Middlemarch George Eliot 89856 downloads.pdf

The Project Gutenberg eBook of Middlemarch

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most
other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of
the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at
www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will
have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using
this eBook.

Title: Middlemarch

Author: George Eliot

Release date: July 1, 1994 [eBook #145]
Most recently updated: April 12, 2026

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/145

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK
MIDDLEMARCH ***

Middlemarch

George Eliot

New York and Boston
H. M. Caldwell Company Publishers
To my dear Husband, George Henry Lewes,
in this nineteenth year of our blessed union.

Contents

PRELUDE.

BOOK I. MISS BROOKE.
CHAPTER I.
CHAPTER II.
CHAPTER III.
CHAPTER IV.
CHAPTER V.
CHAPTER VI.
CHAPTER VII.
CHAPTER VIII.
CHAPTER IX.
CHAPTER X.
CHAPTER XI.
CHAPTER XII.

BOOK II. OLD AND YOUNG.
CHAPTER XIII.
CHAPTER XIV.
CHAPTER XV.
CHAPTER XVI.
CHAPTER XVII.

CHAPTER XVIII.
CHAPTER XIX.
CHAPTER XX.
CHAPTER XXI.
CHAPTER XXII.

BOOK III. WAITING FOR DEATH.
CHAPTER XXIII.
CHAPTER XXIV.
CHAPTER XXV.
CHAPTER XXVI.
CHAPTER XXVII.
CHAPTER XXVIII.
CHAPTER XXIX.
CHAPTER XXX.
CHAPTER XXXI.
CHAPTER XXXII.
CHAPTER XXXIII.

BOOK IV. THREE LOVE PROBLEMS.
CHAPTER XXXIV.
CHAPTER XXXV.
CHAPTER XXXVI.
CHAPTER XXXVII.
CHAPTER XXXVIII.
CHAPTER XXXIX.

CHAPTER XL.
CHAPTER XLI.
CHAPTER XLII.

BOOK V. THE DEAD HAND.
CHAPTER XLIII.
CHAPTER XLIV.
CHAPTER XLV.
CHAPTER XLVI.
CHAPTER XLVII.
CHAPTER XLVIII.
CHAPTER XLIX.
CHAPTER L.
CHAPTER LI.
CHAPTER LII.
CHAPTER LIII.

BOOK VI. THE WIDOW AND THE WIFE.
CHAPTER LIV.
CHAPTER LV.
CHAPTER LVI.
CHAPTER LVII.
CHAPTER LVIII.
CHAPTER LIX.
CHAPTER LX.
CHAPTER LXI.

CHAPTER LXII.

BOOK VII. TWO TEMPTATIONS.
CHAPTER LXIII.
CHAPTER LXIV.
CHAPTER LXV.
CHAPTER LXVI.
CHAPTER LXVII.
CHAPTER LXVIII.
CHAPTER LXIX.
CHAPTER LXX.
CHAPTER LXXI.

BOOK VIII. SUNSET AND SUNRISE.
CHAPTER LXXII.
CHAPTER LXXIII.
CHAPTER LXXIV.
CHAPTER LXXV.
CHAPTER LXXVI.
CHAPTER LXXVII.
CHAPTER LXXVIII.
CHAPTER LXXIX.
CHAPTER LXXX.
CHAPTER LXXXI.
CHAPTER LXXXII.
CHAPTER LXXXIII.

CHAPTER LXXXIV.
CHAPTER LXXXV.
CHAPTER LXXXVI.

FINALE.

PRELUDE.

Who that cares much to know the history of man, and how the
mysterious mixture behaves under the varying experiments of Time, has not
dwelt, at least briefly, on the life of Saint Theresa, has not smiled with some
gentleness at the thought of the little girl walking forth one morning hand-
in-hand with her still smaller brother, to go and seek martyrdom in the
country of the Moors? Out they toddled from rugged Avila, wide-eyed and
helpless-looking as two fawns, but with human hearts, already beating to a
national idea; until domestic reality met them in the shape of uncles, and
turned them back from their great resolve. That child-pilgrimage was a fit
beginning. Theresa’s passionate, ideal nature demanded an epic life: what
were many-volumed romances of chivalry and the social conquests of a
brilliant girl to her? Her flame quickly burned up that light fuel; and, fed
from within, soared after some illimitable satisfaction, some object which
would never justify weariness, which would reconcile self-despair with the
rapturous consciousness of life beyond self. She found her epos in the
reform of a religious order.
That Spanish woman who lived three hundred years ago, was certainly
not the last of her kind. Many Theresas have been born who found for
themselves no epic life wherein there was a constant unfolding of far-
resonant action; perhaps only a life of mistakes, the offspring of a certain
spiritual grandeur ill-matched with the meanness of opportunity; perhaps a
tragic failure which found no sacred poet and sank unwept into oblivion.
With dim lights and tangled circumstance they tried to shape their thought
and deed in noble agreement; but after all, to common eyes their struggles
seemed mere inconsistency and formlessness; for these later-born Theresas
were helped by no coherent social faith and order which could perform the
function of knowledge for the ardently willing soul. Their ardor alternated
between a vague ideal and the common yearning of womanhood; so that the
one was disapproved as extravagance, and the other condemned as a lapse.

Some have felt that these blundering lives are due to the inconvenient
indefiniteness with which the Supreme Power has fashioned the natures of
women: if there were one level of feminine incompetence as strict as the
ability to count three and no more, the social lot of women might be treated
with scientific certitude. Meanwhile the indefiniteness remains, and the
limits of variation are really much wider than any one would imagine from
the sameness of women’s coiffure and the favorite love-stories in prose and
verse. Here and there a cygnet is reared uneasily among the ducklings in the
brown pond, and never finds the living stream in fellowship with its own
oary-footed kind. Here and there is born a Saint Theresa, foundress of
nothing, whose loving heart-beats and sobs after an unattained goodness
tremble off and are dispersed among hindrances, instead of centring in some
long-recognizable deed.

BOOK I.
MISS BROOKE.

CHAPTER I.
Since I can do no good because a woman,
Reach constantly at something that is near it.
—The Maid’s Tragedy: BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER.

Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief
by poor dress. Her hand and wrist were so finely formed that she could
wear sleeves not less bare of style than those in which the Blessed Virgin
appeared to Italian painters; and her profile as well as her stature and
bearing seemed to gain the more dignity from her plain garments, which by
the side of provincial fashion gave her the impressiveness of a fine
quotation from the Bible,—or from one of our elder poets,—in a paragraph
of to-day’s newspaper. She was usually spoken of as being remarkably
clever, but with the addition that her sister Celia had more common-sense.
Nevertheless, Celia wore scarcely more trimmings; and it was only to close
observers that her dress differed from her sister’s, and had a shade of
coquetry in its arrangements; for Miss Brooke’s plain dressing was due to
mixed conditions, in most of which her sister shared. The pride of being
ladies had something to do with it: the Brooke connections, though not
exactly aristocratic, were unquestionably “good:” if you inquired backward
for a generation or two, you would not find any yard-measuring or parcel-
tying forefathers—anything lower than an admiral or a clergyman; and
there was even an ancestor discernible as a Puritan gentleman who served
under Cromwell, but afterwards conformed, and managed to come out of all
political troubles as the proprietor of a respectable family estate. Young
women of such birth, living in a quiet country-house, and attending a
village church hardly larger than a parlor, naturally regarded frippery as the
ambition of a huckster’s daughter. Then there was well-bred economy,
which in those days made show in dress the first item to be deducted from,
when any margin was required for expenses more distinctive of rank. Such
reasons would have been enough to account for plain dress, quite apart from
religious feeling; but in Miss Brooke’s case, religion alone would have
determined it; and Celia mildly acquiesced in all her sister’s sentiments,

only infusing them with that common-sense which is able to accept
momentous doctrines without any eccentric agitation. Dorothea knew many
passages of Pascal’s Pensees and of Jeremy Taylor by heart; and to her the
destinies of mankind, seen by the light of Christianity, made the solicitudes
of feminine fashion appear an occupation for Bedlam. She could not
reconcile the anxieties of a spiritual life involving eternal consequences,
with a keen interest in gimp and artificial protrusions of drapery. Her mind
was theoretic, and yearned by its nature after some lofty conception of the
world which might frankly include the parish of Tipton and her own rule of
conduct there; she was enamoured of intensity and greatness, and rash in
embracing whatever seemed to her to have those aspects; likely to seek
martyrdom, to make retractations, and then to incur martyrdom after all in a
quarter where she had not sought it. Certainly such elements in the
character of a marriageable girl tended to interfere with her lot, and hinder
it from being decided according to custom, by good looks, vanity, and
merely canine affection. With all this, she, the elder of the sisters, was not
yet twenty, and they had both been educated, since they were about twelve
years old and had lost their parents, on plans at once narrow and
promiscuous, first in an English family and afterwards in a Swiss family at
Lausanne, their bachelor uncle and guardian trying in this way to remedy
the disadvantages of their orphaned condition.
It was hardly a year since they had come to live at Tipton Grange with
their uncle, a man nearly sixty, of acquiescent temper, miscellaneous
opinions, and uncertain vote. He had travelled in his younger years, and was
held in this part of the county to have contracted a too rambling habit of
mind. Mr. Brooke’s conclusions were as difficult to predict as the weather:
it was only safe to say that he would act with benevolent intentions, and that
he would spend as little money as possible in carrying them out. For the
most glutinously indefinite minds enclose some hard grains of habit; and a
man has been seen lax about all his own interests except the retention of his
snuff-box, concerning which he was watchful, suspicious, and greedy of
clutch.
In Mr. Brooke the hereditary strain of Puritan energy was clearly in
abeyance; but in his niece Dorothea it glowed alike through faults and
virtues, turning sometimes into impatience of her uncle’s talk or his way of
“letting things be” on his estate, and making her long all the more for the
time when she would be of age and have some command of money for

generous schemes. She was regarded as an heiress; for not only had the
sisters seven hundred a-year each from their parents, but if Dorothea
married and had a son, that son would inherit Mr. Brooke’s estate,
presumably worth about three thousand a-year—a rental which seemed
wealth to provincial families, still discussing Mr. Peel’s late conduct on the
Catholic question, innocent of future gold-fields, and of that gorgeous
plutocracy which has so nobly exalted the necessities of genteel life.
And how should Dorothea not marry?—a girl so handsome and with such
prospects? Nothing could hinder it but her love of extremes, and her
insistence on regulating life according to notions which might cause a wary
man to hesitate before he made her an offer, or even might lead her at last to
refuse all offers. A young lady of some birth and fortune, who knelt
suddenly down on a brick floor by the side of a sick laborer and prayed
fervidly as if she thought herself living in the time of the Apostles—who
had strange whims of fasting like a Papist, and of sitting up at night to read
old theological books! Such a wife might awaken you some fine morning
with a new scheme for the application of her income which would interfere
with political economy and the keeping of saddle-horses: a man would
naturally think twice before he risked himself in such fellowship. Women
were expected to have weak opinions; but the great safeguard of society and
of domestic life was, that opinions were not acted on. Sane people did what
their neighbors did, so that if any lunatics were at large, one might know
and avoid them.
The rural opinion about the new young ladies, even among the cottagers,
was generally in favor of Celia, as being so amiable and innocent-looking,
while Miss Brooke’s large eyes seemed, like her religion, too unusual and
striking. Poor Dorothea! compared with her, the innocent-looking Celia was
knowing and worldly-wise; so much subtler is a human mind than the
outside tissues which make a sort of blazonry or clock-face for it.
Yet those who approached Dorothea, though prejudiced against her by
this alarming hearsay, found that she had a charm unaccountably
reconcilable with it. Most men thought her bewitching when she was on
horseback. She loved the fresh air and the various aspects of the country,
and when her eyes and cheeks glowed with mingled pleasure she looked
very little like a devotee. Riding was an indulgence which she allowed

herself in spite of conscientious qualms; she felt that she enjoyed it in a
pagan sensuous way, and always looked forward to renouncing it.
She was open, ardent, and not in the least self-admiring; indeed, it was
pretty to see how her imagination adorned her sister Celia with attractions
altogether superior to her own, and if any gentleman appeared to come to
the Grange from some other motive than that of seeing Mr. Brooke, she
concluded that he must be in love with Celia: Sir James Chettam, for
example, whom she constantly considered from Celia’s point of view,
inwardly debating whether it would be good for Celia to accept him. That
he should be regarded as a suitor to herself would have seemed to her a
ridiculous irrelevance. Dorothea, with all her eagerness to know the truths
of life, retained very childlike ideas about marriage. She felt sure that she
would have accepted the judicious Hooker, if she had been born in time to
save him from that wretched mistake he made in matrimony; or John
Milton when his blindness had come on; or any of the other great men
whose odd habits it would have been glorious piety to endure; but an
amiable handsome baronet, who said “Exactly” to her remarks even when
she expressed uncertainty,—how could he affect her as a lover? The really
delightful marriage must be that where your husband was a sort of father,
and could teach you even Hebrew, if you wished it.
These peculiarities of Dorothea’s character caused Mr. Brooke to be all
the more blamed in neighboring families for not securing some middle-aged
lady as guide and companion to his nieces. But he himself dreaded so much
the sort of superior woman likely to be available for such a position, that he
allowed himself to be dissuaded by Dorothea’s objections, and was in this
case brave enough to defy the world—that is to say, Mrs. Cadwallader the
Rector’s wife, and the small group of gentry with whom he visited in the
northeast corner of Loamshire. So Miss Brooke presided in her uncle’s
household, and did not at all dislike her new authority, with the homage that
belonged to it.
Sir James Chettam was going to dine at the Grange to-day with another
gentleman whom the girls had never seen, and about whom Dorothea felt
some venerating expectation. This was the Reverend Edward Casaubon,
noted in the county as a man of profound learning, understood for many
years to be engaged on a great work concerning religious history; also as a
man of wealth enough to give lustre to his piety, and having views of his

own which were to be more clearly ascertained on the publication of his
book. His very name carried an impressiveness hardly to be measured
without a precise chronology of scholarship.
Early in the day Dorothea had returned from the infant school which she
had set going in the village, and was taking her usual place in the pretty
sitting-room which divided the bedrooms of the sisters, bent on finishing a
plan for some buildings (a kind of work which she delighted in), when
Celia, who had been watching her with a hesitating desire to propose
something, said—
“Dorothea, dear, if you don’t mind—if you are not very busy—suppose
we looked at mamma’s jewels to-day, and divided them? It is exactly six
months to-day since uncle gave them to you, and you have not looked at
them yet.”
Celia’s face had the shadow of a pouting expression in it, the full
presence of the pout being kept back by an habitual awe of Dorothea and
principle; two associated facts which might show a mysterious electricity if
you touched them incautiously. To her relief, Dorothea’s eyes were full of
laughter as she looked up.
“What a wonderful little almanac you are, Celia! Is it six calendar or six
lunar months?”
“It is the last day of September now, and it was the first of April when
uncle gave them to you. You know, he said that he had forgotten them till
then. I believe you have never thought of them since you locked them up in
the cabinet here.”
“Well, dear, we should never wear them, you know.” Dorothea spoke in a
full cordial tone, half caressing, half explanatory. She had her pencil in her
hand, and was making tiny side-plans on a margin.
Celia colored, and looked very grave. “I think, dear, we are wanting in
respect to mamma’s memory, to put them by and take no notice of them.
And,” she added, after hesitating a little, with a rising sob of mortification,
“necklaces are quite usual now; and Madame Poincon, who was stricter in
some things even than you are, used to wear ornaments. And Christians
generally—surely there are women in heaven now who wore jewels.” Celia
was conscious of some mental strength when she really applied herself to
argument.

“You would like to wear them?” exclaimed Dorothea, an air of
astonished discovery animating her whole person with a dramatic action
which she had caught from that very Madame Poincon who wore the
ornaments. “Of course, then, let us have them out. Why did you not tell me
before? But the keys, the keys!” She pressed her hands against the sides of
her head and seemed to despair of her memory.
“They are here,” said Celia, with whom this explanation had been long
meditated and prearranged.
“Pray open the large drawer of the cabinet and get out the jewel-box.”
The casket was soon open before them, and the various jewels spread
out, making a bright parterre on the table. It was no great collection, but a
few of the ornaments were really of remarkable beauty, the finest that was
obvious at first being a necklace of purple amethysts set in exquisite gold
work, and a pearl cross with five brilliants in it. Dorothea immediately took
up the necklace and fastened it round her sister’s neck, where it fitted
almost as closely as a bracelet; but the circle suited the Henrietta-Maria
style of Celia’s head and neck, and she could see that it did, in the pier-glass
opposite.
“There, Celia! you can wear that with your Indian muslin. But this cross
you must wear with your dark dresses.”
Celia was trying not to smile with pleasure. “O Dodo, you must keep the
cross yourself.”
“No, no, dear, no,” said Dorothea, putting up her hand with careless
deprecation.
“Yes, indeed you must; it would suit you—in your black dress, now,”
said Celia, insistingly. “You might wear that.”
“Not for the world, not for the world. A cross is the last thing I would
wear as a trinket.” Dorothea shuddered slightly.
“Then you will think it wicked in me to wear it,” said Celia, uneasily.
“No, dear, no,” said Dorothea, stroking her sister’s cheek. “Souls have
complexions too: what will suit one will not suit another.”
“But you might like to keep it for mamma’s sake.”
“No, I have other things of mamma’s—her sandal-wood box which I am
so fond of—plenty of things. In fact, they are all yours, dear. We need

discuss them no longer. There—take away your property.”
Celia felt a little hurt. There was a strong assumption of superiority in
this Puritanic toleration, hardly less trying to the blond flesh of an
unenthusiastic sister than a Puritanic persecution.
“But how can I wear ornaments if you, who are the elder sister, will
never wear them?”
“Nay, Celia, that is too much to ask, that I should wear trinkets to keep
you in countenance. If I were to put on such a necklace as that, I should feel
as if I had been pirouetting. The world would go round with me, and I
should not know how to walk.”
Celia had unclasped the necklace and drawn it off. “It would be a little
tight for your neck; something to lie down and hang would suit you better,”
she said, with some satisfaction. The complete unfitness of the necklace
from all points of view for Dorothea, made Celia happier in taking it. She
was opening some ring-boxes, which disclosed a fine emerald with
diamonds, and just then the sun passing beyond a cloud sent a bright gleam
over the table.
“How very beautiful these gems are!” said Dorothea, under a new current
of feeling, as sudden as the gleam. “It is strange how deeply colors seem to
penetrate one, like scent. I suppose that is the reason why gems are used as
spiritual emblems in the Revelation of St. John. They look like fragments of
heaven. I think that emerald is more beautiful than any of them.”
“And there is a bracelet to match it,” said Celia. “We did not notice this
at first.”
“They are lovely,” said Dorothea, slipping the ring and bracelet on her
finely turned finger and wrist, and holding them towards the window on a
level with her eyes. All the while her thought was trying to justify her
delight in the colors by merging them in her mystic religious joy.
“You would like those, Dorothea,” said Celia, rather falteringly,
beginning to think with wonder that her sister showed some weakness, and
also that emeralds would suit her own complexion even better than purple
amethysts. “You must keep that ring and bracelet—if nothing else. But see,
these agates are very pretty and quiet.”
“Yes! I will keep these—this ring and bracelet,” said Dorothea. Then,
letting her hand fall on the table, she said in another tone—“Yet what

miserable men find such things, and work at them, and sell them!” She
paused again, and Celia thought that her sister was going to renounce the
ornaments, as in consistency she ought to do.
“Yes, dear, I will keep these,” said Dorothea, decidedly. “But take all the
rest away, and the casket.”
She took up her pencil without removing the jewels, and still looking at
them. She thought of often having them by her, to feed her eye at these little
fountains of pure color.
“Shall you wear them in company?” said Celia, who was watching her
with real curiosity as to what she would do.
Dorothea glanced quickly at her sister. Across all her imaginative
adornment of those whom she loved, there darted now and then a keen
discernment, which was not without a scorching quality. If Miss Brooke
ever attained perfect meekness, it would not be for lack of inward fire.
“Perhaps,” she said, rather haughtily. “I cannot tell to what level I may
sink.”
Celia blushed, and was unhappy: she saw that she had offended her sister,
and dared not say even anything pretty about the gift of the ornaments
which she put back into the box and carried away. Dorothea too was
unhappy, as she went on with her plan-drawing, questioning the purity of
her own feeling and speech in the scene which had ended with that little
explosion.
Celia’s consciousness told her that she had not been at all in the wrong: it
was quite natural and justifiable that she should have asked that question,
and she repeated to herself that Dorothea was inconsistent: either she should
have taken her full share of the jewels, or, after what she had said, she
should have renounced them altogether.
“I am sure—at least, I trust,” thought Celia, “that the wearing of a
necklace will not interfere with my prayers. And I do not see that I should
be bound by Dorothea’s opinions now we are going into society, though of
course she herself ought to be bound by them. But Dorothea is not always
consistent.”
Thus Celia, mutely bending over her tapestry, until she heard her sister
calling her.

“Here, Kitty, come and look at my plan; I shall think I am a great
architect, if I have not got incompatible stairs and fireplaces.”
As Celia bent over the paper, Dorothea put her cheek against her sister’s
arm caressingly. Celia understood the action. Dorothea saw that she had
been in the wrong, and Celia pardoned her. Since they could remember,
there had been a mixture of criticism and awe in the attitude of Celia’s mind
towards her elder sister. The younger had always worn a yoke; but is there
any yoked creature without its private opinions?

CHAPTER II.
“‘Dime; no ves aquel caballero que hacia nosotros viene sobre un caballo rucio rodado que
trae puesto en la cabeza un yelmo de oro?’ ‘Lo que veo y columbro,’ respondio Sancho, ‘no
es sino un hombre sobre un as no pardo como el mio, que trae sobre la cabeza una cosa que
relumbra.’ ‘Pues ese es el yelmo de Mambrino,’ dijo Don Quijote.”—CERVANTES.

“‘Seest thou not yon cavalier who cometh toward us on a dapple-gray steed, and weareth a
golden helmet?’ ‘What I see,’ answered Sancho, ‘is nothing but a man on a gray ass like
my own, who carries something shiny on his head.’ ‘Just so,’ answered Don Quixote: ‘and
that resplendent object is the helmet of Mambrino.’”

“Sir Humphry Davy?” said Mr. Brooke, over the soup, in his easy
smiling way, taking up Sir James Chettam’s remark that he was studying
Davy’s Agricultural Chemistry. “Well, now, Sir Humphry Davy; I dined
with him years ago at Cartwright’s, and Wordsworth was there too—the
poet Wordsworth, you know. Now there was something singular. I was at
Cambridge when Wordsworth was there, and I never met him—and I dined
with him twenty years afterwards at Cartwright’s. There’s an oddity in
things, now. But Davy was there: he was a poet too. Or, as I may say,
Wordsworth was poet one, and Davy was poet two. That was true in every
sense, you know.”
Dorothea felt a little more uneasy than usual. In the beginning of dinner,
the party being small and the room still, these motes from the mass of a
magistrate’s mind fell too noticeably. She wondered how a man like Mr.
Casaubon would support such triviality. His manners, she thought, were
very dignified; the set of his iron-gray hair and his deep eye-sockets made
him resemble the portrait of Locke. He had the spare form and the pale
complexion which became a student; as different as possible from the
blooming Englishman of the red-whiskered type represented by Sir James
Chettam.
“I am reading the Agricultural Chemistry,” said this excellent baronet,
“because I am going to take one of the farms into my own hands, and see if

something cannot be done in setting a good pattern of farming among my
tenants. Do you approve of that, Miss Brooke?”
“A great mistake, Chettam,” interposed Mr. Brooke, “going into
electrifying your land and that kind of thing, and making a parlor of your
cow-house. It won’t do. I went into science a great deal myself at one time;
but I saw it would not do. It leads to everything; you can let nothing alone.
No, no—see that your tenants don’t sell their straw, and that kind of thing;
and give them draining-tiles, you know. But your fancy farming will not do
—the most expensive sort of whistle you can buy: you may as well keep a
pack of hounds.”
“Surely,” said Dorothea, “it is better to spend money in finding out how
men can make the most of the land which supports them all, than in keeping
dogs and horses only to gallop over it. It is not a sin to make yourself poor
in performing experiments for the good of all.”
She spoke with more energy than is expected of so young a lady, but Sir
James had appealed to her. He was accustomed to do so, and she had often
thought that she could urge him to many good actions when he was her
brother-in-law.
Mr. Casaubon turned his eyes very markedly on Dorothea while she was
speaking, and seemed to observe her newly.
“Young ladies don’t understand political economy, you know,” said Mr.
Brooke, smiling towards Mr. Casaubon. “I remember when we were all
reading Adam Smith. There is a book, now. I took in all the new ideas at
one time—human perfectibility, now. But some say, history moves in
circles; and that may be very well argued; I have argued it myself. The fact
is, human reason may carry you a little too far—over the hedge, in fact. It
carried me a good way at one time; but I saw it would not do. I pulled up; I
pulled up in time. But not too hard. I have always been in favor of a little
theory: we must have Thought; else we shall be landed back in the dark
ages. But talking of books, there is Southey’s ‘Peninsular War.’ I am reading
that of a morning. You know Southey?”
“No,” said Mr. Casaubon, not keeping pace with Mr. Brooke’s impetuous
reason, and thinking of the book only. “I have little leisure for such
literature just now. I have been using up my eyesight on old characters
lately; the fact is, I want a reader for my evenings; but I am fastidious in
voices, and I cannot endure listening to an imperfect reader. It is a

misfortune, in some senses: I feed too much on the inward sources; I live
too much with the dead. My mind is something like the ghost of an ancient,
wandering about the world and trying mentally to construct it as it used to
be, in spite of ruin and confusing changes. But I find it necessary to use the
utmost caution about my eyesight.”
This was the first time that Mr. Casaubon had spoken at any length. He
delivered himself with precision, as if he had been called upon to make a
public statement; and the balanced sing-song neatness of his speech,
occasionally corresponded to by a movement of his head, was the more
conspicuous from its contrast with good Mr. Brooke’s scrappy slovenliness.
Dorothea said to herself that Mr. Casaubon was the most interesting man
she had ever seen, not excepting even Monsieur Liret, the Vaudois
clergyman who had given conferences on the history of the Waldenses. To
reconstruct a past world, doubtless with a view to the highest purposes of
truth—what a work to be in any way present at, to assist in, though only as
a lamp-holder! This elevating thought lifted her above her annoyance at
being twitted with her ignorance of political economy, that never-explained
science which was thrust as an extinguisher over all her lights.
“But you are fond of riding, Miss Brooke,” Sir James presently took an
opportunity of saying. “I should have thought you would enter a little into
the pleasures of hunting. I wish you would let me send over a chestnut
horse for you to try. It has been trained for a lady. I saw you on Saturday
cantering over the hill on a nag not worthy of you. My groom shall bring
Corydon for you every day, if you will only mention the time.”
“Thank you, you are very good. I mean to give up riding. I shall not ride
any more,” said Dorothea, urged to this brusque resolution by a little
annoyance that Sir James would be soliciting her attention when she wanted
to give it all to Mr. Casaubon.
“No, that is too hard,” said Sir James, in a tone of reproach that showed
strong interest. “Your sister is given to self-mortification, is she not?” he
continued, turning to Celia, who sat at his right hand.
“I think she is,” said Celia, feeling afraid lest she should say something
that would not please her sister, and blushing as prettily as possible above
her necklace. “She likes giving up.”
“If that were true, Celia, my giving-up would be self-indulgence, not
self-mortification. But there may be good reasons for choosing not to do

what is very agreeable,” said Dorothea.
Mr. Brooke was speaking at the same time, but it was evident that Mr.
Casaubon was observing Dorothea, and she was aware of it.
“Exactly,” said Sir James. “You give up from some high, generous
motive.”
“No, indeed, not exactly. I did not say that of myself,” answered
Dorothea, reddening. Unlike Celia, she rarely blushed, and only from high
delight or anger. At this moment she felt angry with the perverse Sir James.
Why did he not pay attention to Celia, and leave her to listen to Mr.
Casaubon?—if that learned man would only talk, instead of allowing
himself to be talked to by Mr. Brooke, who was just then informing him
that the Reformation either meant something or it did not, that he himself
was a Protestant to the core, but that Catholicism was a fact; and as to
refusing an acre of your ground for a Romanist chapel, all men needed the
bridle of religion, which, properly speaking, was the dread of a Hereafter.
“I made a great study of theology at one time,” said Mr. Brooke, as if to
explain the insight just manifested. “I know something of all schools. I
knew Wilberforce in his best days. Do you know Wilberforce?”
Mr. Casaubon said, “No.”
“Well, Wilberforce was perhaps not enough of a thinker; but if I went
into Parliament, as I have been asked to do, I should sit on the independent
bench, as Wilberforce did, and work at philanthropy.”
Mr. Casaubon bowed, and observed that it was a wide field.
“Yes,” said Mr. Brooke, with an easy smile, “but I have documents. I
began a long while ago to collect documents. They want arranging, but
when a question has struck me, I have written to somebody and got an
answer. I have documents at my back. But now, how do you arrange your
documents?”
“In pigeon-holes partly,” said Mr. Casaubon, with rather a startled air of
effort.
“Ah, pigeon-holes will not do. I have tried pigeon-holes, but everything
gets mixed in pigeon-holes: I never know whether a paper is in A or Z.”
“I wish you would let me sort your papers for you, uncle,” said Dorothea.
“I would letter them all, and then make a list of subjects under each letter.”

Mr. Casaubon gravely smiled approval, and said to Mr. Brooke, “You
have an excellent secretary at hand, you perceive.”
“No, no,” said Mr. Brooke, shaking his head; “I cannot let young ladies
meddle with my documents. Young ladies are too flighty.”
Dorothea felt hurt. Mr. Casaubon would think that her uncle had some
special reason for delivering this opinion, whereas the remark lay in his
mind as lightly as the broken wing of an insect among all the other
fragments there, and a chance current had sent it alighting on her.
When the two girls were in the drawing-room alone, Celia said—
“How very ugly Mr. Casaubon is!”
“Celia! He is one of the most distinguished-looking men I ever saw. He is
remarkably like the portrait of Locke. He has the same deep eye-sockets.”
“Had Locke those two white moles with hairs on them?”
“Oh, I dare say! when people of a certain sort looked at him,” said
Dorothea, walking away a little.
“Mr. Casaubon is so sallow.”
“All the better. I suppose you admire a man with the complexion of a
cochon de lait.”
“Dodo!” exclaimed Celia, looking after her in surprise. “I never heard
you make such a comparison before.”
“Why should I make it before the occasion came? It is a good
comparison: the match is perfect.”
Miss Brooke was clearly forgetting herself, and Celia thought so.
“I wonder you show temper, Dorothea.”
“It is so painful in you, Celia, that you will look at human beings as if
they were merely animals with a toilet, and never see the great soul in a
man’s face.”
“Has Mr. Casaubon a great soul?” Celia was not without a touch of naive
malice.
“Yes, I believe he has,” said Dorothea, with the full voice of decision.
“Everything I see in him corresponds to his pamphlet on Biblical
Cosmology.”
“He talks very little,” said Celia

“There is no one for him to talk to.”
Celia thought privately, “Dorothea quite despises Sir James Chettam; I
believe she would not accept him.” Celia felt that this was a pity. She had
never been deceived as to the object of the baronet’s interest. Sometimes,
indeed, she had reflected that Dodo would perhaps not make a husband
happy who had not her way of looking at things; and stifled in the depths of
her heart was the feeling that her sister was too religious for family comfort.
Notions and scruples were like spilt needles, making one afraid of treading,
or sitting down, or even eating.
When Miss Brooke was at the tea-table, Sir James came to sit down by
her, not having felt her mode of answering him at all offensive. Why should
he? He thought it probable that Miss Brooke liked him, and manners must
be very marked indeed before they cease to be interpreted by
preconceptions either confident or distrustful. She was thoroughly charming
to him, but of course he theorized a little about his attachment. He was
made of excellent human dough, and had the rare merit of knowing that his
talents, even if let loose, would not set the smallest stream in the county on
fire: hence he liked the prospect of a wife to whom he could say, “What
shall we do?” about this or that; who could help her husband out with
reasons, and would also have the property qualification for doing so. As to
the excessive religiousness alleged against Miss Brooke, he had a very
indefinite notion of what it consisted in, and thought that it would die out
with marriage. In short, he felt himself to be in love in the right place, and
was ready to endure a great deal of predominance, which, after all, a man
could always put down when he liked. Sir James had no idea that he should
ever like to put down the predominance of this handsome girl, in whose
cleverness he delighted. Why not? A man’s mind—what there is of it—has
always the advantage of being masculine,—as the smallest birch-tree is of a
higher kind than the most soaring palm,—and even his ignorance is of a
sounder quality. Sir James might not have originated this estimate; but a
kind Providence furnishes the limpest personality with a little gum or starch
in the form of tradition.
“Let me hope that you will rescind that resolution about the horse, Miss
Brooke,” said the persevering admirer. “I assure you, riding is the most
healthy of exercises.”

“I am aware of it,” said Dorothea, coldly. “I think it would do Celia good
—if she would take to it.”
“But you are such a perfect horsewoman.”
“Excuse me; I have had very little practice, and I should be easily
thrown.”
“Then that is a reason for more practice. Every lady ought to be a perfect
horsewoman, that she may accompany her husband.”
“You see how widely we differ, Sir James. I have made up my mind that I
ought not to be a perfect horsewoman, and so I should never correspond to
your pattern of a lady.” Dorothea looked straight before her, and spoke with
cold brusquerie, very much with the air of a handsome boy, in amusing
contrast with the solicitous amiability of her admirer.
“I should like to know your reasons for this cruel resolution. It is not
possible that you should think horsemanship wrong.”
“It is quite possible that I should think it wrong for me.”
“Oh, why?” said Sir James, in a tender tone of remonstrance.
Mr. Casaubon had come up to the table, teacup in hand, and was
listening.
“We must not inquire too curiously into motives,” he interposed, in his
measured way. “Miss Brooke knows that they are apt to become feeble in
the utterance: the aroma is mixed with the grosser air. We must keep the
germinating grain away from the light.”
Dorothea colored with pleasure, and looked up gratefully to the speaker.
Here was a man who could understand the higher inward life, and with
whom there could be some spiritual communion; nay, who could illuminate
principle with the widest knowledge: a man whose learning almost
amounted to a proof of whatever he believed!
Dorothea’s inferences may seem large; but really life could never have
gone on at any period but for this liberal allowance of conclusions, which
has facilitated marriage under the difficulties of civilization. Has any one
ever pinched into its pilulous smallness the cobweb of pre-matrimonial
acquaintanceship?
“Certainly,” said good Sir James. “Miss Brooke shall not be urged to tell
reasons she would rather be silent upon. I am sure her reasons would do her

honor.”
He was not in the least jealous of the interest with which Dorothea had
looked up at Mr. Casaubon: it never occurred to him that a girl to whom he
was meditating an offer of marriage could care for a dried bookworm
towards fifty, except, indeed, in a religious sort of way, as for a clergyman
of some distinction.
However, since Miss Brooke had become engaged in a conversation with
Mr. Casaubon about the Vaudois clergy, Sir James betook himself to Celia,
and talked to her about her sister; spoke of a house in town, and asked
whether Miss Brooke disliked London. Away from her sister, Celia talked
quite easily, and Sir James said to himself that the second Miss Brooke was
certainly very agreeable as well as pretty, though not, as some people
pretended, more clever and sensible than the elder sister. He felt that he had
chosen the one who was in all respects the superior; and a man naturally
likes to look forward to having the best. He would be the very Mawworm of
bachelors who pretended not to expect it.

CHAPTER III.
“Say, goddess, what ensued, when Raphael,
The affable archangel . . .
Eve
The story heard attentive, and was filled
With admiration, and deep muse, to hear
Of things so high and strange.”
—Paradise Lost, B. vii.

If it had really occurred to Mr. Casaubon to think of Miss Brooke as a
suitable wife for him, the reasons that might induce her to accept him were
already planted in her mind, and by the evening of the next day the reasons
had budded and bloomed. For they had had a long conversation in the
morning, while Celia, who did not like the company of Mr. Casaubon’s
moles and sallowness, had escaped to the vicarage to play with the curate’s
ill-shod but merry children.
Dorothea by this time had looked deep into the ungauged reservoir of Mr.
Casaubon’s mind, seeing reflected there in vague labyrinthine extension
every quality she herself brought; had opened much of her own experience
to him, and had understood from him the scope of his great work, also of
attractively labyrinthine extent. For he had been as instructive as Milton’s
“affable archangel;” and with something of the archangelic manner he told
her how he had undertaken to show (what indeed had been attempted
before, but not with that thoroughness, justice of comparison, and
effectiveness of arrangement at which Mr. Casaubon aimed) that all the
mythical systems or erratic mythical fragments in the world were
corruptions of a tradition originally revealed. Having once mastered the true
position and taken a firm footing there, the vast field of mythical
constructions became intelligible, nay, luminous with the reflected light of
correspondences. But to gather in this great harvest of truth was no light or
speedy work. His notes already made a formidable range of volumes, but
the crowning task would be to condense these voluminous still-
accumulating results and bring them, like the earlier vintage of Hippocratic
books, to fit a little shelf. In explaining this to Dorothea, Mr. Casaubon

expressed himself nearly as he would have done to a fellow-student, for he
had not two styles of talking at command: it is true that when he used a
Greek or Latin phrase he always gave the English with scrupulous care, but
he would probably have done this in any case. A learned provincial
clergyman is accustomed to think of his acquaintances as of “lords,
knyghtes, and other noble and worthi men, that conne Latyn but lytille.”
Dorothea was altogether captivated by the wide embrace of this
conception. Here was something beyond the shallows of ladies’ school
literature: here was a living Bossuet, whose work would reconcile complete
knowledge with devoted piety; here was a modern Augustine who united
the glories of doctor and saint.
The sanctity seemed no less clearly marked than the learning, for when
Dorothea was impelled to open her mind on certain themes which she could
speak of to no one whom she had before seen at Tipton, especially on the
secondary importance of ecclesiastical forms and articles of belief
compared with that spiritual religion, that submergence of self in
communion with Divine perfection which seemed to her to be expressed in
the best Christian books of widely distant ages, she found in Mr. Casaubon
a listener who understood her at once, who could assure her of his own
agreement with that view when duly tempered with wise conformity, and
could mention historical examples before unknown to her.
“He thinks with me,” said Dorothea to herself, “or rather, he thinks a
whole world of which my thought is but a poor twopenny mirror. And his
feelings too, his whole experience—what a lake compared with my little
pool!”
Miss Brooke argued from words and dispositions not less unhesitatingly
than other young ladies of her age. Signs are small measurable things, but
interpretations are illimitable, and in girls of sweet, ardent nature, every
sign is apt to conjure up wonder, hope, belief, vast as a sky, and colored by
a diffused thimbleful of matter in the shape of knowledge. They are not
always too grossly deceived; for Sinbad himself may have fallen by good-
luck on a true description, and wrong reasoning sometimes lands poor
mortals in right conclusions: starting a long way off the true point, and
proceeding by loops and zigzags, we now and then arrive just where we
ought to be. Because Miss Brooke was hasty in her trust, it is not therefore
clear that Mr. Casaubon was unworthy of it.

