A House of Air

This short novel is her masterpiece, no doubt about that, but it is difficult to discuss the plot because it can hardly be said to have one. Dunnet Landing is ‘a salt-aired, white-clapboarded little town’ on the central coast of Maine, more attractive than the rest, perhaps, but much like them. ‘One evening in June, a single passenger landed upon the steamboat wharf.’ She is a writer who has taken a lodging in the town, in search of peace and quiet. Her landlady, Mrs Almira Todd, is the local herbalist, being a very large person, majestic almost, living in the last little house on the way inland. In a few pages Jewett establishes forever the substantial reality of Dunnet Landing. We know it, we have been there, we have walked up the steep streets, we taste the sea air. Now we have got to get to know the inhabitants, slowly, as the narrator does herself, and, in good time, to hear their confidences. Jewett knew all about fishing and small-holding and cooking haddock chowder, about birds, weather, tides, and clouds. She had a wonderful ear for the Maine voice, breaking the immense silences. She quotes, more than once, what her father said to her: ‘Don’t write about things and people. Tell them just as they are.’ And she understood the natural history of small communities, where you will find impoverished, lonely people, often old but proud, self-respecting and respected.

The narrator of The Country of the Pointed Firs rents the local schoolhouse, for fifty cents a week, as her study. Here her first visitor, apart from the bees and an occasional sheep pausing to look in at the open door, is Captain Littlepage, an ancient retired shipmaster. His reminiscences are not what we expect: he tells a story of the unseen—a voyage west of Baffin Island which fetched up ‘on a coast which wasn’t laid down or charted’ where the crew saw, or half-saw, the shapes of men through the sea-fog ‘like a place where there was neither living nor dead.’ These were men waiting between this life and the next. Captain Littlepage offers no further explanation, and, indeed, it’s generally felt in Dunnet Landing that he has overset his mind with too much reading, but Mrs Todd, with a sharp look, says that ‘some of them tales hangs together tolerable well.’

Loneliness and hospitality are the two extremes of the hard existence on the coast of Maine. Elijah Tilley, one of the old fishermen, thought of as a ‘plodding man,’ has been a widower for the past eight years. ‘Folks all kept repeating that time would ease me, but I can’t find it does. No, I just miss her the same every day.’ It is his habit to lapse into silence. What more is there to say? Towards the end of her life, Sarah Orne Jewett gave some words of advice to the young Willa Cather: ‘You must write to the human heart, the great consciousness that all humanity goes to make up.’ Otherwise it may remain unexpressed, as it often does in Dunnet Landing.

Joanna, Mrs Todd’s cousin, whose young man threw her over, withdrew to live alone on tiny Shell-heap Island, ‘a dreadful small place to make a world of.’ She had some poultry and a patch of potatoes. But what about company? She must have made do with the hens, her one-time neighbours think: ‘I expect she soon came to making folks of them.’ But Joanna maintained the dignity of loss. She lived, died, and was buried on Shell-heap Island. We are in a world where silence is understood.

When the time comes for the narrator to leave, Mrs Todd, who has become a true friend, hardly speaks all day, ‘except in the briefest and most disapproving way.’ Then she resolutely goes out on an errand, without turning her head. ‘My room looked as empty as the day I came…and I knew how it would seem when Mrs Todd came back and found her lodger gone. So we die before our own eyes; so we see some chapters of our lives come to their natural end.’

Jewett is an expert in the homely and everyday who gives us every now and then a glimpse of the numinous. (That, perhaps, is why Rudyard Kipling wrote to her about The Country of the Pointed Firs, ‘I don’t believe even you know how good that work is.’) She does this, for instance, in a short story, ‘Miss Tempy’s Watchers.’ Upstairs lies the outworn body of kindly Miss Temperance Dent, while in the kitchen, two of her old friends, keeping vigil before the next day’s funeral, gradually nod off. ‘Perhaps Tempy herself stood near, and saw her own life and its surroundings with new understanding. Perhaps she herself was the only watcher.’ In one of the later Dunnet Landing stories, ‘The Foreigner,’ Mrs Todd observes: ‘You know plain enough there’s something beyond this world: the doors stand wide open.’ There are moments, too, of communication or empathy between friends that go beyond understanding. Friendship, for Sarah Orne Jewett, was the world’s greatest good.

