Bab Bab 20 · Chapter XX

“A child forsaken, waking suddenly,

Whose gaze afeard on all things round doth rove,

And seeth only that it cannot see

The meeting eyes of love.”

Two hours later, Dorothea was seated in an inner room or boudoir of a

handsome apartment in the Via Sistina.

I am sorry to add that she was sobbing bitterly, with such abandonment

to this relief of an oppressed heart as a woman habitually controlled

by pride on her own account and thoughtfulness for others will

sometimes allow herself when she feels securely alone. And Mr. Casaubon

was certain to remain away for some time at the Vatican.

Yet Dorothea had no distinctly shapen grievance that she could state

even to herself; and in the midst of her confused thought and passion,

the mental act that was struggling forth into clearness was a

self-accusing cry that her feeling of desolation was the fault of her

own spiritual poverty. She had married the man of her choice, and with

the advantage over most girls that she had contemplated her marriage

chiefly as the beginning of new duties: from the very first she had

thought of Mr. Casaubon as having a mind so much above her own, that he

must often be claimed by studies which she could not entirely share;

moreover, after the brief narrow experience of her girlhood she was

beholding Rome, the city of visible history, where the past of a whole

hemisphere seems moving in funeral procession with strange ancestral

images and trophies gathered from afar.

But this stupendous fragmentariness heightened the dreamlike

strangeness of her bridal life. Dorothea had now been five weeks in

Rome, and in the kindly mornings when autumn and winter seemed to go

hand in hand like a happy aged couple one of whom would presently

survive in chiller loneliness, she had driven about at first with Mr.

Casaubon, but of late chiefly with Tantripp and their experienced

courier. She had been led through the best galleries, had been taken to

the chief points of view, had been shown the grandest ruins and the

most glorious churches, and she had ended by oftenest choosing to drive

out to the Campagna where she could feel alone with the earth and sky,

away-from the oppressive masquerade of ages, in which her own life too

seemed to become a masque with enigmatical costumes.

To those who have looked at Rome with the quickening power of a

knowledge which breathes a growing soul into all historic shapes, and

traces out the suppressed transitions which unite all contrasts, Rome

may still be the spiritual centre and interpreter of the world. But let

them conceive one more historical contrast: the gigantic broken

revelations of that Imperial and Papal city thrust abruptly on the

notions of a girl who had been brought up in English and Swiss

Puritanism, fed on meagre Protestant histories and on art chiefly of

the hand-screen sort; a girl whose ardent nature turned all her small

allowance of knowledge into principles, fusing her actions into their

mould, and whose quick emotions gave the most abstract things the

quality of a pleasure or a pain; a girl who had lately become a wife,

and from the enthusiastic acceptance of untried duty found herself

plunged in tumultuous preoccupation with her personal lot. The weight

of unintelligible Rome might lie easily on bright nymphs to whom it

formed a background for the brilliant picnic of Anglo-foreign society;

but Dorothea had no such defence against deep impressions. Ruins and

basilicas, palaces and colossi, set in the midst of a sordid present,

where all that was living and warm-blooded seemed sunk in the deep

degeneracy of a superstition divorced from reverence; the dimmer but

yet eager Titanic life gazing and struggling on walls and ceilings; the

long vistas of white forms whose marble eyes seemed to hold the

monotonous light of an alien world: all this vast wreck of ambitious

ideals, sensuous and spiritual, mixed confusedly with the signs of

breathing forgetfulness and degradation, at first jarred her as with an

electric shock, and then urged themselves on her with that ache

belonging to a glut of confused ideas which check the flow of emotion.

Forms both pale and glowing took possession of her young sense, and

fixed themselves in her memory even when she was not thinking of them,

preparing strange associations which remained through her after-years.

Our moods are apt to bring with them images which succeed each other

like the magic-lantern pictures of a doze; and in certain states of

dull forlornness Dorothea all her life continued to see the vastness of

St. Peter’s, the huge bronze canopy, the excited intention in the

attitudes and garments of the prophets and evangelists in the mosaics

above, and the red drapery which was being hung for Christmas spreading

itself everywhere like a disease of the retina.

Not that this inward amazement of Dorothea’s was anything very

exceptional: many souls in their young nudity are tumbled out among

incongruities and left to “find their feet” among them, while their

elders go about their business. Nor can I suppose that when Mrs.

