Middlemarch
religious for family comfort. Notions and scruples were like spilt
needles, making one afraid of treading, or sitting down, or even
eating.
When Miss Brooke was at the tea-table, Sir James came to sit down by
her, not having felt her mode of answering him at all offensive. Why
should he? He thought it probable that Miss Brooke liked him, and
manners must be very marked indeed before they cease to be interpreted
by preconceptions either confident or distrustful. She was thoroughly
charming to him, but of course he theorized a little about his
attachment. He was made of excellent human dough, and had the rare
merit of knowing that his talents, even if let loose, would not set the
smallest stream in the county on fire: hence he liked the prospect of a
wife to whom he could say, “What shall we do?” about this or that; who
could help her husband out with reasons, and would also have the
property qualification for doing so. As to the excessive religiousness
alleged against Miss Brooke, he had a very indefinite notion of what it
consisted in, and thought that it would die out with marriage. In
short, he felt himself to be in love in the right place, and was ready
to endure a great deal of predominance, which, after all, a man could
always put down when he liked. Sir James had no idea that he should
ever like to put down the predominance of this handsome girl, in whose
cleverness he delighted. Why not? A man’s mind—what there is of it—has
always the advantage of being masculine,—as the smallest birch-tree is
of a higher kind than the most soaring palm,—and even his ignorance is
of a sounder quality. Sir James might not have originated this
estimate; but a kind Providence furnishes the limpest personality with
a little gum or starch in the form of tradition.
“Let me hope that you will rescind that resolution about the horse,
Miss Brooke,” said the persevering admirer. “I assure you, riding is
the most healthy of exercises.”
“I am aware of it,” said Dorothea, coldly. “I think it would do Celia
good—if she would take to it.”
“But you are such a perfect horsewoman.”
“Excuse me; I have had very little practice, and I should be easily
thrown.”
“Then that is a reason for more practice. Every lady ought to be a
perfect horsewoman, that she may accompany her husband.”
“You see how widely we differ, Sir James. I have made up my mind that I
ought not to be a perfect horsewoman, and so I should never correspond
to your pattern of a lady.” Dorothea looked straight before her, and
spoke with cold brusquerie, very much with the air of a handsome boy,
in amusing contrast with the solicitous amiability of her admirer.
“I should like to know your reasons for this cruel resolution. It is
not possible that you should think horsemanship wrong.”
“It is quite possible that I should think it wrong for me.”
“Oh, why?” said Sir James, in a tender tone of remonstrance.
Mr. Casaubon had come up to the table, teacup in hand, and was
listening.
“We must not inquire too curiously into motives,” he interposed, in his
measured way. “Miss Brooke knows that they are apt to become feeble in
the utterance: the aroma is mixed with the grosser air. We must keep
the germinating grain away from the light.”
Dorothea colored with pleasure, and looked up gratefully to the
speaker. Here was a man who could understand the higher inward life,
and with whom there could be some spiritual communion; nay, who could
illuminate principle with the widest knowledge: a man whose learning
almost amounted to a proof of whatever he believed!
Dorothea’s inferences may seem large; but really life could never have
gone on at any period but for this liberal allowance of conclusions,
which has facilitated marriage under the difficulties of civilization.
Has any one ever pinched into its pilulous smallness the cobweb of
pre-matrimonial acquaintanceship?
“Certainly,” said good Sir James. “Miss Brooke shall not be urged to
tell reasons she would rather be silent upon. I am sure her reasons
would do her honor.”
He was not in the least jealous of the interest with which Dorothea had
looked up at Mr. Casaubon: it never occurred to him that a girl to whom
he was meditating an offer of marriage could care for a dried bookworm
towards fifty, except, indeed, in a religious sort of way, as for a
clergyman of some distinction.
However, since Miss Brooke had become engaged in a conversation with
Mr. Casaubon about the Vaudois clergy, Sir James betook himself to
Celia, and talked to her about her sister; spoke of a house in town,
and asked whether Miss Brooke disliked London. Away from her sister,
Celia talked quite easily, and Sir James said to himself that the
second Miss Brooke was certainly very agreeable as well as pretty,
though not, as some people pretended, more clever and sensible than the
elder sister. He felt that he had chosen the one who was in all
respects the superior; and a man naturally likes to look forward to
having the best. He would be the very Mawworm of bachelors who
pretended not to expect it.
CHAPTER III.
“Say, goddess, what ensued, when Raphael,
The affable archangel . . .
Eve
The story heard attentive, and was filled
With admiration, and deep muse, to hear
Of things so high and strange.”
—_Paradise Lost_, B. vii.
If it had really occurred to Mr. Casaubon to think of Miss Brooke as a
suitable wife for him, the reasons that might induce her to accept him
were already planted in her mind, and by the evening of the next day
the reasons had budded and bloomed. For they had had a long
conversation in the morning, while Celia, who did not like the company
of Mr. Casaubon’s moles and sallowness, had escaped to the vicarage to
play with the curate’s ill-shod but merry children.
