Middlemarch

1t Gent. An ancient land in ancient oracles
Is called “law-thirsty”: all the struggle there
Was after order and a perfect rule.
Pray, where lie such lands now? . . .

2d Gent. Why, where they lay of old—in human souls.

Mr. Casaubon’s behavior about settlements was highly satisfactory to
Mr. Brooke, and the preliminaries of marriage rolled smoothly along,
shortening the weeks of courtship. The betrothed bride must see her
future home, and dictate any changes that she would like to have made
there. A woman dictates before marriage in order that she may have an
appetite for submission afterwards. And certainly, the mistakes that we
male and female mortals make when we have our own way might fairly
raise some wonder that we are so fond of it.

On a gray but dry November morning Dorothea drove to Lowick in company
with her uncle and Celia. Mr. Casaubon’s home was the manor-house.
Close by, visible from some parts of the garden, was the little church,
with the old parsonage opposite. In the beginning of his career, Mr.
Casaubon had only held the living, but the death of his brother had put
him in possession of the manor also. It had a small park, with a fine
old oak here and there, and an avenue of limes towards the southwest
front, with a sunk fence between park and pleasure-ground, so that from
the drawing-room windows the glance swept uninterruptedly along a slope
of greensward till the limes ended in a level of corn and pastures,
which often seemed to melt into a lake under the setting sun. This was
the happy side of the house, for the south and east looked rather
melancholy even under the brightest morning. The grounds here were more
confined, the flower-beds showed no very careful tendance, and large
clumps of trees, chiefly of sombre yews, had risen high, not ten yards
from the windows. The building, of greenish stone, was in the old
English style, not ugly, but small-windowed and melancholy-looking: the
sort of house that must have children, many flowers, open windows, and
little vistas of bright things, to make it seem a joyous home. In this
latter end of autumn, with a sparse remnant of yellow leaves falling
slowly athwart the dark evergreens in a stillness without sunshine, the
house too had an air of autumnal decline, and Mr. Casaubon, when he
presented himself, had no bloom that could be thrown into relief by
that background.

“Oh dear!” Celia said to herself, “I am sure Freshitt Hall would have
been pleasanter than this.” She thought of the white freestone, the
pillared portico, and the terrace full of flowers, Sir James smiling
above them like a prince issuing from his enchantment in a rose-bush,
with a handkerchief swiftly metamorphosed from the most delicately
odorous petals—Sir James, who talked so agreeably, always about things
which had common-sense in them, and not about learning! Celia had those
light young feminine tastes which grave and weatherworn gentlemen
sometimes prefer in a wife; but happily Mr. Casaubon’s bias had been
different, for he would have had no chance with Celia.

Dorothea, on the contrary, found the house and grounds all that she
could wish: the dark book-shelves in the long library, the carpets and
curtains with colors subdued by time, the curious old maps and
bird’s-eye views on the walls of the corridor, with here and there an
old vase below, had no oppression for her, and seemed more cheerful
than the casts and pictures at the Grange, which her uncle had long ago
brought home from his travels—they being probably among the ideas he
had taken in at one time. To poor Dorothea these severe classical
nudities and smirking Renaissance-Correggiosities were painfully
inexplicable, staring into the midst of her Puritanic conceptions: she
had never been taught how she could bring them into any sort of
relevance with her life. But the owners of Lowick apparently had not
been travellers, and Mr. Casaubon’s studies of the past were not
carried on by means of such aids.

Dorothea walked about the house with delightful emotion. Everything
seemed hallowed to her: this was to be the home of her wifehood, and
she looked up with eyes full of confidence to Mr. Casaubon when he drew
her attention specially to some actual arrangement and asked her if she
would like an alteration. All appeals to her taste she met gratefully,
but saw nothing to alter. His efforts at exact courtesy and formal
tenderness had no defect for her. She filled up all blanks with
unmanifested perfections, interpreting him as she interpreted the works
of Providence, and accounting for seeming discords by her own deafness
to the higher harmonies. And there are many blanks left in the weeks of
courtship which a loving faith fills with happy assurance.