On 3 September 1902, her fifty-third birthday, she was thrown from her carriage when the horse stumbled and fell. She suffered concussion of the spine and never entirely recovered. ‘The strange machinery that writes,’ as she described it, ‘seems broken and confused.’ For long spells she was in fact forbidden by her doctors to read or write, which must have been a cruel deprivation. In 1909 she was back in South Berwick, where she had the last of a series of strokes, and died in the house where she was born.

Books and Company, Winter 1999

GEORGE ELIOT The Will to Good

An Introduction to Middlemarch

George Eliot began what is now Book Two of Middlemarch early in 1869. She wrote slowly, because for her it was a year of illness and trouble, and in the winter of 1870 she put this work aside and began a new story that is now Book One, ‘Miss Brooke.’ She made a note in her journal that the ‘subject…has been recorded among my possible themes ever since I began to write fiction.’ What is this subject?

Middlemarch is set in the years just before the Reform Bill of 1832. In Chapter 10 Mr Brooke, the uncle and guardian of Dorothea and her sister Celia, gives a dinner party at his house, Tipton Grange. Maddening, vacillating, kindhearted Mr Brooke is a local magistrate and a countryman—so too, of course, is the Rector, Mr Cadwallader, with his magnificently sharp-tongued wife. The Reverend Mr Casaubon, scholarly, withering into dry old age, is also a man of property, as is Sir James Chettam, Brooke’s guileless neighbour. But to meet these gentry Mr Brooke has rather enterprisingly invited guests from Middlemarch itself: the upper ranks, that is, of the townspeople—Mr Vincy, the mayor, Mr Chicheley, the coroner, and the Evangelical banker, Mr Bulstrode. They are talking about Dorothea and about Lydgate, the new doctor. These two have also been talking to each other, discussing model housing and the proposed fever hospital, and we get Lydgate’s first impression, as he leaves the party, of Dorothea: ‘She is a good creature—that fine girl—but a little too earnest.’ She would not do, therefore, for Lydgate, who wants relaxation after his work, and smiling blue eyes. This is George Eliot’s particular method of turning an incident around, so that we can look at it with her, and from different angles. In this way we have been introduced to the field of action and the beginning of what she calls ‘the stealthy convergence of human lots.’

George Eliot’s living creed—painfully arrived at—was meliorist (a word she believed she had invented). We should do all we can, during a short human lifetime, to achieve ‘some possible better,’ and the ‘should’ is all the more binding because we cannot have a direct knowledge of God. But the individual will to good is affected by social and natural forces—by the kind of society we are born into and the kind of temperament we are born with. In Middlemarch Eliot is considering a money-making professional society, based on Coventry, where she lived from 1841 to 1850.

Middlemarch is a manufacturing town—‘the people in manufacturing towns are always disreputable,’ says Mrs Cadwallader—with a corruptible local paper, electioneering for and against a reforming parliament, professional charities, and deeply distrusted advances in medicine and hygiene. Everyone knows everyone else’s business. What is to be hoped for from this thriving borough, where nearly all are loudly certain of their own opinion? ‘I know the sort,’ cries Mr Hawley, the town clerk, hearing that Casaubon’s cousin, Ladislaw, is of foreign extraction; ‘some emissary. He’ll begin with flourishing about the Rights of Man and end with murdering a wench. That’s the style.’ At the Tankard in Slaughter Lane it is ‘known’ to Mrs Dollop, the landlady, that people are allowed to die in the new hospital for the sake of cutting them up, ‘a poor tale for a doctor, who if he was good for anything should know what was the matter with you before you died.’ To be ‘candid’ in Middlemarch means that you are about to let a man know the very worst that is being said about him. ‘The gossip of the auction room, the billiard room, the tea table, the kitchen,’ as Frank Kermode puts it, ‘is the more or less corrupt blood of the organism.’ The challenges to Middle-march come from young Dr Lydgate and young Miss Brooke.

Lydgate has the impulse to mercy and healing and the ambition to research. But he is impatient and too self-confident and does not mind it being known that he is better born than other country surgeons. He is drawn, by fatal degrees, into the evil secret of Bulstrode’s past (a favourite theme of George Eliot’s and as old as fiction itself). And yet his only real error is his marriage to Rosamond Vincy. He is overwhelmed by the ‘terrible tenacity of this mild creature.’ She is, what is more, one of the world’s unteachables. Whatever George Eliot’s scheme of moral effort and retribution may be, Rosamond is quite exempt from it. Through all vicissitudes she quietly keeps her self-esteem. Her dream of existence is shocked, then rights itself, and she will continue, blonde and imperturbable. The world as it is seems created for Rosamonds.

