Middlemarch
thoroughly hateful to him. Hitherto in his own life his wants had been
supplied without any trouble to himself, and his first impulse was
always to be liberal with half-crowns as matters of no importance to a
gentleman; it had never occurred to him to devise a plan for getting
half-crowns. He had always known in a general way that he was not rich,
but he had never felt poor, and he had no power of imagining the part
which the want of money plays in determining the actions of men. Money
had never been a motive to him. Hence he was not ready to frame excuses
for this deliberate pursuit of small gains. It was altogether repulsive
to him, and he never entered into any calculation of the ratio between
the Vicar’s income and his more or less necessary expenditure. It was
possible that he would not have made such a calculation in his own
case.
And now, when the question of voting had come, this repulsive fact told
more strongly against Mr. Farebrother than it had done before. One
would know much better what to do if men’s characters were more
consistent, and especially if one’s friends were invariably fit for any
function they desired to undertake! Lydgate was convinced that if there
had been no valid objection to Mr. Farebrother, he would have voted for
him, whatever Bulstrode might have felt on the subject: he did not
intend to be a vassal of Bulstrode’s. On the other hand, there was
Tyke, a man entirely given to his clerical office, who was simply
curate at a chapel of ease in St. Peter’s parish, and had time for
extra duty. Nobody had anything to say against Mr. Tyke, except that
they could not bear him, and suspected him of cant. Really, from his
point of view, Bulstrode was thoroughly justified.
But whichever way Lydgate began to incline, there was something to make
him wince; and being a proud man, he was a little exasperated at being
obliged to wince. He did not like frustrating his own best purposes by
getting on bad terms with Bulstrode; he did not like voting against
Farebrother, and helping to deprive him of function and salary; and the
question occurred whether the additional forty pounds might not leave
the Vicar free from that ignoble care about winning at cards. Moreover,
Lydgate did not like the consciousness that in voting for Tyke he
should be voting on the side obviously convenient for himself. But
would the end really be his own convenience? Other people would say so,
and would allege that he was currying favor with Bulstrode for the sake
of making himself important and getting on in the world. What then? He
for his own part knew that if his personal prospects simply had been
concerned, he would not have cared a rotten nut for the banker’s
friendship or enmity. What he really cared for was a medium for his
work, a vehicle for his ideas; and after all, was he not bound to
prefer the object of getting a good hospital, where he could
demonstrate the specific distinctions of fever and test therapeutic
results, before anything else connected with this chaplaincy? For the
first time Lydgate was feeling the hampering threadlike pressure of
small social conditions, and their frustrating complexity. At the end
of his inward debate, when he set out for the hospital, his hope was
really in the chance that discussion might somehow give a new aspect to
the question, and make the scale dip so as to exclude the necessity for
voting. I think he trusted a little also to the energy which is
begotten by circumstances—some feeling rushing warmly and making
resolve easy, while debate in cool blood had only made it more
difficult. However it was, he did not distinctly say to himself on
which side he would vote; and all the while he was inwardly resenting
the subjection which had been forced upon him. It would have seemed
beforehand like a ridiculous piece of bad logic that he, with his
unmixed resolutions of independence and his select purposes, would find
himself at the very outset in the grasp of petty alternatives, each of
which was repugnant to him. In his student’s chambers, he had
prearranged his social action quite differently.
Lydgate was late in setting out, but Dr. Sprague, the two other
surgeons, and several of the directors had arrived early; Mr.
Bulstrode, treasurer and chairman, being among those who were still
absent. The conversation seemed to imply that the issue was
problematical, and that a majority for Tyke was not so certain as had
been generally supposed. The two physicians, for a wonder, turned out
to be unanimous, or rather, though of different minds, they concurred
in action. Dr. Sprague, the rugged and weighty, was, as every one had
foreseen, an adherent of Mr. Farebrother. The Doctor was more than
suspected of having no religion, but somehow Middlemarch tolerated this
deficiency in him as if he had been a Lord Chancellor; indeed it is
probable that his professional weight was the more believed in, the
world-old association of cleverness with the evil principle being still
potent in the minds even of lady-patients who had the strictest ideas
of frilling and sentiment. It was perhaps this negation in the Doctor
which made his neighbors call him hard-headed and dry-witted;
conditions of texture which were also held favorable to the storing of
judgments connected with drugs. At all events, it is certain that if
any medical man had come to Middlemarch with the reputation of having
very definite religious views, of being given to prayer, and of
otherwise showing an active piety, there would have been a general
presumption against his medical skill.
On this ground it was (professionally speaking) fortunate for Dr.
Minchin that his religious sympathies were of a general kind, and such
as gave a distant medical sanction to all serious sentiment, whether of
Church or Dissent, rather than any adhesion to particular tenets. If
Mr. Bulstrode insisted, as he was apt to do, on the Lutheran doctrine
of justification, as that by which a Church must stand or fall, Dr.
