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Middlemarch

By George Eliot

New York and Boston H. M. Caldwell Company Publishers

To my dear Husband, George Henry Lewes,
in this nineteenth year of our blessed union.

PRELUDE

Who that cares much to know the history of man, and how the mysterious
mixture behaves under the varying experiments of Time, has not dwelt,
at least briefly, on the life of Saint Theresa, has not smiled
with some gentleness at the thought of the little girl walking
forth one morning hand-in-hand with her still smaller brother,
to go and seek martyrdom in the country of the Moors? Out they toddled
from rugged Avila, wide-eyed and helpless-looking as two fawns,
but with human hearts, already beating to a national idea; until domestic
reality met them in the shape of uncles, and turned them back from
their great resolve. That child-pilgrimage was a fit beginning.
Theresa's passionate, ideal nature demanded an epic life: what were
many-volumed romances of chivalry and the social conquests of a
brilliant girl to her? Her flame quickly burned up that light fuel;
and, fed from within, soared after some illimitable satisfaction,
some object which would never justify weariness, which would reconcile
self-despair with the rapturous consciousness of life beyond self.
She found her epos in the reform of a religious order.

That Spanish woman who lived three hundred years ago, was certainly
not the last of her kind. Many Theresas have been born who
found for themselves no epic life wherein there was a constant
unfolding of far-resonant action; perhaps only a life of mistakes,
the offspring of a certain spiritual grandeur ill-matched with
the meanness of opportunity; perhaps a tragic failure which found
no sacred poet and sank unwept into oblivion. With dim lights
and tangled circumstance they tried to shape their thought and deed
in noble agreement; but after all, to common eyes their struggles
seemed mere inconsistency and formlessness; for these later-born
Theresas were helped by no coherent social faith and order which could
perform the function of knowledge for the ardently willing soul.
Their ardor alternated between a vague ideal and the common yearning
of womanhood; so that the one was disapproved as extravagance,
and the other condemned as a lapse.

Some have felt that these blundering lives are due to the
inconvenient indefiniteness with which the Supreme Power has
fashioned the natures of women: if there were one level of feminine
incompetence as strict as the ability to count three and no more,
the social lot of women might be treated with scientific certitude.
Meanwhile the indefiniteness remains, and the limits of variation
are really much wider than any one would imagine from the sameness
of women's coiffure and the favorite love-stories in prose and verse.
Here and there a cygnet is reared uneasily among the ducklings
in the brown pond, and never finds the living stream in fellowship
with its own oary-footed kind. Here and there is born a Saint Theresa,
foundress of nothing, whose loving heart-beats and sobs after an
unattained goodness tremble off and are dispersed among hindrances,
instead of centring in some long-recognizable deed.

BOOK I.

MISS BROOKE.

----

CHAPTER I.

"Since I can do no good because a woman,
Reach constantly at something that is near it.
--The Maid's Tragedy: BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER.

Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into
relief by poor dress. Her hand and wrist were so finely formed that
she could wear sleeves not less bare of style than those in which
the Blessed Virgin appeared to Italian painters; and her profile
as well as her stature and bearing seemed to gain the more dignity
from her plain garments, which by the side of provincial fashion
gave her the impressiveness of a fine quotation from the Bible,--or
from one of our elder poets,--in a paragraph of to-day's newspaper.
She was usually spoken of as being remarkably clever, but with the
addition that her sister Celia had more common-sense. Nevertheless,
Celia wore scarcely more trimmings; and it was only to close
observers that her dress differed from her sister's, and had a shade
of coquetry in its arrangements; for Miss Brooke's plain dressing
was due to mixed conditions, in most of which her sister shared.
The pride of being ladies had something to do with it: the Brooke
connections, though not exactly aristocratic, were unquestionably
"good:" if you inquired backward for a generation or two, you would
not find any yard-measuring or parcel-tying forefathers--anything
lower than an admiral or a clergyman; and there was even an ancestor
discernible as a Puritan gentleman who served under Cromwell,
but afterwards conformed, and managed to come out of all political
troubles as the proprietor of a respectable family estate.
Young women of such birth, living in a quiet country-house,
and attending a village church hardly larger than a parlor,
naturally regarded frippery as the ambition of a huckster's daughter.
Then there was well-bred economy, which in those days made show in
dress the first item to be deducted from, when any margin was required
for expenses more distinctive of rank. Such reasons would have been
enough to account for plain dress, quite apart from religious feeling;
but in Miss Brooke's case, religion alone would have determined it;
and Celia mildly acquiesced in all her sister's sentiments,
only infusing them with that common-sense which is able to accept
momentous doctrines without any eccentric agitation. Dorothea knew
many passages of Pascal's Pensees and of Jeremy Taylor by heart;
and to her the destinies of mankind, seen by the light of Christianity,
made the solicitudes of feminine fashion appear an occupation
for Bedlam. She could not reconcile the anxieties of a spiritual
life involving eternal consequences, with a keen interest in gimp
and artificial protrusions of drapery. Her mind was theoretic,
and yearned by its nature after some lofty conception of the world
which might frankly include the parish of Tipton and her own rule
of conduct there; she was enamoured of intensity and greatness,
and rash in embracing whatever seemed to her to have those aspects;
likely to seek martyrdom, to make retractations, and then to incur
martyrdom after all in a quarter where she had not sought it.
Certainly such elements in the character of a marriageable girl tended
to interfere with her lot, and hinder it from being decided according
to custom, by good looks, vanity, and merely canine affection.
With all this, she, the elder of the sisters, was not yet twenty,
and they had both been educated, since they were about twelve years old
and had lost their parents, on plans at once narrow and promiscuous,
first in an English family and afterwards in a Swiss family at Lausanne,
their bachelor uncle and guardian trying in this way to remedy the
disadvantages of their orphaned condition.

It was hardly a year since they had come to live at Tipton Grange
with their uncle, a man nearly sixty, of acquiescent temper,
miscellaneous opinions, and uncertain vote. He had travelled
in his younger years, and was held in this part of the county
to have contracted a too rambling habit of mind. Mr. Brooke's
conclusions were as difficult to predict as the weather: it was
only safe to say that he would act with benevolent intentions,
and that he would spend as little money as possible in carrying
them out. For the most glutinously indefinite minds enclose some
hard grains of habit; and a man has been seen lax about all his
own interests except the retention of his snuff-box, concerning
which he was watchful, suspicious, and greedy of clutch.

In Mr. Brooke the hereditary strain of Puritan energy was clearly
in abeyance; but in his niece Dorothea it glowed alike through faults
and virtues, turning sometimes into impatience of her uncle's talk
or his way of "letting things be" on his estate, and making her long
all the more for the time when she would be of age and have some
command of money for generous schemes. She was regarded as an heiress;
for not only had the sisters seven hundred a-year each from
their parents, but if Dorothea married and had a son, that son would
inherit Mr. Brooke's estate, presumably worth about three thousand
a-year--a rental which seemed wealth to provincial families,
still discussing Mr. Peel's late conduct on the Catholic question,
innocent of future gold-fields, and of that gorgeous plutocracy
which has so nobly exalted the necessities of genteel life.

And how should Dorothea not marry?--a girl so handsome and with
such prospects? Nothing could hinder it but her love of extremes,
and her insistence on regulating life according to notions which
might cause a wary man to hesitate before he made her an offer,
or even might lead her at last to refuse all offers. A young lady
of some birth and fortune, who knelt suddenly down on a brick floor
by the side of a sick laborer and prayed fervidly as if she thought
herself living in the time of the Apostles--who had strange whims
of fasting like a Papist, and of sitting up at night to read old
theological books! Such a wife might awaken you some fine morning with
a new scheme for the application of her income which would interfere
with political economy and the keeping of saddle-horses: a man would
naturally think twice before he risked himself in such fellowship.
Women were expected to have weak opinions; but the great safeguard
of society and of domestic life was, that opinions were not acted on.
Sane people did what their neighbors did, so that if any lunatics
were at large, one might know and avoid them.

The rural opinion about the new young ladies, even among the cottagers,
was generally in favor of Celia, as being so amiable and innocent-looking,
while Miss Brooke's large eyes seemed, like her religion, too unusual
and striking. Poor Dorothea! compared with her, the innocent-looking
Celia was knowing and worldly-wise; so much subtler is a human mind
than the outside tissues which make a sort of blazonry or clock-face for it.

