by Rebecca Mead
“THERE is no general doctrine which is not capable of eating out our morality if unchecked by the deep-seated habit of direct fellow-feeling with individual fellow-men,” Eliot writes in Middlemarch. The object of this authorial observation is Nicholas Bulstrode, the wealthy, ostentatiously religious banker who has long adopted an attitude of pious subjection to God’s will as “the mould into which he had constrained his immense need of being something important and predominating.” By selectively lending and investing money, and contributing funds to pet causes, Bulstrode has exerted control over the worldly goings-on of Middlemarch, all the while professing to be thinking only of readying his soul for the world to come. Bulstrode is the closest thing Middlemarch has to a villain, but his villainy does not spring from pure malevolence. Rather it is the product of a moral deficit. In Bulstrode, Eliot presents a self-appointed man of God who fails to demonstrate compassion and sympathy—the ethical precepts that Eliot believed were worth salvaging from the Christianity she had rejected.
When Eliot rejected Christianity, she set herself the harder task of determining what her own guiding ethics would be. In the last essay she wrote for the Westminster Review Eliot gave as good an exposition of her moral code as she did anywhere. The essay is a scything indictment of Edward Young, the eighteenth-century poet-cleric whom she had adored in her youth. By 1858, when she wrote the essay, she had diagnosed a falsity in his theology and morality, which, she argued, contributed to a fundamental insincerity in his poetry.
Young, she wrote, adheres to abstractions—“Virtue sitting on a mount serene,” “Religion coming down from the skies”—while paying no attention to “virtue or religion as it really exists.” Virtue as it really exists, she went on to say, can be found “in courageous effort for unselfish ends, in the internal triumph of justice and pity over personal resentment, in all the sublime self-renunciation and sweet charities which are found in the details of ordinary life.” Virtue is ethical practice, not theoretical doctrine.
Nicholas Bulstrode is not a clergyman, though as a young man he was active in a Calvinist dissenting church, and considered becoming a preacher or a missionary. At sixty, he is the oldest of the central characters in the novel, and not native to Middlemarch. He grew up in London, an orphan and a charity-school student, then became a subordinate to a pawnbroker—whose trade, it turned out, was in stolen goods. He rose in the business and was much admired for his acumen and his piety by the pawnbroker’s wife, herself a devout woman who was unaware of the true contours of her husband’s dealings. When the pawnbroker died, Bulstrode took over the business, and not long afterward he also married the pawnbroker’s widow. Within a few years the widow died, and Bulstrode’s fortune was made.
By the time the reader meets him, Bulstrode is living comfortably in the town of Middlemarch, having for almost thirty years repressed, more or less successfully, one piece of knowledge from his past: the pawnbroker and his wife were survived by a daughter, who had run away from home upon discovering the criminal foundation of her father’s business. This daughter was rightfully the heir of the fortune Bulstrode had appropriated. Now, a florid stranger named Raffles has arrived in Middlemarch, threatening to expose Bulstrode’s past.
Raffles is no stranger to Bulstrode. Years earlier, Bulstrode engaged Raffles to track down the pawnbroker’s daughter—and then, when she was found, having married the son of a Polish refugee, Bulstrode paid Raffles to keep quiet about her existence, so that he would not have to surrender his fortune to her. Eventually Raffles, shattered by drink and desperate for income, stumbles across the surviving son of the pawnbroker’s daughter—none other than Will Ladislaw.
Raffles’s discovery threatens to ruin Bulstrode, undermining his high social position and making a mockery of his professed piety. In Book Seven of Middlemarch, “Two Temptations,” Bulstrode’s mounting deceptions in the name of piety have a horrific consequence. He finds himself wishing for Raffles’s death, and acting in a way that hastens it, claiming all the while the flimsy justification of Providence.
