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? 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 — noth
ing 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 hut 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 au 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 aevo 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
feature less 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 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.