“Now, my dear Dorothea, I wish you to favor me by pointing out which
room you would like to have as your boudoir,” said Mr. Casaubon,
showing that his views of the womanly nature were sufficiently large to
include that requirement.

“It is very kind of you to think of that,” said Dorothea, “but I assure
you I would rather have all those matters decided for me. I shall be
much happier to take everything as it is—just as you have been used to
have it, or as you will yourself choose it to be. I have no motive for
wishing anything else.”

“Oh, Dodo,” said Celia, “will you not have the bow-windowed room
up-stairs?”

Mr. Casaubon led the way thither. The bow-window looked down the avenue
of limes; the furniture was all of a faded blue, and there were
miniatures of ladies and gentlemen with powdered hair hanging in a
group. A piece of tapestry over a door also showed a blue-green world
with a pale stag in it. The chairs and tables were thin-legged and easy
to upset. It was a room where one might fancy the ghost of a
tight-laced lady revisiting the scene of her embroidery. A light
bookcase contained duodecimo volumes of polite literature in calf,
completing the furniture.

“Yes,” said Mr. Brooke, “this would be a pretty room with some new
hangings, sofas, and that sort of thing. A little bare now.”

“No, uncle,” said Dorothea, eagerly. “Pray do not speak of altering
anything. There are so many other things in the world that want
altering—I like to take these things as they are. And you like them as
they are, don’t you?” she added, looking at Mr. Casaubon. “Perhaps this
was your mother’s room when she was young.”

“It was,” he said, with his slow bend of the head.

“This is your mother,” said Dorothea, who had turned to examine the
group of miniatures. “It is like the tiny one you brought me; only, I
should think, a better portrait. And this one opposite, who is this?”

“Her elder sister. They were, like you and your sister, the only two
children of their parents, who hang above them, you see.”

“The sister is pretty,” said Celia, implying that she thought less
favorably of Mr. Casaubon’s mother. It was a new opening to Celia’s
imagination, that he came of a family who had all been young in their
time—the ladies wearing necklaces.

“It is a peculiar face,” said Dorothea, looking closely. “Those deep
gray eyes rather near together—and the delicate irregular nose with a
sort of ripple in it—and all the powdered curls hanging backward.
Altogether it seems to me peculiar rather than pretty. There is not
even a family likeness between her and your mother.”

“No. And they were not alike in their lot.”

“You did not mention her to me,” said Dorothea.

“My aunt made an unfortunate marriage. I never saw her.”

Dorothea wondered a little, but felt that it would be indelicate just
then to ask for any information which Mr. Casaubon did not proffer, and
she turned to the window to admire the view. The sun had lately pierced
the gray, and the avenue of limes cast shadows.

“Shall we not walk in the garden now?” said Dorothea.

“And you would like to see the church, you know,” said Mr. Brooke. “It
is a droll little church. And the village. It all lies in a nut-shell.
By the way, it will suit you, Dorothea; for the cottages are like a row
of alms-houses—little gardens, gilly-flowers, that sort of thing.”

“Yes, please,” said Dorothea, looking at Mr. Casaubon, “I should like
to see all that.” She had got nothing from him more graphic about the
Lowick cottages than that they were “not bad.”

They were soon on a gravel walk which led chiefly between grassy
borders and clumps of trees, this being the nearest way to the church,
Mr. Casaubon said. At the little gate leading into the churchyard there
was a pause while Mr. Casaubon went to the parsonage close by to fetch
a key. Celia, who had been hanging a little in the rear, came up
presently, when she saw that Mr. Casaubon was gone away, and said in
her easy staccato, which always seemed to contradict the suspicion of
any malicious intent—

“Do you know, Dorothea, I saw some one quite young coming up one of the
walks.”

“Is that astonishing, Celia?”

“There may be a young gardener, you know—why not?” said Mr. Brooke. “I
told Casaubon he should change his gardener.”

