My Life in Middlemarch (32 page)

At the time of that letter her father was weeks away from death, and her mood was somber. She wrote of herself as a moon, a “cold dark orb,” solitary and demoralized. “Alas for the fate of poor mortals which condemns them to wake up some fine morning and find all the poetry in which their world was bathed only the evening before utterly gone—the hard angular world of chairs and tables and looking-glasses staring at them in all its naked prose,” she wrote. “It is so in all the stages of life—the poetry of girlhood goes—the poetry of love and marriage—the poetry of maternity—and at last the very poetry of duty forsakes us for a
season and we see ourselves and all about us as nothing more than miserable agglomerations of atoms—poor tentative efforts of the Natur Princip to mould a personality.”

This litany of life stages passing away is staggeringly expressed, and wrenchingly sad, but what Eliot did with the years that followed was redemptive.
Middlemarch
itself might be seen as capturing the poetry of girlhood, the poetry of love and marriage, the poetry of maternity, or motherhood, and the poetry of duty. In the novel she comes to terms with the hard, angular world of tables and chairs and looking glasses, and finds a struggling person’s place within it. By the time Eliot was writing
Middlemarch
she had found a way to think of herself, and of everyone around her, as something more than a miserable agglomeration of atoms. In 1870 she wrote a letter of condolence to a friend and in it, not for the only time, she drew upon an image of death that recalled the grace-giving sunlight of childhood. “I try to delight in the sunshine that will be when I shall never see it any more,” she wrote. “And I think it is possible for this sort of impersonal life to attain great intensity,—possible for us to gain much more independence, than is usually believed, of the small bundle of facts that make our own personality.” Her aspiration was not for literary immortality—though she got that—but for a kind of encompassing empathy that would make the punishing experience of egoism shrink and dwindle. She believed that growth depends upon complex connections and openness to others, and does not derive from a solitary swelling of the self. She became great because she recognized that she was small.

“We cannot give the young our experience,” a visitor to the
Priory once recalled Eliot as saying. “They will not take it. There must be the actual friction of life, the individual contact with sorrow, to discipline the character.” She was right, of course, though as we grow older it can be hard to resist the temptation to tell younger people how to live—to believe that we have acquired some wisdom fit to impart to the benighted young. Only an occasional fictional character, like Mary Garth, is wise enough to know for sure at the beginning of her life what she will want in life’s middle, or at life’s end; and if more fictional characters were as certain as that, fiction wouldn’t be worth reading. For most characters, and for most readers, the course is less clear.

Middlemarch
has not given me George Eliot’s experience, not on my first reading of it, or my latest. But in reading her works and her letters, and learning about her life and the lives of those near to her, it becomes clear to me that she could not have written this novel without her individual contact with sorrow. And as I continue to read and think and reflect, I also realize that she has given me something else: a profound experience with a book, over time, that amounts to one of the frictions of my life. I have grown up with George Eliot. I think
Middlemarch
has disciplined my character. I know it has become part of my own experience and my own endurance.
Middlemarch
inspired me when I was young, and chafing to leave home; and now, in middle life, it suggests to me what else home might mean, beyond a place to grow up and grow out of.

O
N
this mild May day I sit in my Brooklyn backyard, reading and thinking. Between me and the sky grows a broad-limbed elm
tree that must have been a sapling when my parents were young. Squirrels skitter through it, while sparrows flit from its branches to those of the copper birch beyond. This is a peaceful city garden, surrounded by high, ivy-covered brick walls that bring to my mind the walls around the very first garden I knew, as a small child under a London sky, before my parents moved to the coast.

