Chapter: "The clerkly person smiled and said
     Promise was a pretty maid,
     But being poor she died unwed."


The Rev. Camden Farebrother, whom Lydgate went to see the next evening,
lived in an old parsonage, built of stone, venerable enough to match
the church which it looked out upon.  All the furniture too in the
house was old, but with another grade of age--that of Mr. Farebrother's
father and grandfather.  There were painted white chairs, with gilding
and wreaths on them, and some lingering red silk damask with slits in
it.  There were engraved portraits of Lord Chancellors and other
celebrated lawyers of the last century; and there were old pier-glasses
to reflect them, as well as the little satin-wood tables and the sofas
resembling a prolongation of uneasy chairs, all standing in relief
against the dark wainscot. This was the physiognomy of the drawing-room
into which Lydgate was shown; and there were three ladies to receive
him, who were also old-fashioned, and of a faded but genuine
respectability: Mrs. Farebrother, the Vicar's white-haired mother,
befrilled and kerchiefed with dainty cleanliness, upright, quick-eyed,
and still under seventy; Miss Noble, her sister, a tiny old lady of
meeker aspect, with frills and kerchief decidedly more worn and mended;
and Miss Winifred Farebrother, the Vicar's elder sister, well-looking
like himself, but nipped and subdued as single women are apt to be who
spend their lives in uninterrupted subjection to their elders.  Lydgate
had not expected to see so quaint a group: knowing simply that Mr.
Farebrother was a bachelor, he had thought of being ushered into a
snuggery where the chief furniture would probably be books and
collections of natural objects.  The Vicar himself seemed to wear
rather a changed aspect, as most men do when acquaintances made
elsewhere see them for the first time in their own homes; some indeed
showing like an actor of genial parts disadvantageously cast for the
curmudgeon in a new piece.  This was not the case with Mr. Farebrother:
he seemed a trifle milder and more silent, the chief talker being his
mother, while he only put in a good-humored moderating remark here and
there.  The old lady was evidently accustomed to tell her company what
they ought to think, and to regard no subject as quite safe without her
steering.  She was afforded leisure for this function by having all her
little wants attended to by Miss Winifred.  Meanwhile tiny Miss Noble
carried on her arm a small basket, into which she diverted a bit of
sugar, which she had first dropped in her saucer as if by mistake;
looking round furtively afterwards, and reverting to her teacup with a
small innocent noise as of a tiny timid quadruped.  Pray think no ill
of Miss Noble.  That basket held small savings from her more portable
food, destined for the children of her poor friends among whom she
trotted on fine mornings; fostering and petting all needy creatures
being so spontaneous a delight to her, that she regarded it much as if
it had been a pleasant vice that she was addicted to.  Perhaps she was
conscious of being tempted to steal from those who had much that she
might give to those who had nothing, and carried in her conscience the
guilt of that repressed desire.  One must be poor to know the luxury of
giving!

Mrs. Farebrother welcomed the guest with a lively formality and
precision.  She presently informed him that they were not often in want
of medical aid in that house.  She had brought up her children to wear
flannel and not to over-eat themselves, which last habit she considered
the chief reason why people needed doctors.  Lydgate pleaded for those
whose fathers and mothers had over-eaten themselves, but Mrs.
Farebrother held that view of things dangerous: Nature was more just
than that; it would be easy for any felon to say that his ancestors
ought to have been hanged instead of him.  If those who had bad fathers
and mothers were bad themselves, they were hanged for that.  There was
no need to go back on what you couldn't see.

"My mother is like old George the Third," said the Vicar, "she objects
to metaphysics."

"I object to what is wrong, Camden.  I say, keep hold of a few plain
truths, and make everything square with them.  When I was young, Mr.
Lydgate, there never was any question about right and wrong.  We knew
our catechism, and that was enough; we learned our creed and our duty.
Every respectable Church person had the same opinions.  But now, if you
speak out of the Prayer-book itself, you are liable to be contradicted."

"That makes rather a pleasant time of it for those who like to maintain
their own point," said Lydgate.

"But my mother always gives way," said the Vicar, slyly.

"No, no, Camden, you must not lead Mr. Lydgate into a mistake about
_me_. I shall never show that disrespect to my parents, to give up what
they taught me.  Any one may see what comes of turning.  If you change
once, why not twenty times?"

"A man might see good arguments for changing once, and not see them for
changing again," said Lydgate, amused with the decisive old lady.

"Excuse me there.  If you go upon arguments, they are never wanting,
when a man has no constancy of mind.  My father never changed, and he
preached plain moral sermons without arguments, and was a good man--few
better.  When you get me a good man made out of arguments, I will get
you a good dinner with reading you the cookery-book. That's my opinion,
and I think anybody's stomach will bear me out."

"About the dinner certainly, mother," said Mr. Farebrother.

"It is the same thing, the dinner or the man.  I am nearly seventy, Mr.
Lydgate, and I go upon experience.  I am not likely to follow new
lights, though there are plenty of them here as elsewhere.  I say, they
came in with the mixed stuffs that will neither wash nor wear.  It was
not so in my youth: a Churchman was a Churchman, and a clergyman, you
might be pretty sure, was a gentleman, if nothing else.  But now he may
be no better than a Dissenter, and want to push aside my son on
pretence of doctrine.  But whoever may wish to push him aside, I am
proud to say, Mr. Lydgate, that he will compare with any preacher in
this kingdom, not to speak of this town, which is but a low standard to
go by; at least, to my thinking, for I was born and bred at Exeter."

"A mother is never partial," said Mr. Farebrother, smiling.  "What do
you think Tyke's mother says about him?"

"Ah, poor creature! what indeed?" said Mrs. Farebrother, her sharpness
blunted for the moment by her confidence in maternal judgments.  "She
says the truth to herself, depend upon it."

"And what is the truth?" said Lydgate. "I am curious to know."

"Oh, nothing bad at all," said Mr. Farebrother.  "He is a zealous
fellow: not very learned, and not very wise, I think--because I don't
agree with him."

"Why, Camden!" said Miss Winifred, "Griffin and his wife told me only
to-day, that Mr. Tyke said they should have no more coals if they came
to hear you preach."

Mrs. Farebrother laid down her knitting, which she had resumed after
her small allowance of tea and toast, and looked at her son as if to
say "You hear that?"  Miss Noble said, "Oh poor things! poor things!"
in reference, probably, to the double loss of preaching and coal.  But
the Vicar answered quietly--

"That is because they are not my parishioners.  And I don't think my
sermons are worth a load of coals to them."

"Mr. Lydgate," said Mrs. Farebrother, who could not let this pass, "you
don't know my son: he always undervalues himself.  I tell him he is
undervaluing the God who made him, and made him a most excellent
preacher."

"That must be a hint for me to take Mr. Lydgate away to my study,
mother," said the Vicar, laughing.  "I promised to show you my
collection," he added, turning to Lydgate; "shall we go?"

All three ladies remonstrated.  Mr. Lydgate ought not to be hurried
away without being allowed to accept another cup of tea: Miss Winifred
had abundance of good tea in the pot.  Why was Camden in such haste to
take a visitor to his den?  There was nothing but pickled vermin, and
drawers full of blue-bottles and moths, with no carpet on the floor.
Mr. Lydgate must excuse it.  A game at cribbage would be far better.
In short, it was plain that a vicar might be adored by his womankind as
the king of men and preachers, and yet be held by them to stand in much
need of their direction.  Lydgate, with the usual shallowness of a
young bachelor, wondered that Mr. Farebrother had not taught them
better.

"My mother is not used to my having visitors who can take any interest
in my hobbies," said the Vicar, as he opened the door of his study,
which was indeed as bare of luxuries for the body as the ladies had
implied, unless a short porcelain pipe and a tobacco-box were to be
excepted.

"Men of your profession don't generally smoke," he said.  Lydgate
smiled and shook his head.  "Nor of mine either, properly, I suppose.
You will hear that pipe alleged against me by Bulstrode and Company.
They don't know how pleased the devil would be if I gave it up."

"I understand.  You are of an excitable temper and want a sedative.  I
am heavier, and should get idle with it.  I should rush into idleness,
and stagnate there with all my might."

"And you mean to give it all to your work.  I am some ten or twelve
years older than you, and have come to a compromise.  I feed a weakness
or two lest they should get clamorous.  See," continued the Vicar,
opening several small drawers, "I fancy I have made an exhaustive study
of the entomology of this district.  I am going on both with the fauna
and flora; but I have at least done my insects well.  We are singularly
rich in orthoptera: I don't know whether--Ah! you have got hold of that
glass jar--you are looking into that instead of my drawers.  You don't
really care about these things?"

"Not by the side of this lovely anencephalous monster.  I have never
had time to give myself much to natural history.  I was early bitten
with an interest in structure, and it is what lies most directly in my
profession.  I have no hobby besides.  I have the sea to swim in there."

"Ah! you are a happy fellow," said Mr. Farebrother, turning on his heel
and beginning to fill his pipe.  "You don't know what it is to want
spiritual tobacco--bad emendations of old texts, or small items about a
variety of Aphis Brassicae, with the well-known signature of
Philomicron, for the 'Twaddler's Magazine;' or a learned treatise on
the entomology of the Pentateuch, including all the insects not
mentioned, but probably met with by the Israelites in their passage
through the desert; with a monograph on the Ant, as treated by Solomon,
showing the harmony of the Book of Proverbs with the results of modern
research.  You don't mind my fumigating you?"

Lydgate was more surprised at the openness of this talk than at its
implied meaning--that the Vicar felt himself not altogether in the
right vocation.  The neat fitting-up of drawers and shelves, and the
bookcase filled with expensive illustrated books on Natural History,
made him think again of the winnings at cards and their destination.
But he was beginning to wish that the very best construction of
everything that Mr. Farebrother did should be the true one.  The
Vicar's frankness seemed not of the repulsive sort that comes from an
uneasy consciousness seeking to forestall the judgment of others, but
simply the relief of a desire to do with as little pretence as
possible.  Apparently he was not without a sense that his freedom of
speech might seem premature, for he presently said--

"I have not yet told you that I have the advantage of you, Mr. Lydgate,
and know you better than you know me.  You remember Trawley who shared
your apartment at Paris for some time?  I was a correspondent of his,
and he told me a good deal about you.  I was not quite sure when you
first came that you were the same man.  I was very glad when I found
that you were.  Only I don't forget that you have not had the like
prologue about me."

Lydgate divined some delicacy of feeling here, but did not half
understand it.  "By the way," he said, "what has become of Trawley?  I
have quite lost sight of him.  He was hot on the French social systems,
and talked of going to the Backwoods to found a sort of Pythagorean
community.  Is he gone?"

"Not at all.  He is practising at a German bath, and has married a rich
patient."

"Then my notions wear the best, so far," said Lydgate, with a short
scornful laugh.  "He would have it, the medical profession was an
inevitable system of humbug.  I said, the fault was in the men--men who
truckle to lies and folly.  Instead of preaching against humbug outside
the walls, it might be better to set up a disinfecting apparatus
within.  In short--I am reporting my own conversation--you may be sure
I had all the good sense on my side."

