My Life in Middlemarch (28 page)

Eliot—and Lewes, who always had an eye for the marketplace—agreed. Blackwood became Main’s publisher, and Main went on to become the editor of a collection titled
Wise, Witty, and Tender Sayings, in Prose and Verse, Selected from the Works of George Eliot.
In a preface, Main declared that Eliot had “for ever sanctified the Novel by making it the vehicle of the grandest and most uncompromising moral truth.” The book was
dedicated to her, “in recognition of a genius as original as it is profound and a morality as pure as it is impassioned.”

My copy of
Wise, Witty, and Tender Sayings,
which I bought a few years ago from a secondhand bookseller, is the tenth edition, from 1896, which gives Main an enviably long time on the backlist. It’s bound in sage green, with delicate, ornamental gold lettering on the front, and inside it’s inscribed with a dedication from someone called Mary to someone called Lillie, and a date, 1903.

When I thumb through its pages of quotations, some of them extending for more than a page, printed in a font size that has me reaching for reading glasses, I am overcome by a dreadful sense of depletion. I can think of no surer way to be put off the work of George Eliot than by trying to read the
Wise, Witty, and Tender Sayings.
On any given page is an out-of-context pronouncement—“iteration, like friction, is likely to generate heat instead of progress”—or a phrase so recondite that it requires several readings before it can be parsed. Consider this, from
Romola
: “A course of action which is in strictness a slowly-prepared outgrowth of the entire character, is yet almost always traceable to a single impression as its point of apparent origin.” I know what it means—I even think I agree with it—but out of context, it is dead. Main’s book is the nineteenth-century equivalent of the refrigerator magnet.

Blackwood dismissed Main as a sycophant, privately referring to him as “The Gusher” and “The Worshipper of Genius” even while making money from him, and most of Eliot’s biographers have been similarly critical. Contemporary reviewers were not impressed by Main’s effort, either. The
Westminster Review,
Eliot’s
old editorial home, wrote off the
Sayings
in its “Belles Lettres” section, saying that Main had done George Eliot a disservice. “He is one of those officious friends, who are always bringing you into trouble,” the reviewer wrote. “As he does not know exactly what to worship, he worships anything, good, bad, or indifferent.” Even more favorable reviewers acknowledged that Main had put Eliot’s work to a challenging test by so sifting and reducing it. The
Nation
said that her assent to the book’s publication “suggests that George Eliot thinks more of the duties of a teacher than of the reputation of a novelist.”

Eliot had her own misgivings about the project, once it was finished at least. “Unless my readers are more moved towards the ends I seek by works as wholes than by an assemblage of extracts, my writings are a mistake,” she wrote, when the second edition was being planned. She had thought about the reductive effect of extraction earlier in her career and been alarmed by the simplification that comes from quotation. In
The Mill on the Floss,
she warned against the “men of maxims,” and wrote that all people of “broad, strong sense” are skeptical of such men, “because such people early discern that the mysterious complexity of our life is not to be embraced by maxims, and that to lace ourselves up in formulas of that sort is to repress all the divine promptings and inspirations that spring from growing insight and sympathy.” Main found this thought so well expressed that he included it in his book of maxims.

So why did Eliot agree to the publication of
Wise, Witty, and Tender Sayings
in the first place? In part, certainly, she saw it as a marketing tool for her novels. And Main was not the first to suggest that Eliot’s works be mined for moral wisdom: as Leah
Price, a professor of English at Harvard, has demonstrated, quotations appeared during Eliot’s lifetime in schoolbooks, parliamentary debates, an army officer’s examination, and a calendar. But I suspect that Eliot’s positive response to Main’s proposal was not only a pragmatic decision. There was an emotional element to the choice, as well. He seems to have touched something in her, and she seems to have taken him seriously.

And so I wanted to take Main seriously, too. In order to read all his letters, not just the few that have been excerpted, often with belittling commentary, in books about Eliot, I went to Edinburgh, to the National Library of Scotland, where his side of the correspondence is kept. As the home of her publisher, Edinburgh was an important city to Eliot, though she only went there twice in her life. The first time was in 1845, when she was in her midtwenties, during a tour of the north of England and Scotland with the Brays. The physical drama of the city thrilled her, with twisting medieval lanes on one side of the castle mount, and, on the other, a harmonious street plan of handsome Georgian buildings.

