If you believe that Will had the potential to become a great artist or philosopher - and whether you believe this depends on your reading of the text, since I b

If you believe that Will had the potential to become a great artist or philosopher - and whether you believe this depends on your reading of the text, since I believe it is left somewhat ambiguous whether he was truly gifted or simply a high-grade dilettante - then you should probably consider the life he settled for to be underwhelming. You can probably name half a dozen great writers or great painters of the Victorian era without pausing for breath, but can you name even one back-bench MP? Perhaps this is because, especially in the time of Middlemarch, Britain's democracy was only just struggling out of the dark ages (the Reform Act is in fact a major plot point), and was still far from the (mostly) accountable and representative system it is today. Most likely the life of an obscure MP was in fact rather more trivial (and for that matter, rather more bourgeois) than it is today. Of course, perhaps you consider Will to have simply reached his ceiling, as a bright but decidedly non-genius young man. Certainly the reader is left with the impression that while he may be impressive in his own way, the obscurity of Will's later life is something less of a tragedy than the obscurity of Dorothea's, whose brilliance seems rather more unquestionable. However, although it may be the lesser tragedy, I think when considered in view of the broader themes of the book, one must consider Will's comfortable irrelevance to be an underachievement. Recall the title - 'a study of provincial life'. Recall also how the ending dwells on the nature of a parochial existence; 'there is no creature whose inward being is so strong that it is not greatly determined by what lies outside it'. It seems to me - and this reading is not uncommon - that if Eliot intended to leave the reader with any lasting impression, it would be this: that even if a person has a very great talent, potential, or even genius, and even if they also have the temperament to put it to work, without a societal scaffold that is willing to support their growth they are doomed to languish - to settle. For these reasons I think the author of the article is right - Will did choose a trivial existence, neglecting his potential, and to refer to his prior travails as simply 'dabbling in painting' is to discount what should be regarded as the embryonic stages of his curtailed development into an artist of real stature and significance.