The Gyndes rises in the hills of Matiene, and descending through the Dardonians, falls into the Tigris. While Cyrus was endeavouring to pass this same river, which might be crossed in ships, one of his sacred white horses boldly plunged into the stream, and attempted to swim over, but the stream having violently whirled it round, carried it away and drowned it. Cyrus, much ofended with the river for this afront, threatened to render his stream so contemptible, that women should pass to either side without wetting their knees. After which menace, deferring his expedition against Babylon, he divided his army into two parts; and having marked out one hundred and eighty channels, by the line, on each side of the river, commanded his men to dig out the earth. His design was indeed executed by the great numbers he employed; but the whole summer was spent in the work. Thus Cyrus punished the river Gyndes, by draining the stream into three hundred and sixty trenches; and in the beginning of the next spring advanced with his army towards Babylon.10

9 Eliot, *Middlemarch*, 'Finale'.

10 Herodotus, *The History of Herodotus*, trans. by Isaac Littlebury (Oxford: W. Baxter, 1824), p. 73, https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/The\_History\_of\_ Herodotus\_Translated\_By\_I/XgPu0rLKGeIC?hl=en&gbpv=1

Nineteenth-century commentators agreed the rationale ofered here was too thin to explain Cyrus's actions, since they delayed his war for a year. Explanation was divided between attempts at rationalisation—for instance, arguing that Herodotus records a garbled account of Cyrus's siege-craft, redirecting rivers in the attack on Babylon—and accounts that parse the account in *religious* or *mythic* terms (since white horses were sacred to the sun, and there were 360 days in the sacred year). It is likely Eliot was aware of both sides of this debate.

We need to return to the beginning of the novel, for we still have to navigate the pronounced divergence in tone, or mode, between Eliot's opening chapter and the grisly contextual implicature of the epigraph she chooses for it. The lines as quoted speak to the limitations that defne female, as opposed to male, life, and acknowledge that such restrictions may have deleterious *moral* as well as practical consequences for actual women. If we assume that 'Since I can do no good because a woman [I will] reach constantly at something that is near it' means something bland and conventional, something like: prevented as I am by (as we would now say) structural sexism from achieving the fullest good, I will nonetheless try to do the best I can—then, perhaps, clicking the microscope lens into our instrument and examining the actual source will disabuse us. Evadne, here, is not saying that because perfect good is beyond her she will try to live as virtuously as she can. On the contrary, she is telling the man she loves, a man she has married despite being in a sexual relationship with another (married) man, that she will *murder* that other. The 'something near it' of virtue, in other words, is a miss as good as a mile.

*Middlemarch* does not tell the story of a marriage marred by a murderous wife of course, although it is a novel about a marriage in which the husband dies, unhappy in his heart with the fdelity of the woman he married, which is not a million miles from *A Maid's Tragedy*. Of course, it's possible all that's happening here is me attempting to over-leverage the signifcance of one short epigraph, merely because it stands at the head of the frst chapter. But I don't think so. Look at the second sentence of that opening:

[Dorothea's] hand and wrist were so fnely formed that she could wear sleeves not less bare of style than those in which the Blessed Virgin appeared to Italian painters; and her profle 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 fne quotation from the Bible,—or from one of our elder poets,—in a paragraph of to-day's newspaper.11

In other words, Dorothea is not only beautiful, with that particular kind of refned beauty that is ofset to advantage by plainness—she is *herself a quotation*, a particular sort of literary allusion, an epigraph in her own right. The other women of *Middlemarch* are workaday journalistic prose and she is a richer textual inset, a few lines from one of the poets Eliot herself so lavishly draws upon to augment and adorn her chapter headings. She is textual, because she is a character is a novel; but she is doubly textual, a more expressive or poetic 'text' than her companions. She stands out.

What Eliot is doing here is connecting this conceit, of Dorothea as an epigraph, to a related set of images to do with clothing, and more specifcally with adornment. This brings into play another way of thinking of chapter epigraphs: as accessory. Clearly the main function of *Middlemarch* as a novel—the story, the characters, the descriptions and meditations—would be almost entirely unchanged if all the epigraphs were stripped out. They are not functional parts of the narrative, but rather they garnish, or adorn, the main text.

The novel's frst interchange between Dorothea and her sister concerns them dividing up the jewels they have inherited from their dead mother. Dorothea agrees to this but qualifes herself by saying that 'we should never wear them, you know.' Celia replies that refusing to do so would indicate the girls 'are wanting in respect to mamma's memory', and Dorothea begins to soften her puritanism:

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 fnest that was obvious at frst being a necklace of purple amethysts set in exquisite gold work, and a pearl cross with fve brilliants in it. Dorothea immediately took up the necklace and fastened it round her sister's neck, where it ftted 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.

11 Eliot, *Middlemarch*, ch. 1.

'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.'12

*Souls have complexions too* is a deft four-word summary of the work Eliot undertakes as a writer of fctional character. But this exchange not only establishes the diferences in character of the sisters, it rehearses the place of epigraphs in the larger logic of the story. Are such quotations trinkets, trivialising the text, or adornments enriching it? The pearl-andgemstone cross is too gaudy for Dorothea, but Celia wins her round, bringing out 'a fne emerald [ring] with diamonds' and comparing the sunlit jewels to the 'spiritual emblems in the Revelation of St. John'. Dorothea, persuaded, agrees to keep the ring and its accompanying bracelet ('All the while her thought was trying to justify her delight in the colours by merging them in her mystic religious joy'). So it is the type, not the fact, of epigraph that matters. And this returns us to the actual epigraphic choices Eliot has made. We might very well think that tragedy is serious enough, and poetry beautiful enough, to spiritually adorn the bald text, and so such quotations comprise three quarters of the whole.

Earlier I discussed something many critics have explored: the autobiographical contexts and resonances of *Mill on the Floss*. Less is made of these same contexts with respect to *Middlemarch*, although they are manifestly still there. Dorothea is beautiful where Marian Evans was ugly—ungallant of me to say so, I appreciate, but important, since this adventitious and fundamentally irrelevant fact had a major impact on her life possibilities. Dorothea's attraction to Casaubon, an older and more learned man, refracts a number of young Evans's relationships: with R. H. Brabant, Herbert Spencer and John Chapman most notably. In life the possibility of actual emotional or erotic connection with these clever, older men was prevented by the plain fact of their being already married. But the afective truth of this repeating not-quite relationship pattern is, we can intuit, what informs *Middlemarch*: that intrinsic, not external, factors prevented their consummation. Consciously or otherwise George Eliot—the writer—knew what Marian Evans could not allow herself to see: not just that being in love with the intelligence and learning of a person is not the same being in love with a person (that much is so obvious it's almost facile to say so), but much more importantly that human desire is so constituted that it will cathect the former into the latter. Her love for literature, art, myth, the discourses of religion was so intense it carried itself through as much by eros as by agape and pragma, and in such a situation it's easy to fool oneself, or perhaps only to distract oneself from the inevitability of the counterpoint, that the eros encompasses the mentor, the teacher, the older man. It does not, of course, and *Middlemarch* is, amongst other things, Eliot explaining to Evans that it does not. Accordingly, Marian Evans's various afliations with older scholars and editors, variously problematic, are here reinscribed as Dorothea actually marrying one such. And Marian Evans's eventual amatory redemption, with another married man, George Henry Lewes, is reworked as Dorothea's decision to fout both the disapproval of those older scholars and of society as a whole and to marry Ladislaw. Lewes was ugly and Ladislaw handsome, but the novel is entitled to balance out its unfinching emotional honesty with a little wish-fulflment. As Marian Evans escaped Coventry to begin her life, so Dorothea escapes Middlemarch to begin hers.13

This is almost, but not quite, to suggest that *Middlemarch* is an autobiographical fction. The point is not that Eliot has here written a *Prelude* or an *A la recherche du temps perdu*, for manifestly she hasn't. Nor has she written a *David Copperfeld*, although this case is a little closer. As Charles Dickens inverts his name's CD into his protagonist's

13 That Dorothea is a fctionalised autobiographical self-portrait is an idea with a long history. It is, for instance, asserted in Isadore Gilbert Mudge and Minnie Earl Sears's *A George Eliot Dictionary: The Characters and Scenes of the Novels, Stories, and Poems Alphabetically Arranged* (London: Routledge & Sons, 1924). For a discussion of this, see Graham Handley's *George Eliot's Midlands: Passion in Exile* (London: Allison & Busby, 1991), pp. 15–40.

