BOOKS.
MIDDLEMARCH.—PART III.*
Middlernarch improves in interest as it goes on ;—in intellectual. ability it would be very hard for it to improve ; indeed, perhaps, the greatest improvement of which it is susceptible in that direc- tion would be something more of reserve in the display of the. authore.ss's excessive, almost morbid, intellectual ability. As it is, she crowds her books as full of eyes as some of the lower insects. are said to be ; she dissects her own characters till she spoils the charm of some of them, and makes the humour of others of her- conceptions too evident by subtle comment and elaborate analysis. Middlemarch is not only a sketch of country life, connected by a. story, but a running fire of criticism as well. Sometimes the reader feels that the author is unfairly running down one of her own charac- ters ;—that she has conceived in her imagination a much more- pleasant character than her party-spirit, as it were, chooses to admit. For instance, it is quite clear that George Eliot decidedly dislikes the type of pretty, attractive, gentle, sensible, limited young ladies so common in modern life, and loses no oppor- tunity of plunging the dissecting-knife into them. Celia Brooke and Rosamond Vincy are the two representatives of this species in the upper and middle spheres of Middle- * Miactlemarch. By George Eliot. Book ILL—Waiting for Death. London: Blackwood. march society, and Celia Brooke and Rosamond Vincy are, to use an expressive, though rude, schoolboy phrase, "always catching it" from the authoress, till we feel decidedly disposed to take their sides. For George Eliot's imagination is too powerful to let her paint these young people exactly as she would (from her Own partisan point of view) be inclined to do ; she cannot help making us feel, especially of Rosamond Vincy, that however conventional she may be, her's is really a sweet and lovable nature at bottom, and yet she won't let anyone entertain the feeling with- out an admonitory "shallow creature that, that you are admiring so," in his ear. Take the following sentence, for instance, which we entirely object to, as quite beyond the proper duties of a painter of life, who has no right to try and rob her characters of the fair amount of sympathy which would be given to them in real life, except by making her picture more instructive and graphic than real life would ordinarily be. Rosamond is in love, and she has reason to fear that her castle-building has been a mis- take :—" Poor Rosamond lost her appetite, and felt as forlorn as Ariadne,—as a charming stage Ariadne left behind with all her boxes full of costumes and no hope of a coach." Now, that is not an additional touch of the artist's ; it is a malicious stab of the critic's, which makes us distrust our author's impartiality, and feel rather more disposed to take Rosamond's part than if the attack had not been made. Sir Walter Scott takes plenty of security that we shall not attach too much value to Rose Bradwardiue's tenderness for Waverley, but he never deals these unfeeling blows at her, as it were in the dark. It is Thackeray who has set the example which George Eliot so freely follows of playing un- feeling critic to his own creations, but Thackeray is at least pretty impartial, and criticizes his " puppets " all round with even satiric indifference. George Eliot has favourites and aversions, and deals very hardly by the latter.
