Chapter XXIII: Victor’s Death.—plots Against Louis (3)

Some weeks later, I was called to the residence of a well-known British officer, a leader of the Orangemen in Upper Canada, to attend a consultation with several older physicians upon the case of his daughter, who was lying in a very alarming state with a fever. Upon entering the apartment of the patient, I was again surprised to discover in this victim of disease the lovely mourner of that sad scene in the wilderness. She lay in a partial stupor, and, when slightly roused, would utter incoherent and mysterious expressions connected with the events of that night, and painful appeals, which were understood by none but myself, who alone had the key to their meaning.

If I had formerly been amazed to see the change a few days had accomplished, how much more was I now shocked at the ravages wrought by sorrow and disease! Could it be possible that the shrivelled and hollow mask before me represented the fair face that had been so lately blooming in beauty—shining with the joy of a glad and innocent heart?

The anguish of her haughty father was pitiful to see! Determined not to yield to the pressure of a grief which was crushing his proud spirit, his effort to maintain a cool and dignified demeanor unsustained by any aid, human or divine, was a spectacle to make angels weep. Alas! for the heart of poor humanity! In whatever petrifactions of paltry pride it may be encrusted, there are times when its warm emotions will burst the shell, and assert their own with volcanic power! When the attending physician announced the result of the consultation, in the unanimous opinion that no further medical aid could be of any avail, he stalked up and down the room for some time with rapid strides; then, pausing before me, and fixing his bloodshot eyes on my face, exclaimed violently, “It is _better so_! I tell you, it is _better_ even so, than that I should have seen her married to that Yankee Jacobin and Papist! At least, I have been spared that disgrace! But my daughter! Oh! she was my only one; peerless in mind, in person, and in goodness; and must she die? Ha! it is mockery to say so! It cannot be that such perfection was created only to be food for worms! As God is good, it may not, _shall not_, be!”

While he was uttering these frantic exclamations, a thought struck me like an inspiration. The image of old Honey Bee arose suddenly before my mind. I remembered that she had gained the reputation among the settlers of performing marvellous cures in cases of this kind by the use of such simples as her knowledge of all the productions of the fields and forests and their medicinal properties had enabled her to obtain and apply.

Therefore, when the haughty officer paused, I ventured to suggest to his ear and her mother’s only, that the Indian woman might possibly be able to make such applications as might at least alleviate the violence of the painful and alarming symptoms. He was at first highly indignant at the proposal of even bringing one of that hated race into his house, much less would he permit one to minister to his daughter. But when I respectfully urged that she be brought merely as a nurse, in which vocation many of her people were known to excel, and which I had known her to exercise with great skill in the course of my practice, failing not to mention her love and admiration for the sufferer, the entreaties of the sorrow-stricken, anxious mother were joined with mine, and prevailed to obtain his consent. I was requested to remain until she should arrive. Nothing was said of the matter to the other physicians, who soon took their leave.

When the old friend of the hapless maiden arrived, she consented to take charge of the case only upon condition that she should be left entirely alone with the patient, and be permitted to pursue her own course without interruption or interference. It was difficult to bring the imperious officer to these terms; but my confidence in the fidelity of the old squaw, and increasing assurance that the only hope of relief for the sufferer lay in the remedies she might use, combined with the prayers of her mother, won his reluctant consent, if I could be permitted to see his daughter daily, and report her condition. This I promised to do, and found no difficulty in obtaining the permission of the new practitioner to that effect.

Whether the presence of a sympathizing friend assisted the treatment pursued I do not know. There are often mysterious sympathies and influences whose potency baffles the wisdom of philosophers and the researches of science. Certain it is that, to my own astonishment, no less than to that of the gratified parents, there was a manifest improvement in the condition of their daughter from the hour her new nurse undertook the charge.

In a few weeks, the attendance of old Honey Bee was no longer necessary. The joy and gratitude of the father knew no bounds. He would gladly have forced a large reward upon her for services which had proved so successful, but she rejected it, saying: “The gifts that the Great Spirit has guided the Honey Bee to gather are not the price of silver and gold. Freely he gives them; as freely do his red children dispense them. They would scorn to barter the lore he imparts for gold. Enough that the daughter of the white chief lives. Let him see that he quench not the light of her young life again in his home!”

“What does she mean?” he muttered, as she departed. “Does she know? But no, she cannot; it must be some surmise gathered from expressions of my daughter in her delirium.”

In accordance with my promise, I had called daily during the attendance of the Indian woman, who found opportunity, from time to time, to explain to me the circumstances attending the rescue of the Lightfoot.

The Indians, by whom he was greatly beloved, supposed, when they saw his vessel go down, that he was lost, as they knew him to have been badly wounded. A solitary Indian from another detachment was a witness of the catastrophe while he was guiding his canoe in a direction opposite to that of the encampment, and on the other side of the scene of action. He dashed at once with his frail bark into the midst of the affray, to render assistance, if possible, to any who might have escaped from the ill-fated vessel. While he was watching, to his great joy he saw the young officer rise to the surface, and was able to seize and draw him into the canoe. As he was passing to the shore, he was noticed by the father of the officer’s betrothed, and the nature of his prize discovered. A volley of musketry was immediately directed upon the canoe, and the Indian received a mortal wound. He was so near the shore that he was rescued by his party, but died soon after landing.

