Discuss amongst yourselves

A few days ago, Ella was deliberating over what to say about Book II:

My own post is coming; I think it's going to be on Mr. Farebrother's collection of freaky pickled animals, and the symbolism therein. Or I might run out of steam and post something short, lurid, and grossly italicised like "Can you believe Lydgate's affair with that French actress? What was he thinking?"

Ella chose to write about something else, but I still think these topics merit consideration. Really, what was he thinking?

I loved chapter 15!

It made me laugh:

A great historian, as he insisted on calling himself, who had the happiness to be dead a hundred and twenty years ago, and so to take his place among the colossi whose huge legs our living pettiness is observed to walk under, glories in his copious remarks and digressions as the least imitable part of his work, and especially in those initial chapters to the successive books of his history, where he seems to bring his armchair to the proscenium and chat with us in all the lusty ease of his fine English. But Fielding lived when the days were longer (for time, like money, is measured by our needs), when summer afternoons were spacious, and the clock ticked slowly in the winter evenings. We belated historians must not linger after his example; and if we did so, it is probable that our chat would be thin and eager, as if delivered from a campstool in a parrot-house. I at least have so much to do in unraveling certain human lots, and seeing how they were woven and interwoven, that all the light I can command must be concentrated on this particular web, and not dispersed over that tempting range of relevancies called the universe.

(Note that this is the first time the narrator uses the first person.)

It made me cry:

For in the multitude of middle-aged men who go about their vocations in a daily course determined for them much in the same way as the tie of their cravats, there is always a good number who once meant to shape their own deeds and alter the world a little The story of their coming to be shapen after the average and fit to be packed by the gross, is hardly ever told even in their consciousness; for perhaps their ardor in generous unpaid toil cooled as imperceptibly as the ardor of other youthful loves, till one day their earlier self walked like a ghost in its old home and made the new furniture ghastly. Nothing in the world more subtle than the process of their gradual change! In the beginning they inhaled it unknowingly: you and I may have sent some of our breath towards infecting them, when we uttered our conforming falsities or drew our silly conclusions: or perhaps it came with the vibrations from a woman's glance.

More great lines from Book II:

"I have not yet been pained by finding any excessive talent in Middlemarch." (Lydgate, ch 13)

"Not of the least use in the world for him to say he could be better. Might, could, would — they are contemptible auxiliaries." (Mary, ch 14)

It had already occurred to him that books were stuff, and that life was stupid. (ch 15)

Knowledge seemed to him a very superficial affair, easily mastered: judging from the conversation of his elders, he had apparently got already more than was necessary for mature life. (ch 15)

And poor Dorothea! — "the light had changed" (ch 20):

How was it that in the weeks since her marriage, Dorothea had not distinctly observed but felt with a stifling depression, that the large vistas and wide fresh air which she had dreamed of finding in her husband's mind were replaced by anterooms and winding passages which seemed to lead nowhither?.... Having once embarked on your marital voyage, it is impossible not to be aware that you make no way and that the sea is not within sight — that, in fact, you are exploring an enclosed basin.