Middlemarch: Epigraphs and Mirrors

George Eliot and Pascal

A few years ago I wrote a book taking a frankly trivial approach to a great novel.

This short monograph was published in 2021, and is available to buy from Open Books, an open access scholarly publisher, or to download for free. My starting point was to track down any hitherto unrecognised quotations and allusions in Middlemarch, and to look in more detail at the novel’s chapter epigraphs. Out of this lowly, indeed Casaubonic labour, I hoped to make something more generative than mere pedantry, to explore the larger novel in greater depth. Whether I succeeded in this aim, or merely got mired in the trivia, can be determined by a read of the book. I would encourage you to buy a copy if you can afford it, to support Open Access scholarship, but I wouldn’t urge you to spend money on old rope by me if you can’t. As I say, and thanks to the excellent model of the publisher, it’s freely available to download.

Middlemarch consists of a ‘Prelude’, eighty-six numbered chapters and a ‘Finale’. The chapters themselves all come with epigraphs. For instance chapter 1 opens with

Since I can do no good because a woman,
Reach constantly at something that is near it.
—The Maid’s Tragedy: BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER

… before we get to the actual story. Many of the chapter epigraphs in Middlemarch are quoted from specifically attributed sources, like that one. Others are identified as, for instance, ‘Shakespeare’, ‘Old Song’ and so on. Other epigraphs come without attribution, and what’s almost always true in those cases is that Eliot herself is the author—it was she who wrote the snatch of poetry, or the excerpt from an Elizabethan-sounding play, that is being quoted. For instance:

That is Eliot herself, pastiching a bit of Jacobean-y playscript.

In all this, Eliot is following Walter Scott, whose Waverley novels do exactly this: sometimes Scott quotes an actual author for his chapter epigraphs, sometimes he makes up something himself and attributes it to ‘Old Play’, or similar. The epigraphs give us little snippets of observation or insight that gloss the action of the chapters concerned.

A specific example: the epigraph to Middlemarch Chapter 72 (the opening chapter in Part 8 of the novel) is one of the ones where Eliot herself has made up a snatch of verse.

Full souls are double mirrors, making still
An endless vista of fair things before,
Repeating things behind.

I was curious as to where the ‘double mirror’ image originates, or whether it was something Eliot herself invented. So I had a rummage,¹ and this is what I found.

It comes from Pascal, via George Sand.

Now that’s interesting for several Eliot-related reasons. Take Sand: George Henry Lewes met her in person, and encouraged Eliot to read the French novelist (in 1842 Lewes wrote that Sand was ‘the most remarkable writer of the present century … infinitely more than novelist, she is a Poet, not of the head alone, but of the heart’), advice Eliot certainly followed. Indeed, it became something of a commonplace in contemporary critical reactions to Eliot to equate her with Sand.

When Sidney Colvin, in his discerning [1876 Fortnightly] review of Daniel Deronda, remarked, ‘the art of fiction has reached its highest point in the hands of two women in our time’ he was merely echoing a sentiment which had been expressed many times in the preceding fifteen years.²

But while there have been journal articles and even whole PhDs, written on Eliot and Sand, there’s been so far as I’m aware very little on Eliot and Pascal. That’s odd, since we know that Eliot read Pascal’s Pensées avidly from a young age. Pascal provides the epigraph to both Middlemarch’s 33rd and 75th chapters: ‘Qui veut delasser hors de propos, lasse’ and ‘Le sentiment de la fausseté des plaisirs présents, et l’ignorance de la vanité des plaisirs absents causent l’inconstance’ respectively. One of the first things we learn about Dorothea, at the beginning of the very first chapter, is that she ‘ knew many passages of Pascal’s Pensées’ by heart, passages which illuminated for her ‘the destinies of mankind … by the light of Christianity’. And when she first considers marrying Casaubon, this is how Dorothea persuades herself: ‘It would be like marrying Pascal. I should learn to see the truth by the same light as great men have seen it by’ [ch 3]. So what of that epigraph to Chapter 72?

Full souls are double mirrors, making still
An endless vista of fair things before,
Repeating things behind.

