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 freseos 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 ill 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
conoscenti."
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 sea sons, 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 catas
trophe, 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.