"How much, methinks, I could despise this man

Were I not bound in charity against it!

--SHAKESPEARE: Henry VIII.

One of the professional calls made by Lydgate soon after his return

from his wedding-journey was to Lowick Manor, in consequence of a

letter which had requested him to fix a time for his visit.

Mr. Casaubon had never put any question concerning the nature of his

illness to Lydgate, nor had he even to Dorothea betrayed any anxiety as

to how far it might be likely to cut short his labors or his life. On

this point, as on all others, he shrank from pity; and if the suspicion

of being pitied for anything in his lot surmised or known in spite of

himself was embittering, the idea of calling forth a show of compassion

by frankly admitting an alarm or a sorrow was necessarily intolerable

to him. Every proud mind knows something of this experience, and

perhaps it is only to be overcome by a sense of fellowship deep enough

to make all efforts at isolation seem mean and petty instead of

exalting.

But Mr. Casaubon was now brooding over something through which the

question of his health and life haunted his silence with a more

harassing importunity even than through the autumnal unripeness of his

authorship. It is true that this last might be called his central

ambition; but there are some kinds of authorship in which by far the

largest result is the uneasy susceptibility accumulated in the

consciousness of the author--one knows of the river by a few streaks

amid a long-gathered deposit of uncomfortable mud. That was the way

with Mr. Casaubon's hard intellectual labors. Their most

characteristic result was not the "Key to all Mythologies," but a

morbid consciousness that others did not give him the place which he

had not demonstrably merited--a perpetual suspicious conjecture that

the views entertained of him were not to his advantage--a melancholy

absence of passion in his efforts at achievement, and a passionate

resistance to the confession that he had achieved nothing.

Thus his intellectual ambition which seemed to others to have absorbed

and dried him, was really no security against wounds, least of all

against those which came from Dorothea. And he had begun now to frame

possibilities for the future which were somehow more embittering to him

than anything his mind had dwelt on before.

Against certain facts he was helpless: against Will Ladislaw's

existence, his defiant stay in the neighborhood of Lowick, and his

flippant state of mind with regard to the possessors of authentic,

well-stamped erudition: against Dorothea's nature, always taking on

some new shape of ardent activity, and even in submission and silence

covering fervid reasons which it was an irritation to think of: against

certain notions and likings which had taken possession of her mind in

relation to subjects that he could not possibly discuss with her.

There was no denying that Dorothea was as virtuous and lovely a young

lady as he could have obtained for a wife; but a young lady turned out

to be something more troublesome than he had conceived. She nursed

him, she read to him, she anticipated his wants, and was solicitous

about his feelings; but there had entered into the husband's mind the

certainty that she judged him, and that her wifely devotedness was like

a penitential expiation of unbelieving thoughts--was accompanied with a

power of comparison by which himself and his doings were seen too

luminously as a part of things in general. His discontent passed

vapor-like through all her gentle loving manifestations, and clung to

that inappreciative world which she had only brought nearer to him.




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