We know that Eliot read Sand’s Lettres d’un voyageur (1837). And here’s a passage from the English version of that work, [Letters of a Traveller, translated by Eliza A. Ashurst (London 1847) 142]:

“I do not exactly know what Pascal meant by those “pensées de derrière la tête,” which he reserved as a reply to polemical objections, or for denying in secret what he feigned to accept openly. This was most probably, the Jesuitism of intellect, forced to bend to outward duty, but nevertheless involuntarily rebelling against the absurd decision. To me, the expression seemed a terrible one. It has not only been met with amongst his “Pensées,” but written separately on a piece of paper, and conceived somewhat in this way: “And I also, I shall have my ‘thoughts from the back of the head.’” Oh! mournful words, drawn from a desolate heart! Alas! there are days when the human heart is like a double mirror, where one surface sends back to the other the reverse of those objects it has received in front.”

Sand’s image of the human heart as a ‘double-mirror’ (the original is: ‘le cerveau humain est comme un double miroir dont une glace renvoie à l’autre le revers des objets qu’elle a reçus de face’) implies, I suppose, facing mirrors each reflecting the other in a kind of mise-en-abîme—Eliot’s ‘endless vista’ brings this out. But the image riffs, explicitly, on Pascal’s idea of ‘thoughts from the back of the head’ (Pensées 38: ‘Miscellaneous Thoughts’, 6; fr. 659), and that’s an idea that strikes me as having a manifest resonance for what Middlemarch is doing as a novel.

What is at the back of Dorothea’s head in chapter 72? Life has finally freed her from Casaubon, such that she is independent and wealthy. ‘A husband would not let you have your plans,’ Celia rebukes her, to which Dorothea snaps: ‘As if I wanted a husband!’ What plans? To aid Lydgate, caught-up in the scandal of Bulstrode’s fall, and widely thought guilty-by-association or perhaps even a co-conspirator, although believed by Dorothea blameless (as, actually, he is). Her brother-in-law and uncle, over dinner, rebuke Dorothea’s naivety, but presumably it’s not that which is the ‘foil or shadow acting like an iron spring within the brain’ here. Presumably there’s something else going on. The forward part of her head is sure she wants no husband, but the back of her head knows better, and between these two mirrors her soul is cast into its amoureuse, or malamoureuse, mise-en-abîme. Dorothea wants her independence, and that independence means the power to choose the partner her heart desires, but choosing Ladislaw means sacrificing her financial security and therefore her independence just as it means acquiring, for a second time, a husband. As if I wanted a husband!

Pascal’s 72nd pensée, ‘On Man’s Disproportion’, includes his celebrated thoughts on the ‘double infinity’ that frames the human condition, caught as we are between the infinitely large and the infinitely small. Of these ‘deux infinis’ Pascal insists:

If we are well informed, we understand that, as nature has graven her image and that of her Author on all things, they almost all partake of her double infinity … We naturally believe ourselves far more capable of reaching the centre of things than of embracing their circumference. The visible extent of the world visibly exceeds us; but as we exceed little things, we think ourselves more capable of knowing them. And yet we need no less capacity for attaining the Nothing than the All. Infinite capacity is required for both, and it seems to me that whoever shall have understood the ultimate principles of being might also attain to the knowledge of the Infinite. The one depends on the other, and one leads to the other. These extremes meet and reunite by force of distance and find each other in God, and in God alone.

The ‘Middle’ of Middlemarch is, as we first take it, a place, a geographical locator: a town in the midlands, the central territory of this British island. Then, as we read, we understand that the middle of this novel is its subject: neither the aristocracy nor the very poor, neither the extraordinarily virtuous nor the melodramatically wicked. The novel an aesthetic project calibrated carefully to walk a middling path between fantasy and documentary. But there is, I think, another sense in which the novel middles its vision. In tacit answer to Pascal’s question ‘Qu’est-ce qu’un homme dans l’infini?’ Eliot says: infinite greatness and infinite divisibility both would annihilate us, and so it must be that we are where we are, in the middle between these two things. Middlemarch is neither concerned with infinitesimals and trivia, nor does it have pretensions to talk in windily cosmic terms; it is about ordinary people and the ordinary things that happen to them, and in this is, precisely, its knowledge of the infinite. It has to be, as the narrator notes in one of the novel’s most famous passages, since either of Pascal’s infinities could collapse our minds: ‘if we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity.’ [Middlemarch, chapter 22]

