My Life in Middlemarch (20 page)

Dorothea is outraged at his treatment of her, and spends several hours raging in her boudoir. Eliot writes that another woman in this situation might start to hate. But Dorothea struggles against that impulse and approaches Casaubon again, catching him off guard as he is ascending the staircase, taper in hand, heading for bed. He tells her, “Come, my dear, come. You are young, and need not to extend your life by watching.” The “kind quiet melancholy of that speech,” as Eliot calls it, is enough to move Dorothea’s sympathy back to him. In a gesture of resignation and submission, she slips her hand into his, and the reader can imagine the cold inadequacy of his hand’s responding touch.

Casaubon is not without his emotional intuitions—he accurately anticipates the inevitability of Dorothea and Ladislaw falling in love, and attempts through the codicil to his will to manipulate their futures with his dead hand. But his sympathies are never enlarged. He cannot feel with Dorothea—even if the meeting on the stairs does surprise him into a fleeting moment of kindness and reciprocity. (Great art “surprises even the trivial and the selfish into that attention to what is apart from themselves,” Eliot writes in “The Natural History of German Life.”)

But if Casaubon is incapable of emotional enlargement the
reader of
Middlemarch
is not, and Eliot sows the seeds of sympathy for Casaubon early on. Ladislaw steams inwardly at his prematurely elderly cousin marrying Dorothea, convinced in his own mind that “a man was bound to know himself better than that.” But Casaubon, crucially, does
not
know himself better than that, and there is one moment in his proposal letter where pathos breaks through the pomposity. He has outlined the ways in which he considers Dorothea a suitable handmaiden to his labors; he has assured her that there is nothing in his past to cause her bitterness or shame. Then he tells her that if she were to refuse him he cannot help but feel that resignation to solitude will be more difficult now that his hopes have been raised. “But in this order of experience I am still young,” he writes.

Casaubon may be in his midforties, well into middle age, but he is still as inexperienced and fearful as he was as a young man, with the added burden of knowing that all that he expected to have accomplished by this point in his life is still undone. Dorothea fails to see that while Casaubon is by far her senior, he is still beset by the confusions of earlier years. “I mention this trifling incident because it is typical of my way of doing things all my life,” Mark Pattison wrote of his clumsy teenage quest for solitude. Casaubon may have gray hair and a lined face, but when it comes to love, he’s at least as unsophisticated as Dorothea, and maybe more.

At Dorothea’s age it can be very hard to realize that a middle-aged person, who seems so very much older, has not necessarily achieved wisdom and self-mastery. When I was in my twenties it came as a surprise to me to learn that a person a generation older than I was might not feel him- or herself to be the experienced
elder that he or she seemed to me, but might still be a green, anxious youth, at least in his or her self-perception. Looking back from the vantage point of forty-five, though, twenty doesn’t look quite so far away. We are still recognizably ourselves, with many of the same confusions, even if experience has abated them, and granted us some self-awareness. We can hope, at best, that growing older has given us some degree of emotional maturity, and a greater understanding of the perspectives and the projections of others. This greater understanding should, ideally, include a comprehension of the errors of the young—precisely what Ladislaw suggests Casaubon lacks when he permits Dorothea to join him crunching bones in a cave. But then again, older men have often found it difficult to turn away idolizing young women.

When I read
Middlemarch
at Dorothea’s age, and reread it in my early twenties, I did not react against Casaubon as violently as do Ladislaw and the others at Tipton. There was enough of Dorothea in me to understand her initial infatuation with what he represented to her, a person of knowledge and experience who could lead her out of the oppressive narrowness that had characterized her life thus far. Dorothea’s hopes were misplaced, but they did not seem entirely unfounded. As I grew a little older with the book, though, I developed a greater scorn for Casaubon—for his undeserved self-importance and his intellectual pettiness, and for his ungenerous, withholding behavior toward his young wife, who deserves so much better from him. By my thirties, it was easier to look down on Casaubon, to regard him as contemptible and repellent.