She went back in 1852, and visited George Combe, the phrenologist. “I have a beautiful view from my room window—masses of wood, distant hills, the Firth, and four splendid buildings dotted far apart—not an ugly object to be seen,” she wrote to the Brays. “When I look out in the morning it is as if I had waked up in Utopia or Icaria or one of [Robert] Owen’s parallelograms.” Blackwood invited Eliot to Edinburgh in the summer of 1871, to attend a centenary celebration for Sir Walter Scott, but she declined, in one of her letters that does show an appealing flash of wit. “I think that prudence advises me to abstain from the fatigue and excitement of a long railway journey with a great gathering at
the end of it,” she wrote. “If there is a chance that ‘Middlemarch’ will be good for anything, I don’t want to break down and die without finishing it.”

My first morning in the city, fortified with coffee, I went to a windowless room in the National Library and retrieved Main’s letters, which are bound into a single volume. As I read, a picture of him began to emerge, enhancing somewhat jaundiced descriptions given by Blackwood, after their first encounter, of “a little fellow, dark with bright clear-looking eyes,” who “used his knife in a dangerous manner at lunch.”

Main was thirty years old when the correspondence began, and lived with his elderly widowed mother in Arbroath, a small town on the eastern coast of Scotland. In the letters he described no occupation beyond giving lectures on literary subjects to young men, whose moral growth he sought to mentor. He was not well off, and had to wait for Eliot’s books to be published in cheap editions in order to own them. He was given to taking walks along the cliffs to the east of the town, finding a spot on the beach where he could sit and read aloud to himself from Eliot’s works “without the awkward risk of being voted crazy,” as he confessed in one letter.

As I read Main’s copious correspondence I found myself alternately appalled and moved by the glimpses it offered into the life of this sad, shadowy man. There was something alarming, almost stalker-like, in his attentions. Over and over again he wrote Eliot long, effusive letters, then followed up with a demand for reassurance that his effusion had not given offense, then offered apologies for his neediness. On one occasion he told her, “I should like to see you in your home, but I think I should myself choose to be
unseen the while—if that could be. I could not be disappointed in you, but you might easily be disappointed in me.” I wondered how Eliot could not have recoiled from what started to feel to me like a creepy imposition.

For all the pages that he wrote—some of the letters cover a dozen sides of writing paper—Main gave very little of himself away. He devoted pots of ink to rhapsodic pronouncements of the beneficial effects Eliot’s work had had on his life, but when Eliot asked him to tell her a little of “the general web” of that life—using a metaphor that figures prominently in
Middlemarch
—he darted out of sight. “I do not think that fuller knowledge would sink me in your estimation, but my life would look like a featureless one indeed were I only to show you its outward aspect, with no thorough disclosure of the inner mechanism,” he told her. He professed that he was not strong enough to offer that degree of disclosure, at least not yet. There was something he wasn’t telling her—or there was something he was pretending not to tell her, so that she would be drawn further into an engagement with him.

Sometimes Lewes wrote to Main instead of Eliot, when she was too busy to respond, and then Main made a correspondent of Lewes, too. To him, Main confessed that he was still unmarried. “Perhaps I have hitherto
idealized
too much, and who, dear Sir, can find a
realized ideal
as you have done?” he wrote. He requested Eliot’s photograph—a request that smacks today of fandom, though it was also borne of a simple desire to know what Eliot looked like, so few images of her were there in circulation. She said she didn’t have one. When Eliot and Lewes asked him to send them his photograph so that they could picture him, he said he didn’t have one, either. He had once had his portrait taken,
he acknowledged. In it he looked like a Member of Parliament, according to a gentleman he knew, while a lady of his acquaintance observed that he looked painfully sad and world-weary. “I couldn’t then, I cannot now, reconcile the two observations; but I feel at times that the
lady
must have caught some glimpse of the truth,” he wrote.

