THE STORIES OF TWO WORLDS:

MIDDLEMARCH AND FLEURANGE.

Between the world of Middlemarch and the world of Fleurange there yawns as wide a moral gulf as that which nature has set between the continents. The one is a world with God, the other without. It is not that George Eliot’s story partakes of the characteristics which usually attach to female novelists, with their vague interpretations of the Sixth and Ninth Commandments; nor, on the other hand, that Fleurange is in any sense a goody-goody book. But the authors occupying essentially different stand-points, all things naturally wear a different aspect; their characters are subject to a different order; all life has a different meaning; so that, though the subject of each is humanity, its crosses and loads of sorrow and pain, rather than its laughter and gladness; though the men and women breathe the same air, are warmed by the same sun their, faces wet with human tears, their hearts sore with human sorrows; nevertheless, through either book runs an abiding tone felt rather than heard, like an unseen odor pervading the atmosphere, which affects the reader differently throughout. The characters in the one believe in, pray to, love, obey, or rebel against a definite, personal God; the presiding spirit in the other veils his face, and it is not for man to say who he is. The author only sees men and women gathered together in this world—how, they know not; why, it is difficult to conceive—and all we know for certain is that here they are, coming in contact one with the other, increasing, multiplying, and dropping out after each one has added his necessary mite to the immensity of the universe.

There are books and writings which seem rather the production of an age than of any particular author; which seem to take up and gather into one voice the long inarticulate breathing of a portion of humanity, dumb hitherto for want of an oracle. Such were the writings previous to the first French Revolution; such are the songs of Ireland; such, after a certain fashion, is Middlemarch. It is measuring daily life by the favorite doctrines of the day, whose holders profess to see things as they are, and to judge of them purely and solely by what they see, explaining them as best they may. To remind such people that often the visible is the appearance only, the invisible the reality, is to speak to them a language they will not understand.

Middlemarch is a story of English provincial life as English provincial life obtained fifty years ago; at the dawn, that is, practically speaking, of this wonderful XIXth century; before California and Australia had discovered their golden secret, when steam was still in its infancy, electric telegraphs unknown, and the sciences just beginning to take a bolder flight. In England, O’Connell was thundering for Catholic emancipation, and the nation clamoring for that vague thing in the mouth of the masses—reform.

Just as matters were in this chrysalis state, whilst the masses were still undisturbed by the wonders of the century, or, if the phrase is better, not educated up to them, George Eliot settles down in that dullest of places, an English provincial district, to give us

“The story of its life from year to year.”

The story covers very extensive ground; all Middlemarch, in fact, with its parishes and towns, its churches and taverns, its clergy and magistrates, its physicians and shopkeepers, its gentry and its yokels, its good men and its rascals, its maidens young and old, its loves and its hates, its hopes and its fears, its marriages and deaths, its thoughts, words, and deeds, from high to low—such is the broad scope of the book, and the author has gathered all in in a manner to make the reader wonder. Nothing has escaped her eye. One seems to have been living in Middlemarch all his life, and every character comes and goes with the face of an old acquaintance. It is not the author’s fault if the district be a narrow one—narrow, that is, in ideas, in knowledge, in faith, in all that ennobles man. It is not her fault if its great ideas take the shape of “keys to all mythologies”; if its religion is a poor affair at the best; if its leading men are religious hypocrites like Mr. Bulstrode, or philanthropic asses like Mr. Brooke, who “goes in” for everything, and talks the broadest and vaguest philanthropy whilst he pinches his tenants. It is not the author’s fault if generosity find no place in Middlemarch; if honesty is misunderstood or at a discount; if the local physicians throw discredit upon Lydgate with his youth, his burning desire to achieve, his cleverness, and his genuine enthusiasm; if they call his ideas quackery, because they threaten their pockets, as the yokels in turn look upon the railway as destruction, and hold that steam takes the handle from the plough and the pitchfork; as Middlemarch receives Dorothea Brooke’s generous aspirations after a higher life than that which, in response to the question of an ardent nature, “What can I do?” says, “Whatever you please, my dear”—as “notions” which are wrong in themselves, because undreamed of in Middlemarch philosophy, which, in Miss Brooke are odd, and which, if carried a little farther, would find their fitting sphere of action in the lunatic asylum.

It is not the author’s fault if all this be so; if there be nothing in Middlemarch beyond the common good, and very little even of that, whilst all the rest is mean, sordid, crooked, narrow, and outspokenly wicked. Such is Middlemarch, and such is it given to us. The only question is, How far does Middlemarch extend? Is it restricted to the English county, or is it a miniature photograph of the world as seen by George Eliot?

In the keynote to the whole book, the prelude, the author cries out bitterly that in this world and in these days there is no place for a S. Teresa. In this assertion, in this wail rather, the author does not limit her district to Middlemarch. It is a doctrine meant to apply to the broad world. Throughout the book the same thing is to be observed. Though with wonderful consistency and truth of local coloring, and continual recurrence of petty local questions and local ideas, the author keeps the reader in Middlemarch from beginning to end, nevertheless, whether with or without intention, from time to time she strikes out with broader aim, and flings her sarcasm, or her observation, or her moral, such as it may be, in the face of humanity.

Therefore, though it would be unfair to infer that George Eliot’s views of the world, its possibilities, its hopes, its all that makes it what it is, are confined to the cramped, narrow, provincial district chosen as the subject of her story; to allege that she believes in nothing nobler now in humanity than what Middlemarch affords; yet so wide is the district embraced, so various the subjects entered into, not merely touched upon—religion, politics, the bettering of the poor, marriage, preparation for the married state, and the effect of such preparation on married life, the thousand conflicts that meet, and jostle, and combine to make everyday life what it is—it is not unfair to say that the author, in drawing within this somewhat narrow circle the main elements which compose humanity, has taken Middlemarch up as a scientist would take a basin of water from the sea to examine it—not for the sake of that sample only, but with a view to the whole.