He stayed a little longer than he had intended, on a slight pressure of
invitation from Mr. Brooke, who offered no bait except his own documents
on machine-breaking and rick-burning. Mr. Casaubon was called into the
library to look at these in a heap, while his host picked up first one and then
the other to read aloud from in a skipping and uncertain way, passing from
one unfinished passage to another with a “Yes, now, but here!” and finally
pushing them all aside to open the journal of his youthful Continental
travels.
“Look here—here is all about Greece. Rhamnus, the ruins of Rhamnus—
you are a great Grecian, now. I don’t know whether you have given much
study to the topography. I spent no end of time in making out these things—
Helicon, now. Here, now!—‘We started the next morning for Parnassus, the
double-peaked Parnassus.’ All this volume is about Greece, you know,” Mr.
Brooke wound up, rubbing his thumb transversely along the edges of the
leaves as he held the book forward.
Mr. Casaubon made a dignified though somewhat sad audience; bowed in
the right place, and avoided looking at anything documentary as far as
possible, without showing disregard or impatience; mindful that this
desultoriness was associated with the institutions of the country, and that
the man who took him on this severe mental scamper was not only an
amiable host, but a landholder and custos rotulorum. Was his endurance
aided also by the reflection that Mr. Brooke was the uncle of Dorothea?
Certainly he seemed more and more bent on making her talk to him, on
drawing her out, as Celia remarked to herself; and in looking at her his face
was often lit up by a smile like pale wintry sunshine. Before he left the next
morning, while taking a pleasant walk with Miss Brooke along the
gravelled terrace, he had mentioned to her that he felt the disadvantage of
loneliness, the need of that cheerful companionship with which the presence
of youth can lighten or vary the serious toils of maturity. And he delivered
this statement with as much careful precision as if he had been a diplomatic
envoy whose words would be attended with results. Indeed, Mr. Casaubon
was not used to expect that he should have to repeat or revise his
communications of a practical or personal kind. The inclinations which he
had deliberately stated on the 2d of October he would think it enough to
refer to by the mention of that date; judging by the standard of his own
memory, which was a volume where a vide supra could serve instead of

repetitions, and not the ordinary long-used blotting-book which only tells of
forgotten writing. But in this case Mr. Casaubon’s confidence was not likely
to be falsified, for Dorothea heard and retained what he said with the eager
interest of a fresh young nature to which every variety in experience is an
epoch.
It was three o’clock in the beautiful breezy autumn day when Mr.
Casaubon drove off to his Rectory at Lowick, only five miles from Tipton;
and Dorothea, who had on her bonnet and shawl, hurried along the
shrubbery and across the park that she might wander through the bordering
wood with no other visible companionship than that of Monk, the Great St.
Bernard dog, who always took care of the young ladies in their walks.
There had risen before her the girl’s vision of a possible future for herself to
which she looked forward with trembling hope, and she wanted to wander
on in that visionary future without interruption. She walked briskly in the
brisk air, the color rose in her cheeks, and her straw bonnet (which our
contemporaries might look at with conjectural curiosity as at an obsolete
form of basket) fell a little backward. She would perhaps be hardly
characterized enough if it were omitted that she wore her brown hair flatly
braided and coiled behind so as to expose the outline of her head in a daring
manner at a time when public feeling required the meagreness of nature to
be dissimulated by tall barricades of frizzed curls and bows, never
surpassed by any great race except the Feejeean. This was a trait of Miss
Brooke’s asceticism. But there was nothing of an ascetic’s expression in her
bright full eyes, as she looked before her, not consciously seeing, but
absorbing into the intensity of her mood, the solemn glory of the afternoon
with its long swathes of light between the far-off rows of limes, whose
shadows touched each other.
All people, young or old (that is, all people in those ante-reform times),
would have thought her an interesting object if they had referred the glow in
her eyes and cheeks to the newly awakened ordinary images of young love:
the illusions of Chloe about Strephon have been sufficiently consecrated in
poetry, as the pathetic loveliness of all spontaneous trust ought to be. Miss
Pippin adoring young Pumpkin, and dreaming along endless vistas of
unwearying companionship, was a little drama which never tired our fathers
and mothers, and had been put into all costumes. Let but Pumpkin have a
figure which would sustain the disadvantages of the shortwaisted swallow-
tail, and everybody felt it not only natural but necessary to the perfection of

womanhood, that a sweet girl should be at once convinced of his virtue, his
exceptional ability, and above all, his perfect sincerity. But perhaps no
persons then living—certainly none in the neighborhood of Tipton—would
have had a sympathetic understanding for the dreams of a girl whose
notions about marriage took their color entirely from an exalted enthusiasm
about the ends of life, an enthusiasm which was lit chiefly by its own fire,
and included neither the niceties of the trousseau, the pattern of plate, nor
even the honors and sweet joys of the blooming matron.
It had now entered Dorothea’s mind that Mr. Casaubon might wish to
make her his wife, and the idea that he would do so touched her with a sort
of reverential gratitude. How good of him—nay, it would be almost as if a
winged messenger had suddenly stood beside her path and held out his hand
towards her! For a long while she had been oppressed by the indefiniteness
which hung in her mind, like a thick summer haze, over all her desire to
make her life greatly effective. What could she do, what ought she to do?—
she, hardly more than a budding woman, but yet with an active conscience
and a great mental need, not to be satisfied by a girlish instruction
comparable to the nibblings and judgments of a discursive mouse. With
some endowment of stupidity and conceit, she might have thought that a
Christian young lady of fortune should find her ideal of life in village
charities, patronage of the humbler clergy, the perusal of “Female Scripture
Characters,” unfolding the private experience of Sara under the Old
Dispensation, and Dorcas under the New, and the care of her soul over her
embroidery in her own boudoir—with a background of prospective
marriage to a man who, if less strict than herself, as being involved in
affairs religiously inexplicable, might be prayed for and seasonably
exhorted. From such contentment poor Dorothea was shut out. The intensity
of her religious disposition, the coercion it exercised over her life, was but
one aspect of a nature altogether ardent, theoretic, and intellectually
consequent: and with such a nature struggling in the bands of a narrow
teaching, hemmed in by a social life which seemed nothing but a labyrinth
of petty courses, a walled-in maze of small paths that led no whither, the
outcome was sure to strike others as at once exaggeration and
inconsistency. The thing which seemed to her best, she wanted to justify by
the completest knowledge; and not to live in a pretended admission of rules
which were never acted on. Into this soul-hunger as yet all her youthful
passion was poured; the union which attracted her was one that would

deliver her from her girlish subjection to her own ignorance, and give her
the freedom of voluntary submission to a guide who would take her along
the grandest path.
“I should learn everything then,” she said to herself, still walking quickly
along the bridle road through the wood. “It would be my duty to study that I
might help him the better in his great works. There would be nothing trivial
about our lives. Every-day things with us would mean the greatest things. It
would be like marrying Pascal. I should learn to see the truth by the same
light as great men have seen it by. And then I should know what to do,
when I got older: I should see how it was possible to lead a grand life here
—now—in England. I don’t feel sure about doing good in any way now:
everything seems like going on a mission to a people whose language I
don’t know;—unless it were building good cottages—there can be no doubt
about that. Oh, I hope I should be able to get the people well housed in
Lowick! I will draw plenty of plans while I have time.”
Dorothea checked herself suddenly with self-rebuke for the
presumptuous way in which she was reckoning on uncertain events, but she
was spared any inward effort to change the direction of her thoughts by the
appearance of a cantering horseman round a turning of the road. The well-
groomed chestnut horse and two beautiful setters could leave no doubt that
the rider was Sir James Chettam. He discerned Dorothea, jumped off his
horse at once, and, having delivered it to his groom, advanced towards her
with something white on his arm, at which the two setters were barking in
an excited manner.
“How delightful to meet you, Miss Brooke,” he said, raising his hat and
showing his sleekly waving blond hair. “It has hastened the pleasure I was
looking forward to.”
Miss Brooke was annoyed at the interruption. This amiable baronet,
really a suitable husband for Celia, exaggerated the necessity of making
himself agreeable to the elder sister. Even a prospective brother-in-law may
be an oppression if he will always be presupposing too good an
understanding with you, and agreeing with you even when you contradict
him. The thought that he had made the mistake of paying his addresses to
herself could not take shape: all her mental activity was used up in
persuasions of another kind. But he was positively obtrusive at this

moment, and his dimpled hands were quite disagreeable. Her roused temper
made her color deeply, as she returned his greeting with some haughtiness.
Sir James interpreted the heightened color in the way most gratifying to
himself, and thought he never saw Miss Brooke looking so handsome.
“I have brought a little petitioner,” he said, “or rather, I have brought him
to see if he will be approved before his petition is offered.” He showed the
white object under his arm, which was a tiny Maltese puppy, one of nature’s
most naive toys.
“It is painful to me to see these creatures that are bred merely as pets,”
said Dorothea, whose opinion was forming itself that very moment (as
opinions will) under the heat of irritation.
“Oh, why?” said Sir James, as they walked forward.
“I believe all the petting that is given them does not make them happy.
They are too helpless: their lives are too frail. A weasel or a mouse that gets
its own living is more interesting. I like to think that the animals about us
have souls something like our own, and either carry on their own little
affairs or can be companions to us, like Monk here. Those creatures are
parasitic.”
“I am so glad I know that you do not like them,” said good Sir James. “I
should never keep them for myself, but ladies usually are fond of these
Maltese dogs. Here, John, take this dog, will you?”
The objectionable puppy, whose nose and eyes were equally black and
expressive, was thus got rid of, since Miss Brooke decided that it had better
not have been born. But she felt it necessary to explain.
“You must not judge of Celia’s feeling from mine. I think she likes these
small pets. She had a tiny terrier once, which she was very fond of. It made
me unhappy, because I was afraid of treading on it. I am rather short-
sighted.”
“You have your own opinion about everything, Miss Brooke, and it is
always a good opinion.”
What answer was possible to such stupid complimenting?
“Do you know, I envy you that,” Sir James said, as they continued
walking at the rather brisk pace set by Dorothea.
“I don’t quite understand what you mean.”

“Your power of forming an opinion. I can form an opinion of persons. I
know when I like people. But about other matters, do you know, I have
often a difficulty in deciding. One hears very sensible things said on
opposite sides.”
“Or that seem sensible. Perhaps we don’t always discriminate between
sense and nonsense.”
Dorothea felt that she was rather rude.
“Exactly,” said Sir James. “But you seem to have the power of
discrimination.”
“On the contrary, I am often unable to decide. But that is from ignorance.
The right conclusion is there all the same, though I am unable to see it.”
“I think there are few who would see it more readily. Do you know,
Lovegood was telling me yesterday that you had the best notion in the
world of a plan for cottages—quite wonderful for a young lady, he thought.
You had a real genus, to use his expression. He said you wanted Mr. Brooke
to build a new set of cottages, but he seemed to think it hardly probable that
your uncle would consent. Do you know, that is one of the things I wish to
do—I mean, on my own estate. I should be so glad to carry out that plan of
yours, if you would let me see it. Of course, it is sinking money; that is why
people object to it. Laborers can never pay rent to make it answer. But, after
all, it is worth doing.”
“Worth doing! yes, indeed,” said Dorothea, energetically, forgetting her
previous small vexations. “I think we deserve to be beaten out of our
beautiful houses with a scourge of small cords—all of us who let tenants
live in such sties as we see round us. Life in cottages might be happier than
ours, if they were real houses fit for human beings from whom we expect
duties and affections.”
“Will you show me your plan?”
“Yes, certainly. I dare say it is very faulty. But I have been examining all
the plans for cottages in Loudon’s book, and picked out what seem the best
things. Oh what a happiness it would be to set the pattern about here! I
think instead of Lazarus at the gate, we should put the pigsty cottages
outside the park-gate.”
Dorothea was in the best temper now. Sir James, as brother in-law,
building model cottages on his estate, and then, perhaps, others being built

at Lowick, and more and more elsewhere in imitation—it would be as if the
spirit of Oberlin had passed over the parishes to make the life of poverty
beautiful!
Sir James saw all the plans, and took one away to consult upon with
Lovegood. He also took away a complacent sense that he was making great
progress in Miss Brooke’s good opinion. The Maltese puppy was not
offered to Celia; an omission which Dorothea afterwards thought of with
surprise; but she blamed herself for it. She had been engrossing Sir James.
After all, it was a relief that there was no puppy to tread upon.
Celia was present while the plans were being examined, and observed Sir
James’s illusion. “He thinks that Dodo cares about him, and she only cares
about her plans. Yet I am not certain that she would refuse him if she
thought he would let her manage everything and carry out all her notions.
And how very uncomfortable Sir James would be! I cannot bear notions.”
It was Celia’s private luxury to indulge in this dislike. She dared not
confess it to her sister in any direct statement, for that would be laying
herself open to a demonstration that she was somehow or other at war with
all goodness. But on safe opportunities, she had an indirect mode of making
her negative wisdom tell upon Dorothea, and calling her down from her
rhapsodic mood by reminding her that people were staring, not listening.
Celia was not impulsive: what she had to say could wait, and came from her
always with the same quiet staccato evenness. When people talked with
energy and emphasis she watched their faces and features merely. She never
could understand how well-bred persons consented to sing and open their
mouths in the ridiculous manner requisite for that vocal exercise.
It was not many days before Mr. Casaubon paid a morning visit, on
which he was invited again for the following week to dine and stay the
night. Thus Dorothea had three more conversations with him, and was
convinced that her first impressions had been just. He was all she had at
first imagined him to be: almost everything he had said seemed like a
specimen from a mine, or the inscription on the door of a museum which
might open on the treasures of past ages; and this trust in his mental wealth
was all the deeper and more effective on her inclination because it was now
obvious that his visits were made for her sake. This accomplished man
condescended to think of a young girl, and take the pains to talk to her, not
with absurd compliment, but with an appeal to her understanding, and

sometimes with instructive correction. What delightful companionship! Mr.
Casaubon seemed even unconscious that trivialities existed, and never
handed round that small-talk of heavy men which is as acceptable as stale
bride-cake brought forth with an odor of cupboard. He talked of what he
was interested in, or else he was silent and bowed with sad civility. To
Dorothea this was adorable genuineness, and religious abstinence from that
artificiality which uses up the soul in the efforts of pretence. For she looked
as reverently at Mr. Casaubon’s religious elevation above herself as she did
at his intellect and learning. He assented to her expressions of devout
feeling, and usually with an appropriate quotation; he allowed himself to
say that he had gone through some spiritual conflicts in his youth; in short,
Dorothea saw that here she might reckon on understanding, sympathy, and
guidance. On one—only one—of her favorite themes she was disappointed.
Mr. Casaubon apparently did not care about building cottages, and diverted
the talk to the extremely narrow accommodation which was to be had in the
dwellings of the ancient Egyptians, as if to check a too high standard. After
he was gone, Dorothea dwelt with some agitation on this indifference of
his; and her mind was much exercised with arguments drawn from the
varying conditions of climate which modify human needs, and from the
admitted wickedness of pagan despots. Should she not urge these arguments
on Mr. Casaubon when he came again? But further reflection told her that
she was presumptuous in demanding his attention to such a subject; he
would not disapprove of her occupying herself with it in leisure moments,
as other women expected to occupy themselves with their dress and
embroidery—would not forbid it when—Dorothea felt rather ashamed as
she detected herself in these speculations. But her uncle had been invited to
go to Lowick to stay a couple of days: was it reasonable to suppose that Mr.
Casaubon delighted in Mr. Brooke’s society for its own sake, either with or
without documents?
Meanwhile that little disappointment made her delight the more in Sir
James Chettam’s readiness to set on foot the desired improvements. He
came much oftener than Mr. Casaubon, and Dorothea ceased to find him
disagreeable since he showed himself so entirely in earnest; for he had
already entered with much practical ability into Lovegood’s estimates, and
was charmingly docile. She proposed to build a couple of cottages, and
transfer two families from their old cabins, which could then be pulled

down, so that new ones could be built on the old sites. Sir James said
“Exactly,” and she bore the word remarkably well.
Certainly these men who had so few spontaneous ideas might be very
useful members of society under good feminine direction, if they were
fortunate in choosing their sisters-in-law! It is difficult to say whether there
was or was not a little wilfulness in her continuing blind to the possibility
that another sort of choice was in question in relation to her. But her life
was just now full of hope and action: she was not only thinking of her
plans, but getting down learned books from the library and reading many
things hastily (that she might be a little less ignorant in talking to Mr.
Casaubon), all the while being visited with conscientious questionings
whether she were not exalting these poor doings above measure and
contemplating them with that self-satisfaction which was the last doom of
ignorance and folly.

CHAPTER IV.
1st Gent. Our deeds are fetters that we forge ourselves.

2d Gent. Ay, truly: but I think it is the world
That brings the iron.

“Sir James seems determined to do everything you wish,” said Celia, as
they were driving home from an inspection of the new building-site.
“He is a good creature, and more sensible than any one would imagine,”
said Dorothea, inconsiderately.
“You mean that he appears silly.”
“No, no,” said Dorothea, recollecting herself, and laying her hand on her
sister’s a moment, “but he does not talk equally well on all subjects.”
“I should think none but disagreeable people do,” said Celia, in her usual
purring way. “They must be very dreadful to live with. Only think! at
breakfast, and always.”
Dorothea laughed. “O Kitty, you are a wonderful creature!” She pinched
Celia’s chin, being in the mood now to think her very winning and lovely—
fit hereafter to be an eternal cherub, and if it were not doctrinally wrong to
say so, hardly more in need of salvation than a squirrel. “Of course people
need not be always talking well. Only one tells the quality of their minds
when they try to talk well.”
“You mean that Sir James tries and fails.”
“I was speaking generally. Why do you catechise me about Sir James? It
is not the object of his life to please me.”
“Now, Dodo, can you really believe that?”
“Certainly. He thinks of me as a future sister—that is all.” Dorothea had
never hinted this before, waiting, from a certain shyness on such subjects
which was mutual between the sisters, until it should be introduced by some
decisive event. Celia blushed, but said at once—

“Pray do not make that mistake any longer, Dodo. When Tantripp was
brushing my hair the other day, she said that Sir James’s man knew from
Mrs. Cadwallader’s maid that Sir James was to marry the eldest Miss
Brooke.”
“How can you let Tantripp talk such gossip to you, Celia?” said
Dorothea, indignantly, not the less angry because details asleep in her
memory were now awakened to confirm the unwelcome revelation. “You
must have asked her questions. It is degrading.”
“I see no harm at all in Tantripp’s talking to me. It is better to hear what
people say. You see what mistakes you make by taking up notions. I am
quite sure that Sir James means to make you an offer; and he believes that
you will accept him, especially since you have been so pleased with him
about the plans. And uncle too—I know he expects it. Every one can see
that Sir James is very much in love with you.”
The revulsion was so strong and painful in Dorothea’s mind that the tears
welled up and flowed abundantly. All her dear plans were embittered, and
she thought with disgust of Sir James’s conceiving that she recognized him
as her lover. There was vexation too on account of Celia.
“How could he expect it?” she burst forth in her most impetuous manner.
“I have never agreed with him about anything but the cottages: I was barely
polite to him before.”
“But you have been so pleased with him since then; he has begun to feel
quite sure that you are fond of him.”
“Fond of him, Celia! How can you choose such odious expressions?”
said Dorothea, passionately.
“Dear me, Dorothea, I suppose it would be right for you to be fond of a
man whom you accepted for a husband.”
“It is offensive to me to say that Sir James could think I was fond of him.
Besides, it is not the right word for the feeling I must have towards the man
I would accept as a husband.”
“Well, I am sorry for Sir James. I thought it right to tell you, because you
went on as you always do, never looking just where you are, and treading in
the wrong place. You always see what nobody else sees; it is impossible to
satisfy you; yet you never see what is quite plain. That’s your way, Dodo.”
Something certainly gave Celia unusual courage; and she was not sparing

the sister of whom she was occasionally in awe. Who can tell what just
criticisms Murr the Cat may be passing on us beings of wider speculation?
“It is very painful,” said Dorothea, feeling scourged. “I can have no more
to do with the cottages. I must be uncivil to him. I must tell him I will have
nothing to do with them. It is very painful.” Her eyes filled again with tears.
“Wait a little. Think about it. You know he is going away for a day or two
to see his sister. There will be nobody besides Lovegood.” Celia could not
help relenting. “Poor Dodo,” she went on, in an amiable staccato. “It is very
hard: it is your favorite fad to draw plans.”
“Fad to draw plans! Do you think I only care about my fellow-creatures’
houses in that childish way? I may well make mistakes. How can one ever
do anything nobly Christian, living among people with such petty
thoughts?”
No more was said; Dorothea was too much jarred to recover her temper
and behave so as to show that she admitted any error in herself. She was
disposed rather to accuse the intolerable narrowness and the purblind
conscience of the society around her: and Celia was no longer the eternal
cherub, but a thorn in her spirit, a pink-and-white nullifidian, worse than
any discouraging presence in the “Pilgrim’s Progress.” The fad of drawing
plans! What was life worth—what great faith was possible when the whole
effect of one’s actions could be withered up into such parched rubbish as
that? When she got out of the carriage, her cheeks were pale and her eyelids
red. She was an image of sorrow, and her uncle who met her in the hall
would have been alarmed, if Celia had not been close to her looking so
pretty and composed, that he at once concluded Dorothea’s tears to have
their origin in her excessive religiousness. He had returned, during their
absence, from a journey to the county town, about a petition for the pardon
of some criminal.
“Well, my dears,” he said, kindly, as they went up to kiss him, “I hope
nothing disagreeable has happened while I have been away.”
“No, uncle,” said Celia, “we have been to Freshitt to look at the cottages.
We thought you would have been at home to lunch.”
“I came by Lowick to lunch—you didn’t know I came by Lowick. And I
have brought a couple of pamphlets for you, Dorothea—in the library, you
know; they lie on the table in the library.”

It seemed as if an electric stream went through Dorothea, thrilling her
from despair into expectation. They were pamphlets about the early Church.
The oppression of Celia, Tantripp, and Sir James was shaken off, and she
walked straight to the library. Celia went up-stairs. Mr. Brooke was
detained by a message, but when he re-entered the library, he found
Dorothea seated and already deep in one of the pamphlets which had some
marginal manuscript of Mr. Casaubon’s,—taking it in as eagerly as she
might have taken in the scent of a fresh bouquet after a dry, hot, dreary
walk.
She was getting away from Tipton and Freshitt, and her own sad liability
to tread in the wrong places on her way to the New Jerusalem.
Mr. Brooke sat down in his arm-chair, stretched his legs towards the
wood-fire, which had fallen into a wondrous mass of glowing dice between
the dogs, and rubbed his hands gently, looking very mildly towards
Dorothea, but with a neutral leisurely air, as if he had nothing particular to
say. Dorothea closed her pamphlet, as soon as she was aware of her uncle’s
presence, and rose as if to go. Usually she would have been interested about
her uncle’s merciful errand on behalf of the criminal, but her late agitation
had made her absent-minded.
“I came back by Lowick, you know,” said Mr. Brooke, not as if with any
intention to arrest her departure, but apparently from his usual tendency to
say what he had said before. This fundamental principle of human speech
was markedly exhibited in Mr. Brooke. “I lunched there and saw
Casaubon’s library, and that kind of thing. There’s a sharp air, driving.
Won’t you sit down, my dear? You look cold.”
Dorothea felt quite inclined to accept the invitation. Some times, when
her uncle’s easy way of taking things did not happen to be exasperating, it
was rather soothing. She threw off her mantle and bonnet, and sat down
opposite to him, enjoying the glow, but lifting up her beautiful hands for a
screen. They were not thin hands, or small hands; but powerful, feminine,
maternal hands. She seemed to be holding them up in propitiation for her
passionate desire to know and to think, which in the unfriendly mediums of
Tipton and Freshitt had issued in crying and red eyelids.
She bethought herself now of the condemned criminal. “What news have
you brought about the sheep-stealer, uncle?”

“What, poor Bunch?—well, it seems we can’t get him off—he is to be
hanged.”
Dorothea’s brow took an expression of reprobation and pity.
“Hanged, you know,” said Mr. Brooke, with a quiet nod. “Poor Romilly!
he would have helped us. I knew Romilly. Casaubon didn’t know Romilly.
He is a little buried in books, you know, Casaubon is.”
“When a man has great studies and is writing a great work, he must of
course give up seeing much of the world. How can he go about making
acquaintances?”
“That’s true. But a man mopes, you know. I have always been a bachelor
too, but I have that sort of disposition that I never moped; it was my way to
go about everywhere and take in everything. I never moped: but I can see
that Casaubon does, you know. He wants a companion—a companion, you
know.”
“It would be a great honor to any one to be his companion,” said
Dorothea, energetically.
“You like him, eh?” said Mr. Brooke, without showing any surprise, or
other emotion. “Well, now, I’ve known Casaubon ten years, ever since he
came to Lowick. But I never got anything out of him—any ideas, you
know. However, he is a tiptop man and may be a bishop—that kind of thing,
you know, if Peel stays in. And he has a very high opinion of you, my dear.”
Dorothea could not speak.
“The fact is, he has a very high opinion indeed of you. And he speaks
uncommonly well—does Casaubon. He has deferred to me, you not being
of age. In short, I have promised to speak to you, though I told him I
thought there was not much chance. I was bound to tell him that. I said, my
niece is very young, and that kind of thing. But I didn’t think it necessary to
go into everything. However, the long and the short of it is, that he has
asked my permission to make you an offer of marriage—of marriage, you
know,” said Mr. Brooke, with his explanatory nod. “I thought it better to tell
you, my dear.”
No one could have detected any anxiety in Mr. Brooke’s manner, but he
did really wish to know something of his niece’s mind, that, if there were
any need for advice, he might give it in time. What feeling he, as a
magistrate who had taken in so many ideas, could make room for, was

unmixedly kind. Since Dorothea did not speak immediately, he repeated, “I
thought it better to tell you, my dear.”
“Thank you, uncle,” said Dorothea, in a clear unwavering tone. “I am
very grateful to Mr. Casaubon. If he makes me an offer, I shall accept him. I
admire and honor him more than any man I ever saw.”
Mr. Brooke paused a little, and then said in a lingering low tone, “Ah? …
Well! He is a good match in some respects. But now, Chettam is a good
match. And our land lies together. I shall never interfere against your
wishes, my dear. People should have their own way in marriage, and that
sort of thing—up to a certain point, you know. I have always said that, up to
a certain point. I wish you to marry well; and I have good reason to believe
that Chettam wishes to marry you. I mention it, you know.”
“It is impossible that I should ever marry Sir James Chettam,” said
Dorothea. “If he thinks of marrying me, he has made a great mistake.”
“That is it, you see. One never knows. I should have thought Chettam
was just the sort of man a woman would like, now.”
“Pray do not mention him in that light again, uncle,” said Dorothea,
feeling some of her late irritation revive.
Mr. Brooke wondered, and felt that women were an inexhaustible subject
of study, since even he at his age was not in a perfect state of scientific
prediction about them. Here was a fellow like Chettam with no chance at
all.
“Well, but Casaubon, now. There is no hurry—I mean for you. It’s true,
every year will tell upon him. He is over five-and-forty, you know. I should
say a good seven-and-twenty years older than you. To be sure,—if you like
learning and standing, and that sort of thing, we can’t have everything. And
his income is good—he has a handsome property independent of the
Church—his income is good. Still he is not young, and I must not conceal
from you, my dear, that I think his health is not over-strong. I know nothing
else against him.”
“I should not wish to have a husband very near my own age,” said
Dorothea, with grave decision. “I should wish to have a husband who was
above me in judgment and in all knowledge.”
Mr. Brooke repeated his subdued, “Ah?—I thought you had more of your
own opinion than most girls. I thought you liked your own opinion—liked

it, you know.”
“I cannot imagine myself living without some opinions, but I should wish
to have good reasons for them, and a wise man could help me to see which
opinions had the best foundation, and would help me to live according to
them.”
“Very true. You couldn’t put the thing better—couldn’t put it better,
beforehand, you know. But there are oddities in things,” continued Mr.
Brooke, whose conscience was really roused to do the best he could for his
niece on this occasion. “Life isn’t cast in a mould—not cut out by rule and
line, and that sort of thing. I never married myself, and it will be the better
for you and yours. The fact is, I never loved any one well enough to put
myself into a noose for them. It is a noose, you know. Temper, now. There
is temper. And a husband likes to be master.”
“I know that I must expect trials, uncle. Marriage is a state of higher
duties. I never thought of it as mere personal ease,” said poor Dorothea.
“Well, you are not fond of show, a great establishment, balls, dinners,
that kind of thing. I can see that Casaubon’s ways might suit you better than
Chettam’s. And you shall do as you like, my dear. I would not hinder
Casaubon; I said so at once; for there is no knowing how anything may turn
out. You have not the same tastes as every young lady; and a clergyman and
scholar—who may be a bishop—that kind of thing—may suit you better
than Chettam. Chettam is a good fellow, a good sound-hearted fellow, you
know; but he doesn’t go much into ideas. I did, when I was his age. But
Casaubon’s eyes, now. I think he has hurt them a little with too much
reading.”
“I should be all the happier, uncle, the more room there was for me to
help him,” said Dorothea, ardently.
“You have quite made up your mind, I see. Well, my dear, the fact is, I
have a letter for you in my pocket.” Mr. Brooke handed the letter to
Dorothea, but as she rose to go away, he added, “There is not too much
hurry, my dear. Think about it, you know.”
When Dorothea had left him, he reflected that he had certainly spoken
strongly: he had put the risks of marriage before her in a striking manner. It
was his duty to do so. But as to pretending to be wise for young people,—
no uncle, however much he had travelled in his youth, absorbed the new
ideas, and dined with celebrities now deceased, could pretend to judge what

sort of marriage would turn out well for a young girl who preferred
Casaubon to Chettam. In short, woman was a problem which, since Mr.
Brooke’s mind felt blank before it, could be hardly less complicated than
the revolutions of an irregular solid.

CHAPTER V.
“Hard students are commonly troubled with gowts, catarrhs, rheums, cachexia,
bradypepsia, bad eyes, stone, and collick, crudities, oppilations, vertigo, winds,
consumptions, and all such diseases as come by over-much sitting: they are most part lean,
dry, ill-colored … and all through immoderate pains and extraordinary studies. If you will
not believe the truth of this, look upon great Tostatus and Thomas Aquinas’ works; and tell
me whether those men took pains.”—BURTON’S Anatomy of Melancholy, P. I, s. 2.

This was Mr. Casaubon’s letter.

MY DEAR MISS BROOKE,—I have your guardian’s
permission to address you on a subject than which I have
none more at heart. I am not, I trust, mistaken in the
recognition of some deeper correspondence than that of date
in the fact that a consciousness of need in my own life had
arisen contemporaneously with the possibility of my
becoming acquainted with you. For in the first hour of
meeting you, I had an impression of your eminent and
perhaps exclusive fitness to supply that need (connected, I
may say, with such activity of the affections as even the
preoccupations of a work too special to be abdicated could
not uninterruptedly dissimulate); and each succeeding
opportunity for observation has given the impression an
added depth by convincing me more emphatically of that
fitness which I had preconceived, and thus evoking more
decisively those affections to which I have but now referred.
Our conversations have, I think, made sufficiently clear to
you the tenor of my life and purposes: a tenor unsuited, I am
aware, to the commoner order of minds. But I have
discerned in you an elevation of thought and a capability of
devotedness, which I had hitherto not conceived to be
compatible either with the early bloom of youth or with
those graces of sex that may be said at once to win and to
confer distinction when combined, as they notably are in

you, with the mental qualities above indicated. It was, I
confess, beyond my hope to meet with this rare combination
of elements both solid and attractive, adapted to supply aid
in graver labors and to cast a charm over vacant hours; and
but for the event of my introduction to you (which, let me
again say, I trust not to be superficially coincident with
foreshadowing needs, but providentially related thereto as
stages towards the completion of a life’s plan), I should
presumably have gone on to the last without any attempt to
lighten my solitariness by a matrimonial union.
Such, my dear Miss Brooke, is the accurate statement of
my feelings; and I rely on your kind indulgence in venturing
now to ask you how far your own are of a nature to confirm
my happy presentiment. To be accepted by you as your
husband and the earthly guardian of your welfare, I should
regard as the highest of providential gifts. In return I can at
least offer you an affection hitherto unwasted, and the
faithful consecration of a life which, however short in the
sequel, has no backward pages whereon, if you choose to
turn them, you will find records such as might justly cause
you either bitterness or shame. I await the expression of your
sentiments with an anxiety which it would be the part of
wisdom (were it possible) to divert by a more arduous labor
than usual. But in this order of experience I am still young,
and in looking forward to an unfavorable possibility I cannot
but feel that resignation to solitude will be more difficult
after the temporary illumination of hope.

In any case, I shall remain,
Yours with sincere devotion,
EDWARD CASAUBON.

Dorothea trembled while she read this letter; then she fell on her knees,
buried her face, and sobbed. She could not pray: under the rush of solemn
emotion in which thoughts became vague and images floated uncertainly,
she could but cast herself, with a childlike sense of reclining, in the lap of a

divine consciousness which sustained her own. She remained in that
attitude till it was time to dress for dinner.
How could it occur to her to examine the letter, to look at it critically as a
profession of love? Her whole soul was possessed by the fact that a fuller
life was opening before her: she was a neophyte about to enter on a higher
grade of initiation. She was going to have room for the energies which
stirred uneasily under the dimness and pressure of her own ignorance and
the petty peremptoriness of the world’s habits.
Now she would be able to devote herself to large yet definite duties; now
she would be allowed to live continually in the light of a mind that she
could reverence. This hope was not unmixed with the glow of proud delight
—the joyous maiden surprise that she was chosen by the man whom her
admiration had chosen. All Dorothea’s passion was transfused through a
mind struggling towards an ideal life; the radiance of her transfigured
girlhood fell on the first object that came within its level. The impetus with
which inclination became resolution was heightened by those little events
of the day which had roused her discontent with the actual conditions of her
life.
After dinner, when Celia was playing an “air, with variations,” a small
kind of tinkling which symbolized the aesthetic part of the young ladies’
education, Dorothea went up to her room to answer Mr. Casaubon’s letter.
Why should she defer the answer? She wrote it over three times, not
because she wished to change the wording, but because her hand was
unusually uncertain, and she could not bear that Mr. Casaubon should think
her handwriting bad and illegible. She piqued herself on writing a hand in
which each letter was distinguishable without any large range of conjecture,
and she meant to make much use of this accomplishment, to save Mr.
Casaubon’s eyes. Three times she wrote.

MY DEAR MR. CASAUBON,—I am very grateful to you
for loving me, and thinking me worthy to be your wife. I can
look forward to no better happiness than that which would
be one with yours. If I said more, it would only be the same
thing written out at greater length, for I cannot now dwell on
any other thought than that I may be through life

Yours devotedly,
DOROTHEA BROOKE.

Later in the evening she followed her uncle into the library to give him
the letter, that he might send it in the morning. He was surprised, but his
surprise only issued in a few moments’ silence, during which he pushed
about various objects on his writing-table, and finally stood with his back to
the fire, his glasses on his nose, looking at the address of Dorothea’s letter.
“Have you thought enough about this, my dear?” he said at last.
“There was no need to think long, uncle. I know of nothing to make me
vacillate. If I changed my mind, it must be because of something important
and entirely new to me.”
“Ah!—then you have accepted him? Then Chettam has no chance? Has
Chettam offended you—offended you, you know? What is it you don’t like
in Chettam?”
“There is nothing that I like in him,” said Dorothea, rather impetuously.
Mr. Brooke threw his head and shoulders backward as if some one had
thrown a light missile at him. Dorothea immediately felt some self-rebuke,
and said—
“I mean in the light of a husband. He is very kind, I think—really very
good about the cottages. A well-meaning man.”
“But you must have a scholar, and that sort of thing? Well, it lies a little
in our family. I had it myself—that love of knowledge, and going into
everything—a little too much—it took me too far; though that sort of thing
doesn’t often run in the female-line; or it runs underground like the rivers in
Greece, you know—it comes out in the sons. Clever sons, clever mothers. I
went a good deal into that, at one time. However, my dear, I have always
said that people should do as they like in these things, up to a certain point.
I couldn’t, as your guardian, have consented to a bad match. But Casaubon
stands well: his position is good. I am afraid Chettam will be hurt, though,
and Mrs. Cadwallader will blame me.”
That evening, of course, Celia knew nothing of what had happened. She
attributed Dorothea’s abstracted manner, and the evidence of further crying
since they had got home, to the temper she had been in about Sir James
Chettam and the buildings, and was careful not to give further offence:

having once said what she wanted to say, Celia had no disposition to recur
to disagreeable subjects. It had been her nature when a child never to
quarrel with any one—only to observe with wonder that they quarrelled
with her, and looked like turkey-cocks; whereupon she was ready to play at
cat’s cradle with them whenever they recovered themselves. And as to
Dorothea, it had always been her way to find something wrong in her
sister’s words, though Celia inwardly protested that she always said just
how things were, and nothing else: she never did and never could put words
together out of her own head. But the best of Dodo was, that she did not
keep angry for long together. Now, though they had hardly spoken to each
other all the evening, yet when Celia put by her work, intending to go to
bed, a proceeding in which she was always much the earlier, Dorothea, who
was seated on a low stool, unable to occupy herself except in meditation,
said, with the musical intonation which in moments of deep but quiet
feeling made her speech like a fine bit of recitative—
“Celia, dear, come and kiss me,” holding her arms open as she spoke.
Celia knelt down to get the right level and gave her little butterfly kiss,
while Dorothea encircled her with gentle arms and pressed her lips gravely
on each cheek in turn.
“Don’t sit up, Dodo, you are so pale to-night: go to bed soon,” said Celia,
in a comfortable way, without any touch of pathos.
“No, dear, I am very, very happy,” said Dorothea, fervently.
“So much the better,” thought Celia. “But how strangely Dodo goes from
one extreme to the other.”
The next day, at luncheon, the butler, handing something to Mr. Brooke,
said, “Jonas is come back, sir, and has brought this letter.”
Mr. Brooke read the letter, and then, nodding toward Dorothea, said,
“Casaubon, my dear: he will be here to dinner; he didn’t wait to write more
—didn’t wait, you know.”
It could not seem remarkable to Celia that a dinner guest should be
announced to her sister beforehand, but, her eyes following the same
direction as her uncle’s, she was struck with the peculiar effect of the
announcement on Dorothea. It seemed as if something like the reflection of
a white sunlit wing had passed across her features, ending in one of her rare
blushes. For the first time it entered into Celia’s mind that there might be

something more between Mr. Casaubon and her sister than his delight in
bookish talk and her delight in listening. Hitherto she had classed the
admiration for this “ugly” and learned acquaintance with the admiration for
Monsieur Liret at Lausanne, also ugly and learned. Dorothea had never
been tired of listening to old Monsieur Liret when Celia’s feet were as cold
as possible, and when it had really become dreadful to see the skin of his
bald head moving about. Why then should her enthusiasm not extend to Mr.
Casaubon simply in the same way as to Monsieur Liret? And it seemed
probable that all learned men had a sort of schoolmaster’s view of young
people.
But now Celia was really startled at the suspicion which had darted into
her mind. She was seldom taken by surprise in this way, her marvellous
quickness in observing a certain order of signs generally preparing her to
expect such outward events as she had an interest in. Not that she now
imagined Mr. Casaubon to be already an accepted lover: she had only begun
to feel disgust at the possibility that anything in Dorothea’s mind could tend
towards such an issue. Here was something really to vex her about Dodo: it
was all very well not to accept Sir James Chettam, but the idea of marrying
Mr. Casaubon! Celia felt a sort of shame mingled with a sense of the
ludicrous. But perhaps Dodo, if she were really bordering on such an
extravagance, might be turned away from it: experience had often shown
that her impressibility might be calculated on. The day was damp, and they
were not going to walk out, so they both went up to their sitting-room; and
there Celia observed that Dorothea, instead of settling down with her usual
diligent interest to some occupation, simply leaned her elbow on an open
book and looked out of the window at the great cedar silvered with the
damp. She herself had taken up the making of a toy for the curate’s
children, and was not going to enter on any subject too precipitately.
Dorothea was in fact thinking that it was desirable for Celia to know of
the momentous change in Mr. Casaubon’s position since he had last been in
the house: it did not seem fair to leave her in ignorance of what would
necessarily affect her attitude towards him; but it was impossible not to
shrink from telling her. Dorothea accused herself of some meanness in this
timidity: it was always odious to her to have any small fears or contrivances
about her actions, but at this moment she was seeking the highest aid
possible that she might not dread the corrosiveness of Celia’s pretty carnally
minded prose. Her reverie was broken, and the difficulty of decision

banished, by Celia’s small and rather guttural voice speaking in its usual
tone, of a remark aside or a “by the bye.”
“Is any one else coming to dine besides Mr. Casaubon?”
“Not that I know of.”
“I hope there is some one else. Then I shall not hear him eat his soup so.”
“What is there remarkable about his soup-eating?”
“Really, Dodo, can’t you hear how he scrapes his spoon? And he always
blinks before he speaks. I don’t know whether Locke blinked, but I’m sure I
am sorry for those who sat opposite to him if he did.”
“Celia,” said Dorothea, with emphatic gravity, “pray don’t make any
more observations of that kind.”
“Why not? They are quite true,” returned Celia, who had her reasons for
persevering, though she was beginning to be a little afraid.
“Many things are true which only the commonest minds observe.”
“Then I think the commonest minds must be rather useful. I think it is a
pity Mr. Casaubon’s mother had not a commoner mind: she might have
taught him better.” Celia was inwardly frightened, and ready to run away,
now she had hurled this light javelin.
Dorothea’s feelings had gathered to an avalanche, and there could be no
further preparation.
“It is right to tell you, Celia, that I am engaged to marry Mr. Casaubon.”
Perhaps Celia had never turned so pale before. The paper man she was
making would have had his leg injured, but for her habitual care of
whatever she held in her hands. She laid the fragile figure down at once,
and sat perfectly still for a few moments. When she spoke there was a tear
gathering.
“Oh, Dodo, I hope you will be happy.” Her sisterly tenderness could not
but surmount other feelings at this moment, and her fears were the fears of
affection.
Dorothea was still hurt and agitated.
“It is quite decided, then?” said Celia, in an awed under tone. “And uncle
knows?”
“I have accepted Mr. Casaubon’s offer. My uncle brought me the letter
that contained it; he knew about it beforehand.”

