Tea at Trianon: The Gulf Between Aspiration and Accomplishment

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Monday, October 4, 2021

The Gulf Between Aspiration and Accomplishment

From LitHub:

Among the most enduring of 19th-century novels there are a handful with opening sentences that have achieved proverbial status. Consider Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice: “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife” or Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” These are lines as memorable and as often-reached-for as a Shakespearean verse. Through the conjunction of irony and verity, each opening sentence aspires to universality and conveys to readers that they are in safe authorial hands.

It would be hard, however, for even the most devoted aficionado of George Eliot to argue that the opening sentence of Middlemarch should be numbered among the greats in terms of memorability, effectiveness, or enticement. The novel opens with a Prelude—not so much an introduction to the novel’s characters or context as an announcement of its themes. It begins with a rhetorical question: “Who that cares much to know the history of man, and how the mysterious mixture behaves under the varying experiments of Time, has not dwelt, at least briefly, on the life of Saint Theresa, has not smiled with some gentleness at the thought of the little girl walking forth one morning hand in hand with her still smaller brother, to go and seek martyrdom in the country of the Moors?” Modern-day readers, invited at the outset of what is a dauntingly long book to reflect upon their familiarity with the life of a 16th-century Spanish saint, might be forgiven for meekly responding, “Er, me?”

George Eliot—who was born Mary Ann Evans in 1819, and who adopted her masculine pen name in 1857 when she published her first work of fiction, Scenes of Clerical Life—was herself very familiar with the life of Saint Theresa, a Spanish noblewoman of passionate religious conviction who first joined a religious order when she was twenty years old, and who, over the subsequent almost half-century, became an influential theologian, mystic, and religious reformer. The opening sentence of Middlemarch refers to an incident in which the young Theresa and a sibling, seized with precocious religious conviction, set off from Ávila with the intention of being gloriously executed for their faith by non-Christians, only to be thwarted by family members who stopped them in their outing.

It is described in Saint Theresa’s autobiography, which Eliot would doubtless have read multiple times and in different languages: in 1867, three years before Middlemarch was published, she sought out a Spanish-language copy while on a trip through Spain, and seems to have been mildly irked when, in a bookshop, an effort was made to sell her a photograph instead. Eliot might have expected that her contemporary readers would be at least somewhat familiar with the Life of the saint—which is, modern-day readers may be surprised to discover if they look at it, approachable and even winningly ironical in its depiction of its narrator’s early religious ardor. “As soon as I saw it was impossible to go to any place where people would put me to death for the sake of God, my brother and I set about becoming hermits,” Saint Theresa writes of the abortive effort at martyrdom cited by Eliot. “We contrived, as well as we could, to build hermitages, by piling up small stones one on the other, which fell down immediately; and so it came to pass that we found no means of accomplishing our wish.” (Read more.)

From the Los Angeles Review of Books:

In 1871, Mary Ann Evans had been publishing for over a decade as “George Eliot.” A male pseudonym was her first line of defense against a risk that all women faced at the time: having their work ridiculed as, in Evans’s own words, “silly novels by lady novelists.” With male critics maligning women’s novels, not to mention their rights to education and careers outside the home, Evans signed even her own notebooks “Eliot,” and it is under that name that she is remembered today.
Yet the contents of Eliot’s private notebooks, which she called “Quarries,” would have been a slap in the face to the male naysayers. Her Quarry for Middlemarch is loaded with cutting-edge medical research and sharp political commentary regarding the cholera epidemic that wracked England in the 1830s. A simulacrum of Coventry, where Eliot attended Miss Franklin’s school for girls, the town of Middlemarch narrowly avoids its own outbreak in the novel — but it certainly doesn’t dodge the sociopolitical injustices and scientific debates surrounding medical reform in England.

If her Quarry is any indication, Eliot built Middlemarch around the figure of Dr. Tertius Lydgate. Over the course of the novel, Lydgate’s elite education — a medical degree from Edinburgh, extended study in London, and practice in Paris, all carefully mapped out in the Quarry — serve as the credentials for a uniquely capacious career. His soap-opera surgeon’s charm also helps. Lydgate’s romantic and medical projects provide a one-man through-line, spanning all the major social groups of Middlemarch. Even the scandal that ends with one man’s death and another’s disgrace, as well as Lydgate’s own departure from the town, only strengthens his friendship with Eliot’s fictional alter ego, Dorothea Brooke.

I am far from the first reader to notice how medical events connect the characters of Middlemarch with one another and with Eliot’s Quarry. In 1949, Professor Anna Kitchel traveled from Vassar College to the Houghton Library to transcribe and publish the Quarry. Her introduction dwells on Eliot’s medical research, and she identifies several doctors who may have inspired the figure of Lydgate. Although Kitchel is modest regarding her own grasp of Eliot’s research — “a professor of English is hardly equipped to produce a sound study on that subject” — she did publish a paper on the topic in Transactions and Studies of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia in 1945. Eliot would have been proud.

Unlike Kitchel, Eliot was confident from the first in her own ability to write about the medical innovations of her day. Whereas the second book that makes up the Quarry — in which the author sketches out the social and romantic action of Middlemarch — is full of cross outs, scribbles, and subtly rephrased repetitions, Book One, which features her medical research, is neatly composed, written with bold intention. With a steady hand and few emendations, Eliot inserts her own voice and opinions into debates lifted from Rapsail’s Noveau système de chimie organique fondé sur des nouvelles methodes d’observation (1833), Gerhard and Pennock’s research on typhoid fever in Philadelphia (1836), Sir Thomas Watson’s Lectures on the Principles and Practice of Physic (1843), and T. H. Huxley’s “The Cell-Theory” (1853), among many other works of both practical advice and pure science. Dr. Lydgate’s scientific interests and experiments mark him as a medical practitioner of rare intellect and nerve — that is, of Eliot’s own caliber. (Read more.)