Chapter Chapter 3 · 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

personal kind. The inclinations which he had deliberately stated on the

2d of October he would think it enough to refer to by the mention of

that date; judging by the standard of his own memory, which was a

volume where a vide supra could serve instead of repetitions, and not

the ordinary long-used blotting-book which only tells of forgotten

writing. But in this case Mr. Casaubon’s confidence was not likely to

be falsified, for Dorothea heard and retained what he said with the

eager interest of a fresh young nature to which every variety in

experience is an epoch.

It was three o’clock in the beautiful breezy autumn day when Mr.

Casaubon drove off to his Rectory at Lowick, only five miles from

Tipton; and Dorothea, who had on her bonnet and shawl, hurried along

the shrubbery and across the park that she might wander through the

bordering wood with no other visible companionship than that of Monk,

the Great St. Bernard dog, who always took care of the young ladies in

their walks. There had risen before her the girl’s vision of a possible

future for herself to which she looked forward with trembling hope, and

she wanted to wander on in that visionary future without interruption.

She walked briskly in the brisk air, the color rose in her cheeks, and

her straw bonnet (which our contemporaries might look at with

conjectural curiosity as at an obsolete form of basket) fell a little

backward. She would perhaps be hardly characterized enough if it were

omitted that she wore her brown hair flatly braided and coiled behind

so as to expose the outline of her head in a daring manner at a time

when public feeling required the meagreness of nature to be

dissimulated by tall barricades of frizzed curls and bows, never

surpassed by any great race except the Feejeean. This was a trait of

Miss Brooke’s asceticism. But there was nothing of an ascetic’s

expression in her bright full eyes, as she looked before her, not

consciously seeing, but absorbing into the intensity of her mood, the

solemn glory of the afternoon with its long swathes of light between

the far-off rows of limes, whose shadows touched each other.

All people, young or old (that is, all people in those ante-reform

times), would have thought her an interesting object if they had

referred the glow in her eyes and cheeks to the newly awakened ordinary

images of young love: the illusions of Chloe about Strephon have been

sufficiently consecrated in poetry, as the pathetic loveliness of all

spontaneous trust ought to be. Miss Pippin adoring young Pumpkin, and

dreaming along endless vistas of unwearying companionship, was a little

drama which never tired our fathers and mothers, and had been put into

all costumes. Let but Pumpkin have a figure which would sustain the

disadvantages of the shortwaisted swallow-tail, and everybody felt it

not only natural but necessary to the perfection of womanhood, that a

sweet girl should be at once convinced of his virtue, his exceptional

ability, and above all, his perfect sincerity. But perhaps no persons

then living—certainly none in the neighborhood of Tipton—would have had

a sympathetic understanding for the dreams of a girl whose notions

about marriage took their color entirely from an exalted enthusiasm

about the ends of life, an enthusiasm which was lit chiefly by its own

fire, and included neither the niceties of the trousseau, the pattern

of plate, nor even the honors and sweet joys of the blooming matron.

It had now entered Dorothea’s mind that Mr. Casaubon might wish to make

her his wife, and the idea that he would do so touched her with a sort

of reverential gratitude. How good of him—nay, it would be almost as if

a winged messenger had suddenly stood beside her path and held out his

hand towards her! For a long while she had been oppressed by the

indefiniteness which hung in her mind, like a thick summer haze, over

all her desire to make her life greatly effective. What could she do,

what ought she to do?—she, hardly more than a budding woman, but yet

with an active conscience and a great mental need, not to be satisfied

by a girlish instruction comparable to the nibblings and judgments of a

discursive mouse. With some endowment of stupidity and conceit, she

might have thought that a Christian young lady of fortune should find

her ideal of life in village charities, patronage of the humbler

clergy, the perusal of “Female Scripture Characters,” unfolding the

private experience of Sara under the Old Dispensation, and Dorcas under

the New, and the care of her soul over her embroidery in her own

boudoir—with a background of prospective marriage to a man who, if less

strict than herself, as being involved in affairs religiously

inexplicable, might be prayed for and seasonably exhorted. From such

contentment poor Dorothea was shut out. The intensity of her religious

disposition, the coercion it exercised over her life, was but one

aspect of a nature altogether ardent, theoretic, and intellectually

consequent: and with such a nature struggling in the bands of a narrow

teaching, hemmed in by a social life which seemed nothing but a

labyrinth of petty courses, a walled-in maze of small paths that led no

whither, the outcome was sure to strike others as at once exaggeration

and inconsistency. The thing which seemed to her best, she wanted to

justify by the completest knowledge; and not to live in a pretended

admission of rules which were never acted on. Into this soul-hunger as

yet all her youthful passion was poured; the union which attracted her

was one that would deliver her from her girlish subjection to her own

ignorance, and give her the freedom of voluntary submission to a guide

who would take her along the grandest path.