"Your scheme is a good deal more difficult to carry out than the
Pythagorean community, though.  You have not only got the old Adam in
yourself against you, but you have got all those descendants of the
original Adam who form the society around you.  You see, I have paid
twelve or thirteen years more than you for my knowledge of
difficulties.  But"--Mr. Farebrother broke off a moment, and then
added, "you are eying that glass vase again.  Do you want to make an
exchange?  You shall not have it without a fair barter."

"I have some sea-mice--fine specimens--in spirits.  And I will throw in
Robert Brown's new thing--'Microscopic Observations on the Pollen of
Plants'--if you don't happen to have it already."

"Why, seeing how you long for the monster, I might ask a higher price.
Suppose I ask you to look through my drawers and agree with me about
all my new species?"  The Vicar, while he talked in this way,
alternately moved about with his pipe in his mouth, and returned to
hang rather fondly over his drawers.  "That would be good discipline,
you know, for a young doctor who has to please his patients in
Middlemarch.  You must learn to be bored, remember.  However, you shall
have the monster on your own terms."

"Don't you think men overrate the necessity for humoring everybody's
nonsense, till they get despised by the very fools they humor?" said
Lydgate, moving to Mr. Farebrother's side, and looking rather absently
at the insects ranged in fine gradation, with names subscribed in
exquisite writing.  "The shortest way is to make your value felt, so
that people must put up with you whether you flatter them or not."

"With all my heart.  But then you must be sure of having the value, and
you must keep yourself independent.  Very few men can do that.  Either
you slip out of service altogether, and become good for nothing, or you
wear the harness and draw a good deal where your yoke-fellows pull you.
But do look at these delicate orthoptera!"

Lydgate had after all to give some scrutiny to each drawer, the Vicar
laughing at himself, and yet persisting in the exhibition.

"Apropos of what you said about wearing harness," Lydgate began, after
they had sat down, "I made up my mind some time ago to do with as
little of it as possible. That was why I determined not to try anything
in London, for a good many years at least.  I didn't like what I saw
when I was studying there--so much empty bigwiggism, and obstructive
trickery.  In the country, people have less pretension to knowledge,
and are less of companions, but for that reason they affect one's
amour-propre less: one makes less bad blood, and can follow one's own
course more quietly."

"Yes--well--you have got a good start; you are in the right profession,
the work you feel yourself most fit for.  Some people miss that, and
repent too late.  But you must not be too sure of keeping your
independence."

"You mean of family ties?" said Lydgate, conceiving that these might
press rather tightly on Mr. Farebrother.

"Not altogether.  Of course they make many things more difficult.  But
a good wife--a good unworldly woman--may really help a man, and keep
him more independent.  There's a parishioner of mine--a fine fellow,
but who would hardly have pulled through as he has done without his
wife.  Do you know the Garths?  I think they were not Peacock's
patients."

"No; but there is a Miss Garth at old Featherstone's, at Lowick."

"Their daughter: an excellent girl."

"She is very quiet--I have hardly noticed her."

"She has taken notice of you, though, depend upon it."

"I don't understand," said Lydgate; he could hardly say "Of course."

"Oh, she gauges everybody.  I prepared her for confirmation--she is a
favorite of mine."

Mr. Farebrother puffed a few moments in silence, Lydgate not caring to
know more about the Garths.  At last the Vicar laid down his pipe,
stretched out his legs, and turned his bright eyes with a smile towards
Lydgate, saying--

"But we Middlemarchers are not so tame as you take us to be.  We have
our intrigues and our parties.  I am a party man, for example, and
Bulstrode is another.  If you vote for me you will offend Bulstrode."

"What is there against Bulstrode?" said Lydgate, emphatically.

"I did not say there was anything against him except that.  If you vote
against him you will make him your enemy."

"I don't know that I need mind about that," said Lydgate, rather
proudly; "but he seems to have good ideas about hospitals, and he
spends large sums on useful public objects.  He might help me a good
deal in carrying out my ideas.  As to his religious notions--why, as
Voltaire said, incantations will destroy a flock of sheep if
administered with a certain quantity of arsenic.  I look for the man
who will bring the arsenic, and don't mind about his incantations."

"Very good.  But then you must not offend your arsenic-man. You will
not offend me, you know," said Mr. Farebrother, quite unaffectedly.  "I
don't translate my own convenience into other people's duties.  I am
opposed to Bulstrode in many ways.  I don't like the set he belongs to:
they are a narrow ignorant set, and do more to make their neighbors
uncomfortable than to make them better.  Their system is a sort of
worldly-spiritual cliqueism: they really look on the rest of mankind as
a doomed carcass which is to nourish them for heaven.  But," he added,
smilingly, "I don't say that Bulstrode's new hospital is a bad thing;
and as to his wanting to oust me from the old one--why, if he thinks me
a mischievous fellow, he is only returning a compliment.  And I am not
a model clergyman--only a decent makeshift."

Lydgate was not at all sure that the Vicar maligned himself.  A model
clergyman, like a model doctor, ought to think his own profession the
finest in the world, and take all knowledge as mere nourishment to his
moral pathology and therapeutics.  He only said, "What reason does
Bulstrode give for superseding you?"

"That I don't teach his opinions--which he calls spiritual religion;
and that I have no time to spare.  Both statements are true.  But then
I could make time, and I should be glad of the forty pounds.  That is
the plain fact of the case.  But let us dismiss it.  I only wanted to
tell you that if you vote for your arsenic-man, you are not to cut me
in consequence.  I can't spare you.  You are a sort of circumnavigator
come to settle among us, and will keep up my belief in the antipodes.
Now tell me all about them in Paris."



    "Oh, sir, the loftiest hopes on earth
     Draw lots with meaner hopes: heroic breasts,
     Breathing bad air, ran risk of pestilence;
     Or, lacking lime-juice when they cross the Line,
     May languish with the scurvy."


Some weeks passed after this conversation before the question of the
chaplaincy gathered any practical import for Lydgate, and without
telling himself the reason, he deferred the predetermination on which
side he should give his vote.  It would really have been a matter of
total indifference to him--that is to say, he would have taken the more
convenient side, and given his vote for the appointment of Tyke without
any hesitation--if he had not cared personally for Mr. Farebrother.

But his liking for the Vicar of St. Botolph's grew with growing
acquaintanceship.  That, entering into Lydgate's position as a
new-comer who had his own professional objects to secure, Mr.
Farebrother should have taken pains rather to warn off than to obtain
his interest, showed an unusual delicacy and generosity, which
Lydgate's nature was keenly alive to.  It went along with other points
of conduct in Mr. Farebrother which were exceptionally fine, and made
his character resemble those southern landscapes which seem divided
between natural grandeur and social slovenliness.  Very few men could
have been as filial and chivalrous as he was to the mother, aunt, and
sister, whose dependence on him had in many ways shaped his life rather
uneasily for himself; few men who feel the pressure of small needs are
so nobly resolute not to dress up their inevitably self-interested
desires in a pretext of better motives.  In these matters he was
conscious that his life would bear the closest scrutiny; and perhaps
the consciousness encouraged a little defiance towards the critical
strictness of persons whose celestial intimacies seemed not to improve
their domestic manners, and whose lofty aims were not needed to account
for their actions.  Then, his preaching was ingenious and pithy, like
the preaching of the English Church in its robust age, and his sermons
were delivered without book.  People outside his parish went to hear
him; and, since to fill the church was always the most difficult part
of a clergyman's function, here was another ground for a careless sense
of superiority.  Besides, he was a likable man: sweet-tempered,
ready-witted, frank, without grins of suppressed bitterness or other
conversational flavors which make half of us an affliction to our
friends.  Lydgate liked him heartily, and wished for his friendship.

With this feeling uppermost, he continued to waive the question of the
chaplaincy, and to persuade himself that it was not only no proper
business of his, but likely enough never to vex him with a demand for
his vote.  Lydgate, at Mr. Bulstrode's request, was laying down plans
for the internal arrangements of the new hospital, and the two were
often in consultation.  The banker was always presupposing that he
could count in general on Lydgate as a coadjutor, but made no special
recurrence to the coming decision between Tyke and Farebrother.  When
the General Board of the Infirmary had met, however, and Lydgate had
notice that the question of the chaplaincy was thrown on a council of
the directors and medical men, to meet on the following Friday, he had
a vexed sense that he must make up his mind on this trivial Middlemarch
business.  He could not help hearing within him the distinct
declaration that Bulstrode was prime minister, and that the Tyke affair
was a question of office or no office; and he could not help an equally
pronounced dislike to giving up the prospect of office.  For his
observation was constantly confirming Mr. Farebrother's assurance that
the banker would not overlook opposition.  "Confound their petty
politics!" was one of his thoughts for three mornings in the meditative
process of shaving, when he had begun to feel that he must really hold
a court of conscience on this matter.  Certainly there were valid
things to be said against the election of Mr. Farebrother: he had too
much on his hands already, especially considering how much time he
spent on non-clerical occupations.  Then again it was a continually
repeated shock, disturbing Lydgate's esteem, that the Vicar should
obviously play for the sake of money, liking the play indeed, but
evidently liking some end which it served.  Mr. Farebrother contended
on theory for the desirability of all games, and said that Englishmen's
wit was stagnant for want of them; but Lydgate felt certain that he
would have played very much less but for the money.  There was a
billiard-room at the Green Dragon, which some anxious mothers and wives
regarded as the chief temptation in Middlemarch.  The Vicar was a
first-rate billiard-player, and though he did not frequent the Green
Dragon, there were reports that he had sometimes been there in the
daytime and had won money.  And as to the chaplaincy, he did not
pretend that he cared for it, except for the sake of the forty pounds.
Lydgate was no Puritan, but he did not care for play, and winning money
at it had always seemed a meanness to him; besides, he had an ideal of
life which made this subservience of conduct to the gaining of small
sums thoroughly hateful to him.  Hitherto in his own life his wants had
been supplied without any trouble to himself, and his first impulse was
always to be liberal with half-crowns as matters of no importance to a
gentleman; it had never occurred to him to devise a plan for getting
half-crowns.  He had always known in a general way that he was not
rich, but he had never felt poor, and he had no power of imagining the
part which the want of money plays in determining the actions of men.
Money had never been a motive to him.  Hence he was not ready to frame
excuses for this deliberate pursuit of small gains.  It was altogether
repulsive to him, and he never entered into any calculation of the
ratio between the Vicar's income and his more or less necessary
expenditure.  It was possible that he would not have made such a
calculation in his own case.

And now, when the question of voting had come, this repulsive fact told
more strongly against Mr. Farebrother than it had done before.  One
would know much better what to do if men's characters were more
consistent, and especially if one's friends were invariably fit for any
function they desired to undertake!  Lydgate was convinced that if
there had been no valid objection to Mr. Farebrother, he would have
voted for him, whatever Bulstrode might have felt on the subject: he
did not intend to be a vassal of Bulstrode's. On the other hand, there
was Tyke, a man entirely given to his clerical office, who was simply
curate at a chapel of ease in St. Peter's parish, and had time for
extra duty.  Nobody had anything to say against Mr. Tyke, except that
they could not bear him, and suspected him of cant.  Really, from his
point of view, Bulstrode was thoroughly justified.

