Middlemarch

Abstract

Although Tito Melema is portrayed as a musician of initially Orphic charm in Romola, that charm has no power over the reader’s senses. We merely perceive that, as his ruthlessness increases, Tito’s strain becomes increasingly Bacchantic, until, with an ‘Evoè, evoè!’, he denies his adoptive father, thus triumphantly destroying the last vestige of beauty within himself. Dramatically effective though this mythological and narrative fusion is, it is musically inaccessible — and therefore musicially inert. The cultural gulf between George Eliot’s fifteenth-century Florence and her own world is too great for the auditory imagination to bridge. But with music’s restoration to the English Midlands, its potency is also restored, and, in Middlemarch — which even begins and ends with the musical terms ‘Prelude’ and ‘Finale’, as Barbara Hardy has noted¹ — George Eliot is able to move as freely in her natural narrative (and social) element as she had in The Mill on the Floss. Once again, music and musical allusion morally codify and stratify the fictive world, and reveal the capacity for sympathy of each principal character.