第 十 章 · Chapter X

“He had catched a great cold, had he had no other clothes to wear than

the skin of a bear not yet killed.”—FULLER.

Young Ladislaw did not pay that visit to which Mr. Brooke had invited

him, and only six days afterwards Mr. Casaubon mentioned that his young

relative had started for the Continent, seeming by this cold vagueness

to waive inquiry. Indeed, Will had declined to fix on any more precise

destination than the entire area of Europe. Genius, he held, is

necessarily intolerant of fetters: on the one hand it must have the

utmost play for its spontaneity; on the other, it may confidently await

those messages from the universe which summon it to its peculiar work,

only placing itself in an attitude of receptivity towards all sublime

chances. The attitudes of receptivity are various, and Will had

sincerely tried many of them. He was not excessively fond of wine, but

he had several times taken too much, simply as an experiment in that

form of ecstasy; he had fasted till he was faint, and then supped on

lobster; he had made himself ill with doses of opium. Nothing greatly

original had resulted from these measures; and the effects of the opium

had convinced him that there was an entire dissimilarity between his

constitution and De Quincey’s. The superadded circumstance which would

evolve the genius had not yet come; the universe had not yet beckoned.

Even Caesar’s fortune at one time was but a grand presentiment. We know

what a masquerade all development is, and what effective shapes may be

disguised in helpless embryos. In fact, the world is full of hopeful

analogies and handsome dubious eggs called possibilities. Will saw

clearly enough the pitiable instances of long incubation producing no

chick, and but for gratitude would have laughed at Casaubon, whose

plodding application, rows of note-books, and small taper of learned

theory exploring the tossed ruins of the world, seemed to enforce a

moral entirely encouraging to Will’s generous reliance on the

intentions of the universe with regard to himself. He held that

reliance to be a mark of genius; and certainly it is no mark to the

contrary; genius consisting neither in self-conceit nor in humility,

but in a power to make or do, not anything in general, but something in

particular. Let him start for the Continent, then, without our

pronouncing on his future. Among all forms of mistake, prophecy is the

most gratuitous.

But at present this caution against a too hasty judgment interests me

more in relation to Mr. Casaubon than to his young cousin. If to

Dorothea Mr. Casaubon had been the mere occasion which had set alight

the fine inflammable material of her youthful illusions, does it follow

that he was fairly represented in the minds of those less impassioned

personages who have hitherto delivered their judgments concerning him?

I protest against any absolute conclusion, any prejudice derived from

Mrs. Cadwallader’s contempt for a neighboring clergyman’s alleged

greatness of soul, or Sir James Chettam’s poor opinion of his rival’s

legs,—from Mr. Brooke’s failure to elicit a companion’s ideas, or from

Celia’s criticism of a middle-aged scholar’s personal appearance. I am

not sure that the greatest man of his age, if ever that solitary

superlative existed, could escape these unfavorable reflections of

himself in various small mirrors; and even Milton, looking for his

portrait in a spoon, must submit to have the facial angle of a bumpkin.

Moreover, if Mr. Casaubon, speaking for himself, has rather a chilling

rhetoric, it is not therefore certain that there is no good work or

fine feeling in him. Did not an immortal physicist and interpreter of

hieroglyphs write detestable verses? Has the theory of the solar system

been advanced by graceful manners and conversational tact? Suppose we

turn from outside estimates of a man, to wonder, with keener interest,

what is the report of his own consciousness about his doings or

capacity: with what hindrances he is carrying on his daily labors; what

fading of hopes, or what deeper fixity of self-delusion the years are

marking off within him; and with what spirit he wrestles against

universal pressure, which will one day be too heavy for him, and bring

his heart to its final pause. Doubtless his lot is important in his own

eyes; and the chief reason that we think he asks too large a place in

our consideration must be our want of room for him, since we refer him

to the Divine regard with perfect confidence; nay, it is even held

sublime for our neighbor to expect the utmost there, however little he

may have got from us. Mr. Casaubon, too, was the centre of his own

world; if he was liable to think that others were providentially made

for him, and especially to consider them in the light of their fitness

for the author of a “Key to all Mythologies,” this trait is not quite

alien to us, and, like the other mendicant hopes of mortals, claims

some of our pity.

