66

From Blackwood's Magazine.
MIDDLEMARCH.*

expect, would have been in her eyes somewhat of a degradation. Here is her description:

-or

It is difficult to say how far the large circle of readers who hailed with keen de- "Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which light the announcement of a new novel by seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress. George Eliot," will be satisfied with that Her hand and wrist were so finely formed that writer for having adopted the tantalizing she could wear sleeves not less bare of style expedient of issuing this last by instal- than those in which the Blessed Virgin appeared inents a single "book" at a time. Certo Italian painters; and her profile as well as her stature and bearing seemed to gain the more tainly the tales which have already pro- dignity from her plain garments, which by the ceeded from this hand owe their deserved side of provincial fashion gave her the imprespopularity by no means exclusively to the siveness of a fine quotation from the Bible, interest of the narrative, or to that eager from one of our elder poets, in a paragraph curiosity which may sometimes be roused of to-day's newspaper. She was usually spoken by the skilful handling of a mystery. of as being remarkably clever, but with the adFar less do they depend for their attrac- dition that her sister Celia had more commontion upon anything that can be understood sense. Nevertheless, Celia wore scarcely more by the term "sensational." Such books are not like the "foaming grape of eastern France," whose chief zest is lost unless we take the full draught at once, and which becomes stale and unprofitable if set aside by any interruption; they are like the still old wine of rare vintage, whose flavour we love to dwell upon and to recur to, and which we have no desire to toss off out of hand. If any work of fiction can bear the being read in portions without injury to its effect, it is one which, like the present, is really not so much a novel as a narrative which is made the vehicle of careful studies of character, fine and discriminating satire, and original thought clothed in the most finished and epigrammatic language. Regarded in this point of view, each "book" of "Middlemarch" is complete in itself. But thorough justice will not have been done to the work until it has been read through a second time as a whole an experiment which very few will grudge to make.

Dorothea Brooke, the heroine of this Middlemarch history, is as unlike an ordinary modern young lady as well can be. She would have felt, perhaps, that in saying this we were paying her almost the only compliment which she would have valued. To be complimented, or even to be made love to, after the fashion which most of her sex permit, and even seem to

• Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life. By George Eliot. William Blackwood and Sons, Edinburgh and London. 1871.

6

trimmings; and it was only to close observers
that her dress differed from her sister's, and
had a shade of coquetry in its arrangements;
for Miss Brooke's plain dressing was due to
mixed conditions, in most of which her sister
shared. The pride of being ladies had some-
thing to do with it: the Brooke connections,
though not exactly aristocratic, were unques-
tionably good:' if you inquired backward for
a generation or two, you would not find any
yard-measuring or parcel-tying forefathers-
anything lower than an admiral or a clergyman;
and there was even an ancestor discernible as a
Puritan gentleman who served under Cromwell,
but afterwards conformed, and managed to come
out of all political troubles as the proprietor of
a respectable family estate. Young women of
such birth, living in a quiet country-house, and
attending a village church hardly larger than a
parlour, naturally regarded frippery as the am-
bition of a huckster's daughter.
knew many passages of Pascal's Pensées and of
nies of mankind, seen by the light of Christian-
Jeremy Taylor by heart; and to her the desti-
ity, made the solicitudes of feminine fashion ap-
pear an occupation for Bedlam. She could not
reconcile the anxieties of a spiritual life involv-
ing eternal consequences, with a keen interest
in guimp and artificial protrusions of drapery.
Her mind was theoretic, and yearned by its na-
ture after some lofty conception of the world
which might frankly include the parish of Tip-
ton and her own rule of conduct there; she was
enamoured of intensity and greatness, and rash
in embracing whatever seemed to her to have
those aspects; likely to seek martyrdom, to
make retractations, and then to incur martyr-
dom after all in a quarter where she had not
sought it."

...