But we are finding too much fault where our own predominant feeling is admiration. This book of illiddlemarch has certainly as much power in it as either of the others, and more wit. The last scene, the death of Mr. Featherstone, is very finely conceived, and every page in the book is written as no other author in the world could have written it. There is much less of the high- scientific style, which, though it is not pedantry in George Eliot,—who is incapable of pedantry,—has all the effect of it to those who do not know her writings well ; and though there is certainly not leas of that bitter criticism which, we dislike in George Eliot, whose style is too simple and broad for such needle-pricks of acrid banter, there are more than usual of those exquisite touches of humorous observation which make the pages teem with occasions of silent laughter, without vexing the reader by any trace of bitterness. What can be more perfect than the sketch of the veterinary surgeon, Mr. Horrock, and the horse-dealer, Mr. Bambridge, in whose company Fred Vincy rides to Eloundsley horse-fair, bent on selling his own back to good advantage :— "In Mr. Horrock there was certainly an apparent uufathomableness which offered play to the imagination. Costume, at a glance, gave him a thrilling association with horses (enough to specify the hat-brim, which took the slightest upward angle just to escape the suspicion of bending downwards), and nature had given him a face which by dint of Mon- golian eyes, and a nose, mouth, and chin seeming to follow his hat-brim in a moderate inclination upwards, gave the effect of a subdued unchange- able sceptical smile, of all expressions the most tyrannous over a suscep- tible mind, and, when accompanied by adequate silence, likely to create the reputation of an invincible understanding, an infinite fund of humour —too dry to flow, and probably in a state of immovable crust—and a critical judgment which, if you could ever be fortunate enough to know it, would be the thing, and no other. It is a physiognomy seen in all vocations, but perhaps it has never been more powerful over the youth of England than in a judge of horses. Mr. Horrock, at a question from Fred about his horse's fetlock, turned sideways in his saddle, and watched the horse's action for the space of three minutes, then turned forward, twitched his own bridle, and remained silent with a profile neither more nor less sceptical than it had been. The part thus played in dialogue by Mr. Horrock was terribly effective. A mixture of passions was excited in Fred,—a mad desire to thrash Horrock's opinion into utterance, restrained by anxiety to retain the advantage of his friendship. There was always the chance that Horrock might say something quite invaluable at the right moment. Mr. Bambridge had more open manners, and appeared to give forth his ideas without economy. He was loud, robust, and was sometimes spoken of as being 'given to indulgence '- chiefly in swearing, drinking, and beating his wife. Some people who had lost by him called him a vicious man ; but he regarded horse-dealing as the finest of the arts, and might have argued plausibly that it had nothing to do with morality. He was undeniably a prosperous man, bore his drinking better than others bore their moderation, and, on the whole, flourished like the green bay-tree. But his range of conversation was limited, and like the fine old tune, 'Drops of brandy,' gave you after a while a sense of returning upon itself in a way that might make weak heads dizzy. But a slight infusion of Mr. Bambridge was felt to give tone and character to several circles in Mtddlemarch ; and be was a distinguished figure in the bar and billiard-room at the Green Dragon. He knew some anecdotes about the heroes of the turf, and various clever tricks of Marquesses and Viscounts which seemed to prove that blood asserted its pre-eminence even among blacklegs ; but the minute reten- tiveness of his memory was chiefly shown about the horses he had him- self bought and sold; the number of miles they would trot you in no- time without turning a hair being, after the lapse of years, still a subject of passionate asseveration, in which he would assist the imagination of his hearers by solemnly swearing that they never saw anything like it. In short, Mr. Bambridge was a man of pleasure and a gay companion. Fred was subtle, and did not tell his friends that he was going to Houndaley bent on selling his horse : he wished to get indirectly at their genuine opinion of its value, not being aware that a genuine opinion was the last thing likely to be extracted from such eminent critics. It was not Mr. Bambridge's weakness to be a gratuitous flatterer. He had never- before been so much struck with the fact that this unfortunate bay was a roarer to a degree which required the roundest word for perdition to. give you any idea of it. 'You made a bad hand at swapping when you went to anybody but me, Vincy. Why, you never threw your leg across a finer horse than that chestnut, and you gave him for this brute. If yon set him cantering, he goes on like twenty sawyers. I never heard but one worse roarer in my life, and that was a roan : it belonged to Pegwell, the corn-factor ; he used to drive him in his gig seven years ago, and he wanted me to take him, but I said, 'Thank you, Peg, I dont deal in wind-instruments.' That was what I said. It went the round of ths country, that joke did. But, what the hell ! the horse was a penny trumpet to that roarer of yours.'—' Why, you said just now his was worse than mine,' said Fred, more irritable than usual.—' I said a lie, then,' said Mr. Bambridge, emphatically. • There wasn't a penny to, choose between 'em.' Fred spurred his horse, and they trotted on a little way. When they slackened again, Mr. Bambridge said,—' Not but what the roan was a better trotter than yours.'—' I'm quite satisfied with his paces, I know,' said Fred, who required all the consciousness of' being in gay company to support him ; say, his trot is an uncommonly clean one. ! Horrock ?' Mr. Horrock looked before him with as com- plete a neutrality as if he had been a portrait by a great master."
