Middlemarch
neck and kiss it?
“My dear Dorothea—‘who with repentance is not satisfied, is not of
heaven nor earth:’—you do not think me worthy to be banished by that
severe sentence,” said Mr. Casaubon, exerting himself to make a strong
statement, and also to smile faintly.
Dorothea was silent, but a tear which had come up with the sob would
insist on falling.
“You are excited, my dear. And I also am feeling some unpleasant
consequences of too much mental disturbance,” said Mr. Casaubon. In
fact, he had it in his thought to tell her that she ought not to have
received young Ladislaw in his absence: but he abstained, partly from
the sense that it would be ungracious to bring a new complaint in the
moment of her penitent acknowledgment, partly because he wanted to
avoid further agitation of himself by speech, and partly because he was
too proud to betray that jealousy of disposition which was not so
exhausted on his scholarly compeers that there was none to spare in
other directions. There is a sort of jealousy which needs very little
fire: it is hardly a passion, but a blight bred in the cloudy, damp
despondency of uneasy egoism.
“I think it is time for us to dress,” he added, looking at his watch.
They both rose, and there was never any further allusion between them
to what had passed on this day.
But Dorothea remembered it to the last with the vividness with which we
all remember epochs in our experience when some dear expectation dies,
or some new motive is born. Today she had begun to see that she had
been under a wild illusion in expecting a response to her feeling from
Mr. Casaubon, and she had felt the waking of a presentiment that there
might be a sad consciousness in his life which made as great a need on
his side as on her own.
We are all of us born in moral stupidity, taking the world as an udder
to feed our supreme selves: Dorothea had early begun to emerge from
that stupidity, but yet it had been easier to her to imagine how she
would devote herself to Mr. Casaubon, and become wise and strong in his
strength and wisdom, than to conceive with that distinctness which is
no longer reflection but feeling—an idea wrought back to the directness
of sense, like the solidity of objects—that he had an equivalent centre
of self, whence the lights and shadows must always fall with a certain
difference.
CHAPTER XXII.
“Nous câusames longtemps; elle était simple et bonne.
Ne sachant pas le mal, elle faisait le bien;
Des richesses du coeur elle me fit l’aumône,
Et tout en écoutant comme le coeur se donne,
Sans oser y penser je lui donnai le mien;
Elle emporta ma vie, et n’en sut jamais rien.”
—ALFRED DE MUSSET.
Will Ladislaw was delightfully agreeable at dinner the next day, and
gave no opportunity for Mr. Casaubon to show disapprobation. On the
contrary it seemed to Dorothea that Will had a happier way of drawing
her husband into conversation and of deferentially listening to him
than she had ever observed in any one before. To be sure, the listeners
about Tipton were not highly gifted! Will talked a good deal himself,
but what he said was thrown in with such rapidity, and with such an
unimportant air of saying something by the way, that it seemed a gay
little chime after the great bell. If Will was not always perfect, this
was certainly one of his good days. He described touches of incident
among the poor people in Rome, only to be seen by one who could move
about freely; he found himself in agreement with Mr. Casaubon as to the
unsound opinions of Middleton concerning the relations of Judaism and
Catholicism; and passed easily to a half-enthusiastic half-playful
picture of the enjoyment he got out of the very miscellaneousness of
Rome, which made the mind flexible with constant comparison, and saved
you from seeing the world’s ages as a set of box-like partitions
without vital connection. Mr. Casaubon’s studies, Will observed, had
always been of too broad a kind for that, and he had perhaps never felt
any such sudden effect, but for himself he confessed that Rome had
given him quite a new sense of history as a whole: the fragments
stimulated his imagination and made him constructive. Then
occasionally, but not too often, he appealed to Dorothea, and discussed
what she said, as if her sentiment were an item to be considered in the
final judgment even of the Madonna di Foligno or the Laocoon. A sense
of contributing to form the world’s opinion makes conversation
particularly cheerful; and Mr. Casaubon too was not without his pride
in his young wife, who spoke better than most women, as indeed he had
perceived in choosing her.
Since things were going on so pleasantly, Mr. Casaubon’s statement that
his labors in the Library would be suspended for a couple of days, and
that after a brief renewal he should have no further reason for staying
in Rome, encouraged Will to urge that Mrs. Casaubon should not go away
without seeing a studio or two. Would not Mr. Casaubon take her? That
sort of thing ought not to be missed: it was quite special: it was a
form of life that grew like a small fresh vegetation with its
population of insects on huge fossils. Will would be happy to conduct
them—not to anything wearisome, only to a few examples.
Mr. Casaubon, seeing Dorothea look earnestly towards him, could not but
ask her if she would be interested in such visits: he was now at her
service during the whole day; and it was agreed that Will should come
on the morrow and drive with them.
Will could not omit Thorwaldsen, a living celebrity about whom even Mr.
Casaubon inquired, but before the day was far advanced he led the way
to the studio of his friend Adolf Naumann, whom he mentioned as one of
the chief renovators of Christian art, one of those who had not only
revived but expanded that grand conception of supreme events as
mysteries at which the successive ages were spectators, and in relation
to which the great souls of all periods became as it were
contemporaries. Will added that he had made himself Naumann’s pupil for
the nonce.
