The reader is sometimes tempted to complain of a tendency which we are at a loss exactly to express-a tendency to make light of the serious elements of the story and to sacrifice them to the more trivial ones.
To James, Dorothea is a serious element, Fred a trivial one. It’s strange to see wise Henry reading like a dogmatic young man, with a young man’s certainty of what elements, in our lives, will prove the most significant. But then, Middlemarch is a book about the effects of experience that changes with experience. It gets better as you age, being, as Woolf knew, “One of the few English novels written for grown-up people.” Jane Eyre is understood by the fourteen-year-old as effectively as by the forty-year-old, possibly better. Surely few fourteen-year-olds can make real sense of the marriage of Lydgate and Rosamund. When you’re young, the domestic seems such a trivial thing. And as for Fred, the rereader grows steadily less certain that the problems of a Fred Vincy are necessarily more trivial than the angst of a Dorothea Brooke. With time, we’re less tempted to find serious only those matters clothed in the garments of Seriousness. And this is fitting because it mirrors Eliot’s own journey: as a young woman she shared Dorothea’s puritan, self-conscious seriousness, those lofty principles untempered by actual living. The young Marian Evans was all for God, and then, with equal violence, all against Him; she adopted a severe mode of dress and a Quaker-style cape and dreamed of martyrdom (Middlemarch opens with a memorable sideswipe at the Art of Serious Dressing); like Dorothea she tried to offer herself as “lamp-holder” to a great man-it’s lucky for literature that the great men she chose found her too ugly. Serially rejected, Marian grew convinced that the life of the affections would never be hers. Finally, she gave up on experience and settled for the comforts of the intellect: reading, translating, reviewing. She was no stranger to the proud opinion she later placed in Lydgate’s mind: books are stuff and life is stupid. It’s the necessary, defensive position of those whom (like Eliot) experience seems to refuse, and also those (like Lydgate) who refuse experience. But then, in her forties, things changed for Eliot. It was a mixture of ideas and experience that did it, of love and philosophy. By the time she writes Middlemarch, at age fifty, she can look upon her young self with satirical good humor (Dorothea is, in large part, a satirical self-portrait) and clinical self-knowledge. She is able to identify her own mistake:
The first impulse of a young and ingenuous mind is to withhold the slightest sanction from all that contains even a mixture of supposed error. When the soul is just liberated from the wretched giant’s bed of dogmas on which it has been racked and stretched ever since it began to think there is a feeling of exultation and strong hope.
The young Eliot could exult only in the perfect truths we glean from certain books in our libraries; the mature Eliot had learned to have sympathy for the stumbling errors of human beings. These days, when reading critically, the fashion is to remain aloof from the human experiences of novelists. Eliot herself was less squeamish. It was her contention that human experience is as powerful a force as theory or revealed fact. Experience transforms perspective, and transformations in perspective, to Eliot, constitute real changes in the world. “Our subtlest analysis of schools and sects,” she wrote, “must miss the essential truth, unless it be lit up by the love that sees in all forms of human thought and work the life and death struggles of separate human beings.” Experience, for Eliot, was a powerful way of knowing. She had no doubt that she had learned as much from loving her partner George Lewes, for example, as she had from translating Spinoza. When Dorothea truly becomes great (only really in the last third of the novel, when she comes to the aid of Lydgate and Rosamund), it is because she has at last recognized the value of emotional experience:
All the active thought with which she had before been representing to herself the trials of Lydgate’s lot… all this vivid sympathetic experience returned to her now as a power: it asserted itself as acquired knowledge asserts itself and will not let us see as we saw in the day of our ignorance.
Once she saw through a glass, darkly, now she is the less deceived… Of how many Victorian novels could that sentence serve as shorthand. One of the reasons we idolize the nineteenth-century English novel is the way its methods, aims and expression seem so beautifully integrated. Author, characters and reader are all striving in the same direction. Eliot, speaking of Dorothea’s mind, describes the process this way: “The reaching forward of the whole consciousness towards the fullest truth, the least partial good.” It is a fine description of what all good novelists try to do, after their own fashion. But Eliot made a religion of this process; it replaced the old-time religion in which she was raised. Her imagination was particularly compelled by those moments when, as we have it in the vernacular, “the scales fall from our eyes.” Bulstrode realizing the true nature of his choices, Rosamund realizing other people exist as she does, Lydgate realizing he has mistaken his wife in every particular, Dorothea realizing the very same of her own husband (“Having 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”), even old Mr. Brooke realizing the peasants who live on his land don’t actually like him… With a scalpel Eliot dissects degrees of human velleity, finding the conscious action hidden within the impulse hidden within the desire hidden within the will tucked away deep inside the decision that we have obfuscated even from ourselves. (She is very modern in this; she articulates the obsessive circles of self-consciousness and self-deception as sharply as that other master of diffusion, David Foster Wallace. Or maybe we should say that David Foster Wallace is very Victorian.) She pulls it all into the light, as Christ determined to pluck our sins even from our souls. Eliot is the secular laureate of revelation. I love that ecstatic final conversation between Dorothea and her sister:
“I cannot think how it all came about.” Celia thought it would be pleasant to hear the story.
“I daresay not,” said Dorothea, pinching her sister’s chin. “If you knew how it came about, it would not seem wonderful to you.”
“Can’t you tell me?” said Celia, settling her arms cozily.
“No dear, you would have to feel with me, else you would never know.”
Oh, you have to feel it to know it! “Ten years of experience,” Eliot wrote to a friend, “Have wrought great changes in my inward self.” She believed it was a significant change of perspective that enabled the martyred, self-involved Marian Evans to become George Eliot, wisest of writers, who has time for Fred, time for everybody. Here she is, post-Middlemarch, replying to a young male correspondent (who had written asking for advice on a personal matter, as many did, post-Middlemarch), assuring him that even the simplest aspects of his problem and of her advice to him are of interest to her:
You should share my reliance on those old, old truths which shallow, drawing-room talk contemptuously dismisses as “commonplaces”, though they have more marrow in them, and are quite as seldom wrought into the mental habits as any of the subtleties that pretend to novelty.
That might be a Fred Vincy writing in, troubled by his love problem with Mary Garth. For the mature George Eliot, the trivial problems of a Fred, the commonplaces he thinks and speaks, these are human experience, too, and therefore sacred. For the young Henry James, who has not yet patience for the commonplace, it is a mystery why there must be Fred (or so much Fred). But Fred, to Eliot, is a member of “mixed and erring humanity”-her favorite Goethe quote. She always hoped that her work would demonstrate the “remedial influences of pure, natural human relations.” Still, it took a great deal of Art to arrange Middlemarch so that it might resemble Nature in all its diffusion, all its naturalness. Eliot’s Nature is a thing highly stylized, highly intellectual. She was a writer of ideas, maybe more so than any novelist in our canon. In order to be attentive to Fred, Eliot had to take the long way round. It was a philosopher, Spinoza, who first convinced her of the importance of experience. It was theory that brought her to practice. These days, writer of ideas has become a term of abuse: we think “Ideas” are the opposite of something we call “Life.” It wasn’t that way with Eliot. In fact, her ability to animate ideas is so acute she is able to fool the great Henry James into believing Fred Vincy a commonplace young man who has wandered into Middlemarch with no purpose, when really nothing could be further from the truth.