1Middlemarch By George Eliot
New York and Boston
H. M. Caldwell Company Publishers
PRELUDE
Who that cares much to know the history of man, and how themysterious mixture behaves under the varying experiments of Time, hasnot dwelt, at least briefly, on the life of Saint Theresa, has not smiledwith some gentleness at the thought of the little girl walking forth onemorning hand-in-hand with her still smaller brother, to go and seekmartyrdom in the country of the Moors? Out they toddled from ruggedAvila, wide-eyed and helpless-looking as two fawns, but with humanhearts, already beating to a national idea; until domestic reality metthem in the shape of uncles, and turned them back from their greatresolve. That child-pilgrimage was a fit beginning. Theresa's passionate,ideal nature demanded an epic life: what were many-volumed romancesof chivalry and the social conquests of a brilliant girl to her? Her flamequickly burned up that light fuel; and, fed from within, soared aftersome illimitable satisfaction, some object which would never justifyweariness, which would reconcile self-despair with the rapturousconsciousness of life beyond self. She found her epos in the reform of areligious order.
That Spanish woman who lived three hundred years ago, wascertainly not the last of her kind. Many Theresas have been born whofound for themselves no epic life wherein there was a constant unfoldingof far-resonant action; perhaps only a life of mistakes, the offspring of acertain spiritual grandeur ill-matched with the meanness of opportunity;perhaps a tragic failure which found no sacred poet and sank unweptinto oblivion. With dim lights and tangled circumstance they tried toshape their thought and deed in noble agreement; but after all, tocommon eyes their struggles seemed mere inconsistency andformlessness; for these later-born Theresas were helped by no coherentsocial faith and order which could perform the function of knowledge forthe ardently willing soul. Their ardor alternated between a vague idealand the common yearning of womanhood; so that the one wasdisapproved as extravagance, and the other condemned as a lapse.
Some have felt that these blundering lives are due to theinconvenient indefiniteness with which the Supreme Power hasfashioned the natures of women: if there were one level of feminineincompetence as strict as the ability to count three and no more, thesocial lot of women might be treated with scientific certitude. Meanwhilethe indefiniteness remains, and the limits of variation are really muchwider than any one would imagine from the sameness of women'scoiffure and the favorite love-stories in prose and verse. Here and there acygnet is reared uneasily among the ducklings in the brown pond, andnever finds the living stream in fellowship with its own oary-footed kind.Here and there is born a Saint Theresa, foundress of nothing, whoseloving heart-beats and sobs after an unattained goodness tremble off andare 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 intorelief by poor dress. Her hand and wrist were so finely formed that shecould wear sleeves not less bare of style than those in which the BlessedVirgin appeared to Italian painters; and her profile as well as her statureand bearing seemed to gain the more dignity from her plain garments,which by the side of provincial fashion gave her the impressiveness of afine quotation from the Bible,—or from one of our elder poets,—in aparagraph of to-day's newspaper. She was usually spoken of as beingremarkably clever, but with the addition that her sister Celia had morecommon-sense. Nevertheless, Celia wore scarcely more trimmings; and itwas only to close observers that her dress differed from her sister's, andhad a shade of coquetry in its arrangements; for Miss Brooke's plaindressing was due to mixed conditions, in most of which her sistershared. The pride of being ladies had something to do with it: the Brookeconnections, though not exactly aristocratic, were unquestionably "good:"if you inquired backward for a generation or two, you would not find anyyard-measuring or parcel-tying forefathers—anything lower than anadmiral or a clergyman; and there was even an ancestor discernible as aPuritan gentleman who served under Cromwell, but afterwardsconformed, and managed to come out of all political troubles as theproprietor of a respectable family estate. Young women of such birth,living in a quiet country-house, and attending a village church hardlylarger than a parlor, naturally regarded frippery as the ambition of ahuckster's daughter. Then there was well-bred economy, which in thosedays made show in dress the first item to be deducted from, when anymargin was required for expenses more distinctive of rank. Such reasonswould have been enough to account