Middlemarch
You’d never get elected, you know. And we shall always want talent in
the House: reform as we will, we shall always want talent. That
avalanche and the thunder, now, was really a little like Burke. I want
that sort of thing—not ideas, you know, but a way of putting them.”
“Pocket-boroughs would be a fine thing,” said Ladislaw, “if they were
always in the right pocket, and there were always a Burke at hand.”
Will was not displeased with that complimentary comparison, even from
Mr. Brooke; for it is a little too trying to human flesh to be
conscious of expressing one’s self better than others and never to have
it noticed, and in the general dearth of admiration for the right
thing, even a chance bray of applause falling exactly in time is rather
fortifying. Will felt that his literary refinements were usually beyond
the limits of Middlemarch perception; nevertheless, he was beginning
thoroughly to like the work of which when he began he had said to
himself rather languidly, “Why not?”—and he studied the political
situation with as ardent an interest as he had ever given to poetic
metres or mediaevalism. It is undeniable that but for the desire to be
where Dorothea was, and perhaps the want of knowing what else to do,
Will would not at this time have been meditating on the needs of the
English people or criticising English statesmanship: he would probably
have been rambling in Italy sketching plans for several dramas, trying
prose and finding it too jejune, trying verse and finding it too
artificial, beginning to copy “bits” from old pictures, leaving off
because they were “no good,” and observing that, after all,
self-culture was the principal point; while in politics he would have
been sympathizing warmly with liberty and progress in general. Our
sense of duty must often wait for some work which shall take the place
of dilettanteism and make us feel that the quality of our action is not
a matter of indifference.
Ladislaw had now accepted his bit of work, though it was not that
indeterminate loftiest thing which he had once dreamed of as alone
worthy of continuous effort. His nature warmed easily in the presence
of subjects which were visibly mixed with life and action, and the
easily stirred rebellion in him helped the glow of public spirit. In
spite of Mr. Casaubon and the banishment from Lowick, he was rather
happy; getting a great deal of fresh knowledge in a vivid way and for
practical purposes, and making the “Pioneer” celebrated as far as
Brassing (never mind the smallness of the area; the writing was not
worse than much that reaches the four corners of the earth).
Mr. Brooke was occasionally irritating; but Will’s impatience was
relieved by the division of his time between visits to the Grange and
retreats to his Middlemarch lodgings, which gave variety to his life.
“Shift the pegs a little,” he said to himself, “and Mr. Brooke might be
in the Cabinet, while I was Under-Secretary. That is the common order
of things: the little waves make the large ones and are of the same
pattern. I am better here than in the sort of life Mr. Casaubon would
have trained me for, where the doing would be all laid down by a
precedent too rigid for me to react upon. I don’t care for prestige or
high pay.”
As Lydgate had said of him, he was a sort of gypsy, rather enjoying the
sense of belonging to no class; he had a feeling of romance in his
position, and a pleasant consciousness of creating a little surprise
wherever he went. That sort of enjoyment had been disturbed when he had
felt some new distance between himself and Dorothea in their accidental
meeting at Lydgate’s, and his irritation had gone out towards Mr.
Casaubon, who had declared beforehand that Will would lose caste. “I
never had any caste,” he would have said, if that prophecy had been
uttered to him, and the quick blood would have come and gone like
breath in his transparent skin. But it is one thing to like defiance,
and another thing to like its consequences.
Meanwhile, the town opinion about the new editor of the “Pioneer” was
tending to confirm Mr. Casaubon’s view. Will’s relationship in that
distinguished quarter did not, like Lydgate’s high connections, serve
as an advantageous introduction: if it was rumored that young Ladislaw
was Mr. Casaubon’s nephew or cousin, it was also rumored that “Mr.
Casaubon would have nothing to do with him.”
“Brooke has taken him up,” said Mr. Hawley, “because that is what no
man in his senses could have expected. Casaubon has devilish good
reasons, you may be sure, for turning the cold shoulder on a young
fellow whose bringing-up he paid for. Just like Brooke—one of those
fellows who would praise a cat to sell a horse.”
And some oddities of Will’s, more or less poetical, appeared to support
Mr. Keck, the editor of the “Trumpet,” in asserting that Ladislaw, if
the truth were known, was not only a Polish emissary but crack-brained,
which accounted for the preternatural quickness and glibness of his
speech when he got on to a platform—as he did whenever he had an
opportunity, speaking with a facility which cast reflections on solid
Englishmen generally. It was disgusting to Keck to see a strip of a
fellow, with light curls round his head, get up and speechify by the
hour against institutions “which had existed when he was in his
cradle.” And in a leading article of the “Trumpet,” Keck characterized
Ladislaw’s speech at a Reform meeting as “the violence of an
energumen—a miserable effort to shroud in the brilliancy of fireworks
the daring of irresponsible statements and the poverty of a knowledge
which was of the cheapest and most recent description.”
“That was a rattling article yesterday, Keck,” said Dr. Sprague, with
sarcastic intentions. “But what is an energumen?”
“Oh, a term that came up in the French Revolution,” said Keck.