Certainly this affair of his marriage with Miss Brooke touched him more

nearly than it did any one of the persons who have hitherto shown their

disapproval of it, and in the present stage of things I feel more

tenderly towards his experience of success than towards the

disappointment of the amiable Sir James. For in truth, as the day fixed

for his marriage came nearer, Mr. Casaubon did not find his spirits

rising; nor did the contemplation of that matrimonial garden scene,

where, as all experience showed, the path was to be bordered with

flowers, prove persistently more enchanting to him than the accustomed

vaults where he walked taper in hand. He did not confess to himself,

still less could he have breathed to another, his surprise that though

he had won a lovely and noble-hearted girl he had not won

delight,—which he had also regarded as an object to be found by search.

It is true that he knew all the classical passages implying the

contrary; but knowing classical passages, we find, is a mode of motion,

which explains why they leave so little extra force for their personal

application.

Poor Mr. Casaubon had imagined that his long studious bachelorhood had

stored up for him a compound interest of enjoyment, and that large

drafts on his affections would not fail to be honored; for we all of

us, grave or light, get our thoughts entangled in metaphors, and act

fatally on the strength of them. And now he was in danger of being

saddened by the very conviction that his circumstances were unusually

happy: there was nothing external by which he could account for a

certain blankness of sensibility which came over him just when his

expectant gladness should have been most lively, just when he exchanged

the accustomed dulness of his Lowick library for his visits to the

Grange. Here was a weary experience in which he was as utterly

condemned to loneliness as in the despair which sometimes threatened

him while toiling in the morass of authorship without seeming nearer to

the goal. And his was that worst loneliness which would shrink from

sympathy. He could not but wish that Dorothea should think him not less

happy than the world would expect her successful suitor to be; and in

relation to his authorship he leaned on her young trust and veneration,

he liked to draw forth her fresh interest in listening, as a means of

encouragement to himself: in talking to her he presented all his

performance and intention with the reflected confidence of the

pedagogue, and rid himself for the time of that chilling ideal audience

which crowded his laborious uncreative hours with the vaporous pressure

of Tartarean shades.

For to Dorothea, after that toy-box history of the world adapted to

young ladies which had made the chief part of her education, Mr.

Casaubon’s talk about his great book was full of new vistas; and this

sense of revelation, this surprise of a nearer introduction to Stoics

and Alexandrians, as people who had ideas not totally unlike her own,

kept in abeyance for the time her usual eagerness for a binding theory

which could bring her own life and doctrine into strict connection with

that amazing past, and give the remotest sources of knowledge some

bearing on her actions. That more complete teaching would come—Mr.

Casaubon would tell her all that: she was looking forward to higher

initiation in ideas, as she was looking forward to marriage, and

blending her dim conceptions of both. It would be a great mistake to

suppose that Dorothea would have cared about any share in Mr.

Casaubon’s learning as mere accomplishment; for though opinion in the

neighborhood of Freshitt and Tipton had pronounced her clever, that

epithet would not have described her to circles in whose more precise

vocabulary cleverness implies mere aptitude for knowing and doing,

apart from character. All her eagerness for acquirement lay within that

full current of sympathetic motive in which her ideas and impulses were

habitually swept along. She did not want to deck herself with

knowledge—to wear it loose from the nerves and blood that fed her

action; and if she had written a book she must have done it as Saint

Theresa did, under the command of an authority that constrained her

conscience. But something she yearned for by which her life might be

filled with action at once rational and ardent; and since the time was

gone by for guiding visions and spiritual directors, since prayer

heightened yearning but not instruction, what lamp was there but

knowledge? Surely learned men kept the only oil; and who more learned

than Mr. Casaubon?

Thus in these brief weeks Dorothea’s joyous grateful expectation was

unbroken, and however her lover might occasionally be conscious of

flatness, he could never refer it to any slackening of her affectionate

interest.

The season was mild enough to encourage the project of extending the

wedding journey as far as Rome, and Mr. Casaubon was anxious for this

because he wished to inspect some manuscripts in the Vatican.

“I still regret that your sister is not to accompany us,” he said one

morning, some time after it had been ascertained that Celia objected to

go, and that Dorothea did not wish for her companionship. “You will

have many lonely hours, Dorothea, for I shall be constrained to make

the utmost use of my time during our stay in Rome, and I should feel

more at liberty if you had a companion.”

The words “I should feel more at liberty” grated on Dorothea. For the

first time in speaking to Mr. Casaubon she colored from annoyance.

