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.