More Middlemarch, more MELISANDE

I am testing out several different ways of accompanying the exponential growth number for MELISANDE, by which I mean I'm really on the third iteration, and although I could tell you that I was testing out a few different ways of accompanying the number, I suspect I won't figure out what the accompaniment actually is until the fifth or sixth iteration.

Today I tried an accompaniment figure that I had been wanting to use ever since I tried to write a musical based on Shakespeare's Pericles, and although the figure works harmonically it seems like there could be something wrong with using it, since I didn't develop the idea organically to fit the composition but pulled it from a memory of another composition I had previously written.

(Most of the Pericles musical draft isn't worth mentioning, but I've always loved the naïve love song I wrote for Pericles and the unnamed woman at the beginning of the story. I could sing it for you, right now, which suggests that it has stood the test of time. Unfortunately I doubt I'd ever be able to work it into another show.)

I've also read my way through most of Chapter XV of Middlemarch, and it occurs to me that if people read this book carefully – which is presumptuous, I know, because it implies "as carefully as I'm reading it" – they might install some essential ideas into their minds, such as Eliot's definition of genius as "consisting neither in self-conceit nor in humility, but in a power to make or do, not anything in general, but something in particular."

I mean, you could read the entire text of The Fountainhead or you could read that one sentence and pay attention to it, and later you could pay attention to the way she describes philanthropy: "[Lydgate] did not mean to imitate those philanthropic models who make a profit out of poisonous pickles to support themselves while they are exposing adulteration, or hold shares in a gambling-hell that they may have leisure to represent the cause of public morality."

It is worth noting that every time Eliot uses the word philanthropy it is within the context of con artistry. Take, for example, the conversation between Mr. Bulstrode (a banker and philanthropist) and Mr. Vincy (a manufacturer):

“I am not at all sure that I should be befriending your son by smoothing his way to the future possession of Featherstone’s property. I cannot regard wealth as a blessing to those who use it simply as a harvest for this world. You do not like to hear these things, Vincy, but on this occasion I feel called upon to tell you that I have no motive for furthering such a disposition of property as that which you refer to. I do not shrink from saying that it will not tend to your son’s eternal welfare or to the glory of God. Why then should you expect me to pen this kind of affidavit, which has no object but to keep up a foolish partiality and secure a foolish bequest?”

“If you mean to hinder everybody from having money but saints and evangelists, you must give up some profitable partnerships, that’s all I can say,” Mr. Vincy burst out very bluntly. “It may be for the glory of God, but it is not for the glory of the Middlemarch trade, that Plymdale’s house uses those blue and green dyes it gets from the Brassing manufactory; they rot the silk, that’s all I know about it. Perhaps if other people knew so much of the profit went to the glory of God, they might like it better. But I don’t mind so much about that—I could get up a pretty row, if I chose.”

Vincy, by the way, is scarcely a hero. He's self-indulgent (as opposed to Bulstrode, who would have everyone measure their meat to the ounce) and has raised an indolent son and a narcissistic daughter (more on that later). But he's in the right, in this conversation, and Eliot later has Vincy describe philanthropy as follows: "Such doings may be lined with religion, but outside they have a nasty, dog-in-the-manger look."

What, then, of social reform? Lydgate, the young doctor, assumes it can only take place through science (and yes, this is a long quote, read it all, it includes the process of turning concretes into concepts and chains of events):

Lydgate was ambitious above all to contribute towards enlarging the scientific, rational basis of his profession. The more he became interested in special questions of disease, such as the nature of fever or fevers, the more keenly he felt the need for that fundamental knowledge of structure which just at the beginning of the century had been illuminated by the brief and glorious career of Bichat, who died when he was only one-and-thirty, but, like another Alexander, left a realm large enough for many heirs. That great Frenchman first carried out the conception that living bodies, fundamentally considered, are not associations of organs which can be understood by studying them first apart, and then as it were federally; but must be regarded as consisting of certain primary webs or tissues, out of which the various organs—brain, heart, lungs, and so on—are compacted, as the various accommodations of a house are built up in various proportions of wood, iron, stone, brick, zinc, and the rest, each material having its peculiar composition and proportions. No man, one sees, can understand and estimate the entire structure or its parts—what are its frailties and what its repairs, without knowing the nature of the materials. And the conception wrought out by Bichat, with his detailed study of the different tissues, acted necessarily on medical questions as the turning of gas-light would act on a dim, oil-lit street, showing new connections and hitherto hidden facts of structure which must be taken into account in considering the symptoms of maladies and the action of medicaments. But results which depend on human conscience and intelligence work slowly, and now at the end of 1829, most medical practice was still strutting or shambling along the old paths, and there was still scientific work to be done which might have seemed to be a direct sequence of Bichat’s. This great seer did not go beyond the consideration of the tissues as ultimate facts in the living organism, marking the limit of anatomical analysis; but it was open to another mind to say, have not these structures some common basis from which they have all started, as your sarsnet, gauze, net, satin, and velvet from the raw cocoon? Here would be another light, as of oxy-hydrogen, showing the very grain of things, and revising all former explanations. Of this sequence to Bichat’s work, already vibrating along many currents of the European mind, Lydgate was enamoured; he longed to demonstrate the more intimate relations of living structure, and help to define men’s thought more accurately after the true order. The work had not yet been done, but only prepared for those who knew how to use the preparation. What was the primitive tissue? In that way Lydgate put the question—not quite in the way required by the awaiting answer; but such missing of the right word befalls many seekers. And he counted on quiet intervals to be watchfully seized, for taking up the threads of investigation—on many hints to be won from diligent application, not only of the scalpel, but of the microscope, which research had begun to use again with new enthusiasm of reliance. Such was Lydgate’s plan of his future: to do good small work for Middlemarch, and great work for the world.

Lydgate specifically chooses Middlemarch so he will not have to deal with fashion or politics or competition or any of the factors that might otherwise distract him from his pursuit of science – "he would keep away from the range of London intrigues, jealousies, and social truckling, and win celebrity, however slowly, as Jenner had done, by the independent value of his work" – and yet he falls, almost immediately, for a local woman who wishes to destroy him.

The word Eliot uses, in this case, is "enslave," and if we take the text literally it is because Lydgate has a sense of self and Rosamond Vincy does not. Eliot's clearest description of Rosamond (as she always puts her truest truths in parentheticals) is as follows:

(Every nerve and muscle in Rosamond was adjusted to the consciousness that she was being looked at. She was by nature an actress of parts that entered into her physique: she even acted her own character, and so well, that she did not know it to be precisely her own.)

We understand why Rosamond seeks to ruin Mary Garth's chances at happiness with her younger brother Fred, although she doesn't know that Mary, who has a very strong sense of self, has already decided that she cannot marry Fred Vincy until he decides to do something with his life (“I don’t see how a man is to be good for much unless he has some one woman to love him dearly,” says Fred; “I think the goodness should come before he expects that," says Mary). We also understand why Rosamond wants to use and destroy Lydgate; she moves up in the class system, and he loses his soul.

We do not yet –

which is to say that I do not yet –

understand why Lydgate chooses Rosamond.

Perhaps I will find out in Chapter XVI.

(update: it was at the very end of Chapter XV, I will tell you tomorrow)