DC, so does he invert various aspects of his actual life—killing of his parents, inserting fairy tale elements (adding Betsey Trotwood as fairy godmother, strewing David's path with ogres and monsters, and fnally winning his princess). The logic here is dream logic in a strict sense, which is to say, it undertakes the psychic work that Freud was interested in exploring. And, in fact, *Middlemarch* records a doubled inversion. On the one hand, beautiful Dorothea leaves Middlemarch just as plain Marian left Coventry (even the names invert one another: 'Dorothea' means 'given by God', and Mary is the woman who gave God). But on the other hand, plain Mary Garth does what plain Mary Ann never did: stays in Middlemarch, marries her love as a victory (that is: becomes a Vincy), has children and lives a fulflled existence in the place she holds dear. Mary even becomes a published writer as Marian did, although this fantasy alternate George Eliot is defned by her sons and her *heimat*: a children's book*, Stories of Great Men, taken from Plutarch*, printed by the signifcantly named 'Gripp & Co., Middlemarch'. The main autobiographical 'fantasy' of Middlemarch is of a beautiful Marian Evans who leaves the claustrophobia of parochialism fnally to begin her life with the handsome man she loves. Juxtaposed with this is a separate, smaller fantasy-autobiography: of the kind of woman Marian Evans actually was and could have stayed, gripping tight to her locale and putting her energies and love into her children.

I am aware, I hasten to add, of what Colin Burrow pithily calls 'the heuristic poverty of biographical explanations of works of art'.14 My argument here is not that *Middlemarch* is autobiographical fction, but on the contrary that, in a crucial sense, it isn't. Adam Phillips notes how hostile Freud was to biography as a whole. The mode is, he thought, structurally mendacious.

We know that Freud, even as a younger man, didn't want a biography written about him; and that he is rather terrifed (i.e. mocking) of his, perhaps presumptuously assumed, future biographers. It is equally evident that in writing about biographers and biographies he is writing about what he doesn't want psychoanalysts and psychoanalysis to be […] When we speak about biography we speak about what we want lives, and life-stories, and truth-telling, to be.15

14 Colin Burrow, 'Who Wouldn't Buy It?', *London Review of Books*, 27.2 (2005), https:// www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v27/n02/colin-burrow/who-wouldn-t-buy-it

15 Adam Phillips, *In Writing* (London: Penguin Books, 2019), p. 62.

Phillips's point is that 'for Freud, truth-telling about lives, such as it was, could be done only by the person himself, through the method of free-association, responded to by a psychoanalyst'. But he goes on to note, shrewdly, that 'yet, in some ways like the biographer, the analyst is giving the fragmentary discontinuous speech of the analysand a new narrative coherence. A new story is told out of an old story diferently told'.

That's a good way of thinking of what Eliot has accomplished in *Middlemarch*: a new story being made out of an old story told diferently. Quotation and epigraphy are linked ways of invoking old stories, of literally positioning markers to old stories into the body of the text; but Eliot uses both to remake and so build towards her new story. Her epigraphs (I've been arguing) are mirrors, which is to say, items of *mimesis*, encapsulations of literary realism. But I've also been arguing that they are lenses, which invokes a more complex mode of literary realism than is comprehended by more linearly refective modes of what mimesis means. We are encouraged, throughout this novel, to look *through*, as well as to refect (to refect the beginning in the end, let's say). And amongst the things we are encouraged to look through is the kind of process of desiring a particular life-story that motivated Eliot herself.

It only looks trivialising—only appears facile—to talk of Dorothea as Marian Evans's 'wish-fulflment' version of herself; because wish, or desire, is actually a much stranger and more complex dynamic than we generally think of it as being. We never really know why we want what we want. Indeed, we rarely know even *what* we want. We only know *that* we want. In such a condition (the human condition, the circumstance Freud spent his career excavating) we often misinvest our desire in wrongly-conceived or misapprehended targets. It's what both Dorothea and Lydgate do, after all (it's also what Casaubon does when he decides that marrying Dorothea is what he wants, but critics rarely talk about that). Indeed, their doing so is what gives this novel its extraordinary resonance with ordinary readers, because we all understand that something like this very often characterises our own desiring, and our own life-choices. In the case of George Eliot it doesn't, I think, take us too far into mere speculation to suggest that she both wanted a life somewhat like Dorothea's (to be beautiful, and spiritual, and adored by a handsome

man she could adore, and most of all to *escape* parochial littleness) *and* a life like Mary Vincy's: rooted in a location she loved, surrounded by her own children. Rationally she knew she couldn't have both these things, but desire is not a rational process. This is a roundabout way of saying that what makes Eliot a great, rather than merely a profcient, novelist is her intuitive understanding not just that desire sabotages itself but that it is in this sabotage that art germinates. Dorothea does escape with the beautiful man she loves, but she publishes no books. Mary stays, and becomes a published writer, but a writer *for children*—Eliot's way of saying that Mary's story is of herself, of Marian Evans, *for* children, completed and sanctifed by children. Mary takes the work of Plutarch, the most famous biographer of antiquity, perhaps the most famous biographer of all, and re-writes those biographies. She makes a new story out of an old story diferently told. Both these fctionalised lifestories stand askew to the life-story of Marian Evans, plain, who did escape provincial littleness, who did become a published writer, who did not have children and did not, unlike her Ladislaw, George Henry Lewes, become a biographer.16

As we grow, and the reality principle intrudes increasingly upon our lives, we come to understand that it is infantile to believe we can always get what we want. In such a circumstance the reverse of this—that we can come, in time, to want what we get—perhaps looks like wisdom (hard-won, or otherwise); as it might be, the marriage of verity and wanting. But Eliot is interested in neither of these mutual-mappings of desire and lived-experience.

It seems to me both signifcant and characteristic of Eliot's strategy of intertextual allusion, that the last book named in *Middlemarch* (discounting Lydgate's unnamed 'treatise on Gout') is Plutarch's *Lives*, and that it appears not as itself but as reworked and retold. It is as a Freudian that Adam Phillips repeats Freud's belief 'that the best life stories are the ones told in psychoanalysis, in the psychoanalytic way. All other stories are rationalized self-deceptions'. But one need not be a

16 George Henry Lewes's frst published book was *A Biographical History of Philosophy* (London: Charles Knight & Co., 1846) and he very often returned to biography across his writing career, as with *The Life of Maximilien Robespierre: With Extracts from his Unpublished Correspondence* (Philadelphia: Carey and Hart, 1849), *The Life and Works of Goethe* (London: David Nutt, 1855) and *Aristotle: A Chapter from the History of Science* (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1864).