“I beg your pardon, if I have said anything to hurt you, Dodo,” said
Celia, with a slight sob. She never could have thought that she should feel
as she did. There was something funereal in the whole affair, and Mr.
Casaubon seemed to be the officiating clergyman, about whom it would be
indecent to make remarks.
“Never mind, Kitty, do not grieve. We should never admire the same
people. I often offend in something of the same way; I am apt to speak too
strongly of those who don’t please me.”
In spite of this magnanimity Dorothea was still smarting: perhaps as
much from Celia’s subdued astonishment as from her small criticisms. Of
course all the world round Tipton would be out of sympathy with this
marriage. Dorothea knew of no one who thought as she did about life and
its best objects.
Nevertheless before the evening was at an end she was very happy. In an
hour’s tête-à-tête with Mr. Casaubon she talked to him with more freedom
than she had ever felt before, even pouring out her joy at the thought of
devoting herself to him, and of learning how she might best share and
further all his great ends. Mr. Casaubon was touched with an unknown
delight (what man would not have been?) at this childlike unrestrained
ardor: he was not surprised (what lover would have been?) that he should be
the object of it.
“My dear young lady—Miss Brooke—Dorothea!” he said, pressing her
hand between his hands, “this is a happiness greater than I had ever
imagined to be in reserve for me. That I should ever meet with a mind and
person so rich in the mingled graces which could render marriage desirable,
was far indeed from my conception. You have all—nay, more than all—
those qualities which I have ever regarded as the characteristic excellences
of womanhood. The great charm of your sex is its capability of an ardent
self-sacrificing affection, and herein we see its fitness to round and
complete the existence of our own. Hitherto I have known few pleasures
save of the severer kind: my satisfactions have been those of the solitary
student. I have been little disposed to gather flowers that would wither in
my hand, but now I shall pluck them with eagerness, to place them in your
bosom.”
No speech could have been more thoroughly honest in its intention: the
frigid rhetoric at the end was as sincere as the bark of a dog, or the cawing

of an amorous rook. Would it not be rash to conclude that there was no
passion behind those sonnets to Delia which strike us as the thin music of a
mandolin?
Dorothea’s faith supplied all that Mr. Casaubon’s words seemed to leave
unsaid: what believer sees a disturbing omission or infelicity? The text,
whether of prophet or of poet, expands for whatever we can put into it, and
even his bad grammar is sublime.
“I am very ignorant—you will quite wonder at my ignorance,” said
Dorothea. “I have so many thoughts that may be quite mistaken; and now I
shall be able to tell them all to you, and ask you about them. But,” she
added, with rapid imagination of Mr. Casaubon’s probable feeling, “I will
not trouble you too much; only when you are inclined to listen to me. You
must often be weary with the pursuit of subjects in your own track. I shall
gain enough if you will take me with you there.”
“How should I be able now to persevere in any path without your
companionship?” said Mr. Casaubon, kissing her candid brow, and feeling
that heaven had vouchsafed him a blessing in every way suited to his
peculiar wants. He was being unconsciously wrought upon by the charms of
a nature which was entirely without hidden calculations either for
immediate effects or for remoter ends. It was this which made Dorothea so
childlike, and, according to some judges, so stupid, with all her reputed
cleverness; as, for example, in the present case of throwing herself,
metaphorically speaking, at Mr. Casaubon’s feet, and kissing his
unfashionable shoe-ties as if he were a Protestant Pope. She was not in the
least teaching Mr. Casaubon to ask if he were good enough for her, but
merely asking herself anxiously how she could be good enough for Mr.
Casaubon. Before he left the next day it had been decided that the marriage
should take place within six weeks. Why not? Mr. Casaubon’s house was
ready. It was not a parsonage, but a considerable mansion, with much land
attached to it. The parsonage was inhabited by the curate, who did all the
duty except preaching the morning sermon.

CHAPTER VI.
My lady’s tongue is like the meadow blades,
That cut you stroking them with idle hand.
Nice cutting is her function: she divides
With spiritual edge the millet-seed,
And makes intangible savings.

As Mr. Casaubon’s carriage was passing out of the gateway, it arrested
the entrance of a pony phaeton driven by a lady with a servant seated
behind. It was doubtful whether the recognition had been mutual, for Mr.
Casaubon was looking absently before him; but the lady was quick-eyed,
and threw a nod and a “How do you do?” in the nick of time. In spite of her
shabby bonnet and very old Indian shawl, it was plain that the lodge-keeper
regarded her as an important personage, from the low curtsy which was
dropped on the entrance of the small phaeton.
“Well, Mrs. Fitchett, how are your fowls laying now?” said the high-
colored, dark-eyed lady, with the clearest chiselled utterance.
“Pretty well for laying, madam, but they’ve ta’en to eating their eggs:
I’ve no peace o’ mind with ’em at all.”
“Oh, the cannibals! Better sell them cheap at once. What will you sell
them a couple? One can’t eat fowls of a bad character at a high price.”
“Well, madam, half-a-crown: I couldn’t let ’em go, not under.”
“Half-a-crown, these times! Come now—for the Rector’s chicken-broth
on a Sunday. He has consumed all ours that I can spare. You are half paid
with the sermon, Mrs. Fitchett, remember that. Take a pair of tumbler-
pigeons for them—little beauties. You must come and see them. You have
no tumblers among your pigeons.”
“Well, madam, Master Fitchett shall go and see ’em after work. He’s very
hot on new sorts; to oblige you.”
“Oblige me! It will be the best bargain he ever made. A pair of church
pigeons for a couple of wicked Spanish fowls that eat their own eggs! Don’t
you and Fitchett boast too much, that is all!”

The phaeton was driven onwards with the last words, leaving Mrs.
Fitchett laughing and shaking her head slowly, with an interjectional
“Surely, surely!”—from which it might be inferred that she would have
found the country-side somewhat duller if the Rector’s lady had been less
free-spoken and less of a skinflint. Indeed, both the farmers and laborers in
the parishes of Freshitt and Tipton would have felt a sad lack of
conversation but for the stories about what Mrs. Cadwallader said and did: a
lady of immeasurably high birth, descended, as it were, from unknown
earls, dim as the crowd of heroic shades—who pleaded poverty, pared down
prices, and cut jokes in the most companionable manner, though with a turn
of tongue that let you know who she was. Such a lady gave a neighborliness
to both rank and religion, and mitigated the bitterness of uncommuted tithe.
A much more exemplary character with an infusion of sour dignity would
not have furthered their comprehension of the Thirty-nine Articles, and
would have been less socially uniting.
Mr. Brooke, seeing Mrs. Cadwallader’s merits from a different point of
view, winced a little when her name was announced in the library, where he
was sitting alone.
“I see you have had our Lowick Cicero here,” she said, seating herself
comfortably, throwing back her wraps, and showing a thin but well-built
figure. “I suspect you and he are brewing some bad polities, else you would
not be seeing so much of the lively man. I shall inform against you:
remember you are both suspicious characters since you took Peel’s side
about the Catholic Bill. I shall tell everybody that you are going to put up
for Middlemarch on the Whig side when old Pinkerton resigns, and that
Casaubon is going to help you in an underhand manner: going to bribe the
voters with pamphlets, and throw open the public-houses to distribute them.
Come, confess!”
“Nothing of the sort,” said Mr. Brooke, smiling and rubbing his eye-
glasses, but really blushing a little at the impeachment. “Casaubon and I
don’t talk politics much. He doesn’t care much about the philanthropic side
of things; punishments, and that kind of thing. He only cares about Church
questions. That is not my line of action, you know.”
“Ra-a-ther too much, my friend. I have heard of your doings. Who was it
that sold his bit of land to the Papists at Middlemarch? I believe you bought
it on purpose. You are a perfect Guy Faux. See if you are not burnt in effigy

this 5th of November coming. Humphrey would not come to quarrel with
you about it, so I am come.”
“Very good. I was prepared to be persecuted for not persecuting—not
persecuting, you know.”
“There you go! That is a piece of clap-trap you have got ready for the
hustings. Now, do not let them lure you to the hustings, my dear Mr.
Brooke. A man always makes a fool of himself, speechifying: there’s no
excuse but being on the right side, so that you can ask a blessing on your
humming and hawing. You will lose yourself, I forewarn you. You will
make a Saturday pie of all parties’ opinions, and be pelted by everybody.”
“That is what I expect, you know,” said Mr. Brooke, not wishing to
betray how little he enjoyed this prophetic sketch—“what I expect as an
independent man. As to the Whigs, a man who goes with the thinkers is not
likely to be hooked on by any party. He may go with them up to a certain
point—up to a certain point, you know. But that is what you ladies never
understand.”
“Where your certain point is? No. I should like to be told how a man can
have any certain point when he belongs to no party—leading a roving life,
and never letting his friends know his address. ‘Nobody knows where
Brooke will be—there’s no counting on Brooke’—that is what people say
of you, to be quite frank. Now, do turn respectable. How will you like going
to Sessions with everybody looking shy on you, and you with a bad
conscience and an empty pocket?”
“I don’t pretend to argue with a lady on politics,” said Mr. Brooke, with
an air of smiling indifference, but feeling rather unpleasantly conscious that
this attack of Mrs. Cadwallader’s had opened the defensive campaign to
which certain rash steps had exposed him. “Your sex are not thinkers, you
know—varium et mutabile semper—that kind of thing. You don’t know
Virgil. I knew”—Mr. Brooke reflected in time that he had not had the
personal acquaintance of the Augustan poet—“I was going to say, poor
Stoddart, you know. That was what he said. You ladies are always against
an independent attitude—a man’s caring for nothing but truth, and that sort
of thing. And there is no part of the county where opinion is narrower than
it is here—I don’t mean to throw stones, you know, but somebody is wanted
to take the independent line; and if I don’t take it, who will?”

“Who? Why, any upstart who has got neither blood nor position. People
of standing should consume their independent nonsense at home, not hawk
it about. And you! who are going to marry your niece, as good as your
daughter, to one of our best men. Sir James would be cruelly annoyed: it
will be too hard on him if you turn round now and make yourself a Whig
sign-board.”
Mr. Brooke again winced inwardly, for Dorothea’s engagement had no
sooner been decided, than he had thought of Mrs. Cadwallader’s
prospective taunts. It might have been easy for ignorant observers to say,
“Quarrel with Mrs. Cadwallader;” but where is a country gentleman to go
who quarrels with his oldest neighbors? Who could taste the fine flavor in
the name of Brooke if it were delivered casually, like wine without a seal?
Certainly a man can only be cosmopolitan up to a certain point.
“I hope Chettam and I shall always be good friends; but I am sorry to say
there is no prospect of his marrying my niece,” said Mr. Brooke, much
relieved to see through the window that Celia was coming in.
“Why not?” said Mrs. Cadwallader, with a sharp note of surprise. “It is
hardly a fortnight since you and I were talking about it.”
“My niece has chosen another suitor—has chosen him, you know. I have
had nothing to do with it. I should have preferred Chettam; and I should
have said Chettam was the man any girl would have chosen. But there is no
accounting for these things. Your sex is capricious, you know.”
“Why, whom do you mean to say that you are going to let her marry?”
Mrs. Cadwallader’s mind was rapidly surveying the possibilities of choice
for Dorothea.
But here Celia entered, blooming from a walk in the garden, and the
greeting with her delivered Mr. Brooke from the necessity of answering
immediately. He got up hastily, and saying, “By the way, I must speak to
Wright about the horses,” shuffled quickly out of the room.
“My dear child, what is this?—this about your sister’s engagement?” said
Mrs. Cadwallader.
“She is engaged to marry Mr. Casaubon,” said Celia, resorting, as usual,
to the simplest statement of fact, and enjoying this opportunity of speaking
to the Rector’s wife alone.
“This is frightful. How long has it been going on?”

“I only knew of it yesterday. They are to be married in six weeks.”
“Well, my dear, I wish you joy of your brother-in-law.”
“I am so sorry for Dorothea.”
“Sorry! It is her doing, I suppose.”
“Yes; she says Mr. Casaubon has a great soul.”
“With all my heart.”
“Oh, Mrs. Cadwallader, I don’t think it can be nice to marry a man with a
great soul.”
“Well, my dear, take warning. You know the look of one now; when the
next comes and wants to marry you, don’t you accept him.”
“I’m sure I never should.”
“No; one such in a family is enough. So your sister never cared about Sir
James Chettam? What would you have said to him for a brother-in-law?”
“I should have liked that very much. I am sure he would have been a
good husband. Only,” Celia added, with a slight blush (she sometimes
seemed to blush as she breathed), “I don’t think he would have suited
Dorothea.”
“Not high-flown enough?”
“Dodo is very strict. She thinks so much about everything, and is so
particular about what one says. Sir James never seemed to please her.”
“She must have encouraged him, I am sure. That is not very creditable.”
“Please don’t be angry with Dodo; she does not see things. She thought
so much about the cottages, and she was rude to Sir James sometimes; but
he is so kind, he never noticed it.”
“Well,” said Mrs. Cadwallader, putting on her shawl, and rising, as if in
haste, “I must go straight to Sir James and break this to him. He will have
brought his mother back by this time, and I must call. Your uncle will never
tell him. We are all disappointed, my dear. Young people should think of
their families in marrying. I set a bad example—married a poor clergyman,
and made myself a pitiable object among the De Bracys—obliged to get my
coals by stratagem, and pray to heaven for my salad oil. However,
Casaubon has money enough; I must do him that justice. As to his blood, I
suppose the family quarterings are three cuttle-fish sable, and a
commentator rampant. By the bye, before I go, my dear, I must speak to

your Mrs. Carter about pastry. I want to send my young cook to learn of her.
Poor people with four children, like us, you know, can’t afford to keep a
good cook. I have no doubt Mrs. Carter will oblige me. Sir James’s cook is
a perfect dragon.”
In less than an hour, Mrs. Cadwallader had circumvented Mrs. Carter and
driven to Freshitt Hall, which was not far from her own parsonage, her
husband being resident in Freshitt and keeping a curate in Tipton.
Sir James Chettam had returned from the short journey which had kept
him absent for a couple of days, and had changed his dress, intending to
ride over to Tipton Grange. His horse was standing at the door when Mrs.
Cadwallader drove up, and he immediately appeared there himself, whip in
hand. Lady Chettam had not yet returned, but Mrs. Cadwallader’s errand
could not be despatched in the presence of grooms, so she asked to be taken
into the conservatory close by, to look at the new plants; and on coming to a
contemplative stand, she said—
“I have a great shock for you; I hope you are not so far gone in love as
you pretended to be.”
It was of no use protesting against Mrs. Cadwallader’s way of putting
things. But Sir James’s countenance changed a little. He felt a vague alarm.
“I do believe Brooke is going to expose himself after all. I accused him
of meaning to stand for Middlemarch on the Liberal side, and he looked
silly and never denied it—talked about the independent line, and the usual
nonsense.”
“Is that all?” said Sir James, much relieved.
“Why,” rejoined Mrs. Cadwallader, with a sharper note, “you don’t mean
to say that you would like him to turn public man in that way—making a
sort of political Cheap Jack of himself?”
“He might be dissuaded, I should think. He would not like the expense.”
“That is what I told him. He is vulnerable to reason there—always a few
grains of common-sense in an ounce of miserliness. Miserliness is a capital
quality to run in families; it’s the safe side for madness to dip on. And there
must be a little crack in the Brooke family, else we should not see what we
are to see.”
“What? Brooke standing for Middlemarch?”

“Worse than that. I really feel a little responsible. I always told you Miss
Brooke would be such a fine match. I knew there was a great deal of
nonsense in her—a flighty sort of Methodistical stuff. But these things wear
out of girls. However, I am taken by surprise for once.”
“What do you mean, Mrs. Cadwallader?” said Sir James. His fear lest
Miss Brooke should have run away to join the Moravian Brethren, or some
preposterous sect unknown to good society, was a little allayed by the
knowledge that Mrs. Cadwallader always made the worst of things. “What
has happened to Miss Brooke? Pray speak out.”
“Very well. She is engaged to be married.” Mrs. Cadwallader paused a
few moments, observing the deeply hurt expression in her friend’s face,
which he was trying to conceal by a nervous smile, while he whipped his
boot; but she soon added, “Engaged to Casaubon.”
Sir James let his whip fall and stooped to pick it up. Perhaps his face had
never before gathered so much concentrated disgust as when he turned to
Mrs. Cadwallader and repeated, “Casaubon?”
“Even so. You know my errand now.”
“Good God! It is horrible! He is no better than a mummy!” (The point of
view has to be allowed for, as that of a blooming and disappointed rival.)
“She says, he is a great soul.—A great bladder for dried peas to rattle in!”
said Mrs. Cadwallader.
“What business has an old bachelor like that to marry?” said Sir James.
“He has one foot in the grave.”
“He means to draw it out again, I suppose.”
“Brooke ought not to allow it: he should insist on its being put off till she
is of age. She would think better of it then. What is a guardian for?”
“As if you could ever squeeze a resolution out of Brooke!”
“Cadwallader might talk to him.”
“Not he! Humphrey finds everybody charming. I never can get him to
abuse Casaubon. He will even speak well of the bishop, though I tell him it
is unnatural in a beneficed clergyman; what can one do with a husband who
attends so little to the decencies? I hide it as well as I can by abusing
everybody myself. Come, come, cheer up! you are well rid of Miss Brooke,
a girl who would have been requiring you to see the stars by daylight.

Between ourselves, little Celia is worth two of her, and likely after all to be
the better match. For this marriage to Casaubon is as good as going to a
nunnery.”
“Oh, on my own account—it is for Miss Brooke’s sake I think her friends
should try to use their influence.”
“Well, Humphrey doesn’t know yet. But when I tell him, you may
depend on it he will say, ‘Why not? Casaubon is a good fellow—and young
—young enough.’ These charitable people never know vinegar from wine
till they have swallowed it and got the colic. However, if I were a man I
should prefer Celia, especially when Dorothea was gone. The truth is, you
have been courting one and have won the other. I can see that she admires
you almost as much as a man expects to be admired. If it were any one but
me who said so, you might think it exaggeration. Good-by!”
Sir James handed Mrs. Cadwallader to the phaeton, and then jumped on
his horse. He was not going to renounce his ride because of his friend’s
unpleasant news—only to ride the faster in some other direction than that of
Tipton Grange.
Now, why on earth should Mrs. Cadwallader have been at all busy about
Miss Brooke’s marriage; and why, when one match that she liked to think
she had a hand in was frustrated, should she have straightway contrived the
preliminaries of another? Was there any ingenious plot, any hide-and-seek
course of action, which might be detected by a careful telescopic watch?
Not at all: a telescope might have swept the parishes of Tipton and Freshitt,
the whole area visited by Mrs. Cadwallader in her phaeton, without
witnessing any interview that could excite suspicion, or any scene from
which she did not return with the same unperturbed keenness of eye and the
same high natural color. In fact, if that convenient vehicle had existed in the
days of the Seven Sages, one of them would doubtless have remarked, that
you can know little of women by following them about in their pony-
phaetons. Even with a microscope directed on a water-drop we find
ourselves making interpretations which turn out to be rather coarse; for
whereas under a weak lens you may seem to see a creature exhibiting an
active voracity into which other smaller creatures actively play as if they
were so many animated tax-pennies, a stronger lens reveals to you certain
tiniest hairlets which make vortices for these victims while the swallower
waits passively at his receipt of custom. In this way, metaphorically

speaking, a strong lens applied to Mrs. Cadwallader’s match-making will
show a play of minute causes producing what may be called thought and
speech vortices to bring her the sort of food she needed. Her life was rurally
simple, quite free from secrets either foul, dangerous, or otherwise
important, and not consciously affected by the great affairs of the world. All
the more did the affairs of the great world interest her, when communicated
in the letters of high-born relations: the way in which fascinating younger
sons had gone to the dogs by marrying their mistresses; the fine old-
blooded idiocy of young Lord Tapir, and the furious gouty humors of old
Lord Megatherium; the exact crossing of genealogies which had brought a
coronet into a new branch and widened the relations of scandal,—these
were topics of which she retained details with the utmost accuracy, and
reproduced them in an excellent pickle of epigrams, which she herself
enjoyed the more because she believed as unquestionably in birth and no-
birth as she did in game and vermin. She would never have disowned any
one on the ground of poverty: a De Bracy reduced to take his dinner in a
basin would have seemed to her an example of pathos worth exaggerating,
and I fear his aristocratic vices would not have horrified her. But her feeling
towards the vulgar rich was a sort of religious hatred: they had probably
made all their money out of high retail prices, and Mrs. Cadwallader
detested high prices for everything that was not paid in kind at the Rectory:
such people were no part of God’s design in making the world; and their
accent was an affliction to the ears. A town where such monsters abounded
was hardly more than a sort of low comedy, which could not be taken
account of in a well-bred scheme of the universe. Let any lady who is
inclined to be hard on Mrs. Cadwallader inquire into the comprehensiveness
of her own beautiful views, and be quite sure that they afford
accommodation for all the lives which have the honor to coexist with hers.
With such a mind, active as phosphorus, biting everything that came near
into the form that suited it, how could Mrs. Cadwallader feel that the Miss
Brookes and their matrimonial prospects were alien to her? especially as it
had been the habit of years for her to scold Mr. Brooke with the friendliest
frankness, and let him know in confidence that she thought him a poor
creature. From the first arrival of the young ladies in Tipton she had
prearranged Dorothea’s marriage with Sir James, and if it had taken place
would have been quite sure that it was her doing: that it should not take
place after she had preconceived it, caused her an irritation which every

thinker will sympathize with. She was the diplomatist of Tipton and
Freshitt, and for anything to happen in spite of her was an offensive
irregularity. As to freaks like this of Miss Brooke’s, Mrs. Cadwallader had
no patience with them, and now saw that her opinion of this girl had been
infected with some of her husband’s weak charitableness: those
Methodistical whims, that air of being more religious than the rector and
curate together, came from a deeper and more constitutional disease than
she had been willing to believe.
“However,” said Mrs. Cadwallader, first to herself and afterwards to her
husband, “I throw her over: there was a chance, if she had married Sir
James, of her becoming a sane, sensible woman. He would never have
contradicted her, and when a woman is not contradicted, she has no motive
for obstinacy in her absurdities. But now I wish her joy of her hair shirt.”
It followed that Mrs. Cadwallader must decide on another match for Sir
James, and having made up her mind that it was to be the younger Miss
Brooke, there could not have been a more skilful move towards the success
of her plan than her hint to the baronet that he had made an impression on
Celia’s heart. For he was not one of those gentlemen who languish after the
unattainable Sappho’s apple that laughs from the topmost bough—the
charms which
“Smile like the knot of cowslips on the cliff,
Not to be come at by the willing hand.”

He had no sonnets to write, and it could not strike him agreeably that he
was not an object of preference to the woman whom he had preferred.
Already the knowledge that Dorothea had chosen Mr. Casaubon had bruised
his attachment and relaxed its hold. Although Sir James was a sportsman,
he had some other feelings towards women than towards grouse and foxes,
and did not regard his future wife in the light of prey, valuable chiefly for
the excitements of the chase. Neither was he so well acquainted with the
habits of primitive races as to feel that an ideal combat for her, tomahawk in
hand, so to speak, was necessary to the historical continuity of the
marriage-tie. On the contrary, having the amiable vanity which knits us to
those who are fond of us, and disinclines us to those who are indifferent,
and also a good grateful nature, the mere idea that a woman had a kindness
towards him spun little threads of tenderness from out his heart towards
hers.

Thus it happened, that after Sir James had ridden rather fast for half an
hour in a direction away from Tipton Grange, he slackened his pace, and at
last turned into a road which would lead him back by a shorter cut. Various
feelings wrought in him the determination after all to go to the Grange to-
day as if nothing new had happened. He could not help rejoicing that he had
never made the offer and been rejected; mere friendly politeness required
that he should call to see Dorothea about the cottages, and now happily
Mrs. Cadwallader had prepared him to offer his congratulations, if
necessary, without showing too much awkwardness. He really did not like
it: giving up Dorothea was very painful to him; but there was something in
the resolve to make this visit forthwith and conquer all show of feeling,
which was a sort of file-biting and counter-irritant. And without his
distinctly recognizing the impulse, there certainly was present in him the
sense that Celia would be there, and that he should pay her more attention
than he had done before.
We mortals, men and women, devour many a disappointment between
breakfast and dinner-time; keep back the tears and look a little pale about
the lips, and in answer to inquiries say, “Oh, nothing!” Pride helps us; and
pride is not a bad thing when it only urges us to hide our own hurts—not to
hurt others.

CHAPTER VII.
“Piacer e popone
Vuol la sua stagione.”
—Italian Proverb.

Mr. Casaubon, as might be expected, spent a great deal of his time at the
Grange in these weeks, and the hindrance which courtship occasioned to the
progress of his great work—the Key to all Mythologies—naturally made
him look forward the more eagerly to the happy termination of courtship.
But he had deliberately incurred the hindrance, having made up his mind
that it was now time for him to adorn his life with the graces of female
companionship, to irradiate the gloom which fatigue was apt to hang over
the intervals of studious labor with the play of female fancy, and to secure
in this, his culminating age, the solace of female tendance for his declining
years. Hence he determined to abandon himself to the stream of feeling, and
perhaps was surprised to find what an exceedingly shallow rill it was. As in
droughty regions baptism by immersion could only be performed
symbolically, Mr. Casaubon found that sprinkling was the utmost approach
to a plunge which his stream would afford him; and he concluded that the
poets had much exaggerated the force of masculine passion. Nevertheless,
he observed with pleasure that Miss Brooke showed an ardent submissive
affection which promised to fulfil his most agreeable previsions of
marriage. It had once or twice crossed his mind that possibly there was
some deficiency in Dorothea to account for the moderation of his
abandonment; but he was unable to discern the deficiency, or to figure to
himself a woman who would have pleased him better; so that there was
clearly no reason to fall back upon but the exaggerations of human
tradition.
“Could I not be preparing myself now to be more useful?” said Dorothea
to him, one morning, early in the time of courtship; “could I not learn to
read Latin and Greek aloud to you, as Milton’s daughters did to their father,
without understanding what they read?”

“I fear that would be wearisome to you,” said Mr. Casaubon, smiling;
“and, indeed, if I remember rightly, the young women you have mentioned
regarded that exercise in unknown tongues as a ground for rebellion against
the poet.”
“Yes; but in the first place they were very naughty girls, else they would
have been proud to minister to such a father; and in the second place they
might have studied privately and taught themselves to understand what they
read, and then it would have been interesting. I hope you don’t expect me to
be naughty and stupid?”
“I expect you to be all that an exquisite young lady can be in every
possible relation of life. Certainly it might be a great advantage if you were
able to copy the Greek character, and to that end it were well to begin with a
little reading.”
Dorothea seized this as a precious permission. She would not have asked
Mr. Casaubon at once to teach her the languages, dreading of all things to
be tiresome instead of helpful; but it was not entirely out of devotion to her
future husband that she wished to know Latin and Greek. Those provinces
of masculine knowledge seemed to her a standing-ground from which all
truth could be seen more truly. As it was, she constantly doubted her own
conclusions, because she felt her own ignorance: how could she be
confident that one-roomed cottages were not for the glory of God, when
men who knew the classics appeared to conciliate indifference to the
cottages with zeal for the glory? Perhaps even Hebrew might be necessary
—at least the alphabet and a few roots—in order to arrive at the core of
things, and judge soundly on the social duties of the Christian. And she had
not reached that point of renunciation at which she would have been
satisfied with having a wise husband: she wished, poor child, to be wise
herself. Miss Brooke was certainly very naive with all her alleged
cleverness. Celia, whose mind had never been thought too powerful, saw
the emptiness of other people’s pretensions much more readily. To have in
general but little feeling, seems to be the only security against feeling too
much on any particular occasion.
However, Mr. Casaubon consented to listen and teach for an hour
together, like a schoolmaster of little boys, or rather like a lover, to whom a
mistress’s elementary ignorance and difficulties have a touching fitness.
Few scholars would have disliked teaching the alphabet under such

circumstances. But Dorothea herself was a little shocked and discouraged at
her own stupidity, and the answers she got to some timid questions about
the value of the Greek accents gave her a painful suspicion that here indeed
there might be secrets not capable of explanation to a woman’s reason.
Mr. Brooke had no doubt on that point, and expressed himself with his
usual strength upon it one day that he came into the library while the
reading was going forward.
“Well, but now, Casaubon, such deep studies, classics, mathematics, that
kind of thing, are too taxing for a woman—too taxing, you know.”
“Dorothea is learning to read the characters simply,” said Mr. Casaubon,
evading the question. “She had the very considerate thought of saving my
eyes.”
“Ah, well, without understanding, you know—that may not be so bad.
But there is a lightness about the feminine mind—a touch and go—music,
the fine arts, that kind of thing—they should study those up to a certain
point, women should; but in a light way, you know. A woman should be
able to sit down and play you or sing you a good old English tune. That is
what I like; though I have heard most things—been at the opera in Vienna:
Gluck, Mozart, everything of that sort. But I’m a conservative in music—
it’s not like ideas, you know. I stick to the good old tunes.”
“Mr. Casaubon is not fond of the piano, and I am very glad he is not,”
said Dorothea, whose slight regard for domestic music and feminine fine art
must be forgiven her, considering the small tinkling and smearing in which
they chiefly consisted at that dark period. She smiled and looked up at her
betrothed with grateful eyes. If he had always been asking her to play the
“Last Rose of Summer,” she would have required much resignation. “He
says there is only an old harpsichord at Lowick, and it is covered with
books.”
“Ah, there you are behind Celia, my dear. Celia, now, plays very prettily,
and is always ready to play. However, since Casaubon does not like it, you
are all right. But it’s a pity you should not have little recreations of that sort,
Casaubon: the bow always strung—that kind of thing, you know—will not
do.”
“I never could look on it in the light of a recreation to have my ears
teased with measured noises,” said Mr. Casaubon. “A tune much iterated
has the ridiculous effect of making the words in my mind perform a sort of

minuet to keep time—an effect hardly tolerable, I imagine, after boyhood.
As to the grander forms of music, worthy to accompany solemn
celebrations, and even to serve as an educating influence according to the
ancient conception, I say nothing, for with these we are not immediately
concerned.”
“No; but music of that sort I should enjoy,” said Dorothea. “When we
were coming home from Lausanne my uncle took us to hear the great organ
at Freiberg, and it made me sob.”
“That kind of thing is not healthy, my dear,” said Mr. Brooke. “Casaubon,
she will be in your hands now: you must teach my niece to take things more
quietly, eh, Dorothea?”
He ended with a smile, not wishing to hurt his niece, but really thinking
that it was perhaps better for her to be early married to so sober a fellow as
Casaubon, since she would not hear of Chettam.
“It is wonderful, though,” he said to himself as he shuffled out of the
room—“it is wonderful that she should have liked him. However, the match
is good. I should have been travelling out of my brief to have hindered it, let
Mrs. Cadwallader say what she will. He is pretty certain to be a bishop, is
Casaubon. That was a very seasonable pamphlet of his on the Catholic
Question:—a deanery at least. They owe him a deanery.”
And here I must vindicate a claim to philosophical reflectiveness, by
remarking that Mr. Brooke on this occasion little thought of the Radical
speech which, at a later period, he was led to make on the incomes of the
bishops. What elegant historian would neglect a striking opportunity for
pointing out that his heroes did not foresee the history of the world, or even
their own actions?—For example, that Henry of Navarre, when a Protestant
baby, little thought of being a Catholic monarch; or that Alfred the Great,
when he measured his laborious nights with burning candles, had no idea of
future gentlemen measuring their idle days with watches. Here is a mine of
truth, which, however vigorously it may be worked, is likely to outlast our
coal.
But of Mr. Brooke I make a further remark perhaps less warranted by
precedent—namely, that if he had foreknown his speech, it might not have
made any great difference. To think with pleasure of his niece’s husband
having a large ecclesiastical income was one thing—to make a Liberal

speech was another thing; and it is a narrow mind which cannot look at a
subject from various points of view.

CHAPTER VIII.
“Oh, rescue her! I am her brother now,
And you her father. Every gentle maid
Should have a guardian in each gentleman.”

