Middlemarch

  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 thehappiness to be dead a hundred and twenty years ago, and so to take hisplace among the colossi whose huge legs our living pettiness isobserved to walk under, glories in his copious remarks and digressionsas the least imitable part of his work, and especially in those initialchapters to the successive books of his history, where he seems tobring his armchair to the proscenium and chat with us in all the lustyease of his fine English. But Fielding lived when the days were longer(for time, like money, is measured by our needs), when summerafternoons were spacious, and the clock ticked slowly in the winterevenings. We belated historians must not linger after his example; andif we did so, it is probable that our chat would be thin and eager, asif delivered from a campstool in a parrot-house. I at least have somuch to do in unraveling certain human lots, and seeing how they werewoven and interwoven, that all the light I can command must beconcentrated on this particular web, and not dispersed over thattempting range of relevancies called the universe.

  At present I have to make the new settler Lydgate better known to anyone interested in him than he could possibly be even to those who hadseen the most of him since his arrival in Middlemarch. For surely allmust 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 asa future husband, and yet remain virtually unknown--known merely as acluster of signs for his neighbors' false suppositions. There was ageneral impression, however, that Lydgate was not altogether a commoncountry doctor, and in Middlemarch at that time such an impression wassignificant of great things being expected from him. For everybody'sfamily doctor was remarkably clever, and was understood to haveimmeasurable skill in the management and training of the most skittishor vicious diseases. The evidence of his cleverness was of the higherintuitive order, lying in his lady-patients' immovable conviction, andwas unassailable by any objection except that their intuitions wereopposed by others equally strong; each lady who saw medical truth inWrench and "the strengthening treatment" regarding Toller and "thelowering system" as medical perdition. For the heroic times of copiousbleeding and blistering had not yet departed, still less the times ofthorough-going theory, when disease in general was called by some badname, and treated accordingly without shilly-shally--as if, forexample, it were to be called insurrection, which must not be fired onwith blank-cartridge, but have its blood drawn at once. Thestrengtheners and the lowerers were all "clever" men in somebody'sopinion, 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. Lydgatecould know as much as Dr. Sprague and Dr. Minchin, the two physicians,who alone could offer any hope when danger was extreme, and when thesmallest hope was worth a guinea. Still, I repeat, there was a generalimpression that Lydgate was something rather more uncommon than anygeneral practitioner in Middlemarch. And this was true. He was butseven-and-twenty, an age at which many men are not quite common--atwhich they are hopeful of achievement, resolute in avoidance, thinkingthat Mammon shall never put a bit in their mouths and get astride theirbacks, 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. Hisfather, a military man, had made but little provision for threechildren, and when the boy Tertius asked to have a medical education,it seemed easier to his guardians to grant his request by apprenticinghim to a country practitioner than to make any objections on the scoreof family dignity. He was one of the rarer lads who early get adecided bent and make up their minds that there is something particularin life which they would like to do for its own sake, and not becausetheir fathers did it. Most of us who turn to any subject with loveremember some morning or evening hour when we got on a high stool toreach down an untried volume, or sat with parted lips listening to anew talker, or for very lack of books began to listen to the voiceswithin, as the first traceable beginning of our love. Something ofthat sort happened to Lydgate. He was a quick fellow, and when hotfrom play, would toss himself in a corner, and in five minutes be deepin any sort of book that he could lay his hands on: if it were Rasselasor Gulliver, so much the better, but Bailey's Dictionary would do, orthe Bible with the Apocrypha in it. Something he must read, when hewas not riding the pony, or running and hunting, or listening to thetalk of men. All this was true of him at ten years of age; he had thenread through "Chrysal, or the Adventures of a Guinea," which wasneither 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 lifewas stupid. His school studies had not much modified that opinion, forthough he "did" his classics and mathematics, he was not pre-eminent inthem. It was said of him, that Lydgate could do anything he liked, buthe had certainly not yet liked to do anything remarkable. He was avigorous animal with a ready understanding, but no spark had yetkindled in him an intellectual passion; knowledge seemed to him a verysuperficial affair, easily mastered: judging from the conversation ofhis elders, he had apparently got already more than was necessary formature life. Probably this was not an exceptional result of expensiveteaching at that period of short-waisted coats, and other fashionswhich have not yet recurred. But, one vacation, a wet day sent him tothe small home library to hunt once more for a book which might havesome freshness for him: in vain! unless, indeed, he took down a dustyrow of volumes with gray-paper backs and dingy labels--the volumes ofan old Cyclopaedia which he had never disturbed. It would at least bea novelty to disturb them. They were on the highest shelf, and hestood on a chair to get them down. But he opened the volume which hefirst took from the shelf: somehow, one is apt to read in a makeshiftattitude, just where it might seem inconvenient to do so. The page heopened on was under the head of Anatomy, and the first passage thatdrew his eyes was on the valves of the heart. He was not muchacquainted with valves of any sort, but he knew that valvae werefolding-doors, and through this crevice came a sudden light startlinghim with his first vivid notion of finely adjusted mechanism in thehuman frame. A liberal education had of course left him free to readthe indecent passages in the school classics, but beyond a generalsense of secrecy and obscenity in connection with his internalstructure, had left his imagination quite unbiassed, so that foranything he knew his brains lay in small bags at his temples, and hehad no more thought of representing to himself how his blood circulatedthan how paper served instead of gold. But the moment of vocation hadcome, and before he got down from his chair, the world was made new tohim by a presentiment of endless processes filling the vast spacesplanked out of his sight by that wordy ignorance which he had supposedto be knowledge. From that hour Lydgate felt the growth of anintellectual passion.