Freudian in any doctrinaire sense to agree that when an analyst is 'akin to a biographer, he is failing as a psychoanalyst'.

The psychoanalytic method is, fortunately, easily explained. But we should note that there is no comparable biographical method. Nor is the biographer trying to cure anybody of anything; nor indeed is biography a mode of medical treatment.17

This study has spent some time considering the degree to which Eliot's 'realism' in *Middlemarch* is a *medical* realism. Biography, we might say, is realism raised to the level of realism: an exercise in *le naturalisme* from which the intermixture of fctional character is drained from the body of scrupulously recorded verisimilitude. But, of course, we wouldn't say anything so foolish: Freud is surely right that biography and autobiography both are rationalised self-deceptions. To get at the truth of a life, lived, means not recording verifable exteriorities but, on the contrary, capturing interior myths and fantasies that are not only unverifable, they are radically unfalsifable too. At the end we come to understand the purpose of Eliot's epigraphy, and the underlying logic to her subtle, wide-ranging and eloquent intertextuality.

17 Phillips, *In Writing*, p. 56.

## Postscript: The Flute inside the Bell

*Middlemarch*'s thirty-frst chapter opens with a conversation between Lydgate and Rosamond about Dorothea.

Lydgate that evening spoke to Miss Vincy of Mrs. Casaubon, and laid some emphasis on the strong feeling she appeared to have for that formal studious man thirty years older than herself.

'Of course she is devoted to her husband,' said Rosamond, implying a notion of necessary sequence which the scientifc man regarded as the prettiest possible for a woman; but she was thinking at the same time that it was not so very melancholy to be mistress of Lowick Manor with a husband likely to die soon. 'Do you think her very handsome?'

'She certainly is handsome, but I have not thought about it,' said Lydgate.

'I suppose it would be unprofessional,' said Rosamond, dimpling.1

There's quite a lot going on here, and it is not especially fattering to Lydgate. At the heart of this brief exchange are two diferent modes of cause-and-efect. Lydgate, 'the scientifc man', assumes a 'billiard-ball striking another billiard-ball' model, a conception of necessary sequence. A woman agrees to marry a man. Ergo the woman loves the man. But Rosamond's 'of course' is not so mechanistic or sequential as this, and Eliot's point is that we, as readers, take the force of *her* rather than his understanding. Rosamond's 'of course' indexes social convention, not the motion of the heart, and stands-in for the material rather than the emotional satisfactions of the union. Not that Rosamond ignores the way actual desire, for a person rather than for social standing or material wealth, factors-in to human relationships. Her next statement,

1 Eliot, *Middlemarch*, ch. 31.

though styled as a question, actually fgures by way of a mild accusation: 'you fnd her attractive, of course?' Lydgate's answer is, we presume, perfectly ingenuous: for his desire runs on rails in a way not true of his wife. His efective denial is then parried by Rosamond: *I suppose it would be unprofessional*, delivered with that tell-tale dimple, means: *naturally you desire her—for she is, as you have conceded, attractive—but you repress that desire for professional and socially-conventional reasons*.

Rosamond is over-reading her more simply constituted suitor, just as he is under-reading his more complexly constituted inamorata. It is a perfect encapsulation of their relationship, a more nuanced psychologically-grounded portrait of marital incompatibility than the one ofered by Dorothea and Casaubon. In *their* case the mismatch is external, something the whole world can see; where Lydgate and Rosamond appear, to all external observers, to be very well matched indeed. That glint of steel in Rosamond's character implicit in 'it was not so very melancholy to be mistress of Lowick Manor with a husband likely to die soon' recruits empathy—for Rosamond is thinking herself into Dorothea's situation—to a materialist ruthlessness of feeling, and therefore of afect. It is a little thing that resonates signifcantly in terms of our understanding of Rosamond's character. Which is to say: it acts, as it were, epigraphically, smallness achieving a mode of largeness in the more capacious context of the novel as a whole.

 Let but a fute Play'neath the fne-mixed metal: listen close Till the right note fows forth, a silvery rill: Then shall the huge bell tremble—then the mass With myriad waves concurrent shall respond In low soft unison.

This versifes a phenomenon well-known to campanologists, and often discussed during this period.2 Indeed, Eliot's little section of verse

2 'I was anxious to ascertain what relation the secondary tones of a large bell bore to its fundamental note, and for this purpose I availed myself of the excellent musical ear of my friend, Mr. Dodd, during his too short sojourn with me, and we went accompanied by a fute to the large bell of Salisbury Cathedral'. Charles Tomlinson, 'Mr Tomlinson's Experiments and Observations on Visible Vibration', *Records of General Science*, 2 (1835), 124–33 (p. 128).

describing this acoustic peculiarity was itself widely quoted and copied, especially in books about bell-ringing or acoustics.3

So widely quoted, in fact, did Eliot's short poem become that it began to be discussed on its own merits. Several commentators understood the passage in a theological sense, as (for instance) saying that our individual and mortal faith, though small in an absolute sense, might nonetheless resonate with the vastness of the Godhead.4 More recently, Evan Horowitz has read the epigraph as being about 'social form'.5 To read it as I propose here, as a more self-refexive gesture on Eliot's part, a gloss as much on the realist novelist's apprehension of the nature of cause and efect in human character and interpersonal relation, is not to dismiss such takes, of course. Still, the epigraph in situ speaks more directly to questions of which efects are followed by causes, introducing the less obvious infuences with the more direct hammer-strike—like Wallace Stevens's celebrated, if perhaps rather opaque, distinction

3 J. Solis Cohen's *The Throat and the Voice* (London: Ward, Lock, & Co., 1880) compares human vocalisation to campanological acoustics: 'Heavy bells are started by commencing with gentle impulses in rhythmic accord with the proper oscillation of the bell', adding: 'To quote from an excellent novel, *Middlemarch* …' and citing the epigraph (p.123). The ffth chapter of Frank E. Miller's *The Voice* (New York: G. Schirmer, 1910), 'The Physiology and Psychology of Voice-Production', begins: 'Above this chapter I might well have placed the following lines which George Eliot wrote above Chapter XXXI of *Middlemarch* …', then quoting the epigraph (p.180). The anonymously authored article on 'The Bell' in *The Southern Review*, 22 (1877), 372, follows a lengthy prose account of campanological acoustics with the words: 'this is matter-of-fact prose, dealing with bells in the rough. Now listen to this perfect poetry from George Eliot, which by its magic touch transforms the bell into a thing of life', quoting the lines.

4 For example, the unsigned article in *The Bible Christian Magazine*, 17 (1881), 60 that quotes Eliot's lines and adds: 'thus the slightest touch of faith makes the nature of the Godhead quiver to the centre'. Joseph William Reynolds's *The Mystery of the Universe, Our Common Faith* (London: Kegan Paul, 1884), p. 274 and Henry Burton's *The Gospel According to St. Luke* (New York: A.C. Armstrong and Son, 1893), p. 74 both quote these lines, to similar purpose.