It was wonderful to Sir James Chettam how well he continued to like
going to the Grange after he had once encountered the difficulty of seeing
Dorothea for the first time in the light of a woman who was engaged to
another man. Of course the forked lightning seemed to pass through him
when he first approached her, and he remained conscious throughout the
interview of hiding uneasiness; but, good as he was, it must be owned that
his uneasiness was less than it would have been if he had thought his rival a
brilliant and desirable match. He had no sense of being eclipsed by Mr.
Casaubon; he was only shocked that Dorothea was under a melancholy
illusion, and his mortification lost some of its bitterness by being mingled
with compassion.
Nevertheless, while Sir James said to himself that he had completely
resigned her, since with the perversity of a Desdemona she had not affected
a proposed match that was clearly suitable and according to nature; he
could not yet be quite passive under the idea of her engagement to Mr.
Casaubon. On the day when he first saw them together in the light of his
present knowledge, it seemed to him that he had not taken the affair
seriously enough. Brooke was really culpable; he ought to have hindered it.
Who could speak to him? Something might be done perhaps even now, at
least to defer the marriage. On his way home he turned into the Rectory and
asked for Mr. Cadwallader. Happily, the Rector was at home, and his visitor
was shown into the study, where all the fishing tackle hung. But he himself
was in a little room adjoining, at work with his turning apparatus, and he
called to the baronet to join him there. The two were better friends than any
other landholder and clergyman in the county—a significant fact which was
in agreement with the amiable expression of their faces.
Mr. Cadwallader was a large man, with full lips and a sweet smile; very
plain and rough in his exterior, but with that solid imperturbable ease and

good-humor which is infectious, and like great grassy hills in the sunshine,
quiets even an irritated egoism, and makes it rather ashamed of itself.
“Well, how are you?” he said, showing a hand not quite fit to be grasped.
“Sorry I missed you before. Is there anything particular? You look vexed.”
Sir James’s brow had a little crease in it, a little depression of the
eyebrow, which he seemed purposely to exaggerate as he answered.
“It is only this conduct of Brooke’s. I really think somebody should speak
to him.”
“What? meaning to stand?” said Mr. Cadwallader, going on with the
arrangement of the reels which he had just been turning. “I hardly think he
means it. But where’s the harm, if he likes it? Any one who objects to
Whiggery should be glad when the Whigs don’t put up the strongest fellow.
They won’t overturn the Constitution with our friend Brooke’s head for a
battering ram.”
“Oh, I don’t mean that,” said Sir James, who, after putting down his hat
and throwing himself into a chair, had begun to nurse his leg and examine
the sole of his boot with much bitterness. “I mean this marriage. I mean his
letting that blooming young girl marry Casaubon.”
“What is the matter with Casaubon? I see no harm in him—if the girl
likes him.”
“She is too young to know what she likes. Her guardian ought to
interfere. He ought not to allow the thing to be done in this headlong
manner. I wonder a man like you, Cadwallader—a man with daughters, can
look at the affair with indifference: and with such a heart as yours! Do think
seriously about it.”
“I am not joking; I am as serious as possible,” said the Rector, with a
provoking little inward laugh. “You are as bad as Elinor. She has been
wanting me to go and lecture Brooke; and I have reminded her that her
friends had a very poor opinion of the match she made when she married
me.”
“But look at Casaubon,” said Sir James, indignantly. “He must be fifty,
and I don’t believe he could ever have been much more than the shadow of
a man. Look at his legs!”
“Confound you handsome young fellows! you think of having it all your
own way in the world. You don’t understand women. They don’t admire

you half so much as you admire yourselves. Elinor used to tell her sisters
that she married me for my ugliness—it was so various and amusing that it
had quite conquered her prudence.”
“You! it was easy enough for a woman to love you. But this is no
question of beauty. I don’t like Casaubon.” This was Sir James’s strongest
way of implying that he thought ill of a man’s character.
“Why? what do you know against him?” said the Rector laying down his
reels, and putting his thumbs into his armholes with an air of attention.
Sir James paused. He did not usually find it easy to give his reasons: it
seemed to him strange that people should not know them without being
told, since he only felt what was reasonable. At last he said—
“Now, Cadwallader, has he got any heart?”
“Well, yes. I don’t mean of the melting sort, but a sound kernel, that you
may be sure of. He is very good to his poor relations: pensions several of
the women, and is educating a young fellow at a good deal of expense.
Casaubon acts up to his sense of justice. His mother’s sister made a bad
match—a Pole, I think—lost herself—at any rate was disowned by her
family. If it had not been for that, Casaubon would not have had so much
money by half. I believe he went himself to find out his cousins, and see
what he could do for them. Every man would not ring so well as that, if you
tried his metal. You would, Chettam; but not every man.”
“I don’t know,” said Sir James, coloring. “I am not so sure of myself.” He
paused a moment, and then added, “That was a right thing for Casaubon to
do. But a man may wish to do what is right, and yet be a sort of parchment
code. A woman may not be happy with him. And I think when a girl is so
young as Miss Brooke is, her friends ought to interfere a little to hinder her
from doing anything foolish. You laugh, because you fancy I have some
feeling on my own account. But upon my honor, it is not that. I should feel
just the same if I were Miss Brooke’s brother or uncle.”
“Well, but what should you do?”
“I should say that the marriage must not be decided on until she was of
age. And depend upon it, in that case, it would never come off. I wish you
saw it as I do—I wish you would talk to Brooke about it.”
Sir James rose as he was finishing his sentence, for he saw Mrs.
Cadwallader entering from the study. She held by the hand her youngest

girl, about five years old, who immediately ran to papa, and was made
comfortable on his knee.
“I hear what you are talking about,” said the wife. “But you will make no
impression on Humphrey. As long as the fish rise to his bait, everybody is
what he ought to be. Bless you, Casaubon has got a trout-stream, and does
not care about fishing in it himself: could there be a better fellow?”
“Well, there is something in that,” said the Rector, with his quiet, inward
laugh. “It is a very good quality in a man to have a trout-stream.”
“But seriously,” said Sir James, whose vexation had not yet spent itself,
“don’t you think the Rector might do some good by speaking?”
“Oh, I told you beforehand what he would say,” answered Mrs.
Cadwallader, lifting up her eyebrows. “I have done what I could: I wash my
hands of the marriage.”
“In the first place,” said the Rector, looking rather grave, “it would be
nonsensical to expect that I could convince Brooke, and make him act
accordingly. Brooke is a very good fellow, but pulpy; he will run into any
mould, but he won’t keep shape.”
“He might keep shape long enough to defer the marriage,” said Sir
James.
“But, my dear Chettam, why should I use my influence to Casaubon’s
disadvantage, unless I were much surer than I am that I should be acting for
the advantage of Miss Brooke? I know no harm of Casaubon. I don’t care
about his Xisuthrus and Fee-fo-fum and the rest; but then he doesn’t care
about my fishing-tackle. As to the line he took on the Catholic Question,
that was unexpected; but he has always been civil to me, and I don’t see
why I should spoil his sport. For anything I can tell, Miss Brooke may be
happier with him than she would be with any other man.”
“Humphrey! I have no patience with you. You know you would rather
dine under the hedge than with Casaubon alone. You have nothing to say to
each other.”
“What has that to do with Miss Brooke’s marrying him? She does not do
it for my amusement.”
“He has got no good red blood in his body,” said Sir James.
“No. Somebody put a drop under a magnifying-glass and it was all
semicolons and parentheses,” said Mrs. Cadwallader.

“Why does he not bring out his book, instead of marrying,” said Sir
James, with a disgust which he held warranted by the sound feeling of an
English layman.
“Oh, he dreams footnotes, and they run away with all his brains. They
say, when he was a little boy, he made an abstract of ‘Hop o’ my Thumb,’
and he has been making abstracts ever since. Ugh! And that is the man
Humphrey goes on saying that a woman may be happy with.”
“Well, he is what Miss Brooke likes,” said the Rector. “I don’t profess to
understand every young lady’s taste.”
“But if she were your own daughter?” said Sir James.
“That would be a different affair. She is not my daughter, and I don’t feel
called upon to interfere. Casaubon is as good as most of us. He is a
scholarly clergyman, and creditable to the cloth. Some Radical fellow
speechifying at Middlemarch said Casaubon was the learned straw-
chopping incumbent, and Freke was the brick-and-mortar incumbent, and I
was the angling incumbent. And upon my word, I don’t see that one is
worse or better than the other.” The Rector ended with his silent laugh. He
always saw the joke of any satire against himself. His conscience was large
and easy, like the rest of him: it did only what it could do without any
trouble.
Clearly, there would be no interference with Miss Brooke’s marriage
through Mr. Cadwallader; and Sir James felt with some sadness that she
was to have perfect liberty of misjudgment. It was a sign of his good
disposition that he did not slacken at all in his intention of carrying out
Dorothea’s design of the cottages. Doubtless this persistence was the best
course for his own dignity: but pride only helps us to be generous; it never
makes us so, any more than vanity makes us witty. She was now enough
aware of Sir James’s position with regard to her, to appreciate the rectitude
of his perseverance in a landlord’s duty, to which he had at first been urged
by a lover’s complaisance, and her pleasure in it was great enough to count
for something even in her present happiness. Perhaps she gave to Sir James
Chettam’s cottages all the interest she could spare from Mr. Casaubon, or
rather from the symphony of hopeful dreams, admiring trust, and passionate
self devotion which that learned gentleman had set playing in her soul.
Hence it happened that in the good baronet’s succeeding visits, while he
was beginning to pay small attentions to Celia, he found himself talking

with more and more pleasure to Dorothea. She was perfectly unconstrained
and without irritation towards him now, and he was gradually discovering
the delight there is in frank kindness and companionship between a man
and a woman who have no passion to hide or confess.

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

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

Mr. Casaubon’s behavior about settlements was highly satisfactory to Mr.
Brooke, and the preliminaries of marriage rolled smoothly along, shortening
the weeks of courtship. The betrothed bride must see her future home, and
dictate any changes that she would like to have made there. A woman
dictates before marriage in order that she may have an appetite for
submission afterwards. And certainly, the mistakes that we male and female
mortals make when we have our own way might fairly raise some wonder
that we are so fond of it.
On a gray but dry November morning Dorothea drove to Lowick in
company with her uncle and Celia. Mr. Casaubon’s home was the manor-
house. Close by, visible from some parts of the garden, was the little
church, with the old parsonage opposite. In the beginning of his career, Mr.
Casaubon had only held the living, but the death of his brother had put him
in possession of the manor also. It had a small park, with a fine old oak here
and there, and an avenue of limes towards the southwest front, with a sunk
fence between park and pleasure-ground, so that from the drawing-room
windows the glance swept uninterruptedly along a slope of greensward till
the limes ended in a level of corn and pastures, which often seemed to melt
into a lake under the setting sun. This was the happy side of the house, for
the south and east looked rather melancholy even under the brightest
morning. The grounds here were more confined, the flower-beds showed no
very careful tendance, and large clumps of trees, chiefly of sombre yews,
had risen high, not ten yards from the windows. The building, of greenish
stone, was in the old English style, not ugly, but small-windowed and
melancholy-looking: the sort of house that must have children, many
flowers, open windows, and little vistas of bright things, to make it seem a

joyous home. In this latter end of autumn, with a sparse remnant of yellow
leaves falling slowly athwart the dark evergreens in a stillness without
sunshine, the house too had an air of autumnal decline, and Mr. Casaubon,
when he presented himself, had no bloom that could be thrown into relief
by that background.
“Oh dear!” Celia said to herself, “I am sure Freshitt Hall would have
been pleasanter than this.” She thought of the white freestone, the pillared
portico, and the terrace full of flowers, Sir James smiling above them like a
prince issuing from his enchantment in a rose-bush, with a handkerchief
swiftly metamorphosed from the most delicately odorous petals—Sir
James, who talked so agreeably, always about things which had common-
sense in them, and not about learning! Celia had those light young feminine
tastes which grave and weatherworn gentlemen sometimes prefer in a wife;
but happily Mr. Casaubon’s bias had been different, for he would have had
no chance with Celia.
Dorothea, on the contrary, found the house and grounds all that she could
wish: the dark book-shelves in the long library, the carpets and curtains with
colors subdued by time, the curious old maps and bird’s-eye views on the
walls of the corridor, with here and there an old vase below, had no
oppression for her, and seemed more cheerful than the casts and pictures at
the Grange, which her uncle had long ago brought home from his travels—
they being probably among the ideas he had taken in at one time. To poor
Dorothea these severe classical nudities and smirking Renaissance-
Correggiosities were painfully inexplicable, staring into the midst of her
Puritanic conceptions: she had never been taught how she could bring them
into any sort of relevance with her life. But the owners of Lowick
apparently had not been travellers, and Mr. Casaubon’s studies of the past
were not carried on by means of such aids.
Dorothea walked about the house with delightful emotion. Everything
seemed hallowed to her: this was to be the home of her wifehood, and she
looked up with eyes full of confidence to Mr. Casaubon when he drew her
attention specially to some actual arrangement and asked her if she would
like an alteration. All appeals to her taste she met gratefully, but saw
nothing to alter. His efforts at exact courtesy and formal tenderness had no
defect for her. She filled up all blanks with unmanifested perfections,
interpreting him as she interpreted the works of Providence, and accounting

for seeming discords by her own deafness to the higher harmonies. And
there are many blanks left in the weeks of courtship which a loving faith
fills with happy assurance.
“Now, my dear Dorothea, I wish you to favor me by pointing out which
room you would like to have as your boudoir,” said Mr. Casaubon, showing
that his views of the womanly nature were sufficiently large to include that
requirement.
“It is very kind of you to think of that,” said Dorothea, “but I assure you I
would rather have all those matters decided for me. I shall be much happier
to take everything as it is—just as you have been used to have it, or as you
will yourself choose it to be. I have no motive for wishing anything else.”
“Oh, Dodo,” said Celia, “will you not have the bow-windowed room up-
stairs?”
Mr. Casaubon led the way thither. The bow-window looked down the
avenue of limes; the furniture was all of a faded blue, and there were
miniatures of ladies and gentlemen with powdered hair hanging in a group.
A piece of tapestry over a door also showed a blue-green world with a pale
stag in it. The chairs and tables were thin-legged and easy to upset. It was a
room where one might fancy the ghost of a tight-laced lady revisiting the
scene of her embroidery. A light bookcase contained duodecimo volumes of
polite literature in calf, completing the furniture.
“Yes,” said Mr. Brooke, “this would be a pretty room with some new
hangings, sofas, and that sort of thing. A little bare now.”
“No, uncle,” said Dorothea, eagerly. “Pray do not speak of altering
anything. There are so many other things in the world that want altering—I
like to take these things as they are. And you like them as they are, don’t
you?” she added, looking at Mr. Casaubon. “Perhaps this was your mother’s
room when she was young.”
“It was,” he said, with his slow bend of the head.
“This is your mother,” said Dorothea, who had turned to examine the
group of miniatures. “It is like the tiny one you brought me; only, I should
think, a better portrait. And this one opposite, who is this?”
“Her elder sister. They were, like you and your sister, the only two
children of their parents, who hang above them, you see.”

“The sister is pretty,” said Celia, implying that she thought less favorably
of Mr. Casaubon’s mother. It was a new opening to Celia’s imagination, that
he came of a family who had all been young in their time—the ladies
wearing necklaces.
“It is a peculiar face,” said Dorothea, looking closely. “Those deep gray
eyes rather near together—and the delicate irregular nose with a sort of
ripple in it—and all the powdered curls hanging backward. Altogether it
seems to me peculiar rather than pretty. There is not even a family likeness
between her and your mother.”
“No. And they were not alike in their lot.”
“You did not mention her to me,” said Dorothea.
“My aunt made an unfortunate marriage. I never saw her.”
Dorothea wondered a little, but felt that it would be indelicate just then to
ask for any information which Mr. Casaubon did not proffer, and she turned
to the window to admire the view. The sun had lately pierced the gray, and
the avenue of limes cast shadows.
“Shall we not walk in the garden now?” said Dorothea.
“And you would like to see the church, you know,” said Mr. Brooke. “It
is a droll little church. And the village. It all lies in a nut-shell. By the way,
it will suit you, Dorothea; for the cottages are like a row of alms-houses—
little gardens, gilly-flowers, that sort of thing.”
“Yes, please,” said Dorothea, looking at Mr. Casaubon, “I should like to
see all that.” She had got nothing from him more graphic about the Lowick
cottages than that they were “not bad.”
They were soon on a gravel walk which led chiefly between grassy
borders and clumps of trees, this being the nearest way to the church, Mr.
Casaubon said. At the little gate leading into the churchyard there was a
pause while Mr. Casaubon went to the parsonage close by to fetch a key.
Celia, who had been hanging a little in the rear, came up presently, when
she saw that Mr. Casaubon was gone away, and said in her easy staccato,
which always seemed to contradict the suspicion of any malicious intent—
“Do you know, Dorothea, I saw some one quite young coming up one of
the walks.”
“Is that astonishing, Celia?”

“There may be a young gardener, you know—why not?” said Mr.
Brooke. “I told Casaubon he should change his gardener.”
“No, not a gardener,” said Celia; “a gentleman with a sketch-book. He
had light-brown curls. I only saw his back. But he was quite young.”
“The curate’s son, perhaps,” said Mr. Brooke. “Ah, there is Casaubon
again, and Tucker with him. He is going to introduce Tucker. You don’t
know Tucker yet.”
Mr. Tucker was the middle-aged curate, one of the “inferior clergy,” who
are usually not wanting in sons. But after the introduction, the conversation
did not lead to any question about his family, and the startling apparition of
youthfulness was forgotten by every one but Celia. She inwardly declined
to believe that the light-brown curls and slim figure could have any
relationship to Mr. Tucker, who was just as old and musty-looking as she
would have expected Mr. Casaubon’s curate to be; doubtless an excellent
man who would go to heaven (for Celia wished not to be unprincipled), but
the corners of his mouth were so unpleasant. Celia thought with some
dismalness of the time she should have to spend as bridesmaid at Lowick,
while the curate had probably no pretty little children whom she could like,
irrespective of principle.
Mr. Tucker was invaluable in their walk; and perhaps Mr. Casaubon had
not been without foresight on this head, the curate being able to answer all
Dorothea’s questions about the villagers and the other parishioners.
Everybody, he assured her, was well off in Lowick: not a cottager in those
double cottages at a low rent but kept a pig, and the strips of garden at the
back were well tended. The small boys wore excellent corduroy, the girls
went out as tidy servants, or did a little straw-plaiting at home: no looms
here, no Dissent; and though the public disposition was rather towards
laying by money than towards spirituality, there was not much vice. The
speckled fowls were so numerous that Mr. Brooke observed, “Your farmers
leave some barley for the women to glean, I see. The poor folks here might
have a fowl in their pot, as the good French king used to wish for all his
people. The French eat a good many fowls—skinny fowls, you know.”
“I think it was a very cheap wish of his,” said Dorothea, indignantly.
“Are kings such monsters that a wish like that must be reckoned a royal
virtue?”

“And if he wished them a skinny fowl,” said Celia, “that would not be
nice. But perhaps he wished them to have fat fowls.”
“Yes, but the word has dropped out of the text, or perhaps was
subauditum; that is, present in the king’s mind, but not uttered,” said Mr.
Casaubon, smiling and bending his head towards Celia, who immediately
dropped backward a little, because she could not bear Mr. Casaubon to
blink at her.
Dorothea sank into silence on the way back to the house. She felt some
disappointment, of which she was yet ashamed, that there was nothing for
her to do in Lowick; and in the next few minutes her mind had glanced over
the possibility, which she would have preferred, of finding that her home
would be in a parish which had a larger share of the world’s misery, so that
she might have had more active duties in it. Then, recurring to the future
actually before her, she made a picture of more complete devotion to Mr.
Casaubon’s aims in which she would await new duties. Many such might
reveal themselves to the higher knowledge gained by her in that
companionship.
Mr. Tucker soon left them, having some clerical work which would not
allow him to lunch at the Hall; and as they were re-entering the garden
through the little gate, Mr. Casaubon said—
“You seem a little sad, Dorothea. I trust you are pleased with what you
have seen.”
“I am feeling something which is perhaps foolish and wrong,” answered
Dorothea, with her usual openness—“almost wishing that the people
wanted more to be done for them here. I have known so few ways of
making my life good for anything. Of course, my notions of usefulness
must be narrow. I must learn new ways of helping people.”
“Doubtless,” said Mr. Casaubon. “Each position has its corresponding
duties. Yours, I trust, as the mistress of Lowick, will not leave any yearning
unfulfilled.”
“Indeed, I believe that,” said Dorothea, earnestly. “Do not suppose that I
am sad.”
“That is well. But, if you are not tired, we will take another way to the
house than that by which we came.”

Dorothea was not at all tired, and a little circuit was made towards a fine
yew-tree, the chief hereditary glory of the grounds on this side of the house.
As they approached it, a figure, conspicuous on a dark background of
evergreens, was seated on a bench, sketching the old tree. Mr. Brooke, who
was walking in front with Celia, turned his head, and said—
“Who is that youngster, Casaubon?”
They had come very near when Mr. Casaubon answered—
“That is a young relative of mine, a second cousin: the grandson, in fact,”
he added, looking at Dorothea, “of the lady whose portrait you have been
noticing, my aunt Julia.”
The young man had laid down his sketch-book and risen. His bushy
light-brown curls, as well as his youthfulness, identified him at once with
Celia’s apparition.
“Dorothea, let me introduce to you my cousin, Mr. Ladislaw. Will, this is
Miss Brooke.”
The cousin was so close now, that, when he lifted his hat, Dorothea could
see a pair of gray eyes rather near together, a delicate irregular nose with a
little ripple in it, and hair falling backward; but there was a mouth and chin
of a more prominent, threatening aspect than belonged to the type of the
grandmother’s miniature. Young Ladislaw did not feel it necessary to smile,
as if he were charmed with this introduction to his future second cousin and
her relatives; but wore rather a pouting air of discontent.
“You are an artist, I see,” said Mr. Brooke, taking up the sketch-book and
turning it over in his unceremonious fashion.
“No, I only sketch a little. There is nothing fit to be seen there,” said
young Ladislaw, coloring, perhaps with temper rather than modesty.
“Oh, come, this is a nice bit, now. I did a little in this way myself at one
time, you know. Look here, now; this is what I call a nice thing, done with
what we used to call brio.” Mr. Brooke held out towards the two girls a
large colored sketch of stony ground and trees, with a pool.
“I am no judge of these things,” said Dorothea, not coldly, but with an
eager deprecation of the appeal to her. “You know, uncle, I never see the
beauty of those pictures which you say are so much praised. They are a
language I do not understand. I suppose there is some relation between
pictures and nature which I am too ignorant to feel—just as you see what a

Greek sentence stands for which means nothing to me.” Dorothea looked up
at Mr. Casaubon, who bowed his head towards her, while Mr. Brooke said,
smiling nonchalantly—
“Bless me, now, how different people are! But you had a bad style of
teaching, you know—else this is just the thing for girls—sketching, fine art
and so on. But you took to drawing plans; you don’t understand
morbidezza, and that kind of thing. You will come to my house, I hope, and
I will show you what I did in this way,” he continued, turning to young
Ladislaw, who had to be recalled from his preoccupation in observing
Dorothea. Ladislaw had made up his mind that she must be an unpleasant
girl, since she was going to marry Casaubon, and what she said of her
stupidity about pictures would have confirmed that opinion even if he had
believed her. As it was, he took her words for a covert judgment, and was
certain that she thought his sketch detestable. There was too much
cleverness in her apology: she was laughing both at her uncle and himself.
But what a voice! It was like the voice of a soul that had once lived in an
Aeolian harp. This must be one of Nature’s inconsistencies. There could be
no sort of passion in a girl who would marry Casaubon. But he turned from
her, and bowed his thanks for Mr. Brooke’s invitation.
“We will turn over my Italian engravings together,” continued that good-
natured man. “I have no end of those things, that I have laid by for years.
One gets rusty in this part of the country, you know. Not you, Casaubon;
you stick to your studies; but my best ideas get undermost—out of use, you
know. You clever young men must guard against indolence. I was too
indolent, you know: else I might have been anywhere at one time.”
“That is a seasonable admonition,” said Mr. Casaubon; “but now we will
pass on to the house, lest the young ladies should be tired of standing.”
When their backs were turned, young Ladislaw sat down to go on with
his sketching, and as he did so his face broke into an expression of
amusement which increased as he went on drawing, till at last he threw
back his head and laughed aloud. Partly it was the reception of his own
artistic production that tickled him; partly the notion of his grave cousin as
the lover of that girl; and partly Mr. Brooke’s definition of the place he
might have held but for the impediment of indolence. Mr. Will Ladislaw’s
sense of the ludicrous lit up his features very agreeably: it was the pure

enjoyment of comicality, and had no mixture of sneering and self-
exaltation.
“What is your nephew going to do with himself, Casaubon?” said Mr.
Brooke, as they went on.
“My cousin, you mean—not my nephew.”
“Yes, yes, cousin. But in the way of a career, you know.”
“The answer to that question is painfully doubtful. On leaving Rugby he
declined to go to an English university, where I would gladly have placed
him, and chose what I must consider the anomalous course of studying at
Heidelberg. And now he wants to go abroad again, without any special
object, save the vague purpose of what he calls culture, preparation for he
knows not what. He declines to choose a profession.”
“He has no means but what you furnish, I suppose.”
“I have always given him and his friends reason to understand that I
would furnish in moderation what was necessary for providing him with a
scholarly education, and launching him respectably. I am therefore bound to
fulfil the expectation so raised,” said Mr. Casaubon, putting his conduct in
the light of mere rectitude: a trait of delicacy which Dorothea noticed with
admiration.
“He has a thirst for travelling; perhaps he may turn out a Bruce or a
Mungo Park,” said Mr. Brooke. “I had a notion of that myself at one time.”
“No, he has no bent towards exploration, or the enlargement of our
geognosis: that would be a special purpose which I could recognize with
some approbation, though without felicitating him on a career which so
often ends in premature and violent death. But so far is he from having any
desire for a more accurate knowledge of the earth’s surface, that he said he
should prefer not to know the sources of the Nile, and that there should be
some unknown regions preserved as hunting grounds for the poetic
imagination.”
“Well, there is something in that, you know,” said Mr. Brooke, who had
certainly an impartial mind.
“It is, I fear, nothing more than a part of his general inaccuracy and
indisposition to thoroughness of all kinds, which would be a bad augury for
him in any profession, civil or sacred, even were he so far submissive to
ordinary rule as to choose one.”

“Perhaps he has conscientious scruples founded on his own unfitness,”
said Dorothea, who was interesting herself in finding a favorable
explanation. “Because the law and medicine should be very serious
professions to undertake, should they not? People’s lives and fortunes
depend on them.”
“Doubtless; but I fear that my young relative Will Ladislaw is chiefly
determined in his aversion to these callings by a dislike to steady
application, and to that kind of acquirement which is needful
instrumentally, but is not charming or immediately inviting to self-indulgent
taste. I have insisted to him on what Aristotle has stated with admirable
brevity, that for the achievement of any work regarded as an end there must
be a prior exercise of many energies or acquired facilities of a secondary
order, demanding patience. I have pointed to my own manuscript volumes,
which represent the toil of years preparatory to a work not yet
accomplished. But in vain. To careful reasoning of this kind he replies by
calling himself Pegasus, and every form of prescribed work ‘harness.’”
Celia laughed. She was surprised to find that Mr. Casaubon could say
something quite amusing.
“Well, you know, he may turn out a Byron, a Chatterton, a Churchill—
that sort of thing—there’s no telling,” said Mr. Brooke. “Shall you let him
go to Italy, or wherever else he wants to go?”
“Yes; I have agreed to furnish him with moderate supplies for a year or
so; he asks no more. I shall let him be tried by the test of freedom.”
“That is very kind of you,” said Dorothea, looking up at Mr. Casaubon
with delight. “It is noble. After all, people may really have in them some
vocation which is not quite plain to themselves, may they not? They may
seem idle and weak because they are growing. We should be very patient
with each other, I think.”
“I suppose it is being engaged to be married that has made you think
patience good,” said Celia, as soon as she and Dorothea were alone
together, taking off their wrappings.
“You mean that I am very impatient, Celia.”
“Yes; when people don’t do and say just what you like.” Celia had
become less afraid of “saying things” to Dorothea since this engagement:
cleverness seemed to her more pitiable than ever.

CHAPTER X.
“He had catched a great cold, had he had no other clothes to wear than the skin of a bear
not yet killed.”—FULLER.

Young Ladislaw did not pay that visit to which Mr. Brooke had invited
him, and only six days afterwards Mr. Casaubon mentioned that his young
relative had started for the Continent, seeming by this cold vagueness to
waive inquiry. Indeed, Will had declined to fix on any more precise
destination than the entire area of Europe. Genius, he held, is necessarily
intolerant of fetters: on the one hand it must have the utmost play for its
spontaneity; on the other, it may confidently await those messages from the
universe which summon it to its peculiar work, only placing itself in an
attitude of receptivity towards all sublime chances. The attitudes of
receptivity are various, and Will had sincerely tried many of them. He was
not excessively fond of wine, but he had several times taken too much,
simply as an experiment in that form of ecstasy; he had fasted till he was
faint, and then supped on lobster; he had made himself ill with doses of
opium. Nothing greatly original had resulted from these measures; and the
effects of the opium had convinced him that there was an entire
dissimilarity between his constitution and De Quincey’s. The superadded
circumstance which would evolve the genius had not yet come; the universe
had not yet beckoned. Even Caesar’s fortune at one time was but a grand
presentiment. We know what a masquerade all development is, and what
effective shapes may be disguised in helpless embryos. In fact, the world is
full of hopeful analogies and handsome dubious eggs called possibilities.
Will saw clearly enough the pitiable instances of long incubation producing
no chick, and but for gratitude would have laughed at Casaubon, whose
plodding application, rows of note-books, and small taper of learned theory
exploring the tossed ruins of the world, seemed to enforce a moral entirely
encouraging to Will’s generous reliance on the intentions of the universe
with regard to himself. He held that reliance to be a mark of genius; and
certainly it is no mark to the contrary; genius consisting neither in self-

conceit nor in humility, but in a power to make or do, not anything in
general, but something in particular. Let him start for the Continent, then,
without our pronouncing on his future. Among all forms of mistake,
prophecy is the most gratuitous.
But at present this caution against a too hasty judgment interests me more
in relation to Mr. Casaubon than to his young cousin. If to Dorothea Mr.
Casaubon had been the mere occasion which had set alight the fine
inflammable material of her youthful illusions, does it follow that he was
fairly represented in the minds of those less impassioned personages who
have hitherto delivered their judgments concerning him? I protest against
any absolute conclusion, any prejudice derived from Mrs. Cadwallader’s
contempt for a neighboring clergyman’s alleged greatness of soul, or Sir
James Chettam’s poor opinion of his rival’s legs,—from Mr. Brooke’s
failure to elicit a companion’s ideas, or from Celia’s criticism of a middle-
aged scholar’s personal appearance. I am not sure that the greatest man of
his age, if ever that solitary superlative existed, could escape these
unfavorable reflections of himself in various small mirrors; and even
Milton, looking for his portrait in a spoon, must submit to have the facial
angle of a bumpkin. Moreover, if Mr. Casaubon, speaking for himself, has
rather a chilling rhetoric, it is not therefore certain that there is no good
work or fine feeling in him. Did not an immortal physicist and interpreter of
hieroglyphs write detestable verses? Has the theory of the solar system been
advanced by graceful manners and conversational tact? Suppose we turn
from outside estimates of a man, to wonder, with keener interest, what is the
report of his own consciousness about his doings or capacity: with what
hindrances he is carrying on his daily labors; what fading of hopes, or what
deeper fixity of self-delusion the years are marking off within him; and with
what spirit he wrestles against universal pressure, which will one day be too
heavy for him, and bring his heart to its final pause. Doubtless his lot is
important in his own eyes; and the chief reason that we think he asks too
large a place in our consideration must be our want of room for him, since
we refer him to the Divine regard with perfect confidence; nay, it is even
held sublime for our neighbor to expect the utmost there, however little he
may have got from us. Mr. Casaubon, too, was the centre of his own world;
if he was liable to think that others were providentially made for him, and
especially to consider them in the light of their fitness for the author of a

“Key to all Mythologies,” this trait is not quite alien to us, and, like the
other mendicant hopes of mortals, claims some of our pity.
Certainly this affair of his marriage with Miss Brooke touched him more
nearly than it did any one of the persons who have hitherto shown their
disapproval of it, and in the present stage of things I feel more tenderly
towards his experience of success than towards the disappointment of the
amiable Sir James. For in truth, as the day fixed for his marriage came
nearer, Mr. Casaubon did not find his spirits rising; nor did the
contemplation of that matrimonial garden scene, where, as all experience
showed, the path was to be bordered with flowers, prove persistently more
enchanting to him than the accustomed vaults where he walked taper in
hand. He did not confess to himself, still less could he have breathed to
another, his surprise that though he had won a lovely and noble-hearted girl
he had not won delight,—which he had also regarded as an object to be
found by search. It is true that he knew all the classical passages implying
the contrary; but knowing classical passages, we find, is a mode of motion,
which explains why they leave so little extra force for their personal
application.
Poor Mr. Casaubon had imagined that his long studious bachelorhood
had stored up for him a compound interest of enjoyment, and that large
drafts on his affections would not fail to be honored; for we all of us, grave
or light, get our thoughts entangled in metaphors, and act fatally on the
strength of them. And now he was in danger of being saddened by the very
conviction that his circumstances were unusually happy: there was nothing
external by which he could account for a certain blankness of sensibility
which came over him just when his expectant gladness should have been
most lively, just when he exchanged the accustomed dulness of his Lowick
library for his visits to the Grange. Here was a weary experience in which
he was as utterly condemned to loneliness as in the despair which
sometimes threatened him while toiling in the morass of authorship without
seeming nearer to the goal. And his was that worst loneliness which would
shrink from sympathy. He could not but wish that Dorothea should think
him not less happy than the world would expect her successful suitor to be;
and in relation to his authorship he leaned on her young trust and
veneration, he liked to draw forth her fresh interest in listening, as a means
of encouragement to himself: in talking to her he presented all his
performance and intention with the reflected confidence of the pedagogue,

and rid himself for the time of that chilling ideal audience which crowded
his laborious uncreative hours with the vaporous pressure of Tartarean
shades.
For to Dorothea, after that toy-box history of the world adapted to young
ladies which had made the chief part of her education, Mr. Casaubon’s talk
about his great book was full of new vistas; and this sense of revelation, this
surprise of a nearer introduction to Stoics and Alexandrians, as people who
had ideas not totally unlike her own, kept in abeyance for the time her usual
eagerness for a binding theory which could bring her own life and doctrine
into strict connection with that amazing past, and give the remotest sources
of knowledge some bearing on her actions. That more complete teaching
would come—Mr. Casaubon would tell her all that: she was looking
forward to higher initiation in ideas, as she was looking forward to
marriage, and blending her dim conceptions of both. It would be a great
mistake to suppose that Dorothea would have cared about any share in Mr.
Casaubon’s learning as mere accomplishment; for though opinion in the
neighborhood of Freshitt and Tipton had pronounced her clever, that epithet
would not have described her to circles in whose more precise vocabulary
cleverness implies mere aptitude for knowing and doing, apart from
character. All her eagerness for acquirement lay within that full current of
sympathetic motive in which her ideas and impulses were habitually swept
along. She did not want to deck herself with knowledge—to wear it loose
from the nerves and blood that fed her action; and if she had written a book
she must have done it as Saint Theresa did, under the command of an
authority that constrained her conscience. But something she yearned for by
which her life might be filled with action at once rational and ardent; and
since the time was gone by for guiding visions and spiritual directors, since
prayer heightened yearning but not instruction, what lamp was there but
knowledge? Surely learned men kept the only oil; and who more learned
than Mr. Casaubon?
Thus in these brief weeks Dorothea’s joyous grateful expectation was
unbroken, and however her lover might occasionally be conscious of
flatness, he could never refer it to any slackening of her affectionate
interest.
The season was mild enough to encourage the project of extending the
wedding journey as far as Rome, and Mr. Casaubon was anxious for this

because he wished to inspect some manuscripts in the Vatican.
“I still regret that your sister is not to accompany us,” he said one
morning, some time after it had been ascertained that Celia objected to go,
and that Dorothea did not wish for her companionship. “You will have
many lonely hours, Dorothea, for I shall be constrained to make the utmost
use of my time during our stay in Rome, and I should feel more at liberty if
you had a companion.”
The words “I should feel more at liberty” grated on Dorothea. For the
first time in speaking to Mr. Casaubon she colored from annoyance.
“You must have misunderstood me very much,” she said, “if you think I
should not enter into the value of your time—if you think that I should not
willingly give up whatever interfered with your using it to the best
purpose.”
“That is very amiable in you, my dear Dorothea,” said Mr. Casaubon, not
in the least noticing that she was hurt; “but if you had a lady as your
companion, I could put you both under the care of a cicerone, and we could
thus achieve two purposes in the same space of time.”
“I beg you will not refer to this again,” said Dorothea, rather haughtily.
But immediately she feared that she was wrong, and turning towards him
she laid her hand on his, adding in a different tone, “Pray do not be anxious
about me. I shall have so much to think of when I am alone. And Tantripp
will be a sufficient companion, just to take care of me. I could not bear to
have Celia: she would be miserable.”
It was time to dress. There was to be a dinner-party that day, the last of
the parties which were held at the Grange as proper preliminaries to the
wedding, and Dorothea was glad of a reason for moving away at once on
the sound of the bell, as if she needed more than her usual amount of
preparation. She was ashamed of being irritated from some cause she could
not define even to herself; for though she had no intention to be untruthful,
her reply had not touched the real hurt within her. Mr. Casaubon’s words
had been quite reasonable, yet they had brought a vague instantaneous
sense of aloofness on his part.
“Surely I am in a strangely selfish weak state of mind,” she said to
herself. “How can I have a husband who is so much above me without
knowing that he needs me less than I need him?”

Having convinced herself that Mr. Casaubon was altogether right, she
recovered her equanimity, and was an agreeable image of serene dignity
when she came into the drawing-room in her silver-gray dress—the simple
lines of her dark-brown hair parted over her brow and coiled massively
behind, in keeping with the entire absence from her manner and expression
of all search after mere effect. Sometimes when Dorothea was in company,
there seemed to be as complete an air of repose about her as if she had been
a picture of Santa Barbara looking out from her tower into the clear air; but
these intervals of quietude made the energy of her speech and emotion the
more remarked when some outward appeal had touched her.
She was naturally the subject of many observations this evening, for the
dinner-party was large and rather more miscellaneous as to the male portion
than any which had been held at the Grange since Mr. Brooke’s nieces had
resided with him, so that the talking was done in duos and trios more or less
inharmonious. There was the newly elected mayor of Middlemarch, who
happened to be a manufacturer; the philanthropic banker his brother-in-law,
who predominated so much in the town that some called him a Methodist,
others a hypocrite, according to the resources of their vocabulary; and there
were various professional men. In fact, Mrs. Cadwallader said that Brooke
was beginning to treat the Middlemarchers, and that she preferred the
farmers at the tithe-dinner, who drank her health unpretentiously, and were
not ashamed of their grandfathers’ furniture. For in that part of the country,
before reform had done its notable part in developing the political
consciousness, there was a clearer distinction of ranks and a dimmer
distinction of parties; so that Mr. Brooke’s miscellaneous invitations
seemed to belong to that general laxity which came from his inordinate
travel and habit of taking too much in the form of ideas.
Already, as Miss Brooke passed out of the dining-room, opportunity was
found for some interjectional “asides.”
“A fine woman, Miss Brooke! an uncommonly fine woman, by God!”
said Mr. Standish, the old lawyer, who had been so long concerned with the
landed gentry that he had become landed himself, and used that oath in a
deep-mouthed manner as a sort of armorial bearings, stamping the speech
of a man who held a good position.
Mr. Bulstrode, the banker, seemed to be addressed, but that gentleman
disliked coarseness and profanity, and merely bowed. The remark was taken

up by Mr. Chichely, a middle-aged bachelor and coursing celebrity, who
had a complexion something like an Easter egg, a few hairs carefully
arranged, and a carriage implying the consciousness of a distinguished
appearance.
“Yes, but not my style of woman: I like a woman who lays herself out a
little more to please us. There should be a little filigree about a woman—
something of the coquette. A man likes a sort of challenge. The more of a
dead set she makes at you the better.”
“There’s some truth in that,” said Mr. Standish, disposed to be genial.
“And, by God, it’s usually the way with them. I suppose it answers some
wise ends: Providence made them so, eh, Bulstrode?”
“I should be disposed to refer coquetry to another source,” said Mr.
Bulstrode. “I should rather refer it to the devil.”
“Ay, to be sure, there should be a little devil in a woman,” said Mr.
Chichely, whose study of the fair sex seemed to have been detrimental to
his theology. “And I like them blond, with a certain gait, and a swan neck.
Between ourselves, the mayor’s daughter is more to my taste than Miss
Brooke or Miss Celia either. If I were a marrying man I should choose Miss
Vincy before either of them.”
“Well, make up, make up,” said Mr. Standish, jocosely; “you see the
middle-aged fellows carry the day.”
Mr. Chichely shook his head with much meaning: he was not going to
incur the certainty of being accepted by the woman he would choose.
The Miss Vincy who had the honor of being Mr. Chichely’s ideal was of
course not present; for Mr. Brooke, always objecting to go too far, would
not have chosen that his nieces should meet the daughter of a Middlemarch
manufacturer, unless it were on a public occasion. The feminine part of the
company included none whom Lady Chettam or Mrs. Cadwallader could
object to; for Mrs. Renfrew, the colonel’s widow, was not only
unexceptionable in point of breeding, but also interesting on the ground of
her complaint, which puzzled the doctors, and seemed clearly a case
wherein the fulness of professional knowledge might need the supplement
of quackery. Lady Chettam, who attributed her own remarkable health to
home-made bitters united with constant medical attendance, entered with
much exercise of the imagination into Mrs. Renfrew’s account of

symptoms, and into the amazing futility in her case of all strengthening
medicines.
“Where can all the strength of those medicines go, my dear?” said the
mild but stately dowager, turning to Mrs. Cadwallader reflectively, when
Mrs. Renfrew’s attention was called away.
“It strengthens the disease,” said the Rector’s wife, much too well-born
not to be an amateur in medicine. “Everything depends on the constitution:
some people make fat, some blood, and some bile—that’s my view of the
matter; and whatever they take is a sort of grist to the mill.”
“Then she ought to take medicines that would reduce—reduce the
disease, you know, if you are right, my dear. And I think what you say is
reasonable.”
“Certainly it is reasonable. You have two sorts of potatoes, fed on the
same soil. One of them grows more and more watery—”
“Ah! like this poor Mrs. Renfrew—that is what I think. Dropsy! There is
no swelling yet—it is inward. I should say she ought to take drying
medicines, shouldn’t you?—or a dry hot-air bath. Many things might be
tried, of a drying nature.”
“Let her try a certain person’s pamphlets,” said Mrs. Cadwallader in an
undertone, seeing the gentlemen enter. “He does not want drying.”
“Who, my dear?” said Lady Chettam, a charming woman, not so quick as
to nullify the pleasure of explanation.
“The bridegroom—Casaubon. He has certainly been drying up faster
since the engagement: the flame of passion, I suppose.”
“I should think he is far from having a good constitution,” said Lady
Chettam, with a still deeper undertone. “And then his studies—so very dry,
as you say.”
“Really, by the side of Sir James, he looks like a death’s head skinned
over for the occasion. Mark my words: in a year from this time that girl will
hate him. She looks up to him as an oracle now, and by-and-by she will be
at the other extreme. All flightiness!”
“How very shocking! I fear she is headstrong. But tell me—you know all
about him—is there anything very bad? What is the truth?”