But having reached the age of Casaubon, I realize that it would take a great deal of self-regard on my part not to feel a tender sense of kinship with that sad, proud, desiccated man. In
middle age, it becomes considerably harder to maintain a superior sense of distance from his preoccupations: his timid fear of professional judgment, hindering him from ever producing the work upon which he has staked his life; his quietly devastating discovery that, having deferred domestic intimacy for so long, he is incapable of entering into it; his perverse conviction that Dorothea’s ardor and submissiveness amount to a cruel, deliberate undermining of all he has aspired to be. Casaubon is crippled by caution and undone by closed-heartedness. He is a frail creature tortured by his own sense of his insufficiencies, whose soul was “too languid to thrill out of self-consciousness into passionate delight; it went on fluttering in the swampy ground where it was hatched, thinking of its wings and never flying.” Once Eliot was asked whom she had in mind as the original for Casaubon; in response, she silently tapped her own breast. And as I read
Middlemarch
in middle age, his failures and fears no longer seem so remote or theoretical to me as they once did, when I was in my Dorothea youth.

T
HE
wife of the Rector of Lincoln met me in the porter’s lodge at the college, wearing a burgundy-colored suit and greeting me with the energetic manner of a Girl Scout leader. Margaret Langford’s husband, Paul Langford, a historian, was appointed to the post in 2000, and while the rector no longer lives in the college’s main quadrangle, a less cramped, more private neo-Georgian residence having been built farther along Turl Street eighty-odd years ago, Mrs. Langford had agreed to show me around the rooms in which the Pattisons had entertained Eliot and Lewes.

First, though, we stopped in the college’s fifteenth-century
hall to see a portrait of Mark Pattison that was hanging over the high table, where faculty are seated to dine. In it, Pattison has a reddish beard traced with gray, and deep lines are etched in his melancholy face. He looks down at a book in his lap, though it’s impossible to tell what the book is. Perhaps, Mrs. Langford suggested with a note of conspiracy in her voice, it is one by Isaac Casaubon, the Renaissance scholar, about whom he wrote an influential book in 1875. Or perhaps it is one by John Milton, about whose works and life, including his devastatingly unsatisfying first marriage, Pattison published a volume in 1879. The rector’s wife knew quite a bit about her predecessor, and about the speculation over whether the Pattisons inspired the Casaubons. “I don’t think it was a match made in heaven,” she said, with understatement.

Lord Dilke, Francis Pattison’s second husband, publicly disavowed the identification, and said that his wife had always found the comparison odious. But in the memoir Dilke wrote of Francis after her death, he contradicted himself, claiming that Eliot had in some respects been drawing from life. Dilke wrote that Eliot had been thinking of Francis when she wrote of Dorothea knowing Pascal and Jeremy Taylor by heart, staying up all night to read theological books, and fasting; and he said that Book One of
Middlemarch
was to some extent drawn from the courtship of the Pattisons. Dorothea’s expectations of marriage, he implied, were like those experienced by Emily Strong, while Casaubon’s hopes for marriage bore a relation to those of Mark Pattison. In unpublished diaries Dilke wrote that he had it on the authority of George Eliot herself that she had based Casaubon’s proposal letter upon the very one that Pattison wrote to Francis, though scholars are skeptical of this claim.

Gordon S. Haight, Eliot’s preeminent biographer and the editor of nine volumes of her letters, thought that the identification was utterly wrong-headed. “There could hardly be greater contrast in moral character between the sophisticated worldly-minded Mrs. Pattison and the serious, naïve Dorothea Casaubon—unless it was that between the foolish pedant of Lowick and the energetic and learned Rector of Lincoln,” is how Haight, who spent more than forty years studying Eliot, dismissed the case in one essay. Haight argued, reasonably enough, that Eliot had no motive to offend the Pattisons by exposing the difficulties of their marriage, and the fact that the friendship continued only makes clearer the absurdity of the identification.

But not everyone who reviewed the evidence agreed with Haight. John Sparrow, the conservative warden of All Souls College for a quarter of a century, provided an alternative version of events in a series of lectures he gave at Trinity College, Cambridge. Sparrow argued that when it came to Francis Pattison and Dorothea Casaubon, “it was only in inessentials that the two women differed.” He acknowledged that, unlike Edward Casaubon, Mark Pattison was a man of true intellectual accomplishment. But he argued that there were nonetheless remarkable similarities between them—“the prematurely aged appearance, the stilted utterance, the selfishness about the larger things in life, the meanness about the little ones.” Sparrow suggested that Eliot must have heard of the Pattisons’ marital unhappiness from Francis, and then had chosen to reproduce it. The fact that both Pattisons continued to be on good terms with Eliot after the book was published is evidence of Eliot’s shrewdness, Sparrow argued. “Pattison was not so vain as to be blind to the odious resemblance,
but he was too proud to admit by any public gesture that a resemblance existed.”