Casaubon is discovered in a fit of weeping six weeks after her wedding,

the situation will be regarded as tragic. Some discouragement, some

faintness of heart at the new real future which replaces the imaginary,

is not unusual, and we do not expect people to be deeply moved by what

is not unusual. That element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of

frequency, has not yet wrought itself into the coarse emotion of

mankind; and perhaps our frames could hardly bear much of it. If we had

a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like

hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die

of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the

quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity.

However, Dorothea was crying, and if she had been required to state the

cause, she could only have done so in some such general words as I have

already used: to have been driven to be more particular would have been

like trying to give a history of the lights and shadows, for that new

real future which was replacing the imaginary drew its material from

the endless minutiae by which her view of Mr. Casaubon and her wifely

relation, now that she was married to him, was gradually changing with

the secret motion of a watch-hand from what it had been in her maiden

dream. It was too early yet for her fully to recognize or at least

admit the change, still more for her to have readjusted that

devotedness which was so necessary a part of her mental life that she

was almost sure sooner or later to recover it. Permanent rebellion, the

disorder of a life without some loving reverent resolve, was not

possible to her; but she was now in an interval when the very force of

her nature heightened its confusion. In this way, the early months of

marriage often are times of critical tumult—whether that of a

shrimp-pool or of deeper waters—which afterwards subsides into cheerful

peace.

But was not Mr. Casaubon just as learned as before? Had his forms of

expression changed, or his sentiments become less laudable? Oh

waywardness of womanhood! did his chronology fail him, or his ability

to state not only a theory but the names of those who held it; or his

provision for giving the heads of any subject on demand? And was not

Rome the place in all the world to give free play to such

accomplishments? Besides, had not Dorothea’s enthusiasm especially

dwelt on the prospect of relieving the weight and perhaps the sadness

with which great tasks lie on him who has to achieve them?— And that

such weight pressed on Mr. Casaubon was only plainer than before.

All these are crushing questions; but whatever else remained the same,

the light had changed, and you cannot find the pearly dawn at noonday.

The fact is unalterable, that a fellow-mortal with whose nature you are

acquainted solely through the brief entrances and exits of a few

imaginative weeks called courtship, may, when seen in the continuity of

married companionship, be disclosed as something better or worse than

what you have preconceived, but will certainly not appear altogether

the same. And it would be astonishing to find how soon the change is

felt if we had no kindred changes to compare with it. To share lodgings

with a brilliant dinner-companion, or to see your favorite politician

in the Ministry, may bring about changes quite as rapid: in these cases

too we begin by knowing little and believing much, and we sometimes end

by inverting the quantities.

Still, such comparisons might mislead, for no man was more incapable of

flashy make-believe than Mr. Casaubon: he was as genuine a character as

any ruminant animal, and he had not actively assisted in creating any

illusions about himself. How was it that in the weeks since her

marriage, Dorothea had not distinctly observed but felt with a stifling

depression, that the large vistas and wide fresh air which she had

dreamed of finding in her husband’s mind were replaced by anterooms and

winding passages which seemed to lead nowhither? I suppose it was that

in courtship everything is regarded as provisional and preliminary, and

the smallest sample of virtue or accomplishment is taken to guarantee

delightful stores which the broad leisure of marriage will reveal. But

the door-sill of marriage once crossed, expectation is concentrated on

the present. Having once embarked on your marital voyage, it is

impossible not to be aware that you make no way and that the sea is not

within sight—that, in fact, you are exploring an enclosed basin.

In their conversation before marriage, Mr. Casaubon had often dwelt on

some explanation or questionable detail of which Dorothea did not see

the bearing; but such imperfect coherence seemed due to the brokenness

of their intercourse, and, supported by her faith in their future, she

had listened with fervid patience to a recitation of possible arguments

to be brought against Mr. Casaubon’s entirely new view of the

Philistine god Dagon and other fish-deities, thinking that hereafter

she should see this subject which touched him so nearly from the same

high ground whence doubtless it had become so important to him. Again,

the matter-of-course statement and tone of dismissal with which he

treated what to her were the most stirring thoughts, was easily

accounted for as belonging to the sense of haste and preoccupation in

which she herself shared during their engagement. But now, since they

had been in Rome, with all the depths of her emotion roused to

tumultuous activity, and with life made a new problem by new elements,

she had been becoming more and more aware, with a certain terror, that

her mind was continually sliding into inward fits of anger and

repulsion, or else into forlorn weariness. How far the judicious Hooker

or any other hero of erudition would have been the same at Mr.