The Raffles subplot, with its piling up of extraordinary coincidences, looks in its outlines like something transposed from a very different kind of Victorian novel. Raffles’s very name is Dickensian, and so are the twists that bring him into the path of Bulstrode and Ladislaw. Strange coincidences do occur in real life as well as in novels, but it is in the plot concerning Raffles and Bulstrode that a reader sees most clearly the machinery of the novelist at work. I find it the hardest part of the novel to hold in my head as I am reading, or to remember the details of afterward. It is like being immersed in a new, complicated Victorian melodrama. The intrigue is crucial to the working out of the novel’s plot, but it is far from being what Middlemarch is about.
What is most compelling about Bulstrode’s story is not the outward unfolding of plot—though there is a satisfyingly lurid tension to it—but the depiction of his own inward, organic, psychological movement. Eliot accomplishes what D. H. Lawrence gave her credit for doing before any other novelist: “It was she who started putting all the action inside.” The reader learns of Bulstrode’s initial shrinking from involvement in the shady business of the pawnbroker—and then of his self-justification for taking the work on, since he would thereby be transforming illegally won gains into funds for doing God’s work. Bulstrode, crucially, is not a coarse hypocrite. “He was simply a man whose desire had been stronger than his theoretic beliefs, and who had gradually explained the gratification of his desires into satisfactory agreement with those beliefs,” Eliot writes. She adds, “If this be hypocrisy, it is a process which shows itself occasionally in us all, to whatever confession we belong.”
Bulstrode holds to his faith as a set of rigid, abstract rules, not as a lived practice of compassion. In this, he differs entirely from Eliot’s depiction of “virtue or religion as it really exists” in the person of the Reverend Camden Farebrother, the vicar of St. Botolph’s church. A keen amateur entomologist, Farebrother has become a clergyman more out of familial obligation than a sense of vocation. He supports an elderly mother, an aunt, and an unmarried sister on an inadequate income of four hundred pounds a year. He delivers pithy sermons, which draw listeners from parishes other than his own, but his religion is shown in how he treats others, rather than how he preaches to them. “His position is not quite like that of the Apostles,” Lydgate says of Farebrother. “He is only a parson among parishoners whose lives he has to try and make better.” Farebrother, as his name suggests, is among the most appealing characters in the book: intelligent, caring, generous, and very far from perfect.
In Book Seven of Middlemarch, Farebrother faces his own temptation. He is in love with Mary Garth, and she admires and likes him. Fred Vincy, who hopes to marry Mary, has been playing billiards at the Green Dragon tavern, where participants often gamble on the outcome of games. Farebrother knows that if Fred is drawn back into a life of idleness and dissipation Mary might reconsider her commitment to marry him, and that she might then begin to look at the vicar in the light of a husband, instead. Farebrother is momentarily tempted to do nothing to hinder Fred’s slide, but he quickly realizes that he could not bear to profit by Fred’s moral devaluation. He speaks to Fred, reminding him of his commitment to be worthy of Mary, and in doing so Farebrother deprives himself of the possibility of finding his own happiness with Mary. It’s an enormous sacrifice, given with a shake of the hand and the shrug of the shoulder that is the vicar’s habitual gesture.
Farebrother never articulates his faith in Middlemarch—unlike Bulstrode, he feels no need to vaunt it. But in her essay on Young, Eliot gave voice to a man—or woman—who feels beholden to others out of felt sympathy, not because of abstract doctrine. “I am just and honest, not because I expect to live in another world, but because, having felt the pain of injustice and dishonesty towards myself, I have a fellow-feeling with other men, who would suffer the same pain if I were unjust or dishonest towards them,” she wrote. “It is a pang to
me to witness the suffering of a fellow-being, and I feel his suffering the more acutely because he is mortal—because his life is so short, and I would have it, if possible, filled with happiness and not misery.”
This is not a doctrine the vicar of St. Boltoph’s would be likely to preach from the pulpit, given that it relies upon humanist fellowship rather than Christian faith, but I can imagine him saying something like this to himself when he is alone in his study, turning over his insect specimens, irrevocably putting the happiness of others before his own.