I told her that I had heard the remainder of the story from the missionary at the wigwam.

She then informed me that, after she came to take charge of the maiden, as soon as her patient became sufficiently conscious to realize her critical condition, she had implored so piteously that the priest might be sent for that it was impossible to refuse. When he came—privately, of course, for it was too well known that her father would never consent to such a visit—she entreated permission to profess the Catholic faith without delay. After some hesitation, the priest consented when he found her well instructed in its great and important truths, heard her confession, her solemn profession of faith, and administered conditional baptism; following the rite by the consoling and transcendent gift which is at once the life and nourishment of the Catholic soul and the sun of the Catholic firmament.

The squaw dreaded the violence of her father when he should discover what had transpired, and enjoined it upon me to shield the victim, if possible, from the storm of his wrath. Alas! she little dreamed how powerless I should prove in such a conflict!

Before the strength of the invalid was established, that discovery was made. I had known much of the unreasoning bigotry and black animosity which was cherished by the Orange faction against Catholics; but I was still wholly unprepared for his savage outbreak. He heaped curses upon his daughter’s head, and poured forth the most bitter and blasphemous lamentations that she had been permitted to live only to bring such hopeless disgrace upon his gray hairs.

Despite the mother’s tears and prayers, he ordered her from the house, and forbade her ever to return or to call him father again. Once more did old Honey Bee come to the rescue of her _protégée_. Her affectionate fears had made her vigilant, and, when the maiden was driven from her father’s house, she was received and conducted to a wigwam which had been carefully prepared for her reception. Here she was served with the most tender assiduity until able to be removed to Montreal, whither her kind nurse attended her, and she entered at once upon her novitiate in a convent there.

The day after her departure, I also took my leave of that part of the country, and, proceeding to a distant city, entered the ecclesiastical state. In due time, I was ordained to the new office of ministering to spiritual instead of physical ills, my vocation to which was clearly made known to me by that death-bed in the wilderness.

And now that I have related to you how the Protestant doctor became a Catholic priest, I must ask, in my turn, how it happened that you and your family became Catholics.

“The story is soon told,” we replied. “Very probably our attention might never have been called to the subject but for a great affliction which was laid upon us in the sufferings of our only and tenderly cherished daughter. She was blest with rosy health until her tenth year, and a merrier little sprite the sun never shone upon.

“Suddenly disease in its most painful and hopeless form fastened itself upon her, and, while sinking under its oppressive weight, she felt more and more deeply day by day, with a thoughtfulness rapidly matured by suffering, the necessity for such aid and support as Protestantism failed to furnish. It was, humanly speaking, by a mere accident that she discovered where it might be found.

“During an interval between the paroxysms of the disease, and a little more than a year after the first attack, a missionary priest visited our place, and her Catholic nurse obtained our permission to take her to the house of a neighbor where Mass was to be celebrated.

“She was deeply impressed with what she saw, and the fervent address of that devoted and saintly priest melted her young heart. She obtained from him a catechism and some books of devotion. From that time her conviction grew and strengthened that here was the healing balm her wounded spirit so much needed. After long persuasion and many entreaties, we gave our reluctant consent that she might avail herself of its benefits by making profession of the Catholic faith. To the sustaining power of its holy influences we owe it that her life, from which every earthly hope had been stricken, was made thenceforth so happy and cheerful as to shed perpetual sunshine over her home and its neighborhood.

“By degrees she drew us, at first unwillingly, and at length irresistibly, to the consideration of Catholic verities. Through the grace of God operating upon these considerations, our whole family, old and young, were soon united within the peaceful enclosure of the ‘household of faith.’

“When the work of our dear little missionary was thus happily accomplished, she was removed from the home for which she had been the means of procuring such priceless blessings to that other and better home, the joys of which may not even be imagined here. With grateful hearts we have proved and realized that for those whom God sorely afflicts his bountiful hand also provides great and abundant consolations.”

THE STORIES OF TWO WORLDS:

MIDDLEMARCH AND FLEURANGE.

BETWEEN the world of _Middlemarch_ and the world of _Fleurange_ there yawns as wide a moral gulf as that which nature has set between the continents. The one is a world with God, the other without. It is not that George Eliot’s story partakes of the characteristics which usually attach to female novelists, with their vague interpretations of the Sixth and Ninth Commandments; nor, on the other hand, that _Fleurange_ is in any sense a goody-goody book. But the authors occupying essentially different stand-points, all things naturally wear a different aspect; their characters are subject to a different order; all life has a different meaning; so that, though the subject of each is humanity, its crosses and loads of sorrow and pain, rather than its laughter and gladness; though the men and women breathe the same air, are warmed by the same sun their, faces wet with human tears, their hearts sore with human sorrows; nevertheless, through either book runs an abiding tone felt rather than heard, like an unseen odor pervading the atmosphere, which affects the reader differently throughout. The characters in the one believe in, pray to, love, obey, or rebel against a definite, personal God; the presiding spirit in the other veils his face, and it is not for man to say who he is. The author only sees men and women gathered together in this world—how, they know not; why, it is difficult to conceive—and all we know for certain is that here they are, coming in contact one with the other, increasing, multiplying, and dropping out after each one has added his necessary mite to the immensity of the universe.