5 'If it is not immediately clear that these lines are about social form, rather than, say, the acoustics of bells, the evidence is nonetheless there—most directly in that pointed word "mass", and most profoundly in the fnal cadence, where the "mass" is made a chorus of individuals singing in "low soft unison."' Evan Horowitz, 'Industrialism and the Victorian Novel'. Evan Horowitz, 'Industrialism and the Victorian Novel', in *The Oxford Handbook of the Victorian Novel*, ed. by Lisa Rodensky (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), https://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/ oxfordhb/9780199533145.001.0001/oxfordhb-9780199533145-e-021373. The moral he draws is: 'though the whole of society may seem overgrown or unwieldy, the right cause, the right ideal, the right note will show its resounding harmony.'

between the beauty of infections and the beauty of innuendoes.6 We are, according to the idiom 'struck' by another person's beauty, like a bell being struck by its clapper. Rosamond and Dorothea are both beautiful, and Lydgate is struck by both; but, considered in terms of cause and efect, one has a more insinuating, resonant efect upon him than the other. Why might this be? To answer such questions we turn, perhaps, to the character, perhaps even the subconscious subjectivities of the individual efected; but to do so in this context is to realise how rich the ironies of Eliot's characterisation are. Lydgate, who believes in a simple chain of cause-and-efect, is actually to be acted upon with a more fute-line trembling. What we feel we ought to desire and what we actually desire rarely align.

That this is so is picked out in the chapter's eighth paragraph, following this brief and firtatious exchange from Lydgate's courting of Rosamond. Before he leaves, Lydgate lifts and smells Rosamond's perfumed handkerchief 'as if to enjoy its scent' (why *as if*? Is Eliot hinting at a less self-evident motive?) The narrator continues:

But this agreeable holiday freedom with which Lydgate hovered about the fower of Middlemarch, could not continue indefnitely. It was not more possible to fnd social isolation in that town than elsewhere, and two people persistently firting could by no means escape from 'the various entanglements, weights, blows, clashings, motions, by which things severally go on.'

The line quoted is neither identifed in the text, nor is its provenance particularly obvious.7 It is, though, germane to this question of human motivation, of cause and efect, that is shaping Lydgate's personal, and the novel's collective, narrative. The quotation is Lucretian, from a section of the *De Rerum Natura* describing how the primal nature of matter as a 'state of discord' led to all the atoms in the universe 'joining battle, disordered their interspaces, passages, connexions, weights,

6 For a still valuable investigation of nineteenth-century literature—though not, specifcally, of Eliot—under this aegis, see Jerome J. McGann's *The Beauty of Infections: Literary Investigations in Historical Method and Theory* (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985).

7 Its source evades the editorial labour of Bert G. Hornback in his 'Norton Critical Edition' of the novel (Scranton, PA: W. W. Norton & Co., 1977), although David Carroll correctly identifes it in his Oxford edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).

blows, clashings, motions, because by reason of their unlike forms and varied shapes they could not all remain thus joined together nor fall into mutually harmonious motions'.8 It is, of course, a radically materialist vision of the universe, although Lucretius's actual account of cause-andefect is rather more nuanced and complex than is sometimes assumed.9 If Lydgate were to take fully to heart the implications of living in this clashing tempest of interactions he would, we can presume, be less complacent. There's a leaven of humour here too, of course: describing this one Midlands town in the 1830s in terms of a cosmic downpour of clashing Lucretian atoms. But it touches on something that some critics of Eliot have argued persuasively: that one of her distinctive attributes as a writer is precisely her repudiation of linear cause and efect.10

To return to Eliot's epigraphic bell: the particular phraseology in this short piece of verse is signifcant.  That word—concurrent—is an important one for *Middlemarch*. It frst occurs during an exchange between Bulstrode and Lydgate, indicative of the diference in their respective world-views.

'I am aware,' [Bulstrode] said, 'that the peculiar bias of medical ability is towards material means. Nevertheless, Mr. Lydgate, I hope we shall not vary in sentiment as to a measure in which you are not likely to be actively concerned, but in which your sympathetic concurrence may be an aid to me. You recognize, I hope; the existence of spiritual interests in your patients?'

'Certainly I do. But those words are apt to cover diferent meanings to diferent minds.'11

8 This is H. A. J. Munro's translation, *De Rerum Natura Libri Sex*, 2 vols (Cambridge: Deighton Bell & Co., 1866), vol. 2, p. 126. The Latin is: *discordia quorum/intervalla vias conexus pondera plagas/concursus motus turbabat proelia miscens/propter dissimilis formas variasque fguras,/quod non omnia sic poterant coniuncta manere* [*De Natura Rerum*, 5:436–38].

9 See, for instance, David Webb 'On Causality and Law in Lucretius and Contemporary Cosmology', in *Contemporary Encounters with Ancient Metaphysics*, ed. by Abraham Jacob Greenstine and Ryan J. Johnson (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017), pp. 254–69.

10 See, for instance, Sally Shuttleworth's reading of *Daniel Deronda* as a novel demonstrating Eliot's rejection of 'a linear sequence of cause and efect […] full authoritative knowledge, she asserts, cannot be obtained by tracing through a linear sequence of cause and efect'. Sally Shuttleworth, *George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Science: The Make-Believe of a Beginning* (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 177.

11 Eliot, *Middlemarch*, ch. 13.

Sympathetic concurrence, here, mediates between Bulstrode's spiritual apprehension of the universe and the physical, Lucretian connections of Lydgate's materialism. The word appears again at the meeting Bulstrode chairs to determine whether the 'scientifc' Vicar Farebrother or the more conventionally religious Tyke ('a man entirely given to his clerical ofce') be given the lucrative position of secretary at the new hospital—Tyke, of course, being Bulstrode's man:

Lydgate was late in setting out, but Dr. Sprague, the two other surgeons, and several of the directors had arrived early; Mr. Bulstrode, treasurer and chairman, being among those who were still absent. The conversation seemed to imply that the issue was problematical, and that a majority for Tyke was not so certain as had been generally supposed. The two physicians, for a wonder, turned out to be unanimous, or rather, though of diferent minds, they concurred in action.12

The Doctor is 'more than suspected of having no religion' by Middlemarch society—though this fact is not held against him ('it is certain that if any medical man had come to Middlemarch with the reputation of having very defnite religious views, of being given to prayer, and of otherwise showing an active piety, there would have been a general presumption against his medical skill'). He and his colleagues concur in preferring the more scientifc Farebrother. Lydgate, though it makes him wince to be believed to be kowtowing to Bulstrode—and although Farebrother is his friend—votes for Tyke. His anxieties have some grounding in reality. 'Mr. Wrench and Mr. Toller', the narrator says, 'were just now standing apart and having a friendly colloquy, in which they agreed that Lydgate was a jackanapes, just made to serve Bulstrode's purpose'. But this passage goes on to point up the mild social hypocrisy of these gentlemen, for 'to non-medical friends they had already concurred in praising the other young practitioner'. *Concurrence*, once again, speaks not to harmonious unanimity but rather to more practically-minded compromises.

The next use of the word is again associated with Lydgate: this time chapter 30's interview between the doctor and Dorothea over Casaubon's failing health. Informing her that Casaubon 'may possibly live for ffteen years or more, without much worse health than he has had hitherto', at which news 'Dorothea had turned very pale, and when Lydgate paused she said in a low voice, "You mean if we are very careful"'. Her point is that 'he would be miserable if he had to give up his work' and Lydgate's reply is less lucid than it frst seems:

'I am aware of that. The only course is to try by all means, direct and indirect, to moderate and vary his occupations. With a happy concurrence of circumstances, there is, as I said, no immediate danger from that afection of the heart, which I believe to have been the cause of his late attack. On the other hand, it is possible that the disease may develop itself more rapidly: it is one of those cases in which death is sometimes sudden. Nothing should be neglected which might be afected by such an issue.'13

The 'happy concurrence' to which Lydgate here refers is a notional congeries of eventualities that will, somehow, protect Casaubon's fragile heart.