This dangerous aspect of Ladislaw was strangely contrasted with other
habits which became matter of remark. He had a fondness, half artistic,
half affectionate, for little children—the smaller they were on
tolerably active legs, and the funnier their clothing, the better Will
liked to surprise and please them. We know that in Rome he was given to
ramble about among the poor people, and the taste did not quit him in
Middlemarch.
He had somehow picked up a troop of droll children, little hatless boys
with their galligaskins much worn and scant shirting to hang out,
little girls who tossed their hair out of their eyes to look at him,
and guardian brothers at the mature age of seven. This troop he had led
out on gypsy excursions to Halsell Wood at nutting-time, and since the
cold weather had set in he had taken them on a clear day to gather
sticks for a bonfire in the hollow of a hillside, where he drew out a
small feast of gingerbread for them, and improvised a Punch-and-Judy
drama with some private home-made puppets. Here was one oddity. Another
was, that in houses where he got friendly, he was given to stretch
himself at full length on the rug while he talked, and was apt to be
discovered in this attitude by occasional callers for whom such an
irregularity was likely to confirm the notions of his dangerously mixed
blood and general laxity.
But Will’s articles and speeches naturally recommended him in families
which the new strictness of party division had marked off on the side
of Reform. He was invited to Mr. Bulstrode’s; but here he could not lie
down on the rug, and Mrs. Bulstrode felt that his mode of talking about
Catholic countries, as if there were any truce with Antichrist,
illustrated the usual tendency to unsoundness in intellectual men.
At Mr. Farebrother’s, however, whom the irony of events had brought on
the same side with Bulstrode in the national movement, Will became a
favorite with the ladies; especially with little Miss Noble, whom it
was one of his oddities to escort when he met her in the street with
her little basket, giving her his arm in the eyes of the town, and
insisting on going with her to pay some call where she distributed her
small filchings from her own share of sweet things.
But the house where he visited oftenest and lay most on the rug was
Lydgate’s. The two men were not at all alike, but they agreed none the
worse. Lydgate was abrupt but not irritable, taking little notice of
megrims in healthy people; and Ladislaw did not usually throw away his
susceptibilities on those who took no notice of them. With Rosamond, on
the other hand, he pouted and was wayward—nay, often uncomplimentary,
much to her inward surprise; nevertheless he was gradually becoming
necessary to her entertainment by his companionship in her music, his
varied talk, and his freedom from the grave preoccupation which, with
all her husband’s tenderness and indulgence, often made his manners
unsatisfactory to her, and confirmed her dislike of the medical
profession.
Lydgate, inclined to be sarcastic on the superstitious faith of the
people in the efficacy of “the bill,” while nobody cared about the low
state of pathology, sometimes assailed Will with troublesome questions.
One evening in March, Rosamond in her cherry-colored dress with
swansdown trimming about the throat sat at the tea-table; Lydgate,
lately come in tired from his outdoor work, was seated sideways on an
easy-chair by the fire with one leg over the elbow, his brow looking a
little troubled as his eyes rambled over the columns of the “Pioneer,”
while Rosamond, having noticed that he was perturbed, avoided looking
at him, and inwardly thanked heaven that she herself had not a moody
disposition. Will Ladislaw was stretched on the rug contemplating the
curtain-pole abstractedly, and humming very low the notes of “When
first I saw thy face;” while the house spaniel, also stretched out with
small choice of room, looked from between his paws at the usurper of
the rug with silent but strong objection.
Rosamond bringing Lydgate his cup of tea, he threw down the paper, and
said to Will, who had started up and gone to the table—
“It’s no use your puffing Brooke as a reforming landlord, Ladislaw:
they only pick the more holes in his coat in the ‘Trumpet.’”
“No matter; those who read the ‘Pioneer’ don’t read the ‘Trumpet,’”
said Will, swallowing his tea and walking about. “Do you suppose the
public reads with a view to its own conversion? We should have a
witches’ brewing with a vengeance then—‘Mingle, mingle, mingle, mingle,
You that mingle may’—and nobody would know which side he was going to
take.”
“Farebrother says, he doesn’t believe Brooke would get elected if the
opportunity came: the very men who profess to be for him would bring
another member out of the bag at the right moment.”
“There’s no harm in trying. It’s good to have resident members.”
“Why?” said Lydgate, who was much given to use that inconvenient word
in a curt tone.
“They represent the local stupidity better,” said Will, laughing, and
shaking his curls; “and they are kept on their best behavior in the
neighborhood. Brooke is not a bad fellow, but he has done some good
things on his estate that he never would have done but for this
Parliamentary bite.”
“He’s not fitted to be a public man,” said Lydgate, with contemptuous
decision. “He would disappoint everybody who counted on him: I can see
that at the Hospital. Only, there Bulstrode holds the reins and drives
him.”
“That depends on how you fix your standard of public men,” said Will.
“He’s good enough for the occasion: when the people have made up their
mind as they are making it up now, they don’t want a man—they only want
a vote.”
“That is the way with you political writers, Ladislaw—crying up a
measure as if it were a universal cure, and crying up men who are a
part of the very disease that wants curing.”