“The truth? he is as bad as the wrong physic—nasty to take, and sure to
disagree.”
“There could not be anything worse than that,” said Lady Chettam, with
so vivid a conception of the physic that she seemed to have learned
something exact about Mr. Casaubon’s disadvantages. “However, James
will hear nothing against Miss Brooke. He says she is the mirror of women
still.”
“That is a generous make-believe of his. Depend upon it, he likes little
Celia better, and she appreciates him. I hope you like my little Celia?”
“Certainly; she is fonder of geraniums, and seems more docile, though
not so fine a figure. But we were talking of physic. Tell me about this new
young surgeon, Mr. Lydgate. I am told he is wonderfully clever: he
certainly looks it—a fine brow indeed.”
“He is a gentleman. I heard him talking to Humphrey. He talks well.”
“Yes. Mr. Brooke says he is one of the Lydgates of Northumberland,
really well connected. One does not expect it in a practitioner of that kind.
For my own part, I like a medical man more on a footing with the servants;
they are often all the cleverer. I assure you I found poor Hicks’s judgment
unfailing; I never knew him wrong. He was coarse and butcher-like, but he
knew my constitution. It was a loss to me his going off so suddenly. Dear
me, what a very animated conversation Miss Brooke seems to be having
with this Mr. Lydgate!”
“She is talking cottages and hospitals with him,” said Mrs. Cadwallader,
whose ears and power of interpretation were quick. “I believe he is a sort of
philanthropist, so Brooke is sure to take him up.”
“James,” said Lady Chettam when her son came near, “bring Mr. Lydgate
and introduce him to me. I want to test him.”
The affable dowager declared herself delighted with this opportunity of
making Mr. Lydgate’s acquaintance, having heard of his success in treating
fever on a new plan.
Mr. Lydgate had the medical accomplishment of looking perfectly grave
whatever nonsense was talked to him, and his dark steady eyes gave him
impressiveness as a listener. He was as little as possible like the lamented
Hicks, especially in a certain careless refinement about his toilet and
utterance. Yet Lady Chettam gathered much confidence in him. He

confirmed her view of her own constitution as being peculiar, by admitting
that all constitutions might be called peculiar, and he did not deny that hers
might be more peculiar than others. He did not approve of a too lowering
system, including reckless cupping, nor, on the other hand, of incessant port
wine and bark. He said “I think so” with an air of so much deference
accompanying the insight of agreement, that she formed the most cordial
opinion of his talents.
“I am quite pleased with your protege,” she said to Mr. Brooke before
going away.
“My protege?—dear me!—who is that?” said Mr. Brooke.
“This young Lydgate, the new doctor. He seems to me to understand his
profession admirably.”
“Oh, Lydgate! he is not my protege, you know; only I knew an uncle of
his who sent me a letter about him. However, I think he is likely to be first-
rate—has studied in Paris, knew Broussais; has ideas, you know—wants to
raise the profession.”
“Lydgate has lots of ideas, quite new, about ventilation and diet, that sort
of thing,” resumed Mr. Brooke, after he had handed out Lady Chettam, and
had returned to be civil to a group of Middlemarchers.
“Hang it, do you think that is quite sound?—upsetting the old treatment,
which has made Englishmen what they are?” said Mr. Standish.
“Medical knowledge is at a low ebb among us,” said Mr. Bulstrode, who
spoke in a subdued tone, and had rather a sickly air. “I, for my part, hail the
advent of Mr. Lydgate. I hope to find good reason for confiding the new
hospital to his management.”
“That is all very fine,” replied Mr. Standish, who was not fond of Mr.
Bulstrode; “if you like him to try experiments on your hospital patients, and
kill a few people for charity I have no objection. But I am not going to hand
money out of my purse to have experiments tried on me. I like treatment
that has been tested a little.”
“Well, you know, Standish, every dose you take is an experiment-an
experiment, you know,” said Mr. Brooke, nodding towards the lawyer.
“Oh, if you talk in that sense!” said Mr. Standish, with as much disgust at
such non-legal quibbling as a man can well betray towards a valuable client.

“I should be glad of any treatment that would cure me without reducing
me to a skeleton, like poor Grainger,” said Mr. Vincy, the mayor, a florid
man, who would have served for a study of flesh in striking contrast with
the Franciscan tints of Mr. Bulstrode. “It’s an uncommonly dangerous thing
to be left without any padding against the shafts of disease, as somebody
said,—and I think it a very good expression myself.”
Mr. Lydgate, of course, was out of hearing. He had quitted the party
early, and would have thought it altogether tedious but for the novelty of
certain introductions, especially the introduction to Miss Brooke, whose
youthful bloom, with her approaching marriage to that faded scholar, and
her interest in matters socially useful, gave her the piquancy of an unusual
combination.
“She is a good creature—that fine girl—but a little too earnest,” he
thought. “It is troublesome to talk to such women. They are always wanting
reasons, yet they are too ignorant to understand the merits of any question,
and usually fall back on their moral sense to settle things after their own
taste.”
Evidently Miss Brooke was not Mr. Lydgate’s style of woman any more
than Mr. Chichely’s. Considered, indeed, in relation to the latter, whose
mind was matured, she was altogether a mistake, and calculated to shock
his trust in final causes, including the adaptation of fine young women to
purplefaced bachelors. But Lydgate was less ripe, and might possibly have
experience before him which would modify his opinion as to the most
excellent things in woman.
Miss Brooke, however, was not again seen by either of these gentlemen
under her maiden name. Not long after that dinner-party she had become
Mrs. Casaubon, and was on her way to Rome.

CHAPTER XI.
But deeds and language such as men do use,
And persons such as comedy would choose,
When she would show an image of the times,
And sport with human follies, not with crimes.
—BEN JONSON.

Lydgate, in fact, was already conscious of being fascinated by a woman
strikingly different from Miss Brooke: he did not in the least suppose that
he had lost his balance and fallen in love, but he had said of that particular
woman, “She is grace itself; she is perfectly lovely and accomplished. That
is what a woman ought to be: she ought to produce the effect of exquisite
music.” Plain women he regarded as he did the other severe facts of life, to
be faced with philosophy and investigated by science. But Rosamond Vincy
seemed to have the true melodic charm; and when a man has seen the
woman whom he would have chosen if he had intended to marry speedily,
his remaining a bachelor will usually depend on her resolution rather than
on his. Lydgate believed that he should not marry for several years: not
marry until he had trodden out a good clear path for himself away from the
broad road which was quite ready made. He had seen Miss Vincy above his
horizon almost as long as it had taken Mr. Casaubon to become engaged
and married: but this learned gentleman was possessed of a fortune; he had
assembled his voluminous notes, and had made that sort of reputation
which precedes performance,—often the larger part of a man’s fame. He
took a wife, as we have seen, to adorn the remaining quadrant of his course,
and be a little moon that would cause hardly a calculable perturbation. But
Lydgate was young, poor, ambitious. He had his half-century before him
instead of behind him, and he had come to Middlemarch bent on doing
many things that were not directly fitted to make his fortune or even secure
him a good income. To a man under such circumstances, taking a wife is
something more than a question of adornment, however highly he may rate
this; and Lydgate was disposed to give it the first place among wifely
functions. To his taste, guided by a single conversation, here was the point
on which Miss Brooke would be found wanting, notwithstanding her

undeniable beauty. She did not look at things from the proper feminine
angle. The society of such women was about as relaxing as going from your
work to teach the second form, instead of reclining in a paradise with sweet
laughs for bird-notes, and blue eyes for a heaven.
Certainly nothing at present could seem much less important to Lydgate
than the turn of Miss Brooke’s mind, or to Miss Brooke than the qualities of
the woman who had attracted this young surgeon. But any one watching
keenly the stealthy convergence of human lots, sees a slow preparation of
effects from one life on another, which tells like a calculated irony on the
indifference or the frozen stare with which we look at our unintroduced
neighbor. Destiny stands by sarcastic with our dramatis personae folded in
her hand.
Old provincial society had its share of this subtle movement: had not
only its striking downfalls, its brilliant young professional dandies who
ended by living up an entry with a drab and six children for their
establishment, but also those less marked vicissitudes which are constantly
shifting the boundaries of social intercourse, and begetting new
consciousness of interdependence. Some slipped a little downward, some
got higher footing: people denied aspirates, gained wealth, and fastidious
gentlemen stood for boroughs; some were caught in political currents, some
in ecclesiastical, and perhaps found themselves surprisingly grouped in
consequence; while a few personages or families that stood with rocky
firmness amid all this fluctuation, were slowly presenting new aspects in
spite of solidity, and altering with the double change of self and beholder.
Municipal town and rural parish gradually made fresh threads of connection
—gradually, as the old stocking gave way to the savings-bank, and the
worship of the solar guinea became extinct; while squires and baronets, and
even lords who had once lived blamelessly afar from the civic mind,
gathered the faultiness of closer acquaintanceship. Settlers, too, came from
distant counties, some with an alarming novelty of skill, others with an
offensive advantage in cunning. In fact, much the same sort of movement
and mixture went on in old England as we find in older Herodotus, who
also, in telling what had been, thought it well to take a woman’s lot for his
starting-point; though Io, as a maiden apparently beguiled by attractive
merchandise, was the reverse of Miss Brooke, and in this respect perhaps
bore more resemblance to Rosamond Vincy, who had excellent taste in
costume, with that nymph-like figure and pure blondness which give the

largest range to choice in the flow and color of drapery. But these things
made only part of her charm. She was admitted to be the flower of Mrs.
Lemon’s school, the chief school in the county, where the teaching included
all that was demanded in the accomplished female—even to extras, such as
the getting in and out of a carriage. Mrs. Lemon herself had always held up
Miss Vincy as an example: no pupil, she said, exceeded that young lady for
mental acquisition and propriety of speech, while her musical execution
was quite exceptional. We cannot help the way in which people speak of us,
and probably if Mrs. Lemon had undertaken to describe Juliet or Imogen,
these heroines would not have seemed poetical. The first vision of
Rosamond would have been enough with most judges to dispel any
prejudice excited by Mrs. Lemon’s praise.
Lydgate could not be long in Middlemarch without having that agreeable
vision, or even without making the acquaintance of the Vincy family; for
though Mr. Peacock, whose practice he had paid something to enter on, had
not been their doctor (Mrs. Vincy not liking the lowering system adopted by
him), he had many patients among their connections and acquaintances. For
who of any consequence in Middlemarch was not connected or at least
acquainted with the Vincys? They were old manufacturers, and had kept a
good house for three generations, in which there had naturally been much
intermarrying with neighbors more or less decidedly genteel. Mr. Vincy’s
sister had made a wealthy match in accepting Mr. Bulstrode, who, however,
as a man not born in the town, and altogether of dimly known origin, was
considered to have done well in uniting himself with a real Middlemarch
family; on the other hand, Mr. Vincy had descended a little, having taken an
innkeeper’s daughter. But on this side too there was a cheering sense of
money; for Mrs. Vincy’s sister had been second wife to rich old Mr.
Featherstone, and had died childless years ago, so that her nephews and
nieces might be supposed to touch the affections of the widower. And it
happened that Mr. Bulstrode and Mr. Featherstone, two of Peacock’s most
important patients, had, from different causes, given an especially good
reception to his successor, who had raised some partisanship as well as
discussion. Mr. Wrench, medical attendant to the Vincy family, very early
had grounds for thinking lightly of Lydgate’s professional discretion, and
there was no report about him which was not retailed at the Vincys’, where
visitors were frequent. Mr. Vincy was more inclined to general good-
fellowship than to taking sides, but there was no need for him to be hasty in

making any new man acquaintance. Rosamond silently wished that her
father would invite Mr. Lydgate. She was tired of the faces and figures she
had always been used to—the various irregular profiles and gaits and turns
of phrase distinguishing those Middlemarch young men whom she had
known as boys. She had been at school with girls of higher position, whose
brothers, she felt sure, it would have been possible for her to be more
interested in, than in these inevitable Middlemarch companions. But she
would not have chosen to mention her wish to her father; and he, for his
part, was in no hurry on the subject. An alderman about to be mayor must
by-and-by enlarge his dinner-parties, but at present there were plenty of
guests at his well-spread table.
That table often remained covered with the relics of the family breakfast
long after Mr. Vincy had gone with his second son to the warehouse, and
when Miss Morgan was already far on in morning lessons with the younger
girls in the schoolroom. It awaited the family laggard, who found any sort
of inconvenience (to others) less disagreeable than getting up when he was
called. This was the case one morning of the October in which we have
lately seen Mr. Casaubon visiting the Grange; and though the room was a
little overheated with the fire, which had sent the spaniel panting to a
remote corner, Rosamond, for some reason, continued to sit at her
embroidery longer than usual, now and then giving herself a little shake,
and laying her work on her knee to contemplate it with an air of hesitating
weariness. Her mamma, who had returned from an excursion to the kitchen,
sat on the other side of the small work-table with an air of more entire
placidity, until, the clock again giving notice that it was going to strike, she
looked up from the lace-mending which was occupying her plump fingers
and rang the bell.
“Knock at Mr. Fred’s door again, Pritchard, and tell him it has struck
half-past ten.”
This was said without any change in the radiant good-humor of Mrs.
Vincy’s face, in which forty-five years had delved neither angles nor
parallels; and pushing back her pink capstrings, she let her work rest on her
lap, while she looked admiringly at her daughter.
“Mamma,” said Rosamond, “when Fred comes down I wish you would
not let him have red herrings. I cannot bear the smell of them all over the
house at this hour of the morning.”

“Oh, my dear, you are so hard on your brothers! It is the only fault I have
to find with you. You are the sweetest temper in the world, but you are so
tetchy with your brothers.”
“Not tetchy, mamma: you never hear me speak in an unladylike way.”
“Well, but you want to deny them things.”
“Brothers are so unpleasant.”
“Oh, my dear, you must allow for young men. Be thankful if they have
good hearts. A woman must learn to put up with little things. You will be
married some day.”
“Not to any one who is like Fred.”
“Don’t decry your own brother, my dear. Few young men have less
against them, although he couldn’t take his degree—I’m sure I can’t
understand why, for he seems to me most clever. And you know yourself he
was thought equal to the best society at college. So particular as you are,
my dear, I wonder you are not glad to have such a gentlemanly young man
for a brother. You are always finding fault with Bob because he is not Fred.”
“Oh no, mamma, only because he is Bob.”
“Well, my dear, you will not find any Middlemarch young man who has
not something against him.”
“But”—here Rosamond’s face broke into a smile which suddenly
revealed two dimples. She herself thought unfavorably of these dimples and
smiled little in general society. “But I shall not marry any Middlemarch
young man.”
“So it seems, my love, for you have as good as refused the pick of them;
and if there’s better to be had, I’m sure there’s no girl better deserves it.”
“Excuse me, mamma—I wish you would not say, ‘the pick of them.’”
“Why, what else are they?”
“I mean, mamma, it is rather a vulgar expression.”
“Very likely, my dear; I never was a good speaker. What should I say?”
“The best of them.”
“Why, that seems just as plain and common. If I had had time to think, I
should have said, ‘the most superior young men.’ But with your education
you must know.”

“What must Rosy know, mother?” said Mr. Fred, who had slid in
unobserved through the half-open door while the ladies were bending over
their work, and now going up to the fire stood with his back towards it,
warming the soles of his slippers.
“Whether it’s right to say ‘superior young men,’” said Mrs. Vincy,
ringing the bell.
“Oh, there are so many superior teas and sugars now. Superior is getting
to be shopkeepers’ slang.”
“Are you beginning to dislike slang, then?” said Rosamond, with mild
gravity.
“Only the wrong sort. All choice of words is slang. It marks a class.”
“There is correct English: that is not slang.”
“I beg your pardon: correct English is the slang of prigs who write
history and essays. And the strongest slang of all is the slang of poets.”
“You will say anything, Fred, to gain your point.”
“Well, tell me whether it is slang or poetry to call an ox a leg-plaiter.”
“Of course you can call it poetry if you like.”
“Aha, Miss Rosy, you don’t know Homer from slang. I shall invent a new
game; I shall write bits of slang and poetry on slips, and give them to you to
separate.”
“Dear me, how amusing it is to hear young people talk!” said Mrs. Vincy,
with cheerful admiration.
“Have you got nothing else for my breakfast, Pritchard?” said Fred, to
the servant who brought in coffee and buttered toast; while he walked round
the table surveying the ham, potted beef, and other cold remnants, with an
air of silent rejection, and polite forbearance from signs of disgust.
“Should you like eggs, sir?”
“Eggs, no! Bring me a grilled bone.”
“Really, Fred,” said Rosamond, when the servant had left the room, “if
you must have hot things for breakfast, I wish you would come down
earlier. You can get up at six o’clock to go out hunting; I cannot understand
why you find it so difficult to get up on other mornings.”
“That is your want of understanding, Rosy. I can get up to go hunting
because I like it.”

“What would you think of me if I came down two hours after every one
else and ordered grilled bone?”
“I should think you were an uncommonly fast young lady,” said Fred,
eating his toast with the utmost composure.
“I cannot see why brothers are to make themselves disagreeable, any
more than sisters.”
“I don’t make myself disagreeable; it is you who find me so.
Disagreeable is a word that describes your feelings and not my actions.”
“I think it describes the smell of grilled bone.”
“Not at all. It describes a sensation in your little nose associated with
certain finicking notions which are the classics of Mrs. Lemon’s school.
Look at my mother; you don’t see her objecting to everything except what
she does herself. She is my notion of a pleasant woman.”
“Bless you both, my dears, and don’t quarrel,” said Mrs. Vincy, with
motherly cordiality. “Come, Fred, tell us all about the new doctor. How is
your uncle pleased with him?”
“Pretty well, I think. He asks Lydgate all sorts of questions and then
screws up his face while he hears the answers, as if they were pinching his
toes. That’s his way. Ah, here comes my grilled bone.”
“But how came you to stay out so late, my dear? You only said you were
going to your uncle’s.”
“Oh, I dined at Plymdale’s. We had whist. Lydgate was there too.”
“And what do you think of him? He is very gentlemanly, I suppose. They
say he is of excellent family—his relations quite county people.”
“Yes,” said Fred. “There was a Lydgate at John’s who spent no end of
money. I find this man is a second cousin of his. But rich men may have
very poor devils for second cousins.”
“It always makes a difference, though, to be of good family,” said
Rosamond, with a tone of decision which showed that she had thought on
this subject. Rosamond felt that she might have been happier if she had not
been the daughter of a Middlemarch manufacturer. She disliked anything
which reminded her that her mother’s father had been an innkeeper.
Certainly any one remembering the fact might think that Mrs. Vincy had the

air of a very handsome good-humored landlady, accustomed to the most
capricious orders of gentlemen.
“I thought it was odd his name was Tertius,” said the bright-faced
matron, “but of course it’s a name in the family. But now, tell us exactly
what sort of man he is.”
“Oh, tallish, dark, clever—talks well—rather a prig, I think.”
“I never can make out what you mean by a prig,” said Rosamond.
“A fellow who wants to show that he has opinions.”
“Why, my dear, doctors must have opinions,” said Mrs. Vincy. “What are
they there for else?”
“Yes, mother, the opinions they are paid for. But a prig is a fellow who is
always making you a present of his opinions.”
“I suppose Mary Garth admires Mr. Lydgate,” said Rosamond, not
without a touch of innuendo.
“Really, I can’t say.” said Fred, rather glumly, as he left the table, and
taking up a novel which he had brought down with him, threw himself into
an arm-chair. “If you are jealous of her, go oftener to Stone Court yourself
and eclipse her.”
“I wish you would not be so vulgar, Fred. If you have finished, pray ring
the bell.”
“It is true, though—what your brother says, Rosamond,” Mrs. Vincy
began, when the servant had cleared the table. “It is a thousand pities you
haven’t patience to go and see your uncle more, so proud of you as he is,
and wanted you to live with him. There’s no knowing what he might have
done for you as well as for Fred. God knows, I’m fond of having you at
home with me, but I can part with my children for their good. And now it
stands to reason that your uncle Featherstone will do something for Mary
Garth.”
“Mary Garth can bear being at Stone Court, because she likes that better
than being a governess,” said Rosamond, folding up her work. “I would
rather not have anything left to me if I must earn it by enduring much of my
uncle’s cough and his ugly relations.”
“He can’t be long for this world, my dear; I wouldn’t hasten his end, but
what with asthma and that inward complaint, let us hope there is something

better for him in another. And I have no ill-will towards Mary Garth, but
there’s justice to be thought of. And Mr. Featherstone’s first wife brought
him no money, as my sister did. Her nieces and nephews can’t have so
much claim as my sister’s. And I must say I think Mary Garth a dreadful
plain girl—more fit for a governess.”
“Every one would not agree with you there, mother,” said Fred, who
seemed to be able to read and listen too.
“Well, my dear,” said Mrs. Vincy, wheeling skilfully, “if she had some
fortune left her,—a man marries his wife’s relations, and the Garths are so
poor, and live in such a small way. But I shall leave you to your studies, my
dear; for I must go and do some shopping.”
“Fred’s studies are not very deep,” said Rosamond, rising with her
mamma, “he is only reading a novel.”
“Well, well, by-and-by he’ll go to his Latin and things,” said Mrs. Vincy,
soothingly, stroking her son’s head. “There’s a fire in the smoking-room on
purpose. It’s your father’s wish, you know—Fred, my dear—and I always
tell him you will be good, and go to college again to take your degree.”
Fred drew his mother’s hand down to his lips, but said nothing.
“I suppose you are not going out riding to-day?” said Rosamond,
lingering a little after her mamma was gone.
“No; why?”
“Papa says I may have the chestnut to ride now.”
“You can go with me to-morrow, if you like. Only I am going to Stone
Court, remember.”
“I want to ride so much, it is indifferent to me where we go.” Rosamond
really wished to go to Stone Court, of all other places.
“Oh, I say, Rosy,” said Fred, as she was passing out of the room, “if you
are going to the piano, let me come and play some airs with you.”
“Pray do not ask me this morning.”
“Why not this morning?”
“Really, Fred, I wish you would leave off playing the flute. A man looks
very silly playing the flute. And you play so out of tune.”
“When next any one makes love to you, Miss Rosamond, I will tell him
how obliging you are.”

“Why should you expect me to oblige you by hearing you play the flute,
any more than I should expect you to oblige me by not playing it?”
“And why should you expect me to take you out riding?”
This question led to an adjustment, for Rosamond had set her mind on
that particular ride.
So Fred was gratified with nearly an hour’s practice of “Ar hyd y nos,”
“Ye banks and braes,” and other favorite airs from his “Instructor on the
Flute;” a wheezy performance, into which he threw much ambition and an
irrepressible hopefulness.

CHAPTER XII.
He had more tow on his distaffe
Than Gerveis knew.
—CHAUCER.

The ride to Stone Court, which Fred and Rosamond took the next
morning, lay through a pretty bit of midland landscape, almost all meadows
and pastures, with hedgerows still allowed to grow in bushy beauty and to
spread out coral fruit for the birds. Little details gave each field a particular
physiognomy, dear to the eyes that have looked on them from childhood:
the pool in the corner where the grasses were dank and trees leaned
whisperingly; the great oak shadowing a bare place in mid-pasture; the high
bank where the ash-trees grew; the sudden slope of the old marl-pit making
a red background for the burdock; the huddled roofs and ricks of the
homestead without a traceable way of approach; the gray gate and fences
against the depths of the bordering wood; and the stray hovel, its old, old
thatch full of mossy hills and valleys with wondrous modulations of light
and shadow such as we travel far to see in later life, and see larger, but not
more beautiful. These are the things that make the gamut of joy in
landscape to midland-bred souls—the things they toddled among, or
perhaps learned by heart standing between their father’s knees while he
drove leisurely.
But the road, even the byroad, was excellent; for Lowick, as we have
seen, was not a parish of muddy lanes and poor tenants; and it was into
Lowick parish that Fred and Rosamond entered after a couple of miles’
riding. Another mile would bring them to Stone Court, and at the end of the
first half, the house was already visible, looking as if it had been arrested in
its growth toward a stone mansion by an unexpected budding of farm-
buildings on its left flank, which had hindered it from becoming anything
more than the substantial dwelling of a gentleman farmer. It was not the less
agreeable an object in the distance for the cluster of pinnacled corn-ricks
which balanced the fine row of walnuts on the right.

Presently it was possible to discern something that might be a gig on the
circular drive before the front door.
“Dear me,” said Rosamond, “I hope none of my uncle’s horrible relations
are there.”
“They are, though. That is Mrs. Waule’s gig—the last yellow gig left, I
should think. When I see Mrs. Waule in it, I understand how yellow can
have been worn for mourning. That gig seems to me more funereal than a
hearse. But then Mrs. Waule always has black crape on. How does she
manage it, Rosy? Her friends can’t always be dying.”
“I don’t know at all. And she is not in the least evangelical,” said
Rosamond, reflectively, as if that religious point of view would have fully
accounted for perpetual crape. “And, not poor,” she added, after a moment’s
pause.
“No, by George! They are as rich as Jews, those Waules and
Featherstones; I mean, for people like them, who don’t want to spend
anything. And yet they hang about my uncle like vultures, and are afraid of
a farthing going away from their side of the family. But I believe he hates
them all.”
The Mrs. Waule who was so far from being admirable in the eyes of these
distant connections, had happened to say this very morning (not at all with a
defiant air, but in a low, muffled, neutral tone, as of a voice heard through
cotton wool) that she did not wish “to enjoy their good opinion.” She was
seated, as she observed, on her own brother’s hearth, and had been Jane
Featherstone five-and-twenty years before she had been Jane Waule, which
entitled her to speak when her own brother’s name had been made free with
by those who had no right to it.
“What are you driving at there?” said Mr. Featherstone, holding his stick
between his knees and settling his wig, while he gave her a momentary
sharp glance, which seemed to react on him like a draught of cold air and
set him coughing.
Mrs. Waule had to defer her answer till he was quiet again, till Mary
Garth had supplied him with fresh syrup, and he had begun to rub the gold
knob of his stick, looking bitterly at the fire. It was a bright fire, but it made
no difference to the chill-looking purplish tint of Mrs. Waule’s face, which
was as neutral as her voice; having mere chinks for eyes, and lips that
hardly moved in speaking.

“The doctors can’t master that cough, brother. It’s just like what I have;
for I’m your own sister, constitution and everything. But, as I was saying,
it’s a pity Mrs. Vincy’s family can’t be better conducted.”
“Tchah! you said nothing o’ the sort. You said somebody had made free
with my name.”
“And no more than can be proved, if what everybody says is true. My
brother Solomon tells me it’s the talk up and down in Middlemarch how
unsteady young Vincy is, and has been forever gambling at billiards since
home he came.”
“Nonsense! What’s a game at billiards? It’s a good gentlemanly game;
and young Vincy is not a clodhopper. If your son John took to billiards,
now, he’d make a fool of himself.”
“Your nephew John never took to billiards or any other game, brother,
and is far from losing hundreds of pounds, which, if what everybody says is
true, must be found somewhere else than out of Mr. Vincy the father’s
pocket. For they say he’s been losing money for years, though nobody
would think so, to see him go coursing and keeping open house as they do.
And I’ve heard say Mr. Bulstrode condemns Mrs. Vincy beyond anything
for her flightiness, and spoiling her children so.”
“What’s Bulstrode to me? I don’t bank with him.”
“Well, Mrs. Bulstrode is Mr. Vincy’s own sister, and they do say that Mr.
Vincy mostly trades on the Bank money; and you may see yourself, brother,
when a woman past forty has pink strings always flying, and that light way
of laughing at everything, it’s very unbecoming. But indulging your
children is one thing, and finding money to pay their debts is another. And
it’s openly said that young Vincy has raised money on his expectations. I
don’t say what expectations. Miss Garth hears me, and is welcome to tell
again. I know young people hang together.”
“No, thank you, Mrs. Waule,” said Mary Garth. “I dislike hearing scandal
too much to wish to repeat it.”
Mr. Featherstone rubbed the knob of his stick and made a brief
convulsive show of laughter, which had much the same genuineness as an
old whist-player’s chuckle over a bad hand. Still looking at the fire, he said
—

“And who pretends to say Fred Vincy hasn’t got expectations? Such a
fine, spirited fellow is like enough to have ’em.”
There was a slight pause before Mrs. Waule replied, and when she did so,
her voice seemed to be slightly moistened with tears, though her face was
still dry.
“Whether or no, brother, it is naturally painful to me and my brother
Solomon to hear your name made free with, and your complaint being such
as may carry you off sudden, and people who are no more Featherstones
than the Merry-Andrew at the fair, openly reckoning on your property
coming to them. And me your own sister, and Solomon your own brother!
And if that’s to be it, what has it pleased the Almighty to make families
for?” Here Mrs. Waule’s tears fell, but with moderation.
“Come, out with it, Jane!” said Mr. Featherstone, looking at her. “You
mean to say, Fred Vincy has been getting somebody to advance him money
on what he says he knows about my will, eh?”
“I never said so, brother” (Mrs. Waule’s voice had again become dry and
unshaken). “It was told me by my brother Solomon last night when he
called coming from market to give me advice about the old wheat, me being
a widow, and my son John only three-and-twenty, though steady beyond
anything. And he had it from most undeniable authority, and not one, but
many.”
“Stuff and nonsense! I don’t believe a word of it. It’s all a got-up story.
Go to the window, missy; I thought I heard a horse. See if the doctor’s
coming.”
“Not got up by me, brother, nor yet by Solomon, who, whatever else he
may be—and I don’t deny he has oddities—has made his will and parted his
property equal between such kin as he’s friends with; though, for my part, I
think there are times when some should be considered more than others.
But Solomon makes it no secret what he means to do.”
“The more fool he!” said Mr. Featherstone, with some difficulty;
breaking into a severe fit of coughing that required Mary Garth to stand
near him, so that she did not find out whose horses they were which
presently paused stamping on the gravel before the door.
Before Mr. Featherstone’s cough was quiet, Rosamond entered, bearing
up her riding-habit with much grace. She bowed ceremoniously to Mrs.

Waule, who said stiffly, “How do you do, miss?” smiled and nodded silently
to Mary, and remained standing till the coughing should cease, and allow
her uncle to notice her.
“Heyday, miss!” he said at last, “you have a fine color. Where’s Fred?”
“Seeing about the horses. He will be in presently.”
“Sit down, sit down. Mrs. Waule, you’d better go.”
Even those neighbors who had called Peter Featherstone an old fox, had
never accused him of being insincerely polite, and his sister was quite used
to the peculiar absence of ceremony with which he marked his sense of
blood-relationship. Indeed, she herself was accustomed to think that entire
freedom from the necessity of behaving agreeably was included in the
Almighty’s intentions about families. She rose slowly without any sign of
resentment, and said in her usual muffled monotone, “Brother, I hope the
new doctor will be able to do something for you. Solomon says there’s great
talk of his cleverness. I’m sure it’s my wish you should be spared. And
there’s none more ready to nurse you than your own sister and your own
nieces, if you’d only say the word. There’s Rebecca, and Joanna, and
Elizabeth, you know.”
“Ay, ay, I remember—you’ll see I’ve remembered ’em all—all dark and
ugly. They’d need have some money, eh? There never was any beauty in the
women of our family; but the Featherstones have always had some money,
and the Waules too. Waule had money too. A warm man was Waule. Ay, ay;
money’s a good egg; and if you’ve got money to leave behind you, lay it in
a warm nest. Good-by, Mrs. Waule.” Here Mr. Featherstone pulled at both
sides of his wig as if he wanted to deafen himself, and his sister went away
ruminating on this oracular speech of his. Notwithstanding her jealousy of
the Vincys and of Mary Garth, there remained as the nethermost sediment
in her mental shallows a persuasion that her brother Peter Featherstone
could never leave his chief property away from his blood-relations:—else,
why had the Almighty carried off his two wives both childless, after he had
gained so much by manganese and things, turning up when nobody
expected it?—and why was there a Lowick parish church, and the Waules
and Powderells all sitting in the same pew for generations, and the
Featherstone pew next to them, if, the Sunday after her brother Peter’s
death, everybody was to know that the property was gone out of the family?
The human mind has at no period accepted a moral chaos; and so

preposterous a result was not strictly conceivable. But we are frightened at
much that is not strictly conceivable.
When Fred came in the old man eyed him with a peculiar twinkle, which
the younger had often had reason to interpret as pride in the satisfactory
details of his appearance.
“You two misses go away,” said Mr. Featherstone. “I want to speak to
Fred.”
“Come into my room, Rosamond, you will not mind the cold for a little
while,” said Mary. The two girls had not only known each other in
childhood, but had been at the same provincial school together (Mary as an
articled pupil), so that they had many memories in common, and liked very
well to talk in private. Indeed, this tête-à-tête was one of Rosamond’s
objects in coming to Stone Court.
Old Featherstone would not begin the dialogue till the door had been
closed. He continued to look at Fred with the same twinkle and with one of
his habitual grimaces, alternately screwing and widening his mouth; and
when he spoke, it was in a low tone, which might be taken for that of an
informer ready to be bought off, rather than for the tone of an offended
senior. He was not a man to feel any strong moral indignation even on
account of trespasses against himself. It was natural that others should want
to get an advantage over him, but then, he was a little too cunning for them.
“So, sir, you’ve been paying ten per cent for money which you’ve
promised to pay off by mortgaging my land when I’m dead and gone, eh?
You put my life at a twelvemonth, say. But I can alter my will yet.”
Fred blushed. He had not borrowed money in that way, for excellent
reasons. But he was conscious of having spoken with some confidence
(perhaps with more than he exactly remembered) about his prospect of
getting Featherstone’s land as a future means of paying present debts.
“I don’t know what you refer to, sir. I have certainly never borrowed any
money on such an insecurity. Please do explain.”
“No, sir, it’s you must explain. I can alter my will yet, let me tell you. I’m
of sound mind—can reckon compound interest in my head, and remember
every fool’s name as well as I could twenty years ago. What the deuce? I’m
under eighty. I say, you must contradict this story.”

“I have contradicted it, sir,” Fred answered, with a touch of impatience,
not remembering that his uncle did not verbally discriminate contradicting
from disproving, though no one was further from confounding the two ideas
than old Featherstone, who often wondered that so many fools took his own
assertions for proofs. “But I contradict it again. The story is a silly lie.”
“Nonsense! you must bring dockiments. It comes from authority.”
“Name the authority, and make him name the man of whom I borrowed
the money, and then I can disprove the story.”
“It’s pretty good authority, I think—a man who knows most of what goes
on in Middlemarch. It’s that fine, religious, charitable uncle o’ yours. Come
now!” Here Mr. Featherstone had his peculiar inward shake which signified
merriment.
“Mr. Bulstrode?”
“Who else, eh?”
“Then the story has grown into this lie out of some sermonizing words he
may have let fall about me. Do they pretend that he named the man who
lent me the money?”
“If there is such a man, depend upon it Bulstrode knows him. But,
supposing you only tried to get the money lent, and didn’t get it—Bulstrode
’ud know that too. You bring me a writing from Bulstrode to say he doesn’t
believe you’ve ever promised to pay your debts out o’ my land. Come
now!”
Mr. Featherstone’s face required its whole scale of grimaces as a
muscular outlet to his silent triumph in the soundness of his faculties.
Fred felt himself to be in a disgusting dilemma.
“You must be joking, sir. Mr. Bulstrode, like other men, believes scores
of things that are not true, and he has a prejudice against me. I could easily
get him to write that he knew no facts in proof of the report you speak of,
though it might lead to unpleasantness. But I could hardly ask him to write
down what he believes or does not believe about me.” Fred paused an
instant, and then added, in politic appeal to his uncle’s vanity, “That is
hardly a thing for a gentleman to ask.” But he was disappointed in the
result.
“Ay, I know what you mean. You’d sooner offend me than Bulstrode.
And what’s he?—he’s got no land hereabout that ever I heard tell of. A

speckilating fellow! He may come down any day, when the devil leaves off
backing him. And that’s what his religion means: he wants God A’mighty to
come in. That’s nonsense! There’s one thing I made out pretty clear when I
used to go to church—and it’s this: God A’mighty sticks to the land. He
promises land, and He gives land, and He makes chaps rich with corn and
cattle. But you take the other side. You like Bulstrode and speckilation
better than Featherstone and land.”
“I beg your pardon, sir,” said Fred, rising, standing with his back to the
fire and beating his boot with his whip. “I like neither Bulstrode nor
speculation.” He spoke rather sulkily, feeling himself stalemated.
“Well, well, you can do without me, that’s pretty clear,” said old
Featherstone, secretly disliking the possibility that Fred would show
himself at all independent. “You neither want a bit of land to make a squire
of you instead of a starving parson, nor a lift of a hundred pound by the
way. It’s all one to me. I can make five codicils if I like, and I shall keep my
bank-notes for a nest-egg. It’s all one to me.”
Fred colored again. Featherstone had rarely given him presents of money,
and at this moment it seemed almost harder to part with the immediate
prospect of bank-notes than with the more distant prospect of the land.
“I am not ungrateful, sir. I never meant to show disregard for any kind
intentions you might have towards me. On the contrary.”
“Very good. Then prove it. You bring me a letter from Bulstrode saying
he doesn’t believe you’ve been cracking and promising to pay your debts
out o’ my land, and then, if there’s any scrape you’ve got into, we’ll see if I
can’t back you a bit. Come now! That’s a bargain. Here, give me your arm.
I’ll try and walk round the room.”
Fred, in spite of his irritation, had kindness enough in him to be a little
sorry for the unloved, unvenerated old man, who with his dropsical legs
looked more than usually pitiable in walking. While giving his arm, he
thought that he should not himself like to be an old fellow with his
constitution breaking up; and he waited good-temperedly, first before the
window to hear the wonted remarks about the guinea-fowls and the
weather-cock, and then before the scanty book-shelves, of which the chief
glories in dark calf were Josephus, Culpepper, Klopstock’s “Messiah,” and
several volumes of the “Gentleman’s Magazine.”
“Read me the names o’ the books. Come now! you’re a college man.”