Pascal finds in our middle-ness a sign of divine providence: ‘Car enfin qu’est-ce que l’homme dans la nature ? Un néant à l’égard de l’infini, un tout à l’égard du néant, un milieu entre rien et tout.’ We’re where we are, says Pascal, because this is where God has put us: ‘la nature ayant gravé son image et celle de son auteur dans toutes choses, elles tiennent presque toutes de sa double infinité’ [Pascal, Pensées, 72, ‘Disproportion de l’homme’].

More, in arguing that humanity is strung between ‘two infinities’ Pascal also means that we exist between the infinite stretch of time before our birth and he time that stretches out, infinitely far, after our death. ‘When,’ he says in the Pensées

I consider the short duration of my life, swallowed up in the eternity before and after, the small space which I fill, or even can see, engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces whereof I know nothing, and which know nothing of me, I am terrified, and wonder that I am here rather than there, for there is no reason why here rather than there, or now rather than then. Who has set me here? By whose order and design have this place and time been destined for me?—Memoria hospitis unius diei prætereuntis [‘the remembrance of a guest that tarrieth but a day’ is how the KJV translates this line from the Book of Wisdom]. It is not well to be too much at liberty. It is not well to have all we want. [Pensées, 205]

‘The eternal silence of these infinite spaces alarms me,’ shudders Pascal. Le silence éternel de ces espaces infinis m’effraie. Eliot, however, is not afraid. And that, I think, says something important about her art. She is not interested, as a Conrad or a Cioran might be, in existential dread and terror. On the contrary: Eliot’s ‘middle’ inverts the Pascalian framing—not, as it might be, a little life surrounded on either side by terrifying infinities of lifelessness, but a little death, Casaubon’s, bookended by two zones of life, love and hope. Perhaps it looks odd to describe Dorothea’s starting point, back in the novel’s early chapters as being one of love; it’s more conventional to think of her as just misguided (although it’s pretty condescending to Dorothea as a person to tell her, ‘no my dear you’re not really in love with Casaubon, you’re just casting around for some way to express your nascent spiritual yearning’). But what if—she isn’t? Is it so impossible to believe she actually did love Casaubon? Perhaps, for all her austerity of manner, what most defines Dorothea is precisely a kind of spontaneous excess of love.

Since I’m playing with epigraphs, with this Pascal-via-George-Sand-y verse heading to the first chapter of Book 8, it’s instructive to look at the epigraph to Book 8’s (and the novel’s) very last chapter. From the soul as a double-mirror to the heart as preserved in a miraculous supersaturation of love:

Le coeur se sature d’amour comme d’un sel divin qui le conserve; de la l’incorruptible adhérence de ceux qui se sont aimes des l’aube de la vie, et la fraicheur des vielles amours prolonges. Il existe un embaumement d’amour. C’est de Daphnis et Chloe que sont faits Philemon et Baucis. Cette vieillesse la, ressemblance du soir avec l’aurore.—VICTOR HUGO: L’homme qui rit.

The heart is saturated with love as with a divine salt that preserves it; there is an incorruptible coherence to those who have loved in the dawn of their life that brings freshness to old, long-lasting loves. It is, as it were, an embalming of love. It is out of Daphnis and Chloe that Philemon and Baucis are made. In such an old age, the evening harks back to the dawn.

This is Eliot’s inversion—her mirror image, we could say—of Pascal’s two, terrifying eternities of blankness: a life bookended by love and preserved by the connection, the reflection, of the one in the other. It’s a heartening way of looking at life, and long-term relationships; but it’s also the way Eliot has chosen to frame her novel. The shape of Middlemarch is a death between two loves.

