Author: George Eliot
Release Date: July, 1994 [EBook #145]
[This file was last updated on June 29, 2003]
Edition: 11
Language: English
Character set encoding: ASCII
*** Start of the project gutenberg
EBOOK Middlemarch ***
Scanned with OmniPage Professional OCR software
donated by Caere Corporation, 1-800-535-7226.
By George Eliot
New York and Boston H. M. Caldwell Company Publishers
To my dear Husband, George Henry Lewes,
in this nineteenth year of our blessed union.
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.
