Middlemarch

Long book with intricate small plots, but worth it when you know it is one of those who can expand your consciousness..Masterpiece

A kaleidoscopic portrait of an evolving community, and the impact it has on the relatively small and unimportant lives within it. A transformative book.

One is constantly wondering what sort of lives other people lead, and how they take things.

There’s something about Victorian literature that speaks to my soul, and

Middlemarch is no exception. It did take me about 250 pages to get comfortable with Eliot’s prose, which is a bit more dense than other Victorian authors, but once I did I found her writing style both readable and beautiful.

Eliot doesn’t focus that much on setting or atmosphere, but instead on the psychology of her characters, all of whom feel perfectly real (and are therefore deeply flawed).

Middlemarch is overwhelmingly a quiet novel that focuses on the sort of “trivial” little problems that make up the realities of life and happiness. Generally, those problems are found in relationships and marriages.

Middlemarch is certainly not the first Victorian novel to warn readers of the risk of making a bad match, but it’s perhaps the one that explores this theme with the most nuance and through a lens with the most facets. There really aren’t any wholly “bad” people in the novel—the characters are mainly well-intended, though sometimes make terrible mistakes—but mismatched tempers and priorities are enough to lead to some miserable marriages that wreak havoc on both parties. Perhaps the closest

Middlemarch has to a villain is Bulstrode…and yet one of the most touching marital moments happens between him and his wife.

That is not to say that there’s no drama. On the contrary, there are a handful of sensational plot points that feel positively Dickensian. Each is a delight and keeps the pace moving forward. It truly is a testament to Eliot’s writing that a novel this long is rarely boring (though it’s almost always slow)—a notable exception being around maybe 100 pages in, when the narrative shifts away from Dorothy and immediately gets bogged down for a fair bit. (I thought I was alone in finding this section of the novel dreadfully dull, but looking at other reviews I see that other people have also had difficulty with this transition.) Otherwise, the book continues to get better as it goes, partly because we understand the characters so well, and partly because everything comes to a head. The best moments come at the end:

the confrontation between Dorothy and Rosamund and Ladislaw’s proposal during a thunderstorm

being my favorite parts.

Stylistically, one of the first things that jumps out is that each chapter opens with an epigraph (some of which are a bit difficult to understand, though that’s probably got more to do with my unfamiliarity with poetry, the form many of her epigraphs take). In hindsight, I really wish I’d gone back and reread these at the end of each chapter, because there were only a handful of times I made the connection. Also notable is that Eliot has an absolutely biting wit that is sometimes downright acerbic—I wasn’t expecting to laugh as much as I did.

I have very few actual criticisms of the novel. Instead, the only reasons this isn’t going to be an all-time favorite are matters of personal preference. It’s very long, and very slow (the slowness isn't a problem until coupled with the length). I prefer focusing intimately on a small handful of characters instead of a large ensemble cast. The politics went mostly over my head. I think I want a bit—just a bit!—more excitement in my fiction. And I didn’t feel much emotional impact (some, but not much). I will definitely be reading more Eliot, and I’m sure

Middlemarch will come to mind often, but it will be a while before I commit to a reread.

Some favorite quotes:

‘Souls have complexions too: what will suit one will not suit another.’

We mortals, men and women, devour many a disappointment between breakfast and dinner-time; keep back the tears and look a little pale about the lips, and in answer to inquiries say, ‘Oh, nothing!’ Pride helps us; and pride is not a bad thing when it only urges us to hide our own hurts–not to hurt others.

‘He has got no good red blood in his body,’ said Sir James.

‘No. Somebody put a drop under a magnifying-glass, and it was all semicolons and parentheses,’ said Mrs Cadwallader.

The bow-window looked down the avenue of limes; the furniture was all of a faded blue, and there were miniatures of ladies and gentlemen with powdered hair hanging in a group.

It was a room where one might fancy the ghost of a tight-laced lady revisiting the scene of her embroidery.

Others, who expected to make no great figure, disliked this kind of moral lantern turned on them. If you are not proud of your cellar, there is no thrill of satisfaction in seeing your guest hold up his wine-glass to the light and look judicial. Such joys are reserved for conscious merit.

But Fielding lived when the days were longer (for time, like money, is measured by our needs), when summer afternoons were spacious, and the clock ticked slowly in the winter evenings.

I at least have so much to do in unravelling certain human lots, and seeing how they were woven and interwoven, that all the light I can command must be concentrated on this particular web, and not dispersed over that tempting range of relevancies called the universe.

Our vanities differ as our noses do: all conceit is not the same conceit, but varies in correspondence with the minutiæ of mental make in which one of us differs from another.

There was nothing but pickled vermin, and drawers full of bluebottles and moths, with no carpet on the floor.

Some discouragement, some faintness of heart at the new real future which replaces the imaginary, is not unusual, and we do not expect people to be deeply moved by what is not unusual.

