A great historian, as he insisted on calling himself, who had the happiness to be dead a hundred and twenty years ago, and so to take his place among the colossi whose huge legs our living pettiness is observed to walk under, glories in his copious remarks and digressions as the least imitable part of his work, and especially in those initial chapters to the successive books of his history, where he seems to bring his arm-chair to the proscenium and chat with us in all the lusty ease of his fine English. But [Henry] Fielding lived when the days were longer (for time, like money, is measured by our needs), when summer afternoons were spacious, and the clock ticked slowly in the winter evenings. We belated historians must not linger after his example; and if we did so, it is probable that our chat would be thin and eager, as if delivered from a camp-stool in a parrot-house. I at least have so much to do in unravelling certain human lots, and seeing how they are woven and interwoven, that all the light I can command must be concentrated on this particular web, and not dispersed over that tempting range of relevancies called the universe.[1]
George
Eliot, Middlemarch (1874)
[1] George Eliot, Middlemarch (New York: Random House, 1991), pp. 144,145. [Chapter
XV, first paragraph]. Middlemarch was originally published in
eight parts between 1871-2. It appeared
as four volumes in 1873, and as a single volume in 1874. George Eliot, a pen
name, was born as Mary Ann Evans in 1819.
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