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.




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