Middlemarch

Eliot opens with a glance at Fielding — that great historian who had the luxury of spacious summer afternoons for his digressions. She is more pressed: she has human lots to unravel, and all the light she can command must be concentrated on this particular web. Lydgate is seven-and-twenty and not altogether common. His story begins during a school vacation: bored, he took down a dusty old Cyclopaedia from the highest shelf and opened it at random to the article on Anatomy. The passage on the valves of the heart gave him "his first vivid notion of finely adjusted mechanism in the human frame." Before he climbed down from the chair, the world was made new. From that hour Lydgate felt the growth of an intellectual passion. He studied in London, Edinburgh, and Paris, convinced that medicine was the finest profession in the world — the most complete interchange between science and art, the most direct alliance between intellectual conquest and social good. He planned to settle in a provincial town, resist the London intrigues and truckling, prescribe without dispensing drugs (a then-radical reform), and pursue his great private ambition: to build on the work of Bichat, who first showed that the organs of the body are woven from distinct primary tissues. Lydgate's question was the next one — what is the primitive tissue from which all the others arise? His plan was to do good small work for Middlemarch and great work for the world. But he had spots of commonness. In spite of his noble intentions, he had the ordinary prejudices of a well-bred man about furniture, women, and the desirability of people knowing (without his telling) that he was better born than other country surgeons. His conceit was "massive in its claims and benevolently contemptuous": he would do a great deal for noodles, being sorry for them. The cautionary tale: in Paris he had watched an actress named Laure perform the role of a woman who stabs her lover on stage. One night, in the middle of the play, she veritably stabbed her husband, who fell as death willed. Lydgate leaped onto the stage and lifted her in his arms. He pursued her to Avignon, found her performing again, and knelt to ask her to marry him. She said: "My foot really slipped." He said he knew — a fatal accident. She looked at him and said slowly: "I meant to do it." Pressed for reasons, she said: "He wearied me; he was too fond: he would live in Paris, and not in my country." Lydgate returned to his galvanism believing illusions were at an end. Henceforth he would take a strictly scientific view of woman. He did not notice that his "scientific view" was already being drawn toward Rosamond Vincy.