for plain dress, quite apart fromreligious feeling; but in Miss Brooke's case, religion alone would havedetermined it; and Celia mildly acquiesced in all her sister's sentiments,only infusing them with that common-sense which is able to acceptmomentous doctrines without any eccentric agitation. Dorothea knewmany passages of Pascal's Pensees and of Jeremy Taylor by heart; and toher the destinies of mankind, seen by the light of Christianity, made thesolicitudes of feminine fashion appear an occupation for Bedlam. Shecould not reconcile the anxieties of a spiritual life involving eternalconsequences, with a keen interest in gimp and artificial protrusions ofdrapery. Her mind was theoretic, and yearned by its nature after somelofty conception of the world which might frankly include the parish ofTipton and her own rule of conduct there; she was enamoured ofintensity and greatness, and rash in embracing whatever seemed to herto have those aspects; likely to seek martyrdom, to make retractations,and then to incur martyrdom after all in a quarter where she had notsought it. Certainly such elements in the character of a marriageable girltended to interfere with her lot, and hinder it from being decidedaccording to custom, by good looks, vanity, and merely canine affection.With all this, she, the elder of the sisters, was not yet twenty, and theyhad both been educated, since they were about twelve years old and hadlost their parents, on plans at once narrow and promiscuous, first in anEnglish family and afterwards in a Swiss family at Lausanne, theirbachelor uncle and guardian trying in this way to remedy thedisadvantages of their orphaned condition.
It was hardly a year since they had come to live at Tipton Grangewith their uncle, a man nearly sixty, of acquiescent temper,miscellaneous opinions, and uncertain vote. He had travelled in hisyounger years, and was held in this part of the county to have contracteda too rambling habit of mind. Mr. Brooke's conclusions were as difficultto predict as the weather: it was only safe to say that he would act withbenevolent intentions, and that he would spend as little money aspossible in carrying them out. For the most glutinously indefinite mindsenclose some hard grains of habit; and a man has been seen lax about allhis own interests except the retention of his snuff-box, concerning whichhe was watchful, suspicious, and greedy of clutch.
In Mr. Brooke the hereditary strain of Puritan energy was clearly inabeyance; but in his niece Dorothea it glowed alike through faults andvirtues, turning sometimes into impatience of her uncle's talk or his wayof "letting things be" on his estate, and making her long all the more forthe time when she would be of age and have some command of moneyfor generous schemes. She was regarded as an heiress; for not only hadthe sisters seven hundred a-year each from their parents, but if Dorotheamarried and had a son, that son would inherit Mr. Brooke's estate,presumably worth about three thousand a-year—a rental which seemedwealth to provincial families, still discussing Mr. Peel's late conduct onthe Catholic question, innocent of future gold-fields, and of that gorgeousplutocracy which has so nobly exalted the necessities of genteel life.
And how should Dorothea not marry?—a girl so handsome and withsuch prospects? Nothing could hinder it but her love of extremes, andher insistence on regulating life according to notions which might cause awary man to hesitate before he made her an offer, or even might lead herat last to refuse all offers. A young lady of some birth and fortune, whoknelt suddenly down on a brick floor by the side of a sick laborer andprayed fervidly as if she thought herself living in the time of theApostles—who had strange whims of fasting like a Papist, and of sittingup at night to read old theological books! Such a wife might awaken yousome fine morning with a new scheme for the application of her incomewhich would interfere with political economy and the keeping of saddle-horses: a man would naturally think twice before he risked himself insuch fellowship. Women were expected to have weak opinions; but thegreat safeguard of society and of domestic life was, that opinions werenot acted on. Sane people did what their neighbors did, so that if anylunatics were at large, one might know and avoid them.
The rural opinion about the new young ladies, even among thecottagers, was generally in favor of Celia, as being so amiable andinnocent-looking, while Miss Brooke's large eyes seemed, like herreligion, too unusual and striking. Poor Dorothea! compared with her,the innocent-looking Celia was knowing and worldly-wise; so muchsubtler is a human mind than the outside tissues which make a sort ofblazonry or clock-face for it.