Yet those who approached Dorothea, though prejudiced against her
by this alarming hearsay, found that she had a charm unaccountably
reconcilable with it. Most men thought her bewitching when she
was on horseback. She loved the fresh air and the various aspects
of the country, and when her eyes and cheeks glowed with mingled
pleasure she looked very little like a devotee. Riding was an
indulgence which she allowed herself in spite of conscientious qualms;
she felt that she enjoyed it in a pagan sensuous way, and always
looked forward to renouncing it.

She was open, ardent, and not in the least self-admiring; indeed,
it was pretty to see how her imagination adorned her sister Celia
with attractions altogether superior to her own, and if any gentleman
appeared to come to the Grange from some other motive than that of
seeing Mr. Brooke, she concluded that he must be in love with Celia:
Sir James Chettam, for example, whom she constantly considered from
Celia's point of view, inwardly debating whether it would be good
for Celia to accept him. That he should be regarded as a suitor
to herself would have seemed to her a ridiculous irrelevance.
Dorothea, with all her eagerness to know the truths of life,
retained very childlike ideas about marriage. She felt sure that
she would have accepted the judicious Hooker, if she had been born
in time to save him from that wretched mistake he made in matrimony;
or John Milton when his blindness had come on; or any of the other
great men whose odd habits it would have been glorious piety to endure;
but an amiable handsome baronet, who said "Exactly" to her remarks
even when she expressed uncertainty,--how could he affect her as a
lover? The really delightful marriage must be that where your husband
was a sort of father, and could teach you even Hebrew, if you wished it.

These peculiarities of Dorothea's character caused Mr. Brooke
to be all the more blamed in neighboring families for not securing
some middle-aged lady as guide and companion to his nieces.
But he himself dreaded so much the sort of superior woman likely
to be available for such a position, that he allowed himself to be
dissuaded by Dorothea's objections, and was in this case brave enough
to defy the world--that is to say, Mrs. Cadwallader the Rector's wife,
and the small group of gentry with whom he visited in the northeast corner
of Loamshire. So Miss Brooke presided in her uncle's household, and
did not at all dislike her new authority, with the homage that belonged to it.

Sir James Chettam was going to dine at the Grange to-day with
another gentleman whom the girls had never seen, and about whom
Dorothea felt some venerating expectation. This was the Reverend
Edward Casaubon, noted in the county as a man of profound learning,
understood for many years to be engaged on a great work concerning
religious history; also as a man of wealth enough to give lustre
to his piety, and having views of his own which were to be more
clearly ascertained on the publication of his book. His very name
carried an impressiveness hardly to be measured without a precise
chronology of scholarship.

Early in the day Dorothea had returned from the infant school
which she had set going in the village, and was taking her usual
place in the pretty sitting-room which divided the bedrooms
of the sisters, bent on finishing a plan for some buildings (a
kind of work which she delighted in), when Celia, who had been
watching her with a hesitating desire to propose something, said--

"Dorothea, dear, if you don't mind--if you are not very busy--suppose we
looked at mamma's jewels to-day, and divided them? It is exactly six months
to-day since uncle gave them to you, and you have not looked at them yet."

Celia's face had the shadow of a pouting expression in it, the full
presence of the pout being kept back by an habitual awe of Dorothea
and principle; two associated facts which might show a mysterious
electricity if you touched them incautiously. To her relief,
Dorothea's eyes were full of laughter as she looked up.

"What a wonderful little almanac you are, Celia! Is it six calendar
or six lunar months?"

"It is the last day of September now, and it was the first of
April when uncle gave them to you. You know, he said that he
had forgotten them till then. I believe you have never thought
of them since you locked them up in the cabinet here."

"Well, dear, we should never wear them, you know." Dorothea spoke
in a full cordial tone, half caressing, half explanatory.
She had her pencil in her hand, and was making tiny side-plans
on a margin.

Celia colored, and looked very grave. "I think, dear, we are
wanting in respect to mamma's memory, to put them by and take
no notice of them. And," she added, after hesitating a little,
with a rising sob of mortification, "necklaces are quite usual now;
and Madame Poincon, who was stricter in some things even than you are,
used to wear ornaments. And Christians generally--surely there are
women in heaven now who wore jewels." Celia was conscious of some
mental strength when she really applied herself to argument.

