"_This_ is what I am thinking of; and _that_ is what I might
have been thinking of," was the bitter incessant murmur within him,
making every difficulty a double goad to impatience.
Some gentlemen have made an amazing figure in literature by general
discontent with the universe as a trap of dulness into which their
great souls have fallen by mistake; but the sense of a stupendous
self and an insignificant world may have its consolations.
Lydgate's discontent was much harder to bear: it was the sense that
there was a grand existence in thought and effective action lying
around him, while his self was being narrowed into the miserable
isolation of egoistic fears, and vulgar anxieties for events that might
allay such fears. His troubles will perhaps appear miserably sordid,
and beneath the attention of lofty persons who can know nothing
of debt except on a magnificent scale. Doubtless they were sordid;
and for the majority, who are not lofty, there is no escape from
sordidness but by being free from money-craving, with all its base
hopes and temptations, its watching for death, its hinted requests.
its horse-dealer's desire to make bad work pass for good,
its seeking for function which ought to be another's, its compulsion
often to long for Luck in the shape of a wide calamity.
It was because Lydgate writhed under the idea of getting his neck
beneath this vile yoke that he had fallen into a bitter moody state
which was continually widening Rosamond's alienation from him.
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