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with just a bit of overstatement, that flourishes in the life of the middle
class. Characters like the serious young doctor Lydgate and the earnest
but drifting young woman Dorothea, who set themselves a little apart
from the standards of this world, seeking vocations of purpose and lives
graced by consciousness, have to measure very soberly the odds against
them. They have
to
know that their struggle, while not doomed, will be
difficult. They have to be alert to those subtle corruptions with which
the world would stain them (those "spots of commonness," as Eliot
calls Lydgate's partronizing view of women).
To be personally distinguished in the world of Jane Austen is
to
experience some inconvenience; one has to set oneself at a certain
distance, yet by no means wholly apart, from the bulk of ordinary, dull
people. Somewhat more than half a century later, in the world of
George Eliot, the problem has become far more severe. To engage in a
serious vocation, whether as artist or scientist or political thinker, or to
live by disinterested moral ends that don't necessarily require a particu–
lar vocation, is now to face a harsh struggle with the powers that
dominate society. It may still be possible to reach a truce allowing one
a margin of survival, but only by commanding large gifts of self–
knowledge and strategy. As George Eliot sees it, this is not a political
struggle: she does nQt often think in such categories. The Lydgates and
Dorotheas need a patient, clear-headed strength in order
to
hold their
ground, defend their standards, and above all, do the work they really
want to. Flaws of character can lead to defeat in the enterprise of
defining one's life. When a Lydgate suffers the humiliation of worldly
"success," it is mostly because he has not understood what his dedica–
tion as a scientist demands from him as citizen and man. It is not
possible, suggests George Eliot, simultaneously to defy the standards of
the community and drift painlessly in its commonplace ways of life.
At the end of
Middlemarch
the problem remains mostly unre–
solved: how can intelligent and sensitive people carve out a portion of
autonomy in their lives? how maintain themselves in their distinctive–
ness? And because no certain answer emerges, Eliot's preoccupation
with the problem of vocation seems, so
to
say, a problem remaining
beyond the last page of the book.
It
will become more urgent still–
indeed, all but obsessional-in
Daniel Deronda.
One might even say
that she is here bringing
to
bear an essentiall y religious vision, that
hunger for spiritual consecration which is the heritage of the Chris–
tianity she abandoned in her earlier years. A contemporary writer spoke
of Eliot as "the first great
godless
writer of fiction that has appeared in
England," and this is keen provided one adds that precisety her
