Middlemarch
scholarly education, and launching him respectably. I am therefore
bound to fulfil the expectation so raised,” said Mr. Casaubon, putting
his conduct in the light of mere rectitude: a trait of delicacy which
Dorothea noticed with admiration.
“He has a thirst for travelling; perhaps he may turn out a Bruce or a
Mungo Park,” said Mr. Brooke. “I had a notion of that myself at one
time.”
“No, he has no bent towards exploration, or the enlargement of our
geognosis: that would be a special purpose which I could recognize with
some approbation, though without felicitating him on a career which so
often ends in premature and violent death. But so far is he from having
any desire for a more accurate knowledge of the earth’s surface, that
he said he should prefer not to know the sources of the Nile, and that
there should be some unknown regions preserved as hunting grounds for
the poetic imagination.”
“Well, there is something in that, you know,” said Mr. Brooke, who had
certainly an impartial mind.
“It is, I fear, nothing more than a part of his general inaccuracy and
indisposition to thoroughness of all kinds, which would be a bad augury
for him in any profession, civil or sacred, even were he so far
submissive to ordinary rule as to choose one.”
“Perhaps he has conscientious scruples founded on his own unfitness,”
said Dorothea, who was interesting herself in finding a favorable
explanation. “Because the law and medicine should be very serious
professions to undertake, should they not? People’s lives and fortunes
depend on them.”
“Doubtless; but I fear that my young relative Will Ladislaw is chiefly
determined in his aversion to these callings by a dislike to steady
application, and to that kind of acquirement which is needful
instrumentally, but is not charming or immediately inviting to
self-indulgent taste. I have insisted to him on what Aristotle has
stated with admirable brevity, that for the achievement of any work
regarded as an end there must be a prior exercise of many energies or
acquired facilities of a secondary order, demanding patience. I have
pointed to my own manuscript volumes, which represent the toil of years
preparatory to a work not yet accomplished. But in vain. To careful
reasoning of this kind he replies by calling himself Pegasus, and every
form of prescribed work ‘harness.’”
Celia laughed. She was surprised to find that Mr. Casaubon could say
something quite amusing.
“Well, you know, he may turn out a Byron, a Chatterton, a
Churchill—that sort of thing—there’s no telling,” said Mr. Brooke.
“Shall you let him go to Italy, or wherever else he wants to go?”
“Yes; I have agreed to furnish him with moderate supplies for a year or
so; he asks no more. I shall let him be tried by the test of freedom.”
“That is very kind of you,” said Dorothea, looking up at Mr. Casaubon
with delight. “It is noble. After all, people may really have in them
some vocation which is not quite plain to themselves, may they not?
They may seem idle and weak because they are growing. We should be very
patient with each other, I think.”
“I suppose it is being engaged to be married that has made you think
patience good,” said Celia, as soon as she and Dorothea were alone
together, taking off their wrappings.
“You mean that I am very impatient, Celia.”
“Yes; when people don’t do and say just what you like.” Celia had
become less afraid of “saying things” to Dorothea since this
engagement: cleverness seemed to her more pitiable than ever.
CHAPTER X.
“He had catched a great cold, had he had no other clothes to wear than
the skin of a bear not yet killed.”—FULLER.
Young Ladislaw did not pay that visit to which Mr. Brooke had invited
him, and only six days afterwards Mr. Casaubon mentioned that his young
relative had started for the Continent, seeming by this cold vagueness
to waive inquiry. Indeed, Will had declined to fix on any more precise
destination than the entire area of Europe. Genius, he held, is
necessarily intolerant of fetters: on the one hand it must have the
utmost play for its spontaneity; on the other, it may confidently await
those messages from the universe which summon it to its peculiar work,
only placing itself in an attitude of receptivity towards all sublime
chances. The attitudes of receptivity are various, and Will had
sincerely tried many of them. He was not excessively fond of wine, but
he had several times taken too much, simply as an experiment in that
form of ecstasy; he had fasted till he was faint, and then supped on
lobster; he had made himself ill with doses of opium. Nothing greatly
original had resulted from these measures; and the effects of the opium
had convinced him that there was an entire dissimilarity between his
constitution and De Quincey’s. The superadded circumstance which would
evolve the genius had not yet come; the universe had not yet beckoned.
Even Caesar’s fortune at one time was but a grand presentiment. We know
what a masquerade all development is, and what effective shapes may be
disguised in helpless embryos. In fact, the world is full of hopeful
analogies and handsome dubious eggs called possibilities. Will saw
clearly enough the pitiable instances of long incubation producing no
chick, and but for gratitude would have laughed at Casaubon, whose
plodding application, rows of note-books, and small taper of learned
theory exploring the tossed ruins of the world, seemed to enforce a
moral entirely encouraging to Will’s generous reliance on the
intentions of the universe with regard to himself. He held that
reliance to be a mark of genius; and certainly it is no mark to the
contrary; genius consisting neither in self-conceit nor in humility,
but in a power to make or do, not anything in general, but something in
particular. Let him start for the Continent, then, without our
pronouncing on his future. Among all forms of mistake, prophecy is the
most gratuitous.
