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
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 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 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.