Dorothea

Her pet occupation (or her "favourite | have "carried him over the hedge," as he fad," as her sister irreverently calls it) is observes, "but I saw it wouldn't do -I drawing plans of model cottages for the pulled up; I pulled up in time." This poor; she disciplines herself by occasional complacent appreciation of his own lapsed fasts, has scruples about wearing even her possibilities is of the most inoffensive sort, mother's family jewels, and though very though it brings the Squire into some little fond of riding, is not free from conscientious trouble, inasmuch as it tempts him to take qualms on that subject. "She felt that up the "independent" line in politics, and she enjoyed it in a pagan sensuous sort of fall a prey to the radical wire-pullers in way, and always looked forward to re- the borough of Middlemarch, who are as nouncing it." In short, she is one of those eager as any of their fellows to secure a possible Saint Theresas who, through gentleman of family and position to put in "the meanness of opportunity," never their front. come to the front.

Celia, the younger, looks upon her sister's peculiarities with a good deal of awe, mixed with suppressed impatience. She has the feeling, sometimes, that Dorothea is "too religious for family comfort." To her practical eyes

"Notions and scruples were like spilt needles, making one afraid of treading, or sitting down, or even eating."

Mr. Brooke, the bachelor uncle with whom the two sisters reside, is the Squire of Tipton Grange in Loamshire, keeping up country hospitality on an income of some three thousand a-year; a man of nearly sixty, of aquiescent temper, miscellaneous opinions, and uncertain vote." His conversation which is of the same miscellaneous character as his opinions - is the sort of talk to which we have all listened in a coun

scrappy

pa

try house, the master of which has travelled
a little, and read a little, and dabbled a lit-
tle in accomplishments in his younger days.
Mr. Brooke's mind is a perfect museum of
ideas, or what he takes for such; just as
his library drawers are stuffed with what
he calls "documents"- miscellaneous
pers which he has collected on all sorts of
subjects; and the
slovenliness,"
as his author calls it, with which he jerks
out his disjointed talk is highly comical.
He indulges a good-humoured illusion
that he is a kind of undeveloped universal
genius, a Crichton in posse, who could have
beaten his listeners at their own favourite
weapons if he had cared to take the pains.
"I was too indolent, you know"
plains, on one occasion "else I might
have been anywhere at one time." In-

he ex

we

To such a man, his niece Dorothea is necessarily somewhat of a mystery. He looks upon her with much admiration, a little occasional awe, and a little of that contempt which we all secretly feel for anything which cannot understand. Her ways are not as the ways of other young women. And when she declares it "impossible" for her to marry their neighbour, Sir James Chettam a blooming Englishman of the red-whiskered type ". whose estates adjoin the Tipton property, and who is really a very good tempered and amiable fellow besides being a baronet-though, as even Mr. Brooke is driven to confess, "he doesn't go much into ideas"- then his feeling of the inscrutable nature of the female problem is confirmed.

Mr. Brooke wondered, and felt that women were an inexhaustible subject of study, since even he at his age was not in a perfect state of scientific prediction about them."

Poor Sir James Chettam has been an unacknowledged suitor of Dorothea's some time before the story opens. He has never as yet made open profession; and Dorothea has steadily in her own mind, though latterly with some degree of wilful blindness, referred all his visits to the Grange to the account of her younger sister, and treated him with a frank kindness as a possible brother-in-law. For Celia such a destiny, with its commonplace happiness, might be possible; but for herself-the idea, when it is flashed upon her consciousness at last by Celia's plain speaking, is, as she "horrible." says,

"Dorothea, with all her eagerness to know deed, his natural zeal for knowledge would the truths of life, retained very childlike ideas

"Celia! He is one

of the most distin

He is remarkably like He has the same deep

"Had Locke those two white moles with hairs on them? '

"Oh, I daresay! when people of a certain sort looked at him,' said Dorothea, walking away a little.