"You would like to wear them?" exclaimed Dorothea, an air of astonished
discovery animating her whole person with a dramatic action which she
had caught from that very Madame Poincon who wore the ornaments.
"Of course, then, let us have them out. Why did you not tell me
before? But the keys, the keys!" She pressed her hands against
the sides of her head and seemed to despair of her memory.

"They are here," said Celia, with whom this explanation had been
long meditated and prearranged.

"Pray open the large drawer of the cabinet and get out the jewel-box."

The casket was soon open before them, and the various jewels spread out,
making a bright parterre on the table. It was no great collection,
but a few of the ornaments were really of remarkable beauty, the finest
that was obvious at first being a necklace of purple amethysts set
in exquisite gold work, and a pearl cross with five brilliants in it.
Dorothea immediately took up the necklace and fastened it round
her sister's neck, where it fitted almost as closely as a bracelet;
but the circle suited the Henrietta-Maria style of Celia's head
and neck, and she could see that it did, in the pier-glass opposite.

"There, Celia! you can wear that with your Indian muslin.
But this cross you must wear with your dark dresses."

Celia was trying not to smile with pleasure. "O Dodo, you must
keep the cross yourself."

"No, no, dear, no," said Dorothea, putting up her hand with
careless deprecation.

"Yes, indeed you must; it would suit you--in your black dress, now,"
said Celia, insistingly. "You MIGHT wear that."

"Not for the world, not for the world. A cross is the last thing
I would wear as a trinket." Dorothea shuddered slightly.

"Then you will think it wicked in me to wear it," said Celia, uneasily.

"No, dear, no," said Dorothea, stroking her sister's cheek.
"Souls have complexions too: what will suit one will not suit another."

"But you might like to keep it for mamma's sake."

"No, I have other things of mamma's--her sandal-wood box which I am
so fond of--plenty of things. In fact, they are all yours, dear.
We need discuss them no longer. There--take away your property."

Celia felt a little hurt. There was a strong assumption of superiority
in this Puritanic toleration, hardly less trying to the blond
flesh of an unenthusiastic sister than a Puritanic persecution.

"But how can I wear ornaments if you, who are the elder sister,
will never wear them?"

"Nay, Celia, that is too much to ask, that I should wear trinkets
to keep you in countenance. If I were to put on such a necklace
as that, I should feel as if I had been pirouetting. The world
would go round with me, and I should not know how to walk."

Celia had unclasped the necklace and drawn it off. "It would be
a little tight for your neck; something to lie down and hang would
suit you better," she said, with some satisfaction. The complete
unfitness of the necklace from all points of view for Dorothea,
made Celia happier in taking it. She was opening some ring-boxes,
which disclosed a fine emerald with diamonds, and just then the sun
passing beyond a cloud sent a bright gleam over the table.

"How very beautiful these gems are!" said Dorothea, under a new current
of feeling, as sudden as the gleam. "It is strange how deeply colors
seem to penetrate one, like scent I suppose that is the reason why
gems are used as spiritual emblems in the Revelation of St. John.
They look like fragments of heaven. I think that emerald is more
beautiful than any of them."

"And there is a bracelet to match it," said Celia. "We did not
notice this at first."

"They are lovely," said Dorothea, slipping the ring and bracelet
on her finely turned finger and wrist, and holding them towards
the window on a level with her eyes. All the while her thought
was trying to justify her delight in the colors by merging them
in her mystic religious joy.

"You WOULD like those, Dorothea," said Celia, rather falteringly,
beginning to think with wonder that her sister showed some weakness,
and also that emeralds would suit her own complexion even better
than purple amethysts. "You must keep that ring and bracelet--if
nothing else. But see, these agates are very pretty and quiet."

"Yes! I will keep these--this ring and bracelet," said Dorothea.
Then, letting her hand fall on the table, she said in another
tone--"Yet what miserable men find such things, and work at them,
and sell them!" She paused again, and Celia thought that her sister
was going to renounce the ornaments, as in consistency she ought
to do.

"Yes, dear, I will keep these," said Dorothea, decidedly. "But take
all the rest away, and the casket."

She took up her pencil without removing the jewels, and still
looking at them. She thought of often having them by her, to feed
her eye at these little fountains of pure color.

"Shall you wear them in company?" said Celia, who was watching
her with real curiosity as to what she would do.

