Middlemarch
“It would be a pity not to make the head as good as possible.”
“I am at your service, sir, in the matter,” said Mr. Casaubon, with
polite condescension. “Having given up the interior of my head to
idleness, it is as well that the exterior should work in this way.”
“You are unspeakably good—now I am happy!” said Naumann, and then went
on in German to Will, pointing here and there to the sketch as if he
were considering that. Putting it aside for a moment, he looked round
vaguely, as if seeking some occupation for his visitors, and afterwards
turning to Mr. Casaubon, said—
“Perhaps the beautiful bride, the gracious lady, would not be unwilling
to let me fill up the time by trying to make a slight sketch of
her—not, of course, as you see, for that picture—only as a single
study.”
Mr. Casaubon, bowing, doubted not that Mrs. Casaubon would oblige him,
and Dorothea said, at once, “Where shall I put myself?”
Naumann was all apologies in asking her to stand, and allow him to
adjust her attitude, to which she submitted without any of the affected
airs and laughs frequently thought necessary on such occasions, when
the painter said, “It is as Santa Clara that I want you to
stand—leaning so, with your cheek against your hand—so—looking at that
stool, please, so!”
Will was divided between the inclination to fall at the Saint’s feet
and kiss her robe, and the temptation to knock Naumann down while he
was adjusting her arm. All this was impudence and desecration, and he
repented that he had brought her.
The artist was diligent, and Will recovering himself moved about and
occupied Mr. Casaubon as ingeniously as he could; but he did not in the
end prevent the time from seeming long to that gentleman, as was clear
from his expressing a fear that Mrs. Casaubon would be tired. Naumann
took the hint and said—
“Now, sir, if you can oblige me again; I will release the lady-wife.”
So Mr. Casaubon’s patience held out further, and when after all it
turned out that the head of Saint Thomas Aquinas would be more perfect
if another sitting could be had, it was granted for the morrow. On the
morrow Santa Clara too was retouched more than once. The result of all
was so far from displeasing to Mr. Casaubon, that he arranged for the
purchase of the picture in which Saint Thomas Aquinas sat among the
doctors of the Church in a disputation too abstract to be represented,
but listened to with more or less attention by an audience above. The
Santa Clara, which was spoken of in the second place, Naumann declared
himself to be dissatisfied with—he could not, in conscience, engage to
make a worthy picture of it; so about the Santa Clara the arrangement
was conditional.
I will not dwell on Naumann’s jokes at the expense of Mr. Casaubon that
evening, or on his dithyrambs about Dorothea’s charm, in all which Will
joined, but with a difference. No sooner did Naumann mention any detail
of Dorothea’s beauty, than Will got exasperated at his presumption:
there was grossness in his choice of the most ordinary words, and what
business had he to talk of her lips? She was not a woman to be spoken
of as other women were. Will could not say just what he thought, but he
became irritable. And yet, when after some resistance he had consented
to take the Casaubons to his friend’s studio, he had been allured by
the gratification of his pride in being the person who could grant
Naumann such an opportunity of studying her loveliness—or rather her
divineness, for the ordinary phrases which might apply to mere bodily
prettiness were not applicable to her. (Certainly all Tipton and its
neighborhood, as well as Dorothea herself, would have been surprised at
her beauty being made so much of. In that part of the world Miss Brooke
had been only a “fine young woman.”)
“Oblige me by letting the subject drop, Naumann. Mrs. Casaubon is not
to be talked of as if she were a model,” said Will. Naumann stared at
him.
“Schön! I will talk of my Aquinas. The head is not a bad type, after
all. I dare say the great scholastic himself would have been flattered
to have his portrait asked for. Nothing like these starchy doctors for
vanity! It was as I thought: he cared much less for her portrait than
his own.”
“He’s a cursed white-blooded pedantic coxcomb,” said Will, with
gnashing impetuosity. His obligations to Mr. Casaubon were not known to
his hearer, but Will himself was thinking of them, and wishing that he
could discharge them all by a check.
Naumann gave a shrug and said, “It is good they go away soon, my dear.
They are spoiling your fine temper.”
All Will’s hope and contrivance were now concentrated on seeing
Dorothea when she was alone. He only wanted her to take more emphatic
notice of him; he only wanted to be something more special in her
remembrance than he could yet believe himself likely to be. He was
rather impatient under that open ardent good-will, which he saw was her
usual state of feeling. The remote worship of a woman throned out of
their reach plays a great part in men’s lives, but in most cases the
worshipper longs for some queenly recognition, some approving sign by
which his soul’s sovereign may cheer him without descending from her
high place. That was precisely what Will wanted. But there were plenty
of contradictions in his imaginative demands. It was beautiful to see
how Dorothea’s eyes turned with wifely anxiety and beseeching to Mr.
Casaubon: she would have lost some of her halo if she had been without
that duteous preoccupation; and yet at the next moment the husband’s
sandy absorption of such nectar was too intolerable; and Will’s longing
to say damaging things about him was perhaps not the less tormenting
because he felt the strongest reasons for restraining it.