The chief interest of the story, if story it can be called, lies in this: From the outstart, the author warns you that a S. Teresa has no place in the world now; and, to prove that her warning is correct, she takes up a character, Dorothea Brooke, endows her with the aspirations after a great life, fits her naturally, as far as she can, with every attribute, physical and moral, which she considers a S. Teresa ought to possess; with religious feelings, with the continual desire to do good, with charity, with purity, with the spirit of self-sacrifice, with simplicity, and truth, and utter unconsciousness of self, with wealth enough even, as the author says of Mr. Casaubon, “to lend a lustre to her piety,” and sets her down in the narrow Middlemarch set, where everything runs in a groove, and life is measured by all the pettinesses, to see what will become of her.

The result may as well be told at once. S. Teresa proves a miserable failure in Middlemarch. Instead of marrying, as the world—that is to say, Mrs. Cadwallader—had ordained she should do, the handsome, florid, conventional English baronet, Sir James Chettam, a sort of aristocratic “Mr. Toots,” who is so amiable and admires her so much that he brings her triumphs of nature in the shape of marvellous Maltese puppies as presents, and says “exactly” to all her observations, even when she desires him to say the contrary—out of a spirit of religion, self-sacrifice, and veneration, and honestly because she admires the man, or rather the being dressed out to suit by her own imagination, she marries Mr. Casaubon, with his sallow complexion, his moles, his blinking eyes, and his age, which is more than double her own. Unsympathetic to the loving nature of the girl as a wooden doll whose complexion has suffered and whose form is battered by age, but which notwithstanding the girl invests with all the qualities and beauty of a Prince Charming—a deception that time alone and that ugly thing, common sense, can remove—S. Teresa speedily discovers that her “divine Hooker,” as she fondly imagined him, is after all only “a poor creature,” and she is probably saved from the divorce court only by the timely death of the “divine Hooker.” She discovered that she had married the wrong man—exactly what Middlemarch told her; and there lies the provoking part of the story. Middlemarch was right in its degree, and the woman, whose ideas soared so high above it, was all the worse off for not taking its advice at the outstart. S. Teresa repents of her sin, and characteristically atones for it by marrying the right man—at least, the man she loves and who loves her—and is dismissed in the following remarks, which close the book:

“Certainly those determining acts of her life were not ideally beautiful. They were the mixed result of young and noble impulse struggling under prosaic conditions. Among the many remarks passed on her mistakes, it was never said in the neighborhood of Middlemarch that such mistakes could not have happened if the society into which she was born had not smiled on propositions of marriage from a sickly man to a girl less than half his own age, on modes of education which make a woman’s knowledge another name for motley ignorance, on rules of conduct which are in flat contradiction with its own loudly asserted beliefs. While this is the social air in which mortals begin to breathe, there will be collisions such as those in Dorothea’s life, where great feelings will take the aspect of error, and great faith the aspect of illusion; for there is no creature whose inward being is so strong that it is not greatly determined by what lies outside it. A new Teresa will hardly have the opportunity of reforming a conventual life any more than a new Antigone will spend her heroic piety in daring all for the sake of a brother’s burial; the medium in which their ardent deeds took shape is for ever gone. But we insignificant people, with our daily words and acts, are preparing the lives of many Dorotheas, some of which may present a far sadder sacrifice than that of Dorothea whose story we know.

“Her finely touched spirit had still its fine issues, though they were not widely visible. Her full nature, like that river of which Alexander broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive; for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”

George Eliot writes too earnestly to laugh at. Besides, she is not a Catholic—very far from it; and therefore her views of what a S. Teresa is or ought to be must be radically different from those of the church from which S. Teresa sprang, in which she lived, labored, became Saint Teresa, and died. Were a Catholic to have written certain portions of the extract quoted, he would only provoke laughter; but with this author, the case is different.

It never seems to have occurred to her that S. Teresas are not self-made; as little as the prophets were self-made prophets, or the apostles self-made apostles. Neither were they made by the society which surrounded them. The supernatural state of sanctity in its fulness does not spring from humanity merely; else might we have had eras of sanctity as there have been other eras, and there might be truth in George Eliot’s words that there will be no place for a “new Teresa.” Saints are the very opposite to that growing class so glibly dubbed “providential men,” who seem to come from that vast but rather undefined region which goes by the name of “manifest destiny.” The individuals forming that happy class are set willy-nilly by “Providence” in this world to accomplish some destiny—a theory laughed at long ago by one of Mr. Disraeli’s worldly-wise characters in the words, “We make our fortunes, and we call them fate.” What the saints do they do very consciously. Sanctity consists in not being merely blameless in life, but in devoting life to God, and turning every thought, word, and action to him for his sake. The feeling that produces this state of life may be influenced at the beginning by earthly surroundings, may be shaped by good example or wise teachings, but is essentially independent of them. Sanctity comes from a direct call, as direct as the call of the apostles. It knows neither time nor place, and is therefore as possible in the XIXth as in the XVIth or the Ist century. But it is unknown outside of the church, because the head of the church, “Christ Jesus our Lord,” alone has the power to call his children to the sanctified state in this life. And if it be asked, Why, then, does he not call all to be saints here? it is as though one asked, Why did he not call all men to be apostles directly?

George Eliot’s difficulty springs from not knowing precisely what constitutes a saint.

If she only reads the life of S. Teresa, she will find that the saint of her admiration had to encounter a Middlemarch circle even in Catholic Spain. She will find her “young and noble impulse struggling under prosaic conditions”; that she had to stand the brunt of being misunderstood and misrepresented; her schemes of reform, of good works, her noble aspirations and ardent self-sacrifice, set down as “notions.” In fact, the opposition which meets her heroine at every step in her desire to do good and to be perfect, not only to herself but to others, is puny compared with that which S. Teresa had to sustain all through her life.

