My Life in Middlemarch (27 page)

Some among her admirers protested that her perspective was too bleak. Bessie Rayner Parkes, at one time Eliot’s close friend, insisted in her own tribute that Eliot’s Dorothea had set her ambitions too low, given the number of women of the time, including Queen Victoria and Florence Nightingale, who had made their mark. The example of the latter real-life heroine, born in 1820—about a decade after Eliot places the birth of Dorothea Brooke—might seem to belie Eliot’s concluding observation that the world now cannot accommodate a new Saint Teresa because “the medium in which [her] ardent deeds took shape is for ever gone.” Nightingale was no saint, as Strachey took delight in showing, but she was certainly more than the “foundress of nothing” Eliot put at the center of her story.

But in
Middlemarch,
Eliot was not concerned with showing the effects of large, heroic acts, particularly those performed by extraordinary individuals. The gradual betterment with which she was concerned in this novel was not the good work of charity, or of grand, noble gestures of sacrifice. Eliot took it as a given that she should contribute to good causes, do good works, and help needier relations, however bizarre the relationship might be.
(It was mostly with her earnings that Lewes continued to provide for his estranged wife Agnes and her offspring with Thornton Hunt.) But she was more concerned with changing her reader’s perspective than she was in encouraging that reader to contribute to soup kitchens. Her credo might be expressed this way: If I really care for you—if I try to think myself into your position and orientation—then the world is bettered by my effort at understanding and comprehension. If you respond to my effort by trying to extend the same sympathy and understanding to others in turn, then the betterment of the world has been minutely but significantly extended. “We want people to feel with us, more than to act for us,” she once wrote to a friend.

In order to do as Eliot urges her readers—to feel with you, and care for you—I must take you seriously. And to do that, it follows that I must first take myself seriously. Eliot took herself very seriously, and in the backlash that followed her death that seriousness was sometimes taken to be sanctimony. It may be tempting to laugh at her remembered pronouncements, as even so sympathetic a reader as Virginia Woolf did. To Woolf’s generation, Eliot’s earnestness was an embarrassment. From the perspective of the youth of the immediate post-Victorian era, Eliot had committed the unforgivable offense of being old. A hundred years later, though, Eliot’s melancholy, willed seriousness resonates. It suggests that we, her readers, should take ourselves as seriously as she took us.

“T
HERE
is no general doctrine which is not capable of eating out our morality if unchecked by the deep-seated habit of direct fellow-feeling with individual fellow-men,” Eliot writes in
Middlemarch.
The object of this authorial observation is Nicholas Bulstrode, the wealthy, ostentatiously religious banker who has long adopted an attitude of pious subjection to God’s will as “the mould into which he had constrained his immense need of being something important and predominating.” By selectively lending and investing money, and contributing funds to pet causes, Bulstrode has exerted control over the worldly goings-on of Middlemarch, all the while professing to be thinking only of readying his soul for the world to come. Bulstrode is the closest thing
Middlemarch
has to a villain, but his villainy does not spring from pure malevolence. Rather it is the product of a moral deficit. In Bulstrode, Eliot presents a self-appointed man of God who fails to demonstrate compassion and sympathy—the ethical precepts that Eliot believed were worth salvaging from the Christianity she had rejected.

When Eliot rejected Christianity, she set herself the harder task of determining what her own guiding ethics would be. In the last essay she wrote for the
Westminster Review
Eliot gave as good an exposition of her moral code as she did anywhere. The essay is a scything indictment of Edward Young, the eighteenth-century poet-cleric whom she had adored in her youth. By 1858, when she wrote the essay, she had diagnosed a falsity in his theology and morality, which, she argued, contributed to a fundamental insincerity in his poetry.

Young, she wrote, adheres to abstractions—“Virtue sitting on a mount serene,” “Religion coming down from the skies”—while paying no attention to “virtue or religion as it really exists.” Virtue as it really exists, she went on to say, can be found “in courageous effort for unselfish ends, in the internal triumph of justice and
pity over personal resentment, in all the sublime self-renunciation and sweet charities which are found in the details of ordinary life.” Virtue is ethical practice, not theoretical doctrine.