But whichever way Lydgate began to incline, there was something to make
him wince; and being a proud man, he was a little exasperated at being
obliged to wince.  He did not like frustrating his own best purposes by
getting on bad terms with Bulstrode; he did not like voting against
Farebrother, and helping to deprive him of function and salary; and the
question occurred whether the additional forty pounds might not leave
the Vicar free from that ignoble care about winning at cards.
Moreover, Lydgate did not like the consciousness that in voting for
Tyke he should be voting on the side obviously convenient for himself.
But would the end really be his own convenience?  Other people would
say so, and would allege that he was currying favor with Bulstrode for
the sake of making himself important and getting on in the world.  What
then?  He for his own part knew that if his personal prospects simply
had been concerned, he would not have cared a rotten nut for the
banker's friendship or enmity.  What he really cared for was a medium
for his work, a vehicle for his ideas; and after all, was he not bound
to prefer the object of getting a good hospital, where he could
demonstrate the specific distinctions of fever and test therapeutic
results, before anything else connected with this chaplaincy?  For the
first time Lydgate was feeling the hampering threadlike pressure of
small social conditions, and their frustrating complexity.  At the end
of his inward debate, when he set out for the hospital, his hope was
really in the chance that discussion might somehow give a new aspect to
the question, and make the scale dip so as to exclude the necessity for
voting.  I think he trusted a little also to the energy which is
begotten by circumstances--some feeling rushing warmly and making
resolve easy, while debate in cool blood had only made it more
difficult.  However it was, he did not distinctly say to himself on
which side he would vote; and all the while he was inwardly resenting
the subjection which had been forced upon him.  It would have seemed
beforehand like a ridiculous piece of bad logic that he, with his
unmixed resolutions of independence and his select purposes, would find
himself at the very outset in the grasp of petty alternatives, each of
which was repugnant to him.  In his student's chambers, he had
prearranged his social action quite differently.

Lydgate was late in setting out, but Dr. Sprague, the two other
surgeons, and several of the directors had arrived early; Mr.
Bulstrode, treasurer and chairman, being among those who were still
absent.  The conversation seemed to imply that the issue was
problematical, and that a majority for Tyke was not so certain as had
been generally supposed.  The two physicians, for a wonder, turned out
to be unanimous, or rather, though of different minds, they concurred
in action.  Dr. Sprague, the rugged and weighty, was, as every one had
foreseen, an adherent of Mr. Farebrother.  The Doctor was more than
suspected of having no religion, but somehow Middlemarch tolerated this
deficiency in him as if he had been a Lord Chancellor; indeed it is
probable that his professional weight was the more believed in, the
world-old association of cleverness with the evil principle being still
potent in the minds even of lady-patients who had the strictest ideas
of frilling and sentiment.  It was perhaps this negation in the Doctor
which made his neighbors call him hard-headed and dry-witted;
conditions of texture which were also held favorable to the storing of
judgments connected with drugs.  At all events, it is certain that if
any medical man had come to Middlemarch with the reputation of having
very definite religious views, of being given to prayer, and of
otherwise showing an active piety, there would have been a general
presumption against his medical skill.

On this ground it was (professionally speaking) fortunate for Dr.
Minchin that his religious sympathies were of a general kind, and such
as gave a distant medical sanction to all serious sentiment, whether of
Church or Dissent, rather than any adhesion to particular tenets.  If
Mr. Bulstrode insisted, as he was apt to do, on the Lutheran doctrine
of justification, as that by which a Church must stand or fall, Dr.
Minchin in return was quite sure that man was not a mere machine or a
fortuitous conjunction of atoms; if Mrs. Wimple insisted on a
particular providence in relation to her stomach complaint, Dr. Minchin
for his part liked to keep the mental windows open and objected to
fixed limits; if the Unitarian brewer jested about the Athanasian
Creed, Dr. Minchin quoted Pope's "Essay on Man."  He objected to the
rather free style of anecdote in which Dr. Sprague indulged, preferring
well-sanctioned quotations, and liking refinement of all kinds: it was
generally known that he had some kinship to a bishop, and sometimes
spent his holidays at "the palace."

Dr. Minchin was soft-handed, pale-complexioned, and of rounded outline,
not to be distinguished from a mild clergyman in appearance: whereas
Dr. Sprague was superfluously tall; his trousers got creased at the
knees, and showed an excess of boot at a time when straps seemed
necessary to any dignity of bearing; you heard him go in and out, and
up and down, as if he had come to see after the roofing.  In short, he
had weight, and might be expected to grapple with a disease and throw
it; while Dr. Minchin might be better able to detect it lurking and to
circumvent it.  They enjoyed about equally the mysterious privilege of
medical reputation, and concealed with much etiquette their contempt
for each other's skill.  Regarding themselves as Middlemarch
institutions, they were ready to combine against all innovators, and
against non-professionals given to interference.  On this ground they
were both in their hearts equally averse to Mr. Bulstrode, though Dr.
Minchin had never been in open hostility with him, and never differed
from him without elaborate explanation to Mrs. Bulstrode, who had found
that Dr. Minchin alone understood her constitution.  A layman who pried
into the professional conduct of medical men, and was always obtruding
his reforms,--though he was less directly embarrassing to the two
physicians than to the surgeon-apothecaries who attended paupers by
contract, was nevertheless offensive to the professional nostril as
such; and Dr. Minchin shared fully in the new pique against Bulstrode,
excited by his apparent determination to patronize Lydgate.  The
long-established practitioners, Mr. Wrench and Mr. Toller; were just
now standing apart and having a friendly colloquy, in which they agreed
that Lydgate was a jackanapes, just made to serve Bulstrode's purpose.
To non-medical friends they had already concurred in praising the other
young practitioner, who had come into the town on Mr. Peacock's
retirement without further recommendation than his own merits and such
argument for solid professional acquirement as might be gathered from
his having apparently wasted no time on other branches of knowledge.
It was clear that Lydgate, by not dispensing drugs, intended to cast
imputations on his equals, and also to obscure the limit between his
own rank as a general practitioner and that of the physicians, who, in
the interest of the profession, felt bound to maintain its various
grades,--especially against a man who had not been to either of the
English universities and enjoyed the absence of anatomical and bedside
study there, but came with a libellous pretension to experience in
Edinburgh and Paris, where observation might be abundant indeed, but
hardly sound.

Thus it happened that on this occasion Bulstrode became identified with
Lydgate, and Lydgate with Tyke; and owing to this variety of
interchangeable names for the chaplaincy question, diverse minds were
enabled to form the same judgment concerning it.

Dr. Sprague said at once bluntly to the group assembled when he
entered, "I go for Farebrother.  A salary, with all my heart.  But why
take it from the Vicar?  He has none too much--has to insure his life,
besides keeping house, and doing a vicar's charities.  Put forty pounds
in his pocket and you'll do no harm.  He's a good fellow, is
Farebrother, with as little of the parson about him as will serve to
carry orders."

"Ho, ho!  Doctor," said old Mr. Powderell, a retired iron-monger of
some standing--his interjection being something between a laugh and a
Parliamentary disapproval; "we must let you have your say.  But what we
have to consider is not anybody's income--it's the souls of the poor
sick people"--here Mr. Powderell's voice and face had a sincere pathos
in them.  "He is a real Gospel preacher, is Mr. Tyke.  I should vote
against my conscience if I voted against Mr. Tyke--I should indeed."

"Mr. Tyke's opponents have not asked any one to vote against his
conscience, I believe," said Mr. Hackbutt, a rich tanner of fluent
speech, whose glittering spectacles and erect hair were turned with
some severity towards innocent Mr. Powderell.  "But in my judgment it
behoves us, as Directors, to consider whether we will regard it as our
whole business to carry out propositions emanating from a single
quarter.  Will any member of the committee aver that he would have
entertained the idea of displacing the gentleman who has always
discharged the function of chaplain here, if it had not been suggested
to him by parties whose disposition it is to regard every institution
of this town as a machinery for carrying out their own views?  I tax no
man's motives: let them lie between himself and a higher Power; but I
do say, that there are influences at work here which are incompatible
with genuine independence, and that a crawling servility is usually
dictated by circumstances which gentlemen so conducting themselves
could not afford either morally or financially to avow.  I myself am a
layman, but I have given no inconsiderable attention to the divisions
in the Church and--"

"Oh, damn the divisions!" burst in Mr. Frank Hawley, lawyer and
town-clerk, who rarely presented himself at the board, but now looked
in hurriedly, whip in hand.  "We have nothing to do with them here.
Farebrother has been doing the work--what there was--without pay, and
if pay is to be given, it should be given to him.  I call it a
confounded job to take the thing away from Farebrother."

"I think it would be as well for gentlemen not to give their remarks a
personal bearing," said Mr. Plymdale.  "I shall vote for the
appointment of Mr. Tyke, but I should not have known, if Mr. Hackbutt
hadn't hinted it, that I was a Servile Crawler."

"I disclaim any personalities.  I expressly said, if I may be allowed
to repeat, or even to conclude what I was about to say--"

"Ah, here's Minchin!" said Mr. Frank Hawley; at which everybody turned
away from Mr. Hackbutt, leaving him to feel the uselessness of superior
gifts in Middlemarch.  "Come, Doctor, I must have you on the right
side, eh?"

"I hope so," said Dr. Minchin, nodding and shaking hands here and
there; "at whatever cost to my feelings."

"If there's any feeling here, it should be feeling for the man who is
turned out, I think," said Mr. Frank Hawley.

"I confess I have feelings on the other side also.  I have a divided
esteem," said Dr. Minchin, rubbing his hands.  "I consider Mr. Tyke an
exemplary man--none more so--and I believe him to be proposed from
unimpeachable motives.  I, for my part, wish that I could give him my
vote.  But I am constrained to take a view of the case which gives the
preponderance to Mr. Farebrother's claims.  He is an amiable man, an
able preacher, and has been longer among us."

Old Mr. Powderell looked on, sad and silent.  Mr. Plymdale settled his
cravat, uneasily.

"You don't set up Farebrother as a pattern of what a clergyman ought to
be, I hope," said Mr. Larcher, the eminent carrier, who had just come
in.  "I have no ill-will towards him, but I think we owe something to
the public, not to speak of anything higher, in these appointments.  In
my opinion Farebrother is too lax for a clergyman.  I don't wish to
bring up particulars against him; but he will make a little attendance
here go as far as he can."

"And a devilish deal better than too much," said Mr. Hawley, whose bad
language was notorious in that part of the county.  "Sick people can't
bear so much praying and preaching.  And that methodistical sort of
religion is bad for the spirits--bad for the inside, eh?" he added,
turning quickly round to the four medical men who were assembled.

But any answer was dispensed with by the entrance of three gentlemen,
with whom there were greetings more or less cordial.  These were the
Reverend Edward Thesiger, Rector of St. Peter's, Mr. Bulstrode, and our
friend Mr. Brooke of Tipton, who had lately allowed himself to be put
on the board of directors in his turn, but had never before attended,
his attendance now being due to Mr. Bulstrode's exertions.  Lydgate was
the only person still expected.

Every one now sat down, Mr. Bulstrode presiding, pale and
self-restrained as usual.  Mr. Thesiger, a moderate evangelical, wished
for the appointment of his friend Mr. Tyke, a zealous able man, who,
officiating at a chapel of ease, had not a cure of souls too extensive
to leave him ample time for the new duty.  It was desirable that
chaplaincies of this kind should be entered on with a fervent
intention: they were peculiar opportunities for spiritual influence;
and while it was good that a salary should be allotted, there was the
more need for scrupulous watching lest the office should be perverted
into a mere question of salary.  Mr. Thesiger's manner had so much
quiet propriety that objectors could only simmer in silence.