  We are not afraid of telling over and over again how a man comes tofall in love with a woman and be wedded to her, or else be fatallyparted from her. Is it due to excess of poetry or of stupidity that weare never weary of describing what King James called a woman's "makdomand her fairnesse," never weary of listening to the twanging of the oldTroubadour strings, and are comparatively uninterested in that otherkind of "makdom and fairnesse" which must be wooed with industriousthought and patient renunciation of small desires? In the story ofthis passion, too, the development varies: sometimes it is the gloriousmarriage, sometimes frustration and final parting. And not seldom thecatastrophe is bound up with the other passion, sung by theTroubadours. For in the multitude of middle-aged men who go abouttheir vocations in a daily course determined for them much in the sameway as the tie of their cravats,
there is always a good number who oncemeant to shape their own deeds and alter the world a little. The storyof their coming to be shapen after the average and fit to be packed bythe gross, is hardly ever told even in their consciousness; for perhapstheir ardor in generous unpaid toil cooled as imperceptibly as theardor of other youthful loves, till one day their earlier self walkedlike a ghost in its old home and made the new furniture ghastly.Nothing in the world more subtle than the process of their gradualchange! In the beginning they inhaled it unknowingly: you and I mayhave sent some of our breath towards infecting them, when we utteredour conforming falsities or drew our silly conclusions: or perhaps itcame with the vibrations from a woman's glance.

  Lydgate did not mean to be one of those failures, and there was thebetter hope of him because his scientific interest soon took the formof a professional enthusiasm: he had a youthful belief in hisbread-winning work, not to be stifled by that initiation in makeshiftcalled his 'prentice days; and he carried to his studies in London,Edinburgh, and Paris, the conviction that the medical profession as itmight be was the finest in the world; presenting the most perfectinterchange between science and art; offering the most direct alliancebetween intellectual conquest and the social good. Lydgate's naturedemanded this combination: he was an emotional creature, with aflesh-and-blood sense of fellowship which withstood all theabstractions of special study. He cared not only for "cases," but forJohn and Elizabeth, especially Elizabeth.

