Middlemarch

Will Ladislaw leaves for Europe without paying the visit he was invited to make — declining to fix on any more precise destination than "the entire area of Europe." Genius, he holds, must await messages from the universe. He has sincerely tried various attitudes of receptivity: taken too much wine as an experiment in ecstasy; fasted till faint and then supped on lobster; made himself ill with doses of opium. Nothing greatly original resulted. The universe has not yet beckoned. Eliot turns from Will to Casaubon, and asks the reader to consider him more fairly. Mrs. Cadwallader's contempt, Sir James's view of his legs, Celia's criticism of his soup-spoon — none of these settle the question of his inner life. "Mr. Casaubon, too, was the centre of his own world." As the wedding day approaches, he does not find his spirits rising. He had imagined his long studious bachelorhood had stored up for him a compound interest of enjoyment. Instead he finds a blankness of sensibility where joy should be — a loneliness worse than his usual kind, because it would shrink from sympathy. He cannot confess this even to himself. He leans on Dorothea's young trust and veneration as a means of encouragement. In talking to her he rids himself for the time of "that chilling ideal audience which crowded his laborious uncreative hours with the vaporous pressure of Tartarean shades." Casaubon proposes extending the honeymoon to Rome to inspect Vatican manuscripts. When he mentions that without a companion Dorothea will have many lonely hours — "I should feel more at liberty" — the words grate on her for the first time. She colors with annoyance, recovers herself, and convinces herself she was wrong to be hurt. She arrives at the pre-wedding dinner party in silver-gray, composed as a picture of Santa Barbara. The dinner is miscellaneous. The old lawyer Standish pronounces Dorothea "an uncommonly fine woman." Mr. Chichely, a bachelor celebrity, prefers a woman with more coquetry — and prefers, in fact, Miss Vincy, the mayor's daughter. The new young doctor Lydgate is introduced; he impresses Lady Chettam by agreeing that all constitutions might be called peculiar. Privately, he finds Dorothea "a little too earnest" — always wanting reasons, but too ignorant to understand the merits of any question. Miss Brooke was not Lydgate's style of woman. Not long after, she was Mrs. Casaubon, and on her way to Rome.