The novel’s ‘Finale’, Eliot’s epilogue, comes without an epigraph, which rather puts paid to my drysadust scholarly epigraph game. But it does, by way of concluding Dorothea’s story, or more precisely by way of declining exactly to conclude her story, strike a beautiful, plangent note. Ends, says Eliot, are beginnings, and neither is the terrifying eternity of silence that so affrighted Pascal. ‘Every limit is a beginning as well as an ending … marriage, which has been the bourne of so many narratives, is still a great beginning.’ Dorothea cannot live as a grand heroic Theresa or Antigone, Eliot tells us, because ‘the medium in which their ardent deeds took shape is forever gone’—but a new, quotidian medium has come about, just as dramatically and morally engaging. ‘Medium’ in the sense of environment becomes medium in the sense of middle, and the borderland—the march—that is in that Middle.

Her finely touched spirit had still its fine issues, though they were not widely visible. Her full nature, like that river of which Cyrus broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for 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.

So if I revert to my earlier question—in the middle of what?—by picking up the suggestion that one of the things this great novel mediates is a kind of mutual doubled speculum. ‘The mirror’ has long been a trope of art as such, and ‘realism’, that complicated term, such as Eliot writes is supposed precisely to hold as twere the mirror up to nature. Eliot’s self-reflexive textual mirrors, though, tend to be more complex than a simple foresquare reflection. Adam Bede opens with this Escher-like image:

With a single drop of ink for a mirror, the Egyptian sorcerer undertakes to reveal to any chance comer far-reaching visions of the past. This is what I undertake to do for you, reader. With this drop of ink at the end of my pen, I will show you the roomy workshop of Mr. Jonathan Burge, carpenter and builder, in the village of Hayslope, as it appeared on the eighteenth of June, in the year of our Lord 1799.

But the Middlemarchian mirror, via its Pascalian doubling, involves a still more complex, because deliberately self-reflexive, narrative strategy. Eliot’s novel is both a reflection, scrupulously researched, of an English midlands town in the 1830s, and a self-reflection, a meditation on the scope and nature of Eliot’s own art—as in these last paragraphs. The impossible Pascalian ‘infinity’ that frames the project of realism (what George Henry Lewes, in an 1858 Westminster Review essay, ‘Realism in Art’, pegged as ‘Truthism’ and which he opposed ‘not to Idealism but to Falsism’) is, surely, the idea of total vision. The perfect mirror would reflect everything, and the perfect realist novel would capture everything. But Eliot’s double mirror, by turning on itself (as in these last paragraphs) shrinks that bad infinity down into itself. Eliot achieves her total vision by not attempting totality, as when she so elegantly and deliberately steps away as narrator from the latter phase of Dorothea’s life. Fredric Jameson’s wonders whether ‘the bad totalization projected by Casaubon’s Key to All Mythologies’ isn’t ‘the caricature and distorted mirror image of Eliot’s own achieved totalization in Middlemarch itself.’³ Still: a key is a different kind of thing to a mirror.

This has come quite a long way from the simple business of tracking down one of Eliot’s hitherto unsourced chapter epigraphs. But I find myself wondering whether there mightn’t be something quite important in this. It has to do, I think, with Eliot’s deftness, the way her writing both convincingly ‘reflects’ the world she is describing (in the sense that she compels readerly belief in that world) and ‘self-reflects’ on her own practice as she goes along. Her praxis becomes part of her world, and the world becomes part of her praxis. It is a complex mimesis, I think, and richer and more compelling than the plainer Zola-esque or Gissing-y realism.

1. That I was able to track down those quotations or allusions in Middlemarch that scholarship hadn’t previously managed to identify was entirely a function of the search capacity of Google Books. To be fair to myself, I have become fairly adept at tailoring searches, narrowing windows of possibility, considering likely parallels in Latin, Greek, French and so on, but fundamentally it is the brute force of Google’s database and search options that enable this work. Using it I was able to locate all the hitherto unrecognised quotations and allusions in Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria for my EUP edition of that book, and all the same in Eliot’s novel for this project. That more scholars aren’t using this facility and resource genuinely surprises me. Are they not aware of its possibilities?

2. Patricia Thomson, ‘The Three Georges’ Nineteenth-Century Fiction 18:2 (1963), 137

3. Jameson, Antimonies of Realism (Verso 2014), pp. 133-34