There are books and writings which seem rather the production of an age than of any particular author; which seem to take up and gather into one voice the long inarticulate breathing of a portion of humanity, dumb hitherto for want of an oracle. Such were the writings previous to the first French Revolution; such are the songs of Ireland; such, after a certain fashion, is _Middlemarch_. It is measuring daily life by the favorite doctrines of the day, whose holders profess to see things as they are, and to judge of them purely and solely by what they see, explaining them as best they may. To remind such people that often the visible is the appearance only, the invisible the reality, is to speak to them a language they will not understand.

_Middlemarch_ is a story of English provincial life as English provincial life obtained fifty years ago; at the dawn, that is, practically speaking, of this wonderful XIXth century; before California and Australia had discovered their golden secret, when steam was still in its infancy, electric telegraphs unknown, and the sciences just beginning to take a bolder flight. In England, O’Connell was thundering for Catholic emancipation, and the nation clamoring for that vague thing in the mouth of the masses—reform.

Just as matters were in this chrysalis state, whilst the masses were still undisturbed by the wonders of the century, or, if the phrase is better, not educated up to them, George Eliot settles down in that dullest of places, an English provincial district, to give us

“The story of its life from year to year.”

The story covers very extensive ground; all Middlemarch, in fact, with its parishes and towns, its churches and taverns, its clergy and magistrates, its physicians and shopkeepers, its gentry and its yokels, its good men and its rascals, its maidens young and old, its loves and its hates, its hopes and its fears, its marriages and deaths, its thoughts, words, and deeds, from high to low—such is the broad scope of the book, and the author has gathered all in in a manner to make the reader wonder. Nothing has escaped her eye. One seems to have been living in Middlemarch all his life, and every character comes and goes with the face of an old acquaintance. It is not the author’s fault if the district be a narrow one—narrow, that is, in ideas, in knowledge, in faith, in all that ennobles man. It is not her fault if its great ideas take the shape of “keys to all mythologies”; if its religion is a poor affair at the best; if its leading men are religious hypocrites like Mr. Bulstrode, or philanthropic asses like Mr. Brooke, who “goes in” for everything, and talks the broadest and vaguest philanthropy whilst he pinches his tenants. It is not the author’s fault if generosity find no place in Middlemarch; if honesty is misunderstood or at a discount; if the local physicians throw discredit upon Lydgate with his youth, his burning desire to achieve, his cleverness, and his genuine enthusiasm; if they call his ideas quackery, because they threaten their pockets, as the yokels in turn look upon the railway as destruction, and hold that steam takes the handle from the plough and the pitchfork; as Middlemarch receives Dorothea Brooke’s generous aspirations after a higher life than that which, in response to the question of an ardent nature, “What can I do?” says, “Whatever you please, my dear”—as “notions” which are wrong in themselves, because undreamed of in Middlemarch philosophy, which, in Miss Brooke are odd, and which, if carried a little farther, would find their fitting sphere of action in the lunatic asylum.

It is not the author’s fault if all this be so; if there be nothing in Middlemarch beyond the common good, and very little even of that, whilst all the rest is mean, sordid, crooked, narrow, and outspokenly wicked. Such is Middlemarch, and such is it given to us. The only question is, How far does Middlemarch extend? Is it restricted to the English county, or is it a miniature photograph of the world as seen by George Eliot?

In the keynote to the whole book, the prelude, the author cries out bitterly that in this world and in these days there is no place for a S. Teresa. In this assertion, in this wail rather, the author does not limit her district to Middlemarch. It is a doctrine meant to apply to the broad world. Throughout the book the same thing is to be observed. Though with wonderful consistency and truth of local coloring, and continual recurrence of petty local questions and local ideas, the author keeps the reader in Middlemarch from beginning to end, nevertheless, whether with or without intention, from time to time she strikes out with broader aim, and flings her sarcasm, or her observation, or her moral, such as it may be, in the face of humanity.

Therefore, though it would be unfair to infer that George Eliot’s views of the world, its possibilities, its hopes, its all that makes it what it is, are confined to the cramped, narrow, provincial district chosen as the subject of her story; to allege that she believes in nothing nobler _now_ in humanity than what Middlemarch affords; yet so wide is the district embraced, so various the subjects entered into, not merely touched upon—religion, politics, the bettering of the poor, marriage, preparation for the married state, and the effect of such preparation on married life, the thousand conflicts that meet, and jostle, and combine to make everyday life what it is—it is not unfair to say that the author, in drawing within this somewhat narrow circle the main elements which compose humanity, has taken Middlemarch up as a scientist would take a basin of water from the sea to examine it—not for the sake of that sample only, but with a view to the whole.