Dorothea, on the other hand, never comes into direct conflict with Middlemarch. Her faults, like Lydgate’s, are put to us very clearly, since George Eliot’s methods are analytic. Having set herself, as she said, to imagine ‘how ideas lie in other minds than my own,’ she begins ironically, with Dorothea and sensible Celia dividing the jewellery their mother left them. Dorothea, who has renounced finery, feels an unexpected wish to keep one set of emeralds (a delicate premonition of her passion for Will Ladislaw). We are shown that she doesn’t know her own nature, doesn’t know life, certainly doesn’t know ‘lower experience such as plays a great part in the world,’ is ruthless to Sir James and, of course, to herself, and hopelessly astray in her search for ‘intensity and greatness.’ But Dorothea is noble. On her honeymoon visit to Rome, for instance, she is so much the finest spirit there, seen in contrast not only with those around her but with the motionless statuary of the Vatican Museum. She doesn’t know this. She has ‘little vanity.’ She says: ‘It is surely better to pardon too much than to condemn too much.’ We would give anything to be able to step into the novel and join Celia and Sir James in trying to stop this rare spirit from making her disastrous choice.

But why can’t Dorothea aim at something greater? Why is she left, as the Finale puts it, to lead a ‘hidden life,’ and be buried in an ‘unvisited tomb’? Florence Nightingale, among many others, asked this question, giving as an example not herself, but Octavia Hill, the pioneer of public-housing management. It is true that Dorothea (born about 1812) was too early to have been, for instance, a student at Girton College, Cambridge (founded in 1869). But George Eliot’s attitude to the position of women was, in any case, perplexing. In October 1856 she signed a petition for women to have a legal right to their own earnings, and in 1867 she told a friend that ‘women should be educated equally with men, and secured as far as possible with every other breathing creature from suffering the exercise of any unrighteous power.’ She was, however, resolutely opposed to women’s suffrage. But these questions are not stressed in Middlemarch, and Dorothea is not shown as a great organizer, but as having ‘the ardent woman’s need to rule beneficently by making the joy of another soul.’ The drawback here is that the other soul turns out, in the end, to be Will Ladislaw’s; and what are we to make of Ladislaw? Critics usually consider him to be, like Stephen Guest in The Mill on the Floss, one of George Eliot’s failures. But perhaps she intended him to be exactly what he appears—that is, at the best, ‘a bright creature full of uncertain promises.’ He becomes, of course, a Radical MP, but ‘in those times’—as she reminds us—‘when reforms were begun with a young hopefulness of immediate good which has been much checked in our days.’

George Eliot’s point, however, made both in the Prelude and the Finale of her book, delivers us from having to think of Dorothea as nothing more than a noble woman who loses her head over a questionable young man. Dorothea’s decisions were not ideal, George Eliot tells us, and conditions are not right for a nineteenth-century St Theresa, but her life was not wasted: ‘the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive.’ This is part of the book’s great diminuendo, not tragic but majestic, drawing back, after all its vast complications, into itself, the characters’ prospects narrowing as the story closes. But we have actually seen the effect of Dorothea’s being on those around her, in her generous gift to Lydgate and—in a superb chapter—her yet more generous visit to Rosamond. On these ‘unhistoric acts’ in an undistinguished ribbon-manufacturing town in the Midlands, the growing good of the world may partly depend. We must believe this, if we can.

There was nothing in Middlemarch, George Eliot assured her long-suffering publisher, John Blackwood, ‘that will be seen to be irrelevant to my design, which is to show the gradual action of ordinary causes rather than exceptional.’ This, however, suggests a deliberate, even mechanical method of construction that is quite at odds with the intensely human effect of her great novel. One of the advantages of its sheer length is that there is room in it for hesitations, even moments of relenting, which give the story another dimension, like music heard at a distance. At the end of Book Four, for instance, Dorothea has not only admitted to herself the misery of her marriage to Mr Casaubon but has glimpsed that his lifetime’s work, the ‘Key to all Mythologies,’ is a meaningless accumulation of references. She has gone to her room, and waits for him in the darkness to come upstairs from his library.

