Rosamond and Lydgate

MAY TOMLINSON

It is one of the mysteries of life that man's natural desires. and instincts should be antagonistic to that which most surely makes for moral and spiritual growth. If this life is meant for discipline, and if disaster and thwarting circumstance are a disciplinary force, then man should welcome adversity, and regard himself as fortunate in being the victim of distress. Yet so great is his desire for happiness, so little does he court misery, so confidently does he hope for success, so surely does he mean to shape his own deeds, that he cannot harbor the thought of frustration. However honorable his ambitions, however benevolent his purposes, he starts out on his career with no misgivings, with no anticipations of catastrophe, with no sense of any special need of correction. Then the trial of his strength begins. Struggle, anxiety, grief, disappointment, the relinquishment of hopes, and finally, it may be, the taking up of life on a lower stage of expectation, this is the disciplinary course through which he must pass; and whether the contest be a pathetic illustration of the thwarting power of circumstance or a pitiable example of the lack of strength, he feels himself aggrieved, defrauded of his rightful heritage.

It is this aspect of life that confronts us in the story of Tertius Lydgate; and the various scenes by which we are shown the progress of events in the married life of Rosamond and Lydgate, the strained conjugal relations and the changing mental conditions, remain indelibly stamped upon the memory, deepening the emotional life and strengthening forever the susceptibilities, so skillfully is the situation put before us.

Now, the tragedy of Lydgate's life consists, first, in his failure to do what he had meant to do and, second, in the fact of his having made an unfortunate matrimonial choice. Certainly he was not the first man to be mastered by a sudden outrush of tenderness; he was not the first man to be hurried into an unpremeditated avowal of love; he was not the first man to be captivated by personal charms. Being a physiologist, and therefore keenly observant of bodily aspects, he may have been

more susceptible than most men to physical loveliness. We know that Rosamond's beauty touched him even after he had discovered her impassibility and experienced the chill of her neutral aloofness; its spell was felt even after he had come to regard his marriage as an unmitigated calamity.

George Eliot would have us believe that Lydgate was the more easily led into this mistake-and into the imprudent expenditures which followed-because of certain spots of commonness in his make-up. I cannot see that he has any more of personal pride and unreflecting egoism (and these are the qualities, we are told, which constitute his commonness) than belongs to most men of energetic frame and large mental capacity. What young man preoccupied with professional duties knows anything of the cost of living, or has a mind bent on economy? No man knows by instinct the price of food and furniture. The conception of plain living as an elegance, and of a plain body as the home of sweet, satisfying virtues, does not necessarily go along with high thinking, nor does it often ripen except through hard experience and maturing judgment.

George Eliot does indeed admit that Lydgate was like ther men in his unwisdom as to everyday matters and unapplication of common sense to personal affairs. "Lydgate," she tells us, "was constantly visiting the homes of the poor and adjusting his prescriptions of diet to their small means; but, dear me ! has it not by this time ceased to be remarkable—is it not rather what we expect in men, that they should have numerous strands of experience lying side by side and never compare them with each other? Expenditure-like ugliness and errors-becomes a totally new thing when we attach our own personality to it, and measure it by that wide difference which is manifest (in our own sensations) between ourselves and others." "It must be remembered," she further says in extenuation of Lydgate's extravagance, "that he had never hitherto felt the check of importunate debt, and he walked by habit and not by self-criticism." When the check came, "its novelty made it the more irritating." "He was amazed, disgusted, that conditions so foreign to all his purposes, so hatefully disconnected with the objects he cared to occupy himself with, should have lain in ambush and clutched him when he was unaware."

Again Lydgate was like other men in his confident hope that marriage would bring calmness and freedom, and in his belief that he had found perfect womanhood. The story of growing discontent, of how he came to walk under a weight of grief, and to live in the presence of a petty, degrading care, sinking every day deeper into that swamp which "tempts men toward it with such a pretty covering of flowers and verdure," falling into that condition in which, in spite of himself, a man "is forced to think chiefly of release, though he had a scheme of the universe in his soul," the story of his gradual disillusionment concerning Rosamond and married life, of the final relinquishment of all higher effort, though the sense of a grand existence in thought and effective action still burned within him,-this is the story so compelling, so surpassingly great, in its power to move the sympathies.

