CHAPTER LI.
Party is Nature too, and you shall see
By force of Logic how they both agree:
The Many in the One, the One in Many;
All is not Some, nor Some the same as Any:
Genus holds species, both are great or small;
One genus highest, one not high at all;
Each species has its differentia too,
This is not That, and He was never You,
Though this and that are AYES, and you and he
Are like as one to one, or three to three.
No gossip about Mr. Casaubon's will had yet reached Ladislaw:
the air seemed to be filled with the dissolution of Parliament
and the coming election, as the old wakes and fairs were filled
with the rival clatter of itinerant shows; and more private noises
were taken little notice of. The famous "dry election" was at hand,
in which the depths of public feeling might be measured by the low
flood-mark of drink. Will Ladislaw was one of the busiest at this time;
and though Dorothea's widowhood was continually in his thought,
he was so far from wishing to be spoken to on the subject,
that when Lydgate sought him out to tell him what had passed about
the Lowick living, he answered rather waspishly--
"Why should you bring me into the matter? I never see Mrs. Casaubon,
and am not likely to see her, since she is at Freshitt.
I never go there. It is Tory ground, where I and the `Pioneer'
are no more welcome than a poacher and his gun."
The fact was that Will had been made the more susceptible by
observing that Mr. Brooke, instead of wishing him, as before,
to come to the Grange oftener than was quite agreeable to himself,
seemed now to contrive that he should go there as little as possible.
This was a shuffling concession of Mr. Brooke's to Sir James
Chettam's indignant remonstrance; and Will, awake to the slightest
hint in this direction, concluded that he was to be kept away from
the Grange on Dorothea's account. Her friends, then, regarded him
with some suspicion? Their fears were quite superfluous: they were
very much mistaken if they imagined that he would put himself
forward as a needy adventurer trying to win the favor of a rich woman.
Until now Will had never fully seen the chasm between himself
and Dorothea--until now that he was come to the brink of it, and saw
her on the other side. He began, not without some inward rage,
to think of going away from the neighborhood: it would be impossible
for him to show any further interest in Dorothea without subjecting
himself to disagreeable imputations--perhaps even in her mind,
which others might try to poison.
"We are forever divided," said Will. "I might as well be at Rome;
she would be no farther from me." But what we call our despair
is often only the painful eagerness of unfed hope. There were
plenty of reasons why he should not go--public reasons why he
should not quit his post at this crisis, leaving Mr. Brooke in the
lurch when he needed "coaching" for the election, and when there
was so much canvassing, direct and indirect, to be carried on.
Will could not like to leave his own chessmen in the heat of a game;
and any candidate on the right side, even if his brain and marrow
had been as soft as was consistent with a gentlemanly bearing,
might help to turn a majority. To coach Mr. Brooke and keep him
steadily to the idea that he must pledge himself to vote for the actual
Reform Bill, instead of insisting on his independence and power
of pulling up in time, was not an easy task. Mr. Farebrother's
prophecy of a fourth candidate "in the bag" had not yet been fulfilled,
neither the Parliamentary Candidate Society nor any other power
on the watch to secure a reforming majority seeing a worthy nodus
for interference while there was a second reforming candidate
like Mr. Brooke, who might be returned at his own expense;
and the fight lay entirely between Pinkerton the old Tory member,
Bagster the new Whig member returned at the last election, and Brooke
the future independent member, who was to fetter himself for this
occasion only. Mr. Hawley and his party would bend all their
forces to the return of Pinkerton, and Mr. Brooke's success must
depend either on plumpers which would leave Bagster in the rear,
or on the new minting of Tory votes into reforming votes.
The latter means, of course, would be preferable.
This prospect of converting votes was a dangerous distraction to
Mr. Brooke: his impression that waverers were likely to be allured
by wavering statements, and also the liability of his mind to stick
afresh at opposing arguments as they turned up in his memory,
gave Will Ladislaw much trouble.