about marriage. She felt sure she would have accepted the judicious Hooker, if she had been guished men I ever saw. born in time to save him from that wretched the portrait of Locke. mistake he made in matrimony; or John Milton eye-sockets.' when his blindness had come on; or any of the other great men whose odd habits it would have been glorious piety to endure. But an amiable handsome baronet, who said 'Exactly' even when she expressed uncertainty-how could be affect her as a lover? The really delightful marriage must be that where your husband was a sort of father, and could teach you even He-man with the complexion of a cochon de lait.' brew, if you wished it." [This is a spiteful hit at poor Sir James- for Celia's benefit.] "Dodo!' exclaimed Celia, looking after her. in surprise. 'I never heard you make such a comparison before.'

666 Mr. Casaubon is so sallow.'

"All the better. I suppose you admire a

66 6 'Why should I make it before the occasion dame? It is a good comparison: the match is perfect.'

"Miss Brooke was clearly forgetting herself, and Celia thought so.

"I wonder you show temper, Dorothea.' "It is so painful in you, Celia, that you will look at human beings as if they were mere animals with a toilette, and never see the great

soul in a man's face.'

"Has Mr. Casaubon a great soul?' Celia was not without a touch of naïve malice. 666 Yes, I believe he has,' said Dorothea, with

In fact, Miss Brooke has just at this time found- or thinks she has found the ideal hero to whom she feels she can devote herself, who (to use the expression of her own thoughts) "could understand the higher inward life, and with whom there could be some spiritual communion." To her enthusiastic fancy, which has been dreaming of this nobler destiny of women, the coming cavalier wears upon his head (we are borrowing the illustration from the motto to the chapter) the resplendent helmet of Mambrino. Certainly, to the reader's eyes, he appears clad in much more ordinary fashion. He is the Rev. Edward Casaubon, rector and squire (for the full voice of decision. Everything I see in he lives in the manor-house) of the neigh-him corresponds to his pamphlet on Biblical bouring parish of Lowick, a learned and Cosmology." retired scholar, who has for years been making voluminous collections for an important projected work a Key to all Mythologies;" intended to show "that all the mythical systems or erratic mythical fragments in the world were corruptions of a tradition originally revealed;" to supersede, we suppose, that remarkable but almost forgotten book, Gale's "Court of the Gentiles." Mr. Casaubon dines for the first time at the Grange, and there makes complete conquest of poor Dorothea. Her admiration is not shared by Celia, who can see no Mambrino's helmet - only a very plain man of from forty-five to fifty, with blinking eyes, the effect of continual study, and other disagreeable peculiarities. Here is the conversation which takes place between the sisters after this first dinner:

"When the two girls were in the drawingroom alone, Celia said

"How very ugly Mr. Casaubon is!'

"He talks very little,' said Celia.
"There is no one for him to talk to." "

But Celia's opinion of this hero of her sister's imagination is more plainly expressed during a subsequent conversation beteen the two. The Rector is coming to the Grange again to dinner; this time as the accepted lover of Dorothea, though the younger sister has not yet been made acquainted with that fact.

"Is any one else coming to dinner besides Mr. Casaubon?'

666

Not that I know of.'

"I hope there is some one else. Then I shall not hear him eat his soup so.' "What is there remarkable about his soupeating?

666

Really, Dodo, can't you hear how he scrapes his spoon? And he always blinks before he speaks. I don't know whether Locke blinked, but I'm sure I'm sorry for those who sat opposite to him if he did.'

66 6

Celia,' said Dorothea, with emphatic grav

to 2

ity, pray don't make any more observations of that kind.'

666

Why not? They are quite true,' returned Celia, who had her reasons for persevering, though she was beginning to be a little afraid.

