otive of the Rev. Edward Casaubon in popping the question
to Dorothea Brooke, bow complex her motives in answering the question!
He wanted an amanuensis to "love, honor, and obey" him. She wanted a
husband who would be "a sort of father, and could teach you even Hebrew
if you wished it." The matrimonial motives are worked to draw out the
character of Dorothea, and nowhere does the method of George Eliot show
to greater advantage than in probing the motives of this fine, strong,
conscientious, blundering young woman, whose voice "was like the voice of
a soul that once lived in an AEolian harp." She had a theoretic cast of
mind. She was "enamored of intensity and greatness, and rash in
embracing what seemed to her to have those aspects." The awful divine
had those aspects, and she embraced him. "Certainly such elements in the
character of a marriageable girl tended to interfere with her lot, and
hinder it from being decided, according to custom, by good looks, vanity,
and merely canine affection." That's a George Eliot stroke. If the
reader does not see from that what she is driving at he may as well
abandon all hope of ever appreciating her great forte and art.
Dorothea's goodness and sincerity did not save her from the worst blunder
that a woman can make, while her conscientiousness only made it
inevitable. "With all her eagerness to know the truths of life she
retained very childlike ideas about marriage." A little of the goose as
well as the child in her conscientious simplicity, perhaps. She "felt
sure she would have accepted the judicious Hooker if she had been born in
time to save him from that wretched mistake he made in matrimony, or John
Milton, when his blindness had come on, or any other great man whose odd
habits it would be glorious piety to endure."

True to life, our author furnishes the "great man," and the "odd habits,"
and the miserable years of "glorious" endurance. "Dorothea looked deep
into the ungauged reservoir of Mr. Casaubon's mind, seeing reflected
there every quality she herself brought." They exchanged experiences--he
his desire to have an amanuensis, and she hers, to be one. He told her
in the billy-cooing of their courtship that "his notes made a formidable
range of volumes, but the crowning task would be to condense these
voluminous, still accumulating results, and bring them, like the earlier
vintage of Hippocratic books, to fit a little shelf." Dorothea was
altogether captiv