Yet those who approached Dorothea, though prejudiced against herby this alarming hearsay, found that she had a charm unaccountablyreconcilable with it. Most men thought her bewitching when she was onhorseback. She loved the fresh air and the various aspects of the country,and when her eyes and cheeks glowed with mingled pleasure she lookedvery little like a devotee. Riding was an indulgence which she allowedherself in spite of conscientious qualms; she felt that she enjoyed it in apagan sensuous way, and always looked forward to renouncing it.
She was open, ardent, and not in the least self-admiring; indeed, itwas pretty to see how her imagination adorned her sister Celia withattractions altogether superior to her own, and if any gentlemanappeared to come to the Grange from some other motive than that ofseeing Mr. Brooke, she concluded that he must be in love with Celia: SirJames Chettam, for example, whom she constantly considered fromCelia's point of view, inwardly debating whether it would be good forCelia to accept him. That he should be regarded as a suitor to herselfwould have seemed to her a ridiculous irrelevance. Dorothea, with all hereagerness to know the truths of life, retained very childlike ideas aboutmarriage. She felt sure that she would have accepted the judiciousHooker, if she had been born in time to save him from that wretchedmistake he made in matrimony; or John Milton when his blindness hadcome on; or any of the other great men whose odd habits it would havebeen glorious piety to endure; but an amiable handsome baronet, whosaid "Exactly" to her remarks even when she expressed uncertainty,—howcould he affect her as a lover? The really delightful marriage must bethat where your husband was a sort of father, and could teach you evenHebrew, if you wished it.
These peculiarities of Dorothea's character caused Mr. Brooke to beall the more blamed in neighboring families for not securing somemiddle-aged lady as guide and companion to his nieces. But he himselfdreaded so much the sort of superior woman likely to be available forsuch a position, that he allowed himself to be dissuaded by Dorothea'sobjections, and was in this case brave enough to defy the world—that isto say, Mrs. Cadwallader the Rector's wife, and the small group of gentrywith whom he visited in the northeast corner of Loamshire. So MissBrooke presided in her uncle's household, and did not at all dislike hernew authority, with the homage that belonged to it.
Sir James Chettam was going to dine at the Grange to-day withanother gentleman whom the girls had never seen, and about whomDorothea felt some venerating expectation. This was the ReverendEdward Casaubon, noted in the county as a man of profound learning,understood for many years to be engaged on a great work concerningreligious history; also as a man of wealth enough to give lustre to hispiety, and having views of his own which were to be more clearlyascertained on the publication of his book. His very name carried animpressiveness hardly to be measured without a precise chronology ofscholarship.
Early in the day Dorothea had returned from the infant school whichshe had set going in the village, and was taking her usual place in thepretty sitting-room which divided the bedrooms of the sisters, bent onfinishing a plan for some buildings (a kind of work which she delightedin), when Celia, who had been watching her with a hesitating desire topropose 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 isexactly six months to-day since uncle gave them to you, and you havenot looked at them yet."
Celia's face had the shadow of a pouting expression in it, the fullpresence of the pout being kept back by an habitual awe of Dorothea andprinciple; two associated facts which might show a mysterious electricityif you touched them incautiously. To her relief, Dorothea's eyes were fullof laughter as she looked up.
"What a wonderful little almanac you are, Celia! Is it six calendar orsix lunar months?"
"It is the last day of September now, and it was the first of Aprilwhen uncle gave them to you. You know, he said that he had forgottenthem till then. I believe you have never thought of them since you lockedthem up in the cabinet here."
"Well, dear, we should never wear them, you know." Dorothea spokein a full cordial tone, half caressing, half explanatory. She had her pencilin her hand, and was making tiny side-plans on a margin.
Celia colored, and looked very grave. "I think, dear, we are wantingin respect to mamma's memory, to put them by and take no notice ofthem. And," she added, after hesitating a little, with a rising sob ofmortification, "necklaces are quite usual now; and Madame Poincon, whowas stricter in some things even than you are, used to wear ornaments.And Christians generally—surely there are women in heaven now whowore jewels." Celia was conscious of some mental strength when shereally applied herself to argument.
