Chapter XV
"Black eyes you have left, you say,
Blue eyes fail to draw you;
Yet you seem more rapt to-day,
Than of old we saw you.
"Oh, I track the fairest fair
Through new haunts of pleasure;
Footprints here and echoes there
Guide me to my treasure:
"Lo! she turns — immortal youth
Wrought to mortal stature,
Fresh as starlight's aged truth —
Many-named Nature!"
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 armchair to the proscenium and chat with us in all
the lusty ease of his fine English. But 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 campstool in a parrot-house. I at least
have so much to do in unraveling certain human lots, and
seeing how they were 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.
At present I have to make the new settler Lydgate better
known to any one interested in him than he could possibly be
even to those who had seen the most of him since his
arrival in Middlemarch. For surely all must admit that a
man may be puffed and belauded, envied, ridiculed, counted
upon as a tool and fallen in love with, or at least selected
as a future husband, and yet remain virtually unknown — known
merely as a cluster of signs for his neighbors' false
suppositions. There was a general impression, however, that
Lydgate was not altogether a common country doctor, and in
Middlemarch at that time such an impression was significant
of great things being expected from him. For everybody's
family doctor was remarkably clever, and was understood to
have immeasurable skill in the management and training of
the most skittish or vicious diseases. The evidence of his
cleverness was of the higher intuitive order, lying in his
lady-patients' immovable conviction, and was unassailable by
any objection except that their intuitions were opposed by
others equally strong; each lady who saw medical truth in
Wrench and " the strengthening treatment" regarding Toller
and "the lowering system " as medical perdition. For the
heroic times of copious bleeding and blistering had not yet
departed, still less the times of thorough-going theory,
when disease in general was called by some bad name, and
treated accordingly without shilly-shally — as if, for
example, it were to be called insurrection, which must not
be fired on with blank-cartridge, but have its blood drawn
at once. The strengtheners and the lowerers were all
"clever" men in somebody's opinion, which is really as much
as can be said for any living talents. Nobody's imagination
had gone so far as to conjecture that Mr. Lydgate could know
as much as Dr. Sprague and Dr. Minchin, the two physicians,
who alone could offer any hope when danger was extreme, and
when the smallest hope was worth a guinea. Still, I repeat,
there was a general impression that Lydgate was something
rather more uncommon than any general practitioner in
Middlemarch. And this was true. He was but seven-and-twenty, an age at which many men are not quite common — at
which they are hopeful of achievement, resolute in
avoidance, thinking that Mammon shall never put a bit in
their mouths and get astride their backs, but rather that
Mammon,
if they have anything to do with him, shall
draw their chariot.
He had been left an orphan when he was fresh from a
public school. His father, a military man, had made but
little provision for three children, and when the boy
Tertius asked to have a medical education, it seemed easier
to his guardians to grant his request by apprenticing him to
a country practitioner than to make any objections on the
score of family dignity. He was one of the rarer lads who
early get a decided bent and make up their minds that there
is something particular in life which they would like to do
for its own sake, and not because their fathers did it.
Most of us who turn to any subject with love remember some
morning or evening hour when we got on a high stool to reach
down an untried volume, or sat with parted lips listening to
a new talker, or for very lack of books began to listen to
the voices within, as the first traceable beginning of our
love. Something of that sort happened to Lydgate. He was a
quick fellow, and when hot from play, would toss himself in
a corner, and in five minutes be deep in any sort of book
that he could lay his hands on: if it were Rasselas or
Gulliver, so much the better, but Bailey's Dictionary would
do, or the Bible with the Apocrypha in it. Something he
must read, when he was not riding the pony, or running and
hunting, or listening to the talk of men. All this was true
of him at ten years of age; he had then read through
"Chrysal, or the Adventures of a Guinea," which was neither
milk for babes, nor any chalky mixture meant to pass for
milk, and it had already occurred to him that books were
stuff, and that life was stupid. His school studies had not
much modified that opinion, for though he "did"his classics
and mathematics, he was not pre-eminent in them. It was
said of him, that Lydgate could do anything he liked, but he
had certainly not yet liked to do anything remarkable. He
was a vigorous animal with a ready understanding, but no
spark had yet kindled in him an intellectual passion;
knowledge seemed to him a very superficial affair, easily
mastered: judging from the conversation of his elders, he
had apparently got already
more than was necessary for
mature life. Probably this was not an exceptional result of
expensive teaching at that period of short-waisted coats,
and other fashions which have not yet recurred. But, one
vacation, a wet day sent him to the small home library to
hunt once more for a book which might have some freshness
for him: in vain! unless, indeed, he took down a dusty row
of volumes with gray-paper backs and dingy labels — the
volumes of an old Cyclopaedia which he had never disturbed.