Fred gave him the titles.
“What did missy want with more books? What must you be bringing her
more books for?”
“They amuse her, sir. She is very fond of reading.”
“A little too fond,” said Mr. Featherstone, captiously. “She was for
reading when she sat with me. But I put a stop to that. She’s got the
newspaper to read out loud. That’s enough for one day, I should think. I
can’t abide to see her reading to herself. You mind and not bring her any
more books, do you hear?”
“Yes, sir, I hear.” Fred had received this order before, and had secretly
disobeyed it. He intended to disobey it again.
“Ring the bell,” said Mr. Featherstone; “I want missy to come down.”
Rosamond and Mary had been talking faster than their male friends. They
did not think of sitting down, but stood at the toilet-table near the window
while Rosamond took off her hat, adjusted her veil, and applied little
touches of her finger-tips to her hair—hair of infantine fairness, neither
flaxen nor yellow. Mary Garth seemed all the plainer standing at an angle
between the two nymphs—the one in the glass, and the one out of it, who
looked at each other with eyes of heavenly blue, deep enough to hold the
most exquisite meanings an ingenious beholder could put into them, and
deep enough to hide the meanings of the owner if these should happen to be
less exquisite. Only a few children in Middlemarch looked blond by the
side of Rosamond, and the slim figure displayed by her riding-habit had
delicate undulations. In fact, most men in Middlemarch, except her
brothers, held that Miss Vincy was the best girl in the world, and some
called her an angel. Mary Garth, on the contrary, had the aspect of an
ordinary sinner: she was brown; her curly dark hair was rough and
stubborn; her stature was low; and it would not be true to declare, in
satisfactory antithesis, that she had all the virtues. Plainness has its peculiar
temptations and vices quite as much as beauty; it is apt either to feign
amiability, or, not feigning it, to show all the repulsiveness of discontent: at
any rate, to be called an ugly thing in contrast with that lovely creature your
companion, is apt to produce some effect beyond a sense of fine veracity
and fitness in the phrase. At the age of two-and-twenty Mary had certainly
not attained that perfect good sense and good principle which are usually
recommended to the less fortunate girl, as if they were to be obtained in

quantities ready mixed, with a flavor of resignation as required. Her
shrewdness had a streak of satiric bitterness continually renewed and never
carried utterly out of sight, except by a strong current of gratitude towards
those who, instead of telling her that she ought to be contented, did
something to make her so. Advancing womanhood had tempered her
plainness, which was of a good human sort, such as the mothers of our race
have very commonly worn in all latitudes under a more or less becoming
headgear. Rembrandt would have painted her with pleasure, and would
have made her broad features look out of the canvas with intelligent
honesty. For honesty, truth-telling fairness, was Mary’s reigning virtue: she
neither tried to create illusions, nor indulged in them for her own behoof,
and when she was in a good mood she had humor enough in her to laugh at
herself. When she and Rosamond happened both to be reflected in the glass,
she said, laughingly—
“What a brown patch I am by the side of you, Rosy! You are the most
unbecoming companion.”
“Oh no! No one thinks of your appearance, you are so sensible and
useful, Mary. Beauty is of very little consequence in reality,” said
Rosamond, turning her head towards Mary, but with eyes swerving towards
the new view of her neck in the glass.
“You mean my beauty,” said Mary, rather sardonically.
Rosamond thought, “Poor Mary, she takes the kindest things ill.” Aloud
she said, “What have you been doing lately?”
“I? Oh, minding the house—pouring out syrup—pretending to be
amiable and contented—learning to have a bad opinion of everybody.”
“It is a wretched life for you.”
“No,” said Mary, curtly, with a little toss of her head. “I think my life is
pleasanter than your Miss Morgan’s.”
“Yes; but Miss Morgan is so uninteresting, and not young.”
“She is interesting to herself, I suppose; and I am not at all sure that
everything gets easier as one gets older.”
“No,” said Rosamond, reflectively; “one wonders what such people do,
without any prospect. To be sure, there is religion as a support. But,” she
added, dimpling, “it is very different with you, Mary. You may have an
offer.”

“Has any one told you he means to make me one?”
“Of course not. I mean, there is a gentleman who may fall in love with
you, seeing you almost every day.”
A certain change in Mary’s face was chiefly determined by the resolve
not to show any change.
“Does that always make people fall in love?” she answered, carelessly;
“it seems to me quite as often a reason for detesting each other.”
“Not when they are interesting and agreeable. I hear that Mr. Lydgate is
both.”
“Oh, Mr. Lydgate!” said Mary, with an unmistakable lapse into
indifference. “You want to know something about him,” she added, not
choosing to indulge Rosamond’s indirectness.
“Merely, how you like him.”
“There is no question of liking at present. My liking always wants some
little kindness to kindle it. I am not magnanimous enough to like people
who speak to me without seeming to see me.”
“Is he so haughty?” said Rosamond, with heightened satisfaction. “You
know that he is of good family?”
“No; he did not give that as a reason.”
“Mary! you are the oddest girl. But what sort of looking man is he?
Describe him to me.”
“How can one describe a man? I can give you an inventory: heavy
eyebrows, dark eyes, a straight nose, thick dark hair, large solid white hands
—and—let me see—oh, an exquisite cambric pocket-handkerchief. But you
will see him. You know this is about the time of his visits.”
Rosamond blushed a little, but said, meditatively, “I rather like a haughty
manner. I cannot endure a rattling young man.”
“I did not tell you that Mr. Lydgate was haughty; but il y en a pour tous
les goûts, as little Mamselle used to say, and if any girl can choose the
particular sort of conceit she would like, I should think it is you, Rosy.”
“Haughtiness is not conceit; I call Fred conceited.”
“I wish no one said any worse of him. He should be more careful. Mrs.
Waule has been telling uncle that Fred is very unsteady.” Mary spoke from
a girlish impulse which got the better of her judgment. There was a vague

uneasiness associated with the word “unsteady” which she hoped
Rosamond might say something to dissipate. But she purposely abstained
from mentioning Mrs. Waule’s more special insinuation.
“Oh, Fred is horrid!” said Rosamond. She would not have allowed
herself so unsuitable a word to any one but Mary.
“What do you mean by horrid?”
“He is so idle, and makes papa so angry, and says he will not take
orders.”
“I think Fred is quite right.”
“How can you say he is quite right, Mary? I thought you had more sense
of religion.”
“He is not fit to be a clergyman.”
“But he ought to be fit.”—“Well, then, he is not what he ought to be. I
know some other people who are in the same case.”
“But no one approves of them. I should not like to marry a clergyman;
but there must be clergymen.”
“It does not follow that Fred must be one.”
“But when papa has been at the expense of educating him for it! And
only suppose, if he should have no fortune left him?”
“I can suppose that very well,” said Mary, dryly.
“Then I wonder you can defend Fred,” said Rosamond, inclined to push
this point.
“I don’t defend him,” said Mary, laughing; “I would defend any parish
from having him for a clergyman.”
“But of course if he were a clergyman, he must be different.”
“Yes, he would be a great hypocrite; and he is not that yet.”
“It is of no use saying anything to you, Mary. You always take Fred’s
part.”
“Why should I not take his part?” said Mary, lighting up. “He would take
mine. He is the only person who takes the least trouble to oblige me.”
“You make me feel very uncomfortable, Mary,” said Rosamond, with her
gravest mildness; “I would not tell mamma for the world.”
“What would you not tell her?” said Mary, angrily.

“Pray do not go into a rage, Mary,” said Rosamond, mildly as ever.
“If your mamma is afraid that Fred will make me an offer, tell her that I
would not marry him if he asked me. But he is not going to do so, that I am
aware. He certainly never has asked me.”
“Mary, you are always so violent.”
“And you are always so exasperating.”
“I? What can you blame me for?”
“Oh, blameless people are always the most exasperating. There is the bell
—I think we must go down.”
“I did not mean to quarrel,” said Rosamond, putting on her hat.
“Quarrel? Nonsense; we have not quarrelled. If one is not to get into a
rage sometimes, what is the good of being friends?”
“Am I to repeat what you have said?”
“Just as you please. I never say what I am afraid of having repeated. But
let us go down.”
Mr. Lydgate was rather late this morning, but the visitors stayed long
enough to see him; for Mr. Featherstone asked Rosamond to sing to him,
and she herself was so kind as to propose a second favorite song of his
—“Flow on, thou shining river”—after she had sung “Home, sweet home”
(which she detested). This hard-headed old Overreach approved of the
sentimental song, as the suitable garnish for girls, and also as fundamentally
fine, sentiment being the right thing for a song.
Mr. Featherstone was still applauding the last performance, and assuring
missy that her voice was as clear as a blackbird’s, when Mr. Lydgate’s horse
passed the window.
His dull expectation of the usual disagreeable routine with an aged
patient—who can hardly believe that medicine would not “set him up” if
the doctor were only clever enough—added to his general disbelief in
Middlemarch charms, made a doubly effective background to this vision of
Rosamond, whom old Featherstone made haste ostentatiously to introduce
as his niece, though he had never thought it worth while to speak of Mary
Garth in that light. Nothing escaped Lydgate in Rosamond’s graceful
behavior: how delicately she waived the notice which the old man’s want of
taste had thrust upon her by a quiet gravity, not showing her dimples on the

wrong occasion, but showing them afterwards in speaking to Mary, to
whom she addressed herself with so much good-natured interest, that
Lydgate, after quickly examining Mary more fully than he had done before,
saw an adorable kindness in Rosamond’s eyes. But Mary from some cause
looked rather out of temper.
“Miss Rosy has been singing me a song—you’ve nothing to say against
that, eh, doctor?” said Mr. Featherstone. “I like it better than your physic.”
“That has made me forget how the time was going,” said Rosamond,
rising to reach her hat, which she had laid aside before singing, so that her
flower-like head on its white stem was seen in perfection above her riding-
habit. “Fred, we must really go.”
“Very good,” said Fred, who had his own reasons for not being in the
best spirits, and wanted to get away.
“Miss Vincy is a musician?” said Lydgate, following her with his eyes.
(Every nerve and muscle in Rosamond was adjusted to the consciousness
that she was being looked at. She was by nature an actress of parts that
entered into her physique: she even acted her own character, and so well,
that she did not know it to be precisely her own.)
“The best in Middlemarch, I’ll be bound,” said Mr. Featherstone, “let the
next be who she will. Eh, Fred? Speak up for your sister.”
“I’m afraid I’m out of court, sir. My evidence would be good for
nothing.”
“Middlemarch has not a very high standard, uncle,” said Rosamond, with
a pretty lightness, going towards her whip, which lay at a distance.
Lydgate was quick in anticipating her. He reached the whip before she
did, and turned to present it to her. She bowed and looked at him: he of
course was looking at her, and their eyes met with that peculiar meeting
which is never arrived at by effort, but seems like a sudden divine clearance
of haze. I think Lydgate turned a little paler than usual, but Rosamond
blushed deeply and felt a certain astonishment. After that, she was really
anxious to go, and did not know what sort of stupidity her uncle was talking
of when she went to shake hands with him.
Yet this result, which she took to be a mutual impression, called falling in
love, was just what Rosamond had contemplated beforehand. Ever since
that important new arrival in Middlemarch she had woven a little future, of

which something like this scene was the necessary beginning. Strangers,
whether wrecked and clinging to a raft, or duly escorted and accompanied
by portmanteaus, have always had a circumstantial fascination for the virgin
mind, against which native merit has urged itself in vain. And a stranger
was absolutely necessary to Rosamond’s social romance, which had always
turned on a lover and bridegroom who was not a Middlemarcher, and who
had no connections at all like her own: of late, indeed, the construction
seemed to demand that he should somehow be related to a baronet. Now
that she and the stranger had met, reality proved much more moving than
anticipation, and Rosamond could not doubt that this was the great epoch of
her life. She judged of her own symptoms as those of awakening love, and
she held it still more natural that Mr. Lydgate should have fallen in love at
first sight of her. These things happened so often at balls, and why not by
the morning light, when the complexion showed all the better for it?
Rosamond, though no older than Mary, was rather used to being fallen in
love with; but she, for her part, had remained indifferent and fastidiously
critical towards both fresh sprig and faded bachelor. And here was Mr.
Lydgate suddenly corresponding to her ideal, being altogether foreign to
Middlemarch, carrying a certain air of distinction congruous with good
family, and possessing connections which offered vistas of that middle-class
heaven, rank; a man of talent, also, whom it would be especially delightful
to enslave: in fact, a man who had touched her nature quite newly, and
brought a vivid interest into her life which was better than any fancied
“might-be” such as she was in the habit of opposing to the actual.
Thus, in riding home, both the brother and the sister were preoccupied
and inclined to be silent. Rosamond, whose basis for her structure had the
usual airy slightness, was of remarkably detailed and realistic imagination
when the foundation had been once presupposed; and before they had
ridden a mile she was far on in the costume and introductions of her
wedded life, having determined on her house in Middlemarch, and foreseen
the visits she would pay to her husband’s high-bred relatives at a distance,
whose finished manners she could appropriate as thoroughly as she had
done her school accomplishments, preparing herself thus for vaguer
elevations which might ultimately come. There was nothing financial, still
less sordid, in her previsions: she cared about what were considered
refinements, and not about the money that was to pay for them.

Fred’s mind, on the other hand, was busy with an anxiety which even his
ready hopefulness could not immediately quell. He saw no way of eluding
Featherstone’s stupid demand without incurring consequences which he
liked less even than the task of fulfilling it. His father was already out of
humor with him, and would be still more so if he were the occasion of any
additional coolness between his own family and the Bulstrodes. Then, he
himself hated having to go and speak to his uncle Bulstrode, and perhaps
after drinking wine he had said many foolish things about Featherstone’s
property, and these had been magnified by report. Fred felt that he made a
wretched figure as a fellow who bragged about expectations from a queer
old miser like Featherstone, and went to beg for certificates at his bidding.
But—those expectations! He really had them, and he saw no agreeable
alternative if he gave them up; besides, he had lately made a debt which
galled him extremely, and old Featherstone had almost bargained to pay it
off. The whole affair was miserably small: his debts were small, even his
expectations were not anything so very magnificent. Fred had known men
to whom he would have been ashamed of confessing the smallness of his
scrapes. Such ruminations naturally produced a streak of misanthropic
bitterness. To be born the son of a Middlemarch manufacturer, and
inevitable heir to nothing in particular, while such men as Mainwaring and
Vyan—certainly life was a poor business, when a spirited young fellow,
with a good appetite for the best of everything, had so poor an outlook.
It had not occurred to Fred that the introduction of Bulstrode’s name in
the matter was a fiction of old Featherstone’s; nor could this have made any
difference to his position. He saw plainly enough that the old man wanted to
exercise his power by tormenting him a little, and also probably to get some
satisfaction out of seeing him on unpleasant terms with Bulstrode. Fred
fancied that he saw to the bottom of his uncle Featherstone’s soul, though in
reality half what he saw there was no more than the reflex of his own
inclinations. The difficult task of knowing another soul is not for young
gentlemen whose consciousness is chiefly made up of their own wishes.
Fred’s main point of debate with himself was, whether he should tell his
father, or try to get through the affair without his father’s knowledge. It was
probably Mrs. Waule who had been talking about him; and if Mary Garth
had repeated Mrs. Waule’s report to Rosamond, it would be sure to reach
his father, who would as surely question him about it. He said to Rosamond,
as they slackened their pace—

“Rosy, did Mary tell you that Mrs. Waule had said anything about me?”
“Yes, indeed, she did.”
“What?”
“That you were very unsteady.”
“Was that all?”
“I should think that was enough, Fred.”
“You are sure she said no more?”
“Mary mentioned nothing else. But really, Fred, I think you ought to be
ashamed.”
“Oh, fudge! Don’t lecture me. What did Mary say about it?”
“I am not obliged to tell you. You care so very much what Mary says, and
you are too rude to allow me to speak.”
“Of course I care what Mary says. She is the best girl I know.”
“I should never have thought she was a girl to fall in love with.”
“How do you know what men would fall in love with? Girls never
know.”
“At least, Fred, let me advise you not to fall in love with her, for she says
she would not marry you if you asked her.”
“She might have waited till I did ask her.”
“I knew it would nettle you, Fred.”
“Not at all. She would not have said so if you had not provoked her.”
Before reaching home, Fred concluded that he would tell the whole affair as
simply as possible to his father, who might perhaps take on himself the
unpleasant business of speaking to Bulstrode.

BOOK II.
OLD AND YOUNG.

CHAPTER XIII.
1st Gent. How class your man?—as better than the most,
Or, seeming better, worse beneath that cloak?
As saint or knave, pilgrim or hypocrite?

2d Gent. Nay, tell me how you class your wealth of books
The drifted relics of all time.
As well sort them at once by size and livery:
Vellum, tall copies, and the common calf
Will hardly cover more diversity
Than all your labels cunningly devised
To class your unread authors.

In consequence of what he had heard from Fred, Mr. Vincy determined to
speak with Mr. Bulstrode in his private room at the Bank at half-past one,
when he was usually free from other callers. But a visitor had come in at
one o’clock, and Mr. Bulstrode had so much to say to him, that there was
little chance of the interview being over in half an hour. The banker’s
speech was fluent, but it was also copious, and he used up an appreciable
amount of time in brief meditative pauses. Do not imagine his sickly aspect
to have been of the yellow, black-haired sort: he had a pale blond skin, thin
gray-besprinkled brown hair, light-gray eyes, and a large forehead. Loud
men called his subdued tone an undertone, and sometimes implied that it
was inconsistent with openness; though there seems to be no reason why a
loud man should not be given to concealment of anything except his own
voice, unless it can be shown that Holy Writ has placed the seat of candor in
the lungs. Mr. Bulstrode had also a deferential bending attitude in listening,
and an apparently fixed attentiveness in his eyes which made those persons
who thought themselves worth hearing infer that he was seeking the utmost
improvement from their discourse. Others, who expected to make no great
figure, disliked this kind of moral lantern turned on them. If you are not
proud of your cellar, there is no thrill of satisfaction in seeing your guest
hold up his wine-glass to the light and look judicial. Such joys are reserved
for conscious merit. Hence Mr. Bulstrode’s close attention was not
agreeable to the publicans and sinners in Middlemarch; it was attributed by

some to his being a Pharisee, and by others to his being Evangelical. Less
superficial reasoners among them wished to know who his father and
grandfather were, observing that five-and-twenty years ago nobody had
ever heard of a Bulstrode in Middlemarch. To his present visitor, Lydgate,
the scrutinizing look was a matter of indifference: he simply formed an
unfavorable opinion of the banker’s constitution, and concluded that he had
an eager inward life with little enjoyment of tangible things.
“I shall be exceedingly obliged if you will look in on me here
occasionally, Mr. Lydgate,” the banker observed, after a brief pause. “If, as I
dare to hope, I have the privilege of finding you a valuable coadjutor in the
interesting matter of hospital management, there will be many questions
which we shall need to discuss in private. As to the new hospital, which is
nearly finished, I shall consider what you have said about the advantages of
the special destination for fevers. The decision will rest with me, for though
Lord Medlicote has given the land and timber for the building, he is not
disposed to give his personal attention to the object.”
“There are few things better worth the pains in a provincial town like
this,” said Lydgate. “A fine fever hospital in addition to the old infirmary
might be the nucleus of a medical school here, when once we get our
medical reforms; and what would do more for medical education than the
spread of such schools over the country? A born provincial man who has a
grain of public spirit as well as a few ideas, should do what he can to resist
the rush of everything that is a little better than common towards London.
Any valid professional aims may often find a freer, if not a richer field, in
the provinces.”
One of Lydgate’s gifts was a voice habitually deep and sonorous, yet
capable of becoming very low and gentle at the right moment. About his
ordinary bearing there was a certain fling, a fearless expectation of success,
a confidence in his own powers and integrity much fortified by contempt
for petty obstacles or seductions of which he had had no experience. But
this proud openness was made lovable by an expression of unaffected good-
will. Mr. Bulstrode perhaps liked him the better for the difference between
them in pitch and manners; he certainly liked him the better, as Rosamond
did, for being a stranger in Middlemarch. One can begin so many things
with a new person!—even begin to be a better man.

“I shall rejoice to furnish your zeal with fuller opportunities,” Mr.
Bulstrode answered; “I mean, by confiding to you the superintendence of
my new hospital, should a maturer knowledge favor that issue, for I am
determined that so great an object shall not be shackled by our two
physicians. Indeed, I am encouraged to consider your advent to this town as
a gracious indication that a more manifest blessing is now to be awarded to
my efforts, which have hitherto been much withstood. With regard to the
old infirmary, we have gained the initial point—I mean your election. And
now I hope you will not shrink from incurring a certain amount of jealousy
and dislike from your professional brethren by presenting yourself as a
reformer.”
“I will not profess bravery,” said Lydgate, smiling, “but I acknowledge a
good deal of pleasure in fighting, and I should not care for my profession, if
I did not believe that better methods were to be found and enforced there as
well as everywhere else.”
“The standard of that profession is low in Middlemarch, my dear sir,”
said the banker. “I mean in knowledge and skill; not in social status, for our
medical men are most of them connected with respectable townspeople
here. My own imperfect health has induced me to give some attention to
those palliative resources which the divine mercy has placed within our
reach. I have consulted eminent men in the metropolis, and I am painfully
aware of the backwardness under which medical treatment labors in our
provincial districts.”
“Yes;—with our present medical rules and education, one must be
satisfied now and then to meet with a fair practitioner. As to all the higher
questions which determine the starting-point of a diagnosis—as to the
philosophy of medical evidence—any glimmering of these can only come
from a scientific culture of which country practitioners have usually no
more notion than the man in the moon.”
Mr. Bulstrode, bending and looking intently, found the form which
Lydgate had given to his agreement not quite suited to his comprehension.
Under such circumstances a judicious man changes the topic and enters on
ground where his own gifts may be more useful.
“I am aware,” he said, “that the peculiar bias of medical ability is towards
material means. Nevertheless, Mr. Lydgate, I hope we shall not vary in
sentiment as to a measure in which you are not likely to be actively

concerned, but in which your sympathetic concurrence may be an aid to me.
You recognize, I hope; the existence of spiritual interests in your patients?”
“Certainly I do. But those words are apt to cover different meanings to
different minds.”
“Precisely. And on such subjects wrong teaching is as fatal as no
teaching. Now a point which I have much at heart to secure is a new
regulation as to clerical attendance at the old infirmary. The building stands
in Mr. Farebrother’s parish. You know Mr. Farebrother?”
“I have seen him. He gave me his vote. I must call to thank him. He
seems a very bright pleasant little fellow. And I understand he is a
naturalist.”
“Mr. Farebrother, my dear sir, is a man deeply painful to contemplate. I
suppose there is not a clergyman in this country who has greater talents.”
Mr. Bulstrode paused and looked meditative.
“I have not yet been pained by finding any excessive talent in
Middlemarch,” said Lydgate, bluntly.
“What I desire,” Mr. Bulstrode continued, looking still more serious, “is
that Mr. Farebrother’s attendance at the hospital should be superseded by
the appointment of a chaplain—of Mr. Tyke, in fact—and that no other
spiritual aid should be called in.”
“As a medical man I could have no opinion on such a point unless I knew
Mr. Tyke, and even then I should require to know the cases in which he was
applied.” Lydgate smiled, but he was bent on being circumspect.
“Of course you cannot enter fully into the merits of this measure at
present. But”—here Mr. Bulstrode began to speak with a more chiselled
emphasis—“the subject is likely to be referred to the medical board of the
infirmary, and what I trust I may ask of you is, that in virtue of the
cooperation between us which I now look forward to, you will not, so far as
you are concerned, be influenced by my opponents in this matter.”
“I hope I shall have nothing to do with clerical disputes,” said Lydgate.
“The path I have chosen is to work well in my own profession.”
“My responsibility, Mr. Lydgate, is of a broader kind. With me, indeed,
this question is one of sacred accountableness; whereas with my opponents,
I have good reason to say that it is an occasion for gratifying a spirit of
worldly opposition. But I shall not therefore drop one iota of my

convictions, or cease to identify myself with that truth which an evil
generation hates. I have devoted myself to this object of hospital-
improvement, but I will boldly confess to you, Mr. Lydgate, that I should
have no interest in hospitals if I believed that nothing more was concerned
therein than the cure of mortal diseases. I have another ground of action,
and in the face of persecution I will not conceal it.”
Mr. Bulstrode’s voice had become a loud and agitated whisper as he said
the last words.
“There we certainly differ,” said Lydgate. But he was not sorry that the
door was now opened, and Mr. Vincy was announced. That florid sociable
personage was become more interesting to him since he had seen
Rosamond. Not that, like her, he had been weaving any future in which
their lots were united; but a man naturally remembers a charming girl with
pleasure, and is willing to dine where he may see her again. Before he took
leave, Mr. Vincy had given that invitation which he had been “in no hurry
about,” for Rosamond at breakfast had mentioned that she thought her uncle
Featherstone had taken the new doctor into great favor.
Mr. Bulstrode, alone with his brother-in-law, poured himself out a glass
of water, and opened a sandwich-box.
“I cannot persuade you to adopt my regimen, Vincy?”
“No, no; I’ve no opinion of that system. Life wants padding,” said Mr.
Vincy, unable to omit his portable theory. “However,” he went on, accenting
the word, as if to dismiss all irrelevance, “what I came here to talk about
was a little affair of my young scapegrace, Fred’s.”
“That is a subject on which you and I are likely to take quite as different
views as on diet, Vincy.”
“I hope not this time.” (Mr. Vincy was resolved to be good-humored.)
“The fact is, it’s about a whim of old Featherstone’s. Somebody has been
cooking up a story out of spite, and telling it to the old man, to try to set
him against Fred. He’s very fond of Fred, and is likely to do something
handsome for him; indeed he has as good as told Fred that he means to
leave him his land, and that makes other people jealous.”
“Vincy, I must repeat, that you will not get any concurrence from me as
to the course you have pursued with your eldest son. It was entirely from
worldly vanity that you destined him for the Church: with a family of three

sons and four daughters, you were not warranted in devoting money to an
expensive education which has succeeded in nothing but in giving him
extravagant idle habits. You are now reaping the consequences.”
To point out other people’s errors was a duty that Mr. Bulstrode rarely
shrank from, but Mr. Vincy was not equally prepared to be patient. When a
man has the immediate prospect of being mayor, and is ready, in the
interests of commerce, to take up a firm attitude on politics generally, he
has naturally a sense of his importance to the framework of things which
seems to throw questions of private conduct into the background. And this
particular reproof irritated him more than any other. It was eminently
superfluous to him to be told that he was reaping the consequences. But he
felt his neck under Bulstrode’s yoke; and though he usually enjoyed
kicking, he was anxious to refrain from that relief.
“As to that, Bulstrode, it’s no use going back. I’m not one of your pattern
men, and I don’t pretend to be. I couldn’t foresee everything in the trade;
there wasn’t a finer business in Middlemarch than ours, and the lad was
clever. My poor brother was in the Church, and would have done well—had
got preferment already, but that stomach fever took him off: else he might
have been a dean by this time. I think I was justified in what I tried to do for
Fred. If you come to religion, it seems to me a man shouldn’t want to carve
out his meat to an ounce beforehand:—one must trust a little to Providence
and be generous. It’s a good British feeling to try and raise your family a
little: in my opinion, it’s a father’s duty to give his sons a fine chance.”
“I don’t wish to act otherwise than as your best friend, Vincy, when I say
that what you have been uttering just now is one mass of worldliness and
inconsistent folly.”
“Very well,” said Mr. Vincy, kicking in spite of resolutions, “I never
professed to be anything but worldly; and, what’s more, I don’t see anybody
else who is not worldly. I suppose you don’t conduct business on what you
call unworldly principles. The only difference I see is that one worldliness
is a little bit honester than another.”
“This kind of discussion is unfruitful, Vincy,” said Mr. Bulstrode, who,
finishing his sandwich, had thrown himself back in his chair, and shaded his
eyes as if weary. “You had some more particular business.”
“Yes, yes. The long and short of it is, somebody has told old
Featherstone, giving you as the authority, that Fred has been borrowing or

trying to borrow money on the prospect of his land. Of course you never
said any such nonsense. But the old fellow will insist on it that Fred should
bring him a denial in your handwriting; that is, just a bit of a note saying
you don’t believe a word of such stuff, either of his having borrowed or
tried to borrow in such a fool’s way. I suppose you can have no objection to
do that.”
“Pardon me. I have an objection. I am by no means sure that your son, in
his recklessness and ignorance—I will use no severer word—has not tried
to raise money by holding out his future prospects, or even that some one
may not have been foolish enough to supply him on so vague a
presumption: there is plenty of such lax money-lending as of other folly in
the world.”
“But Fred gives me his honor that he has never borrowed money on the
pretence of any understanding about his uncle’s land. He is not a liar. I don’t
want to make him better than he is. I have blown him up well—nobody can
say I wink at what he does. But he is not a liar. And I should have thought—
but I may be wrong—that there was no religion to hinder a man from
believing the best of a young fellow, when you don’t know worse. It seems
to me it would be a poor sort of religion to put a spoke in his wheel by
refusing to say you don’t believe such harm of him as you’ve got no good
reason to believe.”
“I am not at all sure that I should be befriending your son by smoothing
his way to the future possession of Featherstone’s property. I cannot regard
wealth as a blessing to those who use it simply as a harvest for this world.
You do not like to hear these things, Vincy, but on this occasion I feel called
upon to tell you that I have no motive for furthering such a disposition of
property as that which you refer to. I do not shrink from saying that it will
not tend to your son’s eternal welfare or to the glory of God. Why then
should you expect me to pen this kind of affidavit, which has no object but
to keep up a foolish partiality and secure a foolish bequest?”
“If you mean to hinder everybody from having money but saints and
evangelists, you must give up some profitable partnerships, that’s all I can
say,” Mr. Vincy burst out very bluntly. “It may be for the glory of God, but
it is not for the glory of the Middlemarch trade, that Plymdale’s house uses
those blue and green dyes it gets from the Brassing manufactory; they rot
the silk, that’s all I know about it. Perhaps if other people knew so much of

the profit went to the glory of God, they might like it better. But I don’t
mind so much about that—I could get up a pretty row, if I chose.”
Mr. Bulstrode paused a little before he answered. “You pain me very
much by speaking in this way, Vincy. I do not expect you to understand my
grounds of action—it is not an easy thing even to thread a path for
principles in the intricacies of the world—still less to make the thread clear
for the careless and the scoffing. You must remember, if you please, that I
stretch my tolerance towards you as my wife’s brother, and that it little
becomes you to complain of me as withholding material help towards the
worldly position of your family. I must remind you that it is not your own
prudence or judgment that has enabled you to keep your place in the trade.”
“Very likely not; but you have been no loser by my trade yet,” said Mr.
Vincy, thoroughly nettled (a result which was seldom much retarded by
previous resolutions). “And when you married Harriet, I don’t see how you
could expect that our families should not hang by the same nail. If you’ve
changed your mind, and want my family to come down in the world, you’d
better say so. I’ve never changed; I’m a plain Churchman now, just as I
used to be before doctrines came up. I take the world as I find it, in trade
and everything else. I’m contented to be no worse than my neighbors. But if
you want us to come down in the world, say so. I shall know better what to
do then.”
“You talk unreasonably. Shall you come down in the world for want of
this letter about your son?”
“Well, whether or not, I consider it very unhandsome of you to refuse it.
Such doings may be lined with religion, but outside they have a nasty, dog-
in-the-manger look. You might as well slander Fred: it comes pretty near to
it when you refuse to say you didn’t set a slander going. It’s this sort of
thing—this tyrannical spirit, wanting to play bishop and banker everywhere
—it’s this sort of thing makes a man’s name stink.”
“Vincy, if you insist on quarrelling with me, it will be exceedingly
painful to Harriet as well as myself,” said Mr. Bulstrode, with a trifle more
eagerness and paleness than usual.
“I don’t want to quarrel. It’s for my interest—and perhaps for yours too
—that we should be friends. I bear you no grudge; I think no worse of you
than I do of other people. A man who half starves himself, and goes the
length in family prayers, and so on, that you do, believes in his religion

whatever it may be: you could turn over your capital just as fast with
cursing and swearing:—plenty of fellows do. You like to be master, there’s
no denying that; you must be first chop in heaven, else you won’t like it
much. But you’re my sister’s husband, and we ought to stick together; and
if I know Harriet, she’ll consider it your fault if we quarrel because you
strain at a gnat in this way, and refuse to do Fred a good turn. And I don’t
mean to say I shall bear it well. I consider it unhandsome.”
Mr. Vincy rose, began to button his great-coat, and looked steadily at his
brother-in-law, meaning to imply a demand for a decisive answer.
This was not the first time that Mr. Bulstrode had begun by admonishing
Mr. Vincy, and had ended by seeing a very unsatisfactory reflection of
himself in the coarse unflattering mirror which that manufacturer’s mind
presented to the subtler lights and shadows of his fellow-men; and perhaps
his experience ought to have warned him how the scene would end. But a
full-fed fountain will be generous with its waters even in the rain, when
they are worse than useless; and a fine fount of admonition is apt to be
equally irrepressible.
It was not in Mr. Bulstrode’s nature to comply directly in consequence of
uncomfortable suggestions. Before changing his course, he always needed
to shape his motives and bring them into accordance with his habitual
standard. He said, at last—
“I will reflect a little, Vincy. I will mention the subject to Harriet. I shall
probably send you a letter.”
“Very well. As soon as you can, please. I hope it will all be settled before
I see you to-morrow.”

CHAPTER XIV.
“Follows here the strict receipt
For that sauce to dainty meat,
Named Idleness, which many eat
By preference, and call it sweet:
First watch for morsels, like a hound
Mix well with buffets, stir them round
With good thick oil of flatteries, And froth with mean self-lauding lies.
Serve warm: the vessels you must choose
To keep it in are dead men’s shoes.”

Mr. Bulstrode’s consultation of Harriet seemed to have had the effect
desired by Mr. Vincy, for early the next morning a letter came which Fred
could carry to Mr. Featherstone as the required testimony.
The old gentleman was staying in bed on account of the cold weather,
and as Mary Garth was not to be seen in the sitting-room, Fred went up-
stairs immediately and presented the letter to his uncle, who, propped up
comfortably on a bed-rest, was not less able than usual to enjoy his
consciousness of wisdom in distrusting and frustrating mankind. He put on
his spectacles to read the letter, pursing up his lips and drawing down their
corners.
“Under the circumstances I will not decline to state my conviction—
tchah! what fine words the fellow puts! He’s as fine as an auctioneer—that
your son Frederic has not obtained any advance of money on bequests
promised by Mr. Featherstone—promised? who said I had ever promised? I
promise nothing—I shall make codicils as long as I like—and that
considering the nature of such a proceeding, it is unreasonable to presume
that a young man of sense and character would attempt it—ah, but the
gentleman doesn’t say you are a young man of sense and character, mark
you that, sir!—As to my own concern with any report of such a nature, I
distinctly affirm that I never made any statement to the effect that your son
had borrowed money on any property that might accrue to him on Mr.
Featherstone’s demise—bless my heart! ‘property’—accrue—demise!
Lawyer Standish is nothing to him. He couldn’t speak finer if he wanted to

borrow. Well,” Mr. Featherstone here looked over his spectacles at Fred,
while he handed back the letter to him with a contemptuous gesture, “you
don’t suppose I believe a thing because Bulstrode writes it out fine, eh?”
Fred colored. “You wished to have the letter, sir. I should think it very
likely that Mr. Bulstrode’s denial is as good as the authority which told you
what he denies.”
“Every bit. I never said I believed either one or the other. And now what
d’ you expect?” said Mr. Featherstone, curtly, keeping on his spectacles, but
withdrawing his hands under his wraps.
“I expect nothing, sir.” Fred with difficulty restrained himself from
venting his irritation. “I came to bring you the letter. If you like I will bid
you good morning.”
“Not yet, not yet. Ring the bell; I want missy to come.”
It was a servant who came in answer to the bell.
“Tell missy to come!” said Mr. Featherstone, impatiently. “What business
had she to go away?” He spoke in the same tone when Mary came.
“Why couldn’t you sit still here till I told you to go? I want my waistcoat
now. I told you always to put it on the bed.”
Mary’s eyes looked rather red, as if she had been crying. It was clear that
Mr. Featherstone was in one of his most snappish humors this morning, and
though Fred had now the prospect of receiving the much-needed present of
money, he would have preferred being free to turn round on the old tyrant
and tell him that Mary Garth was too good to be at his beck. Though Fred
had risen as she entered the room, she had barely noticed him, and looked
as if her nerves were quivering with the expectation that something would
be thrown at her. But she never had anything worse than words to dread.
When she went to reach the waistcoat from a peg, Fred went up to her and
said, “Allow me.”
“Let it alone! You bring it, missy, and lay it down here,” said Mr.
Featherstone. “Now you go away again till I call you,” he added, when the
waistcoat was laid down by him. It was usual with him to season his
pleasure in showing favor to one person by being especially disagreeable to
another, and Mary was always at hand to furnish the condiment. When his
own relatives came she was treated better. Slowly he took out a bunch of

keys from the waistcoat pocket, and slowly he drew forth a tin box which
was under the bed-clothes.
“You expect I am going to give you a little fortune, eh?” he said, looking
above his spectacles and pausing in the act of opening the lid.
“Not at all, sir. You were good enough to speak of making me a present
the other day, else, of course, I should not have thought of the matter.” But
Fred was of a hopeful disposition, and a vision had presented itself of a sum
just large enough to deliver him from a certain anxiety. When Fred got into
debt, it always seemed to him highly probable that something or other—he
did not necessarily conceive what—would come to pass enabling him to
pay in due time. And now that the providential occurrence was apparently
close at hand, it would have been sheer absurdity to think that the supply
would be short of the need: as absurd as a faith that believed in half a
miracle for want of strength to believe in a whole one.
The deep-veined hands fingered many bank-notes one after the other,
laying them down flat again, while Fred leaned back in his chair, scorning
to look eager. He held himself to be a gentleman at heart, and did not like
courting an old fellow for his money. At last, Mr. Featherstone eyed him
again over his spectacles and presented him with a little sheaf of notes: Fred
could see distinctly that there were but five, as the less significant edges
gaped towards him. But then, each might mean fifty pounds. He took them,
saying—
“I am very much obliged to you, sir,” and was going to roll them up
without seeming to think of their value. But this did not suit Mr.
Featherstone, who was eying him intently.
“Come, don’t you think it worth your while to count ’em? You take
money like a lord; I suppose you lose it like one.”
“I thought I was not to look a gift-horse in the mouth, sir. But I shall be
very happy to count them.”
Fred was not so happy, however, after he had counted them. For they
actually presented the absurdity of being less than his hopefulness had
decided that they must be. What can the fitness of things mean, if not their
fitness to a man’s expectations? Failing this, absurdity and atheism gape
behind him. The collapse for Fred was severe when he found that he held
no more than five twenties, and his share in the higher education of this

country did not seem to help him. Nevertheless he said, with rapid changes
in his fair complexion—
“It is very handsome of you, sir.”
“I should think it is,” said Mr. Featherstone, locking his box and
replacing it, then taking off his spectacles deliberately, and at length, as if
his inward meditation had more deeply convinced him, repeating, “I should
think it handsome.”
“I assure you, sir, I am very grateful,” said Fred, who had had time to
recover his cheerful air.
“So you ought to be. You want to cut a figure in the world, and I reckon
Peter Featherstone is the only one you’ve got to trust to.” Here the old
man’s eyes gleamed with a curiously mingled satisfaction in the
consciousness that this smart young fellow relied upon him, and that the
smart young fellow was rather a fool for doing so.
“Yes, indeed: I was not born to very splendid chances. Few men have
been more cramped than I have been,” said Fred, with some sense of
surprise at his own virtue, considering how hardly he was dealt with. “It
really seems a little too bad to have to ride a broken-winded hunter, and see
men, who, are not half such good judges as yourself, able to throw away
any amount of money on buying bad bargains.”
“Well, you can buy yourself a fine hunter now. Eighty pound is enough
for that, I reckon—and you’ll have twenty pound over to get yourself out of
any little scrape,” said Mr. Featherstone, chuckling slightly.
“You are very good, sir,” said Fred, with a fine sense of contrast between
the words and his feeling.
“Ay, rather a better uncle than your fine uncle Bulstrode. You won’t get
much out of his spekilations, I think. He’s got a pretty strong string round
your father’s leg, by what I hear, eh?”
“My father never tells me anything about his affairs, sir.”
“Well, he shows some sense there. But other people find ’em out without
his telling. He’ll never have much to leave you: he’ll most-like die without
a will—he’s the sort of man to do it—let ’em make him mayor of
Middlemarch as much as they like. But you won’t get much by his dying
without a will, though you are the eldest son.”