As a matter of fact, S. Teresa was much more of the ordinary woman than George Eliot, with a novelist’s love, makes her heroine. In her youth, she was subject to all the ordinary fancies of “the sex,” and has left us the record of her vanities, which were neither more nor less than those of ten thousand very excellent ladies living at this moment, who are no more S. Teresas than they are Aspasias; but good Christian women, girls with a happy future before them, or smiling mothers of families. It was not her surroundings which made Teresa a saint: it was her clear conception of duty, which no “prosaic conditions” could dim, and her profound and very definite faith, not in that obscure creation which George Eliot calls “the perfect Right,” but in Jesus Christ, her God.

It was perfectly natural that George Eliot’s Teresa should fail; but the mistake of the author consists in making the failure come from without rather than from within—a mistake easily understood when it is borne in mind that the author has no firm faith, possibly none at all, in Christianity. Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, all failed to make the world better, not because they may not have wished it, but because they had not the power. They were themselves uncertain of their schemes. Their highest flights, like those of the best of modern philosophers who possess no faith, never pass beyond intellectual excellence devoid of soul. They may daze the intellect, but they do not touch the soul; and the life of a man is never regulated by pure intellect. So they fail, whilst the ignorant fishermen, who lose their personality in God, move and convert the world.

In taking issue on these fundamental points with the author of Middlemarch, many of the subjects touched upon would require elaborate elucidation when read by those who are not of the Catholic faith. But space does not allow of this, and, therefore, it is to be understood that this article is supposed only to meet the eyes of persons fully acquainted at least with the Catholic manner of looking at things.

Dorothea Brooke fails in becoming a S. Teresa, as the author seems to consider she should have become, not because she has lighted on evil days and on a less congenial set than S. Teresa did, but because, in Catholic phrase, she had no vocation.

To find out what is meant by a vocation, let us anticipate, and turn a moment to Fleurange at that point in the heroine’s history where, having “tasted beforehand the bitter pleasures of sacrifice,” she retires heart-broken to the convent where she spent her youth, to find the rest and peace which seemed banished from the world after the voluntary sacrifice she had made of her affections.

“Mother Maddalena stood with her arms folded, and listened without interrupting her. Standing thus motionless in this place, at this evening hour, the noble outlines of her countenance and the long folds of her robe clearly defined against the blue mountains in the distance and the violet heavens above, she might easily have been mistaken for one of the visions of that country which have been depicted for us and all generations. The illusion would not have been dispelled by the aspect of her who, seated on the low wall of the terrace, was talking with her eyes raised, and with an expression and attitude perfectly adapted to one of those young saints often represented by the inspired artist before the divine and majestic form of the Mother of God.

“‘Well, my dear mother, what do you say?’ asked Fleurange, after waiting a long time, and seeing the Madre looking at her and gently shaking her head without any other reply.

“‘Before answering you,’ replied she at last, ‘let me ask this question: Do you think it allowable to consecrate one’s self to God in the religious life without a vocation?’

“‘Assuredly not.’

“‘And do you know what a vocation is?’ said she very slowly.

“Fleurange hesitated. ‘I thought I knew, but you ask in such a way as to make me feel now I do not.’

“‘I am going to tell you: a vocation,’ said the Madre, as her eyes lit up with an expression Fleurange had never seen before—’a vocation to the religious life is to love God more than we love any creature in the world, however dear; it is to be unable to give anything or any person on earth a love comparable to that; to feel the tendency of all our faculties incline us towards him alone; finally,’ pursued she, while her eyes seemed looking beyond the visible heavens on which they were fastened, ‘it is the full persuasion, even in this life, that he is all, our all, in the past, the present, and the future; in this world and in another, for ever, and to the exclusion of everything besides.’”

The carrying out of this feeling made Teresa a saint. It is doubtful whether such thoughts ever entered into George Eliot’s conception of the character she is continually holding up before her readers as impossible in these days. Certainly Dorothea Brooke, with all her natural goodness, never conceived such a life as that possible. The author may be right in attributing her defects to her Calvinistic education, but that does not warrant the inference that anything higher than a life which merely aims at an uncertain good, capable of influencing those coming within its circle in a certain way, is impossible in these days. When the author speaks of “great faith taking the aspect of illusion,” before conceding, one would like to see the “great faith.” Dorothea Brooke never knew what real faith was; from beginning to end, all is uncertainty with her. From girlhood up she lives in an atmosphere of self-delusion and imagination which can find no other possible vent than aimless aspirations after imaginary perfection, which must come into collision with the rough, practical world, and must finally go to the wall. But when the world sees a man or a woman acting steadily up to a practical belief which guides them in all their actions, and meets every contingency, however unexpected, and every calamity, however great, if it does not fall in and follow, it will at least respect it and acknowledge that there is something in it.

It may sound “a hard saying,” but practically there is no such thing as “ideal beauty”; and those who, like George Eliot, strive after it as the great good, pursue a phantom, a nothing, an emanation of their own imagination, and, like the poet in Shelley’s “Alastor,” waste their life in profitless longings, and when death comes—

“All

Is reft at once, when some surpassing Spirit, Whose light adorned the world around it, leaves Those who remain behind nor sobs nor groans, The passionate tumult of a clinging hope, But pale despair and cold tranquillity.”

Persons of an undefined faith, women particularly, are very much attached to this ideal beauty, and, not finding it in man, are apt to rebel against “prosaic conditions”; and those who regulate their actions by their thoughts find issue in absurdities, often in crime, more or less gross. It would be well for these theorists to remember that man after all has a considerable admixture of clay in his composition, which may explain many of those vulgar but necessary “prosaic conditions”; and until the human race comes to be fed on “vril,” the world must continue to count upon and accommodate itself to a vast amount of flesh-and-blood reality. And a beauty, far higher than any ideal beauty, is visible in the everlasting struggle between spirit and clay. There was no ideal in the death upon the cross, the consummation of Christian sacrifice. All was terribly real there, and flesh suffered as well as mind while a flutter of the spirit remained. Here lies something greater than any ideal—the spirit bracing the flesh, sustaining it when it faints, enabling it to bear all things, not blindly and as coming by fate from the hands of a blind destiny or careless power, but as trials sent from heaven to lead to heaven and prepare for heaven.

