Middlemarch
“Good gracious! what dreadful trifling with people’s constitutions!”
said Mrs. Taft.
After this, it came to be held in various quarters that Lydgate played
even with respectable constitutions for his own purposes, and how much
more likely that in his flighty experimenting he should make sixes and
sevens of hospital patients. Especially it was to be expected, as the
landlady of the Tankard had said, that he would recklessly cut up their
dead bodies. For Lydgate having attended Mrs. Goby, who died apparently
of a heart-disease not very clearly expressed in the symptoms, too
daringly asked leave of her relatives to open the body, and thus gave
an offence quickly spreading beyond Parley Street, where that lady had
long resided on an income such as made this association of her body
with the victims of Burke and Hare a flagrant insult to her memory.
Affairs were in this stage when Lydgate opened the subject of the
Hospital to Dorothea. We see that he was bearing enmity and silly
misconception with much spirit, aware that they were partly created by
his good share of success.
“They will not drive me away,” he said, talking confidentially in Mr.
Farebrother’s study. “I have got a good opportunity here, for the ends
I care most about; and I am pretty sure to get income enough for our
wants. By-and-by I shall go on as quietly as possible: I have no
seductions now away from home and work. And I am more and more
convinced that it will be possible to demonstrate the homogeneous
origin of all the tissues. Raspail and others are on the same track,
and I have been losing time.”
“I have no power of prophecy there,” said Mr. Farebrother, who had been
puffing at his pipe thoughtfully while Lydgate talked; “but as to the
hostility in the town, you’ll weather it if you are prudent.”
“How am I to be prudent?” said Lydgate, “I just do what comes before me
to do. I can’t help people’s ignorance and spite, any more than
Vesalius could. It isn’t possible to square one’s conduct to silly
conclusions which nobody can foresee.”
“Quite true; I didn’t mean that. I meant only two things. One is, keep
yourself as separable from Bulstrode as you can: of course, you can go
on doing good work of your own by his help; but don’t get tied. Perhaps
it seems like personal feeling in me to say so—and there’s a good deal
of that, I own—but personal feeling is not always in the wrong if you
boil it down to the impressions which make it simply an opinion.”
“Bulstrode is nothing to me,” said Lydgate, carelessly, “except on
public grounds. As to getting very closely united to him, I am not fond
enough of him for that. But what was the other thing you meant?” said
Lydgate, who was nursing his leg as comfortably as possible, and
feeling in no great need of advice.
“Why, this. Take care—_experto crede_—take care not to get hampered
about money matters. I know, by a word you let fall one day, that you
don’t like my playing at cards so much for money. You are right enough
there. But try and keep clear of wanting small sums that you haven’t
got. I am perhaps talking rather superfluously; but a man likes to
assume superiority over himself, by holding up his bad example and
sermonizing on it.”
Lydgate took Mr. Farebrother’s hints very cordially, though he would
hardly have borne them from another man. He could not help remembering
that he had lately made some debts, but these had seemed inevitable,
and he had no intention now to do more than keep house in a simple way.
The furniture for which he owed would not want renewing; nor even the
stock of wine for a long while.
Many thoughts cheered him at that time—and justly. A man conscious of
enthusiasm for worthy aims is sustained under petty hostilities by the
memory of great workers who had to fight their way not without wounds,
and who hover in his mind as patron saints, invisibly helping. At home,
that same evening when he had been chatting with Mr. Farebrother, he
had his long legs stretched on the sofa, his head thrown back, and his
hands clasped behind it according to his favorite ruminating attitude,
while Rosamond sat at the piano, and played one tune after another, of
which her husband only knew (like the emotional elephant he was!) that
they fell in with his mood as if they had been melodious sea-breezes.
There was something very fine in Lydgate’s look just then, and any one
might have been encouraged to bet on his achievement. In his dark eyes
and on his mouth and brow there was that placidity which comes from the
fulness of contemplative thought—the mind not searching, but beholding,
and the glance seeming to be filled with what is behind it.
Presently Rosamond left the piano and seated herself on a chair close
to the sofa and opposite her husband’s face.
“Is that enough music for you, my lord?” she said, folding her hands
before her and putting on a little air of meekness.
“Yes, dear, if you are tired,” said Lydgate, gently, turning his eyes
and resting them on her, but not otherwise moving. Rosamond’s presence
at that moment was perhaps no more than a spoonful brought to the lake,
and her woman’s instinct in this matter was not dull.
“What is absorbing you?” she said, leaning forward and bringing her
face nearer to his.
He moved his hands and placed them gently behind her shoulders.
“I am thinking of a great fellow, who was about as old as I am three
hundred years ago, and had already begun a new era in anatomy.”
“I can’t guess,” said Rosamond, shaking her head. “We used to play at
guessing historical characters at Mrs. Lemon’s, but not anatomists.”
“I’ll tell you. His name was Vesalius. And the only way he could get to
know anatomy as he did, was by going to snatch bodies at night, from
graveyards and places of execution.”
“Oh!” said Rosamond, with a look of disgust on her pretty face, “I am
very glad you are not Vesalius. I should have thought he might find
some less horrible way than that.”
