I think it's been at least 15 years since I've read this novel, and I was fascinated by Mead's comments on how differently she has read it over the years: "I have gone back to "Middlemarch" every five years or so, my emotional response to it evolving at each revisiting." On her most recent reading, Mead writes:
Rather than limning the inchoate hopes of youth, "Middlemarch" seemed to be about the resignations that attend middle age. It became a primer to the limitations on accomplishment that are, for the most part, the lot of even the most ardent and aspiring among us. (Lydgate dies at fifty, believing himself a failure: "He had not done what he once meant to do.") ...With each reading I became only more grateful for Eliot's wise, consoling grace, and only more admiring of the quiet celebration of the unremarkable that infuses the book's unforgettable conclusion: "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."
Mead's essay is challenging me to re-read Middlemarch. (And being able to read the Kindle free download on my iPhone is very convenient.) What might not have looked to me in my thirties, or even a couple of years ago, like appropriately challenging aspirations now appear honorable to me. "Living faithfully a hidden life" looks just fine to me. The novel's ending is framed by what one might wish to see as a companion quote at the beginning, in the section titled "Prelude":
Here and there is born a Saint Theresa, foundress of nothing, whose loving heart-beats and sobs after an unattained goodness tremble off and are dispersed among hindrances, instead of centring in some long-recognizable deed.
From the vantage point of middle age, I see myself in just that predicament. My own attempts at goodness seem largely failures, and are, indeed, virtually always dispersed among hindrances in scope petty, tragic, or somewhere in between. Mead says that Eliot is unfailingly charitable in her authorial evaluations of her novels' characters: "even when it comes to her most flawed characters...her default authorial position is one of pity." I hope I can learn to be as charitable in my evaluation of my own life. I don't think it is possible to be as insightful or accurate about one's own life as someone else can be, given the inevitable blindness that Jesus described as having a log in one's eye.
Somehow in the world of refrigerator magnets, inspirational books, and greeting cards, people began to attribute to Eliot the sentiment that "It is never too late to be what you might have been." Mead describes her futile attempt to locate such a quotation anywhere in Eliot's writings, given that most of Eliot's work seems to argue the very opposite: that "it is always too late to be what you might have been--but...virtually without exception the unrealized life is worth living." (In a lighter vein, but expressing not too different a sentiment, G.K.Chesterton once said that anything worth doing is worth doing badly.) Middle age is about facing limits. Perhaps, one may hope, those very real, non-abstract limits may function as the rules for writing sonnets function for the poet: to give structure and context to the time that remains in one's life.
If my attempts to complete a re-reading of this novel from a vantage point of middle age do not founder on hindrances, perhaps I will follow up this post with further thoughts on Middlemarch and middle age. Is anybody else inspired to read along with me?
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