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.
For to Dorothea, after that toy-box history of the world adapted
to young ladies which had made the chief part of her education,
Mr. Casaubon's talk about his great book was full of new vistas;
and this sense of revelation, this surprise of a nearer introduction
to Stoics and Alexandrians, as people who had ideas not totally
unlike her own, kept in abeyance for the time her usual eagerness
for a binding theory which could bring her own life and doctrine
into strict connection with that amazing past, and give the remotest
sources of knowledge some bearing on her actions.
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