"You know there are tactics in these things," said Mr. Brooke;
"meeting people half-way--tempering your ideas--saying, `Well now,
there's something in that,' and so on. I agree with you that this
is a peculiar occasion--the country with a will of its own--
political unions--that sort of thing--but we sometimes cut with rather
too sharp a knife, Ladislaw. These ten-pound householders, now:
why ten? Draw the line somewhere--yes: but why just at ten?
That's a difficult question, now, if you go into it."
"Of course it is," said Will, impatiently. "But if you are to wait
till we get a logical Bill, you must put yourself forward as
a revolutionist, and then Middlemarch would not elect you, I fancy.
As for trimming, this is not a time for trimming."
Mr. Brooke always ended by agreeing with Ladislaw, who still
appeared to him a sort of Burke with a leaven of Shelley; but after
an interval the wisdom of his own methods reasserted itself,
and he was again drawn into using them with much hopefulness.
At this stage of affairs he was in excellent spirits, which even
supported him under large advances of money; for his powers
of convincing and persuading had not yet been, tested by anything
more difficult than a chairman's speech introducing other orators,
or a dialogue with a Middlemarch voter, from which he came away
with a sense that he was a tactician by nature, and that it
was a pity he had not gone earlier into this kind of thing.
He was a little conscious of defeat, however, with Mr. Mawmsey,
a chief representative in Middlemarch of that great social power,
the retail trader, and naturally one of the most doubtful voters
in the borough--willing for his own part to supply an equal quality
of teas and sugars to reformer and anti-reformer, as well as to agree
impartially with both, and feeling like the burgesses of old that
this necessity of electing members was a great burthen to a town;
for even if there were no danger in holding out hopes to all
parties beforehand, there would be the painful necessity at last
of disappointing respectable people whose names were on his books.
He was accustomed to receive large orders from Mr. Brooke of Tipton;
but then, there were many of Pinkerton's committee whose opinions
had a great weight of grocery on their side. Mr. Mawmsey thinking
that Mr. Brooke, as not too "clever in his intellects," was the more
likely to forgive a grocer who gave a hostile vote under pressure,
had become confidential in his back parlor.
"As to Reform, sir, put it in a family light," he said, rattling the
small silver in his pocket, and smiling affably. "Will it support
Mrs. Mawmsey, and enable her to bring up six children when I am no more?
I put the question FICTIOUSLY, knowing what must be the answer.
Very well, sir. I ask you what, as a husband and a father, I am
to do when gentlemen come to me and say, `Do as you like, Mawmsey;
but if you vote against us, I shall get my groceries elsewhere:
when I sugar my liquor I like to feel that I am benefiting the country
by maintaining tradesmen of the right color.' Those very words have
been spoken to me, sir, in the very chair where you are now sitting.
I don't mean by your honorable self, Mr. Brooke."
"No, no, no--that's narrow, you know. Until my butler complains
to me of your goods, Mr. Mawmsey," said Mr. Brooke, soothingly,
"until I hear that you send bad sugars, spices--that sort of thing--
I shall never order him to go elsewhere."
"Sir, I am your humble servant, and greatly obliged," said Mr. Mawmsey,
feeling that politics were clearing up a little. "There would be some
pleasure in voting for a gentleman who speaks in that honorable manner."
"Well, you know, Mr. Mawmsey, you would find it the right thing to put
yourself on our side. This Reform will touch everybody by-and-by--
a thoroughly popular measure--a sort of A, B, C, you know,
that must come first before the rest can follow. I quite agree
with you that you've got to look at the thing in a family light:
but public spirit, now. We're all one family, you know--
it's all one cupboard. Such a thing as a vote, now: why, it may
help to make men's fortunes at the Cape--there's no knowing
what may be the effect of a vote," Mr. Brooke ended, with a sense
of being a little out at sea, though finding it still enjoyable.
But Mr. Mawmsey answered in a tone of decisive check.