If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.

In this way, the early months of marriage often are times of critical tumult–whether that of a shrimp-pool or of deeper waters–which afterwards subsides into cheerful peace.

The fact is unalterable, that a fellow-mortal with whose nature you are acquainted solely through the brief entrances and exits of a few imaginative weeks called courtship, may, when seen in the continuity of married companionship, be disclosed as something better or worse than what you have preconceived, but will certainly not appear altogether the same.

Having once embarked on your marital voyage, it is impossible not to be aware that you make no way and that the sea is not within sight–that, in fact, you are exploring an enclosed basin.

To be a poet is to have a soul so quick to discern that no shade of quality escapes it, and so quick to feel, that discernment is but a hand playing with finely-ordered variety on the chords of emotion–a soul in which knowledge passes instantaneously into feeling, and feeling flashes back as a new organ of knowledge. One may have that condition by fits only.’

AN eminent philosopher among my friends, who can dignify even your ugly furniture by lifting it into the serene light of science, has shown me this pregnant little fact. Your pier-glass or extensive surface of polished steel made to be rubbed by a housemaid, will be minutely and multitudinously scratched in all directions; but place now against it a lighted candle as a centre of illumination, and lo! the scratches will seem to arrange themselves in a fine series of concentric circles round that little sun. It is demonstrable that the scratches are going everywhere impartially, and it is only your candle which produces the flattering illusion of a concentric arrangement, its light falling with an exclusive optical selection. These things are a parable. The scratches are events, and the candle is the egoism of any person now absent–of Miss Vincy, for example.

But that intimacy of mutual embarrassment, in which each feels that the other is feeling something, having once existed, its effect is not to be done away with.

ONE morning some weeks after her arrival at Lowick, Dorothea–but why always Dorothea? Was her point of view the only possible one with regard to this marriage? I protest against all our interest, all our effort at understanding being given to the young skins that look blooming in spite of trouble; for these too will get faded, and will know the older and more eating griefs which we are helping to neglect.

In half an hour he left the house an engaged man, whose soul was not his own, but the woman’s to whom he had bound himself.

Mary was fond of her own thoughts, and could amuse herself well sitting in twilight with her hands in her lap;

Young love-making–that gossamer web! Even the points it clings to–the things whence its subtle interlacings are swung–are scarcely perceptible: momentary touches of fingertips, meetings of rays from blue and dark orbs, unfinished phrases, lightest changes of cheek and lip, faintest tremors. The web itself is made of spontaneous beliefs and indefinable joys, yearnings of one life towards another, visions of completeness, indefinite trust.

When I want to be busy with books, I am often playing truant among my thoughts.

It was a lovely afternoon; the leaves from the lofty limes were falling silently across the sombre evergreens, while the lights and shadows slept side by side: there was no sound but the cawing of the rooks, which to the accustomed ear is a lullaby, or that last solemn lullaby, a dirge.

Nay, are there many situations more sublimely tragic than the struggle of the soul with the demand to renounce a work which has been all the significance of its life–a significance which is to vanish as the waters which come and go where no man has need of them?

When the commonplace ‘We must all die’ transforms itself suddenly into the acute consciousness ‘I must die—and soon,’ then death grapples us, and his fingers are cruel; afterwards, he may come to fold us in his arms as our mother did, and our last moment of dim earthly discerning may be like the first.

but prejudices, like odorous bodies, have a double existence both solid and subtle–solid as the pyramids, subtle as the twentieth echo of an echo, or as the memory of hyacinths which once scented the darkness.

How delightful to make captives from the throne of marriage with a husband as crown-prince by your side–himself in fact a subject–while the captives look up for ever hopeless, losing their rest probably, and if their appetite too, so much the better!

I would not creep along the coast, but steer

Out in mid-sea, by guidance of the stars.

He distrusted her affection; and what loneliness is more lonely than distrust?

‘Pues no podemos haber aquello que queremos, queramos aquello que podremos.’ ‘Since we cannot get what we like, let us like what we can get.’—Spanish Proverb

‘Very fine! You talk as if young women were tied up to be chosen, like poultry at market; as if I had only to ask and everybody would have me,’ said the Vicar, not caring to specify.

The one joy after which his soul thirsted was to have a money-changer’s shop on a much-frequented quay, to have locks all round him of which he held the keys, and to look sublimely cool as he handled the breeding coins of all nations, while helpless Cupidity looked at him enviously from the other side of an iron lattice.

But even while we are talking and meditating about the earth’s orbit and the solar system, what we feel and adjust our movements to is the stable earth and the changing day.

How can she choose if she has no variety to choose from? A woman’s choice usually means taking the only man she can get.

IF youth is the season of hope, it is often so only in the sense that our elders are hopeful about us; for no age is so apt as youth to think its emotions, partings, and resolves are the last of their kind. Each crisis seems final, simply because it is new.