IN the summer of 1871, while working on Middlemarch, Eliot received a short letter from a young Scotsman called Alexander Main, who had a question: what was the correct pronunciation of Romola? Gratified by Main’s admiration of the book, which had been published in 1863—he called its prologue “the sublimest piece of writing, thinking, and historical word-painting, all in one, that the pen of a human being has ever yet achieved in prose”—Eliot wrote back at some length, not only giving him the correct pronunciation (stress on the first o) but putting down some thoughts about Florentine literature and Sir Walter Scott. Main replied instantly with a longer letter, filled with impassioned praise. “You are doing a work in and upon this age such that future generations shall rejoice that you have lived,” he said.
Eliot was notoriously diffident, and was susceptible to crippling self-doubt. She had as an author what Lewes called “a shy, shrinking, ambitious nature,” and found it hard to hold on to any sense of her own accomplishment. She was well used to compliments, but even so, she may have been somewhat taken aback by this unusual outpouring from Main. She replied only briefly and with moderation, thanking him and telling him that she was “deeply affected” by his words, but taking pains to mention that she was too busy for much letter writing. Having been drawn in by Main’s enthusiasm, she quickly sought to put a distance between herself and him.
There was, however, no chance of that. Main quickly went on to write more letters further exalting Eliot and her works, particularly her long poem, The Spanish Gypsy—during the reading of which, he told her, “I have felt myself face to face with the Highest in Humanity.” This was a statement that could not better have been calculated to please her, since Eliot was deeply invested in her poetry, which is almost never read today. She wrote back, telling Main that he had thoroughly understood her intention and had entered with perfect insight into the poem’s significance. His letter had made her cry.
The letters from Scotland kept coming, arriving at a tremendous pace. (It’s shocking to realize how much better the postal service was in the 1870s than it is today. If Eliot and her correspondents didn’t quite have the instantaneous back-and-forth of e-mail, they had the advantage of multiple daily postal deliveries, and very swift physical transit of mail.) Emboldened, Main wrote back with a proposal. Her works, he said, contained “essences of high truth, heart-searching Thoughts which go to the very roots of our being—and all these expressed in single sentences and paragraphs.” Would it not be doing her an act of justice, and the reading public a good turn, to collect such salient expressions of wisdom and compile them in a single volume?
Eliot—and Lewes, who always had an eye for the marketplace—agreed. Blackwood became Main’s publisher, and Main went on to become the editor of a collection titled Wise, Witty, and Tender Sayings, in Prose and Verse, Selected from the Works of George Eliot. In a preface, Main declared that Eliot had “for ever sanctified the Novel by making it the vehicle of the grandest and most uncompromising moral truth.” The book was dedicated to her, “in recognition of a genius as original as it is profound and a morality as pure as it is impassioned.”
My copy of Wise, Witty, and Tender Sayings, which I bought a few years ago from a secondhand bookseller, is the tenth edition, from 1896, which gives Main an enviably long time on the backlist. It’s bound in sage green, with delicate, ornamental gold lettering on the front, and inside it’s inscribed with a dedication from someone called Mary to someone called Lillie, and a date, 1903.
When I thumb through its pages of quotations, some of them extending for more than a page, printed in a font size that has me reaching for reading glasses, I am overcome by a dreadful sense of depletion. I can think of no surer way to be put off the work of George Eliot than by trying to read the Wise, Witty, and Tender Sayings. On any given page is an out-of-context pronouncement—“iteration, like friction, is likely to generate heat instead of progress”—or a phrase so recondite that it requires several readings before it can be parsed. Consider this, from Romola: “A course of action which is in strictness a slowly-prepared outgrowth of the entire character, is yet almost always traceable to a single impression as its point of apparent origin.” I know what it means—I even think I agree with it—but out of context, it is dead. Main’s book is the nineteenth-century equivalent of the refrigerator magnet.