But she did hear the library door open, and slowly the light advanced up the staircase without noise from the footsteps on the carpet. When her husband stood opposite to her, she saw that his face was more haggard. He started slightly on seeing her, and she looked up at him beseechingly, without speaking.

‘Dorothea!’ he said, with a gentle surprise in his tone. ‘Were you waiting for me?’

‘Yes, I did not like to disturb you.’

‘Come, my dear, come. You are young, and need not to extend your life by watching.’

When the kind quiet melancholy of that speech fell on Dorothea’s ears, she felt something like the thankfulness that might well up in us if we had narrowly escaped hurting a lamed creature. She put her hand into her husband’s, and they went along the broad corridor together.

The possibility is there, for long enough for us to think about it, of perhaps not happiness between them, but peace. The moment passes, as it does for Mary Garth, who has never realized that Mr Farebrother cared anything for her, and still doesn’t, fully, when he comes to see her to plead Fred Vincy’s cause. But ‘something indefinable, something like the resolute suppression of a pain in Mr Farebrother’s manner, made her feel suddenly miserable, as she had once felt when she saw her father’s hands trembling in a moment of trouble.’ Here Mary herself can’t define her sensation. There is time in Middlemarch, as in life itself, for these echoes or intimations of paths not taken. Another one, which remains just under the surface but is never put into words, is: what if Dorothea had married Lydgate?

There is another complication in Middlemarch, which runs very deep. Meliorism looks cautiously forward, and indeed George Eliot agreed with Gladstone that there was no use in fighting against the future. But she was always true to her own past, her rural childhood when she had been a ‘little sister,’ running through green fields. All around Middlemarch stretches northeast Loamshire, ‘almost all meadows and pastures, with hedgerows still allowed to grow in bushy beauty, and to spread out coral fruit for the birds…These are the things that make the gamut of joy in landscape to midland-bred souls.’ (This recalls the passage from The Mill on the Floss, ‘We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in it…’) It is noticeable that although 1830 saw the height of England’s agricultural distress and, in consequence, of rioting and rick burning—the Cambridgeshire fires could be seen at a distance of eight miles against the night sky—Loamshire, in this novel, is relatively tranquil. (Unrest is represented by Mr Brooke’s visit to Dagley’s smallholding, where he is defied by the drunken Dagley and behaves in a way much less dignified than his own dog, the sagacious Monk.) The reason for this, surely, is that George Eliot needs to indicate an ideal experience and existence. In Middlemarch the country represents work, steadiness, harmony, peace. If we ask ourselves, or let ourselves feel, how human happiness is measured, we have to turn to Fred Vincy. Fred’s love for Mary, in spite of his shortcomings, is the truest emotion in the book, and it is as an expert on the cultivation of green crops and the economy of cattle-feeding that he steadies down to a happy life: ‘On enquiry it might possibly be found that Fred and Mary still inhabit Stone Court—that the creeping plants still cast the foam of their blossoms over the fine stone walls…’ Their marriage is a pastoral. Then again, late on in the book, Dorothea has a moment of vision that is in the nature of an epiphany. It is after her sleepless night of extreme misery over Will Ladislaw.

She opened her curtains, and looked out towards the bit of road that lay in view, with fields beyond, outside the entrance-gates. On the road there was a man with a bundle on his back and a woman carrying her baby; in the field she could see figures moving—perhaps the shepherd with his dog. Far off in the bending sky was the pearly light; and she felt the largeness of the world and the manifold wakings of men to labour and endurance…

What she would resolve to do that day did not yet seem quite clear, but something that she could achieve stirred her as with an approaching murmur which would soon gather distinctness.

Dorothea’s inspiration, at this late stage, comes from the early-morning sight of the labourer and the wayfarer. This, too, is pastoral. George Eliot, of course, did not deceive herself. If her Warwickshire childhood had been an Eden, it was one that she had lost. But it remained as her surest way of judging life as it hurried forward through the unpeaceful, expanding nineteenth century.

Introduction to the Folio Society edition

of Middlemarch, 1999

Not Herself

George Eliot, Voice of a Century: A Biography, by Frederick R. Karl

‘[Burne-Jones] came across her standing monumentally alone at Waterloo Station, and, as he talked with her, they walked for a short distance along the platform. Suddenly Lewes rushed up to them, panic-pale and breathlessly exclaiming “My God! you are HERE!” George Eliot gravely admitted it. “But,” stammered Lewes, “I left you THERE!”’

