조지엘리엇의 미들마치. The Book of Middlemarch, by George Eliot

조지엘리엇의 미들마치. The Book of Middlemarch, by George Eliot
PRELUDE.
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