“No, not a gardener,” said Celia; “a gentleman with a sketch-book. He
had light-brown curls. I only saw his back. But he was quite young.”

“The curate’s son, perhaps,” said Mr. Brooke. “Ah, there is Casaubon
again, and Tucker with him. He is going to introduce Tucker. You don’t
know Tucker yet.”

Mr. Tucker was the middle-aged curate, one of the “inferior clergy,”
who are usually not wanting in sons. But after the introduction, the
conversation did not lead to any question about his family, and the
startling apparition of youthfulness was forgotten by every one but
Celia. She inwardly declined to believe that the light-brown curls and
slim figure could have any relationship to Mr. Tucker, who was just as
old and musty-looking as she would have expected Mr. Casaubon’s curate
to be; doubtless an excellent man who would go to heaven (for Celia
wished not to be unprincipled), but the corners of his mouth were so
unpleasant. Celia thought with some dismalness of the time she should
have to spend as bridesmaid at Lowick, while the curate had probably no
pretty little children whom she could like, irrespective of principle.

Mr. Tucker was invaluable in their walk; and perhaps Mr. Casaubon had
not been without foresight on this head, the curate being able to
answer all Dorothea’s questions about the villagers and the other
parishioners. Everybody, he assured her, was well off in Lowick: not a
cottager in those double cottages at a low rent but kept a pig, and the
strips of garden at the back were well tended. The small boys wore
excellent corduroy, the girls went out as tidy servants, or did a
little straw-plaiting at home: no looms here, no Dissent; and though
the public disposition was rather towards laying by money than towards
spirituality, there was not much vice. The speckled fowls were so
numerous that Mr. Brooke observed, “Your farmers leave some barley for
the women to glean, I see. The poor folks here might have a fowl in
their pot, as the good French king used to wish for all his people. The
French eat a good many fowls—skinny fowls, you know.”

“I think it was a very cheap wish of his,” said Dorothea, indignantly.
“Are kings such monsters that a wish like that must be reckoned a royal
virtue?”

“And if he wished them a skinny fowl,” said Celia, “that would not be
nice. But perhaps he wished them to have fat fowls.”

“Yes, but the word has dropped out of the text, or perhaps was
subauditum; that is, present in the king’s mind, but not uttered,” said
Mr. Casaubon, smiling and bending his head towards Celia, who
immediately dropped backward a little, because she could not bear Mr.
Casaubon to blink at her.

Dorothea sank into silence on the way back to the house. She felt some
disappointment, of which she was yet ashamed, that there was nothing
for her to do in Lowick; and in the next few minutes her mind had
glanced over the possibility, which she would have preferred, of
finding that her home would be in a parish which had a larger share of
the world’s misery, so that she might have had more active duties in
it. Then, recurring to the future actually before her, she made a
picture of more complete devotion to Mr. Casaubon’s aims in which she
would await new duties. Many such might reveal themselves to the higher
knowledge gained by her in that companionship.

Mr. Tucker soon left them, having some clerical work which would not
allow him to lunch at the Hall; and as they were re-entering the garden
through the little gate, Mr. Casaubon said—

“You seem a little sad, Dorothea. I trust you are pleased with what you
have seen.”

“I am feeling something which is perhaps foolish and wrong,” answered
Dorothea, with her usual openness—“almost wishing that the people
wanted more to be done for them here. I have known so few ways of
making my life good for anything. Of course, my notions of usefulness
must be narrow. I must learn new ways of helping people.”

“Doubtless,” said Mr. Casaubon. “Each position has its corresponding
duties. Yours, I trust, as the mistress of Lowick, will not leave any
yearning unfulfilled.”

“Indeed, I believe that,” said Dorothea, earnestly. “Do not suppose
that I am sad.”

“That is well. But, if you are not tired, we will take another way to
the house than that by which we came.”