“No, he couldn’t,” said Lydgate, going on too earnestly to take much
notice of her answer. “He could only get a complete skeleton by
snatching the whitened bones of a criminal from the gallows, and
burying them, and fetching them away by bits secretly, in the dead of
night.”
“I hope he is not one of your great heroes,” said Rosamond, half
playfully, half anxiously, “else I shall have you getting up in the
night to go to St. Peter’s churchyard. You know how angry you told me
the people were about Mrs. Goby. You have enemies enough already.”
“So had Vesalius, Rosy. No wonder the medical fogies in Middlemarch are
jealous, when some of the greatest doctors living were fierce upon
Vesalius because they had believed in Galen, and he showed that Galen
was wrong. They called him a liar and a poisonous monster. But the
facts of the human frame were on his side; and so he got the better of
them.”
“And what happened to him afterwards?” said Rosamond, with some
interest.
“Oh, he had a good deal of fighting to the last. And they did
exasperate him enough at one time to make him burn a good deal of his
work. Then he got shipwrecked just as he was coming from Jerusalem to
take a great chair at Padua. He died rather miserably.”
There was a moment’s pause before Rosamond said, “Do you know, Tertius,
I often wish you had not been a medical man.”
“Nay, Rosy, don’t say that,” said Lydgate, drawing her closer to him.
“That is like saying you wish you had married another man.”
“Not at all; you are clever enough for anything: you might easily have
been something else. And your cousins at Quallingham all think that you
have sunk below them in your choice of a profession.”
“The cousins at Quallingham may go to the devil!” said Lydgate, with
scorn. “It was like their impudence if they said anything of the sort
to you.”
“Still,” said Rosamond, “I do _not_ think it is a nice profession,
dear.” We know that she had much quiet perseverance in her opinion.
“It is the grandest profession in the world, Rosamond,” said Lydgate,
gravely. “And to say that you love me without loving the medical man in
me, is the same sort of thing as to say that you like eating a peach
but don’t like its flavor. Don’t say that again, dear, it pains me.”
“Very well, Doctor Grave-face,” said Rosy, dimpling, “I will declare in
future that I dote on skeletons, and body-snatchers, and bits of things
in phials, and quarrels with everybody, that end in your dying
miserably.”
“No, no, not so bad as that,” said Lydgate, giving up remonstrance and
petting her resignedly.
CHAPTER XLVI.
Pues no podemos haber aquello que queremos, queramos aquello que
podremos.
Since we cannot get what we like, let us like what we can get.—_Spanish
Proverb_.
While Lydgate, safely married and with the Hospital under his command,
felt himself struggling for Medical Reform against Middlemarch,
Middlemarch was becoming more and more conscious of the national
struggle for another kind of Reform.
By the time that Lord John Russell’s measure was being debated in the
House of Commons, there was a new political animation in Middlemarch,
and a new definition of parties which might show a decided change of
balance if a new election came. And there were some who already
predicted this event, declaring that a Reform Bill would never be
carried by the actual Parliament. This was what Will Ladislaw dwelt on
to Mr. Brooke as a reason for congratulation that he had not yet tried
his strength at the hustings.
“Things will grow and ripen as if it were a comet year,” said Will.
“The public temper will soon get to a cometary heat, now the question
of Reform has set in. There is likely to be another election before
long, and by that time Middlemarch will have got more ideas into its
head. What we have to work at now is the ‘Pioneer’ and political
meetings.”
“Quite right, Ladislaw; we shall make a new thing of opinion here,”
said Mr. Brooke. “Only I want to keep myself independent about Reform,
you know; I don’t want to go too far. I want to take up Wilberforce’s
and Romilly’s line, you know, and work at Negro Emancipation, Criminal
Law—that kind of thing. But of course I should support Grey.”
“If you go in for the principle of Reform, you must be prepared to take
what the situation offers,” said Will. “If everybody pulled for his own
bit against everybody else, the whole question would go to tatters.”
“Yes, yes, I agree with you—I quite take that point of view. I should
put it in that light. I should support Grey, you know. But I don’t want
to change the balance of the constitution, and I don’t think Grey
would.”
“But that is what the country wants,” said Will. “Else there would be
no meaning in political unions or any other movement that knows what
it’s about. It wants to have a House of Commons which is not weighted
with nominees of the landed class, but with representatives of the
other interests. And as to contending for a reform short of that, it is
like asking for a bit of an avalanche which has already begun to
thunder.”
“That is fine, Ladislaw: that is the way to put it. Write that down,
now. We must begin to get documents about the feeling of the country,
as well as the machine-breaking and general distress.”
“As to documents,” said Will, “a two-inch card will hold plenty. A few
rows of figures are enough to deduce misery from, and a few more will
show the rate at which the political determination of the people is
growing.”
“Good: draw that out a little more at length, Ladislaw. That is an
idea, now: write it out in the ‘Pioneer.’ Put the figures and deduce
the misery, you know; and put the other figures and deduce—and so on.
You have a way of putting things. Burke, now:—when I think of Burke, I
can’t help wishing somebody had a pocket-borough to give you, Ladislaw.