a flippant, easy, youthful censor has told
her, in a boudoir in the Via Sistina at Rome, that her husband's labor
was thrown away because the Germans had taken the lead in historical
inquiries, and that they laughed at those who groped about in woods
where they had made good roads. The censor is agreeable, curly, and has
engaging ways of lying about on hearth-rugs and giving his arm to quaint
old maids: his criticism is therefore securely effective against all the
conclusions of a life of dry labor; and so it comes that Dorothea writes
on her husband's posthumous schedule: "_I could not use it. Do you not
see now that I could not submit my soul to yours by working hopelessly
at what I have no belief in?_" That is the way in which schemes of more
or less erudition will for ever be lost to the world when entrusted to
those who reason as Nature imperiously teaches them to do, through their
affinity with blooming cheeks, curled locks and versatile intellects. It
is inevitable that Dorothea must sink, from her dreams of emulating
Saint Theresa, to comradeship with the glossy occupant of the
hearth-rug. George Eliot, as a true artist, sees what is faulty in the
catastrophe, but she will not unsex her creation. Another of her
characters, Rosamond, she pursues with a minute, withering, one would
say vindictive, contempt. It is the beautiful, distinguished young
creature who marries Lydgate on account of his high connections, and who
trains him to do up her plaits of hair for her, and allows him to talk
the "little language" of affection, which Rosamond, though not returning
it, "accepted as if she had been a serene and lovely image, now and then
miraculously dimpling toward her votary." How such a creature can become
the cool blighting Nemesis of a hopeful home, ruining it by
extravagance, and taking credit to herself for every act of calm revolt,
until her wretched husband, who had meant to be another Vesalius,
compares her to Boccaccio's basil, that flourished upon the brains of a
massacred man, the author sees only too plainly, and shows forth in some
of the most cutting scenes she has ever written. Her "Study of
Provincial Life," while it reveals her warm poet's love for a lofty
nature defeated by its conditions, shows still plainer her intimate and
personal dread of the cold thin nature that kills by its commonplace.
The last she rewards contemptuously with a carriage in the Park and a
rich second match: the first she punish