brooding, sombre Greek. As you read the book and watch the steady,
inexorable decline of the strong man, you feel minded to cry out for
some one to save him--he is alive to you, and you want to call out and
warn him. When the bitter end comes, you cannot sneer as Lydgate
does--you can hardly keep back the tears. And what is it all about? It
simply comes to this, that a good strong man falls into the bad company
of a number of fairly good but dull people, and the result is a tragedy.
Rosamund Vincy is a pattern of propriety; Mrs. Vincy is a fat, kindly
soul; Mr. Vincy is a blustering good-natured middle-class man. There is
no particular harm among the whole set, yet they contrive to ruin a
great man; they lower him from a great career, and convert him into a
mere prosperous gout-doctor. Every high aspiration of the man dies away.
His wife is essentially a commonplace pretty being, and she cannot
understand the great heart and brain that are sacrificed to her; so the
genius is forced to break his heart about furniture and carpets and
respectability, while the prim pretty young woman who causes the ghastly
death of a soul goes on fancying herself a model of good sense and
virtue and all the rest. "Of course I should like you to make
discoveries," she says; but she only shudders at the microscopic work.
When the financial catastrophe comes, she has the great soul at her
mercy, and she stabs him--stabs him through and through--while he is too
noble and tender to make reply. Ah, it is pitiful! Lydgate is like too
many others who are stifling in the mud of respectable dullness. The
fate of those men proves what we have asserted, that bad company is that
which does not permit the healthful and fruitful development of a soul.
Take the case of a brilliant young man who leaves the University and
dives into the great whirlpool of London. Perhaps he goes to the Bar,
and earns money meantime by writing for the Press. The young fellows who
swarm in the London centres--that is, the higher centres--are gentlemen,
polished in manner and strict as to the code of honour, save perhaps as
regards tradesmen's bills; no coarse word or accent escapes them, and
there is something attractive about their merry stoicism. But they make
bad company for a young and high-souled man, and you may see your young
enthusiast, after a year of town-life, converted into a cynic who tries
to make game of everything. He talks lightly of women, because that is
cons