In the letters he did sound world-weary for his years, prematurely despondent over the state of civilization. His book of quotations, he told Eliot, “will be one of the richest and rarest in the English language—almost too good to bestow upon a faithless and perverse generation like the present.” Having once thought of entering the ministry—he told Blackwood he spent three years at Glasgow University for that purpose—he had become dismissive of clerical teaching. Instead, he chose to worship Eliot, describing her work, to her, as “a mighty protest against all emasculated forms of the religious feeling.” He referred to his copy of a book of her poems as his “breviary.” He was rapturous at Eliot’s suggestion to him that she had been nourished by his appreciation of her. “To the benign influence which your works have shed over me for many years has now been added the closer and still more tender and potent influence of a strong personal regard,” he wrote. “Every time I think of you (and, for the last five months especially, when have I
not
thought of you?) I feel and am better—more like what I ought to be.”

The letters took me two long days to read, my eyes dry and strained by evening, much too fatigued to appreciate the inspired parallelograms of Edinburgh after the library shut its doors. But as I sat at my desk and went through them, I found myself drawn into Main’s consciousness. He was in some ways repellent
—fawning and pretentious and overly familiar. But he was intriguing, too, with his secret concealments and his mysterious involvements. Reading his letters was as suggestive as reading preliminary notes for a novel, in which a character and his motives are sketched out. There was a whole story submerged beneath.

And as I read, I thought I understood better why Eliot had responded to Main as she did. Obviously, she was gratified by his appreciation for her poetry and the novel
Romola
—which had not sold as well as expected, although Eliot was paid an enormous advance for it from George Smith, the publisher of
Cornhill Magazine,
the one occasion on which she strayed from Blackwood. (She received ten thousand pounds, “the most magnificent offer ever yet made for a novel,” as Lewes trumpeted at the time.)

But Eliot must also have been moved by Main’s frequent assurances that her work was achieving the elevated moral effect she had intended. In one of the few personal anecdotes he permitted himself, Main told her that he had been watching at the bedside of a twenty-three-year-old nephew, who had just died of an unspecified condition brought on by what Main characterized as a reckless indulgence in vice. “There I realized, as I had never done before,
the need for you
in a world where such things are: and I blessed you in the silence of that death chamber,” Main wrote. “It is the supreme glory of your works that they both encourage the hearts of those who are manfully struggling to rise, and tend to stagger and sober the many who are falling away.”

This goes beyond the usual compliments that an author like Eliot would be accustomed to receiving, and it would have appealed to her core. In Main’s correspondence, Eliot received testimony that she was, as she hoped, doing something good for the
world with her novels. At the same time, his praise would have answered her shy, shrinking ambition, her tremulous egoism—until, perhaps, she could not quite tell the two effects apart. And this may explain why she consented to the problematic project of the
Wise, Witty, and Tender Sayings.
In seeking to hold on to the principles of Farebrother, Eliot was tempted into the vanities of Bulstrode. Main encouraged her to bring the gratification of her desires into alignment with the satisfaction of her beliefs.

I
N
her 1858 essay on Edward Young, Eliot criticized the poet’s “unintermitting habit of pedagogic moralizing.” Young, she says, views God as a didactic author, a “Divine Instructor,” whose heavens are “forever
scolding
as they shine.” This, she argues, is an indication of a moral deficit on the part of Young—at least when morality is defined, as Eliot defines it, as sympathetic emotion. It is also an artistic deficit. “In proportion as morality is emotional, i.e., has affinity with Art, it will exhibit itself in direct sympathetic feeling and action, and not as the recognition of a rule,” she writes. “Love does not say ‘I ought to love’—it loves. Pity does not say, ‘It is right to be pitiful’—it pities. Justice does not say, ‘I am bound to be just’—it feels justly.”

She goes on to say that dependency upon a rule or theory only is necessary when moral emotion is weak. “We think experience, both in literature and in life, has shown that the minds which are pre-eminently didactic—which insist on a lesson and despise everything that will not convey a moral, are deficient in sympathetic emotion,” she writes. “A man who is perpetually thinking
in apothegms, who has an unintermittent flux of admonition, can have little energy left for simple emotion.”