Mr. Brooke believed that everybody meant well in the matter.  He had
not himself attended to the affairs of the Infirmary, though he had a
strong interest in whatever was for the benefit of Middlemarch, and was
most happy to meet the gentlemen present on any public question--"any
public question, you know," Mr. Brooke repeated, with his nod of
perfect understanding.  "I am a good deal occupied as a magistrate, and
in the collection of documentary evidence, but I regard my time as
being at the disposal of the public--and, in short, my friends have
convinced me that a chaplain with a salary--a salary, you know--is a
very good thing, and I am happy to be able to come here and vote for
the appointment of Mr. Tyke, who, I understand, is an unexceptionable
man, apostolic and eloquent and everything of that kind--and I am the
last man to withhold my vote--under the circumstances, you know."

"It seems to me that you have been crammed with one side of the
question, Mr. Brooke," said Mr. Frank Hawley, who was afraid of nobody,
and was a Tory suspicious of electioneering intentions.  "You don't
seem to know that one of the worthiest men we have has been doing duty
as chaplain here for years without pay, and that Mr. Tyke is proposed
to supersede him."

"Excuse me, Mr. Hawley," said Mr. Bulstrode.  "Mr. Brooke has been
fully informed of Mr. Farebrother's character and position."

"By his enemies," flashed out Mr. Hawley.

"I trust there is no personal hostility concerned here," said Mr.
Thesiger.

"I'll swear there is, though," retorted Mr. Hawley.

"Gentlemen," said Mr. Bulstrode, in a subdued tone, "the merits of the
question may be very briefly stated, and if any one present doubts that
every gentleman who is about to give his vote has not been fully
informed, I can now recapitulate the considerations that should weigh
on either side."

"I don't see the good of that," said Mr. Hawley.  "I suppose we all
know whom we mean to vote for.  Any man who wants to do justice does
not wait till the last minute to hear both sides of the question.  I
have no time to lose, and I propose that the matter be put to the vote
at once."

A brief but still hot discussion followed before each person wrote
"Tyke" or "Farebrother" on a piece of paper and slipped it into a glass
tumbler; and in the mean time Mr. Bulstrode saw Lydgate enter.

"I perceive that the votes are equally divided at present," said Mr.
Bulstrode, in a clear biting voice.  Then, looking up at Lydgate--

"There is a casting-vote still to be given.  It is yours, Mr. Lydgate:
will you be good enough to write?"

"The thing is settled now," said Mr. Wrench, rising.  "We all know how
Mr. Lydgate will vote."

"You seem to speak with some peculiar meaning, sir," said Lydgate,
rather defiantly, and keeping his pencil suspended.

"I merely mean that you are expected to vote with Mr. Bulstrode.  Do
you regard that meaning as offensive?"

"It may be offensive to others.  But I shall not desist from voting
with him on that account."  Lydgate immediately wrote down "Tyke."

So the Rev. Walter Tyke became chaplain to the Infirmary, and Lydgate
continued to work with Mr. Bulstrode.  He was really uncertain whether
Tyke were not the more suitable candidate, and yet his consciousness
told him that if he had been quite free from indirect bias he should
have voted for Mr. Farebrother.  The affair of the chaplaincy remained
a sore point in his memory as a case in which this petty medium of
Middlemarch had been too strong for him.  How could a man be satisfied
with a decision between such alternatives and under such circumstances?
No more than he can be satisfied with his hat, which he has chosen from
among such shapes as the resources of the age offer him, wearing it at
best with a resignation which is chiefly supported by comparison.

But Mr. Farebrother met him with the same friendliness as before.  The
character of the publican and sinner is not always practically
incompatible with that of the modern Pharisee, for the majority of us
scarcely see more distinctly the faultiness of our own conduct than the
faultiness of our own arguments, or the dulness of our own jokes.  But
the Vicar of St. Botolph's had certainly escaped the slightest tincture
of the Pharisee, and by dint of admitting to himself that he was too
much as other men were, he had become remarkably unlike them in
this--that he could excuse others for thinking slightly of him, and
could judge impartially of their conduct even when it told against him.

"The world has been too strong for _me_, I know," he said one day to
Lydgate.  "But then I am not a mighty man--I shall never be a man of
renown.  The choice of Hercules is a pretty fable; but Prodicus makes
it easy work for the hero, as if the first resolves were enough.
Another story says that he came to hold the distaff, and at last wore
the Nessus shirt.  I suppose one good resolve might keep a man right if
everybody else's resolve helped him."

The Vicar's talk was not always inspiriting: he had escaped being a
Pharisee, but he had not escaped that low estimate of possibilities
which we rather hastily arrive at as an inference from our own failure.
Lydgate thought that there was a pitiable infirmity of will in Mr.
Farebrother.



    "L' altra vedete ch'ha fatto alla guancia
     Della sua palma, sospirando, letto."
                              --Purgatorio, vii.


When George the Fourth was still reigning over the privacies of
Windsor, when the Duke of Wellington was Prime Minister, and Mr. Vincy
was mayor of the old corporation in Middlemarch, Mrs. Casaubon, born
Dorothea Brooke, had taken her wedding journey to Rome.  In those days
the world in general was more ignorant of good and evil by forty years
than it is at present.  Travellers did not often carry full information
on Christian art either in their heads or their pockets; and even the
most brilliant English critic of the day mistook the flower-flushed
tomb of the ascended Virgin for an ornamental vase due to the painter's
fancy.  Romanticism, which has helped to fill some dull blanks with
love and knowledge, had not yet penetrated the times with its leaven
and entered into everybody's food; it was fermenting still as a
distinguishable vigorous enthusiasm in certain long-haired German
artists at Rome, and the youth of other nations who worked or idled
near them were sometimes caught in the spreading movement.

One fine morning a young man whose hair was not immoderately long, but
abundant and curly, and who was otherwise English in his equipment, had
just turned his back on the Belvedere Torso in the Vatican and was
looking out on the magnificent view of the mountains from the adjoining
round vestibule.  He was sufficiently absorbed not to notice the
approach of a dark-eyed, animated German who came up to him and placing
a hand on his shoulder, said with a strong accent, "Come here, quick!
else she will have changed her pose."

Quickness was ready at the call, and the two figures passed lightly
along by the Meleager, towards the hall where the reclining Ariadne,
then called the Cleopatra, lies in the marble voluptuousness of her
beauty, the drapery folding around her with a petal-like ease and
tenderness.  They were just in time to see another figure standing
against a pedestal near the reclining marble: a breathing blooming
girl, whose form, not shamed by the Ariadne, was clad in Quakerish gray
drapery; her long cloak, fastened at the neck, was thrown backward from
her arms, and one beautiful ungloved hand pillowed her cheek, pushing
somewhat backward the white beaver bonnet which made a sort of halo to
her face around the simply braided dark-brown hair.  She was not
looking at the sculpture, probably not thinking of it: her large eyes
were fixed dreamily on a streak of sunlight which fell across the
floor.  But she became conscious of the two strangers who suddenly
paused as if to contemplate the Cleopatra, and, without looking at
them, immediately turned away to join a maid-servant and courier who
were loitering along the hall at a little distance off.

"What do you think of that for a fine bit of antithesis?" said the
German, searching in his friend's face for responding admiration, but
going on volubly without waiting for any other answer.  "There lies
antique beauty, not corpse-like even in death, but arrested in the
complete contentment of its sensuous perfection: and here stands beauty
in its breathing life, with the consciousness of Christian centuries in
its bosom.  But she should be dressed as a nun; I think she looks
almost what you call a Quaker; I would dress her as a nun in my
picture.  However, she is married; I saw her wedding-ring on that
wonderful left hand, otherwise I should have thought the sallow
Geistlicher was her father.  I saw him parting from her a good while
ago, and just now I found her in that magnificent pose.  Only think! he
is perhaps rich, and would like to have her portrait taken.  Ah! it is
no use looking after her--there she goes!  Let us follow her home!"

"No, no," said his companion, with a little frown.

"You are singular, Ladislaw.  You look struck together.  Do you know
her?"

"I know that she is married to my cousin," said Will Ladislaw,
sauntering down the hall with a preoccupied air, while his German
friend kept at his side and watched him eagerly.

"What! the Geistlicher? He looks more like an uncle--a more useful sort
of relation."

"He is not my uncle.  I tell you he is my second cousin," said
Ladislaw, with some irritation.

"Schon, schon.  Don't be snappish.  You are not angry with me for
thinking Mrs. Second-Cousin the most perfect young Madonna I ever saw?"

"Angry? nonsense.  I have only seen her once before, for a couple of
minutes, when my cousin introduced her to me, just before I left
England.  They were not married then.  I didn't know they were coming
to Rome."

"But you will go to see them now--you will find out what they have for
an address--since you know the name.  Shall we go to the post?  And you
could speak about the portrait."

"Confound you, Naumann!  I don't know what I shall do.  I am not so
brazen as you."

"Bah! that is because you are dilettantish and amateurish.  If you were
an artist, you would think of Mistress Second-Cousin as antique form
animated by Christian sentiment--a sort of Christian Antigone--sensuous
force controlled by spiritual passion."

"Yes, and that your painting her was the chief outcome of her
existence--the divinity passing into higher completeness and all but
exhausted in the act of covering your bit of canvas.  I am amateurish
if you like: I do _not_ think that all the universe is straining
towards the obscure significance of your pictures."

"But it is, my dear!--so far as it is straining through me, Adolf
Naumann: that stands firm," said the good-natured painter, putting a
hand on Ladislaw's shoulder, and not in the least disturbed by the
unaccountable touch of ill-humor in his tone.  "See now!  My existence
presupposes the existence of the whole universe--does it _not?_ and my
function is to paint--and as a painter I have a conception which is
altogether genialisch, of your great-aunt or second grandmother as a
subject for a picture; therefore, the universe is straining towards
that picture through that particular hook or claw which it puts forth
in the shape of me--not true?"

"But how if another claw in the shape of me is straining to thwart
it?--the case is a little less simple then."

"Not at all: the result of the struggle is the same thing--picture or
no picture--logically."

Will could not resist this imperturbable temper, and the cloud in his
face broke into sunshiny laughter.

"Come now, my friend--you will help?" said Naumann, in a hopeful tone.

"No; nonsense, Naumann!  English ladies are not at everybody's service
as models.  And you want to express too much with your painting.  You
would only have made a better or worse portrait with a background which
every connoisseur would give a different reason for or against.  And
what is a portrait of a woman?  Your painting and Plastik are poor
stuff after all.  They perturb and dull conceptions instead of raising
them.  Language is a finer medium."

"Yes, for those who can't paint," said Naumann.  "There you have
perfect right.  I did not recommend you to paint, my friend."

The amiable artist carried his sting, but Ladislaw did not choose to
appear stung.  He went on as if he had not heard.

"Language gives a fuller image, which is all the better for beings
vague.  After all, the true seeing is within; and painting stares at
you with an insistent imperfection.  I feel that especially about
representations of women.  As if a woman were a mere colored
superficies!  You must wait for movement and tone.  There is a
difference in their very breathing: they change from moment to
moment.--This woman whom you have just seen, for example: how would you
paint her voice, pray?  But her voice is much diviner than anything you
have seen of her."