As the story goes on, Bulstrode's interference in the management of the hospital threatens to sink it (the narrator speaks of 'the outburst of professional disgust at the announcement of the laws Mr. Bulstrode was laying down for the direction of the New Hospital, which were the more exasperating because there was no present possibility of interfering with his will and pleasure'),14 Lydgate gives up part of his practice to be able to devote more time to the project ('I must work the harder, that's all, and I have given up my post at the Infrmary') and Bulstrode assures him: 'Mr. Brooke of Tipton has already given me his concurrence, and a pledge to contribute yearly: he has not specifed the sum—probably not a great one'. This *concurrence* is a fancy way of saying: he has agreed to give me some money (though not much money)—the pun on *currency* is right there—and marks a further debasement on what 'concurrent' might signify. Money also haunts the next connection of Lydgate with concurrence. During Rosamond's post-miscarriage convalescence Lydgate fnds himself 'unable to suppress all signs of inward trouble', and as her health recovers he meditates 'taking her entirely into confdence on his [fnancial] difculties'. There are too many tradesmen's bills, and they need to retrench fnancially: but 'how could such a change be made without Rosamond's concurrence?'.15 By the time we get to chapter 71's

13 Ibid., ch. 30.

14 Ibid., ch. 45.

15 Ibid., ch. 58.

account of Bulstrode's downfall it is no surprise to see the same word utilised. Hawley addresses the meeting:

In what I have to say, Mr. Chairman, I am not speaking simply on my own behalf: I am speaking with the concurrence and at the express request of no fewer than eight of my fellow-townsmen, who are immediately around us. It is our united sentiment that Mr. Bulstrode should be called upon—and I do now call upon him—to resign public positions which he holds not simply as a tax-payer, but as a gentleman among gentlemen.16

This concurrence is a collective outfanking, and marks the end of Bulstrode. The other bigwigs of Middlemarch are running together, as a pack (the Latin *concurro* has the primary meaning 'I run with others, I fock', and only subsequently came to mean 'I concur, I coincide': *curro* means 'I run'). If *currency* is one punning association of concurrence, the canine or lupine *curs* is another. Wolves; people; money.

It says little to note that Eliot 'runs together' her storylines. We could say the same about most writers. But Eliot has a closer eye than most to the way 'running-together' is both a kind of *currency* and a kind of infuence—not a billiard ball striking another, but a more subtle penetration of infuence from individual to individual. It is to create a whole world through the creation of a single fute-note, by sounding your fner instrument inside the canopy of the bell. Currency means money (hospitals don't run without money; younger relatives' debts aren't quitted without money; wives with expensive tastes aren't satisfed without it). Currency also means contemporaneity ('current afairs'), a more complicated relationship for this novel set pre-Darwin but very much written by a sensibility formed post-. And, to return to the beginning of this chapter, there's a particular, quasi-musical concurrence chiming, or sounding, through this novel.

Bells summon the faithful to church, and summon children to school, which is to say: they are instruments of congregation. In chapter 77 the widowed Dorothea on the pretext of attending to the donation of a bell to a school, calls on Lydgate—this at the time of collective suspicion regarding his closeness to the disgraced Bulstrode—hoping to reassure him. Her mind is also running on her burgeoning love for Ladislaw. This 'fne-toned bell'—

Dorothea had another errand in Lowick Gate: it was about a new fnetoned bell for the school-house, and as she had to get out of her carriage very near to Lydgate's, she walked thither across the street, having told the coachman to wait for some packages.17

—leads to an unexpected congregation:

She found herself on the other side of the door without seeing anything remarkable, but immediately she heard a voice speaking in low tones which startled her as with a sense of dreaming in daylight, and advancing unconsciously a step or two beyond the projecting slab of a bookcase, she saw, in the terrible illumination of a certainty which flled up all outlines, something which made her pause, motionless, without self-possession enough to speak.

Seated with his back towards her on a sofa which stood against the wall on a line with the door by which she had entered, she saw Will Ladislaw: close by him and turned towards him with a fushed tearfulness which gave a new brilliancy to her face sat Rosamond, her bonnet hanging back, while Will leaning towards her clasped both her upraised hands in his and spoke with low-toned fervour.

'Dorothea', says Eliot, 'after the frst immeasurable instant of this vision' retreats. She 'walked across the street with her most elastic step and was quickly in her carriage again'. The shock of the encounter, the vibration of this suspicion, is described by Eliot in terms of a crowd, a 'throng' ('she had seen something so far below her belief, that her emotions rushed back from it and made an excited throng without an object'), or as she later says when her sister intuits she is upset, a global population: in reply to Celia's question 'has something happened?', Dorothea asserts that 'a great many things have happened […] all the troubles of all people on the face of the earth'. This abrupt erosion of lover's faith is another kind of concurrence.

That it proves a misunderstanding does nothing to defang this moment, a kind of second disappointment, or loss of innocence, for Dorothea. The failure of her marriage to Casaubon indexed her own naivety (for Casaubon was always exactly what he seemed to be); but this hints that her love for Ladislaw might have fxed itself on an inconstant and unworthy object. A few chapters later these feelings are renewed, and again Eliot connects it to the bell. At a loose end, and somewhat agitated, Dorothea

17 Ibid., ch. 77.

walked straight to the schoolhouse and entered into a conversation with the master and mistress about the new bell, giving eager attention to their small details and repetitions, and getting up a dramatic sense that her life was very busy.18

From here to the parsonage, where Dorothea's agitation is increased by the guileless Miss Noble, who has a 'German box', a present from Ladislaw, and whose ardent feelings are the subject of jolly gossip.

'If Henrietta Noble forms an attachment to any one, Mrs. Casaubon,' said [Farebrother's] mother, emphatically,—'she is like a dog—she would take their shoes for a pillow and sleep the better.'

'Mr. Ladislaw's shoes, I would,' said Henrietta Noble.

Dorothea made an attempt at smiling in return. She was surprised and annoyed to fnd that her heart was palpitating violently, and that it was quite useless to try after a recovery of her former animation. Alarmed at herself—fearing some further betrayal of a change so marked in its occasion, she rose and said in a low voice with undisguised anxiety, 'I must go; I have overtired myself.'19

That's another function of a bell, of course: as with the tolling bell of Donne's 'no man is an island' sermon, it recalls us to our mortality, or, in Dorothea's case, the death of her hopes. That these late misdirections are linked by Eliot to Dorothea's school bell is a mild irony. We could say: its chime is schooling her in the depth, and precarity, of her own feelings. Her grief after her visit to the priory rings her like a bell: '"Oh, I did love him!" Then came the hour in which the waves of sufering shook her too thoroughly to leave any power of thought'. Sound waves, emotional waves, passing out and infuencing the world.

This fute-note concurrency is illustrated by the scene that follows, in which Dorothea goes to Rosamond to 'save' her—that is, to dissuade her from having an afair with Ladislaw—and Rosamond, intuiting the direction in which her delicately circumlocutionary phraseology is going, steps in when the words stop coming. The moment is articulated in terms not only of mutual vibration, a spontaneous concurrency of feeling that leads to intimacy, but also of what the epigraph to chapter 31, with which *this* chapter began, calls 'a low soft unison':

The waves of her own sorrow, from out of which she was struggling to save another, rushed over Dorothea with conquering force. She stopped

18 Ibid., ch. 80.

19 Ibid.

in speechless agitation, not crying, but feeling as if she were being inwardly grappled. Her face had become of a deathlier paleness, her lips trembled, and she pressed her hands helplessly on the hands that lay under them. Rosamond, taken hold of by an emotion stronger than her own—hurried along in a new movement which gave all things some new, awful, undefned aspect—could fnd no words, but involuntarily she put her lips to Dorothea's forehead which was very near her, and then for a minute the two women clasped each other as if they had been in a shipwreck. 'You are thinking what is not true,' said Rosamond, in an eager half-whisper.20

How *will* you know the pitch of that great bell/Too large for us to stir? Breathe upon your fute, and listen close/Till the right note fows forth, a silvery rill:

> Then shall the huge bell tremble—then the mass With myriad waves concurrent shall respond In low soft unison.

