For my part I am very sorry for him.
It is an uneasy lot at best, to be what we call highly taught and
yet not to enjoy: to be present at this great spectacle of life
and never to be liberated from a small hungry shivering self--
never to be fully possessed by the glory we behold, never to have
our consciousness rapturously transformed into the vividness
of a thought, the ardor of a passion, the energy of an action,
but always to be scholarly and uninspired, ambitious and timid,
scrupulous and dim-sighted. Becoming a dean or even a bishop would
make little difference, I fear, to Mr. Casaubon's uneasiness.
Doubtless some ancient Greek has observed that behind the big mask
and the speaking-trumpet, there must always be our poor little
eyes peeping as usual and our timorous lips more or less under
anxious control.
To this mental estate mapped out a quarter of a century before,
to sensibilities thus fenced in, Mr. Casaubon had thought of annexing
happiness with a lovely young bride; but even before marriage,
as we have seen, he found himself under a new depression in
the consciousness that the new bliss was not blissful to him.
Inclination yearned back to its old, easier custom. And the deeper
he went in domesticity the more did the sense of acquitting himself
and acting with propriety predominate over any other satisfaction.
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