"I see, I see.  You are jealous.  No man must presume to think that he
can paint your ideal.  This is serious, my friend!  Your great-aunt!
'Der Neffe als Onkel' in a tragic sense--ungeheuer!"

"You and I shall quarrel, Naumann, if you call that lady my aunt again."

"How is she to be called then?"

"Mrs. Casaubon."

"Good.  Suppose I get acquainted with her in spite of you, and find
that she very much wishes to be painted?"

"Yes, suppose!" said Will Ladislaw, in a contemptuous undertone,
intended to dismiss the subject.  He was conscious of being irritated
by ridiculously small causes, which were half of his own creation.  Why
was he making any fuss about Mrs. Casaubon?  And yet he felt as if
something had happened to him with regard to her.  There are characters
which are continually creating collisions and nodes for themselves in
dramas which nobody is prepared to act with them.  Their
susceptibilities will clash against objects that remain innocently
quiet.



    "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 course 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.



    "Hire facounde eke full womanly and plain,
     No contrefeted termes had she
     To semen wise."
                        --CHAUCER.


It was in that way Dorothea came to be sobbing as soon as she was
securely alone.  But she was presently roused by a knock at the door,
which made her hastily dry her eyes before saying, "Come in." Tantripp
had brought a card, and said that there was a gentleman waiting in the
lobby.  The courier had told him that only Mrs. Casaubon was at home,
but he said he was a relation of Mr. Casaubon's: would she see him?

"Yes," said Dorothea, without pause; "show him into the salon." Her
chief impressions about young Ladislaw were that when she had seen him
at Lowick she had been made aware of Mr. Casaubon's generosity towards
him, and also that she had been interested in his own hesitation about
his career.  She was alive to anything that gave her an opportunity for
active sympathy, and at this moment it seemed as if the visit had come
to shake her out of her self-absorbed discontent--to remind her of her
husband's goodness, and make her feel that she had now the right to be
his helpmate in all kind deeds.  She waited a minute or two, but when
she passed into the next room there were just signs enough that she had
been crying to make her open face look more youthful and appealing than
usual.  She met Ladislaw with that exquisite smile of good-will which
is unmixed with vanity, and held out her hand to him.  He was the elder
by several years, but at that moment he looked much the younger, for
his transparent complexion flushed suddenly, and he spoke with a
shyness extremely unlike the ready indifference of his manner with his
male companion, while Dorothea became all the calmer with a wondering
desire to put him at ease.

"I was not aware that you and Mr. Casaubon were in Rome, until this
morning, when I saw you in the Vatican Museum," he said.  "I knew you
at once--but--I mean, that I concluded Mr. Casaubon's address would be
found at the Poste Restante, and I was anxious to pay my respects to
him and you as early as possible."

"Pray sit down.  He is not here now, but he will be glad to hear of
you, I am sure," said Dorothea, seating herself unthinkingly between
the fire and the light of the tall window, and pointing to a chair
opposite, with the quietude of a benignant matron.  The signs of
girlish sorrow in her face were only the more striking.  "Mr. Casaubon
is much engaged; but you will leave your address--will you not?--and
he will write to you."

"You are very good," said Ladislaw, beginning to lose his diffidence in
the interest with which he was observing the signs of weeping which had
altered her face.  "My address is on my card.  But if you will allow me
I will call again to-morrow at an hour when Mr. Casaubon is likely to
be at home."

"He goes to read in the Library of the Vatican every day, and you can
hardly see him except by an appointment.  Especially now.  We are about
to leave Rome, and he is very busy.  He is usually away almost from
breakfast till dinner.  But I am sure he will wish you to dine with us."

Will Ladislaw was struck mute for a few moments.  He had never been
fond of Mr. Casaubon, and if it had not been for the sense of
obligation, would have laughed at him as a Bat of erudition.  But the
idea of this dried-up pedant, this elaborator of small explanations
about as important as the surplus stock of false antiquities kept in a
vendor's back chamber, having first got this adorable young creature to
marry him, and then passing his honeymoon away from her, groping after
his mouldy futilities (Will was given to hyperbole)--this sudden
picture stirred him with a sort of comic disgust: he was divided
between the impulse to laugh aloud and the equally unseasonable impulse
to burst into scornful invective.

For an instant he felt that the struggle, was causing a queer
contortion of his mobile features, but with a good effort he resolved
it into nothing more offensive than a merry smile.

Dorothea wondered; but the smile was irresistible, and shone back from
her face too.  Will Ladislaw's smile was delightful, unless you were
angry with him beforehand: it was a gush of inward light illuminating
the transparent skin as well as the eyes, and playing about every curve
and line as if some Ariel were touching them with a new charm, and
banishing forever the traces of moodiness.  The reflection of that
smile could not but have a little merriment in it too, even under dark
eyelashes still moist, as Dorothea said inquiringly, "Something amuses
you?"

"Yes," said Will, quick in finding resources.  "I am thinking of the
sort of figure I cut the first time I saw you, when you annihilated my
poor sketch with your criticism."

"My criticism?" said Dorothea, wondering still more.  "Surely not.  I
always feel particularly ignorant about painting."

"I suspected you of knowing so much, that you knew how to say just what
was most cutting.  You said--I dare say you don't remember it as I
do--that the relation of my sketch to nature was quite hidden from you.
At least, you implied that."  Will could laugh now as well as smile.

"That was really my ignorance," said Dorothea, admiring
Will's good-humor. "I must have said so only because I never could see
any beauty in the pictures which my uncle told me all judges thought
very fine.  And I have gone about with just the same ignorance in Rome.
There are comparatively few paintings that I can really enjoy.  At
first when I enter a room where the walls are covered with frescos, or
with rare pictures, I feel a kind of awe--like a child present at great
ceremonies where there are grand robes and processions; I feel myself
in the presence of some higher life than my own.  But when I begin to
examine the pictures one by one the life goes out of them, or else is
something violent and strange to me.  It must be my own dulness.  I am
seeing so much all at once, and not understanding half of it.  That
always makes one feel stupid.  It is painful to be told that anything
is very fine and not be able to feel that it is fine--something like
being blind, while people talk of the sky."

"Oh, there is a great deal in the feeling for art which must be
acquired," said Will.  (It was impossible now to doubt the directness
of Dorothea's confession.) "Art is an old language with a great many
artificial affected styles, and sometimes the chief pleasure one gets
out of knowing them is the mere sense of knowing.  I enjoy the art of
all sorts here immensely; but I suppose if I could pick my enjoyment to
pieces I should find it made up of many different threads.  There is
something in daubing a little one's self, and having an idea of the
process."

"You mean perhaps to be a painter?" said Dorothea, with a new direction
of interest.  "You mean to make painting your profession?  Mr. Casaubon
will like to hear that you have chosen a profession."

"No, oh no," said Will, with some coldness.  "I have quite made up my
mind against it.  It is too one-sided a life.  I have been seeing a
great deal of the German artists here: I travelled from Frankfort with
one of them.  Some are fine, even brilliant fellows--but I should not
like to get into their way of looking at the world entirely from the
studio point of view."

"That I can understand," said Dorothea, cordially.  "And in Rome it
seems as if there were so many things which are more wanted in the
world than pictures.  But if you have a genius for painting, would it
not be right to take that as a guide?  Perhaps you might do better
things than these--or different, so that there might not be so many
pictures almost all alike in the same place."

There was no mistaking this simplicity, and Will was won by it into
frankness.  "A man must have a very rare genius to make changes of that
sort.  I am afraid mine would not carry me even to the pitch of doing
well what has been done already, at least not so well as to make it
worth while.  And I should never succeed in anything by dint of
drudgery.  If things don't come easily to me I never get them."

"I have heard Mr. Casaubon say that he regrets your want of patience,"
said Dorothea, gently.  She was rather shocked at this mode of taking
all life as a holiday.

"Yes, I know Mr. Casaubon's opinion.  He and I differ."

The slight streak of contempt in this hasty reply offended Dorothea.
She was all the more susceptible about Mr. Casaubon because of her
morning's trouble.

"Certainly you differ," she said, rather proudly.  "I did not think of
comparing you: such power of persevering devoted labor as Mr.
Casaubon's is not common."

Will saw that she was offended, but this only gave an additional
impulse to the new irritation of his latent dislike towards Mr.
Casaubon.  It was too intolerable that Dorothea should be worshipping
this husband: such weakness in a woman is pleasant to no man but the
husband in question.  Mortals are easily tempted to pinch the life out
of their neighbor's buzzing glory, and think that such killing is no
murder.

"No, indeed," he answered, promptly.  "And therefore it is a pity that
it should be thrown away, as so much English scholarship is, for want
of knowing what is being done by the rest of the world.  If Mr.
Casaubon read German he would save himself a great deal of trouble."

"I do not understand you," said Dorothea, startled and anxious.

"I merely mean," said Will, in an offhand way, "that the Germans have
taken the lead in historical inquiries, and they laugh at results which
are got by groping about in woods with a pocket-compass while they have
made good roads.  When I was with Mr. Casaubon I saw that he deafened
himself in that direction: it was almost against his will that he read
a Latin treatise written by a German.  I was very sorry."

Will only thought of giving a good pinch that would annihilate that
vaunted laboriousness, and was unable to imagine the mode in which
Dorothea would be wounded.  Young Mr. Ladislaw was not at all deep
himself in German writers; but very little achievement is required in
order to pity another man's shortcomings.

Poor Dorothea felt a pang at the thought that the labor of her
husband's life might be void, which left her no energy to spare for the
question whether this young relative who was so much obliged to him
ought not to have repressed his observation.  She did not even speak,
but sat looking at her hands, absorbed in the piteousness of that
thought.

Will, however, having given that annihilating pinch, was rather
ashamed, imagining from Dorothea's silence that he had offended her
still more; and having also a conscience about plucking the
tail-feathers from a benefactor.

"I regretted it especially," he resumed, taking the usual course from
detraction to insincere eulogy, "because of my gratitude and respect
towards my cousin.  It would not signify so much in a man whose talents
and character were less distinguished."

Dorothea raised her eyes, brighter than usual with excited feeling, and
said in her saddest recitative, "How I wish I had learned German when I
was at Lausanne!  There were plenty of German teachers.  But now I can
be of no use."

There was a new light, but still a mysterious light, for Will in
Dorothea's last words.  The question how she had come to accept Mr.
Casaubon--which he had dismissed when he first saw her by saying that
she must be disagreeable in spite of appearances--was not now to be
answered on any such short and easy method.  Whatever else she might
be, she was not disagreeable.  She was not coldly clever and indirectly
satirical, but adorably simple and full of feeling.  She was an angel
beguiled.  It would be a unique delight to wait and watch for the
melodious fragments in which her heart and soul came forth so directly
and ingenuously.  The Aeolian harp again came into his mind.

She must have made some original romance for herself in this marriage.
And if Mr. Casaubon had been a dragon who had carried her off to his
lair with his talons simply and without legal forms, it would have been
an unavoidable feat of heroism to release her and fall at her feet.
But he was something more unmanageable than a dragon: he was a
benefactor with collective society at his back, and he was at that
moment entering the room in all the unimpeachable correctness of his
demeanor, while Dorothea was looking animated with a newly roused alarm
and regret, and Will was looking animated with his admiring speculation
about her feelings.

