A House of Air. Hermione Lee

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СКАЧАТЬ felt something like the thankfulness that might well up in us if we had narrowly escaped hurting a lamed creature. She put her hand into her husband’s, and they went along the broad corridor together.

      The possibility is there, for long enough for us to think about it, of perhaps not happiness between them, but peace. The moment passes, as it does for Mary Garth, who has never realized that Mr Farebrother cared anything for her, and still doesn’t, fully, when he comes to see her to plead Fred Vincy’s cause. But ‘something indefinable, something like the resolute suppression of a pain in Mr Farebrother’s manner, made her feel suddenly miserable, as she had once felt when she saw her father’s hands trembling in a moment of trouble.’ Here Mary herself can’t define her sensation. There is time in Middlemarch, as in life itself, for these echoes or intimations of paths not taken. Another one, which remains just under the surface but is never put into words, is: what if Dorothea had married Lydgate?

      There is another complication in Middlemarch, which runs very deep. Meliorism looks cautiously forward, and indeed George Eliot agreed with Gladstone that there was no use in fighting against the future. But she was always true to her own past, her rural childhood when she had been a ‘little sister,’ running through green fields. All around Middlemarch stretches northeast Loamshire, ‘almost all meadows and pastures, with hedgerows still allowed to grow in bushy beauty, and to spread out coral fruit for the birds…These are the things that make the gamut of joy in landscape to midland-bred souls.’ (This recalls the passage from The Mill on the Floss, ‘We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in it…’) It is noticeable that although 1830 saw the height of England’s agricultural distress and, in consequence, of rioting and rick burning—the Cambridgeshire fires could be seen at a distance of eight miles against the night sky—Loamshire, in this novel, is relatively tranquil. (Unrest is represented by Mr Brooke’s visit to Dagley’s smallholding, where he is defied by the drunken Dagley and behaves in a way much less dignified than his own dog, the sagacious Monk.) The reason for this, surely, is that George Eliot needs to indicate an ideal experience and existence. In Middlemarch the country represents work, steadiness, harmony, peace. If we ask ourselves, or let ourselves feel, how human happiness is measured, we have to turn to Fred Vincy. Fred’s love for Mary, in spite of his shortcomings, is the truest emotion in the book, and it is as an expert on the cultivation of green crops and the economy of cattle-feeding that he steadies down to a happy life: ‘On enquiry it might possibly be found that Fred and Mary still inhabit Stone Court—that the creeping plants still cast the foam of their blossoms over the fine stone walls…’ Their marriage is a pastoral. Then again, late on in the book, Dorothea has a moment of vision that is in the nature of an epiphany. It is after her sleepless night of extreme misery over Will Ladislaw.

      She opened her curtains, and looked out towards the bit of road that lay in view, with fields beyond, outside the entrance-gates. 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…

      What she would resolve to do that day did not yet seem quite clear, but something that she could achieve stirred her as with an approaching murmur which would soon gather distinctness.

      Dorothea’s inspiration, at this late stage, comes from the early-morning sight of the labourer and the wayfarer. This, too, is pastoral. George Eliot, of course, did not deceive herself. If her Warwickshire childhood had been an Eden, it was one that she had lost. But it remained as her surest way of judging life as it hurried forward through the unpeaceful, expanding nineteenth century.

      Introduction to the Folio Society edition

      of Middlemarch, 1999

       Not Herself

      George Eliot, Voice of a Century: A Biography, by Frederick R. Karl

      ‘[Burne-Jones] came across her standing monumentally alone at Waterloo Station, and, as he talked with her, they walked for a short distance along the platform. Suddenly Lewes rushed up to them, panic-pale and breathlessly exclaiming “My God! you are HERE!” George Eliot gravely admitted it. “But,” stammered Lewes, “I left you THERE!”’

      This story (from Graham Robertson’s Time Was) belongs to the 1870s, when George Eliot had become not only a precious charge to G. H. Lewes but also an object of general reverence as the greatest of secular teachers and (after Dickens died) the supreme English novelist. Opinion turned against her not long after her death in 1880. (A book I’ve got here, a Practical Text Book for Senior Classes published by Harrap in 1923, doesn’t even include her in its chart of the Chief Victorian Novelists.) She had to wait for rescue by F. R. Leavis and above all by Professor Gordon Haight, with his nine volumes of letters and a classic biography (1968). Endlessly helpful, Haight reckoned to be able to say what she was doing at any given moment on any day of her life, even before her written diaries begin, in 1854.

      Frederick Karl’s new biography is seven-hundred-odd pages long and has taken him five years’ hard labour. He has consulted, he thinks, all the available material, notably Eliot’s brave but embarrassing letters to Herbert Spencer (‘If you become attached to anyone else, then I must die’). In his acknowledgements he thanks Haight as the most dauntless of scholars, but, six hundred pages on, he calls the 1968 Life ‘narrow, squeezed, protective, and carefully conventional.’ This leads you to expect a bold treatment of some debatable points, but that would be a mistake. Of John Chapman, the publisher in whose house she lodged when she first came to London, he says ‘it is quite possible she and Chapman were intimate, although we will probably never have definite proof one way or another.’

      Why did John Cross, her second husband, twenty years younger than herself, jump from the balcony during their honeymoon into the Grand Canal? Professor Karl examines the evidence at length, and concludes that the incident only seems amusing ‘if we put on hold the pain of the participants.’ In fact he is more protective of his subject than Haight himself, refusing to accept that she was emotionally dependent on a succession of men, beginning with her father and her elder brother Isaac.

      Although she believed that ‘there is no creature whose inward being is so strong that it is not greatly determined by what lies outside it,’ George Eliot invented herself (though probably not more than most women). She let it be understood that her right hand was larger than her left because of the dairy work she did as a girl, but Isaac declared she had never made a pound of butter in her life. She gallantly defied society when she threw in her lot with the all-purpose journalist and philosopher George Henry Lewes, and yet what she longed for was acceptance and solid respectability, the right wallpaper, the right callers on her Sunday afternoons. Karl patiently admits these contradictions, but relates them to the troubled consciousness of Victorian society, with all its divisions and paradoxes. George Eliot trusted passionately in the individual, coming to believe that each of us should create his own church, but at the same time dreading the chaos and disorder to which freedom might lead. To Karl she is the ‘voice of the century.’ All her changes of name, he says—Mary Anne, Marian, Mrs G. H. Lewes, George Eliot, Mater, Mutter, Madonna—correspond to willed transformations, the moral and spiritual versions of self-help.

      Her responsibilities, as she said, weighed heavily on her, and Professor Karl can’t be called light-footed either. For the most part he plods along with dignity by the side of his Mary Anne. He is strong on her years with Chapman’s Westminster Review and on the details of her business affairs. Lewes, acting as her manager, was a sharp customer, and John Blackwood, most noble-minded of publishers, had reason to complain. But respectability had to be earned, or, as Karl puts it, ‘the inflow of money was an indisputable form of empowerment.’ In the background were Lewes’s legal wife and children, СКАЧАТЬ