MIDDLEMARCH (Completed)

PRELUDE

To my dear Husband, George Henry Lewes,

in this nineteenth year of our blessed union.

PRELUDE

Who that cares much to know the history of man, and how the mysterious

mixture behaves under the varying experiments of Time, has not dwelt,

at least briefly, on the life of Saint Theresa, has not smiled

with some gentleness at the thought of the little girl walking

forth one morning hand-in-hand with her still smaller brother,

to go and seek martyrdom in the country of the Moors? Out they toddled

from rugged Avila, wide-eyed and helpless-looking as two fawns,

but with human hearts, already beating to a national idea; until domestic

reality met them in the shape of uncles, and turned them back from

their great resolve. That child-pilgrimage was a fit beginning.

Theresa's passionate, ideal nature demanded an epic life: what were

many-volumed romances of chivalry and the social conquests of a

brilliant girl to her? Her flame quickly burned up that light fuel;

and, fed from within, soared after some illimitable satisfaction,

some object which would never justify weariness, which would reconcile

self-despair with the rapturous consciousness of life beyond self.

She found her epos in the reform of a religious order.

That Spanish woman who lived three hundred years ago, was certainly

not the last of her kind. Many Theresas have been born who

found for themselves no epic life wherein there was a constant

unfolding of far-resonant action; perhaps only a life of mistakes,

the offspring of a certain spiritual grandeur ill-matched with

the meanness of opportunity; perhaps a tragic failure which found

no sacred poet and sank unwept into oblivion. With dim lights

and tangled circumstance they tried to shape their thought and deed

in noble agreement; but after all, to common eyes their struggles

seemed mere inconsistency and formlessness; for these later-born

Theresas were helped by no coherent social faith and order which could

perform the function of knowledge for the ardently willing soul.

Their ardor alternated between a vague ideal and the common yearning

of womanhood; so that the one was disapproved as extravagance,

and the other condemned as a lapse.

Some have felt that these blundering lives are due to the

inconvenient indefiniteness with which the Supreme Power has

fashioned the natures of women: if there were one level of feminine

incompetence as strict as the ability to count three and no more,

the social lot of women might be treated with scientific certitude.

Meanwhile the indefiniteness remains, and the limits of variation

are really much wider than any one would imagine from the sameness

of women's coiffure and the favorite love-stories in prose and verse.

Here and there a cygnet is reared uneasily among the ducklings

in the brown pond, and never finds the living stream in fellowship

with its own oary-footed kind. Here and there is born a Saint Theresa,

foundress of nothing, whose loving heart-beats and sobs after an

unattained goodness tremble off and are dispersed among hindrances,

instead of centring in some long-recognizable deed.