Mr. Casaubon felt a surprise which was quite unmixed with pleasure, but
he did not swerve from his usual politeness of greeting, when Will rose
and explained his presence.  Mr. Casaubon was less happy than usual,
and this perhaps made him look all the dimmer and more faded; else, the
effect might easily have been produced by the contrast of his young
cousin's appearance.  The first impression on seeing Will was one of
sunny brightness, which added to the uncertainty of his changing
expression.  Surely, his very features changed their form, his jaw
looked sometimes large and sometimes small; and the little ripple in
his nose was a preparation for metamorphosis.  When he turned his head
quickly his hair seemed to shake out light, and some persons thought
they saw decided genius in this coruscation.  Mr. Casaubon, on the
contrary, stood rayless.

As Dorothea's eyes were turned anxiously on her husband she was perhaps
not insensible to the contrast, but it was only mingled with other
causes in making her more conscious of that new alarm on his behalf
which was the first stirring of a pitying tenderness fed by the
realities of his lot and not by her own dreams.  Yet it was a source of
greater freedom to her that Will was there; his young equality was
agreeable, and also perhaps his openness to conviction.  She felt an
immense need of some one to speak to, and she had never before seen any
one who seemed so quick and pliable, so likely to understand everything.

Mr. Casaubon gravely hoped that Will was passing his time profitably as
well as pleasantly in Rome--had thought his intention was to remain in
South Germany--but begged him to come and dine to-morrow, when he could
converse more at large: at present he was somewhat weary.  Ladislaw
understood, and accepting the invitation immediately took his leave.

Dorothea's eyes followed her husband anxiously, while he sank down
wearily at the end of a sofa, and resting his elbow supported his head
and looked on the floor.  A little flushed, and with bright eyes, she
seated herself beside him, and said--

"Forgive me for speaking so hastily to you this morning.  I was wrong.
I fear I hurt you and made the day more burdensome."

"I am glad that you feel that, my dear," said Mr. Casaubon.  He spoke
quietly and bowed his head a little, but there was still an uneasy
feeling in his eyes as he looked at her.

"But you do forgive me?" said Dorothea, with a quick sob.  In her need
for some manifestation of feeling she was ready to exaggerate her own
fault.  Would not love see returning penitence afar off, and fall on
its neck and kiss it?

"My dear Dorothea--'who with repentance is not satisfied, is not of
heaven nor earth:'--you do not think me worthy to be banished by that
severe sentence," said Mr. Casaubon, exerting himself to make a strong
statement, and also to smile faintly.

Dorothea was silent, but a tear which had come up with the sob would
insist on falling.

"You are excited, my dear. And I also am feeling some unpleasant
consequences of too much mental disturbance," said Mr. Casaubon.  In
fact, he had it in his thought to tell her that she ought not to have
received young Ladislaw in his absence: but he abstained, partly from
the sense that it would be ungracious to bring a new complaint in the
moment of her penitent acknowledgment, partly because he wanted to
avoid further agitation of himself by speech, and partly because he was
too proud to betray that jealousy of disposition which was not so
exhausted on his scholarly compeers that there was none to spare in
other directions.  There is a sort of jealousy which needs very little
fire: it is hardly a passion, but a blight bred in the cloudy, damp
despondency of uneasy egoism.

"I think it is time for us to dress," he added, looking at his watch.
They both rose, and there was never any further allusion between them
to what had passed on this day.

But Dorothea remembered it to the last with the vividness with which we
all remember epochs in our experience when some dear expectation dies,
or some new motive is born.  Today she had begun to see that she had
been under a wild illusion in expecting a response to her feeling from
Mr. Casaubon, and she had felt the waking of a presentiment that there
might be a sad consciousness in his life which made as great a need on
his side as on her own.

We are all of us born in moral stupidity, taking the world as an udder
to feed our supreme selves: Dorothea had early begun to emerge from
that stupidity, but yet it had been easier to her to imagine how she
would devote herself to Mr. Casaubon, and become wise and strong in his
strength and wisdom, than to conceive with that distinctness which is
no longer reflection but feeling--an idea wrought back to the
directness of sense, like the solidity of objects--that he had an
equivalent centre of self, whence the lights and shadows must always
fall with a certain difference.



    "Nous causames longtemps; elle etait simple et bonne.
     Ne sachant pas le mal, elle faisait le bien;
     Des richesses du coeur elle me fit l'aumone,
     Et tout en ecoutant comme le coeur se donne,
     Sans oser y penser je lui donnai le mien;
     Elle emporta ma vie, et n'en sut jamais rien."
                                         --ALFRED DE MUSSET.


Will Ladislaw was delightfully agreeable at dinner the next day, and
gave no opportunity for Mr. Casaubon to show disapprobation.  On the
contrary it seemed to Dorothea that Will had a happier way of drawing
her husband into conversation and of deferentially listening to him
than she had ever observed in any one before.  To be sure, the
listeners about Tipton were not highly gifted!  Will talked a good deal
himself, but what he said was thrown in with such rapidity, and with
such an unimportant air of saying something by the way, that it seemed
a gay little chime after the great bell.  If Will was not always
perfect, this was certainly one of his good days.  He described touches
of incident among the poor people in Rome, only to be seen by one who
could move about freely; he found himself in agreement with Mr.
Casaubon as to the unsound opinions of Middleton concerning the
relations of Judaism and Catholicism; and passed easily to a
half-enthusiastic half-playful picture of the enjoyment he got out of
the very miscellaneousness of Rome, which made the mind flexible with
constant comparison, and saved you from seeing the world's ages as a
set of box-like partitions without vital connection.  Mr. Casaubon's
studies, Will observed, had always been of too broad a kind for that,
and he had perhaps never felt any such sudden effect, but for himself
he confessed that Rome had given him quite a new sense of history as a
whole: the fragments stimulated his imagination and made him
constructive.  Then occasionally, but not too often, he appealed to
Dorothea, and discussed what she said, as if her sentiment were an item
to be considered in the final judgment even of the Madonna di Foligno
or the Laocoon.  A sense of contributing to form the world's opinion
makes conversation particularly cheerful; and Mr. Casaubon too was not
without his pride in his young wife, who spoke better than most women,
as indeed he had perceived in choosing her.

Since things were going on so pleasantly, Mr. Casaubon's statement that
his labors in the Library would be suspended for a couple of days, and
that after a brief renewal he should have no further reason for staying
in Rome, encouraged Will to urge that Mrs. Casaubon should not go away
without seeing a studio or two.  Would not Mr. Casaubon take her?  That
sort of thing ought not to be missed: it was quite special: it was a
form of life that grew like a small fresh vegetation with its
population of insects on huge fossils.  Will would be happy to conduct
them--not to anything wearisome, only to a few examples.

Mr. Casaubon, seeing Dorothea look earnestly towards him, could not but
ask her if she would be interested in such visits: he was now at her
service during the whole day; and it was agreed that Will should come
on the morrow and drive with them.

Will could not omit Thorwaldsen, a living celebrity about whom even Mr.
Casaubon inquired, but before the day was far advanced he led the way
to the studio of his friend Adolf Naumann, whom he mentioned as one of
the chief renovators of Christian art, one of those who had not only
revived but expanded that grand conception of supreme events as
mysteries at which the successive ages were spectators, and in relation
to which the great souls of all periods became as it were
contemporaries.  Will added that he had made himself Naumann's pupil
for the nonce.

"I have been making some oil-sketches under him," said Will.  "I hate
copying.  I must put something of my own in.  Naumann has been painting
the Saints drawing the Car of the Church, and I have been making a
sketch of Marlowe's Tamburlaine Driving the Conquered Kings in his
Chariot.  I am not so ecclesiastical as Naumann, and I sometimes twit
him with his excess of meaning.  But this time I mean to outdo him in
breadth of intention.  I take Tamburlaine in his chariot for the
tremendous course of the world's physical history lashing on the
harnessed dynasties.  In my opinion, that is a good mythical
interpretation."  Will here looked at Mr. Casaubon, who received this
offhand treatment of symbolism very uneasily, and bowed with a neutral
air.

"The sketch must be very grand, if it conveys so much," said Dorothea.
"I should need some explanation even of the meaning you give.  Do you
intend Tamburlaine to represent earthquakes and volcanoes?"

"Oh yes," said Will, laughing, "and migrations of races and clearings
of forests--and America and the steam-engine. Everything you can
imagine!"

"What a difficult kind of shorthand!" said Dorothea, smiling towards
her husband.  "It would require all your knowledge to be able to read
it."

Mr. Casaubon blinked furtively at Will.  He had a suspicion that he was
being laughed at.  But it was not possible to include Dorothea in the
suspicion.

They found Naumann painting industriously, but no model was present;
his pictures were advantageously arranged, and his own plain vivacious
person set off by a dove-colored blouse and a maroon velvet cap, so
that everything was as fortunate as if he had expected the beautiful
young English lady exactly at that time.

The painter in his confident English gave little dissertations on his
finished and unfinished subjects, seeming to observe Mr. Casaubon as
much as he did Dorothea.  Will burst in here and there with ardent
words of praise, marking out particular merits in his friend's work;
and Dorothea felt that she was getting quite new notions as to the
significance of Madonnas seated under inexplicable canopied thrones
with the simple country as a background, and of saints with
architectural models in their hands, or knives accidentally wedged in
their skulls.  Some things which had seemed monstrous to her were
gathering intelligibility and even a natural meaning: but all this was
apparently a branch of knowledge in which Mr. Casaubon had not
interested himself.

"I think I would rather feel that painting is beautiful than have to
read it as an enigma; but I should learn to understand these pictures
sooner than yours with the very wide meaning," said Dorothea, speaking
to Will.

"Don't speak of my painting before Naumann," said Will.  "He will tell
you, it is all pfuscherei, which is his most opprobrious word!"

"Is that true?" said Dorothea, turning her sincere eyes on Naumann, who
made a slight grimace and said--

"Oh, he does not mean it seriously with painting.  His walk must be
belles-lettres. That is wi-ide."

Naumann's pronunciation of the vowel seemed to stretch the word
satirically.  Will did not half like it, but managed to laugh: and Mr.
Casaubon, while he felt some disgust at the artist's German accent,
began to entertain a little respect for his judicious severity.

The respect was not diminished when Naumann, after drawing Will aside
for a moment and looking, first at a large canvas, then at Mr.
Casaubon, came forward again and said--

"My friend Ladislaw thinks you will pardon me, sir, if I say that a
sketch of your head would be invaluable to me for the St. Thomas
Aquinas in my picture there.  It is too much to ask; but I so seldom
see just what I want--the idealistic in the real."

"You astonish me greatly, sir," said Mr. Casaubon, his looks improved
with a glow of delight; "but if my poor physiognomy, which I have been
accustomed to regard as of the commonest order, can be of any use to
you in furnishing some traits for the angelical doctor, I shall feel
honored.  That is to say, if the operation will not be a lengthy one;
and if Mrs. Casaubon will not object to the delay."

As for Dorothea, nothing could have pleased her more, unless it had
been a miraculous voice pronouncing Mr. Casaubon the wisest and
worthiest among the sons of men.  In that case her tottering faith
would have become firm again.

