MIDDLEMARCH (Completed)

Chapter 42

CHAPTER XLII.

"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,