Her finely-touched spirit had still its fine issues, though they were not widely visible. Her
full nature, like that river of which Cyrus broke the strength, spent itself in channels
which had no great name on the earth. 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 halfowing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited
tombs.(Cyrus, founder of the Persian Empire, who released the Jews from captivity, was
admired by Christians as well as by the classical author Plutarch. Mary Garth ‘wrote
a little book for her boys, called Stories of Great Men, taken from Plutarch’. Cyrus also
diverted the Euphrates for irrigation.)
George Eliot’s temperate use of catastrophe and happy ending allow a rich if
subdued realism in presentation and a satisfying realism of assessment: life is imper-
fect. By prevailing standards, the incidence of illegitimacy, mistaken identity, legacies,
letters going astray, improbable coincidence and drownings (this author’s favoured
form of natural disaster) is tiny; the lurid Raffles is a well-calculated exception.
George Eliot moderates the excesses of sentiment and irony found in her more
‘V icto rian’ predecessors. In structure and theme, her parallelling of unhappy
marriages, with one woman finally repaying the other’s generosity with a helpful hint
which makes a marriage, may owe something to Vanity Fair. The moral and mechan-
ical complexities of a story with several continuing centres of interest are managed
with steady clarity and subtlety. Here the comparison with Dickens is to George
Eliot’s advantage. These complexities are more numerous than is suggested in the
plot summary above, which leaves out Dorothea’s comical uncle, Brooke of Tipton,
a confused candidate in the Liberal interest; her worldly sister Celia, conventionally
married to Sir James Chettam; two gentry/clergy families, the Cadwalladers and the
Farebrothers; and other relationships of family, class and business interest. The dense
social web built up yields an extraordinarily rich representation of provincial life in
middle England.The picture is also an analysis – ‘study’ in the subtitle has both
senses – and the pettiness and prejudices of Middlemarch can be seen eventually to
limit or stifle all but the Garths, whose worth is related not to the town but to the
land,work and the family. Their integrity is Christian in its derivation.
George Eliot’s running commentary does not please every reader. Some prefer
novel as drama to novel as moral essay. Those who do not wish to be so explicitly
guided will grant the quality and scope of her understanding. The insight into
motiv e towards the end ofMiddlemarch produces wonderful writing. The steady
pace,co mpared with Thackeray and Dickens, does not lessen interest in the evolv-
ing destinies of the Bulstrodes, of Dorothea and Lydgate, Rosamund and Ladislaw,
the Garths.The mounting tension of the penultimate stages is dramatic or operatic,
with the motiv es of the principals in full view. Human imperfection, even in the
chilling instance of Casaubon, is presented with understanding, though he receives
more sympathy from his wife than from his creator. Some critics think Dorothea too
good,and Ladislaw less interesting than she finds him.
This English novel, however, has fewer blemishes than others of its scope in the
19th century. In 1874, the American Henry James (1843–1916), beginning his career
as a nove list,noticed some, yet concluded that Middlemarch ‘sets a limit ... to the
development of the old-fashioned English novel’. All the Victorian novels so far
reviewed were old-fashionedly inclusive in their readership, though Middlemarch
would strain the attention of some educated people today. The conscious procedures
THE TRIUMPH OF THE NOVEL 305