It would at least be a novelty to disturb them. They were
on the highest shelf, and he stood on a chair to get them
down. But he opened the volume which he first took from the
shelf: somehow, one is apt to read in a makeshift attitude,
just where it might seem inconvenient to do so. The page he
opened on was under the head of Anatomy, and the first
passage that drew his eyes was on the valves of the heart.
He was not much acquainted with valves of any sort, but he
knew that
valvae were folding-doors, and through this
crevice came a sudden light startling him with his first
vivid notion of finely adjusted mechanism in the human
frame. A liberal education had of course left him free to
read the indecent passages in the school classics, but
beyond a general sense of secrecy and obscenity in
connection with his internal structure, had left his
imagination quite unbiassed, so that for anything he knew
his brains lay in small bags at his temples, and he had no
more thought of representing to himself how his blood
circulated than how paper served instead of gold. But the
moment of vocation had come, and before he got down from his
chair, the world was made new to him by a presentiment of.
endless processes filling the vast spaces planked out of his
sight by that wordy ignorance which he had supposed to be
knowledge. From that hour Lydgate felt the growth of an
intellectual passion.
We are not afraid of telling over and over again how a man
comes to fall in love with a woman and be wedded to her, or
else be fatally parted from her. Is it due to excess of
poetry
or of stupidity that we are never weary of describing what
King James called a woman's "makdom and her fairnesse,"
never weary of listening to the twanging of the old
Trouba
dour strings, and are comparatively uninterested
in that other kind of " makdom and fairnesse " which must be
wooed with industrious thought and patient renunciation of
small desires? In the story of this passion, too, the
development varies: sometimes it is the glorious marriage,
sometimes frustration and final parting. And not seldom the
catastrophe is bound up with the other passion, sung by the
Troubadours. For in the multitude of middle-aged men who go
about their vocations in a daily course determined for them
much in the same way as the tie of their cravats, there is
always a good number who once meant to shape their own deeds
and alter the world a little The story of their coming to be
shapen after the average and fit to be packed by the gross,
is hardly ever told even in their consciousness; for perhaps
their ardor in generous unpaid toil cooled as imperceptibly
as the ardor of other youthful loves, till one day their
earlier self walked like a ghost in its old home and made
the new furniture ghastly. Nothing in the world more subtle
than the process of their gradual change! In the beginning
they inhaled it unknowingly: you and I may have sent some of
our breath towards infecting them, when we uttered our
conforming falsities or drew our silly conclusions: or
perhaps it came with the vibrations from a woman's glance.
Lydgate did not mean to be one of those failures, and
there was the better hope of him because his scientific
interest soon took the form of a professional enthusiasm: he
had a youthful belief in his bread-winning work, not to be
stifled by that initiation in makeshift called his 'prentice
days; and he carried to his studies in London, Edinburgh,
and Paris, the conviction that the medical profession as it
might be was the finest in the world; presenting the most
perfect interchange between science and art; offering the
most direct alliance between intellectual conquest and the
social good. Lydgate's nature demanded this combination: he
was an emotional creature, with a flesh-and-blood sense of
fellowship which withstood all the abstractions of special
study. He eared not only for "cases," but for John and
Elizabeth, especially Elizabeth.
