Middlemarch

“ 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.