  There was another attraction in his profession: it wanted reform, andgave a man an opportunity for some indignant resolve to reject itsvenal decorations and other humbug, and to be the possessor of genuinethough undemanded qualifications. He went to study in Paris with thedetermination that when he came home again he would settle in someprovincial town as a general practitioner, and resist theirrational severance between medical and surgical knowledge in theinterest of his own scientific pursuits, as well as of the generaladvance: he would keep away from the range of London intrigues,jealousies, and social truckling, and win celebrity, however slowly, asJenner had done, by the independent value of his work. For it must beremembered that this was a dark period; and in spite of venerablecolleges which used great efforts to secure purity of knowledge bymaking it scarce, and to exclude error by a rigid exclusiveness inrelation to fees and appointments, it happened that very ignorant younggentlemen were promoted in town, and many more got a legal right topractise over large areas in the country. Also, the high standard heldup to the public mind by the College of Physicians, which gave its peculiarsanction to the expensive and highly rarefied medical instructionobtained by graduates of Oxford and Cambridge, did not hinder quackeryfrom having an excellent time of it; for since professional practicechiefly consisted in giving a great many drugs, the public inferredthat it might be better off with more drugs still, if they could onlybe got cheaply, and hence swallowed large cubic measures of physicprescribed by unscrupulous ignorance which had taken no degrees.Considering that statistics had not yet embraced a calculation as tothe number of ignorant or canting doctors which absolutely must existin the teeth of all changes, it seemed to Lydgate that a change in theunits was the most direct mode of changing the numbers. He meant to bea unit who would make a certain amount of difference towards thatspreading change which would one day tell appreciably upon theaverages, and in the mean time have the pleasure of making anadvantageous difference to the viscera of his own patients. But he didnot simply aim at a more genuine kind of practice than was common. Hewas ambitious of a wider effect: he was fired with the possibility thathe might work out the proof of an anatomical conception and make a linkin the chain of discovery.

  Does it seem incongruous to you that a Middlemarch surgeon should dreamof himself as a discoverer? Most of us, indeed, know little of thegreat originators until they have been lifted up among theconstellations and already rule our fates. But that Herschel, forexample, who "broke the barriers of the heavens"--did he not once playa provincial church-organ, and give music-lessons to stumblingpianists? Each of those Shining Ones had to walk on the earth amongneighbors who perhaps thought much more of his gait and his garmentsthan of anything which was to give him a title to everlasting fame:each of them had his little local personal history sprinkled with smalltemptations and sordid cares, which made the retarding friction of hiscourse towards final companionship with the immortals. Lydgate was notblind to the dangers of such friction, but he had plenty of confidencein his resolution to avoid it as far as possible: beingseven-and-twenty, he felt himself experienced. And he was not going tohave his vanities provoked by contact with the showy worldly successesof the capital, but to live among people who could hold no rivalry withthat pursuit of a great idea which was to be a twin object with theassiduous practice of his profession. There was fascination in thehope that the two purposes would illuminate each other: the carefulobservation and inference which was his daily work, the use of the lensto further his judgment in special cases, would further his thought asan instrument of larger inquiry. Was not this the typical pre-eminenceof his profession? He would be a good Middlemarch doctor, and by thatvery means keep himself in the track of far-reaching investigation. Onone point he may fairly claim approval at this particular stage of hiscareer: he did not mean to imitate those philanthropic models who makea profit out of poisonous pickles to support themselves while they areexposing adulteration, or hold shares in a gambling-hell that they mayhave leisure to represent the cause of public morality. He intended tobegin in his own case some particular reforms which were quitecertainly within his reach, and much less of a problem than thedemonstrating of an anatomical conception. One of these reforms was toact stoutly on the strength of a recent legal decision, and simplyprescribe, without dispensing drugs or taking percentage fromdruggists. This was an innovation for one who had chosen to adopt thestyle of general practitioner in a country town, and would be felt asoffensive criticism by his professional brethren. But Lydgate meant toinnovate in his treatment also, and he was wise enough to see that thebest security for his practising honestly according to his belief wasto get rid of systematic temptations to the contrary.

