Middlemarch 2

[previous Middlemarch post January 10]

One month and eight chapters into Middlemarch: right on schedule. The rural scene has been set, and we have some plot development, with sweet foolish Dorothea already engaged to dry old Mr Casaubon, whom everyone of good senses understands to be a terrible match for her.  

But I can't say it is enough dram to make me rush to find out what happens next. A 2025 reader  might guesses this wedding night is going to be a disaster, but I can't imagine George Eliot will be able to take us there in much detail. In fact, it is still the sentences that keep me going. Take this sentence from Chapter Eight, which takes us into the thoughts of Sir James Chettam, who had assumed he was the one Dorothea would accept, whenever he got around to proposing. 

Nevertheless, while Sir James said to himself that he had completely resigned her, since with the perversity of a Desdemona she had not affected a proposed match that was clearly suitable and according to nature; he could not yet be quite passive under the idea of her engagement to Mr. Casaubon.

Few editors today would let this sentence stand. In fact it's unlikely any writer would deliver a manuscript containing it.  Look at it:  "Nevertheless," the first word, modifies "he could not yet" but is separated from it by no fewer than 34 intervening words. 

George Eliot expected her readers to hold on to all that information in the intervening 34-word clause and phrase combined, without losing the connection between "nevertheless" and "he could not yet."  Could she not just as well have had two simple sentences by  starting with "While Sir James..." and moving "nevertheless" to follow "according to nature"?  

"Nature" with a period after it, that is, removing the need for that semi-colon. Suddenly one sees why the semi-colon became semi-obsolete in the twentieth century: Because no one wrote the great, twisting, sprawling sentences that required semi-colons to keep them within some kind of control. Think of the tolerance, the education, the spacious untroubled mind a nineteenth century author could expect her reader to have, in order to work though grammatical Wordles like this on every page?  

And yet... what pleasure for a writer, what a Victorian sense of power and control, of almost architectural planning, in being free to construct sentences that loop and swirl like this one, and finally come home with no loose ends and no grammatical missteps at all. 

Seventy six more chapters of them to come. If I finish Middlemarch able to sail through all the sentences like this one, I may feel newly able to do algebra in my head. 

Eight more chapters in February -- and it's a short month.