Blackwood dismissed Main as a sycophant, privately referring to him as “The Gusher” and “The Worshipper of Genius” even while making money from him, and most of Eliot’s biographers have been similarly critical. Contemporary reviewers were not impressed by Main’s effort, either. The Westminster Review, Eliot’s old editorial home, wrote off the Sayings in its “Belles Lettres” section, saying that Main had done George Eliot a disservice. “He is one of those officious friends, who are always bringing you into trouble,” the reviewer wrote. “As he does not know exactly what to worship, he worships anything, good, bad, or indifferent.” Even more favorable reviewers acknowledged that Main had put Eliot’s work to a challenging test by so sifting and reducing it. The Nation said that her assent to the book’s publication “suggests that George Eliot thinks more of the duties of a teacher than of the reputation of a novelist.”
Eliot had her own misgivings about the project, once it was finished at least. “Unless my readers are more moved towards the ends I seek by works as wholes than by an assemblage of extracts, my writings are a mistake,” she wrote, when the second edition was being planned. She had thought about the reductive effect of extraction earlier in her career and been alarmed by the simplification that comes from quotation. In The Mill on the Floss, she warned against the “men of maxims,” and wrote that all people of “broad, strong sense” are skeptical of such men, “because such people early discern that the mysterious complexity of our life is not to be embraced by maxims, and that to lace ourselves up in formulas of that sort is to repress all the divine promptings and inspirations that spring from growing insight and sympathy.” Main found this thought so well expressed that he included it in his book of maxims.
So why did Eliot agree to the publication of Wise, Witty, and Tender Sayings in the first place? In part, certainly, she saw it as a marketing tool for her novels. And Main was not the first to suggest that Eliot’s works be mined for moral wisdom: as Leah Price, a professor of English at Harvard, has demonstrated, quotations appeared during Eliot’s lifetime in schoolbooks, parliamentary debates, an army officer’s examination, and a calendar. But I suspect that Eliot’s positive response to Main’s proposal was not only a pragmatic decision. There was an emotional element to the choice, as well. He seems to have touched something in her, and she seems to have taken him seriously.
And so I wanted to take Main seriously, too. In order to read all his letters, not just the few that have been excerpted, often with belittling commentary, in books about Eliot, I went to Edinburgh, to the National Library of Scotland, where his side of the correspondence is kept. As the home of her publisher, Edinburgh was an important city to Eliot, though she only went there twice in her life. The first time was in 1845, when she was in her midtwenties, during a tour of the north of England and Scotland with the Brays. The physical drama of the city thrilled her, with twisting medieval lanes on one side of the castle mount, and, on the other, a harmonious street plan of handsome Georgian buildings.
She went back in 1852, and visited George Combe, the phrenologist. “I have a beautiful view from my room window—masses of wo
od, distant hills, the Firth, and four splendid buildings dotted far apart—not an ugly object to be seen,” she wrote to the Brays. “When I look out in the morning it is as if I had waked up in Utopia or Icaria or one of [Robert] Owen’s parallelograms.” Blackwood invited Eliot to Edinburgh in the summer of 1871, to attend a centenary celebration for Sir Walter Scott, but she declined, in one of her letters that does show an appealing flash of wit. “I think that prudence advises me to abstain from the fatigue and excitement of a long railway journey with a great gathering at the end of it,” she wrote. “If there is a chance that ‘Middlemarch’ will be good for anything, I don’t want to break down and die without finishing it.”
My first morning in the city, fortified with coffee, I went to a windowless room in the National Library and retrieved Main’s letters, which are bound into a single volume. As I read, a picture of him began to emerge, enhancing somewhat jaundiced descriptions given by Blackwood, after their first encounter, of “a little fellow, dark with bright clear-looking eyes,” who “used his knife in a dangerous manner at lunch.”
Main was thirty years old when the correspondence began, and lived with his elderly widowed mother in Arbroath, a small town on the eastern coast of Scotland. In the letters he described no occupation beyond giving lectures on literary subjects to young men, whose moral growth he sought to mentor. He was not well off, and had to wait for Eliot’s books to be published in cheap editions in order to own them. He was given to taking walks along the cliffs to the east of the town, finding a spot on the beach where he could sit and read aloud to himself from Eliot’s works “without the awkward risk of being voted crazy,” as he confessed in one letter.
