Middlemarch
taking her sister’s face between her hands, and looking at her half
anxiously. Celia’s marriage seemed more serious than it used to do.
“It was only three days ago,” said Celia. “And Lady Chettam is very
kind.”
“And you are very happy?”
“Yes. We are not going to be married yet. Because every thing is to be
got ready. And I don’t want to be married so very soon, because I think
it is nice to be engaged. And we shall be married all our lives after.”
“I do believe you could not marry better, Kitty. Sir James is a good,
honorable man,” said Dorothea, warmly.
“He has gone on with the cottages, Dodo. He will tell you about them
when he comes. Shall you be glad to see him?”
“Of course I shall. How can you ask me?”
“Only I was afraid you would be getting so learned,” said Celia,
regarding Mr. Casaubon’s learning as a kind of damp which might in due
time saturate a neighboring body.
CHAPTER XXIX.
I found that no genius in another could please me. My unfortunate
paradoxes had entirely dried up that source of comfort.—GOLDSMITH.
One morning, some weeks after her arrival at Lowick, Dorothea—but why
always Dorothea? Was her point of view the only possible one with
regard to this marriage? I protest against all our interest, all our
effort at understanding being given to the young skins that look
blooming in spite of trouble; for these too will get faded, and will
know the older and more eating griefs which we are helping to neglect.
In spite of the blinking eyes and white moles objectionable to Celia,
and the want of muscular curve which was morally painful to Sir James,
Mr. Casaubon had an intense consciousness within him, and was
spiritually a-hungered like the rest of us. He had done nothing
exceptional in marrying—nothing but what society sanctions, and
considers an occasion for wreaths and bouquets. It had occurred to him
that he must not any longer defer his intention of matrimony, and he
had reflected that in taking a wife, a man of good position should
expect and carefully choose a blooming young lady—the younger the
better, because more educable and submissive—of a rank equal to his
own, of religious principles, virtuous disposition, and good
understanding. On such a young lady he would make handsome settlements,
and he would neglect no arrangement for her happiness: in return, he
should receive family pleasures and leave behind him that copy of
himself which seemed so urgently required of a man—to the sonneteers of
the sixteenth century. Times had altered since then, and no sonneteer
had insisted on Mr. Casaubon’s leaving a copy of himself; moreover, he
had not yet succeeded in issuing copies of his mythological key; but he
had always intended to acquit himself by marriage, and the sense that
he was fast leaving the years behind him, that the world was getting
dimmer and that he felt lonely, was a reason to him for losing no more
time in overtaking domestic delights before they too were left behind
by the years.
And when he had seen Dorothea he believed that he had found even more
than he demanded: she might really be such a helpmate to him as would
enable him to dispense with a hired secretary, an aid which Mr.
Casaubon had never yet employed and had a suspicious dread of. (Mr.
Casaubon was nervously conscious that he was expected to manifest a
powerful mind.) Providence, in its kindness, had supplied him with the
wife he needed. A wife, a modest young lady, with the purely
appreciative, unambitious abilities of her sex, is sure to think her
husband’s mind powerful. Whether Providence had taken equal care of
Miss Brooke in presenting her with Mr. Casaubon was an idea which could
hardly occur to him. Society never made the preposterous demand that a
man should think as much about his own qualifications for making a
charming girl happy as he thinks of hers for making himself happy. As
if a man could choose not only his wife but his wife’s husband! Or as
if he were bound to provide charms for his posterity in his own
person!— When Dorothea accepted him with effusion, that was only
natural; and Mr. Casaubon believed that his happiness was going to
begin.
He had not had much foretaste of happiness in his previous life. To
know intense joy without a strong bodily frame, one must have an
enthusiastic soul. Mr. Casaubon had never had a strong bodily frame,
and his soul was sensitive without being enthusiastic: it was too
languid to thrill out of self-consciousness into passionate delight; it
went on fluttering in the swampy ground where it was hatched, thinking
of its wings and never flying. His experience was of that pitiable kind
which shrinks from pity, and fears most of all that it should be known:
it was that proud narrow sensitiveness which has not mass enough to
spare for transformation into sympathy, and quivers thread-like in
small currents of self-preoccupation or at best of an egoistic
scrupulosity. And Mr. Casaubon had many scruples: he was capable of a
severe self-restraint; he was resolute in being a man of honor
according to the code; he would be unimpeachable by any recognized
opinion. In conduct these ends had been attained; but the difficulty of
making his Key to all Mythologies unimpeachable weighed like lead upon
his mind; and the pamphlets—or “Parerga” as he called them—by which he
tested his public and deposited small monumental records of his march,
were far from having been seen in all their significance. He suspected
the Archdeacon of not having read them; he was in painful doubt as to
what was really thought of them by the leading minds of Brasenose, and
bitterly convinced that his old acquaintance Carp had been the writer
of that depreciatory recension which was kept locked in a small drawer
of Mr. Casaubon’s desk, and also in a dark closet of his verbal memory.