Casaubon’s time of life, she had no means of knowing, so that he could

not have the advantage of comparison; but her husband’s way of

commenting on the strangely impressive objects around them had begun to

affect her with a sort of mental shiver: he had perhaps the best

intention of acquitting himself worthily, but only of acquitting

himself. What was fresh to her mind was worn out to his; and such

capacity of thought and feeling as had ever been stimulated in him by

the general life of mankind had long shrunk to a sort of dried

preparation, a lifeless embalmment of knowledge.

When he said, “Does this interest you, Dorothea? Shall we stay a little

longer? I am ready to stay if you wish it,”—it seemed to her as if

going or staying were alike dreary. Or, “Should you like to go to the

Farnesina, Dorothea? It contains celebrated frescos designed or painted

by Raphael, which most persons think it worth while to visit.”

“But do you care about them?” was always Dorothea’s question.

“They are, I believe, highly esteemed. Some of them represent the fable

of Cupid and Psyche, which is probably the romantic invention of a

literary period, and cannot, I think, be reckoned as a genuine mythical

product. But if you like these wall-paintings we can easily drive

thither; and you will then, I think, have seen the chief works of

Raphael, any of which it were a pity to omit in a visit to Rome. He is

the painter who has been held to combine the most complete grace of

form with sublimity of expression. Such at least I have gathered to be

the opinion of cognoscenti.”

This kind of answer given in a measured official tone, as of a

clergyman reading according to the rubric, did not help to justify the

glories of the Eternal City, or to give her the hope that if she knew

more about them the world would be joyously illuminated for her. There

is hardly any contact more depressing to a young ardent creature than

that of a mind in which years full of knowledge seem to have issued in

a blank absence of interest or sympathy.

On other subjects indeed Mr. Casaubon showed a tenacity of occupation

and an eagerness which are usually regarded as the effect of

enthusiasm, and Dorothea was anxious to follow this spontaneous

direction of his thoughts, instead of being made to feel that she

dragged him away from it. But she was gradually ceasing to expect with

her former delightful confidence that she should see any wide opening

where she followed him. Poor Mr. Casaubon himself was lost among small

closets and winding stairs, and in an agitated dimness about the

Cabeiri, or in an exposure of other mythologists’ ill-considered

parallels, easily lost sight of any purpose which had prompted him to

these labors. With his taper stuck before him he forgot the absence of

windows, and in bitter manuscript remarks on other men’s notions about

the solar deities, he had become indifferent to the sunlight.

These characteristics, fixed and unchangeable as bone in Mr. Casaubon,

might have remained longer unfelt by Dorothea if she had been

encouraged to pour forth her girlish and womanly feeling—if he would

have held her hands between his and listened with the delight of

tenderness and understanding to all the little histories which made up

her experience, and would have given her the same sort of intimacy in

return, so that the past life of each could be included in their mutual

knowledge and affection—or if she could have fed her affection with

those childlike caresses which are the bent of every sweet woman, who

has begun by showering kisses on the hard pate of her bald doll,

creating a happy soul within that woodenness from the wealth of her own

love. That was Dorothea’s bent. With all her yearning to know what was

afar from her and to be widely benignant, she had ardor enough for what

was near, to have kissed Mr. Casaubon’s coat-sleeve, or to have

caressed his shoe-latchet, if he would have made any other sign of

acceptance than pronouncing her, with his unfailing propriety, to be of

a most affectionate and truly feminine nature, indicating at the same

time by politely reaching a chair for her that he regarded these

manifestations as rather crude and startling. Having made his clerical

toilet with due care in the morning, he was prepared only for those

amenities of life which were suited to the well-adjusted stiff cravat

of the period, and to a mind weighted with unpublished matter.

And by a sad contradiction Dorothea’s ideas and resolves seemed like

melting ice floating and lost in the warm flood of which they had been

but another form. She was humiliated to find herself a mere victim of

feeling, as if she could know nothing except through that medium: all

her strength was scattered in fits of agitation, of struggle, of

despondency, and then again in visions of more complete renunciation,

transforming all hard conditions into duty. Poor Dorothea! she was

certainly troublesome—to herself chiefly; but this morning for the

first time she had been troublesome to Mr. Casaubon.