"I beg your pardon, sir, but I can't afford that. When I give a vote
I must know what I am doing; I must look to what will be the effects
on my till and ledger, speaking respectfully. Prices, I'll admit,
are what nobody can know the merits of; and the sudden falls after
you've bought in currants, which are a goods that will not keep--
I've never; myself seen into the ins and outs there; which is a rebuke
to human pride. But as to one family, there's debtor and creditor,
I hope; they're not going to reform that away; else I should vote
for things staying as they are. Few men have less need to cry
for change than I have, personally speaking--that is, for self
and family. I am not one of those who have nothing to lose:
I mean as to respectability both in parish and private business,
and noways in respect of your honorable self and custom, which you
was good enough to say you would not withdraw from me, vote or no vote,
while the article sent in was satisfactory."
After this conversation Mr. Mawmsey went up and boasted to his wife
that he had been rather too many for Brooke of Tipton, and that he
didn't mind so much now about going to the poll.
Mr. Brooke on this occasion abstained from boasting of his tactics
to Ladislaw, who for his part was glad enough to persuade himself
that he had no concern with any canvassing except the purely
argumentative sort, and that he worked no meaner engine than knowledge.
Mr. Brooke, necessarily, had his agents, who understood the nature
of the Middlemarch voter and the means of enlisting his ignorance
on the side of the Bill--which were remarkably similar to the means
of enlisting it on the side against the Bill. Will stopped his ears.
Occasionally Parliament, like the rest of our lives, even to our
eating and apparel, could hardly go on if our imaginations were
too active about processes. There were plenty of dirty-handed men
in the world to do dirty business; and Will protested to himself
that his share in bringing Mr. Brooke through would be quite innocent.
But whether he should succeed in that mode of contributing
to the majority on the right side was very doubtful to him.
He had written out various speeches and memoranda for speeches,
but he had begun to perceive that Mr. Brooke's mind, if it had
the burthen of remembering any train of thought, would let it drop,
run away in search of it, and not easily come back again. To collect
documents is one mode of serving your country, and to remember
the contents of a document is another. No! the only way in which
Mr. Brooke could be coerced into thinking of the right arguments
at the right time was to be well plied with them till they took
up all the room in his brain. But here there was the difficulty
of finding room, so many things having been taken in beforehand.
Mr. Brooke himself observed that his ideas stood rather in his way
when he was speaking.
However, Ladislaw's coaching was forthwith to be put to the test,
for before the day of nomination Mr. Brooke was to explain himself to
the worthy electors of Middlemarch from the balcony of the White Hart,
which looked out advantageously at an angle of the market-place,
commanding a large area in front and two converging streets.
It was a fine May morning, and everything seemed hopeful:
there was some prospect of an understanding between Bagster's
committee and Brooke's, to which Mr. Bulstrode, Mr. Standish
as a Liberal lawyer, and such manufacturers as Mr. Plymdale and
Mr. Vincy, gave a solidity which almost counterbalanced Mr. Hawley
and his associates who sat for Pinkerton at the Green Dragon.
Mr. Brooke, conscious of having weakened the blasts of the "Trumpet"
against him, by his reforms as a landlord in the last half year,
and hearing himself cheered a little as he drove into the town,
felt his heart tolerably light under his buff-colored waistcoat.
But with regard to critical occasions, it often happens that all moments
seem comfortably remote until the last.
"This looks well, eh?" said Mr. Brooke as the crowd gathered.
"I shall have a good audience, at any rate. I like this, now--
this kind of public made up of one's own neighbors, you know."
The weavers and tanners of Middlemarch, unlike Mr. Mawmsey, had never
thought of Mr. Brooke as a neighbor, and were not more attached
to him than if he had been sent in a box from London. But they
listened without much disturbance to the speakers who introduced
the candidate, one of them--a political personage from Brassing,
who came to tell Middlemarch its duty--spoke so fully, that it was
alarming to think what the candidate could find to say after him.
Meanwhile the crowd became denser, and as the political personage
neared the end of his speech, Mr. Brooke felt a remarkable change
in his sensations while he still handled his eye-glass, trifled
with documents before him, and exchanged remarks with his committee,
as a man to whom the moment of summons was indifferent.