“I should learn everything then,” she said to herself, still walking

quickly along the bridle road through the wood. “It would be my duty to

study that I might help him the better in his great works. There would

be nothing trivial about our lives. Every-day things with us would mean

the greatest things. It would be like marrying Pascal. I should learn

to see the truth by the same light as great men have seen it by. And

then I should know what to do, when I got older: I should see how it

was possible to lead a grand life here—now—in England. I don’t feel

sure about doing good in any way now: everything seems like going on a

mission to a people whose language I don’t know;—unless it were

building good cottages—there can be no doubt about that. Oh, I hope I

should be able to get the people well housed in Lowick! I will draw

plenty of plans while I have time.”

Dorothea checked herself suddenly with self-rebuke for the presumptuous

way in which she was reckoning on uncertain events, but she was spared

any inward effort to change the direction of her thoughts by the

appearance of a cantering horseman round a turning of the road. The

well-groomed chestnut horse and two beautiful setters could leave no

doubt that the rider was Sir James Chettam. He discerned Dorothea,

jumped off his horse at once, and, having delivered it to his groom,

advanced towards her with something white on his arm, at which the two

setters were barking in an excited manner.

“How delightful to meet you, Miss Brooke,” he said, raising his hat and

showing his sleekly waving blond hair. “It has hastened the pleasure I

was looking forward to.”

Miss Brooke was annoyed at the interruption. This amiable baronet,

really a suitable husband for Celia, exaggerated the necessity of

making himself agreeable to the elder sister. Even a prospective

brother-in-law may be an oppression if he will always be presupposing

too good an understanding with you, and agreeing with you even when you

contradict him. The thought that he had made the mistake of paying his

addresses to herself could not take shape: all her mental activity was

used up in persuasions of another kind. But he was positively obtrusive

at this moment, and his dimpled hands were quite disagreeable. Her

roused temper made her color deeply, as she returned his greeting with

some haughtiness.

Sir James interpreted the heightened color in the way most gratifying

to himself, and thought he never saw Miss Brooke looking so handsome.

“I have brought a little petitioner,” he said, “or rather, I have

brought him to see if he will be approved before his petition is

offered.” He showed the white object under his arm, which was a tiny

Maltese puppy, one of nature’s most naive toys.

“It is painful to me to see these creatures that are bred merely as

pets,” said Dorothea, whose opinion was forming itself that very moment

(as opinions will) under the heat of irritation.

“Oh, why?” said Sir James, as they walked forward.

“I believe all the petting that is given them does not make them happy.

They are too helpless: their lives are too frail. A weasel or a mouse

that gets its own living is more interesting. I like to think that the

animals about us have souls something like our own, and either carry on

their own little affairs or can be companions to us, like Monk here.

Those creatures are parasitic.”

“I am so glad I know that you do not like them,” said good Sir James.

“I should never keep them for myself, but ladies usually are fond of

these Maltese dogs. Here, John, take this dog, will you?”

The objectionable puppy, whose nose and eyes were equally black and

expressive, was thus got rid of, since Miss Brooke decided that it had

better not have been born. But she felt it necessary to explain.

“You must not judge of Celia’s feeling from mine. I think she likes

these small pets. She had a tiny terrier once, which she was very fond

of. It made me unhappy, because I was afraid of treading on it. I am

rather short-sighted.”

“You have your own opinion about everything, Miss Brooke, and it is

always a good opinion.”

What answer was possible to such stupid complimenting?

“Do you know, I envy you that,” Sir James said, as they continued

walking at the rather brisk pace set by Dorothea.

“I don’t quite understand what you mean.”

“Your power of forming an opinion. I can form an opinion of persons. I

know when I like people. But about other matters, do you know, I have

often a difficulty in deciding. One hears very sensible things said on

opposite sides.”

“Or that seem sensible. Perhaps we don’t always discriminate between

sense and nonsense.”

Dorothea felt that she was rather rude.

“Exactly,” said Sir James. “But you seem to have the power of

discrimination.”

“On the contrary, I am often unable to decide. But that is from

ignorance. The right conclusion is there all the same, though I am

unable to see it.”

“I think there are few who would see it more readily. Do you know,

Lovegood was telling me yesterday that you had the best notion in the

world of a plan for cottages—quite wonderful for a young lady, he

thought. You had a real _genus_, to use his expression. He said you

wanted Mr. Brooke to build a new set of cottages, but he seemed to

think it hardly probable that your uncle would consent. Do you know,

that is one of the things I wish to do—I mean, on my own estate. I

should be so glad to carry out that plan of yours, if you would let me

see it. Of course, it is sinking money; that is why people object to

it. Laborers can never pay rent to make it answer. But, after all, it

is worth doing.”

“Worth doing! yes, indeed,” said Dorothea, energetically, forgetting

her previous small vexations. “I think we deserve to be beaten out of

our beautiful houses with a scourge of small cords—all of us who let

tenants live in such sties as we see round us. Life in cottages might

be happier than ours, if they were real houses fit for human beings

from whom we expect duties and affections.”

“Will you show me your plan?”

“Yes, certainly. I dare say it is very faulty. But I have been

examining all the plans for cottages in Loudon’s book, and picked out

what seem the best things. Oh what a happiness it would be to set the

pattern about here! I think instead of Lazarus at the gate, we should

put the pigsty cottages outside the park-gate.”