This story (from Graham Robertson’s Time Was) belongs to the 1870s, when George Eliot had become not only a precious charge to G. H. Lewes but also an object of general reverence as the greatest of secular teachers and (after Dickens died) the supreme English novelist. Opinion turned against her not long after her death in 1880. (A book I’ve got here, a Practical Text Book for Senior Classes published by Harrap in 1923, doesn’t even include her in its chart of the Chief Victorian Novelists.) She had to wait for rescue by F. R. Leavis and above all by Professor Gordon Haight, with his nine volumes of letters and a classic biography (1968). Endlessly helpful, Haight reckoned to be able to say what she was doing at any given moment on any day of her life, even before her written diaries begin, in 1854.

Frederick Karl’s new biography is seven-hundred-odd pages long and has taken him five years’ hard labour. He has consulted, he thinks, all the available material, notably Eliot’s brave but embarrassing letters to Herbert Spencer (‘If you become attached to anyone else, then I must die’). In his acknowledgements he thanks Haight as the most dauntless of scholars, but, six hundred pages on, he calls the 1968 Life ‘narrow, squeezed, protective, and carefully conventional.’ This leads you to expect a bold treatment of some debatable points, but that would be a mistake. Of John Chapman, the publisher in whose house she lodged when she first came to London, he says ‘it is quite possible she and Chapman were intimate, although we will probably never have definite proof one way or another.’

Why did John Cross, her second husband, twenty years younger than herself, jump from the balcony during their honeymoon into the Grand Canal? Professor Karl examines the evidence at length, and concludes that the incident only seems amusing ‘if we put on hold the pain of the participants.’ In fact he is more protective of his subject than Haight himself, refusing to accept that she was emotionally dependent on a succession of men, beginning with her father and her elder brother Isaac.

Although she believed that ‘there is no creature whose inward being is so strong that it is not greatly determined by what lies outside it,’ George Eliot invented herself (though probably not more than most women). She let it be understood that her right hand was larger than her left because of the dairy work she did as a girl, but Isaac declared she had never made a pound of butter in her life. She gallantly defied society when she threw in her lot with the all-purpose journalist and philosopher George Henry Lewes, and yet what she longed for was acceptance and solid respectability, the right wallpaper, the right callers on her Sunday afternoons. Karl patiently admits these contradictions, but relates them to the troubled consciousness of Victorian society, with all its divisions and paradoxes. George Eliot trusted passionately in the individual, coming to believe that each of us should create his own church, but at the same time dreading the chaos and disorder to which freedom might lead. To Karl she is the ‘voice of the century.’ All her changes of name, he says—Mary Anne, Marian, Mrs G. H. Lewes, George Eliot, Mater, Mutter, Madonna—correspond to willed transformations, the moral and spiritual versions of self-help.

Her responsibilities, as she said, weighed heavily on her, and Professor Karl can’t be called light-footed either. For the most part he plods along with dignity by the side of his Mary Anne. He is strong on her years with Chapman’s Westminster Review and on the details of her business affairs. Lewes, acting as her manager, was a sharp customer, and John Blackwood, most noble-minded of publishers, had reason to complain. But respectability had to be earned, or, as Karl puts it, ‘the inflow of money was an indisputable form of empowerment.’ In the background were Lewes’s legal wife and children, whom he supported to the very end.

The book goes less well when it parts company from hard facts. In the last twenty years or so, Karl tells us, we’ve come to expect from the biographer ‘the psychological analysis of possibilities and potentialities’ from patterns in the work itself. If by ‘we’ he means the readers, then we have brought deconstructionism on ourselves. From these patterns Karl feels able to suggest that the theft of Silas Marner’s life savings from the floor of his cottage ‘does seem linked to Eliot’s uncertainty about her work,’ or perhaps ‘Eliot saw herself as part of a “theft”…she had “stolen” a particular kind of life in the face of social opprobrium,’ while Hetty, the kitten-like dairy-maid in Adam Bede, is a ‘subtle yet demonic double of Eliot’s own desire to rise, achieve, emerge.’ It’s as if he was allowing himself a well-earned holiday from his long search for exactness.