But at present this caution against a too hasty judgment interests me
more in relation to Mr. Casaubon than to his young cousin. If to
Dorothea Mr. Casaubon had been the mere occasion which had set alight
the fine inflammable material of her youthful illusions, does it follow
that he was fairly represented in the minds of those less impassioned
personages who have hitherto delivered their judgments concerning him?
I protest against any absolute conclusion, any prejudice derived from
Mrs. Cadwallader’s contempt for a neighboring clergyman’s alleged
greatness of soul, or Sir James Chettam’s poor opinion of his rival’s
legs,—from Mr. Brooke’s failure to elicit a companion’s ideas, or from
Celia’s criticism of a middle-aged scholar’s personal appearance. I am
not sure that the greatest man of his age, if ever that solitary
superlative existed, could escape these unfavorable reflections of
himself in various small mirrors; and even Milton, looking for his
portrait in a spoon, must submit to have the facial angle of a bumpkin.
Moreover, if Mr. Casaubon, speaking for himself, has rather a chilling
rhetoric, it is not therefore certain that there is no good work or
fine feeling in him. Did not an immortal physicist and interpreter of
hieroglyphs write detestable verses? Has the theory of the solar system
been advanced by graceful manners and conversational tact? Suppose we
turn from outside estimates of a man, to wonder, with keener interest,
what is the report of his own consciousness about his doings or
capacity: with what hindrances he is carrying on his daily labors; what
fading of hopes, or what deeper fixity of self-delusion the years are
marking off within him; and with what spirit he wrestles against
universal pressure, which will one day be too heavy for him, and bring
his heart to its final pause. Doubtless his lot is important in his own
eyes; and the chief reason that we think he asks too large a place in
our consideration must be our want of room for him, since we refer him
to the Divine regard with perfect confidence; nay, it is even held
sublime for our neighbor to expect the utmost there, however little he
may have got from us. Mr. Casaubon, too, was the centre of his own
world; if he was liable to think that others were providentially made
for him, and especially to consider them in the light of their fitness
for the author of a “Key to all Mythologies,” this trait is not quite
alien to us, and, like the other mendicant hopes of mortals, claims
some of our pity.
Certainly this affair of his marriage with Miss Brooke touched him more
nearly than it did any one of the persons who have hitherto shown their
disapproval of it, and in the present stage of things I feel more
tenderly towards his experience of success than towards the
disappointment of the amiable Sir James. For in truth, as the day fixed
for his marriage came nearer, Mr. Casaubon did not find his spirits
rising; nor did the contemplation of that matrimonial garden scene,
where, as all experience showed, the path was to be bordered with
flowers, prove persistently more enchanting to him than the accustomed
vaults where he walked taper in hand. He did not confess to himself,
still less could he have breathed to another, his surprise that though
he had won a lovely and noble-hearted girl he had not won
delight,—which he had also regarded as an object to be found by search.
It is true that he knew all the classical passages implying the
contrary; but knowing classical passages, we find, is a mode of motion,
which explains why they leave so little extra force for their personal
application.
Poor Mr. Casaubon had imagined that his long studious bachelorhood had
stored up for him a compound interest of enjoyment, and that large
drafts on his affections would not fail to be honored; for we all of
us, grave or light, get our thoughts entangled in metaphors, and act
fatally on the strength of them. And now he was in danger of being
saddened by the very conviction that his circumstances were unusually
happy: there was nothing external by which he could account for a
certain blankness of sensibility which came over him just when his
expectant gladness should have been most lively, just when he exchanged
the accustomed dulness of his Lowick library for his visits to the
Grange. Here was a weary experience in which he was as utterly
condemned to loneliness as in the despair which sometimes threatened
him while toiling in the morass of authorship without seeming nearer to
the goal. And his was that worst loneliness which would shrink from
sympathy. He could not but wish that Dorothea should think him not less
happy than the world would expect her successful suitor to be; and in
relation to his authorship he leaned on her young trust and veneration,
he liked to draw forth her fresh interest in listening, as a means of
encouragement to himself: in talking to her he presented all his
performance and intention with the reflected confidence of the
pedagogue, and rid himself for the time of that chilling ideal audience
which crowded his laborious uncreative hours with the vaporous pressure
of Tartarean shades.
For to Dorothea, after that toy-box history of the world adapted to
young ladies which had made the chief part of her education, Mr.
Casaubon’s talk about his great book was full of new vistas; and this
sense of revelation, this surprise of a nearer introduction to Stoics
and Alexandrians, as people who had ideas not totally unlike her own,
kept in abeyance for the time her usual eagerness for a binding theory
which could bring her own life and doctrine into strict connection with
that amazing past, and give the remotest sources of knowledge some
bearing on her actions. That more complete teaching would come—Mr.
Casaubon would tell her all that: she was looking forward to higher