MIDDLEMARCH (Completed)

Chapter 64

1st Gent. Where lies the power, there let the blame lie too.

2d Gent. Nay, power is relative; you cannot fright

The coming pest with border fortresses,

Or catch your carp with subtle argument.

All force is twain in one: cause is not cause

Unless effect be there; and action's self

Must needs contain a passive. So command

Exists but with obedience."

Even if Lydgate had been inclined to be quite open about his affairs,

he knew that it would have hardly been in Mr. Farebrother's power

to give him the help he immediately wanted. With the year's bills

coming in from his tradesmen, with Dover's threatening hold on

his furniture, and with nothing to depend on but slow dribbling

payments from patients who must not be offended--for the handsome

fees he had had from Freshitt Hall and Lowick Manor had been

easily absorbed--nothing less than a thousand pounds would have

freed him from actual embarrassment, and left a residue which,

according to the favorite phrase of hopefulness in such circumstances,

would have given him "time to look about him."

Naturally, the merry Christmas bringing the happy New Year,

when fellow-citizens expect to be paid for the trouble and goods

they have smilingly bestowed on their neighbors, had so tightened

the pressure of sordid cares on Lydgate's mind that it was hardly

possible for him to think unbrokenly of any other subject, even the

most habitual and soliciting. He was not an ill-tempered man;

his intellectual activity, the ardent kindness of his heart, as well

as his strong frame, would always, under tolerably easy conditions,

have kept him above the petty uncontrolled susceptibilities which make

bad temper. But he was now a prey to that worst irritation which

arises not simply from annoyances, but from the second consciousness

underlying those annoyances, of wasted energy and a degrading

preoccupation, which was the reverse of all his former purposes.

"_This_ is what I am thinking of; and _that_ is what I might

have been thinking of," was the bitter incessant murmur within him,

making every difficulty a double goad to impatience.

Some gentlemen have made an amazing figure in literature by general

discontent with the universe as a trap of dulness into which their

great souls have fallen by mistake; but the sense of a stupendous

self and an insignificant world may have its consolations.

Lydgate's discontent was much harder to bear: it was the sense that