"I'll take another glass of sherry, Ladislaw," he said, with an
easy air, to Will, who was close behind him, and presently handed
him the supposed fortifier. It was ill-chosen; for Mr. Brooke
was an abstemious man, and to drink a second glass of sherry
quickly at no great interval from the first was a surprise
to his system which tended to scatter his energies instead of
collecting them Pray pity him: so many English gentlemen make
themselves miserable by speechifying on entirely private grounds!
whereas Mr. Brooke wished to serve his country by standing
for Parliament--which, indeed, may also be done on private grounds,
but being once undertaken does absolutely demand some speechifying.
It was not about the beginning of his speech that Mr. Brooke was at
all anxious; this, he felt sure, would be all right; he should have
it quite pat, cut out as neatly as a set of couplets from Pope.
Embarking would be easy, but the vision of open sea that might
come after was alarming. "And questions, now," hinted the demon
just waking up in his stomach, "somebody may put questions
about the schedules.--Ladislaw," he continued, aloud, "just hand
me the memorandum of the schedules."
When Mr. Brooke presented himself on the balcony, the cheers were
quite loud enough to counterbalance the yells, groans, brayings,
and other expressions of adverse theory, which were so moderate that
Mr. Standish (decidedly an old bird) observed in the ear next to him,
"This looks dangerous, by God! Hawley has got some deeper plan
than this." Still, the cheers were exhilarating, and no candidate
could look more amiable than Mr. Brooke, with the memorandum
in his breast-pocket, his left hand on the rail of the balcony,
and his right trifling with his eye-glass. The striking points
in his appearance were his buff waistcoat, short-clipped blond hair,
and neutral physiognomy. He began with some confidence.
"Gentlemen--Electors of Middlemarch!"
This was so much the right thing that a little pause after it
seemed natural.
"I'm uncommonly glad to be here--I was never so proud and happy
in my life--never so happy, you know."
This was a bold figure of speech, but not exactly the right thing;
for, unhappily, the pat opening had slipped away--even couplets
from Pope may be but "fallings from us, vanishings," when fear
clutches us, and a glass of sherry is hurrying like smoke among
our ideas. Ladislaw, who stood at the window behind the speaker,
thought, "it's all up now. The only chance is that, since the best
thing won't always do, floundering may answer for once." Mr. Brooke,
meanwhile, having lost other clews, fell back on himself and his
qualifications--always an appropriate graceful subject for a candidate.
"I am a close neighbor of yours, my good friends--you've known
me on the bench a good while--I've always gone a good deal into
public questions--machinery, now, and machine-breaking--you're many
of you concerned with machinery, and I've been going into that lately.
It won't do, you know, breaking machines: everything must go on--
trade, manufactures, commerce, interchange of staples--that kind
of thing--since Adam Smith, that must go on. We must look all over
the globe:--`Observation with extensive view,' must look everywhere,
`from China to Peru,' as somebody says--Johnson, I think, `The Rambler,'
you know. That is what I have done up to a certain point--not as far
as Peru; but I've not always stayed at home--I saw it wouldn't do.
I've been in the Levant, where some of your Middlemarch goods go--
and then, again, in the Baltic. The Baltic, now."
Plying among his recollections in this way, Mr. Brooke might have
got along, easily to himself, and would have come back from the
remotest seas without trouble; but a diabolical procedure had been set
up by the enemy. At one and the same moment there had risen above
the shoulders of the crowd, nearly opposite Mr. Brooke, and within
ten yards of him, the effigy of himself: buff-colored waistcoat,
eye-glass, and neutral physiognomy, painted on rag; and there
had arisen, apparently in the air, like the note of the cuckoo,
a parrot-like, Punch-voiced echo of his words. Everybody looked
up at the open windows in the houses at the opposite angles
of the converging streets; but they were either blank, or filled
by laughing listeners. The most innocent echo has an impish mockery
in it when it follows a gravely persistent speaker, and this echo
was not at all innocent; if it did not follow with the precision
of a natural echo, it had a wicked choice of the words it overtook.