Dorothea by this time had looked deep into the ungauged reservoir of
Mr. Casaubon’s mind, seeing reflected there in vague labyrinthine
extension every quality she herself brought; had opened much of her own
experience to him, and had understood from him the scope of his great
work, also of attractively labyrinthine extent. For he had been as
instructive as Milton’s “affable archangel;” and with something of the
archangelic manner he told her how he had undertaken to show (what
indeed had been attempted before, but not with that thoroughness,
justice of comparison, and effectiveness of arrangement at which Mr.
Casaubon aimed) that all the mythical systems or erratic mythical
fragments in the world were corruptions of a tradition originally
revealed. Having once mastered the true position and taken a firm
footing there, the vast field of mythical constructions became
intelligible, nay, luminous with the reflected light of
correspondences. But to gather in this great harvest of truth was no
light or speedy work. His notes already made a formidable range of
volumes, but the crowning task would be to condense these voluminous
still-accumulating results and bring them, like the earlier vintage of
Hippocratic books, to fit a little shelf. In explaining this to
Dorothea, Mr. Casaubon expressed himself nearly as he would have done
to a fellow-student, for he had not two styles of talking at command:
it is true that when he used a Greek or Latin phrase he always gave the
English with scrupulous care, but he would probably have done this in
any case. A learned provincial clergyman is accustomed to think of his
acquaintances as of “lords, knyghtes, and other noble and worthi men,
that conne Latyn but lytille.”
Dorothea was altogether captivated by the wide embrace of this
conception. Here was something beyond the shallows of ladies’ school
literature: here was a living Bossuet, whose work would reconcile
complete knowledge with devoted piety; here was a modern Augustine who
united the glories of doctor and saint.
The sanctity seemed no less clearly marked than the learning, for when
Dorothea was impelled to open her mind on certain themes which she
could speak of to no one whom she had before seen at Tipton, especially
on the secondary importance of ecclesiastical forms and articles of
belief compared with that spiritual religion, that submergence of self
in communion with Divine perfection which seemed to her to be expressed
in the best Christian books of widely distant ages, she found in Mr.
Casaubon a listener who understood her at once, who could assure her of
his own agreement with that view when duly tempered with wise
conformity, and could mention historical examples before unknown to
her.
“He thinks with me,” said Dorothea to herself, “or rather, he thinks a
whole world of which my thought is but a poor twopenny mirror. And his
feelings too, his whole experience—what a lake compared with my little
pool!”
Miss Brooke argued from words and dispositions not less unhesitatingly
than other young ladies of her age. Signs are small measurable things,
but interpretations are illimitable, and in girls of sweet, ardent
nature, every sign is apt to conjure up wonder, hope, belief, vast as a
sky, and colored by a diffused thimbleful of matter in the shape of
knowledge. They are not always too grossly deceived; for Sinbad himself
may have fallen by good-luck on a true description, and wrong reasoning
sometimes lands poor mortals in right conclusions: starting a long way
off the true point, and proceeding by loops and zigzags, we now and
then arrive just where we ought to be. Because Miss Brooke was hasty in
her trust, it is not therefore clear that Mr. Casaubon was unworthy of
it.
He stayed a little longer than he had intended, on a slight pressure of
invitation from Mr. Brooke, who offered no bait except his own
documents on machine-breaking and rick-burning. Mr. Casaubon was called
into the library to look at these in a heap, while his host picked up
first one and then the other to read aloud from in a skipping and
uncertain way, passing from one unfinished passage to another with a
“Yes, now, but here!” and finally pushing them all aside to open the
journal of his youthful Continental travels.
“Look here—here is all about Greece. Rhamnus, the ruins of Rhamnus—you
are a great Grecian, now. I don’t know whether you have given much
study to the topography. I spent no end of time in making out these
things—Helicon, now. Here, now!—‘We started the next morning for
Parnassus, the double-peaked Parnassus.’ All this volume is about
Greece, you know,” Mr. Brooke wound up, rubbing his thumb transversely
along the edges of the leaves as he held the book forward.
Mr. Casaubon made a dignified though somewhat sad audience; bowed in
the right place, and avoided looking at anything documentary as far as
possible, without showing disregard or impatience; mindful that this
desultoriness was associated with the institutions of the country, and
that the man who took him on this severe mental scamper was not only an
amiable host, but a landholder and custos rotulorum. Was his endurance
aided also by the reflection that Mr. Brooke was the uncle of Dorothea?
Certainly he seemed more and more bent on making her talk to him, on
drawing her out, as Celia remarked to herself; and in looking at her
his face was often lit up by a smile like pale wintry sunshine. Before
he left the next morning, while taking a pleasant walk with Miss Brooke
along the gravelled terrace, he had mentioned to her that he felt the
disadvantage of loneliness, the need of that cheerful companionship
with which the presence of youth can lighten or vary the serious toils
of maturity. And he delivered this statement with as much careful
precision as if he had been a diplomatic envoy whose words would be
attended with results. Indeed, Mr. Casaubon was not used to expect that
he should have to repeat or revise his communications of a practical or