  Perhaps that was a more cheerful time for observers and theorizers thanthe present; we are apt to think it the finest era of the world whenAmerica was beginning to be discovered, when a bold sailor, even if hewere wrecked, might alight on a new kingdom; and about 1829 the darkterritories of Pathology were a fine America for a spirited youngadventurer. Lydgate was ambitious above all to contribute towardsenlarging the scientific, rational basis of his profession. The morehe became interested in special questions of disease, such as thenature of fever or fevers, the more keenly he felt the need for thatfundamental knowledge of structure which just at the beginning of thecentury had been illuminated by the brief and glorious career ofBichat, who died when he was only one-and-thirty, but, like anotherAlexander, left a realm large enough for many heirs. That greatFrenchman first carried out the conception that living bodies,fundamentally considered, are not associations of organs which can beunderstood 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--arecompacted, as the various accommodations of a house are built up invarious 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 itsparts--what are its frailties and what its repairs, without knowing thenature of the materials. And the conception wrought out by Bichat,with his detailed study of the different tissues, acted necessarily onmedical questions as the turning of gas-light would act on a dim,oil-lit street, showing new connections and hitherto hidden facts ofstructure which must be taken into account in considering the symptomsof maladies and the action of medicaments. But results which depend onhuman conscience and intelligence work slowly, and now at the end of1829, most medical practice was still strutt
ing or shambling along theold paths, and there was still scientific work to be done which mighthave seemed to be a direct sequence of Bichat's. This great seer didnot go beyond the consideration of the tissues as ultimate facts in theliving organism, marking the limit of anatomical analysis; but it wasopen to another mind to say, have not these structures some commonbasis from which they have all started, as your sarsnet, gauze, net,satin, and velvet from the raw cocoon? Here would be another light, asof oxy-hydrogen, showing the very grain of things, and revising allformer explanations. Of this sequence to Bichat's work, alreadyvibrating along many currents of the European mind, Lydgate wasenamoured; he longed to demonstrate the more intimate relations ofliving structure, and help to define men's thought more accuratelyafter the true order. The work had not yet been done, but onlyprepared for those who knew how to use the preparation. What was theprimitive tissue? In that way Lydgate put the question--not quite inthe way required by the awaiting answer; but such missing of the rightword befalls many seekers. And he counted on quiet intervals to bewatchfully seized, for taking up the threads of investigation--on manyhints to be won from diligent application, not only of the scalpel, butof the microscope, which research had begun to use again with newenthusiasm of reliance. Such was Lydgate's plan of his future: to dogood 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 actionshould be beneficent, and with ideas in his brain that made lifeinteresting quite apart from the cultus of horseflesh and other mysticrites of costly observance, which the eight hundred pounds left himafter buying his practice would certainly not have gone far in payingfor. He was at a starting-point which makes many a man's career a finesubject for betting, if there were any gentlemen given to thatamusement who could appreciate the complicated probabilities of anarduous purpose, with all the possible thwartings and furtherings ofcircumstance, all the niceties of inward balance, by which a man swimsand makes his point or else is carried headlong. The risk would remaineven with close knowledge of Lydgate's character; for character too isa process and an unfolding. The man was still in the making, as muchas the Middlemarch doctor and immortal discoverer, and there were bothvirtues and faults capable of shrinking or expanding. The faults willnot, 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 littletoo self-confident and disdainful; whose distinguished mind is a littlespotted with commonness; who is a little pinched here and protuberantthere with native prejudices; or whose better energies are liable tolapse down the wrong channel under the influence of transientsolicitations? All these things might be alleged against Lydgate, butthen, they are the periphrases of a polite preacher, who talks of Adam,and would not like to mention anything painful to the pew-renters. Theparticular faults from which these delicate generalities are distilledhave distinguishable physiognomies, diction, accent, and grimaces;filling up parts in very various dramas. Our vanities differ as ournoses do: all conceit is not the same conceit, but varies incorrespondence with the minutiae of mental make in which one of usdiffers from another. Lydgate's conceit was of the arrogant sort,never simpering, never impertinent, but massive in its claims andbenevolently contemptuous. He would do a great deal for noodles, beingsorry for them, and feeling quite sure that they could have no powerover him: he had thought of joining the Saint Simonians when he was inParis, in order to turn them against some of their own doctrines. Allhis faults were marked by kindred traits, and were those of a man whohad a fine baritone, whose clothes hung well upon him, and who even inhis ordinary gestures had an air of inbred distinction. Where then laythe spots of commonness? says a young lady enamoured of that carelessgrace. How could there be any commonness in a man so well-bred, soambitious of social distinction, so generous and unusual in his viewsof social duty? As easily as there may be stupidity in a man of geniusif you take him unawares on the wrong subject, or as many a man who hasthe best will to advance the social millennium might be ill-inspired inimagining its lighter pleasures; unable to go beyond Offenbach's music,or the brilliant punning in the last burlesque. Lydgate's spots ofcommonness lay in the complexion of his prejudices, which, in spite ofnoble intention and sympathy, were half of them such as are found inordinary men of the world: that distinction of mind which belonged tohis intellectual ardor, did not penetrate his feeling and judgmentabout furniture, or women, or the desirability of its being known(without his telling) that he was better born than other countrysurgeons. He did not mean to think of furniture at present; butwhenever he did so it was to be feared that neither biology nor schemesof reform would lift him above the vulgarity of feeling that therewould be an incompatibility in his furniture not being of the best.

