Middlemarch
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
Troubadour 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 cared 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 came 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 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 cases, would further his thought as an instrument
of larger inquiry. Was not this the typical pre-eminence 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 represent the cause of public morality. He intended to
begin in his own case 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