r
pang, as showing more intensely how entirely she stands alone, is thrown
into her life,--in her husband's jealousy of Ladislaw. Yet jealousy it
cannot be called. Of any emotion so comparatively profound, any passion
so comparatively elevated, that self-absorbed, self-tormenting nature is
utterly incapable. Jealousy, in some degree, presupposes love; love not
wholly absorbed in self, but capable to some extent of going forth from
our own mean and sordid self-inclusion in sympathetic relation,
dependence, and aid, towards another existence. In Mr Casaubon there is
no capability, no possibility of this. What in him wears the aspect of
jealousy is simply and solely self-love, callous irritation, that any one
should--not stand above, but--approach himself in importance with the
woman he has purchased as a kind of superior slave. For long her
guileless innocence and purity, her utter inability to conceive such a
feeling, leaves her only in doubt and perplexity before it; long after it
has first betrayed itself, she reveals this incapability in the fullest
extent, and in the way most intensely irritating to her husband's self-
love--by her simple-hearted proposal that whatever of his property would
devolve on her should be shared with Ladislaw. Then it is that Casaubon
is roused to inflict on her the last long and bitter anguish; to lay on
her for life--had not death intervened--the cold, soul-benumbing, life
contracting clutch of "the Dead Hand." In the innocence of her entire
relations with Ladislaw, not the faintest dawning of thought connects
itself with him in her husband's cold, insistent demand on her blind
obedience to his will. She thinks alone of his thus binding her to a
lifelong task, not only hard and ungenial, but one that shall absorb and
fetter all her energies, restrain all her faculties, impair and frustrate
all her higher and broader aims, make impossible all that better and
purer fulness of life for which she yearns. Then follows the long and
painful struggle,--a struggle so agonising to such a nature, that only
one nearly akin to her own can adequately conceive or picture it. For it
is a struggle not primarily to forego any certain or fancied mere
personal good. On one side is ranged tenderest pitifulness over her
husband's wasted life and energies, even though she knows those energies
have been wasted--that life has been thrown away--on an object in which
there is no gain to humanity, no advan