She had begun, while they were taking coffee, with a determination to

shake off what she inwardly called her selfishness, and turned a face

all cheerful attention to her husband when he said, “My dear Dorothea,

we must now think of all that is yet left undone, as a preliminary to

our departure. I would fain have returned home earlier that we might

have been at Lowick for the Christmas; but my inquiries here have been

protracted beyond their anticipated period. I trust, however, that the

time here has not been passed unpleasantly to you. Among the sights of

Europe, that of Rome has ever been held one of the most striking and in

some respects edifying. I well remember that I considered it an epoch

in my life when I visited it for the first time; after the fall of

Napoleon, an event which opened the Continent to travellers. Indeed I

think it is one among several cities to which an extreme hyperbole has

been applied—‘See Rome and die:’ but in your case I would propose an

emendation and say, See Rome as a bride, and live henceforth as a happy

wife.”

Mr. Casaubon pronounced this little speech with the most conscientious

intention, blinking a little and swaying his head up and down, and

concluding with a smile. He had not found marriage a rapturous state,

but he had no idea of being anything else than an irreproachable

husband, who would make a charming young woman as happy as she deserved

to be.

“I hope you are thoroughly satisfied with our stay—I mean, with the

result so far as your studies are concerned,” said Dorothea, trying to

keep her mind fixed on what most affected her husband.

“Yes,” said Mr. Casaubon, with that peculiar pitch of voice which makes

the word half a negative. “I have been led farther than I had foreseen,

and various subjects for annotation have presented themselves which,

though I have no direct need of them, I could not pretermit. The task,

notwithstanding the assistance of my amanuensis, has been a somewhat

laborious one, but your society has happily prevented me from that too

continuous prosecution of thought beyond the hours of study which has

been the snare of my solitary life.”

“I am very glad that my presence has made any difference to you,” said

Dorothea, who had a vivid memory of evenings in which she had supposed

that Mr. Casaubon’s mind had gone too deep during the day to be able to

get to the surface again. I fear there was a little temper in her

reply. “I hope when we get to Lowick, I shall be more useful to you,

and be able to enter a little more into what interests you.”

“Doubtless, my dear,” said Mr. Casaubon, with a slight bow. “The notes

I have here made will want sifting, and you can, if you please, extract

them under my direction.”

“And all your notes,” said Dorothea, whose heart had already burned

within her on this subject, so that now she could not help speaking

with her tongue. “All those rows of volumes—will you not now do what

you used to speak of?—will you not make up your mind what part of them

you will use, and begin to write the book which will make your vast

knowledge useful to the world? I will write to your dictation, or I

will copy and extract what you tell me: I can be of no other use.”

Dorothea, in a most unaccountable, darkly feminine manner, ended with a

slight sob and eyes full of tears.

The excessive feeling manifested would alone have been highly

disturbing to Mr. Casaubon, but there were other reasons why Dorothea’s

words were among the most cutting and irritating to him that she could

have been impelled to use. She was as blind to his inward troubles as

he to hers: she had not yet learned those hidden conflicts in her

husband which claim our pity. She had not yet listened patiently to his

heartbeats, but only felt that her own was beating violently. In Mr.

Casaubon’s ear, Dorothea’s voice gave loud emphatic iteration to those

muffled suggestions of consciousness which it was possible to explain

as mere fancy, the illusion of exaggerated sensitiveness: always when

such suggestions are unmistakably repeated from without, they are

resisted as cruel and unjust. We are angered even by the full

acceptance of our humiliating confessions—how much more by hearing in

hard distinct syllables from the lips of a near observer, those

confused murmurs which we try to call morbid, and strive against as if

they were the oncoming of numbness! And this cruel outward accuser was

there in the shape of a wife—nay, of a young bride, who, instead of

observing his abundant pen-scratches and amplitude of paper with the

uncritical awe of an elegant-minded canary-bird, seemed to present

herself as a spy watching everything with a malign power of inference.

Here, towards this particular point of the compass, Mr. Casaubon had a

sensitiveness to match Dorothea’s, and an equal quickness to imagine

more than the fact. He had formerly observed with approbation her

capacity for worshipping the right object; he now foresaw with sudden

terror that this capacity might be replaced by presumption, this

worship by the most exasperating of all criticism,—that which sees

vaguely a great many fine ends, and has not the least notion what it

costs to reach them.