“I have been making some oil-sketches under him,” said Will. “I hate
copying. I must put something of my own in. Naumann has been painting
the Saints drawing the Car of the Church, and I have been making a
sketch of Marlowe’s Tamburlaine Driving the Conquered Kings in his
Chariot. I am not so ecclesiastical as Naumann, and I sometimes twit
him with his excess of meaning. But this time I mean to outdo him in
breadth of intention. I take Tamburlaine in his chariot for the
tremendous course of the world’s physical history lashing on the
harnessed dynasties. In my opinion, that is a good mythical
interpretation.” Will here looked at Mr. Casaubon, who received this
offhand treatment of symbolism very uneasily, and bowed with a neutral
air.
“The sketch must be very grand, if it conveys so much,” said Dorothea.
“I should need some explanation even of the meaning you give. Do you
intend Tamburlaine to represent earthquakes and volcanoes?”
“Oh yes,” said Will, laughing, “and migrations of races and clearings
of forests—and America and the steam-engine. Everything you can
imagine!”
“What a difficult kind of shorthand!” said Dorothea, smiling towards
her husband. “It would require all your knowledge to be able to read
it.”
Mr. Casaubon blinked furtively at Will. He had a suspicion that he was
being laughed at. But it was not possible to include Dorothea in the
suspicion.
They found Naumann painting industriously, but no model was present;
his pictures were advantageously arranged, and his own plain vivacious
person set off by a dove-colored blouse and a maroon velvet cap, so
that everything was as fortunate as if he had expected the beautiful
young English lady exactly at that time.
The painter in his confident English gave little dissertations on his
finished and unfinished subjects, seeming to observe Mr. Casaubon as
much as he did Dorothea. Will burst in here and there with ardent words
of praise, marking out particular merits in his friend’s work; and
Dorothea felt that she was getting quite new notions as to the
significance of Madonnas seated under inexplicable canopied thrones
with the simple country as a background, and of saints with
architectural models in their hands, or knives accidentally wedged in
their skulls. Some things which had seemed monstrous to her were
gathering intelligibility and even a natural meaning: but all this was
apparently a branch of knowledge in which Mr. Casaubon had not
interested himself.
“I think I would rather feel that painting is beautiful than have to
read it as an enigma; but I should learn to understand these pictures
sooner than yours with the very wide meaning,” said Dorothea, speaking
to Will.
“Don’t speak of my painting before Naumann,” said Will. “He will tell
you, it is all _pfuscherei_, which is his most opprobrious word!”
“Is that true?” said Dorothea, turning her sincere eyes on Naumann, who
made a slight grimace and said—
“Oh, he does not mean it seriously with painting. His walk must be
_belles-lettres_. That is wi-ide.”
Naumann’s pronunciation of the vowel seemed to stretch the word
satirically. Will did not half like it, but managed to laugh: and Mr.
Casaubon, while he felt some disgust at the artist’s German accent,
began to entertain a little respect for his judicious severity.
The respect was not diminished when Naumann, after drawing Will aside
for a moment and looking, first at a large canvas, then at Mr.
Casaubon, came forward again and said—
“My friend Ladislaw thinks you will pardon me, sir, if I say that a
sketch of your head would be invaluable to me for the St. Thomas
Aquinas in my picture there. It is too much to ask; but I so seldom see
just what I want—the idealistic in the real.”
“You astonish me greatly, sir,” said Mr. Casaubon, his looks improved
with a glow of delight; “but if my poor physiognomy, which I have been
accustomed to regard as of the commonest order, can be of any use to
you in furnishing some traits for the angelical doctor, I shall feel
honored. That is to say, if the operation will not be a lengthy one;
and if Mrs. Casaubon will not object to the delay.”
As for Dorothea, nothing could have pleased her more, unless it had
been a miraculous voice pronouncing Mr. Casaubon the wisest and
worthiest among the sons of men. In that case her tottering faith would
have become firm again.
Naumann’s apparatus was at hand in wonderful completeness, and the
sketch went on at once as well as the conversation. Dorothea sat down
and subsided into calm silence, feeling happier than she had done for a
long while before. Every one about her seemed good, and she said to
herself that Rome, if she had only been less ignorant, would have been
full of beauty: its sadness would have been winged with hope. No nature
could be less suspicious than hers: when she was a child she believed
in the gratitude of wasps and the honorable susceptibility of sparrows,
and was proportionately indignant when their baseness was made
manifest.
The adroit artist was asking Mr. Casaubon questions about English
polities, which brought long answers, and, Will meanwhile had perched
himself on some steps in the background overlooking all.
Presently Naumann said—“Now if I could lay this by for half an hour and
take it up again—come and look, Ladislaw—I think it is perfect so far.”
Will vented those adjuring interjections which imply that admiration is
too strong for syntax; and Naumann said in a tone of piteous regret—
“Ah—now—if I could but have had more—but you have other engagements—I
could not ask it—or even to come again to-morrow.”
“Oh, let us stay!” said Dorothea. “We have nothing to do to-day except
go about, have we?” she added, looking entreatingly at Mr. Casaubon.