Middlemarch

George Eliot

<Status Anxiety>에 등장한 것을 보고 몇 달 전에 빌려서 읽기 시작했는데 다 못 읽고 반납했다가, 최근에 다시 빌려서 드디어 다 읽었다.

주옥 같은 문장들이 너무 많아서 해설을 제외해도 인용문이 73개이다.

19세기 영국 사회에서 많은 종류의 인간 군상이 어떻게 생각하고 행동하는지 생생하게 그려낸 역사 소설이라고 볼 수 있다.

종교의 의미가 퇴색되어가던 시기에, 각 인물들이 무엇에서 삶의 중심이 되는 믿음을 찾는지가 그들의 태도와 행보를 결정한다.

뼛속까지 이타적이고 여러 자선 사업을 계획할 만큼 똑똑하지만, 여성이라는 한계로 어떠한 사회적 지위도 얻지 못하는 도로테아.

연구와 진료를 모두 추구하며 완벽한 의사의 모습을 그리지만, 자신이 속한 사회의 한 사람으로서 어쩔 수 없이 다른 사람들의 영향을 받고 현실과 타협하는 리드게이트.

거의 700쪽에 달하는 원서를 읽으면서 미들마치에서 살아가는 인물들의 삶이 도로테아와 리드게이트를 중심으로 펼쳐지는데, 이토록 입체적인 인물들을 창조하고 묘사할 수 있다는 사실이 놀라웠다.

정말 여러 번에 걸쳐 다시 읽을 만한 고전이다.

---

본문

"Many things are true which only the commonest minds observe."
"Then I think the commonest minds must be rather useful."

"He has one foot in the grave."
"He means to draw it out again, I suppose."

Pride helps us, and pride is not a bad thing when it only urges us to hide our own hurts - not to hurt others.

To have in general but little feeling, seems to be the only security against feeling too much on any particular occasion.

She was perfectly unconstrained and without irritation towards him now, and he was gradually discovering the delight there is in frank kindness and companionship between a man and a woman who have no passion to hide or confess.

"I don't make myself disagreeable, it is you who find me so. Disagreeable is a word that describes your feelings and not my actions."

"Oh, blameless people are always the most exasperating."

"I never say what I am afraid of having repeated."

The difficult task of knowing another soul is not for young gentlemen whose consciousness is chiefly made up of their own wishes.

If you are not proud of your cellar, there is no thrill of satisfaction in seeing your guest hold up his wine-glass to the light and look judicial.

One can begin so many things with a new person! - even begin to be a better man.

"And I should have thought - but I may be wrong - that there was no religion to hinder a man from believing the best of a young fellow, when you don't know worse."

"And to me it is one of the most odious things in a girl's life, that there must always be some supposition of falling in love coming between her and any man who is kind to her, and to whom she is grateful."

For surely all must admit that a man may be puffed and be lauded, envied, ridiculed, counted upon as a tool and fallen in love with, or at least selected as a future husband, and yet remain virtually unknown - known merely as a cluster of signs for his neighbours' false suppositions.

The conviction that the medical profession as it might be was the finest in the world; presenting the most perfect interchange between science and art; offering the most direct alliance between intellectual conquest and the social good.

For character too is a process and an unfolding.

And by dint of admitting to himself that he was too much as other men were, he had become remarkably unlike them in this - that he could excuse others for thinking slightly of him, and could judge impartially of their conduct even when it told against him.

"Language gives a fuller image, which is all the better for being vague."

That element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of frequency, has not yet wrought itself into the coarse emotion of mankind; and perhaps our frames could hardly bear much of it. 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.

There is hardly any contact more depressing to a young ardent creature than that of a mind in which years full of knowledge seem to have issued in a blank absence of interest or sympathy.

"It is painful to be told that anything is very fine and not be able to feel that it is fine - something like being blind, while people talk of the sky."

"It spoils my enjoyment of anything when I am made to think that most people are shut out from it."
"I call that the fanaticism of sympathy. You might say the same of landscape, of poetry, of all refinement. If you carried it out you ought to be miserable in your own goodness, and turn evil that you might have no advantage over others. The best piety is to enjoy - when you can. You are doing the most then to save the earth's character as an agreeable planet."

"Of course there is always a great deal of poor work: the rarer things want that soil to grow in."

"Failure after long perseverance is much grander than never to have a striving good enough to be called a failure."

"To be a poet is to have a soul so quick to discern, that no shade of quality escapes it, and so quick to feel, that discernment is but a hand playing with finely ordered variety on the chords of emotion - a soul in which knowledge passes instantaneously into feeling, and feeling flashes back as a new organ of knowledge."

"The theatre of all my actions is fallen,' said an antique personage when his chief friend was dead; and they are fortunate who get a theatre where the audience demands their best.

"Young folks may get fond of each other before they know what life is, and they may think it all holiday if they can only get together; but it soon turns into working day, my dear."

It is an uneasy lot at best, to be what we call hightly taught and yet not to enjoy: to be present at this great spectacle of life and never to be liberated from a small hungry shivering self - never to be fully possessed by the glory we behold, never to have out consciousness rapturously transformed into the vividness of a thought, the ardour of a passion, the energy of an action, but always to be scholarly and uninspired, ambitious and timid, scrupulous and dim-sighted.

Having the scruples of rectitude in our souls, we are above the meanness of injuring him - rather we meet all his claims on us by active benefits; and the drawing of cheques for him, being a superiority which he must recognise, gives our bitterness a milder infusion.

