kdom
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 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 wound 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 for 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 toward infecting them when we uttered our
conforming falsities or drew our silly conclusions; or perhaps it came
with the vibration from a woman's glance.

The pathetic and saddening tragedy of a man's failure to realize the
possibilities of his own nature was never more clearly and minutely told
than in the case of Lydgate. We see all the steps of his fall, we know all
the reasons why it came, we comprehend fully what he might have been and
done. The bitterness of his own failure made him call his wife a basil
plant--"a plant which had flourished wonderfully on a murdered man's
brains." His hair never became white, but having won a large practice in
his profession, he had his life heavily insured, and died at the age of
fifty. He regarded his own life as a failure, though he was outwardly
successful and "his skill was relied on by many paying patients." Against
his will, by ways and causes he could not foresee, through the tenderness
and ease of his own nature, the vision of his youth did not come true.

Perhaps _Middlemarch_ is the most perfect example among George Eliot's
novels of her purpose