ABSTRACT
In a wonderfully resonant passage in George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1994) the author inter-
venes to pass comment on one of the central characters, Mr Casaubon. He is a rather
dull, pedantic scholar who has been working on his life’s project the ‘Key to All
Mythologies’, a process of endless cataloguing that is doomed to failure. Despite his
weaknesses of character, the author declares that she feels sorry for him and gives her
reasons as follows:
It is an uneasy lot at best, to be what we call highly taught and yet not to enjoy: to
be present at this great spectacle of life and never to be liberated from a small hungry
shivering self – never to be fully possessed by the glory we behold, never to have our
consciousness rapturously transformed into the vividness of a thought, the ardour of
a passion, the energy of an action, but always to be scholarly and uninspired, ambi-
tious and timid, scrupulous and dim-sighted.