第 二十九 章 · 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

at least till I appear to consult my own pleasure apart from yours.”

“Dorothea, you are hasty,” answered Mr. Casaubon, nervously.

Decidedly, this woman was too young to be on the formidable level of

wifehood—unless she had been pale and featureless and taken everything

for granted.

“I think it was you who were first hasty in your false suppositions

about my feeling,” said Dorothea, in the same tone. The fire was not

dissipated yet, and she thought it was ignoble in her husband not to

apologize to her.

“We will, if you please, say no more on this subject, Dorothea. I have

neither leisure nor energy for this kind of debate.”

Here Mr. Casaubon dipped his pen and made as if he would return to his

writing, though his hand trembled so much that the words seemed to be

written in an unknown character. There are answers which, in turning

away wrath, only send it to the other end of the room, and to have a

discussion coolly waived when you feel that justice is all on your own

side is even more exasperating in marriage than in philosophy.

Dorothea left Ladislaw’s two letters unread on her husband’s

writing-table and went to her own place, the scorn and indignation

within her rejecting the reading of these letters, just as we hurl away

any trash towards which we seem to have been suspected of mean

cupidity. She did not in the least divine the subtle sources of her

husband’s bad temper about these letters: she only knew that they had

caused him to offend her. She began to work at once, and her hand did

not tremble; on the contrary, in writing out the quotations which had

been given to her the day before, she felt that she was forming her

letters beautifully, and it seemed to her that she saw the construction

of the Latin she was copying, and which she was beginning to

understand, more clearly than usual. In her indignation there was a

sense of superiority, but it went out for the present in firmness of

stroke, and did not compress itself into an inward articulate voice

pronouncing the once “affable archangel” a poor creature.

There had been this apparent quiet for half an hour, and Dorothea had

not looked away from her own table, when she heard the loud bang of a

book on the floor, and turning quickly saw Mr. Casaubon on the library

steps clinging forward as if he were in some bodily distress. She

started up and bounded towards him in an instant: he was evidently in

great straits for breath. Jumping on a stool she got close to his elbow

and said with her whole soul melted into tender alarm—

“Can you lean on me, dear?”

He was still for two or three minutes, which seemed endless to her,

unable to speak or move, gasping for breath. When at last he descended

the three steps and fell backward in the large chair which Dorothea had

drawn close to the foot of the ladder, he no longer gasped but seemed

helpless and about to faint. Dorothea rang the bell violently, and

presently Mr. Casaubon was helped to the couch: he did not faint, and

was gradually reviving, when Sir James Chettam came in, having been met

in the hall with the news that Mr. Casaubon had “had a fit in the

library.”

“Good God! this is just what might have been expected,” was his

immediate thought. If his prophetic soul had been urged to

particularize, it seemed to him that “fits” would have been the

definite expression alighted upon. He asked his informant, the butler,

whether the doctor had been sent for. The butler never knew his master

to want the doctor before; but would it not be right to send for a

physician?

When Sir James entered the library, however, Mr. Casaubon could make

some signs of his usual politeness, and Dorothea, who in the reaction

from her first terror had been kneeling and sobbing by his side now

rose and herself proposed that some one should ride off for a medical

man.

“I recommend you to send for Lydgate,” said Sir James. “My mother has

called him in, and she has found him uncommonly clever. She has had a

poor opinion of the physicians since my father’s death.”

Dorothea appealed to her husband, and he made a silent sign of

approval. So Mr. Lydgate was sent for and he came wonderfully soon, for

the messenger, who was Sir James Chettam’s man and knew Mr. Lydgate,

met him leading his horse along the Lowick road and giving his arm to

Miss Vincy.

Celia, in the drawing-room, had known nothing of the trouble till Sir

James told her of it. After Dorothea’s account, he no longer considered

the illness a fit, but still something “of that nature.”

“Poor dear Dodo—how dreadful!” said Celia, feeling as much grieved as

her own perfect happiness would allow. Her little hands were clasped,

and enclosed by Sir James’s as a bud is enfolded by a liberal calyx.

“It is very shocking that Mr. Casaubon should be ill; but I never did

like him. And I think he is not half fond enough of Dorothea; and he

ought to be, for I am sure no one else would have had him—do you think

they would?”

“I always thought it a horrible sacrifice of your sister,” said Sir

James.

“Yes. But poor Dodo never did do what other people do, and I think she

never will.”

“She is a noble creature,” said the loyal-hearted Sir James. He had

just had a fresh impression of this kind, as he had seen Dorothea

stretching her tender arm under her husband’s neck and looking at him

with unspeakable sorrow. He did not know how much penitence there was

in the sorrow.

“Yes,” said Celia, thinking it was very well for Sir James to say so,

but _he_ would not have been comfortable with Dodo. “Shall I go to her?

Could I help her, do you think?”

“I think it would be well for you just to go and see her before Lydgate

comes,” said Sir James, magnanimously. “Only don’t stay long.”

While Celia was gone he walked up and down remembering what he had

originally felt about Dorothea’s engagement, and feeling a revival of

his disgust at Mr. Brooke’s indifference. If Cadwallader—if every one

else had regarded the affair as he, Sir James, had done, the marriage

might have been hindered. It was wicked to let a young girl blindly

decide her fate in that way, without any effort to save her. Sir James

had long ceased to have any regrets on his own account: his heart was

satisfied with his engagement to Celia. But he had a chivalrous nature

(was not the disinterested service of woman among the ideal glories of

old chivalry?): his disregarded love had not turned to bitterness; its

death had made sweet odors—floating memories that clung with a

consecrating effect to Dorothea. He could remain her brotherly friend,

interpreting her actions with generous trustfulness.