The terror of being judged sharpens the memory: it sends an inevitable glare over that long-unvisited past which has been habitually recalled only in general phrases.

Night and day, without interruption save of brief sleep which only wove retrospect and fear into a fantastic present, he felt the scenes of his earlier life coming between him and everything else, as obstinately as when we look through the window from a lighted room, the objects we turn our backs on are still before us, instead of the grass and the trees.

There may be coarse hypocrites, who consciously affect beliefs and emotions for the sake of gulling the world, but Bulstrode was not one of them. He was simply a man whose desires had been stronger than his theoretic beliefs, and who had gradually explained the gratification of his desires into satisfactory agreement with those beliefs. If this be hypocrisy, it is a process which shows itself occasionally in us all, to whatever confession we belong, and whether we believe in the future perfection of our race or in the nearest date fixed for the end of the world; whether we regard the earth as a putrefying nidus for a saved remnant, including ourselves, or have a passionate belief in the solidarity of mankind.

Please remember me,’ said Dorothea, repressing a rising sob. ‘Why should you say that?’ said Will, with irritation. ‘As if I were not in danger of forgetting everything else.’

The Lydgate with whom she had been in love had been a group of airy conditions for her, most of which had disappeared, while their place had been taken by everyday details which must be lived through slowly from hour to hour, not floated through with a rapid selection of favourable aspects.

Who can know how much of his most inward life is made up of the thoughts he believes other men to have about him, until that fabric of opinion is threatened with ruin?

‘character is not cut in marble–it is not something solid and unalterable. It is something living and changing, and may become diseased as our bodies do.’

but she found to her surprise that an old friend is not always the person whom it is easiest to make a confidant of: there was the barrier of remembered communication under other circumstances–there was the dislike of being pitied and informed by one who had been long wont to allow her the superiority.

He raised his eyes with a little start and looked at her half amazed for a moment: her pale face, her changed, mourning dress, the trembling about her mouth, all said, ‘I know;’ and her hands and eyes rested gently on him. He burst out crying and they cried together, she sitting at his side. They could not yet speak to each other of the shame which she was bearing with him, or of the acts which had brought it down on them. His confession was silent, and her promise of faithfulness was silent

‘Explain! Tell a man to explain how he dropped into hell! Explain my preference! I never had a preference for her, any more than I have a preference for breathing. No other woman exists by the side of her. I would rather touch her hand if it were dead, than I would touch any other woman’s living.’

‘Marriage is so unlike everything else. There is something even awful in the nearness it brings. Even if we loved some one else better than–than those we were married to, it would be no use’—poor Dorothea, in her palpitating anxiety, could only seize her language brokenly—‘I mean, marriage drinks up all our power of giving or getting any blessedness in that sort of love. I know it may be very dear–but it murders our marriage–and then the marriage stays with us like a murder–and everything else is gone. And then our husband–if he loved and trusted us, and we have not helped him, but made a curse in his life .

They stood silent, not looking at each other, but looking at the evergreens which were being tossed, and were showing the pale underside of their leaves against the blackening sky. Will never enjoyed the prospect of a storm so much: it delivered him from the necessity of going away. Leaves and little branches were hurled about, and the thunder was getting nearer. The light was more and more sombre, but there came a flash of lightning which made them start and look at each other, and then smile.

While he was speaking there came a vivid flash of lightning which lit each of them up for the other–and the light seemed to be the terror of a hopeless love. Dorothea darted instantaneously from the window; Will followed her, seizing her hand with a spasmodic movement; and so they stood, with their hands clasped, like two children, looking out on the storm, while the thunder gave a tremendous crack and roll above them, and the rain began to pour down. Then they turned their faces towards each other, with the memory of his last words in them, and they did not loose each other’s hands.

EVERY limit is a beginning as well as an ending. Who can quit young lives after being long in company with them, and not desire to know what befell them in their after-years? For the fragment of a life, however typical, is not the sample of an even web: promises may not be kept, and an ardent outset may be followed by declension; latent powers may find their long-waited opportunity; a past error may urge a grand retrieval. Marriage, which has been the bourne of so many narratives, is still a great beginning, as it was to Adam and Eve, who kept their honeymoon in Eden, but had their first little one among the thorns and thistles of the wilderness. It is still the beginning of the home epic–the gradual conquest or irremediable loss of that complete union which makes the advancing years a climax, and age the harvest of sweet memories in common.

On inquiry 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-wall into the field where the walnut-trees stand in stately row–and that on sunny days the two lovers who were first engaged with the umbrella-ring may be seen in white-haired placidity at the open window from which Mary Garth, in the days of old Peter Featherstone, had often been ordered to look out for Mr Lydgate.

Many who knew her, thought it a pity that so substantive and rare a creature should have been absorbed into the life of another, and be only known in a certain circle as a wife and mother.

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.