He was certainly a happy fellow at this time: to be seven-and-twenty,
without any fixed vices, with a generous resolution that his action
should be beneficent, and with ideas in his brain that made life
interesting quite apart from the cultus of horseflesh and other mystic
rites of costly observance, which the eight hundred pounds left him
after buying his practice would certainly not have gone far in paying
for. He was at a starting-point which makes many a man's career a fine
subject for betting, if there were any gentlemen given to that
amusement who could appreciate the complicated probabilities of an
arduous purpose, with all the possible thwartings and furtherings of
circumstance, all the niceties of inward balance, by which a man swims
and makes his point or else is carried headlong. The risk would remain
even with close knowledge of Lydgate's character; for character too is
a process and an unfolding. The man was still in the making, as much
as the Middlemarch doctor and immortal discoverer, and there were both
virtues and faults capable of shrinking or expanding. The faults will
not, I hope, be a reason for the withdrawal of your interest in him.
Among our valued friends is there not some one or other who is a little
too self-confident and disdainful; whose distinguished mind is a little
spotted with commonness; who is a little pinched here and protuberant
there with native prejudices; or whose better energies are liable to
lapse down the wrong channel under the influence of transient
solicitations? All these things might be alleged against Lydgate, but
then, they are the periphrases of a polite preacher, who talks of Adam,
and would not like to mention anything painful to the pew-renters. The
particular faults from which these delicate generalities are distilled
have distinguishable physiognomies, diction, accent, and grimaces;
filling up parts in very various dramas. Our vanities differ as our
noses do: all conceit is not the same conceit, but varies in
correspondence with the minutiae of mental make in which one of us
differs from another. Lydgate's conceit was of the arrogant sort,
never simpering, never impertinent, but massive in its claims and
benevolently contemptuous. He would do a great deal for noodles, being
sorry for them, and feeling quite sure that they could have no power
over him: he had thought of joining the Saint Simonians when he was in
Paris, in order to turn them against some of their own doctrines. All
his faults were marked by kindred traits, and were those of a man who
had a fine baritone, whose clothes hung well upon him, and who even in
his ordinary gestures had an air of inbred distinction. Where then lay
the spots of commonness? says a young lady enamoured of that careless
grace. How could there be any commonness in a man so well-bred, so
ambitious of social distinction, so generous and unusual in his views
of social duty? As easily as there may be stupidity in a man of genius
if you take him unawares on the wrong subject, or as many a man who has
the best will to advance the social millennium might be ill-inspired in
imagining its lighter pleasures; unable to go beyond Offenbach's music,
or the brilliant punning in the last burlesque. Lydgate's spots of
commonness lay in the complexion of his prejudices, which, in spite of
noble intention and sympathy, were half of them such as are found in
ordinary men of the world: that distinction of mind which belonged to
his intellectual ardor, did not penetrate his feeling and judgment
about furniture, or women, or the desirability of its being known
(without his telling) that he was better born than other country
surgeons. He did not mean to think of furniture at present; but
whenever he did so it was to be feared that neither biology nor schemes
of reform would lift him above the vulgarity of feeling that there
would be an incompatibility in his furniture not being of the best.