Nicholas Bulstrode is not a clergyman, though as a young man he was active in a Calvinist dissenting church, and considered becoming a preacher or a missionary. At sixty, he is the oldest of the central characters in the novel, and not native to Middlemarch. He grew up in London, an orphan and a charity-school student, then became a subordinate to a pawnbroker—whose trade, it turned out, was in stolen goods. He rose in the business and was much admired for his acumen and his piety by the pawnbroker’s wife, herself a devout woman who was unaware of the true contours of her husband’s dealings. When the pawnbroker died, Bulstrode took over the business, and not long afterward he also married the pawnbroker’s widow. Within a few years the widow died, and Bulstrode’s fortune was made.

By the time the reader meets him, Bulstrode is living comfortably in the town of Middlemarch, having for almost thirty years repressed, more or less successfully, one piece of knowledge from his past: the pawnbroker and his wife were survived by a daughter, who had run away from home upon discovering the criminal foundation of her father’s business. This daughter was rightfully the heir of the fortune Bulstrode had appropriated. Now, a florid stranger named Raffles has arrived in Middlemarch, threatening to expose Bulstrode’s past.

Raffles is no stranger to Bulstrode. Years earlier, Bulstrode engaged Raffles to track down the pawnbroker’s daughter—and then, when she was found, having married the son of a Polish refugee, Bulstrode paid Raffles to keep quiet about her existence,
so that he would not have to surrender his fortune to her. Eventually Raffles, shattered by drink and desperate for income, stumbles across the surviving son of the pawnbroker’s daughter—none other than Will Ladislaw.

Raffles’s discovery threatens to ruin Bulstrode, undermining his high social position and making a mockery of his professed piety. In Book Seven of
Middlemarch,
“Two Temptations,” Bulstrode’s mounting deceptions in the name of piety have a horrific consequence. He finds himself wishing for Raffles’s death, and acting in a way that hastens it, claiming all the while the flimsy justification of Providence.

The Raffles subplot, with its piling up of extraordinary coincidences, looks in its outlines like something transposed from a very different kind of Victorian novel. Raffles’s very name is Dickensian, and so are the twists that bring him into the path of Bulstrode and Ladislaw. Strange coincidences do occur in real life as well as in novels, but it is in the plot concerning Raffles and Bulstrode that a reader sees most clearly the machinery of the novelist at work. I find it the hardest part of the novel to hold in my head as I am reading, or to remember the details of afterward. It is like being immersed in a new, complicated Victorian melodrama. The intrigue is crucial to the working out of the novel’s plot, but it is far from being what
Middlemarch
is
about.

What is most compelling about Bulstrode’s story is not the outward unfolding of plot—though there is a satisfyingly lurid tension to it—but the depiction of his own inward, organic, psychological movement. Eliot accomplishes what D. H. Lawrence gave her credit for doing before any other novelist: “It was she who started putting all the action inside.” The reader learns of Bulstrode’s
initial shrinking from involvement in the shady business of the pawnbroker—and then of his self-justification for taking the work on, since he would thereby be transforming illegally won gains into funds for doing God’s work. Bulstrode, crucially, is not a coarse hypocrite. “He was simply a man whose desire had been stronger than his theoretic beliefs, and who had gradually explained the gratification of his desires into satisfactory agreement with those beliefs,” Eliot writes. She adds, “If this be hypocrisy, it is a process which shows itself occasionally in us all, to whatever confession we belong.”

Bulstrode holds to his faith as a set of rigid, abstract rules, not as a lived practice of compassion. In this, he differs entirely from Eliot’s depiction of “virtue or religion as it really exists” in the person of the Reverend Camden Farebrother, the vicar of St. Botolph’s church. A keen amateur entomologist, Farebrother has become a clergyman more out of familial obligation than a sense of vocation. He supports an elderly mother, an aunt, and an unmarried sister on an inadequate income of four hundred pounds a year. He delivers pithy sermons, which draw listeners from parishes other than his own, but his religion is shown in how he treats others, rather than how he preaches to them. “His position is not quite like that of the Apostles,” Lydgate says of Farebrother. “He is only a parson among parishoners whose lives he has to try and make better.” Farebrother, as his name suggests, is among the most appealing characters in the book: intelligent, caring, generous, and very far from perfect.