Dorothea was not at all tired, and a little circuit was made towards a
fine yew-tree, the chief hereditary glory of the grounds on this side
of the house. As they approached it, a figure, conspicuous on a dark
background of evergreens, was seated on a bench, sketching the old
tree. Mr. Brooke, who was walking in front with Celia, turned his head,
and said—

“Who is that youngster, Casaubon?”

They had come very near when Mr. Casaubon answered—

“That is a young relative of mine, a second cousin: the grandson, in
fact,” he added, looking at Dorothea, “of the lady whose portrait you
have been noticing, my aunt Julia.”

The young man had laid down his sketch-book and risen. His bushy
light-brown curls, as well as his youthfulness, identified him at once
with Celia’s apparition.

“Dorothea, let me introduce to you my cousin, Mr. Ladislaw. Will, this
is Miss Brooke.”

The cousin was so close now, that, when he lifted his hat, Dorothea
could see a pair of gray eyes rather near together, a delicate
irregular nose with a little ripple in it, and hair falling backward;
but there was a mouth and chin of a more prominent, threatening aspect
than belonged to the type of the grandmother’s miniature. Young
Ladislaw did not feel it necessary to smile, as if he were charmed with
this introduction to his future second cousin and her relatives; but
wore rather a pouting air of discontent.

“You are an artist, I see,” said Mr. Brooke, taking up the sketch-book
and turning it over in his unceremonious fashion.

“No, I only sketch a little. There is nothing fit to be seen there,”
said young Ladislaw, coloring, perhaps with temper rather than modesty.

“Oh, come, this is a nice bit, now. I did a little in this way myself
at one time, you know. Look here, now; this is what I call a nice
thing, done with what we used to call brio.” Mr. Brooke held out
towards the two girls a large colored sketch of stony ground and trees,
with a pool.

“I am no judge of these things,” said Dorothea, not coldly, but with an
eager deprecation of the appeal to her. “You know, uncle, I never see
the beauty of those pictures which you say are so much praised. They
are a language I do not understand. I suppose there is some relation
between pictures and nature which I am too ignorant to feel—just as you
see what a Greek sentence stands for which means nothing to me.”
Dorothea looked up at Mr. Casaubon, who bowed his head towards her,
while Mr. Brooke said, smiling nonchalantly—

“Bless me, now, how different people are! But you had a bad style of
teaching, you know—else this is just the thing for girls—sketching,
fine art and so on. But you took to drawing plans; you don’t understand
morbidezza, and that kind of thing. You will come to my house, I
hope, and I will show you what I did in this way,” he continued,
turning to young Ladislaw, who had to be recalled from his
preoccupation in observing Dorothea. Ladislaw had made up his mind that
she must be an unpleasant girl, since she was going to marry Casaubon,
and what she said of her stupidity about pictures would have confirmed
that opinion even if he had believed her. As it was, he took her words
for a covert judgment, and was certain that she thought his sketch
detestable. There was too much cleverness in her apology: she was
laughing both at her uncle and himself. But what a voice! It was like
the voice of a soul that had once lived in an Aeolian harp. This must
be one of Nature’s inconsistencies. There could be no sort of passion
in a girl who would marry Casaubon. But he turned from her, and bowed
his thanks for Mr. Brooke’s invitation.

“We will turn over my Italian engravings together,” continued that
good-natured man. “I have no end of those things, that I have laid by
for years. One gets rusty in this part of the country, you know. Not
you, Casaubon; you stick to your studies; but my best ideas get
undermost—out of use, you know. You clever young men must guard against
indolence. I was too indolent, you know: else I might have been
anywhere at one time.”

“That is a seasonable admonition,” said Mr. Casaubon; “but now we will
pass on to the house, lest the young ladies should be tired of
standing.”

When their backs were turned, young Ladislaw sat down to go on with his
sketching, and as he did so his face broke into an expression of
amusement which increased as he went on drawing, till at last he threw
back his head and laughed aloud. Partly it was the reception of his own
artistic production that tickled him; partly the notion of his grave
cousin as the lover of that girl; and partly Mr. Brooke’s definition of
the place he might have held but for the impediment of indolence. Mr.
Will Ladislaw’s sense of the ludicrous lit up his features very
agreeably: it was the pure enjoyment of comicality, and had no mixture
of sneering and self-exaltation.