Naumann's apparatus was at hand in wonderful completeness, and the
sketch went on at once as well as the conversation.  Dorothea sat down
and subsided into calm silence, feeling happier than she had done for a
long while before.  Every one about her seemed good, and she said to
herself that Rome, if she had only been less ignorant, would have been
full of beauty: its sadness would have been winged with hope.  No nature
could be less suspicious than hers: when she was a child she believed
in the gratitude of wasps and the honorable susceptibility of sparrows,
and was proportionately indignant when their baseness was made manifest.

The adroit artist was asking Mr. Casaubon questions about English
polities, which brought long answers, and, Will meanwhile had perched
himself on some steps in the background overlooking all.

Presently Naumann said--"Now if I could lay this by for half an hour
and take it up again--come and look, Ladislaw--I think it is perfect so
far."

Will vented those adjuring interjections which imply that admiration is
too strong for syntax; and Naumann said in a tone of piteous regret--

"Ah--now--if I could but have had more--but you have other
engagements--I could not ask it--or even to come again to-morrow."

"Oh, let us stay!" said Dorothea.  "We have nothing to do to-day except
go about, have we?" she added, looking entreatingly at Mr. Casaubon.
"It would be a pity not to make the head as good as possible."

"I am at your service, sir, in the matter," said Mr. Casaubon, with
polite condescension.  "Having given up the interior of my head to
idleness, it is as well that the exterior should work in this way."

"You are unspeakably good--now I am happy!" said Naumann, and then went
on in German to Will, pointing here and there to the sketch as if he
were considering that.  Putting it aside for a moment, he looked round
vaguely, as if seeking some occupation for his visitors, and afterwards
turning to Mr. Casaubon, said--

"Perhaps the beautiful bride, the gracious lady, would not be unwilling
to let me fill up the time by trying to make a slight sketch of
her--not, of course, as you see, for that picture--only as a single
study."

Mr. Casaubon, bowing, doubted not that Mrs. Casaubon would oblige him,
and Dorothea said, at once, "Where shall I put myself?"

Naumann was all apologies in asking her to stand, and allow him to
adjust her attitude, to which she submitted without any of the affected
airs and laughs frequently thought necessary on such occasions, when
the painter said, "It is as Santa Clara that I want you to
stand--leaning so, with your cheek against your hand--so--looking at
that stool, please, so!"

Will was divided between the inclination to fall at the Saint's feet
and kiss her robe, and the temptation to knock Naumann down while he
was adjusting her arm.  All this was impudence and desecration, and he
repented that he had brought her.

The artist was diligent, and Will recovering himself moved about and
occupied Mr. Casaubon as ingeniously as he could; but he did not in the
end prevent the time from seeming long to that gentleman, as was clear
from his expressing a fear that Mrs. Casaubon would be tired.  Naumann
took the hint and said--

"Now, sir, if you can oblige me again; I will release the lady-wife."

So Mr. Casaubon's patience held out further, and when after all it
turned out that the head of Saint Thomas Aquinas would be more perfect
if another sitting could be had, it was granted for the morrow.  On the
morrow Santa Clara too was retouched more than once.  The result of all
was so far from displeasing to Mr. Casaubon, that he arranged for the
purchase of the picture in which Saint Thomas Aquinas sat among the
doctors of the Church in a disputation too abstract to be represented,
but listened to with more or less attention by an audience above.  The
Santa Clara, which was spoken of in the second place, Naumann declared
himself to be dissatisfied with--he could not, in conscience, engage
to make a worthy picture of it; so about the Santa Clara the
arrangement was conditional.

I will not dwell on Naumann's jokes at the expense of Mr. Casaubon that
evening, or on his dithyrambs about Dorothea's charm, in all which Will
joined, but with a difference.  No sooner did Naumann mention any
detail of Dorothea's beauty, than Will got exasperated at his
presumption: there was grossness in his choice of the most ordinary
words, and what business had he to talk of her lips?  She was not a
woman to be spoken of as other women were.  Will could not say just
what he thought, but he became irritable.  And yet, when after some
resistance he had consented to take the Casaubons to his friend's
studio, he had been allured by the gratification of his pride in being
the person who could grant Naumann such an opportunity of studying her
loveliness--or rather her divineness, for the ordinary phrases which
might apply to mere bodily prettiness were not applicable to her.
(Certainly all Tipton and its neighborhood, as well as Dorothea
herself, would have been surprised at her beauty being made so much of.
In that part of the world Miss Brooke had been only a "fine young
woman.")

"Oblige me by letting the subject drop, Naumann.  Mrs. Casaubon is not
to be talked of as if she were a model," said Will.  Naumann stared at
him.

"Schon!  I will talk of my Aquinas.  The head is not a bad type, after
all.  I dare say the great scholastic himself would have been flattered
to have his portrait asked for.  Nothing like these starchy doctors for
vanity!  It was as I thought: he cared much less for her portrait than
his own."

"He's a cursed white-blooded pedantic coxcomb," said Will, with
gnashing impetuosity.  His obligations to Mr. Casaubon were not known
to his hearer, but Will himself was thinking of them, and wishing that
he could discharge them all by a check.

Naumann gave a shrug and said, "It is good they go away soon, my dear.
They are spoiling your fine temper."

All Will's hope and contrivance were now concentrated on seeing
Dorothea when she was alone.  He only wanted her to take more emphatic
notice of him; he only wanted to be something more special in her
remembrance than he could yet believe himself likely to be.  He was
rather impatient under that open ardent good-will, which he saw was her
usual state of feeling.  The remote worship of a woman throned out of
their reach plays a great part in men's lives, but in most cases the
worshipper longs for some queenly recognition, some approving sign by
which his soul's sovereign may cheer him without descending from her
high place.  That was precisely what Will wanted.  But there were
plenty of contradictions in his imaginative demands.  It was beautiful
to see how Dorothea's eyes turned with wifely anxiety and beseeching to
Mr. Casaubon: she would have lost some of her halo if she had been
without that duteous preoccupation; and yet at the next moment the
husband's sandy absorption of such nectar was too intolerable; and
Will's longing to say damaging things about him was perhaps not the
less tormenting because he felt the strongest reasons for restraining
it.

Will had not been invited to dine the next day.  Hence he persuaded
himself that he was bound to call, and that the only eligible time was
the middle of the day, when Mr. Casaubon would not be at home.

Dorothea, who had not been made aware that her former reception of Will
had displeased her husband, had no hesitation about seeing him,
especially as he might be come to pay a farewell visit.  When he
entered she was looking at some cameos which she had been buying for
Celia.  She greeted Will as if his visit were quite a matter of course,
and said at once, having a cameo bracelet in her hand--

"I am so glad you are come.  Perhaps you understand all about cameos,
and can tell me if these are really good.  I wished to have you with us
in choosing them, but Mr. Casaubon objected: he thought there was not
time.  He will finish his work to-morrow, and we shall go away in three
days.  I have been uneasy about these cameos.  Pray sit down and look
at them."

"I am not particularly knowing, but there can be no great mistake about
these little Homeric bits: they are exquisitely neat.  And the color is
fine: it will just suit you."

"Oh, they are for my sister, who has quite a different complexion.  You
saw her with me at Lowick: she is light-haired and very pretty--at
least I think so.  We were never so long away from each other in our
lives before.  She is a great pet and never was naughty in her life.  I
found out before I came away that she wanted me to buy her some cameos,
and I should be sorry for them not to be good--after their kind."
Dorothea added the last words with a smile.

"You seem not to care about cameos," said Will, seating himself at some
distance from her, and observing her while she closed the cases.

"No, frankly, I don't think them a great object in life," said Dorothea

"I fear you are a heretic about art generally.  How is that?  I should
have expected you to be very sensitive to the beautiful everywhere."

"I suppose I am dull about many things," said Dorothea, simply.  "I
should like to make life beautiful--I mean everybody's life.  And then
all this immense expense of art, that seems somehow to lie outside life
and make it no better for the world, pains one.  It spoils my enjoyment
of anything when I am made to think that most people are shut out from
it."

"I call that the fanaticism of sympathy," said Will, impetuously.  "You
might say the same of landscape, of poetry, of all refinement.  If you
carried it out you ought to be miserable in your own goodness, and turn
evil that you might have no advantage over others.  The best piety is
to enjoy--when you can.  You are doing the most then to save the
earth's character as an agreeable planet.  And enjoyment radiates.  It
is of no use to try and take care of all the world; that is being taken
care of when you feel delight--in art or in anything else.  Would you
turn all the youth of the world into a tragic chorus, wailing and
moralizing over misery?  I suspect that you have some false belief in
the virtues of misery, and want to make your life a martyrdom."  Will
had gone further than he intended, and checked himself.  But Dorothea's
thought was not taking just the same direction as his own, and she
answered without any special emotion--

"Indeed you mistake me.  I am not a sad, melancholy creature.  I am
never unhappy long together.  I am angry and naughty--not like Celia: I
have a great outburst, and then all seems glorious again.  I cannot
help believing in glorious things in a blind sort of way.  I should be
quite willing to enjoy the art here, but there is so much that I don't
know the reason of--so much that seems to me a consecration of ugliness
rather than beauty.  The painting and sculpture may be wonderful, but
the feeling is often low and brutal, and sometimes even ridiculous.
Here and there I see what takes me at once as noble--something that I
might compare with the Alban Mountains or the sunset from the Pincian
Hill; but that makes it the greater pity that there is so little of the
best kind among all that mass of things over which men have toiled so."

"Of course there is always a great deal of poor work: the rarer things
want that soil to grow in."

"Oh dear," said Dorothea, taking up that thought into the chief current
of her anxiety; "I see it must be very difficult to do anything good.
I have often felt since I have been in Rome that most of our lives
would look much uglier and more bungling than the pictures, if they
could be put on the wall."

Dorothea parted her lips again as if she were going to say more, but
changed her mind and paused.

"You are too young--it is an anachronism for you to have such
thoughts," said Will, energetically, with a quick shake of the head
habitual to him.  "You talk as if you had never known any youth.  It is
monstrous--as if you had had a vision of Hades in your childhood, like
the boy in the legend.  You have been brought up in some of those
horrible notions that choose the sweetest women to devour--like
Minotaurs. And now you will go and be shut up in that stone prison at
Lowick: you will be buried alive.  It makes me savage to think of it!
I would rather never have seen you than think of you with such a
prospect."

Will again feared that he had gone too far; but the meaning we attach
to words depends on our feeling, and his tone of angry regret had so
much kindness in it for Dorothea's heart, which had always been giving
out ardor and had never been fed with much from the living beings
around her, that she felt a new sense of gratitude and answered with a
gentle smile--

"It is very good of you to be anxious about me.  It is because you did
not like Lowick yourself: you had set your heart on another kind of
life.  But Lowick is my chosen home."

The last sentence was spoken with an almost solemn cadence, and Will
did not know what to say, since it would not be useful for him to
embrace her slippers, and tell her that he would die for her: it was
clear that she required nothing of the sort; and they were both silent
for a moment or two, when Dorothea began again with an air of saying at
last what had been in her mind beforehand.

"I wanted to ask you again about something you said the other day.
Perhaps it was half of it your lively way of speaking: I notice that
you like to put things strongly; I myself often exaggerate when I speak
hastily."