There was another attraction in his profession: it
wanted reform, and gave a man an opportunity for some
indignant resolve to reject its venal decorations and other
humbug, and to be the possessor of genuine though undemanded
qualifications. He went to study in Paris with the
determination that when he provincial home again he would
settle in some provincial town as a general practitioner,
and resist the irrational severance between medical and
surgical knowledge in the interest of his own scientific
pursuits, as well as of the general advance: he would keep
away from the range of London intrigues, jealousies, and
social truckling, and win celebrity, however slowly, as
Jenner had done, by the independent value of his work. For
it must be remembered that this was a dark period; and in
spite of venerable colleges which used great efforts to
secure purity of knowledge by making it scarce, and to
exclude error by a rigid exclusiveness in relation to fees
and appointments, it happened that very ignorant young
gentlemen were promoted in town, and many more got a legal
right to practise over large areas in the country. Also,
the high standard held up to the public mind by the College
of Physicians, which gave its peculiar sanction to the
expensive and highly rarefied medical instruction obtained
by graduates of Oxford and Cambridge, did not hinder
quackery from having an excellent time of it; for since
professional practice chiefly consisted in giving a great
many drugs, the public inferred that it might be better off
with more drugs still, if they could only be got cheaply,
and hence swallowed large cubic measures of physic
prescribed by unscrupulous ignorance which had taken no
degrees. Considering that statistics had not yet embraced a
calculation as to the number of ignorant or canting doctors
which absolutely must exist in the teeth of all changes, it
seemed to Lydgate that a change in the units was the most
direct mode of changing the numbers. He meant to be a unit
who would make a certain amount of difference towards that
spreading change' which would one day tell appreciably upon
the averages, and in the mean time have the pleasure of
making an advantageous difference to the viscera of his own
patients. But he did not simply aim at a more genuine kind
of practice than
was common. He was ambitious of a
wider effect: he was fired with the possibility that he
might work out the proof of an anatomical conception and
make a link in the chain of discovery.
Does it seem incongruous to you that a Middlemarch
surgeon should dream of himself as a discoverer? Most of
us, indeed, know little of the great originators until they
have been lifted up among the constellations and already
rule our fates. But that Herschel, for example, who " broke
the barriers of the heavens" — did he not once play a
provincial church-organ, and give music-lessons to stumbling
pianists? Each of those Shining Ones had to walk on the
earth among neighbors who perhaps thought much more of his
gait and his garments than of anything which was to give him
a title to everlasting fame: each of them had his little
local personal history sprinkled with small temptations and
sordid 1 cares, which made the retarding friction of his
course towards final companionship with the immortals.
Lydgate was not blind to the dangers of such friction, but
he had plenty of confidence in his resolution to avoid it as
far as possible: being seven-and-twenty, he felt himself
experienced. And he was not going to have his vanities
provoked by contact with the showy worldly successes of the
capital, but to live among people who could hold no rivalry
with that pursuit of a great idea which was to be a twin
object with the assiduous practice of his profession. There
was fascination in the hope that the two purposes would
illuminate each other: the careful observation and inference
which was his daily work, the use of the lens to further his
judgment in special eases, would further his thought as an
instrument of larger inquiry. Was not this the typical preeminence
of his profession? He would be a good Middlemarch
doctor, and by that very means keep himself in the track of
far-reaching investigation. On one point he may fairly
claim approval at this particular stage of his career: he
did not mean to imitate those philanthropic models who make
a profit out of poisonous pickles to support themselves
while they are exposing adulteration, or hold shares in a
gambling-hell that they may have leisure to repre
sent
the cause of public morality. He intended to begin in his
own ease some particular reforms which were quite certainly
within his reach, and much less of a problem than the
demonstrating of an anatomical conception. One of these
reforms was to act stoutly on the strength of a recent legal
decision, and simply prescribe, without dispensing drugs or
taking percentage from druggists. This was an innovation
for one who had chosen to adopt the style of general
practitioner in a country town, and would be felt as
offensive criticism by his professional brethren. But
Lydgate meant to innovate in his treatment also, and he was
wise enough to see that the best security for his practising
honestly according to his belief was to get rid of
systematic temptations to the contrary.
