Coles R., The_Secular

[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

through all this effort to condense words into a solid
mental state, there pierced and spread with irresistible
vividness the images of the events he desired.
Why, then, is Bulstrode s essentially personal (and
psychological) conflict, not unlike the many others so
knowingly (in our sense of things) rendered in this
novel, presented with such explicit resort to matters of
the soul as well as the mind? No question, for Eliot
characters such as Dorothea Brooke and Dr. Lydgate
and even Casaubon are different from Bulstrode: they
belong in the company of thinking people, individuals
74
WHERE WE STOOD: 1900
who have ideas of their own, who are not beholden to a
biblical literalism once so influential. Actually, these are
men and women who have no real attachment to
church life; yes, they are capable of considering religious
or even theological issues, but their daily life is essen-
tially secular in nature. They represent the professions,
the academy, the politically or socially engaged: people
of thought, of training, for whom the past s spiri-
tual anguish is absent; it has yielded to the intellectual
and moral anguish of a secular society. In contrast, Bul-
strode is of a lower order : he is a mere businessman,
an uneducated man who has been on the make, per-
haps in his common life one of Eliot s Christian Car-
nivora, but maybe not they seem higher in social
status, less connected, really, to the daily hurdle of
keeping afloat (and then some) that ordinary working
people must keep confronting. While Bulstrode is
hardly an Isaiah, or a passionate Christian pilgrim, his
moral anguish takes on a spiritual quality, and his very
vulnerability, his lack of self-assurance, his social mar-
ginality, his intense fearfulness and sense of jeopardy,
hearken back, as no other scene in Middlemarch does, to
a long religious history of sinners in turmoil (not to be
confused with wrongdoers in felt danger of exposure,
condemnation, punishment).
In a sense, then, Bulstrode s crisis of the soul, re-
markable for its singularity, enables Eliot to bid an old
tradition of earnest theological introspection farewell,
to give us, by implication, a forecast of the future:
countless Middlemarches in which church attendance
has become a social convenience or a mere duty or even
a business maneuver, and in which psychology and
75
CHAPTER II
social circumstance mean much mean everything. She
was, of course, not a theorist; in fact, she parodies theo-
rists, mocks her own inclination to be one in her treat-
ment of both Casaubon and Dorothea Brooke. Yet she
understood the mind in precisely the way Freud did: we
are told, in authorial asides, of repressed desire, of
identity, of unreflecting egoism, of invisible thor-
oughfares which are the first lurking-places of anguish,
mania, and crime. In the novel she wants to portray
influential secular determinisms at work, those within
us and those that come at us from the outside. With
respect to the latter, every shading of class is attended,
and all possible occupations, institutions brought in to
the narrative. So are words such as alienation, which
(like the unconscious ) we of the late twentieth cen-
tury have assumed as our very own, whereas they make
themselves quite at home in this chronicle not of an im-
mediate, late-nineteenth-century yesteryear but the by
now dim past that preceded by many decades the emer-
gence of writers such as Freud or Max Weber, not to
mention George Eliot.
In the same decade, the 1870s, that gave us Middle-
march, another demanding novel of no mean prophetic
capability appeared, George Meredith s The Egoist
(1879), a devastatingly satirical analysis of privileged
self-centeredness, and an effort, surely, to describe what
was happening in England amidst its obvious economic
and national successes: a boundless assertion of manipu-
lative vanity on the part of some who had come to think
of themselves as the very center of the universe in a
sense, the ultimate challenge to, defiance of, the Judeo-
Christian spiritual ethic, for which such an attitude is
76
WHERE WE STOOD: 1900
but one more aspect of our sinful pride. Meredith was
much influenced by evolutionary theory. In poem after
poem Meredith emphasized our capacity to spring free
of our limitations, to emerge gradually from one state of
being to another. Not that such a collective fate is fore-
ordained. He had read Darwin, had drawn the proper
lesson, the lesson, actually, that novelists such as George [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

Podobne