“‘I am going to tell you: a vocation,’ said the Madre, as her eyes lit up with an expression Fleurange had never seen before—’a vocation to the religious life is to love God more than we love any creature in the world, however dear; it is to be unable to give anything or any person on earth a love comparable to that; to feel the tendency of all our faculties incline us towards him alone; finally,’ pursued she, while her eyes seemed looking beyond the visible heavens on which they were fastened, ‘it is the full persuasion, even in this life, that he is all, our all, in the past, the present, and the future; in this world and in another, for ever, and to the exclusion of everything besides.’”
The carrying out of this feeling made Teresa a saint. It is doubtful whether such thoughts ever entered into George Eliot’s conception of the character she is continually holding up before her readers as impossible in these days. Certainly Dorothea Brooke, with all her natural goodness, never conceived such a life as that possible. The author may be right in attributing her defects to her Calvinistic education, but that does not warrant the inference that anything higher than a life which merely aims at an uncertain good, capable of influencing those coming within its circle in a certain way, is impossible in these days. When the author speaks of “great faith taking the aspect of illusion,” before conceding, one would like to see the “great faith.” Dorothea Brooke never knew what real faith was; from beginning to end, all is uncertainty with her. From girlhood up she lives in an atmosphere of self-delusion and imagination which can find no other possible vent than aimless aspirations after imaginary perfection, which must come into collision with the rough, practical world, and must finally go to the wall. But when the world sees a man or a woman acting steadily up to a practical belief which guides them in all their actions, and meets every contingency, however unexpected, and every calamity, however great, if it does not fall in and follow, it will at least respect it and acknowledge that there is something in it.
It may sound “a hard saying,” but practically there is no such thing as “ideal beauty”; and those who, like George Eliot, strive after it as the great good, pursue a phantom, a nothing, an emanation of their own imagination, and, like the poet in Shelley’s “Alastor,” waste their life in profitless longings, and when death comes—
“All
Is reft at once, when some surpassing Spirit,
Whose light adorned the world around it, leaves
Those who remain behind nor sobs nor groans,
The passionate tumult of a clinging hope,
But pale despair and cold tranquillity.”
Persons of an undefined faith, women particularly, are very much attached to this ideal beauty, and, not finding it in man, are apt to rebel against “prosaic conditions”; and those who regulate their actions by their thoughts find issue in absurdities, often in crime, more or less gross. It would be well for these theorists to remember that man after all has a considerable admixture of clay in his composition, which may explain many of those vulgar but necessary “prosaic conditions”; and until the human race comes to be fed on “vril,” the world must continue to count upon and accommodate itself to a vast amount of flesh-and-blood reality. And a beauty, far higher than any ideal beauty, is visible in the everlasting struggle between spirit and clay. There was no ideal in the death upon the cross, the consummation of Christian sacrifice. All was terribly real there, and flesh suffered as well as mind while a flutter of the spirit remained. Here lies something greater than any ideal—the spirit bracing the flesh, sustaining it when it faints, enabling it to bear all things, not blindly and as coming by fate from the hands of a blind destiny or careless power, but as trials sent from heaven to lead to heaven and prepare for heaven.
That is the fault with Middlemarch. It has all the “prosaic conditions” and nothing else. It wants nothing else; it positively revels in them. And when anything higher comes to it, it sets the higher down as “notions” in religion, or “quackery” in medicine, “or swallowing up” of the little traffic by the big in railroads.
Into these “prosaic conditions” and surroundings the author drops another character similar to that of Dorothea, as far as a man can be similar in nature to a woman, save that his religion consists in the passion for his profession, the ardent aspiration after the glory of achievement, aided by all natural gifts, and strengthened by what have been well called the “pagan virtues.” This is Lydgate, the young physician, a stranger to Middlemarch, who is possessed by the desire common to all young ambition of educating Middlemarch up to a lofty standard, and using it as a lever to move a slow world. Though perhaps as well fitted as man—considered merely as an intellectual animal endowed with Christian instincts, moved by a generous if somewhat impetuous nature, and void of the vices—could be for that purpose, the result in his case is the same as in that of Dorothea. Instead of lifting Middlemarch up to the level of his ideal, he finds himself dragged down to it; and, strangely and perhaps truthfully enough, he finds, in common with Dorothea, that the very being to whom he linked his life is the stumbling-block in the way of his achievement. Dorothea receives a fatal jar to her imaginings in the person of the husband she adored by anticipation. Lydgate finds his nature crushed and resisted at all points by the passive resistance of his wife. The woman is mercifully relieved from her incubus by death; the strong man gives way before his “so charming wife, mild in her temper, inflexible in her judgment, disposed to admonish her husband, and able to frustrate him by stratagem.”
“Lydgate’s hair never became white. He died when he was only fifty, leaving his wife and children provided for by a heavy insurance on his life. He had gained an excellent practice, ... having written a treatise on gout—a disease which has a good deal of wealth on its side. His skill was relied on by many paying patients, but he always regarded himself as a failure: he had not done what he once meant to do. As the years went on, he opposed his wife less and less, whence Rosamond concluded that he had learnt the value of her opinion. In brief, Lydgate was what is called a successful man. But he died prematurely of diphtheria. He once called his wife his basil-plant, and, when she asked for an explanation, said that basil was a plant which had flourished wonderfully on a murdered man’s brains.”
Such is the end of the naturally noble man who marries fair Rosamond, “the flower of Middlemarch.” This fair Rosamond, like her historical namesake, lives in a crooked labyrinth of devious ways, where she fetters her knight, her king, who would fain go forth to conquer kingdoms, and, if need be, take her with him. But her kingdom is bounded by her own narrow domain, and she carries him on from labyrinth to labyrinth, till he is lost and resigns himself to his fate.