“What is your nephew going to do with himself, Casaubon?” said Mr.
Brooke, as they went on.

“My cousin, you mean—not my nephew.”

“Yes, yes, cousin. But in the way of a career, you know.”

“The answer to that question is painfully doubtful. On leaving Rugby he
declined to go to an English university, where I would gladly have
placed him, and chose what I must consider the anomalous course of
studying at Heidelberg. And now he wants to go abroad again, without
any special object, save the vague purpose of what he calls culture,
preparation for he knows not what. He declines to choose a profession.”

“He has no means but what you furnish, I suppose.”

“I have always given him and his friends reason to understand that I
would furnish in moderation what was necessary for providing him with a
scholarly education, and launching him respectably. I am therefore
bound to fulfil the expectation so raised,” said Mr. Casaubon, putting
his conduct in the light of mere rectitude: a trait of delicacy which
Dorothea noticed with admiration.

“He has a thirst for travelling; perhaps he may turn out a Bruce or a
Mungo Park,” said Mr. Brooke. “I had a notion of that myself at one
time.”

“No, he has no bent towards exploration, or the enlargement of our
geognosis: that would be a special purpose which I could recognize with
some approbation, though without felicitating him on a career which so
often ends in premature and violent death. But so far is he from having
any desire for a more accurate knowledge of the earth’s surface, that
he said he should prefer not to know the sources of the Nile, and that
there should be some unknown regions preserved as hunting grounds for
the poetic imagination.”

“Well, there is something in that, you know,” said Mr. Brooke, who had
certainly an impartial mind.

“It is, I fear, nothing more than a part of his general inaccuracy and
indisposition to thoroughness of all kinds, which would be a bad augury
for him in any profession, civil or sacred, even were he so far
submissive to ordinary rule as to choose one.”

“Perhaps he has conscientious scruples founded on his own unfitness,”
said Dorothea, who was interesting herself in finding a favorable
explanation. “Because the law and medicine should be very serious
professions to undertake, should they not? People’s lives and fortunes
depend on them.”

“Doubtless; but I fear that my young relative Will Ladislaw is chiefly
determined in his aversion to these callings by a dislike to steady
application, and to that kind of acquirement which is needful
instrumentally, but is not charming or immediately inviting to
self-indulgent taste. I have insisted to him on what Aristotle has
stated with admirable brevity, that for the achievement of any work
regarded as an end there must be a prior exercise of many energies or
acquired facilities of a secondary order, demanding patience. I have
pointed to my own manuscript volumes, which represent the toil of years
preparatory to a work not yet accomplished. But in vain. To careful
reasoning of this kind he replies by calling himself Pegasus, and every
form of prescribed work ‘harness.’”

Celia laughed. She was surprised to find that Mr. Casaubon could say
something quite amusing.

“Well, you know, he may turn out a Byron, a Chatterton, a
Churchill—that sort of thing—there’s no telling,” said Mr. Brooke.
“Shall you let him go to Italy, or wherever else he wants to go?”

“Yes; I have agreed to furnish him with moderate supplies for a year or
so; he asks no more. I shall let him be tried by the test of freedom.”

“That is very kind of you,” said Dorothea, looking up at Mr. Casaubon
with delight. “It is noble. After all, people may really have in them
some vocation which is not quite plain to themselves, may they not?
They may seem idle and weak because they are growing. We should be very
patient with each other, I think.”

“I suppose it is being engaged to be married that has made you think
patience good,” said Celia, as soon as she and Dorothea were alone
together, taking off their wrappings.

“You mean that I am very impatient, Celia.”

“Yes; when people don’t do and say just what you like.” Celia had
become less afraid of “saying things” to Dorothea since this
engagement: cleverness seemed to her more pitiable than ever.