Middlemarch & the Necessity of Un-historic Acts
Re-reading Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life got me thinking about empathy — something we desperately need more of these days. The novel is George Eliot’s “masterpiece of sympathetic imagination” according to New Yorker staff writer Rebecca Mead.[1] (Some 50 years ago, my English-lit college thesis adviser offered me a sentence of advice that I have never forgotten — though it had nothing to do with my thesis: “You must … read … Middlemarch.”)
“It is regularly included on lists of the greatest novels ever written,” Mead says, “often in the number-one slot.”
December 2021 will mark the 150th anniversary of the first book of the first edition of Middlemarch. Beginning in December 1871, it appeared in eight novella-sized installments. Mead has been writing about the novel for years; I am halfway through her 2014 memoir, My Life in Middlemarch. She suggests that today’s readers may want to approach it “not as an intimidating, monolithic entity, but as its original readers experienced it — as eight utterly manageable short books to be read over the leisurely course of a year.”
Eliot writes, in Chapter 21: “We are all of us born in moral stupidity, taking the world as an udder to feed our supreme selves.” Growing out of such cluelessness requires that we grow into empathy. And no one writes with a clearer understanding of empathy than George Eliot does in her difficult, incredible book. Dear reader: you must read Middlemarch.
As Rebecca Mead tells it, “The book is mostly about young people, and when one reads it as a young person it seems to be all about the preoccupations of youth — the romantic dramas and the personal ambitions. But it was a book written by a person well into middle age [early 50s], and is infused with the wisdom that can only be accrued by the experience of heartbreak and failure.” Virginia Woolf called it “one of the few English novels written for grown-up people.” It is also, Meade adds, a book “about how to be a grownup person — about how to bear one’s share of sorrow, failure, and loss, as well as to enjoy moments of hard-won happiness.” It is about how “individuals must make their best efforts toward a worthy end, but it is the effort toward a goal, rather than the achievement of it, that makes us who we are.” It is about how “wisdom is always being acquired, and is never fully accomplished; [how] our own limited lives might also contain the possibility of renewal. Only a child believes a grownup has stopped growing.”
Eventually, though, we do stop growing — i.e., we die. Something else to think about these days.
So. What can I do at age 70 to keep growing? What can I do in a pandemic to acquire some wisdom and attain the possibility of renewal? Well, I am trying to cultivate a new habit: answering Ben Franklin’s eternally recurring journal entry: “What good shall I do this day?” It is an easy question to answer if, this day, you do some good.
Which brings us back to empathy, and George Eliot. Her masterpiece ends with these words: “. . . the growing good of the world is partly dependent on un-historic 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.”
[1] All my Mead quotations are from her Foreword to the Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition of Middlemarch (2015); her New Yorker essay “Middlemarch and Me” (14 & 21 Feb. 2011); and “George Eliot, Middlemarch and me” in The Guardian (28 Feb. 2014).