The chief interest of the story, if story it can be called, lies in this: From the outstart, the author warns you that a S. Teresa has no place in the world now; and, to prove that her warning is correct, she takes up a character, Dorothea Brooke, endows her with the aspirations after a great life, fits her naturally, as far as she can, with every attribute, physical and moral, which she considers a S. Teresa ought to possess; with religious feelings, with the continual desire to do good, with charity, with purity, with the spirit of self-sacrifice, with simplicity, and truth, and utter unconsciousness of self, with wealth enough even, as the author says of Mr. Casaubon, “to lend a lustre to her piety,” and sets her down in the narrow Middlemarch set, where everything runs in a groove, and life is measured by all the pettinesses, to see what will become of her.

The result may as well be told at once. S. Teresa proves a miserable failure in Middlemarch. Instead of marrying, as the world—that is to say, Mrs. Cadwallader—had ordained she should do, the handsome, florid, conventional English baronet, Sir James Chettam, a sort of aristocratic “Mr. Toots,” who is so amiable and admires her so much that he brings her triumphs of nature in the shape of marvellous Maltese puppies as presents, and says “exactly” to all her observations, even when she desires him to say the contrary—out of a spirit of religion, self-sacrifice, and veneration, and honestly because she admires the man, or rather the being dressed out to suit by her own imagination, she marries Mr. Casaubon, with his sallow complexion, his moles, his blinking eyes, and his age, which is more than double her own. Unsympathetic to the loving nature of the girl as a wooden doll whose complexion has suffered and whose form is battered by age, but which notwithstanding the girl invests with all the qualities and beauty of a Prince Charming—a deception that time alone and that ugly thing, common sense, can remove—S. Teresa speedily discovers that her “divine Hooker,” as she fondly imagined him, is after all only “a poor creature,” and she is probably saved from the divorce court only by the timely death of the “divine Hooker.” She discovered that she had married the wrong man—exactly what Middlemarch told her; and there lies the provoking part of the story. Middlemarch was right in its degree, and the woman, whose ideas soared so high above it, was all the worse off for not taking its advice at the outstart. S. Teresa repents of her sin, and characteristically atones for it by marrying the right man—at least, the man she loves and who loves her—and is dismissed in the following remarks, which close the book:

“Certainly those determining acts of her life were not ideally beautiful. They were the mixed result of young and noble impulse struggling under prosaic conditions. Among the many remarks passed on her mistakes, it was never said in the neighborhood of Middlemarch that such mistakes could not have happened if the society into which she was born had not smiled on propositions of marriage from a sickly man to a girl less than half his own age, on modes of education which make a woman’s knowledge another name for motley ignorance, on rules of conduct which are in flat contradiction with its own loudly asserted beliefs. While this is the social air in which mortals begin to breathe, there will be collisions such as those in Dorothea’s life, where great feelings will take the aspect of error, and great faith the aspect of illusion; for there is no creature whose inward being is so strong that it is not greatly determined by what lies outside it. A new Teresa will hardly have the opportunity of reforming a conventual life any more than a new Antigone will spend her heroic piety in daring all for the sake of a brother’s burial; the medium in which their ardent deeds took shape is for ever gone. But we insignificant people, with our daily words and acts, are preparing the lives of many Dorotheas, some of which may present a far sadder sacrifice than that of Dorothea whose story we know.

“Her finely touched spirit had still its fine issues, though they were not widely visible. Her full nature, like that river of which Alexander broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive; for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”

George Eliot writes too earnestly to laugh at. Besides, she is not a Catholic—very far from it; and therefore her views of what a S. Teresa is or ought to be must be radically different from those of the church from which S. Teresa sprang, in which she lived, labored, became _Saint_ Teresa, and died. Were a Catholic to have written certain portions of the extract quoted, he would only provoke laughter; but with this author, the case is different.

It never seems to have occurred to her that S. Teresas are not self-made; as little as the prophets were self-made prophets, or the apostles self-made apostles. Neither were they made by the society which surrounded them. The supernatural state of sanctity in its fulness does not spring from humanity merely; else might we have had eras of sanctity as there have been other eras, and there might be truth in George Eliot’s words that there will be no place for a “new Teresa.” Saints are the very opposite to that growing class so glibly dubbed “providential men,” who seem to come from that vast but rather undefined region which goes by the name of “manifest destiny.” The individuals forming that happy class are set willy-nilly by “Providence” in this world to accomplish some destiny—a theory laughed at long ago by one of Mr. Disraeli’s worldly-wise characters in the words, “We make our fortunes, and we call them fate.” What the saints do they do very consciously. Sanctity consists in not being merely blameless in life, but in devoting life to God, and turning every thought, word, and action to him for his sake. The feeling that produces this state of life may be influenced at the beginning by earthly surroundings, may be shaped by good example or wise teachings, but is essentially independent of them. Sanctity comes from a direct call, as direct as the call of the apostles. It knows neither time nor place, and is therefore as possible in the XIXth as in the XVIth or the Ist century. But it is unknown outside of the church, because the head of the church, “Christ Jesus our Lord,” alone has the power to call his children to the sanctified state in this life. And if it be asked, Why, then, does he not call all to be saints here? it is as though one asked, Why did he not call all men to be apostles directly?

