Democratic Sentinel, Volume 9, Number 11, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 10 April 1885 — George Eliot’s Married Lovers. [ARTICLE]

George Eliot’s Married Lovers.

Of all married lovers that we have ever read of in books, those of George Eliot are less to be congratulated. It is as wonderful as it is mournful to contemplate the sarcasm which she poured upon married life. Her husbands and wives generally intermarried in greater or less want of consideration for that “inherent fitness” of which she was want to speak with such confidence in the W’estminister Review, and with greater or less ignorance of the imagined superior purposes of matrimony compared with those simple purposes of God, comfort and fruit, with such preservation of honor and love as is possible to an estate so fallen. Except in the case of the Poysers, and their like, she has generally made them petulant, exacting, suspicious, and, wherever possible, oppressive. It is specially remarkable in the married lovers of George Eliot that they are made to refrain from violation of the letter of the bond which has bound thjpm, although the spirit may have long been broken and hopeless of amendment. This fact saved her from being one of the evilest of the teachers of mankind. She did not mean to be an evil teacher. Her heart was too charitable and, according to her ideas of purity, too pure for that. So she made her married lovers faithful to the letter of their bonds. In reading “Middlemarch” we are constantly expect ng Dorothea, ardent as religious, to leave the vain, pompous, jealous autocrat who, though not bloodyminded like Bluebeard, has no more, if as much, regard for a wife's individuality—or Lydgate to withdraw from one so wholly unfit for the society of a good, brave man. No. There is that fatal bond which, unlike Shylock, these obligors interpret against themselves and wait for death or madness to release them. — Catholic World.