In Book Seven of
Middlemarch,
Farebrother faces his own temptation. He is in love with Mary Garth, and she admires and likes him. Fred Vincy, who hopes to marry Mary, has been
playing billiards at the Green Dragon tavern, where participants often gamble on the outcome of games. Farebrother knows that if Fred is drawn back into a life of idleness and dissipation Mary might reconsider her commitment to marry him, and that she might then begin to look at the vicar in the light of a husband, instead. Farebrother is momentarily tempted to do nothing to hinder Fred’s slide, but he quickly realizes that he could not bear to profit by Fred’s moral devaluation. He speaks to Fred, reminding him of his commitment to be worthy of Mary, and in doing so Farebrother deprives himself of the possibility of finding his own happiness with Mary. It’s an enormous sacrifice, given with a shake of the hand and the shrug of the shoulder that is the vicar’s habitual gesture.

Farebrother never articulates his faith in
Middlemarch
—unlike Bulstrode, he feels no need to vaunt it. But in her essay on Young, Eliot gave voice to a man—or woman—who feels beholden to others out of felt sympathy, not because of abstract doctrine. “I am just and honest, not because I expect to live in another world, but because, having felt the pain of injustice and dishonesty towards myself, I have a fellow-feeling with other men, who would suffer the same pain if I were unjust or dishonest towards them,” she wrote. “It is a pang to me to witness the suffering of a fellow-being, and I feel his suffering the more acutely because he is
mortal
—because his life is so short, and I would have it, if possible, filled with happiness and not misery.”

This is not a doctrine the vicar of St. Boltoph’s would be likely to preach from the pulpit, given that it relies upon humanist fellowship rather than Christian faith, but I can imagine him saying something like this to himself when he is alone in his study, turning
over his insect specimens, irrevocably putting the happiness of others before his own.

I
N
the summer of 1871, while working on
Middlemarch,
Eliot received a short letter from a young Scotsman called Alexander Main, who had a question: what was the correct pronunciation of
Romola
? Gratified by Main’s admiration of the book, which had been published in 1863—he called its prologue “the sublimest piece of writing, thinking, and historical word-painting, all in one, that the pen of a human being has ever yet achieved in prose”—Eliot wrote back at some length, not only giving him the correct pronunciation (stress on the first o) but putting down some thoughts about Florentine literature and Sir Walter Scott. Main replied instantly with a longer letter, filled with impassioned praise. “You are doing a work in and upon this age such that future generations shall rejoice that you have lived,” he said.

Eliot was notoriously diffident, and was susceptible to crippling self-doubt. She had as an author what Lewes called “a shy, shrinking, ambitious nature,” and found it hard to hold on to any sense of her own accomplishment. She was well used to compliments, but even so, she may have been somewhat taken aback by this unusual outpouring from Main. She replied only briefly and with moderation, thanking him and telling him that she was “deeply affected” by his words, but taking pains to mention that she was too busy for much letter writing. Having been drawn in by Main’s enthusiasm, she quickly sought to put a distance between herself and him.

There was, however, no chance of that. Main quickly went
on to write more letters further exalting Eliot and her works, particularly her long poem,
The Spanish Gypsy
—during the reading of which, he told her, “I have felt myself face to face with the Highest in Humanity.” This was a statement that could not better have been calculated to please her, since Eliot was deeply invested in her poetry, which is almost never read today. She wrote back, telling Main that he had thoroughly understood her intention and had entered with perfect insight into the poem’s significance. His letter had made her cry.

The letters from Scotland kept coming, arriving at a tremendous pace. (It’s shocking to realize how much better the postal service was in the 1870s than it is today. If Eliot and her correspondents didn’t quite have the instantaneous back-and-forth of e-mail, they had the advantage of multiple daily postal deliveries, and very swift physical transit of mail.) Emboldened, Main wrote back with a proposal. Her works, he said, contained “
essences
of high truth, heart-searching
Thoughts
which go to the very roots of our being—and all these expressed in single sentences and paragraphs.” Would it not be doing her an act of justice, and the reading public a good turn, to collect such salient expressions of wisdom and compile them in a single volume?