George Eliot’s difficulty springs from not knowing precisely what constitutes a saint.

If she only reads the life of S. Teresa, she will find that the saint of her admiration had to encounter a Middlemarch circle even in Catholic Spain. She will find her “young and noble impulse struggling under prosaic conditions”; that she had to stand the brunt of being misunderstood and misrepresented; her schemes of reform, of good works, her noble aspirations and ardent self-sacrifice, set down as “notions.” In fact, the opposition which meets her heroine at every step in her desire to do good and to be perfect, not only to herself but to others, is puny compared with that which S. Teresa had to sustain all through her life.

As a matter of fact, S. Teresa was much more of the ordinary woman than George Eliot, with a novelist’s love, makes her heroine. In her youth, she was subject to all the ordinary fancies of “the sex,” and has left us the record of her vanities, which were neither more nor less than those of ten thousand very excellent ladies living at this moment, who are no more S. Teresas than they are Aspasias; but good Christian women, girls with a happy future before them, or smiling mothers of families. It was not her surroundings which made Teresa a saint: it was her clear conception of duty, which no “prosaic conditions” could dim, and her profound and very definite faith, not in that obscure creation which George Eliot calls “the perfect Right,” but in Jesus Christ, her God.

It was perfectly natural that George Eliot’s Teresa should fail; but the mistake of the author consists in making the failure come from without rather than from within—a mistake easily understood when it is borne in mind that the author has no firm faith, possibly none at all, in Christianity. Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, all failed to make the world better, not because they may not have wished it, but because they had not the power. They were themselves uncertain of their schemes. Their highest flights, like those of the best of modern philosophers who possess no faith, never pass beyond intellectual excellence devoid of soul. They may daze the intellect, but they do not touch the soul; and the life of a man is never regulated by pure intellect. So they fail, whilst the ignorant fishermen, who lose their personality in God, move and convert the world.

In taking issue on these fundamental points with the author of _Middlemarch_, many of the subjects touched upon would require elaborate elucidation when read by those who are not of the Catholic faith. But space does not allow of this, and, therefore, it is to be understood that this article is supposed only to meet the eyes of persons fully acquainted at least with the Catholic manner of looking at things.

Dorothea Brooke fails in becoming a S. Teresa, as the author seems to consider she should have become, not because she has lighted on evil days and on a less congenial set than S. Teresa did, but because, in Catholic phrase, she had no _vocation_.

To find out what is meant by a vocation, let us anticipate, and turn a moment to _Fleurange_ at that point in the heroine’s history where, having “tasted beforehand the bitter pleasures of sacrifice,” she retires heart-broken to the convent where she spent her youth, to find the rest and peace which seemed banished from the world after the voluntary sacrifice she had made of her affections.

“Mother Maddalena stood with her arms folded, and listened without interrupting her. Standing thus motionless in this place, at this evening hour, the noble outlines of her countenance and the long folds of her robe clearly defined against the blue mountains in the distance and the violet heavens above, she might easily have been mistaken for one of the visions of that country which have been depicted for us and all generations. The illusion would not have been dispelled by the aspect of her who, seated on the low wall of the terrace, was talking with her eyes raised, and with an expression and attitude perfectly adapted to one of those young saints often represented by the inspired artist before the divine and majestic form of the Mother of God.

“‘Well, my dear mother, what do you say?’ asked Fleurange, after waiting a long time, and seeing the Madre looking at her and gently shaking her head without any other reply.

“‘Before answering you,’ replied she at last, ‘let me ask this question: Do you think it allowable to consecrate one’s self to God in the religious life without a vocation?’

“‘Assuredly not.’

“‘And do you know what a vocation is?’ said she very slowly.

“Fleurange hesitated. ‘I thought I knew, but you ask in such a way as to make me feel now I do not.’

“‘I am going to tell you: a vocation,’ said the Madre, as her eyes lit up with an expression Fleurange had never seen before—’a vocation to the religious life is to love God more than we love any creature in the world, however dear; it is to be unable to give anything or any person on earth a love comparable to that; to feel the tendency of all our faculties incline us towards him alone; finally,’ pursued she, while her eyes seemed looking beyond the visible heavens on which they were fastened, ‘it is the full persuasion, even in this life, that he is _all_, our all, in the past, the present, and the future; in this world and in another, for ever, and to the exclusion of everything besides.’”