Sparrow’s essays on Pattison are great fun to read. They have the fluid assurance of a barrister making a well-honed case before a courtroom, as well as a delicious insider’s flavor of Oxford past. But perhaps the most nuanced engagement with the question of the Pattison/Casaubon identification is that of another Oxford scholar, A. D. Nuttall, in a book with the irresistible title
Dead from the Waist Down: Scholars and Scholarship in Literature and the Popular Imagination.
In it, Nuttall makes the persuasive observation that, while it is entirely possible that George Eliot was not intending to describe Francis Pattison in the character of Dorothea Brooke, it is certainly possible that Francis afterward modeled herself upon Dorothea, and came to see her experience of marriage as similar to that of Eliot’s heroine. Nuttall goes on to argue that just as Francis may have identified with Dorothea, Pattison may have seen himself in Casaubon, pointing out that Pattison’s great projected work—a history of scholarship built around the figure of Joseph Scaliger—was never written.

Nuttall bases this contention on his reading of Pattison’s
Memoirs,
which the rector wrote when he was in his seventies, and close to death. It is a remarkable work. A ruthless, scrupulous self-examination, it reveals Pattison’s insecurities and his sense of his own personal failures—although it ends before he reaches the period of his marriage, so he doesn’t have to examine whatever failures lay there. In it, Pattison told of falling short of his original intellectual goal, to produce “the history of learning from the Renaissance downwards.” As he wrote in the
Memoirs,
“One’s ambition is always in the inverse proportion of one’s knowledge.” He
added, “Of the ambitious plan I had first conceived I have only executed fragments.” These words might well have come from the pen of a more evolved Casaubon—one who has lived long enough to come to some degree of self-knowledge. In the light of the memoir it is difficult to disagree with Nuttall when he asserts that it would be strange “if this scholar, who clearly perceived himself as a failure, could have read all the way through
Middlemarch
without any uncomfortable twinges from the parts dealing with Mr. Casaubon.”

I would be skeptical of
any
scholar who claims to read Casaubon’s story without feeling uncomfortable twinges, so deadly accurate is Eliot in her characterization of the always-present threat of futility that looms over any scholarly endeavor—what V. S. Pritchett characterized as the scholar’s “befogged and grandiose humiliations.” And I can’t help wondering whether Haight’s own energetic and learned repudiation of the Pattison/Casaubon identification was at least partly motivated by an effort to deny what might be Casaubonish in himself. If I walk the streets Eliot walked, and read the diaries and letters she wrote—if I attempt, in some small measure, to enter sympathetically and imaginatively into her experience—it seems to me impossible to conceive that when, a few months after her visit to Oxford, she began writing a story about the marriage of a passionate young woman and a much older scholar, she did not have the Rector of Lincoln and his wife somewhere in mind.

One vivid image of George Eliot’s stay in Oxford has endured. Mary Augusta Ward, who in subsequent decades became a popular novelist herself, was at the time a young woman living in Oxford, where she studied with Dr. Pattison. (No Oxford colleges
admitted women in 1870; the first, Lady Margaret Hall, was not established until 1878.) In her memoirs Mrs. Ward recalled seeing Eliot in the quadrangle at Lincoln. “Suddenly, at one of the upper windows of the Rector’s lodgings, which occupied the far right-hand corner of the quad, there appeared the head and shoulders of Mrs. Pattison, as she looked out and beckoned, smiling, to Mrs. Lewes,” she wrote. “It was a brilliant apparition, as though a French portrait by Greuze or Perronneau had suddenly slipped into a vacant space in the old college wall. The pale, pretty head,
blond-cendrée,
the delicate, smiling features and white throat; a touch of black, a touch of blue; a white dress; a general eighteenth-century impression as though of powder and patches—Mrs. Lewes perceived it in a flash, and I saw her run eagerly to Mr. Lewes and draw his attention to the window and its occupant. She took his arm, while she looked and waved. If she had lived longer, some day, and somewhere in her books, that vision at the window and that flower-laden garden would have reappeared.” Mrs. Ward thought she witnessed the novelist’s imagination at work, absorbing material, storing it up for transformation.