These were heavy impressions to struggle against, and brought that
melancholy embitterment which is the consequence of all excessive
claim: even his religious faith wavered with his wavering trust in his
own authorship, and the consolations of the Christian hope in
immortality seemed to lean on the immortality of the still unwritten
Key to all Mythologies. For my part I am very sorry for him. It is an
uneasy lot at best, to be what we call highly taught and yet not to
enjoy: to be present at this great spectacle of life and never to be
liberated from a small hungry shivering self—never to be fully
possessed by the glory we behold, never to have our consciousness
rapturously transformed into the vividness of a thought, the ardor of a
passion, the energy of an action, but always to be scholarly and
uninspired, ambitious and timid, scrupulous and dim-sighted. Becoming a
dean or even a bishop would make little difference, I fear, to Mr.
Casaubon’s uneasiness. Doubtless some ancient Greek has observed that
behind the big mask and the speaking-trumpet, there must always be our
poor little eyes peeping as usual and our timorous lips more or less
under anxious control.
To this mental estate mapped out a quarter of a century before, to
sensibilities thus fenced in, Mr. Casaubon had thought of annexing
happiness with a lovely young bride; but even before marriage, as we
have seen, he found himself under a new depression in the consciousness
that the new bliss was not blissful to him. Inclination yearned back to
its old, easier custom. And the deeper he went in domesticity the more
did the sense of acquitting himself and acting with propriety
predominate over any other satisfaction. Marriage, like religion and
erudition, nay, like authorship itself, was fated to become an outward
requirement, and Edward Casaubon was bent on fulfilling unimpeachably
all requirements. Even drawing Dorothea into use in his study,
according to his own intention before marriage, was an effort which he
was always tempted to defer, and but for her pleading insistence it
might never have begun. But she had succeeded in making it a matter of
course that she should take her place at an early hour in the library
and have work either of reading aloud or copying assigned her. The work
had been easier to define because Mr. Casaubon had adopted an immediate
intention: there was to be a new Parergon, a small monograph on some
lately traced indications concerning the Egyptian mysteries whereby
certain assertions of Warburton’s could be corrected. References were
extensive even here, but not altogether shoreless; and sentences were
actually to be written in the shape wherein they would be scanned by
Brasenose and a less formidable posterity. These minor monumental
productions were always exciting to Mr. Casaubon; digestion was made
difficult by the interference of citations, or by the rivalry of
dialectical phrases ringing against each other in his brain. And from
the first there was to be a Latin dedication about which everything was
uncertain except that it was not to be addressed to Carp: it was a
poisonous regret to Mr. Casaubon that he had once addressed a
dedication to Carp in which he had numbered that member of the animal
kingdom among the _viros nullo ævo perituros_, a mistake which would
infallibly lay the dedicator open to ridicule in the next age, and
might even be chuckled over by Pike and Tench in the present.
Thus Mr. Casaubon was in one of his busiest epochs, and as I began to
say a little while ago, Dorothea joined him early in the library where
he had breakfasted alone. Celia at this time was on a second visit to
Lowick, probably the last before her marriage, and was in the
drawing-room expecting Sir James.
Dorothea had learned to read the signs of her husband’s mood, and she
saw that the morning had become more foggy there during the last hour.
She was going silently to her desk when he said, in that distant tone
which implied that he was discharging a disagreeable duty—
“Dorothea, here is a letter for you, which was enclosed in one
addressed to me.”
It was a letter of two pages, and she immediately looked at the
signature.
“Mr. Ladislaw! What can he have to say to me?” she exclaimed, in a tone
of pleased surprise. “But,” she added, looking at Mr. Casaubon, “I can
imagine what he has written to you about.”
“You can, if you please, read the letter,” said Mr. Casaubon, severely
pointing to it with his pen, and not looking at her. “But I may as well
say beforehand, that I must decline the proposal it contains to pay a
visit here. I trust I may be excused for desiring an interval of
complete freedom from such distractions as have been hitherto
inevitable, and especially from guests whose desultory vivacity makes
their presence a fatigue.”
There had been no clashing of temper between Dorothea and her husband
since that little explosion in Rome, which had left such strong traces
in her mind that it had been easier ever since to quell emotion than to
incur the consequence of venting it. But this ill-tempered anticipation
that she could desire visits which might be disagreeable to her
husband, this gratuitous defence of himself against selfish complaint
on her part, was too sharp a sting to be meditated on until after it
had been resented. Dorothea had thought that she could have been
patient with John Milton, but she had never imagined him behaving in
this way; and for a moment Mr. Casaubon seemed to be stupidly
undiscerning and odiously unjust. Pity, that “new-born babe” which was
by-and-by to rule many a storm within her, did not “stride the blast”
on this occasion. With her first words, uttered in a tone that shook
him, she startled Mr. Casaubon into looking at her, and meeting the
flash of her eyes.
“Why do you attribute to me a wish for anything that would annoy you?
You speak to me as if I were something you had to contend against. Wait