“You must have misunderstood me very much,” she said, “if you think I

should not enter into the value of your time—if you think that I should

not willingly give up whatever interfered with your using it to the

best purpose.”

“That is very amiable in you, my dear Dorothea,” said Mr. Casaubon, not

in the least noticing that she was hurt; “but if you had a lady as your

companion, I could put you both under the care of a cicerone, and we

could thus achieve two purposes in the same space of time.”

“I beg you will not refer to this again,” said Dorothea, rather

haughtily. But immediately she feared that she was wrong, and turning

towards him she laid her hand on his, adding in a different tone, “Pray

do not be anxious about me. I shall have so much to think of when I am

alone. And Tantripp will be a sufficient companion, just to take care

of me. I could not bear to have Celia: she would be miserable.”

It was time to dress. There was to be a dinner-party that day, the last

of the parties which were held at the Grange as proper preliminaries to

the wedding, and Dorothea was glad of a reason for moving away at once

on the sound of the bell, as if she needed more than her usual amount

of preparation. She was ashamed of being irritated from some cause she

could not define even to herself; for though she had no intention to be

untruthful, her reply had not touched the real hurt within her. Mr.

Casaubon’s words had been quite reasonable, yet they had brought a

vague instantaneous sense of aloofness on his part.

“Surely I am in a strangely selfish weak state of mind,” she said to

herself. “How can I have a husband who is so much above me without

knowing that he needs me less than I need him?”

Having convinced herself that Mr. Casaubon was altogether right, she

recovered her equanimity, and was an agreeable image of serene dignity

when she came into the drawing-room in her silver-gray dress—the simple

lines of her dark-brown hair parted over her brow and coiled massively

behind, in keeping with the entire absence from her manner and

expression of all search after mere effect. Sometimes when Dorothea was

in company, there seemed to be as complete an air of repose about her

as if she had been a picture of Santa Barbara looking out from her

tower into the clear air; but these intervals of quietude made the

energy of her speech and emotion the more remarked when some outward

appeal had touched her.

She was naturally the subject of many observations this evening, for

the dinner-party was large and rather more miscellaneous as to the male

portion than any which had been held at the Grange since Mr. Brooke’s

nieces had resided with him, so that the talking was done in duos and

trios more or less inharmonious. There was the newly elected mayor of

Middlemarch, who happened to be a manufacturer; the philanthropic

banker his brother-in-law, who predominated so much in the town that

some called him a Methodist, others a hypocrite, according to the

resources of their vocabulary; and there were various professional men.

In fact, Mrs. Cadwallader said that Brooke was beginning to treat the

Middlemarchers, and that she preferred the farmers at the tithe-dinner,

who drank her health unpretentiously, and were not ashamed of their

grandfathers’ furniture. For in that part of the country, before reform

had done its notable part in developing the political consciousness,

there was a clearer distinction of ranks and a dimmer distinction of

parties; so that Mr. Brooke’s miscellaneous invitations seemed to

belong to that general laxity which came from his inordinate travel and

habit of taking too much in the form of ideas.

Already, as Miss Brooke passed out of the dining-room, opportunity was

found for some interjectional “asides.”

“A fine woman, Miss Brooke! an uncommonly fine woman, by God!” said Mr.

Standish, the old lawyer, who had been so long concerned with the

landed gentry that he had become landed himself, and used that oath in

a deep-mouthed manner as a sort of armorial bearings, stamping the

speech of a man who held a good position.

Mr. Bulstrode, the banker, seemed to be addressed, but that gentleman

disliked coarseness and profanity, and merely bowed. The remark was

taken up by Mr. Chichely, a middle-aged bachelor and coursing

celebrity, who had a complexion something like an Easter egg, a few

hairs carefully arranged, and a carriage implying the consciousness of

a distinguished appearance.

“Yes, but not my style of woman: I like a woman who lays herself out a

little more to please us. There should be a little filigree about a

woman—something of the coquette. A man likes a sort of challenge. The

more of a dead set she makes at you the better.”

“There’s some truth in that,” said Mr. Standish, disposed to be genial.

“And, by God, it’s usually the way with them. I suppose it answers some

wise ends: Providence made them so, eh, Bulstrode?”

“I should be disposed to refer coquetry to another source,” said Mr.

Bulstrode. “I should rather refer it to the devil.”

“Ay, to be sure, there should be a little devil in a woman,” said Mr.

