A study of characterisation in the novels of George Eliot

25.
Lydgate,
He was at a starting-point which makes a man's career a fine subject
for betting, if there were any gentlemen given to that amusement
who could appreciate the complicated probabilities of an
arduous purpose, with all the possible thVlartings and furtherings
of circumstance, all the niceties of invlard balance, by which a
man swims and makes his point or else is carried headlong. 70
The emphasis is given equally to circumstances and to inward balance, and
George Eliot continues with the remark that "character too is a process
and an unfolding. II 71 We can recognise here Lewes' "emergents" as well
as a quite explicit organicism. Lydgate is not a mechanical creature,
wound up like a clock to perform predictably and inevitably; he is
rather an embryo which mayor may not develop satisfactorily. There is
no escaping the philosophic paradox of George Eliotts beliefs, the paradox
that Itman is in subjection to the external world, though he also to
a certain extent controls it. II 72
It is this paradox that underlies her stringent comment that "if we
had been greater, ciroumstance would have been less strong against us." 73
She thus sets herself the challenge of revealing convincingly to her
readers both the strength of those circumstances, the provincial t ovm
of Middlemarch which "counted on swallowing Lydgate and assimilating
him very comfortably, II 74 the unrelenting "life who "mastered" 75 him,
as well as those features of his o',m nature which diminished his resistance
to those very circumstances. And she has to do this vrl.thout our
feeling that the dice are 'weighted unbearably against Lydgate from the
very start. It is the Aristotelian problem of what kind of man will
arouse our pity and terror. His humanity needs to be close enough to
ours that we do not reject him as a monster of depravity and yet he
must seem to maintain control over his own situation so that we feel
he could have done otherwise if he had chosen differently, or in this
case, if he had been "greater." George Eliot shows us quite clearly
Lydgate t s hamartia, his fatal flaw or error of judgement,) in his.