Middlemarch
German, searching in his friend’s face for responding admiration, but
going on volubly without waiting for any other answer. “There lies
antique beauty, not corpse-like even in death, but arrested in the
complete contentment of its sensuous perfection: and here stands beauty
in its breathing life, with the consciousness of Christian centuries in
its bosom. But she should be dressed as a nun; I think she looks almost
what you call a Quaker; I would dress her as a nun in my picture.
However, she is married; I saw her wedding-ring on that wonderful left
hand, otherwise I should have thought the sallow _Geistlicher_ was her
father. I saw him parting from her a good while ago, and just now I
found her in that magnificent pose. Only think! he is perhaps rich, and
would like to have her portrait taken. Ah! it is no use looking after
her—there she goes! Let us follow her home!”
“No, no,” said his companion, with a little frown.
“You are singular, Ladislaw. You look struck together. Do you know
her?”
“I know that she is married to my cousin,” said Will Ladislaw,
sauntering down the hall with a preoccupied air, while his German
friend kept at his side and watched him eagerly.
“What! the _Geistlicher_? He looks more like an uncle—a more useful
sort of relation.”
“He is not my uncle. I tell you he is my second cousin,” said Ladislaw,
with some irritation.
“Schön, schön. Don’t be snappish. You are not angry with me for
thinking Mrs. Second-Cousin the most perfect young Madonna I ever saw?”
“Angry? nonsense. I have only seen her once before, for a couple of
minutes, when my cousin introduced her to me, just before I left
England. They were not married then. I didn’t know they were coming to
Rome.”
“But you will go to see them now—you will find out what they have for
an address—since you know the name. Shall we go to the post? And you
could speak about the portrait.”
“Confound you, Naumann! I don’t know what I shall do. I am not so
brazen as you.”
“Bah! that is because you are dilettantish and amateurish. If you were
an artist, you would think of Mistress Second-Cousin as antique form
animated by Christian sentiment—a sort of Christian Antigone—sensuous
force controlled by spiritual passion.”
“Yes, and that your painting her was the chief outcome of her
existence—the divinity passing into higher completeness and all but
exhausted in the act of covering your bit of canvas. I am amateurish if
you like: I do _not_ think that all the universe is straining towards
the obscure significance of your pictures.”
“But it is, my dear!—so far as it is straining through me, Adolf
Naumann: that stands firm,” said the good-natured painter, putting a
hand on Ladislaw’s shoulder, and not in the least disturbed by the
unaccountable touch of ill-humor in his tone. “See now! My existence
presupposes the existence of the whole universe—does it _not?_ and my
function is to paint—and as a painter I have a conception which is
altogether _genialisch_, of your great-aunt or second grandmother as a
subject for a picture; therefore, the universe is straining towards
that picture through that particular hook or claw which it puts forth
in the shape of me—not true?”
“But how if another claw in the shape of me is straining to thwart
it?—the case is a little less simple then.”
“Not at all: the result of the struggle is the same thing—picture or no
picture—logically.”
Will could not resist this imperturbable temper, and the cloud in his
face broke into sunshiny laughter.
“Come now, my friend—you will help?” said Naumann, in a hopeful tone.
“No; nonsense, Naumann! English ladies are not at everybody’s service
as models. And you want to express too much with your painting. You
would only have made a better or worse portrait with a background which
every connoisseur would give a different reason for or against. And
what is a portrait of a woman? Your painting and Plastik are poor stuff
after all. They perturb and dull conceptions instead of raising them.
Language is a finer medium.”
“Yes, for those who can’t paint,” said Naumann. “There you have perfect
right. I did not recommend you to paint, my friend.”
The amiable artist carried his sting, but Ladislaw did not choose to
appear stung. He went on as if he had not heard.
“Language gives a fuller image, which is all the better for being
vague. After all, the true seeing is within; and painting stares at you
with an insistent imperfection. I feel that especially about
representations of women. As if a woman were a mere colored
superficies! You must wait for movement and tone. There is a difference
in their very breathing: they change from moment to moment.—This woman
whom you have just seen, for example: how would you paint her voice,
pray? But her voice is much diviner than anything you have seen of
her.”
“I see, I see. You are jealous. No man must presume to think that he
can paint your ideal. This is serious, my friend! Your great-aunt! ‘Der
Neffe als Onkel’ in a tragic sense—_ungeheuer!_”
“You and I shall quarrel, Naumann, if you call that lady my aunt
again.”
“How is she to be called then?”
“Mrs. Casaubon.”
“Good. Suppose I get acquainted with her in spite of you, and find that
she very much wishes to be painted?”
“Yes, suppose!” said Will Ladislaw, in a contemptuous undertone,
intended to dismiss the subject. He was conscious of being irritated by
ridiculously small causes, which were half of his own creation. Why was
he making any fuss about Mrs. Casaubon? And yet he felt as if something
had happened to him with regard to her. There are characters which are
continually creating collisions and nodes for themselves in dramas
which nobody is prepared to act with them. Their susceptibilities will
clash against objects that remain innocently quiet.
