There may be other reasons, too. Middlemarch is not a romance, as most novels are, although there are one or two romantics in it who are wonderfully well described. Nor does the novel have a distinct hero. Middlemarch is the name of the small (imaginary) city in which most of the action takes place. It has been accurately said that Middlemarch is the novel’s hero. Certainly the town itself, and all the people in it, are the focus of the author’s attention and concern.
The action of the book takes place during the period just before the passage of the Reform Bill, in 1832—which is to say, just before the social revolution brought about by the railroad had occurred. In pre-railroad days, when transportation was both slow and arduous, people lived as they had for centuries, living and dying within a few miles of one another, acting on and being acted on by one another. No man’s or woman’s life could be adequately understood, George Eliot felt, if it were shorn of interrelationships with all those around him or her. Even more than Middlemarch the town, this complex web of interrelationships is the subject of the novel. And for this reason Middlemarch has often been compared to Tolstoy’s War and Peace which, in the opinion of George Eliot’s admirers, is the only novel deserving to be called greater.
It is true enough that Middlemarch and War and Peace are both big books, complex and full of characters. But despite the fact that Tolstoy read everything written by George Eliot and admired her, I don’t think the two books are very much alike. The scope of War and Peace is ever so much larger; it extends over all of Europe at a crucial moment in its history, and throughout an entire society. Middlemarch’s scope is narrow, although it is still broad by comparison with many other novels; it focuses on a town, examining all the people of that town, and all its occupations and social classes, with an unremitting intensity, but it does not extend to a greater world. That greater world is there, of course, but it is only hinted at.
I am glad George Eliot was content with Middlemarch and was not tempted to shift the scene to London, or to the Continent, where she and Lewes had lived. For Middlemarch, in its ideal existence, is itself a world; as a fictional place, as a metaphor, it contains and comprises all the life that was lived in England in its time. The novel has been called the best account and analysis of English life on the eve of the Reform Bill, but the book deserves even higher praise than that. Middlemarch, more effectively than any novel I know, manages to present the entire worldview of a relatively large and variegated group of persons. In Middlemarch, I feel strongly that simply nothing has been left out. This is the way it must have been in an English Midlands town in 1830. And if I can say that, knowing as I do that life in one town is very like another, and life in one time is very like another—then Middlemarch is as complete an account of the kind of lives that people live as we can find anywhere in fiction.
WALT WHITMAN
1819–1892
Leaves of Grass
The first edition of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, the title he gave his collected poems, appeared in 1855 with a picture of the author on the cover, “broad-shouldered, rouge-fleshed, Bacchus-browed, bearded like a satyr,” wearing “a slouched hat, for house and street alike.” This was of course a persona, one of the first to be consciously assumed by a poet on the western side of the Atlantic; as was the claim, in one of the poems included in the collection, that he was sounding his “barbaric yawp over the roof of the world.” Yet there was truth in it, as well, for the book by this “insolent unknown,” as Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote of Whitman, was truly new, “the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom” America had produced. At a time when Stendhal was dedicating The Charterhouse of Parma to “the happy few” and Baudelaire was writing poems for a tiny audience of like-minded aesthetes and précieuses, here was Whitman addressing democratic man en masse. Poetry for everybody, instead of just for literary folk, had indeed to be different. But it was not Americans but rather English and French critics of the culture and society of the Old World who first appreciated Whitman. The first edition of the works of this democratic poet attracted very few democratic readers.
Whitman had been born on Long Island in 1819. It was years before he found and understood himself. He worked as an editor and a printer, writing poems in his infrequent spare time. He was sufficiently encouraged by Emerson’s letter to produce a second edition of Leaves of Grass in 1856, with a quote from Emerson on the cover (without Emerson’s permission), and, inside the book, a collection of quotes from reviews, most of which Whitman had written himself. In this edition many of Whitman’s best-known poems began to take their final shape. A third edition appeared in 1860.
Still, Whitman had not found his true voice, which was not, after all, a barbaric yawp but instead a soft yet strong and steady note. This true voice was given to Whitman by the Civil War, which also made Emily Dickinson a poet, although their experiences of the conflict were different. Whitman spent the war in Washington working for the federal government, visiting hospitals and bringing presents to wounded Union and Confederate soldiers alike. The murder of President Lincoln, in 1865, less than a week after the war’s end, helped Whitman to comprehend fully the bitterness and heartbreak of war. He expressed it with new power in “When lilacs last in the door-yard bloom’d: Memories of President Lincoln,” one of the great American poems, which was included in an edition of Leaves of Grass that appeared late in 1865.
This volume also included a number of small, clear-cut word pictures, like “The noiseless patient spider,” “Once I saw in Louisiana a live oak growing,” and (perhaps best of all) “Come up from the fields father,”—this last a curt, unsentimental account of how word has come to a family that their son has been killed—my throat tightens even as I describe it. Gone was the yawp, gone the uncontrolled self-advertisements, gone the lists of particulars that so offended Emerson in Whitman’s later editions of Leaves of Grass. The war had focused Whitman’s spiritual and emotional strength on a few simple, basic ideas, and the poems he wrote—or rewrote—at this time are among the best ever written by an American.
The taut excellence of his style and subject matter during the period from 1863 to 1868 could not, or at least did not, last. Whitman began to revert in later editions of Leaves of Grass to the diffuse, nervous, even frantic tone that had marked his earliest poems. But Whitman wrote a great deal, and we don’t need to read it all. What remains, after all the bad poems have been weeded out, is still a marvelous harvest of poetry.
Much of “Song of Myself” is fine, although this longest of Whitman poems—more than a hundred pages—also contains tiresome, repetitious matter. “When lilacs last in the door-yard bloom’d” is wonderful, but “Out of the cradle endlessly rocking,” which deals with the same subject—death and the need to face it—is even better. Its soft, repetitive (not repetitious), profoundly moving refrain is hypnotic; it reminds one, as it is supposed to do, of the hypnotic effect of the sea at evening, with the waves lapping ceaselessly against the shore; and it brings to mind long, deep thoughts of death and life. Many of the poems from Drum Taps and The Sequel to Drum Taps (included in Leaves of Grass), which were written during or immediately after the Civil War, have the quintessential Whitman quality. You will discover a handful more of great poems when you read Whitman selectively.