That is the fault with Middlemarch. It has all the “prosaic conditions” and nothing else. It wants nothing else; it positively revels in them. And when anything higher comes to it, it sets the higher down as “notions” in religion, or “quackery” in medicine, “or swallowing up” of the little traffic by the big in railroads.

Into these “prosaic conditions” and surroundings the author drops another character similar to that of Dorothea, as far as a man can be similar in nature to a woman, save that his religion consists in the passion for his profession, the ardent aspiration after the glory of achievement, aided by all natural gifts, and strengthened by what have been well called the “pagan virtues.” This is Lydgate, the young physician, a stranger to Middlemarch, who is possessed by the desire common to all young ambition of educating Middlemarch up to a lofty standard, and using it as a lever to move a slow world. Though perhaps as well fitted as man—considered merely as an intellectual animal endowed with Christian instincts, moved by a generous if somewhat impetuous nature, and void of the vices—could be for that purpose, the result in his case is the same as in that of Dorothea. Instead of lifting Middlemarch up to the level of his ideal, he finds himself dragged down to it; and, strangely and perhaps truthfully enough, he finds, in common with Dorothea, that the very being to whom he linked his life is the stumbling-block in the way of his achievement. Dorothea receives a fatal jar to her imaginings in the person of the husband she adored by anticipation. Lydgate finds his nature crushed and resisted at all points by the passive resistance of his wife. The woman is mercifully relieved from her incubus by death; the strong man gives way before his “so charming wife, mild in her temper, inflexible in her judgment, disposed to admonish her husband, and able to frustrate him by stratagem.”

“Lydgate’s hair never became white. He died when he was only fifty, leaving his wife and children provided for by a heavy insurance on his life. He had gained an excellent practice, ... having written a treatise on gout—a disease which has a good deal of wealth on its side. His skill was relied on by many paying patients, but he always regarded himself as a failure: he had not done what he once meant to do. As the years went on, he opposed his wife less and less, whence Rosamond concluded that he had learnt the value of her opinion. In brief, Lydgate was what is called a successful man. But he died prematurely of diphtheria. He once called his wife his basil-plant, and, when she asked for an explanation, said that basil was a plant which had flourished wonderfully on a murdered man’s brains.”

Such is the end of the naturally noble man who marries fair Rosamond, “the flower of Middlemarch.” This fair Rosamond, like her historical namesake, lives in a crooked labyrinth of devious ways, where she fetters her knight, her king, who would fain go forth to conquer kingdoms, and, if need be, take her with him. But her kingdom is bounded by her own narrow domain, and she carries him on from labyrinth to labyrinth, till he is lost and resigns himself to his fate.

When the lady who is pleased to assume the name of George Eliot first startled the English reading world, there was great doubt as to the sex of the new author. Certainly all such doubt, if any still existed, would be set at rest for ever by the portrait of Rosamond Vincy. No man could ever have executed that. No man could ever have gone down into the very fibres of a woman’s nature, and drawn them all out one by one, and laid them bare before us, to show what constitutes “that best marble of which goddesses are made.” If Dorothea, with the strong touch of Calvinism leading her noble nature astray, prove a failure, what shall be said of “the flower of Mrs. Lemon’s school, the chief school in the county, where the teaching included all that was demanded in the accomplished female—even to extras, such as the getting in and out of the carriage”?

Rosamond Vincy is, perhaps, the most finished portrait ever presented of the intelligent animal of the female sex; clever enough to despise Middlemarch, not because it is low, and mean, and sordid, but because it is too narrow and unworthy to hold so fair and accomplished a specimen of humanity as Rosamond Vincy. All young Middlemarch breaks its heart about her. She refuses it quietly and persistently, wins Lydgate in spite of himself, not because he is Lydgate, the generous, ardent, high-souled young man, but because he brings with him the atmosphere of an outer world, with a hint of great relations, a distinguished person, and an unconscious air of superiority which Middlemarch cannot offer. The result of the wedding of two such natures may be imagined. George Eliot’s version of it is horribly real and miserably natural; and perhaps the most powerful part of the book is the struggle going on between the generous nature of the man and the demon of self incarnate in the perfect form and the narrow but acute intellect of the woman, who is so supremely selfish that she is absolutely unconscious of her selfishness, and therefore incurable. “Lydgate,” after vainly endeavoring to break down this barrier which lay between them, invisible to the eyes of her who raised it, “had accepted his narrowed lot with sad resignation. He had chosen this fragile creature, and had taken the burden of her life upon his arms. He must walk as he could, carrying that burden pitifully.”

And she, his “bird-of-paradise,” only once called his “basil-plant,” when the man whose life had been lost on her died, “married an elderly and wealthy physician, who took kindly to her four children. She made a very pretty show with her daughters, driving out in her carriage, and often spoke of her happiness as ‘a reward’—she did not say for what, but probably she meant that it was a reward for her patience with Tertius, whose temper never became faultless, and to the last occasionally let slip a bitter speech which was more memorable than the signs he made of his repentance. Rosamond had a placid but strong answer to such speeches: Why, then, had he chosen her? It was a pity he had not had Mrs. Ladislaw—Dorothea—whom he was always praising and placing above her.”