"What was it?" said Will, observing that she spoke with a timidity
quite new in her.  "I have a hyperbolical tongue: it catches fire as it
goes.  I dare say I shall have to retract."

"I mean what you said about the necessity of knowing German--I mean,
for the subjects that Mr. Casaubon is engaged in.  I have been thinking
about it; and it seems to me that with Mr. Casaubon's learning he must
have before him the same materials as German scholars--has he not?"
Dorothea's timidity was due to an indistinct consciousness that she was
in the strange situation of consulting a third person about the
adequacy of Mr. Casaubon's learning.

"Not exactly the same materials," said Will, thinking that he would be
duly reserved.  "He is not an Orientalist, you know.  He does not
profess to have more than second-hand knowledge there."

"But there are very valuable books about antiquities which were written
a long while ago by scholars who knew nothing about these modern
things; and they are still used.  Why should Mr. Casaubon's not be
valuable, like theirs?" said Dorothea, with more remonstrant energy.
She was impelled to have the argument aloud, which she had been having
in her own mind.

"That depends on the line of study taken," said Will, also getting a
tone of rejoinder.  "The subject Mr. Casaubon has chosen is as changing
as chemistry: new discoveries are constantly making new points of view.
Who wants a system on the basis of the four elements, or a book to
refute Paracelsus?  Do you not see that it is no use now to be crawling
a little way after men of the last century--men like Bryant--and
correcting their mistakes?--living in a lumber-room and furbishing up
broken-legged theories about Chus and Mizraim?"

"How can you bear to speak so lightly?" said Dorothea, with a look
between sorrow and anger.  "If it were as you say, what could be sadder
than so much ardent labor all in vain?  I wonder it does not affect you
more painfully, if you really think that a man like Mr. Casaubon, of so
much goodness, power, and learning, should in any way fail in what has
been the labor of his best years." She was beginning to be shocked that
she had got to such a point of supposition, and indignant with Will for
having led her to it.

"You questioned me about the matter of fact, not of feeling," said
Will.  "But if you wish to punish me for the fact, I submit.  I am not
in a position to express my feeling toward Mr. Casaubon: it would be at
best a pensioner's eulogy."

"Pray excuse me," said Dorothea, coloring deeply.  "I am aware, as you
say, that I am in fault in having introduced the subject.  Indeed, I am
wrong altogether.  Failure after long perseverance is much grander than
never to have a striving good enough to be called a failure."

"I quite agree with you," said Will, determined to change the
situation--"so much so that I have made up my mind not to run that
risk of never attaining a failure.  Mr. Casaubon's generosity has
perhaps been dangerous to me, and I mean to renounce the liberty it has
given me.  I mean to go back to England shortly and work my own
way--depend on nobody else than myself."

"That is fine--I respect that feeling," said Dorothea, with returning
kindness.  "But Mr. Casaubon, I am sure, has never thought of anything
in the matter except what was most for your welfare."

"She has obstinacy and pride enough to serve instead of love, now she
has married him," said Will to himself.  Aloud he said, rising--

"I shall not see you again."

"Oh, stay till Mr. Casaubon comes," said Dorothea, earnestly.  "I am so
glad we met in Rome.  I wanted to know you."

"And I have made you angry," said Will.  "I have made you think ill of
me."

"Oh no.  My sister tells me I am always angry with people who do not
say just what I like.  But I hope I am not given to think ill of them.
In the end I am usually obliged to think ill of myself for being so
impatient."

"Still, you don't like me; I have made myself an unpleasant thought to
you."

"Not at all," said Dorothea, with the most open kindness.  "I like you
very much."

Will was not quite contented, thinking that he would apparently have
been of more importance if he had been disliked.  He said nothing, but
looked dull, not to say sulky.

"And I am quite interested to see what you will do," Dorothea went on
cheerfully.  "I believe devoutly in a natural difference of vocation.
If it were not for that belief, I suppose I should be very narrow--there
are so many things, besides painting, that I am quite ignorant
of.  You would hardly believe how little I have taken in of music and
literature, which you know so much of.  I wonder what your vocation
will turn out to be: perhaps you will be a poet?"

"That depends.  To be a poet is to have a soul so quick to discern that
no shade of quality escapes it, and so quick to feel, that discernment
is but a hand playing with finely ordered variety on the chords of
emotion--a soul in which knowledge passes instantaneously into feeling,
and feeling flashes back as a new organ of knowledge.  One may have
that condition by fits only."

"But you leave out the poems," said Dorothea.  "I think they are wanted
to complete the poet.  I understand what you mean about knowledge
passing into feeling, for that seems to be just what I experience.  But
I am sure I could never produce a poem."

"You _are_ a poem--and that is to be the best part of a poet--what
makes up the poet's consciousness in his best moods," said Will,
showing such originality as we all share with the morning and the
spring-time and other endless renewals.

"I am very glad to hear it," said Dorothea, laughing out her words in a
bird-like modulation, and looking at Will with playful gratitude in her
eyes.  "What very kind things you say to me!"

"I wish I could ever do anything that would be what you call kind--that
I could ever be of the slightest service to you. I fear I shall never
have the opportunity."  Will spoke with fervor.

"Oh yes," said Dorothea, cordially.  "It will come; and I shall
remember how well you wish me.  I quite hoped that we should be friends
when I first saw you--because of your relationship to Mr. Casaubon."
There was a certain liquid brightness in her eyes, and Will was
conscious that his own were obeying a law of nature and filling too.
The allusion to Mr. Casaubon would have spoiled all if anything at that
moment could have spoiled the subduing power, the sweet dignity, of her
noble unsuspicious inexperience.

"And there is one thing even now that you can do," said Dorothea,
rising and walking a little way under the strength of a recurring
impulse.  "Promise me that you will not again, to any one, speak of
that subject--I mean about Mr. Casaubon's writings--I mean in that
kind of way.  It was I who led to it.  It was my fault.  But promise
me."

She had returned from her brief pacing and stood opposite Will, looking
gravely at him.

"Certainly, I will promise you," said Will, reddening however.  If he
never said a cutting word about Mr. Casaubon again and left off
receiving favors from him, it would clearly be permissible to hate him
the more.  The poet must know how to hate, says Goethe; and Will was at
least ready with that accomplishment.  He said that he must go now
without waiting for Mr. Casaubon, whom he would come to take leave of
at the last moment.  Dorothea gave him her hand, and they exchanged a
simple "Good-by."

But going out of the porte cochere he met Mr. Casaubon, and that
gentleman, expressing the best wishes for his cousin, politely waived
the pleasure of any further leave-taking on the morrow, which would be
sufficiently crowded with the preparations for departure.

"I have something to tell you about our cousin Mr. Ladislaw, which I
think will heighten your opinion of him," said Dorothea to her husband
in the course of the evening.  She had mentioned immediately on his
entering that Will had just gone away, and would come again, but Mr.
Casaubon had said, "I met him outside, and we made our final adieux, I
believe," saying this with the air and tone by which we imply that any
subject, whether private or public, does not interest us enough to wish
for a further remark upon it.  So Dorothea had waited.

"What is that, my love?" said Mr Casaubon (he always said "my love"
when his manner was the coldest).

"He has made up his mind to leave off wandering at once, and to give up
his dependence on your generosity.  He means soon to go back to
England, and work his own way.  I thought you would consider that a
good sign," said Dorothea, with an appealing look into her husband's
neutral face.

"Did he mention the precise order of occupation to which he would
addict himself?"

"No. But he said that he felt the danger which lay for him in your
generosity.  Of course he will write to you about it.  Do you not think
better of him for his resolve?"

"I shall await his communication on the subject," said Mr. Casaubon.

"I told him I was sure that the thing you considered in all you did for
him was his own welfare.  I remembered your goodness in what you said
about him when I first saw him at Lowick," said Dorothea, putting her
hand on her husband's.

"I had a duty towards him," said Mr. Casaubon, laying his other hand on
Dorothea's in conscientious acceptance of her caress, but with a glance
which he could not hinder from being uneasy.  "The young man, I
confess, is not otherwise an object of interest to me, nor need we, I
think, discuss his future course, which it is not ours to determine
beyond the limits which I have sufficiently indicated." Dorothea did
not mention Will again.





BOOK III.





WAITING FOR DEATH.

 Lydgate visits Farebrother and learns that he supports his mother, aunt, and sister on his meager income. Farebrother's mother states that he compares to the best of clergymen, so he should have the position at the hospital. Lydgate learns that Tyke is a zealous, strict type. He also learns that Farebrother smokes, gambles, and studies entomology as well. Farebrother warns Lydgate of Middlemarch's petty politics and prejudices. He tells Lydgate that he will offend Bulstrode if he votes for him. However, he says there will be no hard feelings if Lydgate votes for Tyke. Lydgate's liking for Farebrother increases with greater acquaintance. Lydgate disapproves of Farebrother's gambling, and he knows that Farebrother wants the chaplaincy for the forty-pound salary. Lydgate dislikes the manner in which money becomes a motive for men's actions. He is torn, however, because he feels that the salary might relieve Farebrother of the need to gamble. Lydgate is also frustrated that his vote will damage his relationship with Bulstrode. He begins to feel the harness of petty Middlemarch politics. During the election, Lydgate votes last, breaking a tie. Farebrother's supporters state that they know how Lydgate will vote and why. The hints insult Lydgate, but he votes for Tyke anyway. Farebrother treats Lydgate no differently than before. Naumann, a painter friend of Will Ladislaw, draws his attention to a beautiful woman on the streets of Rome. The woman is Dorothea. Will informs him of her identity, and Naumann asks him to persuade Dorothea to sit for a portrait. Meanwhile, Dorothea is sobbing. She cannot name the reason for her sadness. She has begun to realize that her marriage is not what she expected it to be. Casaubon states that he wishes to return to his work soon. She hints that he should begin sifting through his notes and writing his book. Casaubon takes her suggestion as criticism. He suggests that she defer to his better judgment. Dorothea, although indignant, bows to his will because the quarrel pains her. Ladislaw visits the Casaubons, but only Dorothea is home. Casaubon arrives, interrupting the conversation. His dry, dark, aged appearance contrasts starkly with Will's sunny, bright youth. Will agrees to dine with them the next day. Dorothea begs forgiveness for her short temper with him earlier, but peace is not fully restored. Ladislaw takes Dorothea and Casaubon to visit Naumann's studio. Naumann wants to sketch Dorothea. He flatters Casaubon and asks him to sit as a model for Thomas Aquinas. Afterwards, he asks to do a quick sketch of Dorothea. Will is stricken with an intense admiration for Dorothea. He wishes her to take special notice of him, so he schemes to see her alone. He goes to visit when he knows Casaubon will not be at home. Will laments her sad fate in being locked away in Lowick manor, but Dorothea stresses that Lowick is her chosen home. Will makes light of Casaubon's plodding scholarship on his unfinished work. Dorothea takes offense, but only because he voices the concerns that she herself has been feeling. Will declares that he will renounce Casaubon's charity because he wishes to be independent. He hopes to impress Dorothea. She admires his resolve, but she pleads that he never mock Casaubon's work again. Dorothea reports Will's plan to Casaubon. He replies that Will is of little interest to him except as an object of duty, and he asks her not to mention him again.