This garden is my young son’s home-scene, weaving itself into his joys now, while his joys are vivid. So is the less restful world in which he is being raised, discernible even from this retreat: the traffic passing on the busy street beyond; the subterranean rumble of the crowded subway train that we ride to his school every morning, after waiting on a platform decked with posters for mayhem-filled movies; the ebullient calls of teenagers peacocking down the block to the hilly park on the corner. During the Revolutionary War this park was the site of a fort that was named for a maternal ancestor of my husband, a general who led American troops against the forces of George III. Later, Walt Whitman, the poet and editor of the
Brooklyn Eagle,
who lived in this neighborhood, championed the construction of a park on the fort’s site. When Whitman published
Leaves of Grass
in 1855 George Eliot was among the first reviewers to notice it, in the
Westminster Review.
She alluded to “the very bold expressions by which the author indicates his contempt for the ‘prejudices’ of decency”—a remark that sounds a little prudish until one remembers that Eliot herself was, by then, thought to have held decency in contempt. Whitman achieved his park, and in the 1860s Frederick Law Olmsted, the great nineteenth-century landscape designer, created a small acreage of imagined countryside, where now my son climbs among clusters of old-growth trees whose placement was conceived when
Middlemarch
was no more than jottings in a notebook and ideas in George Eliot’s mind.

The mother tongue of my son’s imagination has a very different accent to mine, and all this will be his inheritance, if he chooses to claim it. I cannot give him my experience. But as I sit in our garden I hope that here, at least, our languages will overlap, among these old-fashioned plants that remind me of England—mature hydrangea bushes with blue flowers that darken to purple as the season progresses, glossy-leafed euonymus that clambers up the wall, and clusters of hellebores bearing subtle green flowers, like those that grow on George Eliot’s grave.

T
he final sentence of
Middlemarch
is one of the most admired in literature, and with good reason—it is “quietly thrilling,” as Stanley Fish, the literary critic, has written. The book ends, as it began, with Dorothea, and it discovers what may be redeemed from disappointment. Dorothea’s fate is not to be another Saint Teresa, but to be a heroine of the ordinary—the embodiment of George Eliot’s grave, demanding, meliorist faith. It reads, “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.”

A vein of melancholy runs through the sentence. Dorothea’s impact upon the people around her is diffusive, like vapor vanishing into the air. Things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been—but ill they still are, to some degree, and are not likely to be otherwise. Acts are unhistoric; lives are hidden; tombs
are unvisited—all is unmarked and unnoticed. With its series of long clauses and then its short final phrase, the sentence concludes with a perfect dying fall. I cannot imagine reading these words and not sighing at the end of them.

But this isn’t quite the sentence as Eliot originally wrote it. In this, the first published edition, she made several small but significant revisions from her original draft, which can be found in the manuscript in the British Library. The manuscript version reads as follows: “But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive; for the growing life of the world is after all chiefly dependent on unhistoric acts, and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is owing to many of those who sleep in unvisited tombs, having lived a hidden life nobly.”

When I first came across this passage, in the library, I felt an acute sense of disorientation. There, in violet-colored ink, was an only partly successful first stab at sublimity. It was like discovering that Leonardo had first tried painting a snub nose on the Mona Lisa, or learning that the question Hamlet originally asked was, “Not to be, or to be?” The music of the line was altered entirely, and so was its import. Instead of the “growing good of the world”—Eliot’s meliorist vision, captured in a phrase—there was the “growing life of the world,” an expression so much less specific, and so much less moving. There was the phrase “after all”—a rhetorical gesture of persuasion that undermined the solemn authority of the passage, absent in the first publication. There was “chiefly dependent” rather than “partly dependent,” and “owing” rather than “half owing”—changes which give the sentence a much more optimistic tone than characterizes the revised, published version, with its irresistible melancholic grandeur.