Chichely, whose study of the fair sex seemed to have been detrimental

to his theology. “And I like them blond, with a certain gait, and a

swan neck. Between ourselves, the mayor’s daughter is more to my taste

than Miss Brooke or Miss Celia either. If I were a marrying man I

should choose Miss Vincy before either of them.”

“Well, make up, make up,” said Mr. Standish, jocosely; “you see the

middle-aged fellows carry the day.”

Mr. Chichely shook his head with much meaning: he was not going to

incur the certainty of being accepted by the woman he would choose.

The Miss Vincy who had the honor of being Mr. Chichely’s ideal was of

course not present; for Mr. Brooke, always objecting to go too far,

would not have chosen that his nieces should meet the daughter of a

Middlemarch manufacturer, unless it were on a public occasion. The

feminine part of the company included none whom Lady Chettam or Mrs.

Cadwallader could object to; for Mrs. Renfrew, the colonel’s widow, was

not only unexceptionable in point of breeding, but also interesting on

the ground of her complaint, which puzzled the doctors, and seemed

clearly a case wherein the fulness of professional knowledge might need

the supplement of quackery. Lady Chettam, who attributed her own

remarkable health to home-made bitters united with constant medical

attendance, entered with much exercise of the imagination into Mrs.

Renfrew’s account of symptoms, and into the amazing futility in her

case of all strengthening medicines.

“Where can all the strength of those medicines go, my dear?” said the

mild but stately dowager, turning to Mrs. Cadwallader reflectively,

when Mrs. Renfrew’s attention was called away.

“It strengthens the disease,” said the Rector’s wife, much too

well-born not to be an amateur in medicine. “Everything depends on the

constitution: some people make fat, some blood, and some bile—that’s my

view of the matter; and whatever they take is a sort of grist to the

mill.”

“Then she ought to take medicines that would reduce—reduce the disease,

you know, if you are right, my dear. And I think what you say is

reasonable.”

“Certainly it is reasonable. You have two sorts of potatoes, fed on the

same soil. One of them grows more and more watery—”

“Ah! like this poor Mrs. Renfrew—that is what I think. Dropsy! There is

no swelling yet—it is inward. I should say she ought to take drying

medicines, shouldn’t you?—or a dry hot-air bath. Many things might be

tried, of a drying nature.”

“Let her try a certain person’s pamphlets,” said Mrs. Cadwallader in an

undertone, seeing the gentlemen enter. “He does not want drying.”

“Who, my dear?” said Lady Chettam, a charming woman, not so quick as to

nullify the pleasure of explanation.

“The bridegroom—Casaubon. He has certainly been drying up faster since

the engagement: the flame of passion, I suppose.”

“I should think he is far from having a good constitution,” said Lady

Chettam, with a still deeper undertone. “And then his studies—so very

dry, as you say.”

“Really, by the side of Sir James, he looks like a death’s head skinned

over for the occasion. Mark my words: in a year from this time that

girl will hate him. She looks up to him as an oracle now, and by-and-by

she will be at the other extreme. All flightiness!”

“How very shocking! I fear she is headstrong. But tell me—you know all

about him—is there anything very bad? What is the truth?”

“The truth? he is as bad as the wrong physic—nasty to take, and sure to

disagree.”

“There could not be anything worse than that,” said Lady Chettam, with

so vivid a conception of the physic that she seemed to have learned

something exact about Mr. Casaubon’s disadvantages. “However, James

will hear nothing against Miss Brooke. He says she is the mirror of

women still.”

“That is a generous make-believe of his. Depend upon it, he likes

little Celia better, and she appreciates him. I hope you like my little

Celia?”

“Certainly; she is fonder of geraniums, and seems more docile, though

not so fine a figure. But we were talking of physic. Tell me about this

new young surgeon, Mr. Lydgate. I am told he is wonderfully clever: he

certainly looks it—a fine brow indeed.”

“He is a gentleman. I heard him talking to Humphrey. He talks well.”

“Yes. Mr. Brooke says he is one of the Lydgates of Northumberland,

really well connected. One does not expect it in a practitioner of that

kind. For my own part, I like a medical man more on a footing with the

servants; they are often all the cleverer. I assure you I found poor

Hicks’s judgment unfailing; I never knew him wrong. He was coarse and

butcher-like, but he knew my constitution. It was a loss to me his

going off so suddenly. Dear me, what a very animated conversation Miss

Brooke seems to be having with this Mr. Lydgate!”