A series of excerpts, familiar enough to those who know their Middlemarch must yet be quoted for the reason that they disclose with a touching pathos the process of Lydgate's disiusionment and deepening gloom.

the very first recorded interview between husband and wife, Rosamond reveals her snobbishness-and her shallowness as well. After a very pretty prelude Rosamond says, "Do you know, Tertius, I often wish you had not been a medical man?'

"Nay, Rosy, don't say that,' said Lydgate, drawing her closer to him, 'that is like saying you wish you had married another man.'

"Not at all; you are clever enough for anything: you might easily have been something else. And your cousins at Quallingham all think that you have sunk below them in your choice of a profession.'

""The cousins at Quallingham may go to the devil!' said Lydgate with scorn. 'It was like their impudence if they said anything of the sort to you.'

"Still,' said Rosamond, 'I do not think it is a nice profession, dear.' We know that she had much quiet perseverance in her opinion.

"It is the grandest profession in the world, Rosamond,' said Lydgate gravely. 'And to say that you love me without

loving the medical man in me, is the same sort of thing as to say that you like eating a peach but don't like its flavor. Don't say that again, dear, it pains me.'”

Here Rosamond's speech grieves but does not enlighten. When, however, in almost the very next scene, Rosamond begins to show an inclination to admonish her husband, Lydgate lets slip words which were like "a sad milestone marking how far he had travelled from his old dreamland, in which Rosamond appeared to be that perfect piece of womanhood who would reverence her husband's mind after the fashion of an accomplished mermaid, using her comb and looking-glass and singing her song for the relaxation of his adored wisdom alone. He had begun to distinguish between that imagined adoration and the attraction towards a man's talent because it gives him prestige, and is like an order in his button-hole or an Honorable before his name."

Again, after the horseback episode, Lydgate "secretly wondered over the terrible tenacity of this mild creature. There was gathering within him an amazed sense of his powerlessness over Rosamond. His superior knowledge and mental force, instead of being, as he had imagined, a shrine to consult on all occasions, was simply set aside on every practical question. He had regarded Rosamond's cleverness as precisely of the receptive kind which became a woman. He was now beginning to find out what that cleverness was—what was the shape into which it had run as into a close network aloof and independent. . . Lydgate was astonished to find in numerous trifling matters, as well as in this last serious case of the riding, that affection did not make her compliant."

Rosamond, having little comprehension of his worries and seeing him preoccupied with other subjects than herself, thought him "moody"; while "to Lydgate it seemed that he had been spending month after month in sacrificing more than half of his best intent and best power to his tenderness for Rosamond; bearing her little claims and interruptions without impatience, and, above all, bearing without betrayal of bitterness to look through less and less of interfering illusion at the blank unreflecting surface her mind presented to his ardor for the more impersonal ends of his profession and his scientific study, an

ardor which he had fancied that the ideal wife must somehow worship as sublime, though not in the least knowing why." "He was intensely miserable, this strong man of nine-and-twenty and of many gifts. He was not saying within himself that he had made a profound mistake; but the mistake was at work in him like a recognized chronic disease, mingling its uneasy importunities with every prospect and enfeebling every thought!" "Lydgate was bowing his head under the yoke like a creature who had talons, but who had reason too, which often reduces us to meekness." The first great disappointment had been borne: the tender devotedness and docile adoration of the ideal wife must be renounced, and life must be taken up on a lower stage of expectation, as it is by men who have lost their limbs. But the real wife had not only her claims, she had still a hold on his heart, and it was his intense desire that the hold should remain strong. In marriage, the certainty, 'She will never love me much,' is easier to bear than the fear, 'I shall love her no more.' Hence, after that outburst, his inward effort was entirely to excuse her, and to blame the hard circumstances which were partly his fault." "He saw even more keenly than Rosamond did the dreariness of taking her into the small house in Bride Street, where she would have scanty furniture around her and discontent within: a life of privation and life with Rosamond were two images which had become more and more irreconcilable ever since the threat of privation had disclosed itself." "Rosamond had the double purchase over him of insensibility to the point of justice in his reproach and of sensibility to the undeniable hardship now present in her married life. Although her duplicity in the affair of the house had exceeded what he knew, . . . she had no consciousness that her action could rightly be called false." "As for him, the need of accommodating himself to her nature, which was inflexible in proportion to its negations, held him as with pincers." "He wished to excuse everything in her if he could-but it was inevitable that in that excusing mood he should think of her as if she were an animal of another and feebler species. Nevertheless she had mastered him."

Yes, she had mastered him, having the power that this sort of feeble animal often possesses (more's the pity). It is sig