By the time it said, "The Baltic, now," the laugh which had been
running through the audience became a general shout, and but for
the sobering effects of party and that great public cause which
the entanglement of things had identified with "Brooke of Tipton,"
the laugh might have caught his committee. Mr. Bulstrode asked,
reprehensively, what the new police was doing; but a voice could not
well be collared, and an attack on the effigy of the candidate would
have been too equivocal, since Hawley probably meant it to be pelted.
Mr. Brooke himself was not in a position to be quickly conscious
of anything except a general slipping away of ideas within himself:
he had even a little singing in the ears, and he was the only person
who had not yet taken distinct account of the echo or discerned the
image of himself. Few things hold the perceptions more thoroughly
captive than anxiety about what we have got to say. Mr. Brooke heard
the laughter; but he had expected some Tory efforts at disturbance,
and he was at this moment additionally excited by the tickling,
stinging sense that his lost exordium was coming back to fetch him
from the Baltic.
"That reminds me," he went on, thrusting a hand into his side-pocket,
with an easy air, "if I wanted a precedent, you know--but we never want
a precedent for the right thing--but there is Chatham, now; I can't
say I should have supported Chatham, or Pitt, the younger Pitt--
he was not a man of ideas, and we want ideas, you know."
"Blast your ideas! we want the Bill," said a loud rough voice
from the crowd below.
Immediately the invisible Punch, who had hitherto followed
Mr. Brooke, repeated, "Blast your ideas! we want the Bill."
The laugh was louder than ever, and for the first time Mr. Brooke
being himself silent, heard distinctly the mocking echo. But it
seemed to ridicule his interrupter, and in that light was encouraging;
so he replied with amenity--
"There is something in what you say, my good friend, and what do we
meet for but to speak our minds--freedom of opinion, freedom of
the press, liberty--that kind of thing? The Bill, now--you shall have
the Bill"--here Mr. Brooke paused a moment to fix on his eye-glass
and take the paper from his breast-pocket, with a sense of being
practical and coming to particulars. The invisible Punch followed:--
"You shall have the Bill, Mr. Brooke, per electioneering contest,
and a seat outside Parliament as delivered, five thousand pounds,
seven shillings, and fourpence."
Mr. Brooke, amid the roars of laughter, turned red, let his eye-glass
fall, and looking about him confusedly, saw the image of himself,
which had come nearer. The next moment he saw it dolorously
bespattered with eggs. His spirit rose a little, and his voice too.
"Buffoonery, tricks, ridicule the test of truth--all that is very
well"--here an unpleasant egg broke on Mr. Brooke's shoulder,
as the echo said, "All that is very well;" then came a hail of eggs,
chiefly aimed at the image, but occasionally hitting the original,
as if by chance. There was a stream of new men pushing among
the crowd; whistles, yells, bellowings, and fifes made all the greater
hubbub because there was shouting and struggling to put them down.
No voice would have had wing enough to rise above the uproar,
and Mr. Brooke, disagreeably anointed, stood his ground no longer.
The frustration would have been less exasperating if it had been
less gamesome and boyish: a serious assault of which the newspaper
reporter "can aver that it endangered the learned gentleman's ribs,"
or can respectfully bear witness to "the soles of that gentleman's boots
having been visible above the railing," has perhaps more consolations
attached to it.
Mr. Brooke re-entered the committee-room, saying, as carelessly
as he could, "This is a little too bad, you know. I should have got
the ear of the people by-and-by--but they didn't give me time.
I should have gone into the Bill by-and-by, you know," he added,
glancing at Ladislaw. "However, things will come all right at
the nomination."
But it was not resolved unanimously that things would come right;
on the contrary, the committee looked rather grim, and the political
personage from Brassing was writing busily, as if he were brewing
new devices.