Perhaps that was a more cheerful time for observers and
theorizers than the present; we are apt to think it the
finest era of the world when America was beginning to be
discovered, when a bold sailor, even if he were wrecked,
might alight on a new kingdom; and about 1829 the dark
territories of Pathology 'were a fine America for a spirited
young adventurer. Lydgate was ambitious above all to
contribute towards enlarging the scientific, rational basis
of his profession. The more he became interested in special
questions of disease, such as the nature of fever or fevers,
the more keenly he felt the need for that fundamental
knowledge of structure which just at the beginning of the
century had been illuminated by the brief and glorious
career of Bichat, who died when he was only one-and-thirty,
but, like another Alexander, left a realm large enough for
many heirs. That great Frenchman first carried out the
conception that living bodies, fundamentally considered, are
not associations of organs which can be understood by
studying them first apart, and then as it were federally;
but must be regarded as consisting of certain primary webs
or tissues, out of which the various organs — brain, heart,
lungs, and so on — are compacted, as the various
accommodations of a house are built up in various
proportions of wood, iron, stone, brick, zinc, and the rest,
each material having its peculiar composition and
proportions No man, one sees, can understand and estimate
the entire structure or its parts — what are its frailties
and
what its repairs, without knowing the nature of the
materials. And the conception wrought out by Bichat, with
his detailed study of the different tissues, acted
necessarily on medical questions as the turning of gas-light
would act on a dim, oil-lit street, showing new connections
and hitherto hidden facts of structure which must be taken
into account in considering the symptoms of maladies and the
action of medicaments. But results which depend on human
conscience and intelligence work slowly, and now at the end
of 1829, most medical practice was still strutting or
shambling along the old paths, and there was still
scientific work to be done which might have seemed to be a
direct sequence of Bichat's. This great seer did not go
beyond the consideration of the tissues as ultimate facts in
the living organism, marking the limit of anatomical
analysis; but it was open to another mind to say, have not
these structures some common basis from which they have all
started, as your sarsnet, gauze, net, satin, and velvet from
the raw cocoon? Here would be another light, as of oxy-hydrogen, showing the very grain of things, and revising ail
former explanations. Of this sequence to Bichat's work,
already vibrating along many currents of the European mind,
Lydgate was enamoured; he longed to demonstrate the more
intimate relations of living structure, and help to define
men's thought more accurately after the true order. The
work had not yet been done, but only prepared for those who
knew how to use the preparation. What was the primitive
tissue? In that way Lydgate put the question — not quite in
the way required by the awaiting answer; but such missing of
the right word befalls many seekers. And he counted on
quiet intervals to be watchfully seized, for taking up the
threads of investigation — on many hints to be won from
diligent application, not only of the scalpel, but of the
microscope, which research had begun to use again with new
enthusiasm of reliance. Such was Lydgate's plan of his
future: to do good small work for Middlemarch, and great
work for the world.
He was certainly a happy fellow at this time: to be
seven-and-twenty, without any fixed vices, with a generous
resolution that his action should be beneficent, and with
ideas in his brain
that made life interesting quite
apart from the
cultus of horseflesh and other mystic
rites of costly observance, which the eight hundred pounds
left him after buying his practice would certainly not nave
gone far in paying for. He was at a starting-point which
makes many a man's career a fine subject for betting, if
there were any gentlemen given to that amusement who could
appreciate the complicated probabilities of an arduous
purpose, with all the possible thwartings and furtherings of
circumstance, all the niceties of inward balance, by which a
man swims and makes his point or else is carried headlong.
The risk would remain even with close knowledge of Lydgate's
character; for character too is a process and au unfolding.
