These were actually Lydgate's first meditations as he walked away from
Mr. Vincy's, and on this ground I fear that many ladies will consider
him hardly worthy of their attention. He thought of Rosamond and her
music only in the second place; and though, when her turn came, he
dwelt on the image of her for the rest of his walk, he felt no
agitation, and had no sense that any new current had set into his life.
He could not marry yet; he wished not to marry for several years; and
therefore he was not ready to entertain the notion of being in love
with a girl whom he happened to admire. He did admire Rosamond
exceedingly; but that madness which had once beset him about Laure was
not, he thought, likely to recur in relation to any other woman.
Certainly, if falling in love had been at all in question, it would
have been quite safe with a creature like this Miss Vincy, who had just
the kind of intelligence one would desire in a woman--polished,
refined, docile, lending itself to finish in all the delicacies of
life, and enshrined in a body which expressed this with a force of
demonstration that excluded the need for other evidence. Lydgate felt
sure that if ever he married, his wife would have that feminine
radiance, that distinctive womanhood which must be classed with flowers
and music, that sort of beauty which by its very nature was virtuous,
being moulded only for pure and delicate joys.
But since he did not mean to marry for the next five years--his more
pressing business was to look into Louis' new book on Fever, which he
was specially interested in, because he had known Louis in Paris, and
had followed many anatomical demonstrations in order to ascertain the
specific differences of typhus and typhoid. He went home and read far
into the smallest hour, bringing a much more testing vision of details
and relations into this pathological study than he had ever thought it
necessary to apply to the complexities of love and marriage, these
being subjects on which he felt himself amply informed by literature,
and that traditional wisdom which is handed down in the genial
conversation of men. Whereas Fever had obscure conditions, and gave
him that delightful labor of the imagination which is not mere
arbitrariness, but the exercise of disciplined power--combining and
constructing with the clearest eye for probabilities and the fullest
obedience to knowledge; and then, in yet more energetic alliance with
impartial Nature, standing aloof to invent tests by which to try its
own work.
Many men have been praised as vividly imaginative on the strength of
their profuseness in indifferent drawing or cheap narration:--reports
of very poor talk going on in distant orbs; or portraits of Lucifer
coming down on his bad errands as a large ugly man with bat's wings and
spurts of phosphorescence; or exaggerations of wantonness that seem to
reflect life in a diseased dream. But these kinds of inspiration
Lydgate regarded as rather vulgar and vinous compared with the
imagination that reveals subtle actions inaccessible by any sort of
lens, but tracked in that outer darkness through long pathways of
necessary sequence by the inward light which is the last refinement of
Energy, capable of bathing even the ethereal atoms in its ideally
illuminated space. He for his part had tossed away all cheap
inventions where ignorance finds itself able and at ease: he was
enamoured of that arduous invention which is the very eye of research,
provisionally framing its object and correcting it to more and more
exactness of relation; he wanted to pierce the obscurity of those
minute processes which prepare human misery and joy, those invisible
thoroughfares which are the first lurking-places of anguish, mania, and
crime, that delicate poise and transition which determine the growth of
happy or unhappy consciousness.