The carrying out of this feeling made Teresa a saint. It is doubtful whether such thoughts ever entered into George Eliot’s conception of the character she is continually holding up before her readers as impossible in these days. Certainly Dorothea Brooke, with all her natural goodness, never conceived such a life as that possible. The author may be right in attributing her defects to her Calvinistic education, but that does not warrant the inference that anything higher than a life which merely aims at an uncertain good, capable of influencing those coming within its circle in a certain way, is impossible in these days. When the author speaks of “great faith taking the aspect of illusion,” before conceding, one would like to see the “great faith.” Dorothea Brooke never knew what real faith was; from beginning to end, all is uncertainty with her. From girlhood up she lives in an atmosphere of self-delusion and imagination which can find no other possible vent than aimless aspirations after imaginary perfection, which must come into collision with the rough, practical world, and must finally go to the wall. But when the world sees a man or a woman acting steadily up to a practical belief which guides them in all their actions, and meets every contingency, however unexpected, and every calamity, however great, if it does not fall in and follow, it will at least respect it and acknowledge that there is something in it.

It may sound “a hard saying,” but practically there is no such thing as “ideal beauty”; and those who, like George Eliot, strive after it as the great good, pursue a phantom, a nothing, an emanation of their own imagination, and, like the poet in Shelley’s “Alastor,” waste their life in profitless longings, and when death comes—

“All
Is reft at once, when some surpassing Spirit,
Whose light adorned the world around it, leaves
Those who remain behind nor sobs nor groans,
The passionate tumult of a clinging hope,
But pale despair and cold tranquillity.”

Persons of an undefined faith, women particularly, are very much attached to this ideal beauty, and, not finding it in man, are apt to rebel against “prosaic conditions”; and those who regulate their actions by their thoughts find issue in absurdities, often in crime, more or less gross. It would be well for these theorists to remember that man after all has a considerable admixture of clay in his composition, which may explain many of those vulgar but necessary “prosaic conditions”; and until the human race comes to be fed on “vril,” the world must continue to count upon and accommodate itself to a vast amount of flesh-and-blood reality. And a beauty, far higher than any ideal beauty, is visible in the everlasting struggle between spirit and clay. There was no ideal in the death upon the cross, the consummation of Christian sacrifice. All was terribly real there, and flesh suffered as well as mind while a flutter of the spirit remained. Here lies something greater than any ideal—the spirit bracing the flesh, sustaining it when it faints, enabling it to bear all things, not blindly and as coming by fate from the hands of a blind destiny or careless power, but as trials sent from heaven to lead to heaven and prepare for heaven.

That is the fault with Middlemarch. It has all the “prosaic conditions” and nothing else. It wants nothing else; it positively revels in them. And when anything higher comes to it, it sets the higher down as “notions” in religion, or “quackery” in medicine, “or swallowing up” of the little traffic by the big in railroads.

Into these “prosaic conditions” and surroundings the author drops another character similar to that of Dorothea, as far as a man can be similar in nature to a woman, save that his religion consists in the passion for his profession, the ardent aspiration after the glory of achievement, aided by all natural gifts, and strengthened by what have been well called the “pagan virtues.” This is Lydgate, the young physician, a stranger to Middlemarch, who is possessed by the desire common to all young ambition of educating Middlemarch up to a lofty standard, and using it as a lever to move a slow world. Though perhaps as well fitted as man—considered merely as an intellectual animal endowed with Christian instincts, moved by a generous if somewhat impetuous nature, and void of the vices—could be for that purpose, the result in his case is the same as in that of Dorothea. Instead of lifting Middlemarch up to the level of his ideal, he finds himself dragged down to it; and, strangely and perhaps truthfully enough, he finds, in common with Dorothea, that the very being to whom he linked his life is the stumbling-block in the way of his achievement. Dorothea receives a fatal jar to her imaginings in the person of the husband she adored by anticipation. Lydgate finds his nature crushed and resisted at all points by the passive resistance of his wife. The woman is mercifully relieved from her incubus by death; the strong man gives way before his “so charming wife, mild in her temper, inflexible in her judgment, disposed to admonish her husband, and able to frustrate him by stratagem.”

“Lydgate’s hair never became white. He died when he was only fifty, leaving his wife and children provided for by a heavy insurance on his life. He had gained an excellent practice, ... having written a treatise on gout—a disease which has a good deal of wealth on its side. His skill was relied on by many paying patients, but he always regarded himself as a failure: he had not done what he once meant to do. As the years went on, he opposed his wife less and less, whence Rosamond concluded that he had learnt the value of her opinion. In brief, Lydgate was what is called a successful man. But he died prematurely of diphtheria. He once called his wife his basil-plant, and, when she asked for an explanation, said that _basil was a plant which had flourished wonderfully on a murdered man’s brains_.”

Such is the end of the naturally noble man who marries fair Rosamond, “the flower of Middlemarch.” This fair Rosamond, like her historical namesake, lives in a crooked labyrinth of devious ways, where she fetters her knight, her king, who would fain go forth to conquer kingdoms, and, if need be, take her with him. But her kingdom is bounded by her own narrow domain, and she carries him on from labyrinth to labyrinth, till he is lost and resigns himself to his fate.

