In the position she at last takes up toward Ladislaw, there is no approach to anything in the very least resembling love—­even illicit and overmastering passion.  Of that her very nature is incapable.  She is influenced solely by resentment against her husband, and his failure to fulfil her vain and self-absorbed dreams; by the hope that he will remove her to a sphere which will give wider scope to her heartless selfishness, and take her away from the social disappointments and humiliations into which that selfishness has mainly plunged her.  In every relation of life near or far, important or trivial, amid all environments, under all impulsion toward anything purer and better, Rosamond Vincy is ever the same; as consistent and unvarying in her hard unwomanliness and impenetrable, insistent self-seeking, as is Dorothea in every opposite characteristic.  And even while the picture in one way fascinates the reader, it is the fascination of ever-increasing contempt and loathing where the extremest charity can hardly even pity; and from it we ever turn to that of St Theresa with the more intense refreshment alike of mind and heart, and the deeper sense of its elevating and refining influence.

Among the many clearly defined and vividly drawn portraits in this great work, it would be easy, did space permit, to select others well worthy of detailed examination, and illustrative of the salient aim and tendency of all George Eliot’s works.  The homely yet beautiful family groups of the Garths, Celia and Sir James Chettam, the Bulstrodes, {97} even the wretched old Featherstone, and the crowd of vultures “waiting for death around him,” all more or less illustrate the fundamental principle of the highest ethics—­that self-abnegation is life, elevation, purity, uplifting our humanity toward the Divine; that self-seeking and self-isolation tend surely toward moral and spiritual death.  Two, however, stand out so delicately yet clearly defined and contrasting, that they claim brief consideration before passing from this great work—­Lydgate and Farebrother.

The whole character and career of Lydgate are brought before us with the skill of the consummate artist.  At first he appears as a man of massive and energetic proportions, of high professional impulses and aims, resolute to carry these through against all difficulty and amid all indifference and opposition, and apparently seeking through these aims the general good of humanity—­the alleviation of suffering, and the arrestment, it may be, of death.  But even then there are signs of inherent weakness, and all but certain decline and fall.  There are indications of arrogant self sufficiency and supercilious contempt for others; of undue deference for Bulstrode, not from respect or esteem, but as a tool to further his views; and a tendency to treat patients not as human beings but as cases—­objects to experiment on, and verify hypotheses regarding pathology and disease, all which