Dorothea was in the best temper now. Sir James, as brother in-law,

building model cottages on his estate, and then, perhaps, others being

built at Lowick, and more and more elsewhere in imitation—it would be

as if the spirit of Oberlin had passed over the parishes to make the

life of poverty beautiful!

Sir James saw all the plans, and took one away to consult upon with

Lovegood. He also took away a complacent sense that he was making great

progress in Miss Brooke’s good opinion. The Maltese puppy was not

offered to Celia; an omission which Dorothea afterwards thought of with

surprise; but she blamed herself for it. She had been engrossing Sir

James. After all, it was a relief that there was no puppy to tread

upon.

Celia was present while the plans were being examined, and observed Sir

James’s illusion. “He thinks that Dodo cares about him, and she only

cares about her plans. Yet I am not certain that she would refuse him

if she thought he would let her manage everything and carry out all her

notions. And how very uncomfortable Sir James would be! I cannot bear

notions.”

It was Celia’s private luxury to indulge in this dislike. She dared not

confess it to her sister in any direct statement, for that would be

laying herself open to a demonstration that she was somehow or other at

war with all goodness. But on safe opportunities, she had an indirect

mode of making her negative wisdom tell upon Dorothea, and calling her

down from her rhapsodic mood by reminding her that people were staring,

not listening. Celia was not impulsive: what she had to say could wait,

and came from her always with the same quiet staccato evenness. When

people talked with energy and emphasis she watched their faces and

features merely. She never could understand how well-bred persons

consented to sing and open their mouths in the ridiculous manner

requisite for that vocal exercise.

It was not many days before Mr. Casaubon paid a morning visit, on which

he was invited again for the following week to dine and stay the night.

Thus Dorothea had three more conversations with him, and was convinced

that her first impressions had been just. He was all she had at first

imagined him to be: almost everything he had said seemed like a

specimen from a mine, or the inscription on the door of a museum which

might open on the treasures of past ages; and this trust in his mental

wealth was all the deeper and more effective on her inclination because

it was now obvious that his visits were made for her sake. This

accomplished man condescended to think of a young girl, and take the

pains to talk to her, not with absurd compliment, but with an appeal to

her understanding, and sometimes with instructive correction. What

delightful companionship! Mr. Casaubon seemed even unconscious that

trivialities existed, and never handed round that small-talk of heavy

men which is as acceptable as stale bride-cake brought forth with an

odor of cupboard. He talked of what he was interested in, or else he

was silent and bowed with sad civility. To Dorothea this was adorable

genuineness, and religious abstinence from that artificiality which

uses up the soul in the efforts of pretence. For she looked as

reverently at Mr. Casaubon’s religious elevation above herself as she

did at his intellect and learning. He assented to her expressions of

devout feeling, and usually with an appropriate quotation; he allowed

himself to say that he had gone through some spiritual conflicts in his

youth; in short, Dorothea saw that here she might reckon on

understanding, sympathy, and guidance. On one—only one—of her favorite

themes she was disappointed. Mr. Casaubon apparently did not care about

building cottages, and diverted the talk to the extremely narrow

accommodation which was to be had in the dwellings of the ancient

Egyptians, as if to check a too high standard. After he was gone,

Dorothea dwelt with some agitation on this indifference of his; and her

mind was much exercised with arguments drawn from the varying

conditions of climate which modify human needs, and from the admitted

wickedness of pagan despots. Should she not urge these arguments on Mr.

Casaubon when he came again? But further reflection told her that she

was presumptuous in demanding his attention to such a subject; he would

not disapprove of her occupying herself with it in leisure moments, as

other women expected to occupy themselves with their dress and

embroidery—would not forbid it when—Dorothea felt rather ashamed as she

detected herself in these speculations. But her uncle had been invited

to go to Lowick to stay a couple of days: was it reasonable to suppose

that Mr. Casaubon delighted in Mr. Brooke’s society for its own sake,

either with or without documents?

Meanwhile that little disappointment made her delight the more in Sir

James Chettam’s readiness to set on foot the desired improvements. He

came much oftener than Mr. Casaubon, and Dorothea ceased to find him

disagreeable since he showed himself so entirely in earnest; for he had

already entered with much practical ability into Lovegood’s estimates,

and was charmingly docile. She proposed to build a couple of cottages,

and transfer two families from their old cabins, which could then be

pulled down, so that new ones could be built on the old sites. Sir

James said “Exactly,” and she bore the word remarkably well.

Certainly these men who had so few spontaneous ideas might be very

useful members of society under good feminine direction, if they were

fortunate in choosing their sisters-in-law! It is difficult to say

whether there was or was not a little wilfulness in her continuing

blind to the possibility that another sort of choice was in question in

relation to her. But her life was just now full of hope and action: she

was not only thinking of her plans, but getting down learned books from

the library and reading many things hastily (that she might be a little

less ignorant in talking to Mr. Casaubon), all the while being visited

with conscientious questionings whether she were not exalting these

poor doings above measure and contemplating them with that

self-satisfaction which was the last doom of ignorance and folly.