With regret the examination into this wonderful book, of which three of the salient characters only have been touched upon, must now close. The story abounds in other characters, each perfect in its way, as far as drawing and execution go. It forms quite a study in parsons as in physicians; and those who quarrel with the author of My Clerical Friends must feel sore aggrieved at the clerical friends of George Eliot. There is not a priestly character among them; not a single devoted man whose heart is given wholly to God, and whose mind is bent solely on doing God’s work for God’s sake. The Middlemarch parsons are a narrow set of men of undefined belief and cramped charity; their belief being measured by their salary, and their charity beginning and often ending at home with their wives and families. The only agreeable characters among them as men are Mr. Cadwallader and Mr. Farebrother. The first of these is a “good, easy man,” whose Gospel is as elastic as his fishing-rod, of whom the author says, “His conscience was large and easy like the rest of him; it did only what it could without any trouble,” and whom his wife characteristically hits off in the sentence that, “as long as the fish rise to his bait, everybody is what he ought to be”; whilst she complains: “He will even speak well of the bishop, though I tell him it is unnatural in a beneficed clergyman. What can one do with a husband who attends so little to the decencies?” The other, Mr. Farebrother, is the best preacher in Middlemarch, and really a man of a noble nature; yet his poverty leads him to play whist for money and even an occasional game of billiards at the Green Dragon. He leads us to infer that he knows he has assumed the wrong profession, but that it is too late to get rid of it.

The only man who really possesses anything in the semblance of religion is Mr. Bulstrode, the Methodist banker, of whom wicked old Featherstone, whose death is so powerfully told, says:

“What’s he? He’s got no land hereabout that ever I heard tell of. A speckilating fellow! He may come down any day, when the devil leaves off backing him. And that’s what his religion means: he wants God A’mighty to come in. That’s nonsense! There’s one thing I made out pretty clear when I used to go to church, and it’s this: God A’mighty sticks to the land. He promises land, and he gives land, and he makes chaps rich with corn and cattle.” That sounds very like the religion of Tennyson’s Northern Farmer of the new style. As a matter of fact, old Featherstone turns out to be right. Bulstrode is a hypocrite. His life and his fortune have been built upon hypocrisy. He is rich on money that does not belong to him and by wealth ill-gotten; he strives to silence his conscience by a life of external mortification and by works set on foot for the improvement of the poor and carried out in his own way. Yet rather than lose his character for respectability and goodness, he murders an old associate; that is, he consciously does what the physician warned him might cause death.

Mrs. Cadwallader, spite of her wit and her mind, “active as phosphorus, biting everything that came near into the form that suited it,” must be dismissed in her own words, though she is the life of Middlemarch, as one who “set a bad example—married a poor clergyman, and made herself a pitiable object among the De Bracys—obliged to get her coals by stratagem, and pray to heaven for her salad-oil”; as must also Ladislaw, whom Mr. Brooke, who takes him up and transfers him to the Pioneer, characterizes as “a kind of Shelley, you know,” whom he (Mr. Brooke) may be able to put on the right tack; who has “a way of putting things,” which is just the sort of thing Mr. Brooke wants—“not ideas, you know, but a way of putting them.” Lydgate characterizes him best as “a likable fellow, but bric-a-brac.” He is just the material out of which Charles Lever constructed “Joe Atlee,” that prince of Bohemians.

It is difficult also to pass unnoticed by the Vincy and the Garth families; thriftless Fred. Vincy, who is only saved from taking to that last resort of an ignoble mind—“the cloth”—by honest Caleb Garth and his merry, true-hearted daughter Mary, who is, perhaps, after all the best and jolliest girl in the book, and whose plain, womanly wit and common sense, plain and undisguised as her open face, is an excellent foil to the pretty animalism of Rosamond Vincy and the vague religiousness of Dorothea. What could be better than this by way of preparation for old Featherstone’s decease?—

“‘Oh! my dear, you must do things handsomely where there’s last illness and a property. God knows, I don’t grudge them [the relatives on the watch] every ham in the house—only save the best for the funeral. Have some stuffed veal always, and a fine cheese in cut. You must expect to keep open house in these last illnesses,’ said liberal Mrs. Vincy.” Or than this picture of one of George Eliot’s favorite characters?—

“Caleb Garth often shook his head in meditation on the value, the indispensable might, of that myriad-headed, myriad-handed labor by which the social body is fed, clothed, and housed. It had laid hold of his imagination in boyhood. The echoes of the great hammer where roof or keel were a-making, the signal-shouts of the workmen, the roar of the furnace, the thunder and plash of the engine, were a sublime music to him; the felling and lading of timber, and the huge trunk vibrating star-like in the distance along the highway, the crane at work on the wharf, the piled-up produce in warehouses, the precision and variety of muscular effort wherever exact work had to be turned out—all these sights of his youth had acted on him as poetry without the aid of poets, had made a philosophy for him without the aid of philosophers, a religion without the aid of theology. His early ambition had been to have as effective a share as possible in this sublime labor, which was peculiarly dignified by him with the name of ‘business.’”

After all, notwithstanding its wit and power, and fund of worldly wisdom, one turns almost with a sense of relief from this disheartening Middlemarch world to the world as seen in Fleurange. Considered merely as a story, for unity of plot and rapidity of action, Fleurange is, to our thinking, far more interesting than Middlemarch. A young girl who has been educated in an Italian convent finds herself soon after leaving it thrown almost entirely upon the world by the death of her father, an artist, to fight the battle of life single-handed. “Young, beautiful, poor, and alone in Paris, what will become of her?” With this question the book opens, and, indeed, the whole story is plainly evolved from this idea. Instead of wasting her efforts on an impossible S. Teresa, Mme. Craven takes up the practical case of a young and religious girl, whose training and education, whatever they may have amounted to in the point of accomplishments, were built upon religion, not a vague unreality, but a religion which in the plainest words taught her to kneel down and pray, not to “the perfect Right,” as did Dorothea, but to God, to Jesus Christ—a being, it may here be mentioned, who is carefully excluded from Middlemarch. The reader need not infer that this inner life of the heroine is insisted upon severely, and that he always finds Fleurange upon her knees. Nothing of the sort. You only feel unconsciously, by little touches here and there, by the tone of the whole story, that the girl lives up to the practical accomplishment of what she was taught in the convent by Madre Maddalena; that she carries her religion out with her into the world as her only guide amidst its manifold dangers; that she has not flung it aside with her leading-strings; and that it is this and this alone which sustains her in the midst of terrible suffering, and saves her from sinking under the pressure of trial.