When the lady who is pleased to assume the name of George Eliot first startled the English reading world, there was great doubt as to the sex of the new author. Certainly all such doubt, if any still existed, would be set at rest for ever by the portrait of Rosamond Vincy. No man could ever have executed that. No man could ever have gone down into the very fibres of a woman’s nature, and drawn them all out one by one, and laid them bare before us, to show what constitutes “that best marble of which goddesses are made.” If Dorothea, with the strong touch of Calvinism leading her noble nature astray, prove a failure, what shall be said of “the flower of Mrs. Lemon’s school, the chief school in the county, where the teaching included all that was demanded in the accomplished female—even to extras, such as the getting in and out of the carriage”?

Rosamond Vincy is, perhaps, the most finished portrait ever presented of the intelligent animal of the female sex; clever enough to despise Middlemarch, not because it is low, and mean, and sordid, but because it is too narrow and unworthy to hold so fair and accomplished a specimen of humanity as Rosamond Vincy. All young Middlemarch breaks its heart about her. She refuses it quietly and persistently, wins Lydgate in spite of himself, not because he is Lydgate, the generous, ardent, high-souled young man, but because he brings with him the atmosphere of an outer world, with a hint of great relations, a distinguished person, and an unconscious air of superiority which Middlemarch cannot offer. The result of the wedding of two such natures may be imagined. George Eliot’s version of it is horribly real and miserably natural; and perhaps the most powerful part of the book is the struggle going on between the generous nature of the man and the demon of self incarnate in the perfect form and the narrow but acute intellect of the woman, who is so supremely selfish that she is absolutely unconscious of her selfishness, and therefore incurable. “Lydgate,” after vainly endeavoring to break down this barrier which lay between them, invisible to the eyes of her who raised it, “had accepted his narrowed lot with sad resignation. He had chosen this fragile creature, and had taken the burden of her life upon his arms. He must walk as he could, carrying that burden pitifully.”

And she, his “bird-of-paradise,” only once called his “basil-plant,” when the man whose life had been lost on her died, “married an elderly and wealthy physician, who took kindly to her four children. She made a very pretty show with her daughters, driving out in her carriage, and often spoke of her happiness as ‘a reward’—she did not say for what, but probably she meant that it was a reward for her patience with Tertius, whose temper never became faultless, and to the last occasionally let slip a bitter speech which was more memorable than the signs he made of his repentance. Rosamond had a placid but strong answer to such speeches: Why, then, had he chosen her? It was a pity he had not had Mrs. Ladislaw—Dorothea—whom he was always praising and placing above her.”

With regret the examination into this wonderful book, of which three of the salient characters only have been touched upon, must now close. The story abounds in other characters, each perfect in its way, as far as drawing and execution go. It forms quite a study in parsons as in physicians; and those who quarrel with the author of _My Clerical Friends_ must feel sore aggrieved at the clerical friends of George Eliot. There is not a _priestly_ character among them; not a single devoted man whose heart is given wholly to God, and whose mind is bent solely on doing God’s work for God’s sake. The Middlemarch parsons are a narrow set of men of undefined belief and cramped charity; their belief being measured by their salary, and their charity beginning and often ending at home with their wives and families. The only agreeable characters among them as men are Mr. Cadwallader and Mr. Farebrother. The first of these is a “good, easy man,” whose Gospel is as elastic as his fishing-rod, of whom the author says, “His conscience was large and easy like the rest of him; it did only what it could without any trouble,” and whom his wife characteristically hits off in the sentence that, “as long as the fish rise to his bait, everybody is what he ought to be”; whilst she complains: “He will even speak well of the bishop, though I tell him it is unnatural in a beneficed clergyman. What can one do with a husband who attends so little to the decencies?” The other, Mr. Farebrother, is the best preacher in Middlemarch, and really a man of a noble nature; yet his poverty leads him to play whist for money and even an occasional game of billiards at the Green Dragon. He leads us to infer that he knows he has assumed the wrong profession, but that it is too late to get rid of it.

The only man who really possesses anything in the semblance of religion is Mr. Bulstrode, the Methodist banker, of whom wicked old Featherstone, whose death is so powerfully told, says:

“What’s he? He’s got no land hereabout that ever I heard tell of. A speckilating fellow! He may come down any day, when the devil leaves off backing him. And that’s what his religion means: he wants God A’mighty to come in. That’s nonsense! There’s one thing I made out pretty clear when I used to go to church, and it’s this: God A’mighty sticks to the land. He promises land, and he gives land, and he makes chaps rich with corn and cattle.” That sounds very like the religion of Tennyson’s Northern Farmer of the new style. As a matter of fact, old Featherstone turns out to be right. Bulstrode is a hypocrite. His life and his fortune have been built upon hypocrisy. He is rich on money that does not belong to him and by wealth ill-gotten; he strives to silence his conscience by a life of external mortification and by works set on foot for the improvement of the poor and carried out in his own way. Yet rather than lose his character for respectability and goodness, he murders an old associate; that is, he consciously does what the physician warned him might cause death.

