower of Mrs. Lemon’s school, the chief school in the county, where the teaching included all that was demanded in the accomplished female—even to extras, such as the getting in and out of the carriage”?
Rosamond Vincy is, perhaps, the most finished portrait ever presented of the intelligent animal of the female sex; clever enough to despise Middlemarch, not because it is low, and mean, and sordid, but because it is too narrow and unworthy to hold so fair and accomplished a specimen of humanity as Rosamond Vincy. All young Middlemarch breaks its heart about her. She refuses it quietly and persistently, wins Lydgate in spite of himself, not because he is Lydgate, the generous, ardent, high-souled young man, but because he brings with him the atmosphere of an outer world, with a hint of great relations, a distinguished person, and an unconscious air of superiority which Middlemarch cannot offer. The result of the wedding of two such natures may be imagined. George Eliot’s version of it is horribly real and miserably natural; and perhaps the most powerful part of the book is the struggle going on between the generous nature of the man and the demon of self incarnate in the perfect form and the narrow but acute intellect of the woman, who is so supremely selfish that she is absolutely unconscious of her selfishness, and therefore incurable. “Lydgate,” after vainly endeavoring to break down this barrier which lay between them, invisible to the eyes of her who raised it, “had accepted his narrowed lot with sad resignation. He had chosen this fragile creature, and had taken the burden of her life upon his arms. He must walk as he could, carrying that burden pitifully.”
And she, his “bird-of-paradise,” only once called his “basil-plant,” when the man whose life had been lost on her died, “married an elderly and wealthy physician, who took kindly to her four children. She made a very pretty show with her daughters, driving out in her carriage, and often spoke of her happiness as ‘a reward’—she did not say for what, but probably she meant that it was a reward for her patience with Tertius, whose temper never became faultless, and to the last occasionally let slip a bitter speech which was more memorable than the signs he made of his repentance. Rosamond had a placid but strong answer to such speeches: Why, then, had he chosen her? It was a pity he had not had Mrs. Ladislaw—Dorothea—whom he was always praising and placing above her.”
With regret the examination into this wonderful book, of which three of the salient characters only have been touched upon, must now close. The story abounds in other characters, each perfect in its way, as far as drawing and execution go. It forms quite a study in parsons as in physicians; and those who quarrel with the author of My Clerical Friends must feel sore aggrieved at the clerical friends of George Eliot. There is not a priestly character among them; not a single devoted man whose heart is given wholly to God, and whose mind is bent solely on doing God’s work for God’s sake. The Middlemarch parsons are a narrow set of men of undefined belief and cramped charity; their belief being measured by their salary, and their charity beginning and often ending at home with their wives and families. The only agreeable characters among them as men are Mr. Cadwallader and Mr. Farebrother. The first of these is a “good, easy man,” whose Gospel is as elastic as his fishing-rod, of whom the author says, “His conscience was large and easy like the rest of him; it did only what it could without any trouble,” and whom his wife characteristically hits off in the sentence that, “as long as the fish rise to his bait, everybody is what he ought to be”; whilst she complains: “He will even speak well of the bishop, though I tell him it is unnatural in a beneficed clergyman. What can one do with a husband who attends so little to the decencies?” The other, Mr. Farebrother, is the best preacher in Middlemarch, and really a man of a noble nature; yet his poverty leads him to play whist for money and even an occasional game of billiards at the Green Dragon. He leads us to infer that he knows he has assumed the wrong profession, but that it is too late to get rid of it.
The only man who really possesses anything in the semblance of religion is Mr. Bulstrode, the Methodist banker, of whom wicked old Featherstone, whose death is so powerfully told, says:
“What’s he? He’s got no land hereabout that ever I heard tell of. A speckilating fellow! He may come down any day, when the devil leaves off backing him. And that’s what his religion means: he wants God A’mighty to come in. That’s nonsense! There’s one thing I made out pretty clear when I used to go to church, and it’s this: God A’mighty sticks to the land. He promises land, and he gives land, and he makes chaps rich with corn and cattle.” That sounds very like the religion of Tennyson’s Northern Farmer of the new style. As a matter of fact, old Featherstone turns out to be right. Bulstrode is a hypocrite. His life and his fortune have been built upon hypocrisy. He is rich on money that does not belong to him and by wealth ill-gotten; he strives to silence his conscience by a life of external mortification and by works set on foot for the improvement of the poor and carried out in his own way. Yet rather than lose his character for respectability and goodness, he murders an old associate; that is, he consciously does what the physician warned him might cause death.
Mrs. Cadwallader, spite of her wit and her mind, “active as phosphorus, biting everything that came near into the form that suited it,” must be dismissed in her own words, though she is the life of Middlemarch, as one who “set a bad example—married a poor clergyman, and made herself a pitiable object among the De Bracys—obliged to get her coals by stratagem, and pray to heaven for her salad-oil”; as must also Ladislaw, whom Mr. Brooke, who takes him up and transfers him to the Pioneer, characterizes as “a kind of Shelley, you know,” whom he (Mr. Brooke) may be able to put on the right tack; who has “a way of putting things,” which is just the sort of thing Mr. Brooke wants—“not ideas, you know, but a way of putting them.” Lydgate characterizes him best as “a likable fellow, but bric-a-brac.” He is just the material out of which Charles Lever constructed “Joe Atlee,” that prince of Bohemians.
It is difficult also to pass unnoticed by the Vincy and the Garth families; thriftless Fred. Vincy, who is only saved from taking to that last resort of an ignoble mind—“the cloth”—by honest Caleb Garth and his merry, true-hearted daughter Mary, who is, perhaps, after all the best and jolliest girl in the book, and whose plain, womanly wit and common sense, plain and undisguised as her open face, is an excellent foil to the pretty animalism of Rosamond Vincy and the vague religiousness of Dorothea. What could be better than this by way of preparation for old Featherstone’s decease?—
“‘Oh! my dear, you must do things handsomely where there’s last illness and a property. God knows, I don’t grudge them [the relatives on the watch] every ham in the house—only save the best for the funeral. Have some stuffed veal always, and a fine cheese in cut. You must expect to keep open house in these last illnesses,’ said liberal Mrs. Vincy.” Or than this picture of one of George Eliot’s favorite characters?—
“Caleb Garth often shook his head in meditation on the value, the indispensable might, of that myriad-headed, myriad-handed labor by which the social body is fed, clothed, and housed. It had laid hold of his imagination in boyhood. The echoes of the great hammer where roof or keel were a-making, the signal-shouts of the workmen, the roar of the furnace, the thunder and plash of the engine, were a sublime music to him; the felling and lading of timber, and the huge trunk vibrating star-like in the distance along the highway, the crane at work on the wharf, the piled-up produce in warehouses, the precision and variety of muscular effort wherever exact work had to be turned out—all these sights of his youth had acted on him as poetry without the aid of poets, had made a philosophy for him without the aid of philosophers, a religion without the aid of theology. His early ambition had been to have as effective a share as possible in this sublime labor, which was peculiarly dignified by him with the name of ‘business.’”