That is both as humorous and as perfect a sketch in small com- pass as English literature could produce ; the humour makes the delineation more vivid, and the vivid delineation makes the humour more delicate : the final touch, the veterinary surgeon's absolute impassibility to Fred's leading questions,—as absolute as if he had been "a portrait of a great master,"—completing the picture with a marvellous melange of mocking associations. And what, again, can be more humorous and true than the following remark as to. the satisfactory excuse for cheerfulness discovered by Mr. Vincy when he bethought himself of calling Mr. Featherstone's expected death a "demise," and so giving it a strictly legal, instead of a. mournful and funereal aspect :— "He came again in the evening to speak with Mr. Vincy, who, just- returned from Stone Court, was feeling sure that it would not be long before he heard of Mr. Featherstone's demise. The felicitous word • demise,' which had seasonably occurred to him, had raised his spirits even above their usual evening pitch. The right word is always a power, and communicates its definiteness to our action. Considered as a demise,. old Featherstone's death assumed a merely legal aspect, so that Mr. Vincy could tap his snuff- box over it and be jovial, without even an intermittent affectation of solemnity ; and Mr. Vincy hated both solemnity and affectation. Who was ever awe-struck about a testator, or sang a hymn on the title to real property ?"
Clearly George Eliot does not know the hymn beginning, "Would, I could read my title clear to mansions in the skies," which is un- questionably entirely a conveyancer's hymn, and looks upon the future life as a remainderman or reversioner looks upon his expec- tation of " messuages and other hereditaments " after the 'demise of the tenant for life. But the truth as well as humour of the observation is perfect.
As regards the development of the main characters of the story, this new part of Middlemarch adds most to the picture of Mary Garth, which promises to be one of the author's best. Dorothea Brooke, now Dorothea Casaubon, and Mary Garth are specimens of the unconventional, warm-hearted girls whom alone George Eliot likes, just as Celia Brooke and Rosamond Vincy are specimens of the "nice," superficial, conventional young ladies whom she de- tests, and to whom she is tempted to be more unfair than to any other manner of human creature, even poor Mr. Casaubon (who. "quivers thread-like in small currents of self-preoccupation, or at best of an egoistic scrupulosity") scarcely excepted. The character of Mary Garth, who has had a severer early training than Dorothea Brooke, though she has less of natural sweetness and enthusiasm is almost brought up in interest to that of Dorothea in this new part of Middlonarch. The scene in which she bitterly reproaches Fred for his selfish extravagance, relaxing into kindly raillery when she sees the pain. she gives,—and that in which she hands. over her earnings to her father to help him to pay the debt which Fred Vincy's extravagance has brought upon him,—when taken together with the last night scene in which she proudly refuses to destroy one of Mr. Featherstone's wills without witnesses lest she be accused of tampering with his property arrangements at the
of his weakness, bring before us a very fine and real picture of shrewdness, tenderness, bitterness, and pride. And the glimpse given us in this part of Mary Garth's father and mother adds. greatly to the power of this sketch. No one studies more carefully the relations between the characters of parents and their children than George Eliot, or is more successful in showing that difference in likeness which we habitually see in life. Mary Garth resembles her mother,—the shrewd, keen, proud, sensible housewife,—much more than her father,—the generous, delicate-minded, sensitively honourable, skilful workman, not only inexperienced in human life, but incapable of experience in it, to whom no experience of human untrustworthiness can teach distrust ; but she has none of her mother's didactic precision, none of her governessy qualities—if we may be permitted to coin a word —and in inheriting something of her father's finer suscepti- bility of nature, the daughter has inherited what tends to disturb the balance of her judgment, and to complicate her nature with impulses of a softer and finer kind than would seem to belong to her brusque and slightly haughty character. The peremptoriness with which she keeps down her real affection for Fred Vincy, allowing it only to give her a maternal sort of tenderness in reproving his faults and trying to put him in a better way of living, is drawn with the utmost delicacy ; indeed, this part raises a hope that we shall have in Mary Garth a figure at least as powerful as Dorothea Casaubon, whose character gains no absolutely new development in this striking and vigorous instal- ment of George Eliot's tolerably even and placid, though morbidly intellectual tale.
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