“She is talking cottages and hospitals with him,” said Mrs.

Cadwallader, whose ears and power of interpretation were quick. “I

believe he is a sort of philanthropist, so Brooke is sure to take him

up.”

“James,” said Lady Chettam when her son came near, “bring Mr. Lydgate

and introduce him to me. I want to test him.”

The affable dowager declared herself delighted with this opportunity of

making Mr. Lydgate’s acquaintance, having heard of his success in

treating fever on a new plan.

Mr. Lydgate had the medical accomplishment of looking perfectly grave

whatever nonsense was talked to him, and his dark steady eyes gave him

impressiveness as a listener. He was as little as possible like the

lamented Hicks, especially in a certain careless refinement about his

toilet and utterance. Yet Lady Chettam gathered much confidence in him.

He confirmed her view of her own constitution as being peculiar, by

admitting that all constitutions might be called peculiar, and he did

not deny that hers might be more peculiar than others. He did not

approve of a too lowering system, including reckless cupping, nor, on

the other hand, of incessant port wine and bark. He said “I think so”

with an air of so much deference accompanying the insight of agreement,

that she formed the most cordial opinion of his talents.

“I am quite pleased with your protege,” she said to Mr. Brooke before

going away.

“My protege?—dear me!—who is that?” said Mr. Brooke.

“This young Lydgate, the new doctor. He seems to me to understand his

profession admirably.”

“Oh, Lydgate! he is not my protege, you know; only I knew an uncle of

his who sent me a letter about him. However, I think he is likely to be

first-rate—has studied in Paris, knew Broussais; has ideas, you

know—wants to raise the profession.”

“Lydgate has lots of ideas, quite new, about ventilation and diet, that

sort of thing,” resumed Mr. Brooke, after he had handed out Lady

Chettam, and had returned to be civil to a group of Middlemarchers.

“Hang it, do you think that is quite sound?—upsetting the old

treatment, which has made Englishmen what they are?” said Mr. Standish.

“Medical knowledge is at a low ebb among us,” said Mr. Bulstrode, who

spoke in a subdued tone, and had rather a sickly air. “I, for my part,

hail the advent of Mr. Lydgate. I hope to find good reason for

confiding the new hospital to his management.”

“That is all very fine,” replied Mr. Standish, who was not fond of Mr.

Bulstrode; “if you like him to try experiments on your hospital

patients, and kill a few people for charity I have no objection. But I

am not going to hand money out of my purse to have experiments tried on

me. I like treatment that has been tested a little.”

“Well, you know, Standish, every dose you take is an experiment-an

experiment, you know,” said Mr. Brooke, nodding towards the lawyer.

“Oh, if you talk in that sense!” said Mr. Standish, with as much

disgust at such non-legal quibbling as a man can well betray towards a

valuable client.

“I should be glad of any treatment that would cure me without reducing

me to a skeleton, like poor Grainger,” said Mr. Vincy, the mayor, a

florid man, who would have served for a study of flesh in striking

contrast with the Franciscan tints of Mr. Bulstrode. “It’s an

uncommonly dangerous thing to be left without any padding against the

shafts of disease, as somebody said,—and I think it a very good

expression myself.”

Mr. Lydgate, of course, was out of hearing. He had quitted the party

early, and would have thought it altogether tedious but for the novelty

of certain introductions, especially the introduction to Miss Brooke,

whose youthful bloom, with her approaching marriage to that faded

scholar, and her interest in matters socially useful, gave her the

piquancy of an unusual combination.

“She is a good creature—that fine girl—but a little too earnest,” he

thought. “It is troublesome to talk to such women. They are always

wanting reasons, yet they are too ignorant to understand the merits of

any question, and usually fall back on their moral sense to settle

things after their own taste.”

Evidently Miss Brooke was not Mr. Lydgate’s style of woman any more

than Mr. Chichely’s. Considered, indeed, in relation to the latter,

whose mind was matured, she was altogether a mistake, and calculated to

shock his trust in final causes, including the adaptation of fine young

women to purplefaced bachelors. But Lydgate was less ripe, and might

possibly have experience before him which would modify his opinion as

to the most excellent things in woman.

Miss Brooke, however, was not again seen by either of these gentlemen

under her maiden name. Not long after that dinner-party she had become

Mrs. Casaubon, and was on her way to Rome.