Fleurange goes first to her uncle’s family in Germany. Their loss of fortune drives her out again from them into the service of a Russian princess, where she is surrounded and flattered by all that the world considers witty, brave, brilliant, and captivating. Her singular beauty and innate nobility enable her to grace the lofty station to which the Princess Catherine assigns her. Here, in Florence, in the very household of his mother, she encounters for the second time Count George de Walden, a handsome and highly accomplished young gentleman, the adoration of his mother and possibly of himself, who is just loitering around Europe, “seeing life.” He met Fleurange before in her father’s studio as she sat for a picture of “Cordelia.” Of course, he fell in love with her, as such young gentlemen will do whose time is heavy on their hands. Father and daughter disappeared. He retained the picture, but what he wanted was the original; and here, after feeding on the memory of his unknown love for a year or so, he finds her actually domesticated in his mother’s household. This is what a playwright would consider “an excellent situation,” particularly as the princess suspects nothing of what is passing under her eyes. As a matter of course, they fall in love, and, equally as a matter of course, they contrive to make their love known. And this is the trying time for Fleurange.

It is not that she is dazzled with the prince, but with what she considers the perfect man. And indeed, in the eyes of the world, Count George is a perfect man, whilst, in the eyes of his mother, he is something still more; and therefore a mésalliance would to her, whose heart was entirely her son’s—all the rest of her being divided between the modiste, the physician, and the salon—seem a greater crime than many of those which bring men to the scaffold. Fleurange knows this, and therefore—though, when the confession is forced from her, she does not even to himself deny her love for George and her desire to be his wife—she is convinced that their union is impossible. She does the best thing under the circumstances: she determines to leave the household of the princess; and thus, not for the first time, do the promptings of duty, of what one ought to do, of what God would have us do, correspond with those of common sense. George has avowed his love for Fleurange to his mother, and the confession has such an effect upon her that she is cured for the time from an attack of one of those incurable maladies not uncommon with ladies who are blessed with everything that this world can offer. There is caste even in illnesses, and fashion in a complaint as in a bonnet. Thus, when some years back the eye-glass became a fashionable ornament, all young England, fashionable and would-be fashionable, suddenly grew weak in one eye, whilst the “sons of industry” remained in their normal condition.

The princess rises to the gravity of the situation, and extracts a promise from her son that he will never marry Fleurange without her consent. But all her difficulties are smoothed away by Fleurange herself, who, even though the count has asked her to be his wife, determines to sacrifice herself for his sake, and go.

“‘Fleurange,’ said the count, with a grave accent of sincerity far more dangerous than that of passion, ‘you shall be my wife if you will consent to be—if you will accept this hand I offer you.’

“‘With your mother’s consent?’ said Fleurange slowly, and in a low tone. ‘Can you assure me of that?’

“After a moment’s hesitation, George replied: ‘No, not to-day; but she will yield her consent, I assure you.’

“Fleurange hesitated in her turn. She knew only too well to what a degree this hope was illusory, but this was her last opportunity of conversing with him. The next day would commence their lifelong separation, which time, distance, and prolonged absence would continually widen. There was no longer any danger in telling the truth—the truth, alas! so devoid of importance now, but which would, perhaps, second the duty she had to accomplish quite as well as contradiction.

“‘Ah! well,’ she at last replied, with simplicity. ‘Yes, why should I deny it? Should life prove more favorable to us; if by some unforeseen circumstance, impossible to conceive, your mother should cheerfully consent to receive me as a daughter, oh! then what an answer I would make you know without my telling you. You are likewise perfectly aware that until that day I will never listen to you.’

“‘But that day will come,’ cried George vehemently, ‘and that speedily.’

“‘Perhaps,’ said Fleurange. ‘Who knows what time has in store for us? And who knows that in time the obstacle may not come from yourself?’

“She endeavored to say these last words in a playful tone. They were hardly uttered before she suddenly stopped; but the shade of the large cypresses that bordered the road prevented George from seeing the tears that inundated her face.”

Thus they part, under the cypresses. George thinks she is only leaving for a short time, to return again. She goes back to the convent, to bury there her broken heart and the hopes her own strong will has blighted. But convents are not built on broken hearts; and Madre Maddalena, who is none the less gifted with common sense and worldly prudence for leading a retired and saintly life, sends her back into the world “to continue the contest,” for the reasons already given, with these words:

“O my poor child! it would be much easier for me to tell you to remain and never leave us again. It would be sweeter for me to preserve you thus from all the sufferings that yet await you. But, believe me, the day will come when you will rejoice you were not spared these sufferings; and you will acknowledge that she who is now speaking to you knew you better than you knew yourself.”

