Middlemarch
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 all
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 have 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 an 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 baritone, 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 case 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