The man was still in the making, as much as the Middlemarch
doctor and immortal discoverer, and there were both virtues
and faults capable of shrinking or expanding. The faults
will not, I hope, be a reason for the withdrawal of your
interest in him. Among our valued friends is there not some
one or other who is a little too self-confident and
disdainful; whose distinguished mind is a little spotted
with commonness; who is a little pinched here and
protuberant there with native. prejudices; or whose better
energies are liable to lapse down the wrong channel under
the influence of transient solicitations? All these things
might be alleged against Lydgate, but then, they are the
periphrases of a polite preacher, who talks of Adam, and
would not like to mention anything painful to the pew-renters. The particular faults from which these delicate
generalities are distilled have distinguishable
physiognomies, diction, accent, and grimaces; filling up
parts in very various dramas. Our vanities differ as our
noses do: all conceit is not the same conceit, but varies in
correspondence with the minutiae of mental make in which one
of us differs from another. Lydgate's conceit was of the
arrogant sort, never simpering, never impertinent, but
massive in its claims and benevolently contemptuous. He
would do a great deal for noodles, being sorry for them, and
feeling quite sure that they could have no power over him:
he had thought of joining the Saint Simonians when he was in
Paris, in order to turn them against some of their own
doctrines. All his faults were marked by kindred traits,
and were
those of a man who had a fine barytone, whose
clothes hung well upon him, and who even in his ordinary
gestures had an air of inbred distinction. Where then lay
the spots of commonness? says a young lady enamoured of that
careless grace. How could there be any commonness in a man
so well-bred, so ambitious of social distinction, so
generous and unusual in his views of social duty? As easily
as there may be stupidity in a man of genius if you take him
unawares on the wrong subject, or as many a man who has the
best will to advance the social millennium might be ill-inspired in imagining its lighter pleasures; unable to go
beyond Offenbach's music, or the brilliant punning in the
last burlesque. Lydgate's spots of commonness lay in the
complexion of his prejudices, which, in spite of noble
intention and sympathy, were half of them such as are found
in ordinary men of the world: that distinction of mind which
belonged to his intellectual ardor, did not penetrate his
feeling and judgment about furniture, or women, or the
desirability of its being known (without his telling) that
he was better born than other country surgeons. He did not
mean to think of furniture at present; but whenever he did
so it was to be feared that neither biology nor schemes of
reform would lift him above the vulgarity of feeling that
there would be an incompatibility in his furniture not being
of the best.
As to women, he had once already been drawn headlong by
impetuous folly, which he meant to be final, since marriage
at some distant period would of course not be impetuous.
For those who want to be acquainted with Lydgate it will be
good to know what was that ease of impetuous folly, for it
may stand as an example of the fitful swerving of passion to
which he was prone, together with the chivalrous kindness
which helped to make him morally lovable. The story can be
told without many words. It happened when he was studying
in Paris, and just at the time when, over and above his
other work, he was occupied with some galvanic experiments.
One evening, tired with his experimenting, and not being
able to elicit the facts he needed, he left his frogs and
rabbits to some repose under their trying and mysterious
dispensation of unexplained shocks, and went to finish his
evening at the theatre
of the Porte Saint Martin, where
there was a melodrama which he had already seen several
times; attracted, not by the ingenious work of the
collaborating authors, but by an actress whose part it was
to stab her lover, mistaking him for the evil-designing duke
of the piece. Lydgate was in love with this actress, as a
man is in love with a woman whom he never expects to speak
to. She was a Provencale, with dark eyes, a Greek profile,
and rounded majestic form, having that sort of beauty which
carries a sweet matronliness even in youth, and her voice
was a soft cooing. She had but lately come to Paris, and
bore a virtuous reputation, her husband acting with her as
the unfortunate lover. It was her acting which was " no
better than it should be," but the public was satisfied.
Lydgate's only relaxation now was to go and look at this
woman, just as he might have thrown himself under the breath
of the sweet south on a bank of violets for a while, without
prejudice to his galvanism, to which he would presently
return. But this evening the old drama had a new
catastrophe. At the moment when the heroine was to act the
stabbing of her lover, and he was to fall gracefully, the
wife veritably stabbed her husband, who fell as death
willed. A wild shriek pierced the house, and the Provencale
fell swooning: a shriek and a swoon were demanded by the
play, but the swooning too was real this time. Lydgate
leaped and climbed, he hardly knew how, on to the stage, and
was active in help, making the acquaintance of his heroine
by finding a contusion on her head and lifting her gently in
his arms. Paris rang with the story of this death: — was it
a murder? Some of the actress's warmest admirers were
inclined to believe in her guilt, and liked her the better
for it (such was the taste of those times); but Lydgate was
not one of these. He vehemently contended for her
innocence, and the remote impersonal passion for her beauty
which he had felt before, had passed now into personal
devotion, and tender thought of her lot. The notion of
murder was absurd: no motive was discoverable, the young
couple being understood to dote on each other; and it was
not unprecedented that an accidental slip of the foot should
have brought these grave consequences. The legal
investigation
ended in Madame Laure's release. Lydgate
by this time had had many interviews with her, and found her
more and more adorable. She talked little; but that was an
additional charm. She was melancholy, and seemed grateful;
her presence was enough, like that of the evening light.