  As to women, he had once already been drawn headlong by impetuousfolly, which he meant to be final, since marriage at some distantperiod would of course not be impetuous. For those who want to beacquainted with Lydgate it will be good to know what was that case ofimpetuous folly, for it may stand as an example of the fitful swervingof passion to which he was prone, together with the chivalrous kindnesswhich helped to make him morally lovable. The story can be toldwithout many words. It happened when he was studying in Paris, andjust at the time when, over and above his other work, he was occupiedwith some galvanic experiments. One evening, tired with hisexperimenting, and not being able to elicit the facts he needed, heleft his frogs and rabbits to some repose under their trying andmysterious dispensation of unexplained shocks, and went to finish hisevening at the theatre of the Porte Saint Martin, where there was amelodrama which he had already seen several times; attracted, not bythe ingenious work of the collaborating authors, but by an actresswhose part it was to stab her lover, mistaking him for theevil-designing duke of the piece. Lydgate was in love with thisactress, as a man is in love with a woman whom he never expects tospeak to. She was a Provencale, with dark eyes, a Greek profile, androunded majestic form, having that sort of beauty which carries a sweetmatronliness even in youth, and her voice was a soft cooing. She hadbut lately come to Paris, and bore a virtuous reputation, her husbandacting with her as the unfortunate lover. It was her acting which was"no better than it should be," but the public was satisfied. Lydgate'sonly relaxation now was to go and look at this woman, just as he mighthave thrown himself under the breath of the sweet south on a bank ofviolets for a while, without prejudice to his galvanism, to which hewould presently return. But this evening the old drama had a newcatastrophe. At the moment when the heroine was to act the stabbing ofher lover, and he was to fall gracefully, the wife veritably stabbedher husband, who fell as death willed. A wild shriek pierced thehouse, and the Provencale fell swooning: a shriek and a swoon weredemanded by the play, but the swooning too was real this time. Lydgateleaped and climbed, he hardly knew how, on to the stage, and was activein help, making the acquaintance of his heroine by finding a contusionon her head and lifting her gently in his arms. Paris rang with thestory of this death:--was it a murder? Some of the actress's warmestadmirers were inclined to believe in her guilt, and liked her thebetter for it (such was the taste of those times); but Lydgate was notone of these. He vehemently contended for her innocence, and theremote impersonal passion for her beauty which he had felt before, hadpassed now into personal devotion, and tender thought of her lot. Thenotion of murder was absurd: no motive was discoverable, the youngcouple being understood to dote on each other; and it was notunprecedented that an accidental slip of the foot should have broughtthese grave consequences. The legal investigation ended in MadameLaure's release. Lydgate by this time had had many interviews withher, and found her more and more adorable. She talked little; but thatwas an additional charm. She was melancholy, and seemed grateful; herpresence was enough, like that of the evening light. Lydgate was madlyanxious about her affection, and jealous lest any other man thanhimself should win it and ask her to marry him. But
instead ofreopening her engagement at the Porte Saint Martin, where she wouldhave been all the more popular for the fatal episode, she left Pariswithout warning, forsaking her little court of admirers. Perhaps noone carried inquiry far except Lydgate, who felt that all science hadcome to a stand-still while he imagined the unhappy Laure, stricken byever-wandering sorrow, herself wandering, and finding no faithfulcomforter. Hidden actresses, however, are not so difficult to find assome other hidden facts, and it was not long before Lydgate gatheredindications that Laure had taken the route to Lyons. He found her atlast acting with great success at Avignon under the same name, lookingmore majestic than ever as a forsaken wife carrying her child in herarms. He spoke to her after the play, was received with the usualquietude which seemed to him beautiful as clear depths of water, andobtained leave to visit her the next day; when he was bent on tellingher that he adored her, and on asking her to marry him. He knew thatthis was like the sudden impulse of a madman--incongruous even with hishabitual foibles. No matter! It was the one thing which he wasresolved to do. He had two selves within him apparently, and they mustlearn to accommodate each other and bear reciprocal impediments.Strange, that some of us, with quick alternate vision, see beyond ourinfatuations, and even while we rave on the heights, behold the wideplain where our persistent self pauses and awaits us.