666 Many things are true which only the commonest minds observe.'

"Then I think the commonest minds must be rather useful. I think it is a pity Mr. Casaubon's mother had not a commoner mind: she might have taught him better.'"'

with themselves than with the lady. But they must feel that it would scarcely help their suit, and might rather startle her self-appreciation to be told that, instead of a necessity to the suitor's happiness, she is only to be taken up as the amusement of a "vacant hour."

so is the Rev. Edward Casaubon, in his views on that important step, very unlike a regulation lover. He does not hesitate, in his very original love-letter, to explain that he looks upon Dorothea as a companion who is "to supply aid in graver labours, and to cast a charm over vacant hours." So, again, in one of their first conversations after their engagement, he says to her: "The great charm of your sex is its capability of an ardent self-sacrificing It is the modern version, often repeated affection; and herein we see its fitness to in the prosaic chronicles of life, of Titania round and complete the existence of our and her love; only that in this case the hero own." It is not improbable that middleof feminine admiration, whatever his social aged gentlemen, when they choose a wife deficiencies, has not exactly an ass's head of deliberate purpose rather than from on his shoulders. He is only too learned, what is called falling in love, are often and too devoted to his literary investiga- very consciously and principally influenced tions. But the die is cast. The beauty by such considerations, and that they are and brightness of Dorothea, her intelli- frequently much more truly "in love" gence and enthusiasm, and even still more, we must suppose, the marked interest with which she listens to his pedantic sententiousness, have caught the fancy of the middle-aged student, and awoke in him a sensation which he supposes to be love. It is not only, or chiefly, that he has been "using up his eyesight too much of late upon old manuscripts, and wants a reader for his evenings," and is, in this matter, "fastidious in voices," as he has told Mr. Brooke; though this consideration has clearly had a large share in directing his thoughts towards the acquisition of a wife. Still, his feelings are genuine, so far as they go. The long letter in which he conveys his proposal is redeemed from much of its egotism and assumption of superiority by one or two touches which show that such heart as he has is really concerned in the matter, and by the confession that "in this order of experience he is still young." Dorothea accepts him,- thankfully, almost rapturously; with an amount of tearful gratitude which, if young ladies in her position often feel, they at least do not let either their lovers or their biographers into the secret. "She fell on her knees, buried her face, and sobbed." Here was her ideal destiny realized.

"How could it occur to her to examine the letter, to look at it critically as a profession of love? Her whole soul was possessed by the fact that a fuller life was opening before her; she was a neophyte about to enter on a higher grade of initiation. She was going to have room for the energies which stirred uneasily under the dimness and pressure of her own ignorance and the petty peremptoriness of the world's habits.' If Miss Brooke's feelings are very unlike those which ordinary young women would be conscious of on the eve of matrimony,

No wonder that such a lover looks forward eagerly to "the happy termination of his courtship," because, among other reasons, it is "a hindrance to the progress of his great work."

"But he had deliberately incurred the hindrance, having made up his mind that it was now time for him to adorn his life with the graces of female companionship, to irradiate the gloom which fatigue was apt to hang over the intervals of studious labour with the play of female fancy, and to secure in this, his culminating age, the solace of female tendance for his declining years. Hence he determined to abandon himself to the stream of feeling, and perhaps was surprised to find what an exceedingly shallow rill it was. As in droughty rezions baptism by immersion could only be performed symbolically, so Mr. Casaubon found that sprinkling was the utmost approach to a plunge cluded that the poets had much exaggerated the force of masculine passion."

which his stream would afford him; and he con

But Dorothea sees no shortcomings. She supplies all that is wanting out of the wealth of her own imagination.

She filled up all blanks with unmanifested perfections, interpreting him as she interpreted the works of Providence, and accounting for seeming discords by her own deafness to the higher harmonies. And there are many blanks left in the weeks of courtship which a loving faith fills with happy assurance.