I have one last observation with respect to the six-and-a-half lines of Eliot's bell verse. The relative eclipse of reputation of Friedrich Schiller in Britain, I mean—between the nineteenth-century and the present day occludes the most obvious intertext for Eliot's short 'bell' poem: Schiller's lengthy 'Das Lied von der Glocke' (1798). Eliot, a dedicated reader of Schiller, was certainly aware of this 'Song of the Bell'.21 Schiller traces the life of the bell from raw materials, through its casting to its transportation and hanging—this a collective activity, *Tausend feißge Hände regen/helfen sich in munterm Bund*, 'a thousand hands, busy in motion, help in cheerful union'—until the bell is fnally sounded, and named 'CONCORDIA', whose chime brings all people's together, and sings-out with a star-bright sound:

20 Ibid., ch. 81.

21 'As Mary Sibree, to whom she taught German, records it: 'Placing together one day the works of Schiller [. . .] Miss Evans said, "Oh, if I had given these to the world, how happy I should be!"' (Cross, p. 53). Although her reading of Schiller was at its most intense in the early I840s, the 'thrill' she felt at the sight of his house in Weimar in I854, as well as references to him as late as in *Middlemarch* and *Daniel Deronda*, show that her attraction to his work remained strong throughout her life. The impact of his work on her own is considerable'. Deborah Guth, 'George Eliot and Schiller: Narrative Ambivalence in *Middlemarch* and *Felix Holt*', *Modern Language Review*, 94.4 (1999), 913–24 (p. ). See also Guth's book-length study, *George Eliot and Schiller: Intertextuality and Cross-Cultural Discourse* (Surrey: Ashgate Publishing, 2003).

*Soll eine Stimme sein von oben, Wie der Gestirne helle Schar!*

This joyous, ingenuous peroration to the 'unison' that Eliot's bell also sounds is one of Schiller's most famous poems. Even more famous is his essay *Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung* (1795–96), 'On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry'.22 And it has sometimes seemed to me that Eliot's novel sets out, playfully enough but with a serious purpose for all that, to upend Schiller's distinction. We could put it this way: Dorothea at the beginning of *Middlemarch* is naïve, whereas at the end, as she realises how easily her sensibility—her genuine love for Ladislaw—could capsize her, she becomes sentimental. But her naivety is not a Schillerian unity of subject and object; it is, on the contrary, an intensely self-considered, self-conscious setting of herself a goal for her life, where her sentimentality is so spontaneous that it eventually moves her, and the object of her love, out of the artifciality of the fction that is *Middlemarch* altogether. In *The Book on Adler* (1872), Søren Kierkegaard claims that 'though it is indeed by writing that one justifes the claim to be an author, it is also, strangely enough, by writing that one virtually renounces this claim. To fnd the conclusion it is necessary frst of all to observe that it is lacking, and then in turn to feel quite vividly the lack of it'.23 The coming-together of Dorothea and Ladislaw feels to some

22 German original available at http://www.zeno.org/Literatur/M/Schiller,+Friedrich/ Theoretische+Schriften/%C3%9Cber+naive+und+sentimentalische+Dichtung. James Wood prefers 'simple' as an Englishing of the German *naive*: 'Schiller argues that the ancient writers, especially the Greeks, were at one with nature, combining thought and feeling, while the modern writer can only seek or aspire to nature, worshipping or elegising what he no longer possesses simply. Schiller fnds in the Greeks "a character of calm necessity. Their impatient imagination only traverses nature to pass beyond it to the drama of human life."  Indeed, the sentimental poet idealises nature much as we (including, self-confessedly, Schiller) sentimentalise the Greeks themselves. The problem for modern literature of this loss of innocence is that, in contrast with the ancient simple poet, we never see "the object itself": instead, the modern poet is always refecting on the impressions he receives from nature, always "a spectator of his own emotion". Schiller's examples of simple poets are Homer and Shakespeare; of sentimental poets, Milton and Kleist'. James Wood, 'Buckets of Empathy', *London Review of Books*, 22.7 (2000), https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v22/n07/james-wood/buckets-of-empathy

23 Søren Kierkegaard, *On Authority and Revelation: The Book on Adler, or a Cycle of Ethico-Religious Essays*, trans. by Walter Lowrie (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1955), p. 65.

readers like a conclusion as well as a consummation, but Eliot is canny enough to understand that it actually represents the lack—the rather vivid lack—of a conclusion. Or to put it another way: a hammer strike meeting the bell's metal might be simple, but there is more haunting and spiritual unison in the fute-song, sentimental though it be, inside the bell's hood.

A bell is revealed as—if this isn't too bizarre a way of putting it an auditory mirror: our action upon it, direct or inferential, is bounced back resonantly to us. The chiming of bells is a preliminary, a kind of aural epigraph, to a church service; and a short text, an epigraph, is the verbal preliminary to the sermon at the heart of the service. Such items stand not as models of the larger, or longer, work to which they append themselves so much as fractal *ratio minores*, encapsulations that refect, like the drop of ink at the end of the pen with which Eliot opens *Adam Bede*. We can see in them, and through them, and what we can see are the vistas Eliot's great novel opens to us.

It would, however, be perverse to end a study that proposes to read Eliot's novel via mirrors and lenses with a bell. After all, *Middlemarch* is not lacking in deictic pointers to its own specular design. This is how chapter 27 opens:

An eminent philosopher among my friends,24 who can dignify even your ugly furniture by lifting it into the serene light of science, has shown me this pregnant little fact. Your pier-glass or extensive surface of polished steel made to be rubbed by a housemaid, will be minutely and multitudinously scratched in all directions; but place now against it a lighted candle as a centre of illumination, and lo! the scratches will seem to arrange themselves in a fne series of concentric circles round that little sun. It is demonstrable that the scratches are going everywhere impartially and it is only your candle which produces the fattering illusion of a concentric arrangement, its light falling with an exclusive optical selection. These things are a parable. The scratches are events, and the candle is the egoism of any person now absent—of Miss Vincy, for example.

24 It is tricky to prove, but nonetheless likely, that the 'eminent friend' referred to here was scientist William Edward Ayrton (1847–1908), who lectured to the Royal Society on mirrors and electric illumination, and was involved in a number of advances in arc-lights, electrical communication and other things. Eliot befriended Ayrton's daughter Hertha in the early 1870s, and helped her gain a place at Girton.

This 'parable' has been widely discussed by Eliot's critics, although given how assiduously Eliot herself spells-out its meaning, elaboration runs the risk of being supererogatory. For J. Hillis Miller, the crucial thing here is the way Eliot describes her own mimetic mirror-work, as novelist, in parabolic terms: as the 'parable' lays clear the lines of sight that are gathered, on parabolic trajectories, by this mirror.25 Barbara Leckie, with perhaps greater penetration into Eliot's craft, focuses instead on the way her mimetic refectivity is *augmented* (rather than, as we might think, compromised) by the 'cross-hatching of scratches' here identifed: 'the cross-hatching of scratches also signal one of the novel's central organising motifs: the web. That is, the pier glass is at once a refective surface and a surface that invokes a web; it represents the mirror not as a straightforward refection but rather, as Leah Price puts it, "the mirror as a system of infnite connections"'.26 It is a web, and a bell, and both are in some sense a mirror—the mimetic art in which a small, distorted thing refects back to us the large, beautiful thing.

