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Authors: Rebecca Mead
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Leslie Stephen, writing in the
Cornhill Magazine
immediately after Eliot’s death, felt a need to defend the practice. Stephen argued that it was one of the ways in which Eliot, the most intellectual of authors, sought to include in her fiction the ideas and convictions that were crucially important to her. “We are indeed told dogmatically that a novelist should never indulge in little asides to the reader. Why not?” he wrote. “A child, it is true, dislikes to have the illusion broken, and is angry if you try to persuade him that Giant Despair was not a real personage like his favorite Blunderbore. But the attemptto produce such illusions is really unworthy of work intended for full-grown readers.” In a foreshadowing of the formula his daughter Virginia Woolf would later use, Stephen suggests that Eliot’s use of the magisterial authorial interjection is one of the things that make her novels suitable for grown-up people.
It’s one of the techniques she feels most at home using. “You are like a great giant walking about among us and fixing every one you meet upon your canvas,” John Blackwood, her publisher, remarked with approval after he’d read the manuscript of the second volume of
Middlemarch.
Blackwood’s use of the first person plural isn’t a slip. He means to include readers of Eliot’s books among the diminutive characters whom George Eliot fixes on her canvas—the ones who gossip about Lydgate’s unconventional unwillingness to dispense medicines, or about his bizarre request to conduct a postmortem on a patient, or about his unseemly closeness to Bulstrode. Bulstrode’s ultimate downfall levels Lydgate, too, after the doctor accepts a loan that, when the fact of it emerges publicly, is taken by onlookers to be a bribe—and which may, indeed, hamper Lydgate’s ability to judge Bulstrode’s actions objectively. By directly addressing us, Eliot draws us deeper inside her panorama. She makes Middlemarchers of us all.
But Eliot does something in addition with those moments of authorial interjection. She insists that the reader look at the characters in the book from her own elevated viewpoint. We are granted a wider perspective, and a greater insight, than is available to their neighbors down in the world of Middlemarch. By showing us the way each character is bound within his or her own narrow viewpoint, while providing us with a broader view, she nurtures what Virginia Woolf described as “the melancholyvirtue of tolerance.” “If Art does not enlarge men’s sympathies, it does nothing morally,” Eliot once wrote. “The only effect I ardently long to produce by my writings, is that those who read them should be better able to
imagine
and to
feel
the pains and the joys of those who differ from themselves in everything but the broad fact of being struggling erring human creatures.”
And this is one way in which
Middlemarch
is a book about young people for older people. This is one reason why Woolf’s epigrammatic observation rings true. When I read of the boy Lydgate in his father’s library, taking up a book and being seized by a passion, or I glimpse the newlywed Dorothea, distraught in her Roman boudoir, unable to name the deficit she feels or to identify the nature of her disappointment, I am able not only to imagine their vivid, solipsistic experience but also to see them from Eliot’s authorial perspective of heightened, mature sympathy. In viewing them I am invited to shed my wadded layers of stupidity, and to listen for the sound of growing grass.
M Y train rumbled into Coventry, and after I left the station I set off toward the city center. I could see from my map that there was a park, Greyfriars Green, through which I needed to pass, but to reach it I had to navigate a tangle of roads and pedestrian walkways under and alongside a busy highway that encircles the city. This ring road was built in the 1960s according to the latest urban planning principles, as was much of
Cornhill Magazine
immediately after Eliot’s death, felt a need to defend the practice. Stephen argued that it was one of the ways in which Eliot, the most intellectual of authors, sought to include in her fiction the ideas and convictions that were crucially important to her. “We are indeed told dogmatically that a novelist should never indulge in little asides to the reader. Why not?” he wrote. “A child, it is true, dislikes to have the illusion broken, and is angry if you try to persuade him that Giant Despair was not a real personage like his favorite Blunderbore. But the attemptto produce such illusions is really unworthy of work intended for full-grown readers.” In a foreshadowing of the formula his daughter Virginia Woolf would later use, Stephen suggests that Eliot’s use of the magisterial authorial interjection is one of the things that make her novels suitable for grown-up people.
It’s one of the techniques she feels most at home using. “You are like a great giant walking about among us and fixing every one you meet upon your canvas,” John Blackwood, her publisher, remarked with approval after he’d read the manuscript of the second volume of
Middlemarch.
Blackwood’s use of the first person plural isn’t a slip. He means to include readers of Eliot’s books among the diminutive characters whom George Eliot fixes on her canvas—the ones who gossip about Lydgate’s unconventional unwillingness to dispense medicines, or about his bizarre request to conduct a postmortem on a patient, or about his unseemly closeness to Bulstrode. Bulstrode’s ultimate downfall levels Lydgate, too, after the doctor accepts a loan that, when the fact of it emerges publicly, is taken by onlookers to be a bribe—and which may, indeed, hamper Lydgate’s ability to judge Bulstrode’s actions objectively. By directly addressing us, Eliot draws us deeper inside her panorama. She makes Middlemarchers of us all.
But Eliot does something in addition with those moments of authorial interjection. She insists that the reader look at the characters in the book from her own elevated viewpoint. We are granted a wider perspective, and a greater insight, than is available to their neighbors down in the world of Middlemarch. By showing us the way each character is bound within his or her own narrow viewpoint, while providing us with a broader view, she nurtures what Virginia Woolf described as “the melancholyvirtue of tolerance.” “If Art does not enlarge men’s sympathies, it does nothing morally,” Eliot once wrote. “The only effect I ardently long to produce by my writings, is that those who read them should be better able to
imagine
and to
feel
the pains and the joys of those who differ from themselves in everything but the broad fact of being struggling erring human creatures.”
And this is one way in which
Middlemarch
is a book about young people for older people. This is one reason why Woolf’s epigrammatic observation rings true. When I read of the boy Lydgate in his father’s library, taking up a book and being seized by a passion, or I glimpse the newlywed Dorothea, distraught in her Roman boudoir, unable to name the deficit she feels or to identify the nature of her disappointment, I am able not only to imagine their vivid, solipsistic experience but also to see them from Eliot’s authorial perspective of heightened, mature sympathy. In viewing them I am invited to shed my wadded layers of stupidity, and to listen for the sound of growing grass.
M Y train rumbled into Coventry, and after I left the station I set off toward the city center. I could see from my map that there was a park, Greyfriars Green, through which I needed to pass, but to reach it I had to navigate a tangle of roads and pedestrian walkways under and alongside a busy highway that encircles the city. This ring road was built in the 1960s according to the latest urban planning principles, as was much of
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