Fred thought that Mr. Featherstone had never been so disagreeable
before. True, he had never before given him quite so much money at once.
“Shall I destroy this letter of Mr. Bulstrode’s, sir?” said Fred, rising with
the letter as if he would put it in the fire.
“Ay, ay, I don’t want it. It’s worth no money to me.”
Fred carried the letter to the fire, and thrust the poker through it with
much zest. He longed to get out of the room, but he was a little ashamed
before his inner self, as well as before his uncle, to run away immediately
after pocketing the money. Presently, the farm-bailiff came up to give his
master a report, and Fred, to his unspeakable relief, was dismissed with the
injunction to come again soon.
He had longed not only to be set free from his uncle, but also to find
Mary Garth. She was now in her usual place by the fire, with sewing in her
hands and a book open on the little table by her side. Her eyelids had lost
some of their redness now, and she had her usual air of self-command.
“Am I wanted up-stairs?” she said, half rising as Fred entered.
“No; I am only dismissed, because Simmons is gone up.”
Mary sat down again, and resumed her work. She was certainly treating
him with more indifference than usual: she did not know how affectionately
indignant he had felt on her behalf up-stairs.
“May I stay here a little, Mary, or shall I bore you?”
“Pray sit down,” said Mary; “you will not be so heavy a bore as Mr. John
Waule, who was here yesterday, and he sat down without asking my leave.”
“Poor fellow! I think he is in love with you.”
“I am not aware of it. And to me it is one of the most odious things in a
girl’s life, that there must always be some supposition of falling in love
coming between her and any man who is kind to her, and to whom she is
grateful. I should have thought that I, at least, might have been safe from all
that. I have no ground for the nonsensical vanity of fancying everybody
who comes near me is in love with me.”
Mary did not mean to betray any feeling, but in spite of herself she ended
in a tremulous tone of vexation.
“Confound John Waule! I did not mean to make you angry. I didn’t know
you had any reason for being grateful to me. I forgot what a great service

you think it if any one snuffs a candle for you.” Fred also had his pride, and
was not going to show that he knew what had called forth this outburst of
Mary’s.
“Oh, I am not angry, except with the ways of the world. I do like to be
spoken to as if I had common-sense. I really often feel as if I could
understand a little more than I ever hear even from young gentlemen who
have been to college.” Mary had recovered, and she spoke with a
suppressed rippling under-current of laughter pleasant to hear.
“I don’t care how merry you are at my expense this morning,” said Fred,
“I thought you looked so sad when you came up-stairs. It is a shame you
should stay here to be bullied in that way.”
“Oh, I have an easy life—by comparison. I have tried being a teacher,
and I am not fit for that: my mind is too fond of wandering on its own way.
I think any hardship is better than pretending to do what one is paid for, and
never really doing it. Everything here I can do as well as any one else
could; perhaps better than some—Rosy, for example. Though she is just the
sort of beautiful creature that is imprisoned with ogres in fairy tales.”
“Rosy!” cried Fred, in a tone of profound brotherly scepticism.
“Come, Fred!” said Mary, emphatically; “you have no right to be so
critical.”
“Do you mean anything particular—just now?”
“No, I mean something general—always.”
“Oh, that I am idle and extravagant. Well, I am not fit to be a poor man. I
should not have made a bad fellow if I had been rich.”
“You would have done your duty in that state of life to which it has not
pleased God to call you,” said Mary, laughing.
“Well, I couldn’t do my duty as a clergyman, any more than you could do
yours as a governess. You ought to have a little fellow-feeling there, Mary.”
“I never said you ought to be a clergyman. There are other sorts of work.
It seems to me very miserable not to resolve on some course and act
accordingly.”
“So I could, if—” Fred broke off, and stood up, leaning against the
mantel-piece.
“If you were sure you should not have a fortune?”

“I did not say that. You want to quarrel with me. It is too bad of you to be
guided by what other people say about me.”
“How can I want to quarrel with you? I should be quarrelling with all my
new books,” said Mary, lifting the volume on the table. “However naughty
you may be to other people, you are good to me.”
“Because I like you better than any one else. But I know you despise
me.”
“Yes, I do—a little,” said Mary, nodding, with a smile.
“You would admire a stupendous fellow, who would have wise opinions
about everything.”
“Yes, I should.” Mary was sewing swiftly, and seemed provokingly
mistress of the situation. When a conversation has taken a wrong turn for
us, we only get farther and farther into the swamp of awkwardness. This
was what Fred Vincy felt.
“I suppose a woman is never in love with any one she has always known
—ever since she can remember; as a man often is. It is always some new
fellow who strikes a girl.”
“Let me see,” said Mary, the corners of her mouth curling archly; “I must
go back on my experience. There is Juliet—she seems an example of what
you say. But then Ophelia had probably known Hamlet a long while; and
Brenda Troil—she had known Mordaunt Merton ever since they were
children; but then he seems to have been an estimable young man; and
Minna was still more deeply in love with Cleveland, who was a stranger.
Waverley was new to Flora MacIvor; but then she did not fall in love with
him. And there are Olivia and Sophia Primrose, and Corinne—they may be
said to have fallen in love with new men. Altogether, my experience is
rather mixed.”
Mary looked up with some roguishness at Fred, and that look of hers was
very dear to him, though the eyes were nothing more than clear windows
where observation sat laughingly. He was certainly an affectionate fellow,
and as he had grown from boy to man, he had grown in love with his old
playmate, notwithstanding that share in the higher education of the country
which had exalted his views of rank and income.
“When a man is not loved, it is no use for him to say that he could be a
better fellow—could do anything—I mean, if he were sure of being loved in

return.”
“Not of the least use in the world for him to say he could be better.
Might, could, would—they are contemptible auxiliaries.”
“I don’t see how a man is to be good for much unless he has some one
woman to love him dearly.”
“I think the goodness should come before he expects that.”
“You know better, Mary. Women don’t love men for their goodness.”
“Perhaps not. But if they love them, they never think them bad.”
“It is hardly fair to say I am bad.”
“I said nothing at all about you.”
“I never shall be good for anything, Mary, if you will not say that you
love me—if you will not promise to marry me—I mean, when I am able to
marry.”
“If I did love you, I would not marry you: I would certainly not promise
ever to marry you.”
“I think that is quite wicked, Mary. If you love me, you ought to promise
to marry me.”
“On the contrary, I think it would be wicked in me to marry you even if I
did love you.”
“You mean, just as I am, without any means of maintaining a wife. Of
course: I am but three-and-twenty.”
“In that last point you will alter. But I am not so sure of any other
alteration. My father says an idle man ought not to exist, much less, be
married.”
“Then I am to blow my brains out?”
“No; on the whole I should think you would do better to pass your
examination. I have heard Mr. Farebrother say it is disgracefully easy.”
“That is all very fine. Anything is easy to him. Not that cleverness has
anything to do with it. I am ten times cleverer than many men who pass.”
“Dear me!” said Mary, unable to repress her sarcasm; “that accounts for
the curates like Mr. Crowse. Divide your cleverness by ten, and the quotient
—dear me!—is able to take a degree. But that only shows you are ten times
more idle than the others.”

“Well, if I did pass, you would not want me to go into the Church?”
“That is not the question—what I want you to do. You have a conscience
of your own, I suppose. There! there is Mr. Lydgate. I must go and tell my
uncle.”
“Mary,” said Fred, seizing her hand as she rose; “if you will not give me
some encouragement, I shall get worse instead of better.”
“I will not give you any encouragement,” said Mary, reddening. “Your
friends would dislike it, and so would mine. My father would think it a
disgrace to me if I accepted a man who got into debt, and would not work!”
Fred was stung, and released her hand. She walked to the door, but there
she turned and said: “Fred, you have always been so good, so generous to
me. I am not ungrateful. But never speak to me in that way again.”
“Very well,” said Fred, sulkily, taking up his hat and whip. His
complexion showed patches of pale pink and dead white. Like many a
plucked idle young gentleman, he was thoroughly in love, and with a plain
girl, who had no money! But having Mr. Featherstone’s land in the
background, and a persuasion that, let Mary say what she would, she really
did care for him, Fred was not utterly in despair.
When he got home, he gave four of the twenties to his mother, asking her
to keep them for him. “I don’t want to spend that money, mother. I want it
to pay a debt with. So keep it safe away from my fingers.”
“Bless you, my dear,” said Mrs. Vincy. She doted on her eldest son and
her youngest girl (a child of six), whom others thought her two naughtiest
children. The mother’s eyes are not always deceived in their partiality: she
at least can best judge who is the tender, filial-hearted child. And Fred was
certainly very fond of his mother. Perhaps it was his fondness for another
person also that made him particularly anxious to take some security against
his own liability to spend the hundred pounds. For the creditor to whom he
owed a hundred and sixty held a firmer security in the shape of a bill signed
by Mary’s father.

CHAPTER XV.
“Black eyes you have left, you say,
Blue eyes fail to draw you;
Yet you seem more rapt to-day,
Than of old we saw you.

“Oh, I track the fairest fair
Through new haunts of pleasure;
Footprints here and echoes there
Guide me to my treasure:

“Lo! she turns—immortal youth
Wrought to mortal stature,
Fresh as starlight’s aged truth—
Many-namèd Nature!”

A great historian, as he insisted on calling himself, who had the
happiness to be dead a hundred and twenty years ago, and so to take his
place among the colossi whose huge legs our living pettiness is observed to
walk under, glories in his copious remarks and digressions as the least
imitable part of his work, and especially in those initial chapters to the
successive books of his history, where he seems to bring his armchair to the
proscenium and chat with us in all the lusty ease of his fine English. But
Fielding lived when the days were longer (for time, like money, is measured
by our needs), when summer afternoons were spacious, and the clock ticked
slowly in the winter evenings. We belated historians must not linger after
his example; and if we did so, it is probable that our chat would be thin and
eager, as if delivered from a campstool in a parrot-house. I at least have so
much to do in unraveling certain human lots, and seeing how they were
woven and interwoven, that all the light I can command must be
concentrated on this particular web, and not dispersed over that tempting
range of relevancies called the universe.
At present I have to make the new settler Lydgate better known to any
one interested in him than he could possibly be even to those who had seen
the most of him since his arrival in Middlemarch. For surely all must admit
that a man may be puffed and belauded, envied, ridiculed, counted upon as

a tool and fallen in love with, or at least selected as a future husband, and
yet remain virtually unknown—known merely as a cluster of signs for his
neighbors’ false suppositions. There was a general impression, however,
that Lydgate was not altogether a common country doctor, and in
Middlemarch at that time such an impression was significant of great things
being expected from him. For everybody’s family doctor was remarkably
clever, and was understood to have immeasurable skill in the management
and training of the most skittish or vicious diseases. The evidence of his
cleverness was of the higher intuitive order, lying in his lady-patients’
immovable conviction, and was unassailable by any objection except that
their intuitions were opposed by others equally strong; each lady who saw
medical truth in Wrench and “the strengthening treatment” regarding Toller
and “the lowering system” as medical perdition. For the heroic times of
copious bleeding and blistering had not yet departed, still less the times of
thorough-going theory, when disease in general was called by some bad
name, and treated accordingly without shilly-shally—as if, for example, it
were to be called insurrection, which must not be fired on with blank-
cartridge, but have its blood drawn at once. The strengtheners and the
lowerers were all “clever” men in somebody’s opinion, which is really as
much as can be said for any living talents. Nobody’s imagination had gone
so far as to conjecture that Mr. Lydgate could know as much as Dr. Sprague
and Dr. Minchin, the two physicians, who alone could offer any hope when
danger was extreme, and when the smallest hope was worth a guinea. Still,
I repeat, there was a general impression that Lydgate was something rather
more uncommon than any general practitioner in Middlemarch. And this
was true. He was but seven-and-twenty, an age at which many men are not
quite common—at which they are hopeful of achievement, resolute in
avoidance, thinking that Mammon shall never put a bit in their mouths and
get astride their backs, but rather that Mammon, if they have anything to do
with him, shall draw their chariot.
He had been left an orphan when he was fresh from a public school. His
father, a military man, had made but little provision for three children, and
when the boy Tertius asked to have a medical education, it seemed easier to
his guardians to grant his request by apprenticing him to a country
practitioner than to make any objections on the score of family dignity. He
was one of the rarer lads who early get a decided bent and make up their
minds that there is something particular in life which they would like to do

for its own sake, and not because their fathers did it. Most of us who turn to
any subject with love remember some morning or evening hour when we
got on a high stool to reach down an untried volume, or sat with parted lips
listening to a new talker, or for very lack of books began to listen to the
voices within, as the first traceable beginning of our love. Something of that
sort happened to Lydgate. He was a quick fellow, and when hot from play,
would toss himself in a corner, and in five minutes be deep in any sort of
book that he could lay his hands on: if it were Rasselas or Gulliver, so much
the better, but Bailey’s Dictionary would do, or the Bible with the
Apocrypha in it. Something he must read, when he was not riding the pony,
or running and hunting, or listening to the talk of men. All this was true of
him at ten years of age; he had then read through “Chrysal, or the
Adventures of a Guinea,” which was neither milk for babes, nor any chalky
mixture meant to pass for milk, and it had already occurred to him that
books were stuff, and that life was stupid. His school studies had not much
modified that opinion, for though he “did” his classics and mathematics, he
was not pre-eminent in them. It was said of him, that Lydgate could do
anything he liked, but he had certainly not yet liked to do anything
remarkable. He was a vigorous animal with a ready understanding, but no
spark had yet kindled in him an intellectual passion; knowledge seemed to
him a very superficial affair, easily mastered: judging from the conversation
of his elders, he had apparently got already more than was necessary for
mature life. Probably this was not an exceptional result of expensive
teaching at that period of short-waisted coats, and other fashions which
have not yet recurred. But, one vacation, a wet day sent him to the small
home library to hunt once more for a book which might have some
freshness for him: in vain! unless, indeed, he took down a dusty row of
volumes with gray-paper backs and dingy labels—the volumes of an old
Cyclopaedia which he had never disturbed. It would at least be a novelty to
disturb them. They were on the highest shelf, and he stood on a chair to get
them down. But he opened the volume which he first took from the shelf:
somehow, one is apt to read in a makeshift attitude, just where it might
seem inconvenient to do so. The page he opened on was under the head of
Anatomy, and the first passage that drew his eyes was on the valves of the
heart. He was not much acquainted with valves of any sort, but he knew
that valvae were folding-doors, and through this crevice came a sudden
light startling him with his first vivid notion of finely adjusted mechanism

in the human frame. A liberal education had of course left him free to read
the indecent passages in the school classics, but beyond a general sense of
secrecy and obscenity in connection with his internal structure, had left his
imagination quite unbiassed, so that for anything he knew his brains lay in
small bags at his temples, and he had no more thought of representing to
himself how his blood circulated than how paper served instead of gold. But
the moment of vocation had come, and before he got down from his chair,
the world was made new to him by a presentiment of endless processes
filling the vast spaces planked out of his sight by that wordy ignorance
which he had supposed to be knowledge. From that hour Lydgate felt the
growth of an intellectual passion.
We are not afraid of telling over and over again how a man comes to fall
in love with a woman and be wedded to her, or else be fatally parted from
her. Is it due to excess of poetry or of stupidity that we are never weary of
describing what King James called a woman’s “makdom and her fairnesse,”
never weary of listening to the twanging of the old Troubadour strings, and
are comparatively uninterested in that other kind of “makdom and
fairnesse” which must be wooed with industrious thought and patient
renunciation of small desires? In the story of this passion, too, the
development varies: sometimes it is the glorious marriage, sometimes
frustration and final parting. And not seldom the catastrophe is bound up
with the other passion, sung by the Troubadours. For in the multitude of
middle-aged men who go about their vocations in a daily course determined
for them much in the same way as the tie of their cravats, there is always a
good number who once meant to shape their own deeds and alter the world
a little. The story of their coming to be shapen after the average and fit to be
packed by the gross, is hardly ever told even in their consciousness; for
perhaps their ardor in generous unpaid toil cooled as imperceptibly as the
ardor of other youthful loves, till one day their earlier self walked like a
ghost in its old home and made the new furniture ghastly. Nothing in the
world more subtle than the process of their gradual change! In the
beginning they inhaled it unknowingly: you and I may have sent some of
our breath towards infecting them, when we uttered our conforming falsities
or drew our silly conclusions: or perhaps it came with the vibrations from a
woman’s glance.
Lydgate did not mean to be one of those failures, and there was the better
hope of him because his scientific interest soon took the form of a

professional enthusiasm: he had a youthful belief in his bread-winning
work, not to be stifled by that initiation in makeshift called his ’prentice
days; and he carried to his studies in London, Edinburgh, and Paris, the
conviction that the medical profession as it might be was the finest in the
world; presenting the most perfect interchange between science and art;
offering the most direct alliance between intellectual conquest and the
social good. Lydgate’s nature demanded this combination: he was an
emotional creature, with a flesh-and-blood sense of fellowship which
withstood all the abstractions of special study. He cared not only for
“cases,” but for John and Elizabeth, especially Elizabeth.
There was another attraction in his profession: it wanted reform, and
gave a man an opportunity for some indignant resolve to reject its venal
decorations and other humbug, and to be the possessor of genuine though
undemanded qualifications. He went to study in Paris with the
determination that when he came home again he would settle in some
provincial town as a general practitioner, and resist the irrational severance
between medical and surgical knowledge in the interest of his own
scientific pursuits, as well as of the general advance: he would keep away
from the range of London intrigues, jealousies, and social truckling, and
win celebrity, however slowly, as Jenner had done, by the independent
value of his work. For it must be remembered that this was a dark period;
and in spite of venerable colleges which used great efforts to secure purity
of knowledge by making it scarce, and to exclude error by a rigid
exclusiveness in relation to fees and appointments, it happened that very
ignorant young gentlemen were promoted in town, and many more got a
legal right to practise over large areas in the country. Also, the high standard
held up to the public mind by the College of Physicians, which gave its
peculiar sanction to the expensive and highly rarefied medical instruction
obtained by graduates of Oxford and Cambridge, did not hinder quackery
from having an excellent time of it; for since professional practice chiefly
consisted in giving a great many drugs, the public inferred that it might be
better off with more drugs still, if they could only be got cheaply, and hence
swallowed large cubic measures of physic prescribed by unscrupulous
ignorance which had taken no degrees. Considering that statistics had not
yet embraced a calculation as to the number of ignorant or canting doctors
which absolutely must exist in the teeth of all changes, it seemed to Lydgate
that a change in the units was the most direct mode of changing the

numbers. He meant to be a unit who would make a certain amount of
difference towards that spreading change which would one day tell
appreciably upon the averages, and in the mean time have the pleasure of
making an advantageous difference to the viscera of his own patients. But
he did not simply aim at a more genuine kind of practice than was common.
He was ambitious of a wider effect: he was fired with the possibility that he
might work out the proof of an anatomical conception and make a link in
the chain of discovery.
Does it seem incongruous to you that a Middlemarch surgeon should
dream of himself as a discoverer? Most of us, indeed, know little of the
great originators until they have been lifted up among the constellations and
already rule our fates. But that Herschel, for example, who “broke the
barriers of the heavens”—did he not once play a provincial church-organ,
and give music-lessons to stumbling pianists? Each of those Shining Ones
had to walk on the earth among neighbors who perhaps thought much more
of his gait and his garments than of anything which was to give him a title
to everlasting fame: each of them had his little local personal history
sprinkled with small temptations and sordid cares, which made the retarding
friction of his course towards final companionship with the immortals.
Lydgate was not blind to the dangers of such friction, but he had plenty of
confidence in his resolution to avoid it as far as possible: being seven-and-
twenty, he felt himself experienced. And he was not going to have his
vanities provoked by contact with the showy worldly successes of the
capital, but to live among people who could hold no rivalry with that
pursuit of a great idea which was to be a twin object with the assiduous
practice of his profession. There was fascination in the hope that the two
purposes would illuminate each other: the careful observation and inference
which was his daily work, the use of the lens to further his judgment in
special cases, would further his thought as an instrument of larger inquiry.
Was not this the typical pre-eminence of his profession? He would be a
good Middlemarch doctor, and by that very means keep himself in the track
of far-reaching investigation. On one point he may fairly claim approval at
this particular stage of his career: he did not mean to imitate those
philanthropic models who make a profit out of poisonous pickles to support
themselves while they are exposing adulteration, or hold shares in a
gambling-hell that they may have leisure to represent the cause of public
morality. He intended to begin in his own case some particular reforms

which were quite certainly within his reach, and much less of a problem
than the demonstrating of an anatomical conception. One of these reforms
was to act stoutly on the strength of a recent legal decision, and simply
prescribe, without dispensing drugs or taking percentage from druggists.
This was an innovation for one who had chosen to adopt the style of general
practitioner in a country town, and would be felt as offensive criticism by
his professional brethren. But Lydgate meant to innovate in his treatment
also, and he was wise enough to see that the best security for his practising
honestly according to his belief was to get rid of systematic temptations to
the contrary.
Perhaps that was a more cheerful time for observers and theorizers than
the present; we are apt to think it the finest era of the world when America
was beginning to be discovered, when a bold sailor, even if he were
wrecked, might alight on a new kingdom; and about 1829 the dark
territories of Pathology were a fine America for a spirited young adventurer.
Lydgate was ambitious above all to contribute towards enlarging the
scientific, rational basis of his profession. The more he became interested in
special questions of disease, such as the nature of fever or fevers, the more
keenly he felt the need for that fundamental knowledge of structure which
just at the beginning of the century had been illuminated by the brief and
glorious career of Bichat, who died when he was only one-and-thirty, but,
like another Alexander, left a realm large enough for many heirs. That great
Frenchman first carried out the conception that living bodies, fundamentally
considered, are not associations of organs which can be understood by
studying them first apart, and then as it were federally; but must be
regarded as consisting of certain primary webs or tissues, out of which the
various organs—brain, heart, lungs, and so on—are compacted, as the
various accommodations of a house are built up in various proportions of
wood, iron, stone, brick, zinc, and the rest, each material having its peculiar
composition and proportions. No man, one sees, can understand and
estimate the entire structure or its parts—what are its frailties and what its
repairs, without knowing the nature of the materials. And the conception
wrought out by Bichat, with his detailed study of the different tissues, acted
necessarily on medical questions as the turning of gas-light would act on a
dim, oil-lit street, showing new connections and hitherto hidden facts of
structure which must be taken into account in considering the symptoms of
maladies and the action of medicaments. But results which depend on

human conscience and intelligence work slowly, and now at the end of
1829, most medical practice was still strutting or shambling along the old
paths, and there was still scientific work to be done which might have
seemed to be a direct sequence of Bichat’s. This great seer did not go
beyond the consideration of the tissues as ultimate facts in the living
organism, marking the limit of anatomical analysis; but it was open to
another mind to say, have not these structures some common basis from
which they have all started, as your sarsnet, gauze, net, satin, and velvet
from the raw cocoon? Here would be another light, as of oxy-hydrogen,
showing the very grain of things, and revising all former explanations. Of
this sequence to Bichat’s work, already vibrating along many currents of the
European mind, Lydgate was enamoured; he longed to demonstrate the
more intimate relations of living structure, and help to define men’s thought
more accurately after the true order. The work had not yet been done, but
only prepared for those who knew how to use the preparation. What was the
primitive tissue? In that way Lydgate put the question—not quite in the way
required by the awaiting answer; but such missing of the right word befalls
many seekers. And he counted on quiet intervals to be watchfully seized,
for taking up the threads of investigation—on many hints to be won from
diligent application, not only of the scalpel, but of the microscope, which
research had begun to use again with new enthusiasm of reliance. Such was
Lydgate’s plan of his future: to do good small work for Middlemarch, and
great work for the world.
He was certainly a happy fellow at this time: to be seven-and-twenty,
without any fixed vices, with a generous resolution that his action should be
beneficent, and with ideas in his brain that made life interesting quite apart
from the cultus of horseflesh and other mystic rites of costly observance,
which the eight hundred pounds left him after buying his practice would
certainly not have gone far in paying for. He was at a starting-point which
makes many a man’s career a fine subject for betting, if there were any
gentlemen given to that amusement who could appreciate the complicated
probabilities of an arduous purpose, with all the possible thwartings and
furtherings of circumstance, all the niceties of inward balance, by which a
man swims and makes his point or else is carried headlong. The risk would
remain even with close knowledge of Lydgate’s character; for character too
is a process and an unfolding. The man was still in the making, as much as
the Middlemarch doctor and immortal discoverer, and there were both

virtues and faults capable of shrinking or expanding. The faults will not, I
hope, be a reason for the withdrawal of your interest in him. Among our
valued friends is there not some one or other who is a little too self-
confident and disdainful; whose distinguished mind is a little spotted with
commonness; who is a little pinched here and protuberant there with native
prejudices; or whose better energies are liable to lapse down the wrong
channel under the influence of transient solicitations? All these things might
be alleged against Lydgate, but then, they are the periphrases of a polite
preacher, who talks of Adam, and would not like to mention anything
painful to the pew-renters. The particular faults from which these delicate
generalities are distilled have distinguishable physiognomies, diction,
accent, and grimaces; filling up parts in very various dramas. Our vanities
differ as our noses do: all conceit is not the same conceit, but varies in
correspondence with the minutiae of mental make in which one of us differs
from another. Lydgate’s conceit was of the arrogant sort, never simpering,
never impertinent, but massive in its claims and benevolently
contemptuous. He would do a great deal for noodles, being sorry for them,
and feeling quite sure that they could have no power over him: he had
thought of joining the Saint Simonians when he was in Paris, in order to
turn them against some of their own doctrines. All his faults were marked
by kindred traits, and were those of a man who had a fine baritone, whose
clothes hung well upon him, and who even in his ordinary gestures had an
air of inbred distinction. Where then lay the spots of commonness? says a
young lady enamoured of that careless grace. How could there be any
commonness in a man so well-bred, so ambitious of social distinction, so
generous and unusual in his views of social duty? As easily as there may be
stupidity in a man of genius if you take him unawares on the wrong subject,
or as many a man who has the best will to advance the social millennium
might be ill-inspired in imagining its lighter pleasures; unable to go beyond
Offenbach’s music, or the brilliant punning in the last burlesque. Lydgate’s
spots of commonness lay in the complexion of his prejudices, which, in
spite of noble intention and sympathy, were half of them such as are found
in ordinary men of the world: that distinction of mind which belonged to his
intellectual ardor, did not penetrate his feeling and judgment about
furniture, or women, or the desirability of its being known (without his
telling) that he was better born than other country surgeons. He did not
mean to think of furniture at present; but whenever he did so it was to be

feared that neither biology nor schemes of reform would lift him above the
vulgarity of feeling that there would be an incompatibility in his furniture
not being of the best.
As to women, he had once already been drawn headlong by impetuous
folly, which he meant to be final, since marriage at some distant period
would of course not be impetuous. For those who want to be acquainted
with Lydgate it will be good to know what was that case of impetuous folly,
for it may stand as an example of the fitful swerving of passion to which he
was prone, together with the chivalrous kindness which helped to make him
morally lovable. The story can be told without many words. It happened
when he was studying in Paris, and just at the time when, over and above
his other work, he was occupied with some galvanic experiments. One
evening, tired with his experimenting, and not being able to elicit the facts
he needed, he left his frogs and rabbits to some repose under their trying
and mysterious dispensation of unexplained shocks, and went to finish his
evening at the theatre of the Porte Saint Martin, where there was a
melodrama which he had already seen several times; attracted, not by the
ingenious work of the collaborating authors, but by an actress whose part it
was to stab her lover, mistaking him for the evil-designing duke of the
piece. Lydgate was in love with this actress, as a man is in love with a
woman whom he never expects to speak to. She was a Provencale, with
dark eyes, a Greek profile, and rounded majestic form, having that sort of
beauty which carries a sweet matronliness even in youth, and her voice was
a soft cooing. She had but lately come to Paris, and bore a virtuous
reputation, her husband acting with her as the unfortunate lover. It was her
acting which was “no better than it should be,” but the public was satisfied.
Lydgate’s only relaxation now was to go and look at this woman, just as he
might have thrown himself under the breath of the sweet south on a bank of
violets for a while, without prejudice to his galvanism, to which he would
presently return. But this evening the old drama had a new catastrophe. At
the moment when the heroine was to act the stabbing of her lover, and he
was to fall gracefully, the wife veritably stabbed her husband, who fell as
death willed. A wild shriek pierced the house, and the Provencale fell
swooning: a shriek and a swoon were demanded by the play, but the
swooning too was real this time. Lydgate leaped and climbed, he hardly
knew how, on to the stage, and was active in help, making the acquaintance
of his heroine by finding a contusion on her head and lifting her gently in

his arms. Paris rang with the story of this death:—was it a murder? Some of
the actress’s warmest admirers were inclined to believe in her guilt, and
liked her the better for it (such was the taste of those times); but Lydgate
was not one of these. He vehemently contended for her innocence, and the
remote impersonal passion for her beauty which he had felt before, had
passed now into personal devotion, and tender thought of her lot. The
notion of murder was absurd: no motive was discoverable, the young
couple being understood to dote on each other; and it was not
unprecedented that an accidental slip of the foot should have brought these
grave consequences. The legal investigation ended in Madame Laure’s
release. Lydgate by this time had had many interviews with her, and found
her more and more adorable. She talked little; but that was an additional
charm. She was melancholy, and seemed grateful; her presence was enough,
like that of the evening light. Lydgate was madly anxious about her
affection, and jealous lest any other man than himself should win it and ask
her to marry him. But instead of reopening her engagement at the Porte
Saint Martin, where she would have been all the more popular for the fatal
episode, she left Paris without warning, forsaking her little court of
admirers. Perhaps no one carried inquiry far except Lydgate, who felt that
all science had come to a stand-still while he imagined the unhappy Laure,
stricken by ever-wandering sorrow, herself wandering, and finding no
faithful comforter. Hidden actresses, however, are not so difficult to find as
some other hidden facts, and it was not long before Lydgate gathered
indications that Laure had taken the route to Lyons. He found her at last
acting with great success at Avignon under the same name, looking more
majestic than ever as a forsaken wife carrying her child in her arms. He
spoke to her after the play, was received with the usual quietude which
seemed to him beautiful as clear depths of water, and obtained leave to visit
her the next day; when he was bent on telling her that he adored her, and on
asking her to marry him. He knew that this was like the sudden impulse of a
madman—incongruous even with his habitual foibles. No matter! It was the
one thing which he was resolved to do. He had two selves within him
apparently, and they must learn to accommodate each other and bear
reciprocal impediments. Strange, that some of us, with quick alternate
vision, see beyond our infatuations, and even while we rave on the heights,
behold the wide plain where our persistent self pauses and awaits us.

To have approached Laure with any suit that was not reverentially tender
would have been simply a contradiction of his whole feeling towards her.
“You have come all the way from Paris to find me?” she said to him the
next day, sitting before him with folded arms, and looking at him with eyes
that seemed to wonder as an untamed ruminating animal wonders. “Are all
Englishmen like that?”
“I came because I could not live without trying to see you. You are
lonely; I love you; I want you to consent to be my wife; I will wait, but I
want you to promise that you will marry me—no one else.”
Laure looked at him in silence with a melancholy radiance from under
her grand eyelids, until he was full of rapturous certainty, and knelt close to
her knees.
“I will tell you something,” she said, in her cooing way, keeping her arms
folded. “My foot really slipped.”
“I know, I know,” said Lydgate, deprecatingly. “It was a fatal accident—a
dreadful stroke of calamity that bound me to you the more.”
Again Laure paused a little and then said, slowly, “I meant to do it.”
Lydgate, strong man as he was, turned pale and trembled: moments
seemed to pass before he rose and stood at a distance from her.
“There was a secret, then,” he said at last, even vehemently. “He was
brutal to you: you hated him.”
“No! he wearied me; he was too fond: he would live in Paris, and not in
my country; that was not agreeable to me.”
“Great God!” said Lydgate, in a groan of horror. “And you planned to
murder him?”
“I did not plan: it came to me in the play—I meant to do it.”
Lydgate stood mute, and unconsciously pressed his hat on while he
looked at her. He saw this woman—the first to whom he had given his
young adoration—amid the throng of stupid criminals.
“You are a good young man,” she said. “But I do not like husbands. I will
never have another.”
Three days afterwards Lydgate was at his galvanism again in his Paris
chambers, believing that illusions were at an end for him. He was saved
from hardening effects by the abundant kindness of his heart and his belief

that human life might be made better. But he had more reason than ever for
trusting his judgment, now that it was so experienced; and henceforth he
would take a strictly scientific view of woman, entertaining no expectations
but such as were justified beforehand.
No one in Middlemarch was likely to have such a notion of Lydgate’s
past as has here been faintly shadowed, and indeed the respectable
townsfolk there were not more given than mortals generally to any eager
attempt at exactness in the representation to themselves of what did not
come under their own senses. Not only young virgins of that town, but
gray-bearded men also, were often in haste to conjecture how a new
acquaintance might be wrought into their purposes, contented with very
vague knowledge as to the way in which life had been shaping him for that
instrumentality. Middlemarch, in fact, counted on swallowing Lydgate and
assimilating him very comfortably.

CHAPTER XVI.
“All that in woman is adored
In thy fair self I find—
For the whole sex can but afford
The handsome and the kind.”
—SIR CHARLES SEDLEY.

The question whether Mr. Tyke should be appointed as salaried chaplain
to the hospital was an exciting topic to the Middlemarchers; and Lydgate
heard it discussed in a way that threw much light on the power exercised in
the town by Mr. Bulstrode. The banker was evidently a ruler, but there was
an opposition party, and even among his supporters there were some who
allowed it to be seen that their support was a compromise, and who frankly
stated their impression that the general scheme of things, and especially the
casualties of trade, required you to hold a candle to the devil.
Mr. Bulstrode’s power was not due simply to his being a country banker,
who knew the financial secrets of most traders in the town and could touch
the springs of their credit; it was fortified by a beneficence that was at once
ready and severe—ready to confer obligations, and severe in watching the
result. He had gathered, as an industrious man always at his post, a chief
share in administering the town charities, and his private charities were both
minute and abundant. He would take a great deal of pains about
apprenticing Tegg the shoemaker’s son, and he would watch over Tegg’s
church-going; he would defend Mrs. Strype the washerwoman against
Stubbs’s unjust exaction on the score of her drying-ground, and he would
himself scrutinize a calumny against Mrs. Strype. His private minor loans
were numerous, but he would inquire strictly into the circumstances both
before and after. In this way a man gathers a domain in his neighbors’ hope
and fear as well as gratitude; and power, when once it has got into that
subtle region, propagates itself, spreading out of all proportion to its
external means. It was a principle with Mr. Bulstrode to gain as much
power as possible, that he might use it for the glory of God. He went
through a great deal of spiritual conflict and inward argument in order to
adjust his motives, and make clear to himself what God’s glory required.