She is content, therefore, with the most imperfect utterances of the idol which sh

uncom

has set up. She even smothers her nat- tions," and is likely to have an ural disappointment when, in response to fortable recollection, for some time after her enthusiasm about model cottages, he the wedding, of the very free strictures "diverts the talk to the extremely narrow which she has passed upon the brideaccommodation which was to be had in the groom; and to the entire disapproval dwellings of the ancient Egyptians." The of a certain Mrs. Cadwallader, wife of author sums up this form of hero-worship, another rector in the neighbourhood, which meets us in so many shapes, in one who has great confidence in her capacity of those terse and frequent sentences with for regulating the affairs of her neighwhich these volumes, like their predeces- bours generally, and especially in the matBors, abound. ter of match-making.

"What believer sees a disturbing omission or infelicity? The text, whether of prophet or poet, expands for whatever we can put into it, and even his bad grammar is sublime."

The marriage turns out not more happily than might be expected. Not that it leads to any domestic catastrophe; the hand from which "Middlemarch comes does not require to work that kind of popOnce, indeed, the veil is half-lifted from ular material up into the story. But her eyes, and a casual remark from her Casaubon is unlovable; unlovable by any future husband, which he lets fall in the most complete unconsciousness of all that possibility of woman's manifold nature, as it reveals, jars painfully upon her woman's poor Dorothea presently discovers. Unfeeling. It has been settled that they are self for loving anything except his prolovable, because he has no capacity in himto go as far as Rome on their wedding jected book, and finds his young wife, exjourney. Mr. Casaubon has some literary cept as a reader and amanuensis, a posiresearches to make in the Vatican. Celia tive embarrassment. Yet none the less has declined to accompany them, nor does will the thoughtful reader regard him, in Dorothea herself desire it; her visions of future happiness and usefulness are fully spite of his narrow selfishness and hardself-sufficient for her. But Mr. Casaubonness, with great pity. For upon him, no

is disappointed — on her account, of course. "You will have many lonely hours, Dorothea, for I shall be constrained to make the utmost use of my time during our stay in Rome, and I shall feel more at liberty if you had a companion.'

less than upon Dorothea, the truth is breaking by slow degrees, that the great idea of his life is a hopeless failure. The secret gnawing mistrust of his own powers, which creeps over him like a slow paralysis; the suspicion that the row of closefilled note-books, the darling interest and "The words I should feel more at liberty' occupation of a life, will never in his hands grated on Dorothea. For the first time in speak-take connected shape, that he has mistaken ing to Mr. Casaubon she coloured from annoy- the diligence of a collector for the genius "You must have misunderstood me very of an author, and that even if his ability much,' she said, if you think I should not enwere equal to the task, still the literary ter into the value of your time; if you think world has been going on while he has that I should not willingly give up whatever in- been lingering - that his researches have terfered with your using it to the best purpose.' ."" been anticipated by more modern scholars, But when she goes up to dress for din- and that in all his elaborate disquisitions ner, she reproaches herself for the irrita- he is but fighting in argument against the' tion she has felt, and for the tone in which ghosts of long-exploded errors

ance.

she had answered him.

I

"Surely I am in a strangely selfish weak state of mind,' she said to herself. How can have a husband who is so much above me, without knowing that he needs me much less

than I need him?'"

- all this is as bitter a mortification to the student as the disenchantment of her illusions is to the young wife. Selfish pedant though he be, we cannot help but pity him; especially when he sees, or thinks he sees, that this keen-eyed enthusiast, whom he has married to be a helpmeet in a very So they are married; to the discom- unusual sense, is becoming a silent critic fiture of poor Sir James Chettam, who of his incapacity. He suddenly begins to bears his defeat, however, with very sen- look upon her as a personification of that sible philosophy; to the dismay of good shallow world which surrounds the illMr. Brooke, who has to fall back for sup-appreciated and desponding author." port upon his convictions of the general There has come upon the scene too, in incomprehensibility of woman; to the order further to trouble his literary peace, great disgust of Celia, who is more than a young cousin whom he has half-adopted, ever confirmed in her autipathy to "no-and to whom he has offered to give a start