The chapter with which this passage opens *pre-*begins with this epigraph:

> Let the high Muse chant loves Olympian: We are but mortals, and must sing of man.

This is Eliot's translation of the following two lines from Theocritus:

Μοῦσαι μὲν θεαὶ ἐντί, θεοὺς θεαὶ ἀείδοντι: ἄμμες δὲ βροτοὶ οἵδε, βροτοὺς βροτοὶ ἀείδωμεν. 27

A more literal rendering might go: 'the Muses, though, are gods and being gods do sing of gods; we who are here (οἵδε) are mortals, and as mortals let us sing of mortals.' Eliot loses something by condensing the

25 '"Parable" means, etymologically, "thrown beside," from the Greek *para*, beside, and *ballein*, to throw. A parable is set or thrown at some distance from the meaning which controls it and to which it obliquely or parabolically refers, as, in its defnition, a parabolic curve is controlled, across a space, by its parallelism to a line on the cone of which it is a section […] the parabola creates that line in the empty air, just as the parables of Jesus remedy a defect of vision, give sight to the blind, and make the invisible visible'. Joseph Hillis Miller, *Reading for Our Time:* Adam Bede *and* Middlemarch *Revisited* (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), p. 65.

26 Barbara Leckie, *Open Houses: Poverty, the Novel, and the Architectural Idea in Nineteenth-Century Britain* (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), p. 191, https://doi.org/10.9783/9780812295177

27 Theocritus, *Idylls*, 16:3–4.

thrice-repeated θεαὶ (goddesses) and thrice-repeated βροτός (mortal men) that balance it, not least the gender distinction between female goddesses and mortal men.

Theocritus's poem turns out to be about how far men have fallen (into love of money and other things) and yet how it remains possible that they can be redeemed, and open their houses to the Χάριτες the 'Graces': Aglaea ('Shining'), Euphrosyne ('Joy') and Thalia ('Blooming'). Grace (Χάρις) has an important place in Christian thought, of course; as do 'parables'. And Theocritus's poem says that *though* we are broken, scratched as in Eliot's 'parable' of the mirror, grace can still enter in. It is hard not to wonder if Eliot, by invoking this gracious poem, is not inviting us to see rose-blooming Rosamond as Thalia, spiritually-illuminated Dorothea as Aglaea and, smaller than the other two in terms of the space the novel allows her, but surely just as important in terms of what she says about the lineaments of female happiness, quietly joyful Mary Garth as Euphrosyne.

And even this, I would say, modest unpacking of a particular epigraph entails the lensing, or fute-resonance, that Eliot's epigraphs so often do. Her choices as a translator, by de-gendering and de-repetitising a gendered, triply-insistent original, universalise and render less insistently rhetorical the underlying sentiment. Most of all, by translating the original triad of Muse-Graces as a single 'Muse', Eliot gestures, delicately enough, at the unifying vision she is attempting in her novel.

Here, for comparison, is a roughly-contemporaneous Victorian translation of the opening lines of Theocritus's sixteenth idyll:

This is ever a care to the daughters of Jove, ever to poets, to hymn immortals, to hymn the glories of brave men. The Muses indeed are goddesses; goddesses sing of gods: but we are mortals here; let us mortals sing of mortals. Yet who of as many as dwell under the bright dawn, will open his doors, and graciously welcome in his home our Graces, and not send them away again unrewarded?28

The translator here adds a footnote, glossing Χάριτες as 'i.e. his poems. For a similar prosopopoeia see Horace's Epistle 1:20 where he compares

28 'Idyll XVI: The Graces; Or, Hiero', *The Idylls of Theocritus, Bion and Moschus, and the War-songs of Tyrtaeus*, trans. by Rev. J. Banks (London: George Bell and Sons, 1878), p. 84.

his book with a damsel desiring to go forth in public'. Theocritus's poem, in other words, is a poem about poetry, a self-refexive text, not in a hermetically sealed or inward manner but, on the contrary, in the sense that poetry goes out into the world. Eliot's novel, similarly, refracts its textualities dialectically between epigraph-small and chapter-, and novel-, large. This specular epigraphy is a line of sight that combines the microscopic and the telescopic, that shines upon the mirror's scratches in order not to overlook or occlude them but rather to transform them in the brilliancy of Eliot's imaginative reconfguration into something as beautiful as true. That *Middlemarch* is a novel that balances the small and the large is hardly a new critical observation of course. Back in 1975, J. Hillis Miller argued that Eliot's confgures *Middlemarch* such that

a fragment is examined as a 'sample' of the larger whole of which it is a part, though the whole impinges on the part as the 'medium' within which it lives, as national politics afect Middlemarch when there is a general election, or as the coming of the railroad upsets rural traditions. Eliot's strategy of totalization is to present individual character or event in the context of that wider medium and to afrm universal laws of human behavior in terms of characters.29

This strikes me as both an over-emphasis on 'totalization' as Eliot's aesthetic strategy, and an over-emphasis on such in-world events as elections and railway development. The refractive epigraphy I am arguing for here as constitutive of the novel is less lineally accretive than Miller's model. In *Middlemarch* we look through the epigraphs, as through a lens; and also back at the quoted text (as in a mirror), and both directions, one gesturing telescopically at the larger, the other condensing attention microscopically upon the former—and by

29 J. Hillis Miller, 'Optic and Semiotic in *Middlemarch*', in *The Worlds of Victorian Fiction*, ed. by Jerome Buckley (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975), pp. 125–45 (126–27). For Miller, the optical is only one of three 'totalizing metaphors' that construe the novel, and is moreover subordinated in his reading to the more prominent 'textual' metaphors (fabric, web and so on) and metaphors of 'fow' or 'stream'. He also, in passing, suggests a meta-metaphor, describing these three as 'a family of intertwined metaphors and motifs' and glossing his own comment in a footnote: 'what, exactly, is the nature of the resemblance which binds together the members of this family and makes it seem of one genetic stock? Why, if Eliot's goal is to describe what is "really there," objectively, must there be more than one model in order to create a total picture?' Miller, 'Optic and Semiotic', p. 134. Like jesting Pilate he does not stay for an answer to these question.

extension, one inviting us to view the whole of this middled England as a vista or panorama, the other inviting us to zero-in on the minutiae that constitute this life-vista, as minutiae constitute all our lives. In all this Eliot is beautifully aware of the textuality of lived experience, not just in the sense that texts (like books and paintings) have a large role in creating and shaping us as human beings, but in the sense that life is a process of reading and re-reading other humans, and their situations, and life as such. In that, the radicalism of the epigraph is its insistence that such reading is always close-reading, actually; that the smallest of expressions or gestures may embody the largest of signifcances. The delicate sound of a fute resonates all the bell-like universe into contrapuntal music.

Towards the end, Ladislaw fnds that he cannot pour out his heart to the (now widowed) Dorothea and that he is constrained to a brevity of expression. This, though, is presented in the novel as no bad thing.

That simplicity of hers, holding up an ideal for others in her believing conception of them, was one of the great powers of her womanhood. And it had from the frst acted strongly on Will Ladislaw. He felt, when he parted from her, that the brief words by which he had tried to convey to her his feeling about herself and the division which her fortune made between them, would only proft by their brevity when Dorothea had to interpret them: he felt that in her mind he had found his highest estimate.30

Brevity is the highest mode of communicating with the expansive simplicity of fulness—and vice versa: in a nutshell, it's the whole novel.