But, as we have seen, his motives were not always rightly appreciated.
There were many crass minds in Middlemarch whose reflective scales
could only weigh things in the lump; and they had a strong suspicion that
since Mr. Bulstrode could not enjoy life in their fashion, eating and drinking
so little as he did, and worreting himself about everything, he must have a
sort of vampire’s feast in the sense of mastery.
The subject of the chaplaincy came up at Mr. Vincy’s table when Lydgate
was dining there, and the family connection with Mr. Bulstrode did not, he
observed, prevent some freedom of remark even on the part of the host
himself, though his reasons against the proposed arrangement turned
entirely on his objection to Mr. Tyke’s sermons, which were all doctrine,
and his preference for Mr. Farebrother, whose sermons were free from that
taint. Mr. Vincy liked well enough the notion of the chaplain’s having a
salary, supposing it were given to Farebrother, who was as good a little
fellow as ever breathed, and the best preacher anywhere, and
companionable too.
“What line shall you take, then?” said Mr. Chichely, the coroner, a great
coursing comrade of Mr. Vincy’s.
“Oh, I’m precious glad I’m not one of the Directors now. I shall vote for
referring the matter to the Directors and the Medical Board together. I shall
roll some of my responsibility on your shoulders, Doctor,” said Mr. Vincy,
glancing first at Dr. Sprague, the senior physician of the town, and then at
Lydgate who sat opposite. “You medical gentlemen must consult which sort
of black draught you will prescribe, eh, Mr. Lydgate?”
“I know little of either,” said Lydgate; “but in general, appointments are
apt to be made too much a question of personal liking. The fittest man for a
particular post is not always the best fellow or the most agreeable.
Sometimes, if you wanted to get a reform, your only way would be to
pension off the good fellows whom everybody is fond of, and put them out
of the question.”
Dr. Sprague, who was considered the physician of most “weight,” though
Dr. Minchin was usually said to have more “penetration,” divested his large
heavy face of all expression, and looked at his wine-glass while Lydgate
was speaking. Whatever was not problematical and suspected about this
young man—for example, a certain showiness as to foreign ideas, and a
disposition to unsettle what had been settled and forgotten by his elders—

was positively unwelcome to a physician whose standing had been fixed
thirty years before by a treatise on Meningitis, of which at least one copy
marked “own” was bound in calf. For my part I have some fellow-feeling
with Dr. Sprague: one’s self-satisfaction is an untaxed kind of property
which it is very unpleasant to find deprecated.
Lydgate’s remark, however, did not meet the sense of the company. Mr.
Vincy said, that if he could have his way, he would not put disagreeable
fellows anywhere.
“Hang your reforms!” said Mr. Chichely. “There’s no greater humbug in
the world. You never hear of a reform, but it means some trick to put in new
men. I hope you are not one of the ‘Lancet’s’ men, Mr. Lydgate—wanting
to take the coronership out of the hands of the legal profession: your words
appear to point that way.”
“I disapprove of Wakley,” interposed Dr. Sprague, “no man more: he is
an ill-intentioned fellow, who would sacrifice the respectability of the
profession, which everybody knows depends on the London Colleges, for
the sake of getting some notoriety for himself. There are men who don’t
mind about being kicked blue if they can only get talked about. But Wakley
is right sometimes,” the Doctor added, judicially. “I could mention one or
two points in which Wakley is in the right.”
“Oh, well,” said Mr. Chichely, “I blame no man for standing up in favor
of his own cloth; but, coming to argument, I should like to know how a
coroner is to judge of evidence if he has not had a legal training?”
“In my opinion,” said Lydgate, “legal training only makes a man more
incompetent in questions that require knowledge of another kind. People
talk about evidence as if it could really be weighed in scales by a blind
Justice. No man can judge what is good evidence on any particular subject,
unless he knows that subject well. A lawyer is no better than an old woman
at a post-mortem examination. How is he to know the action of a poison?
You might as well say that scanning verse will teach you to scan the potato
crops.”
“You are aware, I suppose, that it is not the coroner’s business to conduct
the post-mortem, but only to take the evidence of the medical witness?” said
Mr. Chichely, with some scorn.
“Who is often almost as ignorant as the coroner himself,” said Lydgate.
“Questions of medical jurisprudence ought not to be left to the chance of

decent knowledge in a medical witness, and the coroner ought not to be a
man who will believe that strychnine will destroy the coats of the stomach
if an ignorant practitioner happens to tell him so.”
Lydgate had really lost sight of the fact that Mr. Chichely was his
Majesty’s coroner, and ended innocently with the question, “Don’t you
agree with me, Dr. Sprague?”
“To a certain extent—with regard to populous districts, and in the
metropolis,” said the Doctor. “But I hope it will be long before this part of
the country loses the services of my friend Chichely, even though it might
get the best man in our profession to succeed him. I am sure Vincy will
agree with me.”
“Yes, yes, give me a coroner who is a good coursing man,” said Mr.
Vincy, jovially. “And in my opinion, you’re safest with a lawyer. Nobody
can know everything. Most things are ‘visitation of God.’ And as to
poisoning, why, what you want to know is the law. Come, shall we join the
ladies?”
Lydgate’s private opinion was that Mr. Chichely might be the very
coroner without bias as to the coats of the stomach, but he had not meant to
be personal. This was one of the difficulties of moving in good
Middlemarch society: it was dangerous to insist on knowledge as a
qualification for any salaried office. Fred Vincy had called Lydgate a prig,
and now Mr. Chichely was inclined to call him prick-eared; especially
when, in the drawing-room, he seemed to be making himself eminently
agreeable to Rosamond, whom he had easily monopolized in a tête-à-tête,
since Mrs. Vincy herself sat at the tea-table. She resigned no domestic
function to her daughter; and the matron’s blooming good-natured face,
with the two volatile pink strings floating from her fine throat, and her
cheery manners to husband and children, was certainly among the great
attractions of the Vincy house—attractions which made it all the easier to
fall in love with the daughter. The tinge of unpretentious, inoffensive
vulgarity in Mrs. Vincy gave more effect to Rosamond’s refinement, which
was beyond what Lydgate had expected.
Certainly, small feet and perfectly turned shoulders aid the impression of
refined manners, and the right thing said seems quite astonishingly right
when it is accompanied with exquisite curves of lip and eyelid. And
Rosamond could say the right thing; for she was clever with that sort of

cleverness which catches every tone except the humorous. Happily she
never attempted to joke, and this perhaps was the most decisive mark of her
cleverness.
She and Lydgate readily got into conversation. He regretted that he had
not heard her sing the other day at Stone Court. The only pleasure he
allowed himself during the latter part of his stay in Paris was to go and hear
music.
“You have studied music, probably?” said Rosamond.
“No, I know the notes of many birds, and I know many melodies by ear;
but the music that I don’t know at all, and have no notion about, delights me
—affects me. How stupid the world is that it does not make more use of
such a pleasure within its reach!”
“Yes, and you will find Middlemarch very tuneless. There are hardly any
good musicians. I only know two gentlemen who sing at all well.”
“I suppose it is the fashion to sing comic songs in a rhythmic way,
leaving you to fancy the tune—very much as if it were tapped on a drum?”
“Ah, you have heard Mr. Bowyer,” said Rosamond, with one of her rare
smiles. “But we are speaking very ill of our neighbors.”
Lydgate was almost forgetting that he must carry on the conversation, in
thinking how lovely this creature was, her garment seeming to be made out
of the faintest blue sky, herself so immaculately blond, as if the petals of
some gigantic flower had just opened and disclosed her; and yet with this
infantine blondness showing so much ready, self-possessed grace. Since he
had had the memory of Laure, Lydgate had lost all taste for large-eyed
silence: the divine cow no longer attracted him, and Rosamond was her
very opposite. But he recalled himself.
“You will let me hear some music to-night, I hope.”
“I will let you hear my attempts, if you like,” said Rosamond. “Papa is
sure to insist on my singing. But I shall tremble before you, who have heard
the best singers in Paris. I have heard very little: I have only once been to
London. But our organist at St. Peter’s is a good musician, and I go on
studying with him.”
“Tell me what you saw in London.”
“Very little.” (A more naive girl would have said, “Oh, everything!” But
Rosamond knew better.) “A few of the ordinary sights, such as raw country

girls are always taken to.”
“Do you call yourself a raw country girl?” said Lydgate, looking at her
with an involuntary emphasis of admiration, which made Rosamond blush
with pleasure. But she remained simply serious, turned her long neck a
little, and put up her hand to touch her wondrous hair-plaits—an habitual
gesture with her as pretty as any movements of a kitten’s paw. Not that
Rosamond was in the least like a kitten: she was a sylph caught young and
educated at Mrs. Lemon’s.
“I assure you my mind is raw,” she said immediately; “I pass at
Middlemarch. I am not afraid of talking to our old neighbors. But I am
really afraid of you.”
“An accomplished woman almost always knows more than we men,
though her knowledge is of a different sort. I am sure you could teach me a
thousand things—as an exquisite bird could teach a bear if there were any
common language between them. Happily, there is a common language
between women and men, and so the bears can get taught.”
“Ah, there is Fred beginning to strum! I must go and hinder him from
jarring all your nerves,” said Rosamond, moving to the other side of the
room, where Fred having opened the piano, at his father’s desire, that
Rosamond might give them some music, was parenthetically performing
“Cherry Ripe!” with one hand. Able men who have passed their
examinations will do these things sometimes, not less than the plucked
Fred.
“Fred, pray defer your practising till to-morrow; you will make Mr.
Lydgate ill,” said Rosamond. “He has an ear.”
Fred laughed, and went on with his tune to the end.
Rosamond turned to Lydgate, smiling gently, and said, “You perceive, the
bears will not always be taught.”
“Now then, Rosy!” said Fred, springing from the stool and twisting it
upward for her, with a hearty expectation of enjoyment. “Some good
rousing tunes first.”
Rosamond played admirably. Her master at Mrs. Lemon’s school (close
to a county town with a memorable history that had its relics in church and
castle) was one of those excellent musicians here and there to be found in
our provinces, worthy to compare with many a noted Kapellmeister in a

country which offers more plentiful conditions of musical celebrity.
Rosamond, with the executant’s instinct, had seized his manner of playing,
and gave forth his large rendering of noble music with the precision of an
echo. It was almost startling, heard for the first time. A hidden soul seemed
to be flowing forth from Rosamond’s fingers; and so indeed it was, since
souls live on in perpetual echoes, and to all fine expression there goes
somewhere an originating activity, if it be only that of an interpreter.
Lydgate was taken possession of, and began to believe in her as something
exceptional. After all, he thought, one need not be surprised to find the rare
conjunctions of nature under circumstances apparently unfavorable: come
where they may, they always depend on conditions that are not obvious. He
sat looking at her, and did not rise to pay her any compliments, leaving that
to others, now that his admiration was deepened.
Her singing was less remarkable, but also well trained, and sweet to hear
as a chime perfectly in tune. It is true she sang “Meet me by moonlight,”
and “I’ve been roaming”; for mortals must share the fashions of their time,
and none but the ancients can be always classical. But Rosamond could also
sing “Black-eyed Susan” with effect, or Haydn’s canzonets, or “Voi, che
sapete,” or “Batti, batti”—she only wanted to know what her audience
liked.
Her father looked round at the company, delighting in their admiration.
Her mother sat, like a Niobe before her troubles, with her youngest little girl
on her lap, softly beating the child’s hand up and down in time to the music.
And Fred, notwithstanding his general scepticism about Rosy, listened to
her music with perfect allegiance, wishing he could do the same thing on
his flute. It was the pleasantest family party that Lydgate had seen since he
came to Middlemarch. The Vincys had the readiness to enjoy, the rejection
of all anxiety, and the belief in life as a merry lot, which made a house
exceptional in most county towns at that time, when Evangelicalism had
cast a certain suspicion as of plague-infection over the few amusements
which survived in the provinces. At the Vincys’ there was always whist, and
the card-tables stood ready now, making some of the company secretly
impatient of the music. Before it ceased Mr. Farebrother came in—a
handsome, broad-chested but otherwise small man, about forty, whose
black was very threadbare: the brilliancy was all in his quick gray eyes. He
came like a pleasant change in the light, arresting little Louisa with fatherly
nonsense as she was being led out of the room by Miss Morgan, greeting

everybody with some special word, and seeming to condense more talk into
ten minutes than had been held all through the evening. He claimed from
Lydgate the fulfilment of a promise to come and see him. “I can’t let you
off, you know, because I have some beetles to show you. We collectors feel
an interest in every new man till he has seen all we have to show him.”
But soon he swerved to the whist-table, rubbing his hands and saying,
“Come now, let us be serious! Mr. Lydgate? not play? Ah! you are too
young and light for this kind of thing.”
Lydgate said to himself that the clergyman whose abilities were so
painful to Mr. Bulstrode, appeared to have found an agreeable resort in this
certainly not erudite household. He could half understand it: the good-
humor, the good looks of elder and younger, and the provision for passing
the time without any labor of intelligence, might make the house beguiling
to people who had no particular use for their odd hours.
Everything looked blooming and joyous except Miss Morgan, who was
brown, dull, and resigned, and altogether, as Mrs. Vincy often said, just the
sort of person for a governess. Lydgate did not mean to pay many such
visits himself. They were a wretched waste of the evenings; and now, when
he had talked a little more to Rosamond, he meant to excuse himself and
go.
“You will not like us at Middlemarch, I feel sure,” she said, when the
whist-players were settled. “We are very stupid, and you have been used to
something quite different.”
“I suppose all country towns are pretty much alike,” said Lydgate. “But I
have noticed that one always believes one’s own town to be more stupid
than any other. I have made up my mind to take Middlemarch as it comes,
and shall be much obliged if the town will take me in the same way. I have
certainly found some charms in it which are much greater than I had
expected.”
“You mean the rides towards Tipton and Lowick; every one is pleased
with those,” said Rosamond, with simplicity.
“No, I mean something much nearer to me.”
Rosamond rose and reached her netting, and then said, “Do you care
about dancing at all? I am not quite sure whether clever men ever dance.”
“I would dance with you if you would allow me.”

“Oh!” said Rosamond, with a slight deprecatory laugh. “I was only going
to say that we sometimes have dancing, and I wanted to know whether you
would feel insulted if you were asked to come.”
“Not on the condition I mentioned.”
After this chat Lydgate thought that he was going, but on moving towards
the whist-tables, he got interested in watching Mr. Farebrother’s play, which
was masterly, and also his face, which was a striking mixture of the shrewd
and the mild. At ten o’clock supper was brought in (such were the customs
of Middlemarch) and there was punch-drinking; but Mr. Farebrother had
only a glass of water. He was winning, but there seemed to be no reason
why the renewal of rubbers should end, and Lydgate at last took his leave.
But as it was not eleven o’clock, he chose to walk in the brisk air towards
the tower of St. Botolph’s, Mr. Farebrother’s church, which stood out dark,
square, and massive against the starlight. It was the oldest church in
Middlemarch; the living, however, was but a vicarage worth barely four
hundred a-year. Lydgate had heard that, and he wondered now whether Mr.
Farebrother cared about the money he won at cards; thinking, “He seems a
very pleasant fellow, but Bulstrode may have his good reasons.” Many
things would be easier to Lydgate if it should turn out that Mr. Bulstrode
was generally justifiable. “What is his religious doctrine to me, if he carries
some good notions along with it? One must use such brains as are to be
found.”
These were actually Lydgate’s first meditations as he walked away from
Mr. Vincy’s, and on this ground I fear that many ladies will consider him
hardly worthy of their attention. He thought of Rosamond and her music
only in the second place; and though, when her turn came, he dwelt on the
image of her for the rest of his walk, he felt no agitation, and had no sense
that any new current had set into his life. He could not marry yet; he wished
not to marry for several years; and therefore he was not ready to entertain
the notion of being in love with a girl whom he happened to admire. He did
admire Rosamond exceedingly; but that madness which had once beset him
about Laure was not, he thought, likely to recur in relation to any other
woman. Certainly, if falling in love had been at all in question, it would
have been quite safe with a creature like this Miss Vincy, who had just the
kind of intelligence one would desire in a woman—polished, refined,
docile, lending itself to finish in all the delicacies of life, and enshrined in a

body which expressed this with a force of demonstration that excluded the
need for other evidence. Lydgate felt sure that if ever he married, his wife
would have that feminine radiance, that distinctive womanhood which must
be classed with flowers and music, that sort of beauty which by its very
nature was virtuous, being moulded only for pure and delicate joys.
But since he did not mean to marry for the next five years—his more
pressing business was to look into Louis’ new book on Fever, which he was
specially interested in, because he had known Louis in Paris, and had
followed many anatomical demonstrations in order to ascertain the specific
differences of typhus and typhoid. He went home and read far into the
smallest hour, bringing a much more testing vision of details and relations
into this pathological study than he had ever thought it necessary to apply to
the complexities of love and marriage, these being subjects on which he felt
himself amply informed by literature, and that traditional wisdom which is
handed down in the genial conversation of men. Whereas Fever had obscure
conditions, and gave him that delightful labor of the imagination which is
not mere arbitrariness, but the exercise of disciplined power—combining
and constructing with the clearest eye for probabilities and the fullest
obedience to knowledge; and then, in yet more energetic alliance with
impartial Nature, standing aloof to invent tests by which to try its own
work.
Many men have been praised as vividly imaginative on the strength of
their profuseness in indifferent drawing or cheap narration:—reports of very
poor talk going on in distant orbs; or portraits of Lucifer coming down on
his bad errands as a large ugly man with bat’s wings and spurts of
phosphorescence; or exaggerations of wantonness that seem to reflect life in
a diseased dream. But these kinds of inspiration Lydgate regarded as rather
vulgar and vinous compared with the imagination that reveals subtle actions
inaccessible by any sort of lens, but tracked in that outer darkness through
long pathways of necessary sequence by the inward light which is the last
refinement of Energy, capable of bathing even the ethereal atoms in its
ideally illuminated space. He for his part had tossed away all cheap
inventions where ignorance finds itself able and at ease: he was enamoured
of that arduous invention which is the very eye of research, provisionally
framing its object and correcting it to more and more exactness of relation;
he wanted to pierce the obscurity of those minute processes which prepare
human misery and joy, those invisible thoroughfares which are the first

lurking-places of anguish, mania, and crime, that delicate poise and
transition which determine the growth of happy or unhappy consciousness.
As he threw down his book, stretched his legs towards the embers in the
grate, and clasped his hands at the back of his head, in that agreeable
afterglow of excitement when thought lapses from examination of a specific
object into a suffusive sense of its connections with all the rest of our
existence—seems, as it were, to throw itself on its back after vigorous
swimming and float with the repose of unexhausted strength—Lydgate felt
a triumphant delight in his studies, and something like pity for those less
lucky men who were not of his profession.
“If I had not taken that turn when I was a lad,” he thought, “I might have
got into some stupid draught-horse work or other, and lived always in
blinkers. I should never have been happy in any profession that did not call
forth the highest intellectual strain, and yet keep me in good warm contact
with my neighbors. There is nothing like the medical profession for that:
one can have the exclusive scientific life that touches the distance and
befriend the old fogies in the parish too. It is rather harder for a clergyman:
Farebrother seems to be an anomaly.”
This last thought brought back the Vincys and all the pictures of the
evening. They floated in his mind agreeably enough, and as he took up his
bed-candle his lips were curled with that incipient smile which is apt to
accompany agreeable recollections. He was an ardent fellow, but at present
his ardor was absorbed in love of his work and in the ambition of making
his life recognized as a factor in the better life of mankind—like other
heroes of science who had nothing but an obscure country practice to begin
with.
Poor Lydgate! or shall I say, Poor Rosamond! Each lived in a world of
which the other knew nothing. It had not occurred to Lydgate that he had
been a subject of eager meditation to Rosamond, who had neither any
reason for throwing her marriage into distant perspective, nor any
pathological studies to divert her mind from that ruminating habit, that
inward repetition of looks, words, and phrases, which makes a large part in
the lives of most girls. He had not meant to look at her or speak to her with
more than the inevitable amount of admiration and compliment which a
man must give to a beautiful girl; indeed, it seemed to him that his
enjoyment of her music had remained almost silent, for he feared falling

into the rudeness of telling her his great surprise at her possession of such
accomplishment. But Rosamond had registered every look and word, and
estimated them as the opening incidents of a preconceived romance—
incidents which gather value from the foreseen development and climax. In
Rosamond’s romance it was not necessary to imagine much about the
inward life of the hero, or of his serious business in the world: of course, he
had a profession and was clever, as well as sufficiently handsome; but the
piquant fact about Lydgate was his good birth, which distinguished him
from all Middlemarch admirers, and presented marriage as a prospect of
rising in rank and getting a little nearer to that celestial condition on earth in
which she would have nothing to do with vulgar people, and perhaps at last
associate with relatives quite equal to the county people who looked down
on the Middlemarchers. It was part of Rosamond’s cleverness to discern
very subtly the faintest aroma of rank, and once when she had seen the Miss
Brookes accompanying their uncle at the county assizes, and seated among
the aristocracy, she had envied them, notwithstanding their plain dress.
If you think it incredible that to imagine Lydgate as a man of family
could cause thrills of satisfaction which had anything to do with the sense
that she was in love with him, I will ask you to use your power of
comparison a little more effectively, and consider whether red cloth and
epaulets have never had an influence of that sort. Our passions do not live
apart in locked chambers, but, dressed in their small wardrobe of notions,
bring their provisions to a common table and mess together, feeding out of
the common store according to their appetite.
Rosamond, in fact, was entirely occupied not exactly with Tertius
Lydgate as he was in himself, but with his relation to her; and it was
excusable in a girl who was accustomed to hear that all young men might,
could, would be, or actually were in love with her, to believe at once that
Lydgate could be no exception. His looks and words meant more to her than
other men’s, because she cared more for them: she thought of them
diligently, and diligently attended to that perfection of appearance,
behavior, sentiments, and all other elegancies, which would find in Lydgate
a more adequate admirer than she had yet been conscious of.
For Rosamond, though she would never do anything that was
disagreeable to her, was industrious; and now more than ever she was active
in sketching her landscapes and market-carts and portraits of friends, in

practising her music, and in being from morning till night her own standard
of a perfect lady, having always an audience in her own consciousness, with
sometimes the not unwelcome addition of a more variable external audience
in the numerous visitors of the house. She found time also to read the best
novels, and even the second best, and she knew much poetry by heart. Her
favorite poem was “Lalla Rookh.”
“The best girl in the world! He will be a happy fellow who gets her!” was
the sentiment of the elderly gentlemen who visited the Vincys; and the
rejected young men thought of trying again, as is the fashion in country
towns where the horizon is not thick with coming rivals. But Mrs. Plymdale
thought that Rosamond had been educated to a ridiculous pitch, for what
was the use of accomplishments which would be all laid aside as soon as
she was married? While her aunt Bulstrode, who had a sisterly faithfulness
towards her brother’s family, had two sincere wishes for Rosamond—that
she might show a more serious turn of mind, and that she might meet with a
husband whose wealth corresponded to her habits.

CHAPTER XVII.
“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.”

CHAPTER XVIII.
“Oh, sir, the loftiest hopes on earth
Draw lots with meaner hopes: heroic breasts,
Breathing bad air, run 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.

CHAPTER XIX.
“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.
“Schön, schön. 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 being 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.

CHAPTER XX.
“A child forsaken, waking suddenly,
Whose gaze afeard on all things round doth rove,
And seeth only that it cannot see
The meeting eyes of love.”

Two hours later, Dorothea was seated in an inner room or boudoir of a
handsome apartment in the Via Sistina.
I am sorry to add that she was sobbing bitterly, with such abandonment to
this relief of an oppressed heart as a woman habitually controlled by pride
on her own account and thoughtfulness for others will sometimes allow
herself when she feels securely alone. And Mr. Casaubon was certain to
remain away for some time at the Vatican.
Yet Dorothea had no distinctly shapen grievance that she could state even
to herself; and in the midst of her confused thought and passion, the mental
act that was struggling forth into clearness was a self-accusing cry that her
feeling of desolation was the fault of her own spiritual poverty. She had
married the man of her choice, and with the advantage over most girls that
she had contemplated her marriage chiefly as the beginning of new duties:
from the very first she had thought of Mr. Casaubon as having a mind so
much above her own, that he must often be claimed by studies which she
could not entirely share; moreover, after the brief narrow experience of her
girlhood she was beholding Rome, the city of visible history, where the past
of a whole hemisphere seems moving in funeral procession with strange
ancestral images and trophies gathered from afar.
But this stupendous fragmentariness heightened the dreamlike
strangeness of her bridal life. Dorothea had now been five weeks in Rome,
and in the kindly mornings when autumn and winter seemed to go hand in
hand like a happy aged couple one of whom would presently survive in
chiller loneliness, she had driven about at first with Mr. Casaubon, but of
late chiefly with Tantripp and their experienced courier. She had been led
through the best galleries, had been taken to the chief points of view, had
been shown the grandest ruins and the most glorious churches, and she had

ended by oftenest choosing to drive out to the Campagna where she could
feel alone with the earth and sky, away-from the oppressive masquerade of
ages, in which her own life too seemed to become a masque with
enigmatical costumes.
To those who have looked at Rome with the quickening power of a
knowledge which breathes a growing soul into all historic shapes, and
traces out the suppressed transitions which unite all contrasts, Rome may
still be the spiritual centre and interpreter of the world. But let them
conceive one more historical contrast: the gigantic broken revelations of
that Imperial and Papal city thrust abruptly on the notions of a girl who had
been brought up in English and Swiss Puritanism, fed on meagre Protestant
histories and on art chiefly of the hand-screen sort; a girl whose ardent
nature turned all her small allowance of knowledge into principles, fusing
her actions into their mould, and whose quick emotions gave the most
abstract things the quality of a pleasure or a pain; a girl who had lately
become a wife, and from the enthusiastic acceptance of untried duty found
herself plunged in tumultuous preoccupation with her personal lot. The
weight of unintelligible Rome might lie easily on bright nymphs to whom it
formed a background for the brilliant picnic of Anglo-foreign society; but
Dorothea had no such defence against deep impressions. Ruins and
basilicas, palaces and colossi, set in the midst of a sordid present, where all
that was living and warm-blooded seemed sunk in the deep degeneracy of a
superstition divorced from reverence; the dimmer but yet eager Titanic life
gazing and struggling on walls and ceilings; the long vistas of white forms
whose marble eyes seemed to hold the monotonous light of an alien world:
all this vast wreck of ambitious ideals, sensuous and spiritual, mixed
confusedly with the signs of breathing forgetfulness and degradation, at first
jarred her as with an electric shock, and then urged themselves on her with
that ache belonging to a glut of confused ideas which check the flow of
emotion. Forms both pale and glowing took possession of her young sense,
and fixed themselves in her memory even when she was not thinking of
them, preparing strange associations which remained through her after-
years. Our moods are apt to bring with them images which succeed each
other like the magic-lantern pictures of a doze; and in certain states of dull
forlornness Dorothea all her life continued to see the vastness of St. Peter’s,
the huge bronze canopy, the excited intention in the attitudes and garments
of the prophets and evangelists in the mosaics above, and the red drapery

which was being hung for Christmas spreading itself everywhere like a
disease of the retina.
Not that this inward amazement of Dorothea’s was anything very
exceptional: many souls in their young nudity are tumbled out among
incongruities and left to “find their feet” among them, while their elders go
about their business. Nor can I suppose that when Mrs. Casaubon is
discovered in a fit of weeping six weeks after her wedding, the situation
will be regarded as tragic. Some discouragement, some faintness of heart at
the new real future which replaces the imaginary, is not unusual, and we do
not expect people to be deeply moved by what is not unusual. That element
of tragedy which lies in the very fact of frequency, has not yet wrought
itself into the coarse emotion of mankind; and perhaps our frames could
hardly bear much of it. If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary
human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart
beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.
As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity.
However, Dorothea was crying, and if she had been required to state the
cause, she could only have done so in some such general words as I have
already used: to have been driven to be more particular would have been
like trying to give a history of the lights and shadows, for that new real
future which was replacing the imaginary drew its material from the endless
minutiae by which her view of Mr. Casaubon and her wifely relation, now
that she was married to him, was gradually changing with the secret motion
of a watch-hand from what it had been in her maiden dream. It was too
early yet for her fully to recognize or at least admit the change, still more
for her to have readjusted that devotedness which was so necessary a part of
her mental life that she was almost sure sooner or later to recover it.
Permanent rebellion, the disorder of a life without some loving reverent
resolve, was not possible to her; but she was now in an interval when the
very force of her nature heightened its confusion. In this way, the early
months of marriage often are times of critical tumult—whether that of a
shrimp-pool or of deeper waters—which afterwards subsides into cheerful
peace.
But was not Mr. Casaubon just as learned as before? Had his forms of
expression changed, or his sentiments become less laudable? Oh
waywardness of womanhood! did his chronology fail him, or his ability to

state not only a theory but the names of those who held it; or his provision
for giving the heads of any subject on demand? And was not Rome the
place in all the world to give free play to such accomplishments? Besides,
had not Dorothea’s enthusiasm especially dwelt on the prospect of relieving
the weight and perhaps the sadness with which great tasks lie on him who
has to achieve them?— And that such weight pressed on Mr. Casaubon was
only plainer than before.
All these are crushing questions; but whatever else remained the same,
the light had changed, and you cannot find the pearly dawn at noonday. The
fact is unalterable, that a fellow-mortal with whose nature you are
acquainted solely through the brief entrances and exits of a few imaginative
weeks called courtship, may, when seen in the continuity of married
companionship, be disclosed as something better or worse than what you
have preconceived, but will certainly not appear altogether the same. And it
would be astonishing to find how soon the change is felt if we had no
kindred changes to compare with it. To share lodgings with a brilliant
dinner-companion, or to see your favorite politician in the Ministry, may
bring about changes quite as rapid: in these cases too we begin by knowing
little and believing much, and we sometimes end by inverting the quantities.
Still, such comparisons might mislead, for no man was more incapable of
flashy make-believe than Mr. Casaubon: he was as genuine a character as
any ruminant animal, and he had not actively assisted in creating any
illusions about himself. How was it that in the weeks since her marriage,
Dorothea had not distinctly observed but felt with a stifling depression, that
the large vistas and wide fresh air which she had dreamed of finding in her
husband’s mind were replaced by anterooms and winding passages which
seemed to lead nowhither? I suppose it was that in courtship everything is
regarded as provisional and preliminary, and the smallest sample of virtue
or accomplishment is taken to guarantee delightful stores which the broad
leisure of marriage will reveal. But the door-sill of marriage once crossed,
expectation is concentrated on the present. Having once embarked on your
marital voyage, it is impossible not to be aware that you make no way and
that the sea is not within sight—that, in fact, you are exploring an enclosed
basin.
In their conversation before marriage, Mr. Casaubon had often dwelt on
some explanation or questionable detail of which Dorothea did not see the

bearing; but such imperfect coherence seemed due to the brokenness of
their intercourse, and, supported by her faith in their future, she had listened
with fervid patience to a recitation of possible arguments to be brought
against Mr. Casaubon’s entirely new view of the Philistine god Dagon and
other fish-deities, thinking that hereafter she should see this subject which
touched him so nearly from the same high ground whence doubtless it had
become so important to him. Again, the matter-of-course statement and tone
of dismissal with which he treated what to her were the most stirring
thoughts, was easily accounted for as belonging to the sense of haste and
preoccupation in which she herself shared during their engagement. But
now, since they had been in Rome, with all the depths of her emotion
roused to tumultuous activity, and with life made a new problem by new
elements, she had been becoming more and more aware, with a certain
terror, that her mind was continually sliding into inward fits of anger and
repulsion, or else into forlorn weariness. How far the judicious Hooker or
any other hero of erudition would have been the same at Mr. Casaubon’s
time of life, she had no means of knowing, so that he could not have the
advantage of comparison; but her husband’s way of commenting on the
strangely impressive objects around them had begun to affect her with a sort
of mental shiver: he had perhaps the best intention of acquitting himself
worthily, but only of acquitting himself. What was fresh to her mind was
worn out to his; and such capacity of thought and feeling as had ever been
stimulated in him by the general life of mankind had long shrunk to a sort
of dried preparation, a lifeless embalmment of knowledge.
When he said, “Does this interest you, Dorothea? Shall we stay a little
longer? I am ready to stay if you wish it,”—it seemed to her as if going or
staying were alike dreary. Or, “Should you like to go to the Farnesina,
Dorothea? It contains celebrated frescos designed or painted by Raphael,
which most persons think it worth while to visit.”
“But do you care about them?” was always Dorothea’s question.
“They are, I believe, highly esteemed. Some of them represent the fable
of Cupid and Psyche, which is probably the romantic invention of a literary
period, and cannot, I think, be reckoned as a genuine mythical product. But
if you like these wall-paintings we can easily drive thither; and you 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.

CHAPTER XXI.
“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.

CHAPTER XXII.
“Nous câusames longtemps; elle était simple et bonne.
Ne sachant pas le mal, elle faisait le bien;
Des richesses du coeur elle me fit l’aumône,
Et tout en écoutant 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.
“Schön! 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.

CHAPTER XXIII.
“Your horses of the Sun,” he said,
“And first-rate whip Apollo!
Whate’er they be, I’ll eat my head,
But I will beat them hollow.”

Fred Vincy, we have seen, had a debt on his mind, and though no such
immaterial burthen could depress that buoyant-hearted young gentleman for
many hours together, there were circumstances connected with this debt
which made the thought of it unusually importunate. The creditor was Mr.
Bambridge, a horse-dealer of the neighborhood, whose company was much
sought in Middlemarch by young men understood to be “addicted to
pleasure.” During the vacations Fred had naturally required more
amusements than he had ready money for, and Mr. Bambridge had been
accommodating enough not only to trust him for the hire of horses and the
accidental expense of ruining a fine hunter, but also to make a small
advance by which he might be able to meet some losses at billiards. The
total debt was a hundred and sixty pounds. Bambridge was in no alarm
about his money, being sure that young Vincy had backers; but he had
required something to show for it, and Fred had at first given a bill with his
own signature. Three months later he had renewed this bill with the
signature of Caleb Garth. On both occasions Fred had felt confident that he
should meet the bill himself, having ample funds at disposal in his own
hopefulness. You will hardly demand that his confidence should have a
basis in external facts; such confidence, we know, is something less coarse
and materialistic: it is a comfortable disposition leading us to expect that the
wisdom of providence or the folly of our friends, the mysteries of luck or
the still greater mystery of our high individual value in the universe, will
bring about agreeable issues, such as are consistent with our good taste in
costume, and our general preference for the best style of thing. Fred felt
sure that he should have a present from his uncle, that he should have a run
of luck, that by dint of “swapping” he should gradually metamorphose a
horse worth forty pounds into a horse that would fetch a hundred at any

moment—“judgment” being always equivalent to an unspecified sum in
hard cash. And in any case, even supposing negations which only a morbid
distrust could imagine, Fred had always (at that time) his father’s pocket as
a last resource, so that his assets of hopefulness had a sort of gorgeous
superfluity about them. Of what might be the capacity of his father’s
pocket, Fred had only a vague notion: was not trade elastic? And would not
the deficiencies of one year be made up for by the surplus of another? The
Vincys lived in an easy profuse way, not with any new ostentation, but
according to the family habits and traditions, so that the children had no
standard of economy, and the elder ones retained some of their infantine
notion that their father might pay for anything if he would. Mr. Vincy
himself had expensive Middlemarch habits—spent money on coursing, on
his cellar, and on dinner-giving, while mamma had those running accounts
with tradespeople, which give a cheerful sense of getting everything one
wants without any question of payment. But it was in the nature of fathers,
Fred knew, to bully one about expenses: there was always a little storm over
his extravagance if he had to disclose a debt, and Fred disliked bad weather
within doors. He was too filial to be disrespectful to his father, and he bore
the thunder with the certainty that it was transient; but in the mean time it
was disagreeable to see his mother cry, and also to be obliged to look sulky
instead of having fun; for Fred was so good-tempered that if he looked
glum under scolding, it was chiefly for propriety’s sake. The easier course
plainly, was to renew the bill with a friend’s signature. Why not? With the
superfluous securities of hope at his command, there was no reason why he
should not have increased other people’s liabilities to any extent, but for the
fact that men whose names were good for anything were usually pessimists,
indisposed to believe that the universal order of things would necessarily be
agreeable to an agreeable young gentleman.
With a favor to ask we review our list of friends, do justice to their more
amiable qualities, forgive their little offenses, and concerning each in turn,
try to arrive at the conclusion that he will be eager to oblige us, our own
eagerness to be obliged being as communicable as other warmth. Still there
is always a certain number who are dismissed as but moderately eager until
the others have refused; and it happened that Fred checked off all his
friends but one, on the ground that applying to them would be disagreeable;
being implicitly convinced that he at least (whatever might be maintained
about mankind generally) had a right to be free from anything disagreeable.

That he should ever fall into a thoroughly unpleasant position—wear
trousers shrunk with washing, eat cold mutton, have to walk for want of a
horse, or to “duck under” in any sort of way—was an absurdity
irreconcilable with those cheerful intuitions implanted in him by nature.
And Fred winced under the idea of being looked down upon as wanting
funds for small debts. Thus it came to pass that the friend whom he chose to
apply to was at once the poorest and the kindest—namely, Caleb Garth.
The Garths were very fond of Fred, as he was of them; for when he and
Rosamond were little ones, and the Garths were better off, the slight
connection between the two families through Mr. Featherstone’s double
marriage (the first to Mr. Garth’s sister, and the second to Mrs. Vincy’s) had
led to an acquaintance which was carried on between the children rather
than the parents: the children drank tea together out of their toy teacups, and
spent whole days together in play. Mary was a little hoyden, and Fred at six
years old thought her the nicest girl in the world, making her his wife with a
brass ring which he had cut from an umbrella. Through all the stages of his
education he had kept his affection for the Garths, and his habit of going to
their house as a second home, though any intercourse between them and the
elders of his family had long ceased. Even when Caleb Garth was
prosperous, the Vincys were on condescending terms with him and his wife,
for there were nice distinctions of rank in Middlemarch; and though old
manufacturers could not any more than dukes be connected with none but
equals, they were conscious of an inherent social superiority which was
defined with great nicety in practice, though hardly expressible
theoretically. Since then Mr. Garth had failed in the building business,
which he had unfortunately added to his other avocations of surveyor,
valuer, and agent, had conducted that business for a time entirely for the
benefit of his assignees, and had been living narrowly, exerting himself to
the utmost that he might after all pay twenty shillings in the pound. He had
now achieved this, and from all who did not think it a bad precedent, his
honorable exertions had won him due esteem; but in no part of the world is
genteel visiting founded on esteem, in the absence of suitable furniture and
complete dinner-service. Mrs. Vincy had never been at her ease with Mrs.
Garth, and frequently spoke of her as a woman who had had to work for her
bread—meaning that Mrs. Garth had been a teacher before her marriage; in
which case an intimacy with Lindley Murray and Mangnall’s Questions was
something like a draper’s discrimination of calico trademarks, or a courier’s

acquaintance with foreign countries: no woman who was better off needed
that sort of thing. And since Mary had been keeping Mr. Featherstone’s
house, Mrs. Vincy’s want of liking for the Garths had been converted into
something more positive, by alarm lest Fred should engage himself to this
plain girl, whose parents “lived in such a small way.” Fred, being aware of
this, never spoke at home of his visits to Mrs. Garth, which had of late
become more frequent, the increasing ardor of his affection for Mary
inclining him the more towards those who belonged to her.
Mr. Garth had a small office in the town, and to this Fred went with his
request. He obtained it without much difficulty, for a large amount of
painful experience had not sufficed to make Caleb Garth cautious about his
own affairs, or distrustful of his fellow-men when they had not proved
themselves untrustworthy; and he had the highest opinion of Fred, was
“sure the lad would turn out well—an open affectionate fellow, with a good
bottom to his character—you might trust him for anything.” Such was
Caleb’s psychological argument. He was one of those rare men who are
rigid to themselves and indulgent to others. He had a certain shame about
his neighbors’ errors, and never spoke of them willingly; hence he was not
likely to divert his mind from the best mode of hardening timber and other
ingenious devices in order to preconceive those errors. If he had to blame
any one, it was necessary for him to move all the papers within his reach, or
describe various diagrams with his stick, or make calculations with the odd
money in his pocket, before he could begin; and he would rather do other
men’s work than find fault with their doing. I fear he was a bad
disciplinarian.
When Fred stated the circumstances of his debt, his wish to meet it
without troubling his father, and the certainty that the money would be
forthcoming so as to cause no one any inconvenience, Caleb pushed his
spectacles upward, listened, looked into his favorite’s clear young eyes, and
believed him, not distinguishing confidence about the future from veracity
about the past; but he felt that it was an occasion for a friendly hint as to
conduct, and that before giving his signature he must give a rather strong
admonition. Accordingly, he took the paper and lowered his spectacles,
measured the space at his command, reached his pen and examined it,
dipped it in the ink and examined it again, then pushed the paper a little
way from him, lifted up his spectacles again, showed a deepened depression
in the outer angle of his bushy eyebrows, which gave his face a peculiar