Dorothea glanced quickly at her sister. Across all her imaginative
adornment of those whom she loved, there darted now and then
a keen discernment, which was not without a scorching quality.
If Miss Brooke ever attained perfect meekness, it would not be
for lack of inward fire.

"Perhaps," she said, rather haughtily. "I cannot tell to what level
I may sink."

Celia blushed, and was unhappy: she saw that she had offended
her sister, and dared not say even anything pretty about the gift
of the ornaments which she put back into the box and carried away.
Dorothea too was unhappy, as she went on with her plan-drawing,
questioning the purity of her own feeling and speech in the scene
which had ended with that little explosion.

Celia's consciousness told her that she had not been at all in the
wrong: it was quite natural and justifiable that she should have
asked that question, and she repeated to herself that Dorothea was
inconsistent: either she should have taken her full share of the jewels,
or, after what she had said, she should have renounced them altogether.

"I am sure--at least, I trust," thought Celia, "that the wearing
of a necklace will not interfere with my prayers. And I do not see
that I should be bound by Dorothea's opinions now we are going
into society, though of course she herself ought to be bound by them.
But Dorothea is not always consistent."

Thus Celia, mutely bending over her tapestry, until she heard
her sister calling her.

"Here, Kitty, come and look at my plan; I shall think I am
a great architect, if I have not got incompatible stairs and fireplaces."

As Celia bent over the paper, Dorothea put her cheek against
her sister's arm caressingly. Celia understood the action.
Dorothea saw that she had been in the wrong, and Celia pardoned her.
Since they could remember, there had been a mixture of criticism
and awe in the attitude of Celia's mind towards her elder sister.
The younger had always worn a yoke; but is there any yoked creature
without its private opinions?

CHAPTER II.

"`Dime; no ves aquel caballero que hacia nosotros viene sobre un
caballo rucio rodado que trae puesto en la cabeza un yelmo de oro?'
`Lo que veo y columbro,' respondio Sancho, `no es sino un hombre
sobre un as no pardo como el mio, que trae sobre la cabeza una
cosa que relumbra.' `Pues ese es el yelmo de Mambrino,' dijo Don
Quijote."--CERVANTES.

"`Seest thou not yon cavalier who cometh toward us on a
dapple-gray steed, and weareth a golden helmet?' `What I see,'
answered Sancho, `is nothing but a man on a gray ass like my own,
who carries something shiny on his head.' `Just so,' answered Don
Quixote: `and that resplendent object is the helmet of Mambrino.'"

"Sir Humphry Davy?" said Mr. Brooke, over the soup, in his easy
smiling way, taking up Sir James Chettam's remark that he was studying
Davy's Agricultural Chemistry. "Well, now, Sir Humphry Davy;
I dined with him years ago at Cartwright's, and Wordsworth was there
too--the poet Wordsworth, you know. Now there was something singular.
I was at Cambridge when Wordsworth was there, and I never met him--and
I dined with him twenty years afterwards at Cartwright's. There's
an oddity in things, now. But Davy was there: he was a poet too.
Or, as I may say, Wordsworth was poet one, and Davy was poet two.
That was true in every sense, you know."

Dorothea felt a little more uneasy than usual. In the beginning
of dinner, the party being small and the room still, these motes from
the mass of a magistrate's mind fell too noticeably. She wondered
how a man like Mr. Casaubon would support such triviality. His manners,
she thought, were very dignified; the set of his iron-gray hair
and his deep eye-sockets made him resemble the portrait of Locke.
He had the spare form and the pale complexion which became a student;
as different as possible from the blooming Englishman of the
red-whiskered type represented by Sir James Chettam.

"I am reading the Agricultural Chemistry," said this excellent baronet,
"because I am going to take one of the farms into my own hands,
and see if something cannot be done in setting a good pattern
of farming among my tenants. Do you approve of that, Miss Brooke?"

"A great mistake, Chettam," interposed Mr. Brooke, "going into
electrifying your land and that kind of thing, and making a parlor
of your cow-house. It won't do. I went into science a great deal
myself at one time; but I saw it would not do. It leads to everything;
you can let nothing alone. No, no--see that your tenants don't sell
their straw, and that kind of thing; and give them draining-tiles,
you know. But your fancy farming will not do--the most expensive
sort of whistle you can buy: you may as well keep a pack of hounds."