Still more significant are the revisions to the word order after the final comma, which, in the final published version, is far more resonant. Those tombs may be unvisited, but in reading the sentence—in arriving at them, our ultimate destination, on the page—we are able to pay homage to the hidden lives they commemorate. Those hidden lives are, in the earlier, manuscript version, lived “nobly”—which, like its close synonym “admirably,” is suggestive of moral qualities that are outwardly recognized by others. (The goodness of Miss Henrietta Noble, the Reverend Farebrother’s elderly aunt, who filches sugar lumps from the table to distribute to the poor, is revealed to all by her name.) By replacing “nobly” with “faithfully,” Eliot shifts the emphasis away from the implied judgment of an external observer—a dissonant suggestion when one is talking of “hidden lives.” Instead, she places her emphasis upon a validation that comes from inward conviction.

Faithfulness is “solely the good in us,” as Eliot characterizes Bunyan’s Faithful, the allegorical figure at the center of
The Pilgrim’s Progress
whom she invokes in the penultimate chapter of the novel. By substituting faith for nobility, Eliot has made those hidden lives of which she writes more humble. But she has made them richer, too, as the fertile soil from which the good might grow.

By the end of the book, Dorothea has made her own progress, even if she has not had a chance to stray far beyond the boundaries of her provincial life. Having aspired at the novel’s outset to do good for others in some grand but abstract way, she discovers that the good she is able to do is in relation to the lives that touch her own more closely, even if doing so may be inconvenient or painful
for her. And there is a passage in chapter 80, only a few short pages before the end of this very long book, in which this is crystallized for Dorothea. It is here that she makes her own discovery of what
Middlemarch
is about.

It is early in the morning, and she is in her boudoir at Lowick Manor. By now she is a widow, Casaubon having died. Although she is convinced that she and Ladislaw must always be separated because of the codicil in Casaubon’s will, she has, until now, clung to the knowledge that he loves her, and treasured him for the brightness he brought to the gloomy days of her marriage. But her confidence in him has been shaken: the day before, in an effort to help save Lydgate’s reputation, she has visited the doctor’s house—and there stumbled across Rosamond and Ladislaw in what she has mistakenly taken for a love scene. Shocked and disillusioned, she has spent an anguished night on the hard floor of her room, regretting the loss of her cherished ideal of Ladislaw’s worthiness, and admitting to herself that she had loved him. By morning, though, she has forced herself to think beyond herself, and to consider how she still might act on behalf of Lydgate and even Rosamond, whose troubles she might yet help to remedy even though she feels her own hopes are shattered.

“She opened her curtains, and looked out towards the bit of road that lay in view, with fields beyond, outside the entrance-gates,” Eliot writes. “On the road there was a man with a bundle on his back and a woman carrying her baby; in the field she could see figures moving—perhaps the shepherd with his dog. Far off in the bending sky was the pearly light; and she felt the largeness of the world and the manifold wakings of men to labour and endurance. She was a part of that involuntary, palpitating life, and could
neither look out on it from her luxurious shelter as a mere spectator, nor hide her eyes in selfish complaining.”

There’s a biblical gravitas to the image of husband and wife as they walk through the landscape on the road to Middlemarch, representing the hidden lives of all those people Dorothea now realizes her own life is bound up with, and who must also be recognized. In looking out upon them, small figures in an enlarging vista, Dorothea comprehends the next step she must take on her own journey. We are called to express our generosity and sympathy in ways we might not have chosen for ourselves. Heeding that call, we might become better. Setting aside our own cares, we might find ourselves on the path that can lead us out of resignation.

I
N
the late spring of 1871, just as
Middlemarch
was beginning to fall into place imaginatively for Eliot, she and Lewes moved to the countryside for several months, to Shottermill, in Surrey, a village which in the nineteenth century was a center for broom making, and which was just being discovered by artists and intellectuals, including Lord Tennyson, who had built a house nearby. They rented a house, Brookbank, the home of Anne Gilchrist, whose late husband, Alexander Gilchrist, had been the biographer of William Blake. It was “a queer little cottage,” Eliot wrote to Francis Pattison before her departure, telling her Oxford friend that it “stands in the midst of a lovely country, where there are hill tops from which we shall look down on a round horizon.”