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.




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