Minchin in return was quite sure that man was not a mere machine or a
fortuitous conjunction of atoms; if Mrs. Wimple insisted on a
particular providence in relation to her stomach complaint, Dr. Minchin
for his part liked to keep the mental windows open and objected to
fixed limits; if the Unitarian brewer jested about the Athanasian
Creed, Dr. Minchin quoted Pope’s “Essay on Man.” He objected to the
rather free style of anecdote in which Dr. Sprague indulged, preferring
well-sanctioned quotations, and liking refinement of all kinds: it was
generally known that he had some kinship to a bishop, and sometimes
spent his holidays at “the palace.”
Dr. Minchin was soft-handed, pale-complexioned, and of rounded outline,
not to be distinguished from a mild clergyman in appearance: whereas
Dr. Sprague was superfluously tall; his trousers got creased at the
knees, and showed an excess of boot at a time when straps seemed
necessary to any dignity of bearing; you heard him go in and out, and
up and down, as if he had come to see after the roofing. In short, he
had weight, and might be expected to grapple with a disease and throw
it; while Dr. Minchin might be better able to detect it lurking and to
circumvent it. They enjoyed about equally the mysterious privilege of
medical reputation, and concealed with much etiquette their contempt
for each other’s skill. Regarding themselves as Middlemarch
institutions, they were ready to combine against all innovators, and
against non-professionals given to interference. On this ground they
were both in their hearts equally averse to Mr. Bulstrode, though Dr.
Minchin had never been in open hostility with him, and never differed
from him without elaborate explanation to Mrs. Bulstrode, who had found
that Dr. Minchin alone understood her constitution. A layman who pried
into the professional conduct of medical men, and was always obtruding
his reforms,—though he was less directly embarrassing to the two
physicians than to the surgeon-apothecaries who attended paupers by
contract, was nevertheless offensive to the professional nostril as
such; and Dr. Minchin shared fully in the new pique against Bulstrode,
excited by his apparent determination to patronize Lydgate. The
long-established practitioners, Mr. Wrench and Mr. Toller; were just
now standing apart and having a friendly colloquy, in which they agreed
that Lydgate was a jackanapes, just made to serve Bulstrode’s purpose.
To non-medical friends they had already concurred in praising the other
young practitioner, who had come into the town on Mr. Peacock’s
retirement without further recommendation than his own merits and such
argument for solid professional acquirement as might be gathered from
his having apparently wasted no time on other branches of knowledge. It
was clear that Lydgate, by not dispensing drugs, intended to cast
imputations on his equals, and also to obscure the limit between his
own rank as a general practitioner and that of the physicians, who, in
the interest of the profession, felt bound to maintain its various
grades,—especially against a man who had not been to either of the
English universities and enjoyed the absence of anatomical and bedside
study there, but came with a libellous pretension to experience in
Edinburgh and Paris, where observation might be abundant indeed, but
hardly sound.
Thus it happened that on this occasion Bulstrode became identified with
Lydgate, and Lydgate with Tyke; and owing to this variety of
interchangeable names for the chaplaincy question, diverse minds were
enabled to form the same judgment concerning it.
Dr. Sprague said at once bluntly to the group assembled when he
entered, “I go for Farebrother. A salary, with all my heart. But why
take it from the Vicar? He has none too much—has to insure his life,
besides keeping house, and doing a vicar’s charities. Put forty pounds
in his pocket and you’ll do no harm. He’s a good fellow, is
Farebrother, with as little of the parson about him as will serve to
carry orders.”
“Ho, ho! Doctor,” said old Mr. Powderell, a retired iron-monger of some
standing—his interjection being something between a laugh and a
Parliamentary disapproval; “we must let you have your say. But what we
have to consider is not anybody’s income—it’s the souls of the poor
sick people”—here Mr. Powderell’s voice and face had a sincere pathos
in them. “He is a real Gospel preacher, is Mr. Tyke. I should vote
against my conscience if I voted against Mr. Tyke—I should indeed.”
“Mr. Tyke’s opponents have not asked any one to vote against his
conscience, I believe,” said Mr. Hackbutt, a rich tanner of fluent
speech, whose glittering spectacles and erect hair were turned with
some severity towards innocent Mr. Powderell. “But in my judgment it
behoves us, as Directors, to consider whether we will regard it as our
whole business to carry out propositions emanating from a single
quarter. Will any member of the committee aver that he would have
entertained the idea of displacing the gentleman who has always
discharged the function of chaplain here, if it had not been suggested
to him by parties whose disposition it is to regard every institution
of this town as a machinery for carrying out their own views? I tax no
man’s motives: let them lie between himself and a higher Power; but I
do say, that there are influences at work here which are incompatible
with genuine independence, and that a crawling servility is usually
dictated by circumstances which gentlemen so conducting themselves
could not afford either morally or financially to avow. I myself am a
layman, but I have given no inconsiderable attention to the divisions
in the Church and—”
“Oh, damn the divisions!” burst in Mr. Frank Hawley, lawyer and
town-clerk, who rarely presented himself at the board, but now looked