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Casaubon must have raised some heroic hallucination in her. I wonder if she could have any other sort of passion for a man? Ladislaw? there was certainly an unusual feeling between them. And Casaubon must have had a notion of it. Well her love might help a man more than her money."
"No," replied the mechanic, "but it is easy to know who is wrong in the argument." "How?" enquired his friend. "Why, by seeing who is first angry." Casaubon, in his "Treatise on the Passions," relates the following pleasing anecdote of Robert, one of the greatest monarchs that ever swayed the sceptre of France.
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."
First, then, for the verse; neither Casaubon himself, nor any for him, can defend either his numbers or the purity of his Latin. Casaubon gives this point for lost, and pretends not to justify either the measures or the words of Persius; he is evidently beneath Horace and Juvenal in both.
"My mistake is excusable," said Will. "In old days I used to hear Mr. Casaubon speak as if he looked forward to having a secretary. Indeed he held out the prospect of that office to me. But I turned out to be not good enough for it." Dorothea was trying to extract out of this an excuse for her husband's evident repulsion, as she said, with a playful smile, "You were not a steady worker enough."
The tenacity with which he strove to hide this inward drama made it the more vivid for him; as we hear with the more keenness what we wish others not to hear. Instead of wondering at this result of misery in Mr. Casaubon, I think it quite ordinary. Will not a tiny speck very close to our vision blot out the glory of the world, and leave only a margin by which we see the blot?
It is no case of ethical or intellectual superiority, as he fondly supposed, but only diversity of gift. We must turn to the volume on Casaubon for a fuller interpretation of the oracle. 'The scholar, says the author, 'is greater than his books.
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.
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."
Those who call it her masterpiece are not judging it primarily as art-work: any more than those who call Whitman the greatest American poet are judging him as artist. While it seems necessary to make this distinction, it is quite as necessary to bear down on the attraction of the character-drawing. That is a truly wonderful portrait of the unconsciously selfish scholar in Casaubon.
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