George Eliot's unique voice and vision: some examples

I'm going to depart from past practice here - readers of these posts may note that I never have the book I've been reading beside me while blogging - I emphatically do not want these posts to be anything resembling a term paper or an open-book test, so I don't want to be checking the text for accuracy, for details, or for choice passages (an exception: when I blogged a few times about several poems); what I blog is from memory of my (previous day's) reading - the blog helps me to read more carefully and the process of blogging doesn't get muddied in scholarship or pedantry. (I occasionally toggle to another tab to check the spelling of an author's name or the words in a title.) I'm making an exception today in order to capture something of George Eliot's style; to talk or think or blog about Middlemarch solely based on its plot, characters, and themes - vast and copious as these may be - is to miss what is probably the essential element in her work, which is the narrative intelligence (this phenomenon is even more pronounced in Proust - but Eliot is his precursor). There are several famous passages throughout - such as the one in which she notes that if we could hear the grass growing and the heartbeat of squirrels we would go insane - but it's very hard to recall most of her insights, as her writing propels us forward (and to be honest, some are almost intractable). So I'm going to give just a few brief examples, selected through casual scanning through the novel, of Eliot's voice, which I think show her extremely unusual and heightened manner of thinking and of exposition:

When animals entered the Ark in pairs, one may imagine that allied species made much private remark on each other, and we tempted to think that so many forms feeding on the same store of fodder were eminently superfluous, as tending to diminish rations. (This passage introduces the chapter in which relatives gather around the dying Featherstone, hoping for bequest in his will.)

The country gentry of old time lived in a rarefied social air: dotted apart on their stations up the mountain they looked down with imperfect discrimination on the belts of thicker life below. (Perfect image; notes her unusual and striking choice of nouns and verbs: dotted, belts.)

Goodness is of a modest nature, easily discouraged, and when much privacy, elbowed in early life by unabashed vices, is apt to retire into extreme privacy, so that it is more easily believed in by those who construct a selfish old gentleman theoretically, than by those who form the narrower judgments based on his personal acquaintance. (I think the first "privacy" may be a misprint? Note the extremely complex sentence structure and the unconventional punctuation; essentially what she is saying is that we delude ourselves into thinking some people are "good" when evidence tells us otherwise - especially is we're hopeful of that person's benevolence.)

The above quotes are all in relation to the death of Featherstone. For good measure, here's the squirrel passage:

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 the roar which lies on the other side of silence.

Perfect!