Lydgate was madly anxious about her affection, and jealous
lest any other man than himself should win it and ask her to
marry him. But instead of reopening her engagement at the
Porte Saint Martin, where she would have been all the more
popular for the fatal episode, she left Paris without
warning, forsaking her little court of admirers. Perhaps no
one carried inquiry far except Lydgate, who felt that all
science had come to a stand-still while he imagined the
unhappy Laure, stricken by ever-wandering sorrow, herself
wandering, and finding no faithful comforter. Hidden
actresses, however, are not so difficult to find as some
other hidden facts, and it was not long before Lydgate
gathered indications that Laure had taken the route to
Lyons. He found her at last acting with great success at
Avignon under the same name, looking more majestic than ever
as a forsaken wife carrying her child in her arms. He spoke
to her after the play, was received with the usual quietude
which seemed to him beautiful as clear depths of water, and
obtained leave to visit her the next day; when he was bent
on telling her that he adored her, and on asking her to
marry him. He knew that this was like the sudden impulse of
a madman — incongruous even with his habitual foibles. No
matter! It was the one thing which he was resolved to do.
He had two selves within him apparently, and they must learn
to accommodate each other and bear reciprocal impediments.
Strange, that some of us, with quick alternate vision, see
beyond our infatuations, and even while we rave on the
heights, behold the wide plain where our persistent self
pauses and awaits us.
To have approached Laure with any suit that was not
reverentially tender would have been simply a contradiction
of his whole feeling towards her.
"You have come all the way from Paris to find me?" she
said to him the next day, sitting before him with folded
arms,
and looking at him with eyes that seemed to
wonder as an untamed ruminating animal wonders. "Are all
Englishmen like that?"
"I came because I could not live without trying to see
you. You are lonely; I love you; I want you to consent to
be my wife; I will wait, but I want you to promise that you
will marry me — no one else."
Laure looked at him in silence with a melancholy
radiance from under her grand eyelids, until he was full of
rapturous certainty, and knelt close to her knees.
"I will tell you something," she said, in her cooing
way, keeping her arms folded. " My foot really slipped."
"I know, I know," said Lydgate, deprecatingly. " It was
a fatal accident — a dreadful stroke of calamity that bound
me to you the more."
Again Laure paused a little and then said, slowly, "
I meant to do it."
Lydgate, strong man as he was, turned pale and trembled:
moments seemed to pass before he rose and stood at a
distance from her.
"There was a secret, then," he said at last, even
vehemently. " He was brutal to you: you hated him."
"No! he wearied me; he was too fond: he would live in
Paris, and not in my country; that was not agreeable to me."
"Great God!" said Lydgate, in a groan of horror. " And
you planned to murder him?"
"I did not plan: it came to me in the play — I meant
to do it."
Lydgate stood mute, and unconsciously pressed his hat on
while he looked at her. He saw this woman — the first to
whom he had given his young adoration — amid the throng of
stupid criminals.
"You are a good young man," she said. "But I do not
like husbands. I will never have another."
Three days afterwards Lydgate was at his galvanism again
in his Paris chambers, believing that illusions were at an
end for him. He was saved from hardening effects by the
abundant kindness of his heart and his belief that human
life
might be made better. But he had more reason than
ever for trusting his judgment, now that it was so
experienced; and henceforth he would take a strictly
scientific view of woman, entertaining no expectations but
such as were justified beforehand.
No one in Middle march was likely to have such a notion
of Lydgate's past as has here been faintly shadowed, and
indeed the respectable townsfolk there were not more given
than mortals generally to any eager attempt at exactness in
the representation to themselves of what did not come under
their own senses. Not only young virgins of that town, but
gray-bearded men also, were often in haste to conjecture how
a new acquaintance might be wrought into their purposes,
contented with very vague knowledge as to the way in which
life had been shaping him for that instrumentality.
Middlemarch. in fact, counted on swallowing Lydgate and
assimilating him very comfortably.