30 Eliot, *Middlemarch*, ch. 77.

Ricks, Christopher, *Allusion to the Poets* (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).

*Middlemarch*', *International Journal of the Classical Tradition*, 5.3 (1999), 367–82, https://doi.org/10.1007/bf02687693

### Index

Aeschylus 96 Arendt, Hannah 68 Armstrong, Isabel 62–63, 137 Austen, Jane 3, 21, 142 Baker, William 53 Baltazar, Lisa 86 Balzac, Honoré de 56 Bate, Walter Jackson 19, 21, 137 Beale, Anthony 20, 137 Beaty, Jerome 37 Beaumont, Francis 107, 109 Beer, Gillian 33, 54–55 Bichat, Marie François Xavier 54–56, 137 Blake, William 105 Browne, Thomas 106 Browning, Robert 68 Brown, Robert 56–57 Bunyan, John 106 Burrow, Colin 21–22, 114, 137 Burstein, Miriam 3 Burton, Robert 106 Cervantes, Miguel de 106 Chaucer, Geoffrey 105 Cicero 3–4 Cioran, Emil 29 Cocteau, Jean 22 Conrad, Joseph 7, 29 Dante 106 Darwin, Charles 33, 55–56, 126, 137 De Staël, Germaine 21 Dickens, Charles 21, 113 Disney, Walt 94 Dodd, Valerie 25 Donne, John 105

Dryden, John 89 Eagleton, Terry 95 Einstein, Albert 45 Eliot, Thomas Stearnes 7, 27, 141 Empson, William 6, 138 Erskine-Hill, Howard 5 Euripides 96 Fleishman, Avrom 53 Fletcher, John 107, 109 Flint, Kate 13 Foucault, Michel 12, 56–58, 141 Fuller, Thomas 70, 106 Furst, Lilian 13 Gaston, Sean 83 Ginsburg, Michael Peled 9 Gissing, George 32 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 21, 106, 116, 140 Goldsmith, Oliver 106 Guizot, François Pierre Guillaume 65–67, 106, 138 Halliday, Andrew 75 Handley, Graham 113 Hardy, Thomas 2 Herodotus 23, 109–110, 139 Hesiod 106 Higdon, David Leon 8 Homer 4, 48, 90, 92, 130, 139 Horace 80, 83, 133, 139 Horowitz, Evan 121 Hugo, Victor 30, 106 Jackson, Catherine 62 James, Henry 8, 18–20, 35, 67, 72, 130, 140, 143

#### *148 Middlemarch*

Jameson, Fredric 32, 139 Johnson, Samuel 106 Jones, H Stuart 32 Joyce, James 19–20 Kidd, Colin 85 Kierkegaard, Søren 130 Kitchel, Anna Theresa 13 Kuzmic, Tatania 75 Leckie, Barbara 132 Leinster-Mackay, Donald 53 Lewes, George Henry 25, 31, 35–36, 53, 96, 113, 116, 137, 140 Lucretius 4, 122–123, 140, 143 Macdonald, Fiona 5 Mars-Jones, Adam 102 Marvell, Andrew 6 Mason, Michael York 11 Mayhew, Henry 75 McClintock, John 80 McDonagh, Josephine 99 McGann, Jerome J 122 McKee, Patricia 72 Miller, Joseph Hillis 134 Milton, John 17–18, 105, 130, 141 Milton, Paul 86 Moring, Meg 37 Mudge, Gilbert 113 Müller, Karl Otfried 35–37, 86, 88, 141 Müller, Max 86 Musset, Alfred de 106 Nuttall, Anthony 32, 141 Pascal 4, 12, 25–30, 63, 106, 141 Pascal, Blaise 63 Pattison, Mark 32–33, 139 Petronius 7 Peyre, Henri 95 Phillips, Adam 22, 114–116, 141 Polybius 77 Pound, Ezra 7 Purcell, Nicholas 90

Rebellato, Dan 12, 56–58, 141 Richardson, Samuel 92, 95 Ricks, Christopher 6 Rignall, John 80 Robespierre, Maximilien 116 Rothfield, Lawrence 11, 63 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 66–67 Runciman, David 69 Ruskin, John 78–79, 142 Sanders, Andrew 3 Sand, George 21, 25–27, 30, 143 Sappho 4, 35–37, 41–42 Schiller, Friedrich 129 Scott 1–5, 21, 142 Sears, Minnie Earl 113 Sedley, Charles 105 Shakespeare, William 5, 13, 25, 41, 98, 105, 130 Shuckburgh, Evelyn 77 Shuttleworth, Sally 11, 123 Sophocles 95–97 Southey, Robert 76–77 Spenser, Edmund 105 Stanislaw II 73 Stevens, Wallace 121 Strauss, David 83 Tambling, Jeremy 57 Theocritus 132 Thomson, Patricia 26 Thonemann, Peter 32 Tolstoy, Leo 48–49, 95, 142 Travis, Roger 86 Turner 78 Verne, Jules 74–75 Virgil 2 von Bunsen, Ernest 85 Watt, Ian 94 Watts, Alaric 53 Webb, David 123 Wettlaufer, Alexandra 26 Williams, Raymond 50

Wilson, Catherine 63 Woolf, Virginia 5 Wordsworth, William 9, 21, 105 Wormald, Mark 62

Wright, Terence 11 Ziolkowski, Theodore J 6 Zola, Émile 12, 32, 56–57

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## MIDDLEMARCH **AdAm RobeRts** Epigraphs and Mirrors

### AdAm RobeRts

*Using epigraphs as a lens to open up new vistas, this study explores a wide range of connectons. Moving freely between epigraphs and the main text, Roberts succeeds in throwing fresh light on the manifold 'middleness' of Middlemarch and the richness and sophistcaton of George Eliot's realism.*

John Rignall

**obp**

**A**

**d**

**A**

**m Robe**

**Rts**

MIDDLEMARCH

**MIDDLEMARCH**

**Epigraphs and Mirrors**

In *Middlemarch,* George Eliot draws a character passionately absorbed by abstruse allusion and obscure epigraphs. Casaubon's obsession is a cautonary tale, but Adam Roberts nonetheless sees in him an invitaton to take Eliot's use of epigraphy and allusion seriously, and this book is an atempt to do just that.

Roberts considers the epigraph as a mirror that refracts the meaning of a text, and that thus carries important resonances for the way Eliot's novels generate their meanings. In this lively and provoking study, he tracks down those allusions and quotatons that have hitherto gone unidentfed by scholars, examining their relatonship to the text in which they sit to unfurl a broader argument about the novel – both this novel, and the novel form itself.

*Middlemarch: Epigraphs and Mirrors* is both a study of George Eliot and a meditaton on the textuality of fcton. It is essental reading for specialists and students of George Eliot, the nineteenth century novel, and intertextuality. It will also richly reward anyone who has ever taken pleasure in *Middlemarch*.

This is the author-approved editon of this Open Access ttle. As with all Open Book publicatons, this entre book is available to read for free on the publisher's website. Printed and digital editons, together with supplementary digital material, can also be found at htp://www.openbookpublishers.com

Cover image: Vilhelm Hammershoi, *Interior with a Mirror* (1907). Cover design by Anna Gat.


*Edited by Tao Zhang*

The treatment of waste is highly relevant to human life and is receiving increasing attention from researchers. This volume contains a number of innovative and cuttingedge approaches to waste treatment, which hopefully will provide authors with new ideas for research in the area of waste treatment to contribute to the development of circular economy models.

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The Circular Economy - Recent Advances in Sustainable Waste Management

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