"It was Bowyer who did it," said Mr. Standish, evasively. "I know
it as well as if he had been advertised. He's uncommonly good
at ventriloquism, and he did it uncommonly well, by God! Hawley has
been having him to dinner lately: there's a fund of talent in Bowyer."
"Well, you know, you never mentioned him to me, Standish, else I
would have invited him to dine," said poor Mr. Brooke, who had gone
through a great deal of inviting for the good of his country.
"There's not a more paltry fellow in Middlemarch than Bowyer,"
said Ladislaw, indignantly, "but it seems as if the paltry fellows
were always to turn the scale."
Will was thoroughly out of temper with himself as well as with his
"principal," and he went to shut himself in his rooms with a half-formed
resolve to throw up the "Pioneer" and Mr. Brooke together.
Why should he stay? If the impassable gulf between himself and
Dorothea were ever to be filled up, it must rather be by his going
away and getting into a thoroughly different position than by staying
here and slipping into deserved contempt as an understrapper of
Brooke's. Then came the young dream of wonders that he might do--
in five years, for example: political writing, political speaking,
would get a higher value now public life was going to be wider and
more national, and they might give him such distinction that he would
not seem to be asking Dorothea to step down to him. Five years:--
if he could only be sure that she cared for him more than for others;
if he could only make her aware that he stood aloof until he could
tell his love without lowering himself--then he could go away easily,
and begin a career which at five-and-twenty seemed probable enough
in the inward order of things, where talent brings fame, and fame
everything else which is delightful. He could speak and he could write;
he could master any subject if he chose, and he meant always to take
the side of reason and justice, on which he would carry all his ardor.
Why should he not one day be lifted above the shoulders of the crowd,
and feel that he had won that eminence well? Without doubt he would
leave Middlemarch, go to town, and make himself fit for celebrity
by "eating his dinners."
But not immediately: not until some kind of sign had passed between
him and Dorothea. He could not be satisfied until she knew why,
even if he were the man she would choose to marry, he would not
marry her. Hence he must keep his post and bear with Mr. Brooke
a little longer.
But he soon had reason to suspect that Mr. Brooke had
anticipated him in the wish to break up their connection.
Deputations without and voices within had concurred in inducing
that philanthropist to take a stronger measure than usual for the
good of mankind; namely, to withdraw in favor of another candidate,
to whom he left the advantages of his canvassing machinery.
He himself called this a strong measure, but observed that
his health was less capable of sustaining excitement than he had imagined.
"I have felt uneasy about the chest--it won't do to carry that too far,"
he said to Ladislaw in explaining the affair. "I must pull up.
Poor Casaubon was a warning, you know. I've made some heavy advances,
but I've dug a channel. It's rather coarse work--this electioneering,
eh, Ladislaw? dare say you are tired of it. However, we have dug
a channel with the `Pioneer'--put things in a track, and so on.
A more ordinary man than you might carry it on now--more ordinary,
you know."
"Do you wish me to give it up?" said Will, the quick color coming
in his face, as he rose from the writing-table, and took a turn
of three steps with his hands in his pockets. "I am ready to do
so whenever you wish it."
"As to wishing, my dear Ladislaw, I have the highest opinion of
your powers, you know. But about the `Pioneer,' I have been consulting
a little with some of the men on our side, and they are inclined to take
it into their hands--indemnify me to a certain extent--carry it on,
in fact. And under the circumstances, you might like to give up--
might find a better field. These people might not take that high view
of you which I have always taken, as an alter ego, a right hand--
though I always looked forward to your doing something else.
I think of having a run into France. But I'll write you any letters,
you know--to Althorpe and people of that kind. I've met Althorpe."
"I am exceedingly obliged to you," said Ladislaw, proudly. "Since you
are going to part with the `Pioneer,' I need not trouble you about
the steps I shall take. I may choose to continue here for the present."
After Mr. Brooke had left him Will said to himself, "The rest
of the family have been urging him to get rid of me, and he
doesn't care now about my going. I shall stay as long as I like.
I shall go of my own movements and not because they are afraid
of me."