CHAPTER XX.
“A child forsaken, waking suddenly,
Whose gaze afeard on all things round doth rove,
And seeth only that it cannot see
The meeting eyes of love.”
Two hours later, Dorothea was seated in an inner room or boudoir of a
handsome apartment in the Via Sistina.
I am sorry to add that she was sobbing bitterly, with such abandonment
to this relief of an oppressed heart as a woman habitually controlled
by pride on her own account and thoughtfulness for others will
sometimes allow herself when she feels securely alone. And Mr. Casaubon
was certain to remain away for some time at the Vatican.
Yet Dorothea had no distinctly shapen grievance that she could state
even to herself; and in the midst of her confused thought and passion,
the mental act that was struggling forth into clearness was a
self-accusing cry that her feeling of desolation was the fault of her
own spiritual poverty. She had married the man of her choice, and with
the advantage over most girls that she had contemplated her marriage
chiefly as the beginning of new duties: from the very first she had
thought of Mr. Casaubon as having a mind so much above her own, that he
must often be claimed by studies which she could not entirely share;
moreover, after the brief narrow experience of her girlhood she was
beholding Rome, the city of visible history, where the past of a whole
hemisphere seems moving in funeral procession with strange ancestral
images and trophies gathered from afar.
But this stupendous fragmentariness heightened the dreamlike
strangeness of her bridal life. Dorothea had now been five weeks in
Rome, and in the kindly mornings when autumn and winter seemed to go
hand in hand like a happy aged couple one of whom would presently
survive in chiller loneliness, she had driven about at first with Mr.
Casaubon, but of late chiefly with Tantripp and their experienced
courier. She had been led through the best galleries, had been taken to
the chief points of view, had been shown the grandest ruins and the
most glorious churches, and she had ended by oftenest choosing to drive
out to the Campagna where she could feel alone with the earth and sky,
away-from the oppressive masquerade of ages, in which her own life too
seemed to become a masque with enigmatical costumes.
To those who have looked at Rome with the quickening power of a
knowledge which breathes a growing soul into all historic shapes, and
traces out the suppressed transitions which unite all contrasts, Rome
may still be the spiritual centre and interpreter of the world. But let
them conceive one more historical contrast: the gigantic broken
revelations of that Imperial and Papal city thrust abruptly on the
notions of a girl who had been brought up in English and Swiss
Puritanism, fed on meagre Protestant histories and on art chiefly of
the hand-screen sort; a girl whose ardent nature turned all her small
allowance of knowledge into principles, fusing her actions into their
mould, and whose quick emotions gave the most abstract things the
quality of a pleasure or a pain; a girl who had lately become a wife,
and from the enthusiastic acceptance of untried duty found herself
plunged in tumultuous preoccupation with her personal lot. The weight
of unintelligible Rome might lie easily on bright nymphs to whom it
formed a background for the brilliant picnic of Anglo-foreign society;
but Dorothea had no such defence against deep impressions. Ruins and
basilicas, palaces and colossi, set in the midst of a sordid present,
where all that was living and warm-blooded seemed sunk in the deep
degeneracy of a superstition divorced from reverence; the dimmer but
yet eager Titanic life gazing and struggling on walls and ceilings; the
long vistas of white forms whose marble eyes seemed to hold the
monotonous light of an alien world: all this vast wreck of ambitious
ideals, sensuous and spiritual, mixed confusedly with the signs of
breathing forgetfulness and degradation, at first jarred her as with an
electric shock, and then urged themselves on her with that ache
belonging to a glut of confused ideas which check the flow of emotion.
Forms both pale and glowing took possession of her young sense, and
fixed themselves in her memory even when she was not thinking of them,
preparing strange associations which remained through her after-years.
Our moods are apt to bring with them images which succeed each other
like the magic-lantern pictures of a doze; and in certain states of
dull forlornness Dorothea all her life continued to see the vastness of
St. Peter’s, the huge bronze canopy, the excited intention in the
attitudes and garments of the prophets and evangelists in the mosaics
above, and the red drapery which was being hung for Christmas spreading
itself everywhere like a disease of the retina.
Not that this inward amazement of Dorothea’s was anything very
exceptional: many souls in their young nudity are tumbled out among
incongruities and left to “find their feet” among them, while their
elders go about their business. Nor can I suppose that when Mrs.
Casaubon is discovered in a fit of weeping six weeks after her wedding,
the situation will be regarded as tragic. Some discouragement, some
faintness of heart at the new real future which replaces the imaginary,
is not unusual, and we do not expect people to be deeply moved by what
is not unusual. That element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of
frequency, has not yet wrought itself into the coarse emotion of
mankind; and perhaps our frames could hardly bear much of it. If we had
a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like
hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die
of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the
quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity.
However, Dorothea was crying, and if she had been required to state the
cause, she could only have done so in some such general words as I have