Fleurange goes back to the world, to her uncle’s family, which is gradually recovering its fall through the efforts of Clement, her cousin, who was the first to welcome her among them. Notwithstanding her suffering, she carries on all the duties of life like a Christian woman, without despondency as though God were blotted out of the world, and equally without that foolish ostentation of gaiety sometimes assumed. She never thought with Dorothea that she had suffered “all the troubles of all the people on the face of the earth.” The hour never came to her “in which the waves of suffering shook her too thoroughly to leave any power of thought”; not that she suffered or loved less than Dorothea, but because she saw through all something higher than human suffering and more lovely than human love. That pagan hour never came to her, when Dorothea “repeated what the merciful eyes of solitude have looked on for ages in the spiritual struggles of man”; when “she besought hardness, and coldness, and aching weariness to bring her relief from the mysterious incorporeal might of her anguish”; nor did “she lie on the bare floor and let the night grow cold around her, while her grand woman’s frame was shaken by sobs as if she had been a despairing child.” Fleurange never, as did Dorothea, “yearned toward the perfect Right, that it might make a throne within her, and rule her errant wrong.” Whether she yearned or not, she knew what was right and what was wrong, and, by praying to God for help and strength, she did right. If women in love stop to ask themselves what is the “perfect right,” in nine cases out of ten in love matters the perfect right will be the absolute wrong. Right is fixed; there is a law in those things, as in all questions of the soul, not evolved out of the individual’s brains, but out of the heart of Christian charity, which is in Christ. Duty does not depend on feeling “the largeness of the world,” and on being “a part of that involuntary, palpitating life,” but on being a creation of God. George Eliot tends to pantheism, and, spite of herself, Christian instinct only prompts her heroine to do what is right. If we are “a part of that involuntary and palpitating life,” and nothing more, there is no necessary reason for charity.

The difference between Dorothea and Fleurange, two characters which, allowing for side differences of clime, are naturally similar, consists in all the sufferings of the one bearing the aspect of self-torture, whilst those of the other are a sacrifice. The sorrows of Fleurange, which, after all, are much greater than those of Dorothea, are endured for God’s sake and as coming from God. They are not a whit less painful to nature on this account; but they are explicable, and have a meaning which Dorothea never seems to realize. One suffers because she cannot help herself; the other because it is God’s will. On George Eliot’s principle, there is no guarantee for a person doing right at all, inasmuch as it is so very difficult to determine what is right. If right be “a part of that involuntary and palpitating life” only, it has no meaning beyond what is contained in the word accident; that is to say, right and wrong are effects of circumstance. Nor is this forcing a meaning, as may be seen from various passages in the book—unless, indeed, we have read them very wrongly. Thus, she speaks of the spirit struggling “against universal pressure, which will one day be too heavy for it, and bring the heart to its final pause.” She sneers at our referring a man “to the divine regard with perfect confidence,” and says: “Nay, it is even held sublime for our neighbor to expect the utmost there, however little he may have got from us.” And in another place: “Any one watching keenly the stealthy convergence of human lots sees a slow preparation of effects from one life on another, which tells like a calculated irony on the indifference or frozen stare with which we look at our unintroduced neighbor. Destiny stands by sarcastic, with our dramatis personæ folded in her hand.”

This sounds very fine, and that last sentence might have been written by one of the Greek poets. It is beautifully pagan; but, after all, human life is regulated in man and woman by a will that is free to use or reject the “slow preparation of effects,” to laugh at the phantom, destiny; and when it pleases God to bring this lesser life of time to “a final pause,” man goes before his Creator to give an account of his servitude indeed, but not of his slavery.

Fleurange writes from the convent to the princess. She herself had arranged the plot which was to blind George to her final departure, and this is how the princess receives the letter of the girl who had so freely offered up her heart on the altar of duty. The princess knew of the sacrifice. It is doubtful whether Rosamond Vincy ever displayed her unconscious selfishness so thoroughly as this:

“The Princess Catherine, in an elegant morning négligé, was alone with the Marquis Adelardi in her small salon, when a letter was brought her on a silver salver. She glanced at the address.

“‘Ah! from Gabrielle’ [Fleurange], she exclaimed. ‘The very letter I was expecting to-day.’

“She opened it and hastily ran over its contents. ‘Very well done—very,’ she said. ‘Nothing could be more natural. She hit upon the very best thing to say.... Here, Adelardi,’ continued she, throwing him the letter, ‘read it. It must be owned that this Gabrielle is reliable and true to her word. Moreover, she has a good deal of wit.’

“Adelardi attentively read the letter.

“‘What you have just remarked, princess, is very true; but this time circumstances have favored you. This letter was not written for the occasion; it is sincere from beginning to end. This young girl can keep a secret, but is incapable of prevarication. This is not the kind of a letter she would have written if the contents were not absolutely true.”

“‘Do you think so?’ said the princess. “It is of no consequence, however, as to that, though it would simplify everything still more. But in that case—ah! ciel! let me look at the letter again.’

“She now read it entirely through, instead of merely glancing at the contents.

“‘But in that case, I have lost my physician, and the only one who ever understood my case. This, par exemple! is a real misfortune. If he had had time, at least, to answer my last letter, and tell me what springs I should go to this year! Whom shall I consult now? May is nearly gone, and next month I ought to be there. Really, I am unlucky!’

“‘What do you expect, princess?’ said the marquis, in a tone imperceptibly ironical. ‘One cannot always have good luck.’”