Will had not been invited to dine the next day. Hence he persuaded
himself that he was bound to call, and that the only eligible time was
the middle of the day, when Mr. Casaubon would not be at home.
Dorothea, who had not been made aware that her former reception of Will
had displeased her husband, had no hesitation about seeing him,
especially as he might be come to pay a farewell visit. When he entered
she was looking at some cameos which she had been buying for Celia. She
greeted Will as if his visit were quite a matter of course, and said at
once, having a cameo bracelet in her hand—
“I am so glad you are come. Perhaps you understand all about cameos,
and can tell me if these are really good. I wished to have you with us
in choosing them, but Mr. Casaubon objected: he thought there was not
time. He will finish his work to-morrow, and we shall go away in three
days. I have been uneasy about these cameos. Pray sit down and look at
them.”
“I am not particularly knowing, but there can be no great mistake about
these little Homeric bits: they are exquisitely neat. And the color is
fine: it will just suit you.”
“Oh, they are for my sister, who has quite a different complexion. You
saw her with me at Lowick: she is light-haired and very pretty—at least
I think so. We were never so long away from each other in our lives
before. She is a great pet and never was naughty in her life. I found
out before I came away that she wanted me to buy her some cameos, and I
should be sorry for them not to be good—after their kind.” Dorothea
added the last words with a smile.
“You seem not to care about cameos,” said Will, seating himself at some
distance from her, and observing her while she closed the cases.
“No, frankly, I don’t think them a great object in life,” said
Dorothea.
“I fear you are a heretic about art generally. How is that? I should
have expected you to be very sensitive to the beautiful everywhere.”
“I suppose I am dull about many things,” said Dorothea, simply. “I
should like to make life beautiful—I mean everybody’s life. And then
all this immense expense of art, that seems somehow to lie outside life
and make it no better for the world, pains one. It spoils my enjoyment
of anything when I am made to think that most people are shut out from
it.”
“I call that the fanaticism of sympathy,” said Will, impetuously. “You
might say the same of landscape, of poetry, of all refinement. If you
carried it out you ought to be miserable in your own goodness, and turn
evil that you might have no advantage over others. The best piety is to
enjoy—when you can. You are doing the most then to save the earth’s
character as an agreeable planet. And enjoyment radiates. It is of no
use to try and take care of all the world; that is being taken care of
when you feel delight—in art or in anything else. Would you turn all
the youth of the world into a tragic chorus, wailing and moralizing
over misery? I suspect that you have some false belief in the virtues
of misery, and want to make your life a martyrdom.” Will had gone
further than he intended, and checked himself. But Dorothea’s thought
was not taking just the same direction as his own, and she answered
without any special emotion—
“Indeed you mistake me. I am not a sad, melancholy creature. I am never
unhappy long together. I am angry and naughty—not like Celia: I have a
great outburst, and then all seems glorious again. I cannot help
believing in glorious things in a blind sort of way. I should be quite
willing to enjoy the art here, but there is so much that I don’t know
the reason of—so much that seems to me a consecration of ugliness
rather than beauty. The painting and sculpture may be wonderful, but
the feeling is often low and brutal, and sometimes even ridiculous.
Here and there I see what takes me at once as noble—something that I
might compare with the Alban Mountains or the sunset from the Pincian
Hill; but that makes it the greater pity that there is so little of the
best kind among all that mass of things over which men have toiled so.”
“Of course there is always a great deal of poor work: the rarer things
want that soil to grow in.”
“Oh dear,” said Dorothea, taking up that thought into the chief current
of her anxiety; “I see it must be very difficult to do anything good. I
have often felt since I have been in Rome that most of our lives would
look much uglier and more bungling than the pictures, if they could be
put on the wall.”
Dorothea parted her lips again as if she were going to say more, but
changed her mind and paused.
“You are too young—it is an anachronism for you to have such thoughts,”
said Will, energetically, with a quick shake of the head habitual to
him. “You talk as if you had never known any youth. It is monstrous—as
if you had had a vision of Hades in your childhood, like the boy in the
legend. You have been brought up in some of those horrible notions that
choose the sweetest women to devour—like Minotaurs. And now you will go
and be shut up in that stone prison at Lowick: you will be buried
alive. It makes me savage to think of it! I would rather never have
seen you than think of you with such a prospect.”
Will again feared that he had gone too far; but the meaning we attach
to words depends on our feeling, and his tone of angry regret had so
much kindness in it for Dorothea’s heart, which had always been giving
out ardor and had never been fed with much from the living beings
around her, that she felt a new sense of gratitude and answered with a
gentle smile—
“It is very good of you to be anxious about me. It is because you did
not like Lowick yourself: you had set your heart on another kind of
life. But Lowick is my chosen home.”
The last sentence was spoken with an almost solemn cadence, and Will
did not know what to say, since it would not be useful for him to
embrace her slippers, and tell her that he would die for her: it was
clear that she required nothing of the sort; and they were both silent