  To have approached Laure with any suit that was not reverentiallytender would have been simply a contradiction of his whole feelingtowards her.

  "You have come all the way from Paris to find me?" she said to him thenext day, sitting before him with folded arms, and looking at him witheyes 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 arelonely; 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 underher grand eyelids, until he was full of rapturous certainty, and kneltclose to her knees.

  "I will tell you something," she said, in her cooing way, keeping herarms folded. "My foot really slipped."

  "I know, I know," said Lydgate, deprecatingly. "It was a fatalaccident--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 seemedto pass before he rose and stood at a distance from her.

  "There was a secret, then," he said at last, even vehemently. "He wasbrutal to you: you hated him."

  "No! he wearied me; he was too fond: he would live in Paris, and not inmy country; that was not agreeable to me."

  "Great God!" said Lydgate, in a groan of horror. "And you planned tomurder 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 helooked at her. He saw this woman--the first to whom he had given hisyoung adoration--amid the throng of stupid criminals.

  "You are a good young man," she said. "But I do not like husbands. Iwill never have another."

  Three days afterwards Lydgate was at his galvanism again in his Parischambers, believing that illusions were at an end for him. He wassaved from hardening effects by the abundant kindness of his heart andhis belief that human life might be made better. But he had morereason than ever for trusting his judgment, now that it was soexperienced; and henceforth he would take a strictly scientific view ofwoman, entertaining no expectations but such as were justifiedbeforehand.

  No one in Middlemarch was likely to have such a notion of Lydgate'spast as has here been faintly shadowed, and indeed the respectabletownsfolk there were not more given than mortals generally to any eagerattempt at exactness in the representation to themselves of what didnot 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 newacquaintance might be wrought into their purposes, contented with veryvague knowledge as to the way in which life had been shaping him forthat instrumentality. Middlemarch, in fact, counted on swallowingLydgate and assimilating him very comfortably.