For the first time since Dorothea had known him, Mr. Casaubon’s face

had a quick angry flush upon it.

“My love,” he said, with irritation reined in by propriety, “you may

rely upon me for knowing the times and the seasons, adapted to the

different stages of a work which is not to be measured by the facile

conjectures of ignorant onlookers. It had been easy for me to gain a

temporary effect by a mirage of baseless opinion; but it is ever the

trial of the scrupulous explorer to be saluted with the impatient scorn

of chatterers who attempt only the smallest achievements, being indeed

equipped for no other. And it were well if all such could be admonished

to discriminate judgments of which the true subject-matter lies

entirely beyond their reach, from those of which the elements may be

compassed by a narrow and superficial survey.”

This speech was delivered with an energy and readiness quite unusual

with Mr. Casaubon. It was not indeed entirely an improvisation, but had

taken shape in inward colloquy, and rushed out like the round grains

from a fruit when sudden heat cracks it. Dorothea was not only his

wife: she was a personification of that shallow world which surrounds

the appreciated or desponding author.

Dorothea was indignant in her turn. Had she not been repressing

everything in herself except the desire to enter into some fellowship

with her husband’s chief interests?

“My judgment _was_ a very superficial one—such as I am capable of

forming,” she answered, with a prompt resentment, that needed no

rehearsal. “You showed me the rows of notebooks—you have often spoken

of them—you have often said that they wanted digesting. But I never

heard you speak of the writing that is to be published. Those were very

simple facts, and my judgment went no farther. I only begged you to let

me be of some good to you.”

Dorothea rose to leave the table and Mr. Casaubon made no reply, taking

up a letter which lay beside him as if to reperuse it. Both were

shocked at their mutual situation—that each should have betrayed anger

towards the other. If they had been at home, settled at Lowick in

ordinary life among their neighbors, the clash would have been less

embarrassing: but on a wedding journey, the express object of which is

to isolate two people on the ground that they are all the world to each

other, the sense of disagreement is, to say the least, confounding and

stultifying. To have changed your longitude extensively and placed

yourselves in a moral solitude in order to have small explosions, to

find conversation difficult and to hand a glass of water without

looking, can hardly be regarded as satisfactory fulfilment even to the

toughest minds. To Dorothea’s inexperienced sensitiveness, it seemed

like a catastrophe, changing all prospects; and to Mr. Casaubon it was

a new pain, he never having been on a wedding journey before, or found

himself in that close union which was more of a subjection than he had

been able to imagine, since this charming young bride not only obliged

him to much consideration on her behalf (which he had sedulously

given), but turned out to be capable of agitating him cruelly just

where he most needed soothing. Instead of getting a soft fence against

the cold, shadowy, unapplausive audience of his life, had he only given

it a more substantial presence?

Neither of them felt it possible to speak again at present. To have

reversed a previous arrangement and declined to go out would have been

a show of persistent anger which Dorothea’s conscience shrank from,

seeing that she already began to feel herself guilty. However just her

indignation might be, her ideal was not to claim justice, but to give

tenderness. So when the carriage came to the door, she drove with Mr.

Casaubon to the Vatican, walked with him through the stony avenue of

inscriptions, and when she parted with him at the entrance to the

Library, went on through the Museum out of mere listlessness as to what

was around her. She had not spirit to turn round and say that she would

drive anywhere. It was when Mr. Casaubon was quitting her that Naumann

had first seen her, and he had entered the long gallery of sculpture at

the same time with her; but here Naumann had to await Ladislaw with

whom he was to settle a bet of champagne about an enigmatical

mediaeval-looking figure there. After they had examined the figure, and

had walked on finishing their dispute, they had parted, Ladislaw

lingering behind while Naumann had gone into the Hall of Statues where

he again saw Dorothea, and saw her in that brooding abstraction which

made her pose remarkable. She did not really see the streak of sunlight

on the floor more than she saw the statues: she was inwardly seeing the

light of years to come in her own home and over the English fields and

elms and hedge-bordered highroads; and feeling that the way in which

they might be filled with joyful devotedness was not so clear to her as

it had been. But in Dorothea’s mind there was a current into which all

thought and feeling were apt sooner or later to flow—the reaching

forward of the whole consciousness towards the fullest truth, the least

partial good. There was clearly something better than anger and

despondency.