Mrs. Cadwallader, spite of her wit and her mind, “active as phosphorus, biting everything that came near into the form that suited it,” must be dismissed in her own words, though she is the life of Middlemarch, as one who “set a bad example—married a poor clergyman, and made herself a pitiable object among the De Bracys—obliged to get her coals by stratagem, and pray to heaven for her salad-oil”; as must also Ladislaw, whom Mr. Brooke, who takes him up and transfers him to the _Pioneer_, characterizes as “a kind of Shelley, you know,” whom he (Mr. Brooke) may be able to put on the right tack; who has “a way of putting things,” which is just the sort of thing Mr. Brooke wants—“not ideas, you know, but a way of putting them.” Lydgate characterizes him best as “a likable fellow, but bric-a-brac.” He is just the material out of which Charles Lever constructed “Joe Atlee,” that prince of Bohemians.

It is difficult also to pass unnoticed by the Vincy and the Garth families; thriftless Fred. Vincy, who is only saved from taking to that last resort of an ignoble mind—“the cloth”—by honest Caleb Garth and his merry, true-hearted daughter Mary, who is, perhaps, after all the best and jolliest girl in the book, and whose plain, womanly wit and common sense, plain and undisguised as her open face, is an excellent foil to the pretty animalism of Rosamond Vincy and the vague religiousness of Dorothea. What could be better than this by way of preparation for old Featherstone’s decease?—

“‘Oh! my dear, you must do things handsomely where there’s last illness and a property. God knows, _I_ don’t grudge them [the relatives on the watch] every ham in the house—_only save the best for the funeral_. Have some stuffed veal always, and a fine cheese in cut. You must expect to keep open house in these last illnesses,’ said liberal Mrs. Vincy.” Or than this picture of one of George Eliot’s favorite characters?—

“Caleb Garth often shook his head in meditation on the value, the indispensable might, of that myriad-headed, myriad-handed labor by which the social body is fed, clothed, and housed. It had laid hold of his imagination in boyhood. The echoes of the great hammer where roof or keel were a-making, the signal-shouts of the workmen, the roar of the furnace, the thunder and plash of the engine, were a sublime music to him; the felling and lading of timber, and the huge trunk vibrating star-like in the distance along the highway, the crane at work on the wharf, the piled-up produce in warehouses, the precision and variety of muscular effort wherever exact work had to be turned out—all these sights of his youth had acted on him as poetry without the aid of poets, had made a philosophy for him without the aid of philosophers, a religion without the aid of theology. His early ambition had been to have as effective a share as possible in this sublime labor, which was peculiarly dignified by him with the name of ‘business.’”

After all, notwithstanding its wit and power, and fund of worldly wisdom, one turns almost with a sense of relief from this disheartening Middlemarch world to the world as seen in _Fleurange_. Considered merely as a story, for unity of plot and rapidity of action, _Fleurange_ is, to our thinking, far more interesting than _Middlemarch_. A young girl who has been educated in an Italian convent finds herself soon after leaving it thrown almost entirely upon the world by the death of her father, an artist, to fight the battle of life single-handed. “Young, beautiful, poor, and alone in Paris, what will become of her?” With this question the book opens, and, indeed, the whole story is plainly evolved from this idea. Instead of wasting her efforts on an impossible S. Teresa, Mme. Craven takes up the practical case of a young and religious girl, whose training and education, whatever they may have amounted to in the point of accomplishments, were built upon religion, not a vague unreality, but a religion which in the plainest words taught her to kneel down and pray, not to “the perfect Right,” as did Dorothea, but to God, to Jesus Christ—a being, it may here be mentioned, who is carefully excluded from _Middlemarch_. The reader need not infer that this inner life of the heroine is insisted upon severely, and that he always finds Fleurange upon her knees. Nothing of the sort. You only feel unconsciously, by little touches here and there, by the tone of the whole story, that the girl lives up to the practical accomplishment of what she was taught in the convent by Madre Maddalena; that she carries her religion out with her into the world as her only guide amidst its manifold dangers; that she has not flung it aside with her leading-strings; and that it is this and this alone which sustains her in the midst of terrible suffering, and saves her from sinking under the pressure of trial.

Fleurange goes first to her uncle’s family in Germany. Their loss of fortune drives her out again from them into the service of a Russian princess, where she is surrounded and flattered by all that the world considers witty, brave, brilliant, and captivating. Her singular beauty and innate nobility enable her to grace the lofty station to which the Princess Catherine assigns her. Here, in Florence, in the very household of his mother, she encounters for the second time Count George de Walden, a handsome and highly accomplished young gentleman, the adoration of his mother and possibly of himself, who is just loitering around Europe, “seeing life.” He met Fleurange before in her father’s studio as she sat for a picture of “Cordelia.” Of course, he fell in love with her, as such young gentlemen will do whose time is heavy on their hands. Father and daughter disappeared. He retained the picture, but what he wanted was the original; and here, after feeding on the memory of his unknown love for a year or so, he finds her actually domesticated in his mother’s household. This is what a playwright would consider “an excellent situation,” particularly as the princess suspects nothing of what is passing under her eyes. As a matter of course, they fall in love, and, equally as a matter of course, they contrive to make their love known. And this is the trying time for Fleurange.