It was a question whether gratitude which refers to what is done for one's self ought not to give way to indignation at what is done against another.

"That by desiring what is perfectly good, even when we don't quite know what it is and cannot do what we would, we are part of the divine power against evil - widening the skirts of light and making the struggle with darkness narrower."

"You don't mean your horse to tread on a dog when you're backing out of the way; but it goes through you, when it's done."

"I thought it would always be part of my life to long for home, and losing that grievance makes me feel rather empty: I suppose it served instead of sense to fill up my mind?"

Will not a tiny speck very close to our vision blot out the glory of the world, and leave only a margin by which we see the blot? I know no speck so troublesome as self.

I would not creep along the coast, but steer
Out in mid-sea, by guidance of the stars.

"In this stupid world most people never consider that a thing is good to be done unless it is done by their own set."

"How happy you must be, to know things that you feel sure will do great good! I wish I could awake with that knowledge every morning."

But oppositions have the illimitable range of objections at command, which need never stop short at the boundary of knowledge, but can draw for ever on the vasts of ignorance.

Since we cannot get what we like, let us like what we can get.

But it is one thing to like defiance, and another thing to like its consequences.

"It is surely better to pardon too much, than to condemn too much."

On the contrary, he was a creature who entered into everyone's feelings, and could take the pressure of their thought instead of urging his own with iron resistance.

But what we call our despair is often only the painful eagerness of unfed hope.

For the egoism which enters into our theories does not affect their sincerity; rather, the more our egoism is satisfied, the more robust is our belief.

Life would be no better than candle-light tinsel and daylight rubbish if our spirits were not touched by what has been, to issues of longing and constancy.

"It is not very consoling to have one's own likeness. It would be more consoling if others wanted to have it."

"The thing one most longs for may be surrounded with conditions that would be intolerable."

If youth is the season of hope, it is often so only in the sense that our elders are hopeful about us; for no age is so apt as youth to think its emotions, partings, and resolves are the last of their kind. Each crisis seems final, simply because it is new.

"The young ones have always a claim on the old to help them forward."

But when we do what we have done before, it is often with a difference.

It always remains true that if we had been greater, circumstance would have been less strong against us.

Expenditure - like ugliness and errors - becomes a totally new thing when we attach our own personality to it, and measure it by that wide difference which is manifest (in our own sensations) between ourselves and others.

"Inconsistencies cannot both be right, but imputed to man they may both be true."

The terror of being judged sharpens the memory: it sends an inevitable glare over that long-unvisited past which has been habitually recalled only in general phrases. Even without memory, the life is bound into one by a zone of dependence in growth and decay: but intense memory forces a man to own his blameworthy past. With memory set smarting like a reopened wound, a man's past is not simply a dead history, an outworn preparation of the present: it is not a repented error shaken loose from the life: it is a still quivering part of himself, bringing shudders and bitter flavours and the tinglings of a merited shame.

There is no general doctrine which is not capable of eating out our morality if unchecked by the deep-seated habit of direct fellow-feeling with individual fellow-men.

Unwonted circumstances may make us all rather unlike ourselves: there are conditions under which the most majestic person is obliged to sneeze, and our emotions are liable to be acted on in the same incongruous manner.

Let the music which can take possession of our frame and fill the air with joy for us, sound once more - what does it signify that we heart it found fault with in its absence?

Some gentlemen have made an amazing figure in literature by general discontent with the universe as a trap of dulness into which their great souls have fallen by mistake; but the sense of a stupendous self and an insignificant world may have its consolations.

He was prepared to be indulgent towards feminine weakness, but not towards feminine dictation.

In marriage, the certainty, 'She will never love me much', is easier to bear than the fear, 'I shall love her no more'.

It was not simply that beneficient harness of routine which enables silly men to live respectably and unhappy men to live calmly - it was a perpetual claim on the immediate fresh application of thought, and on the consideration of another's need and trial.

But many of these misdeeds were like the subtle muscular moevments which are not taken account of in the consciousness, though they bring about the end that we fix our mind on and desire.

Who can know how much of his most inward life is made up of the thoughts he belives other men to have about him, until that fabric of opinion is threatened with ruin?

Everybody liked better to conjecture how the thing was, than simply to know it; for conjecture soon became more confident than knowledge, and had a more liberal allowance for the incompatible.

"I believe that people are almost always better than their neighbours think they are."

"What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult to each other?"

"And would you not like to be the one person who believed in that man's innocence, if the rest of the world belied him?"

"People glorify all sorts of bravery except the bravery they might show on behalf of their nearest neighbours."

On the whole, one might say that an ardent charity was at work setting the virtuous mind to make a neighbour unhappy for her good.

"How can we live and think that anyone has trouble - piercing trouble - and we could help them, and never try?"

The pitiable lot is that of the man who could not call himself a martyr even though he were to persuade himself that the men who stoned him were but ugly passions incarnate - who knows that he is stoned, not for professing the Right, but for not being the man he professed to be.

For there is no creature whose inward being is so strong that it is not greatly determined by what lies outside it.

Introduction

Medicine unites a theoretical element (represented by Lydgate's research) and an applied, practical element (his activities as a doctor). It thus, in its way, brings together the abstract and the concrete, the general and the individual, the whole and the parts, reason and feeling.

The novel is raising immense questions, already broached in its 'Prelude', about the individual's power of choice and self-direction in the face of defining and constraining socio-historical circumstances.

Characteristically, in George Eliot's work, it is the noble spirits who are vulnerable and the ignoble who are strong because incapable of imagining the needs and inner life of others.