In the first chapter of Book II of Adam Bede, George Eliot offers an ars poetica on the commonplace subject matter of her fictions:

In this world there are so many of these common, coarse people, who have no picturesque sentimental wretchedness! It is so needful we should remember their existence, else we may happen to leave them quite out of our religion and philosophy, and frame lofty theories which only fit a world of extremes. Therefore let Art always remind us of them; therefore let us always have men ready to give the loving pains of a life to the faithful representing of commonplace things—men who see beauty in these commonplace things, and delight in showing how kindly the light of heaven falls on them. There are few prophets in the world; few sublimely beautiful women; few heroes. I can't afford to give all my love and reverence to such rarities: I want a great deal of those feelings for my everyday fellow-men, especially for the few in the foreground of the great multitude, whose faces I know, whose hands I touch, for whom I have to make way with kindly courtesy.

Eliot's watchword is "common" or "commonplace," a word whose history and roots (L communis, "in common, public, shared by all or many" sharing a root with L munia, "public duties, functions") suggests not only a ubiquitous presence but a shared nature. Public functions held jointly by all.

No wonder the faces she know, the hands she touched, and the kindly courtesy she exchanged among these vulgar souls were so dear.

I chanced to encounter this passage in my audiobook listening right after having finished William Gass's Middle C, another book that aims and shoots to depict people "who have no picturesque sentimental wretchedness." Yet Gass's sensibility and terminology are different. The "middle-C mind" is one of meanness, not commonness; one of mediocre, not common, nature.

"Mediocre" (L mediocris, "halfway up the mountain" from medius "middle" + ocris "jagged mountain") is an admirable calque of "middle C": dead set in the middle of a scale of ascension. ("Mediocrity" also has ten letters, with "C" in the middle. ;‑)

Here's Gass giving his disquisition on mediocrity:

Schoenberg was incapable of the middle-C mind. He was unable to sustain mediocrity. Skizzen thought he probably never understood the bland, the ordinary, the neutral, because it is as difficult to strike as oil. To be the man at the party whom no one remembers is easy for the guest who can shrink into the woodwork without trying, he is so inherently shy; but to be a person who disappears because he is so like everybody else as not to count; who is neither the least lively nor the most; neither the designated driver nor the drunk; neither the most drably dressed nor the most flamboyant; who is as unidentifiable as a glass someone has emptied two drinks ago and left upon the tray like keys mislaid on purpose and subsequently lost: to pretend to be such a one when one is not such a one is to undertake the circling of the square.

Okay then! Very clever, Mr. Gass. There is something quite insightful about the difficulty of producing the absolute invisibility of sameness as an attitude uniquely Midwestern. (Middle C offers one of the most accurate depictions of Midwesternness I've ever read. Truly nails it.)

But this passage also reveals why the book ultimately falls flat as a work of art. A work obsessed with detailing the texture of the mediocre runs the risk of failing to surpass its subject matter. Gass confronts and struggles to surmount the same challenge that David Foster Wallace often does in his fictions: there is nothing of greatness except in the prose itself, which is undoubtedly exquisite but cannot itself do enough to elevate the work of art, as a whole.

Samuel Johnson, writing of Milton, said that the poet's achievement was in the sublimity, the greatness of the work, to "raise wonder" in the reader. "Milton's delight was to sport in the wide regions of possibility," Johnson avers. "Reality was a scene too narrow for his mind."

Not so for William Gass, led on by the temptations of his talent. Plenty of amusement, and the cleverness of cocktail banter, but no wonder.