In the quiet of her German retreat, Fleurange suddenly receives the news that an insurrection has broken out in Russia, in which George is implicated. He is taken prisoner, and only awaits in St. Petersburg the sentence which is to banish him to that living tomb, Siberia. Fleurange now sees the opportunity of uniting herself to her lover by burying herself with him. As his hopes in this world are for ever blasted, she obtains the consent of the princess to their union, and sets out for St. Petersburg under the guidance of her young cousin Clement, who knows the object of her mission. This journey and its results complete the fourth book, entitled “The Immolation,” and in it the author rises to a height of power in pathos, description, and incident which is all the more telling that it was altogether unsuspected: The long ride along the dreary strand through the day and through the night; the crossing of the frozen river in the darkness, with the ice cracking ominously beneath them; the scene where Clement and Fleurange are left alone in the face of eternity and immediate death, and where, for the first and last time, when hope of life seems banished, the confession of his love bursts out of his young heart to the half-conscious girl; the last struggle to carry her safe through on her mission of self-immolation to the man she loves—all told in the same simple, unpretentious style, but with an inner force that carries the reader along, and absorbs him as though he were witnessing a tragedy. The strain is sustained to the close of the story. Amid all the fascination, and glitter, and glare of the imperial court of the Czar, when the late Emperor Nicholas was in his “golden prime,” creeps the oppressive sense of a mute but awful terrorism through an atmosphere of combustible human passion all the more dangerous for being so constrained. The petition of Fleurange is about to be granted; but, as it passes through the hands of Vera, a favorite maid of the empress, it is represented as coming from her, between whom and George a sort of betrothal had taken place, and who is in love with him. His sentence, through the instrumentality of Fleurange, is commuted to pardon on condition that he should pass four years on his estates in Livonia, and that he marry Vera before setting out. George is ignorant of the arrival of Fleurange, of her petition, of her desire to bury herself alive with him in Siberia. Vera sees Fleurange, and implores her to save him by the still greater sacrifice of renouncing him for ever. Fleurange goes back again without a word. The man for whom she made so many sacrifices was utterly unworthy of her, and congratulates himself that he escaped committing the foolishness of marrying her, though really in love with her for a time. The selfishness of the mother comes out in the son. As Fleurange and her cousin turn homewards, they meet the bridal party leaving the church. Once more she seeks to bury herself in the convent, and once more Madre Maddalena warns her back. She tells her that, at her first visit, her sufferings appeared as the expiation of an idolatry the extent of which she did not realize; but that something more was essential—the shattering of the idol, though its destruction seemed to involve the very breaking of her own heart.

The shattering of Dorothea’s idol brings a blank despair; and although she marries Ladislaw, and is presumably happy with him, nevertheless she felt “that there was always something better which she might have done, if she had only been better and known better.” The final shattering of Fleurange’s idol brings peace and opens her eyes to the silent heroism that had stood at her side all through, and for every pang of hers suffered a thousand. There is a vast amount of latent power in this story that stands out the more it is considered. Clement is kept in the background through much of the action. We only know that he loves Fleurange, and, prominently as her self-sacrifice is advanced, the shadow of his always overreaches it with the quiet that becomes a true man. At last her eyes are opened, and she sees, no longer Clement, “her brother,” but Clement, the man who has loved her all the while. The closeness of their relationship—that of first cousins—was almost necessary to bring out this part of the story, their almost continual intercourse after their first seeing each other, without the idea ever occurring to Fleurange that her cousin, who was a stranger to her up to the age of eighteen, might possibly fall in love with her. It is no encouragement to marriage within the prohibited degrees to hit upon such an incident once in a story; as little as it is necessary to inform the Catholic reader of what he or she will know beforehand: that the dispensation of the church is necessary to the contracting such a marriage.

The book, which has only been touched upon in its leading character, will afford an excellent foil to Middlemarch in many ways. The latter, as perhaps the very title indicates, devotes itself chiefly to the English middle class. Fleurange gives pleasant glimpses of German and Italian life with what, from intrinsic evidence, might be judged to be a very true picture of the Russian court and social atmosphere. Though there are plenty of titled folk, it is a consolation for once to find a princess talking like a rational being; not always addressing her attendant as “minion,” her butler as “slave,” and terrifying the ears and eyes of the groundlings by the splendor of her cheap tragedy rhetoric, the glory of her equipages, or the coruscations of her diamonds. Her son, the count, does not, as do most of his class in the titled novel, divide his time between the stable and the green-room. The marquis is not “a villain of the deepest dye,” whether natural or artificial. Though an Italian, he does not carry a poison philter about with him; he employs no bravos, he never carries off Chastity in the shape of a milliner, to be finally chastised by Virtue in a smock-frock. In fact, all these titled folk are very unlike the article one is accustomed to find within flaming covers. The heartlessness and artificiality almost necessarily evoked in the high social atmosphere which Fleurange breathes for a time, is none the less strikingly brought out because it is not taken in epigrammatic parcels, as it were, and flung in your face, after the manner of the author of Middlemarch. The lesson of Felix Dornthall’s wicked life is none the less impressive because, when dying in the hospital ward, Charity stands by his bedside and prays for him as the ill-spent life flickers out in the darkness. It is no shock to human feelings to see Fleurange in her bitter hours kneel down and pray for help to a God she believes can help her. If life is not all “beer and skittles,” neither is it all a continual mistake and a bitter trial. If we cannot have “ideal perfection,” it may be a consolation to some to feel assured that we can do very well without it, and that there is something in the striving after real perfection worthy of human endeavor. To George Eliot, the world was born yesterday, and only grew with her growing faculties. Christianity has practically gone by, and this is not the age for its heroes and heroines. The sham and the cant of it only remain. As long as the sham and the cant produce such characters as Madre Maddalena, Fleurange, Dr. Leblanc, and Clement, we shall welcome the sham and the cant in preference to the reality which can only give us Dorothea and Lydgate as types of true nobility and all that the perfection of manhood and womanhood may expect to come to nowadays. Whilst admiring the wit, and the worldly wisdom, and that power which only ripened genius can give of saying the best thing in the best way which Middlemarch displays throughout, we confess to a little heartsickness at seeing all the nature of a woman author going out over Rosamond Vincy.

Fleurange is certainly a relief after the unnatural atmosphere of Middlemarch, where all is false, uncertain, cold, hard, and brilliant. Though the story is very human, and in this respect has not a whit less of earth than the other, it suffers nothing by an occasional glimpse of heaven. Poor humanity likes a little hope, particularly when it has a very sound title to hope. These two authors traverse it as a hospital; the one surgeon-like, knife in hand, cutting and lopping the useless and unsightly limbs with bright, keen weapon and merciless precision, leaving the dead to bury their dead; the other, like a sister of charity, to bandage the wound, and comfort the sick, and pray by the dying. How different is the same scene to the eyes of each, and how different is each in the eyes of the sick patients! While they admire the skill of the one, they shudder and turn instinctively from her; on the other streaming eyes are bent, and troubled hearts murmur, “God bless you!”