MIDDLEMARCH (Completed)

Chapter 66

"'Tis one thing to be tempted, Escalus,

Another thing to fall."

--Measure for Measure.

Lydgate certainly had good reason to reflect on the service

his practice did him in counteracting his personal cares.

He had no longer free energy enough for spontaneous research and

speculative thinking, but by the bedside of patients, the direct

external calls on his judgment and sympathies brought the added

impulse needed to draw him out of himself. It was not simply

that beneficent harness of routine which enables silly men to live

respectably and unhappy men to live calmly--it was a perpetual

claim on the immediate fresh application of thought, and on the

consideration of another's need and trial. Many of us looking back

through life would say that the kindest man we have ever known

has been a medical man, or perhaps that surgeon whose fine tact,

directed by deeply informed perception, has come to us in our need

with a more sublime beneficence than that of miracle-workers. Some

of that twice-blessed mercy was always with Lydgate in his work at the

Hospital or in private houses, serving better than any opiate to quiet

and sustain him under his anxieties and his sense of mental degeneracy.

Mr. Farebrother's suspicion as to the opiate was true, however.

Under the first galling pressure of foreseen difficulties,

and the first perception that his marriage, if it were not to be

a yoked loneliness, must be a state of effort to go on loving

without too much care about being loved, he had once or twice

tried a dose of opium. But he had no hereditary constitutional

craving after such transient escapes from the hauntings of misery.

He was strong, could drink a great deal of wine, but did not care

about it; and when the men round him were drinking spirits, he took

sugar and water, having a contemptuous pity even for the earliest

stages of excitement from drink. It was the same with gambling.

He had looked on at a great deal of gambling in Paris, watching it

as if it had been a disease. He was no more tempted by such winning

than he was by drink. He had said to himself that the only winning

he cared for must be attained by a conscious process of high,

difficult combination tending towards a beneficent result.

The power he longed for could not be represented by agitated fingers

clutching a heap of coin, or by the half-barbarous, half-idiotic

triumph in the eyes of a man who sweeps within his arms the ventures

of twenty chapfallen companions.