Middlemarch. Джордж Элиот
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a figure, conspicuous on a dark background of evergreens, was seated on a bench, sketching the old tree. Mr Brooke, who was walking in front with Celia, turned his head, and said—
‘Who is that youngster, Casaubon?’
They had come very near when Mr Casaubon answered:—
‘That is a young relative of mine, a second cousin; the grandson, in fact,’ he added, looking at Dorothea, ‘of the lady whose portrait you have been noticing, my aunt Julia.’
The young man had laid down his sketch-book and risen. His bushy light-brown curls, as well as his youthfulness, identified him at once with Celia’s apparition.
‘Dorothea, let me introduce to you my cousin, Mr Ladislaw. Will, this is Miss Brooke.’
The cousin was so close now, that, when he lifted his hat, Dorothea could see a pair of gray eyes rather near together, a delicate irregular nose with a little ripple in it, and hair falling backward; but there was a mouth and chin of a more prominent, threatening aspect than belonged to the type of the grandmother’s miniature. Young Ladislaw did not feel it necessary to smile, as if he were charmed with this introduction to his future second cousin and her relatives; but wore rather a pouting air of discontent.
‘You are an artist, I see,’ said Mr Brooke, taking up the sketch-book and turning it over in his unceremonious fashion.
‘No, I only sketch a little. There is nothing fit to be seen there,’ said young Ladislaw, colouring, perhaps with temper rather than modesty.
‘Oh, come, this is a nice bit, now. I did a little in this way myself at one time, you know. Look here, now; this is what I call a nice thing, done with what we used to call brio.’ Mr Brooke held out towards the two girls a large coloured sketch of stony ground and trees, with a pool.
‘I am no judge of these things,’ said Dorothea, not coldly, but with an eager deprecation of the appeal to her. ‘You know, uncle, I never see the beauty of those pictures which you say are so much praised. They are a language I do not understand. I suppose there is some relation between pictures and nature which I am too ignorant to feel—just as you see what a Greek sentence stands for which means nothing to me.’ Dorothea looked up at Mr Casaubon, who bowed his head towards her, while Mr Brooke said, smiling nonchalantly—
‘Bless me, now, how different people are! But you had a bad style of teaching, you know—else this is just the thing for girls—sketching, fine art, and so on. But you took to drawing plans; you don’t understand morbidezza, and that kind of thing. You will come to my house, I hope, and I will show you what I did in this way,’ he continued, turning to young Ladislaw, who had to be recalled from his preoccupation in observing Dorothea. Ladislaw had made up his mind that she must be an unpleasant girl, since she was going to marry Casaubon, and what she said of her stupidity about pictures would have confirmed that opinion even if he had believed her. As it was, he took her words for a covert judgment, and was certain that she thought his sketch detestable. There was too much cleverness in her apology: she was laughing both at her uncle and himself. But what a voice! It was like the voice of a soul that had once lived in an Aeolian harp. This must be one of Nature’s inconsistencies. There could be no sort of passion in a girl who would marry Casaubon. But he turned from her, and bowed his thanks for Mr Brooke’s invitation.
‘We will turn over my Italian engravings together,’ continued that good-natured man. ‘I have no end of those things, that I have laid by for years. One gets rusty in this part of the country, you know. Not you, Casaubon; you stick to your studies; but my best ideas get undermost—out of use, you know. You clever young men must guard against indolence. I was too indolent, you know, else I might have been anywhere at one time.’
‘That is a seasonable admonition,’ said Mr Casaubon, ‘but now we will pass on to the house, lest the young ladies should be tired of standing.’
When their backs were turned, young Ladislaw sat down to go on with his sketching, and as he did so his face broke into an expression of amusement which increased as he went on drawing, till at last he threw back his head and laughed aloud. Partly it was the reception of his own artistic production that tickled him; partly the notion of his grave cousin as the lover of that girl; and partly Mr Brooke’s definition of the place he might have held but for the impediment of indolence. Mr Will Ladislaw’s sense of the ludicrous lit up his features very agreeably: it was the pure enjoyment of comicality, and had no mixture of sneering and self-exaltation.
‘What is your nephew going to do with himself, Casaubon?’ said Mr Brooke, as they went on.
‘My cousin, you mean—not my nephew.’
‘Yes, yes, cousin. But in the way of a career you know.’
‘The answer to that question is painfully doubtful. On leaving Rugby he declined to go to an English university, where I would gladly have placed him, and chose what I must consider the anomalous course of studying at Heidelberg. And now he wants to go abroad again, without any special object, save the vague purpose of what he calls culture, preparation for he knows not what. He declines to choose a profession.’
‘He has no means but what you furnish, I suppose.’
‘I have always given him and his friends reason to understand that I would furnish in moderation what was necessary for providing him with a scholarly education, and launching him respectably. I am therefore bound to fulfil the expectation so raised,’ said Mr Casaubon, putting his conduct in the light of mere rectitude: a trait of delicacy which Dorothea noticed with admiration.
‘He has a thirst for travelling; perhaps he may turn out a Bruce or a Mungo Park,’ said Mr Brooke. ‘I had a notion of that myself at one time.’
‘No, he has no bent towards exploration, or the enlargement of our geognosis: that would be a special purpose which I could recognise with some approbation, though without felicitating him on a career which so often ends in premature and violent death. But so far is he from having any desire for a more accurate knowledge of the earth’s surface, that he said he should prefer not to know the sources of the Nile, and that there should be some unknown regions preserved as hunting-grounds for the poetic imagination.’
‘Well, there is something in that, you know,’ said Mr Brooke, who had certainly an impartial mind.
‘It is, I fear, nothing more than a part of his general inaccuracy and indisposition to thoroughness of all kinds, which would be a bad augury for him in any profession, civil or sacred, even were he so far submissive to ordinary rule as to choose one.’
‘Perhaps he has conscientious scruples founded on his own unfitness,’ said Dorothea, who was interesting herself in finding a favourable explanation. ‘Because the law and medicine should be very serious professions to undertake, should they not? People’s lives and fortunes depend on them.’
‘Doubtless; but I fear that my young relative Will Ladislaw is chiefly determined in his aversion to these callings by a dislike to steady application, and to that kind of acquirement which is needful instrumentally, but is not charming or immediately inviting to self-indulgent taste. I have insisted to him on what Aristotle has stated with admirable brevity, that for the achievement of any work regarded as an end there must be a prior exercise of many energies or acquired facilities of a secondary order, demanding patience. I have pointed to my own manuscript volumes, which represent the toil of years preparatory to a work not yet accomplished. But in vain. To careful reasoning of this kind he replies by calling himself Pegasus, and every form of prescribed work “harness”.’
Celia laughed. She was surprised to find that Mr Casaubon could say something quite amusing.
‘Well, you know, he may turn out a Byron, a Chatterton, a Churchill—that sort of thing—there’s no telling,’ said Mr Brooke. ‘Shall you let him go to Italy, or wherever else he wants to go?’
‘Yes; I have agreed to furnish him with moderate supplies for a year or so; he asks no more. I shall let him be tried by the test of freedom.’
‘That is very kind of you,’