![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Müller adds a footnote: ‘the fragment is in Walz, Rhetores Graeci, vol. ![]() In a fragment lately discovered, which bears a strong impression of the simple language of Sappho, she compares the freshness of youth and the unsullied beauty of a maiden’s face to an apple of some peculiar kind, which, when all the rest of the fruit is gathered from the tree, remains alone at an unattainable height, and drinks in the whole vigour of vegetation or rather (to give the simple words of the poetess in which the thought is placed before us and gradually heightened with great beauty and nature): “like the sweetapple which ripens at the top of the bough, on the topmost point of the bough, forgotten by the gatherers-no, not quite forgotten, but beyond their reach”. Now: the ‘Sappho’s apple’ reference is something Eliot found in Karl Otfried Müller’s History of the Literature of Ancient Greece: To the Period of Isocrates, which had appeared in English in 1840-translated by the man who went on to become her lover, whom she considered her husband, George Henry Lewes. One more detail: though it was published in the 1870s Eliot’s novel is actually set around the time of the First Reform Act of 1832. Sir James is a down-to-earth fellow, not the sort to go mooning after unattainable women. For he was not one of those gentlemen who languish after the unattainable Sappho’s apple that laughs from the topmost bough. Cadwallader must decide on another match for Sir James, and having made up her mind that it was to be the younger Miss Brooke, there could not have been a more skilful move towards the success of her plan than her hint to the baronet that he had made an impression on Celia’s heart. Her betrothal to Casaubon puts paid to that plan, but matchmaker Mrs Cadwallader is not thereby discouraged: So: the expectation had been that Dorothea would marry Sir James Chettam, an eligible, hearty and rather dim young baronet. This is a small, perhaps pedantic (but hopefully not full-on Casaubonic) note on a reference Eliot makes in the sixth chapter of Middlemarch. ![]()
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