Middlemarch
“Why not? Men may help to cure themselves off the face of the land
without knowing it,” said Will, who could find reasons impromptu, when
he had not thought of a question beforehand.
“That is no excuse for encouraging the superstitious exaggeration of
hopes about this particular measure, helping the cry to swallow it
whole and to send up voting popinjays who are good for nothing but to
carry it. You go against rottenness, and there is nothing more
thoroughly rotten than making people believe that society can be cured
by a political hocus-pocus.”
“That’s very fine, my dear fellow. But your cure must begin somewhere,
and put it that a thousand things which debase a population can never
be reformed without this particular reform to begin with. Look what
Stanley said the other day—that the House had been tinkering long
enough at small questions of bribery, inquiring whether this or that
voter has had a guinea when everybody knows that the seats have been
sold wholesale. Wait for wisdom and conscience in public
agents—fiddlestick! The only conscience we can trust to is the massive
sense of wrong in a class, and the best wisdom that will work is the
wisdom of balancing claims. That’s my text—which side is injured? I
support the man who supports their claims; not the virtuous upholder of
the wrong.”
“That general talk about a particular case is mere question begging,
Ladislaw. When I say, I go in for the dose that cures, it doesn’t
follow that I go in for opium in a given case of gout.”
“I am not begging the question we are upon—whether we are to try for
nothing till we find immaculate men to work with. Should you go on that
plan? If there were one man who would carry you a medical reform and
another who would oppose it, should you inquire which had the better
motives or even the better brains?”
“Oh, of course,” said Lydgate, seeing himself checkmated by a move
which he had often used himself, “if one did not work with such men as
are at hand, things must come to a dead-lock. Suppose the worst opinion
in the town about Bulstrode were a true one, that would not make it
less true that he has the sense and the resolution to do what I think
ought to be done in the matters I know and care most about; but that is
the only ground on which I go with him,” Lydgate added rather proudly,
bearing in mind Mr. Farebrother’s remarks. “He is nothing to me
otherwise; I would not cry him up on any personal ground—I would keep
clear of that.”
“Do you mean that I cry up Brooke on any personal ground?” said Will
Ladislaw, nettled, and turning sharp round. For the first time he felt
offended with Lydgate; not the less so, perhaps, because he would have
declined any close inquiry into the growth of his relation to Mr.
Brooke.
“Not at all,” said Lydgate, “I was simply explaining my own action. I
meant that a man may work for a special end with others whose motives
and general course are equivocal, if he is quite sure of his personal
independence, and that he is not working for his private
interest—either place or money.”
“Then, why don’t you extend your liberality to others?” said Will,
still nettled. “My personal independence is as important to me as yours
is to you. You have no more reason to imagine that I have personal
expectations from Brooke, than I have to imagine that you have personal
expectations from Bulstrode. Motives are points of honor, I
suppose—nobody can prove them. But as to money and place in the world,”
Will ended, tossing back his head, “I think it is pretty clear that I
am not determined by considerations of that sort.”
“You quite mistake me, Ladislaw,” said Lydgate, surprised. He had been
preoccupied with his own vindication, and had been blind to what
Ladislaw might infer on his own account. “I beg your pardon for
unintentionally annoying you. In fact, I should rather attribute to you
a romantic disregard of your own worldly interests. On the political
question, I referred simply to intellectual bias.”
“How very unpleasant you both are this evening!” said Rosamond. “I
cannot conceive why money should have been referred to. Politics and
Medicine are sufficiently disagreeable to quarrel upon. You can both of
you go on quarrelling with all the world and with each other on those
two topics.”
Rosamond looked mildly neutral as she said this, rising to ring the
bell, and then crossing to her work-table.
“Poor Rosy!” said Lydgate, putting out his hand to her as she was
passing him. “Disputation is not amusing to cherubs. Have some music.
Ask Ladislaw to sing with you.”
When Will was gone Rosamond said to her husband, “What put you out of
temper this evening, Tertius?”
“Me? It was Ladislaw who was out of temper. He is like a bit of
tinder.”
“But I mean, before that. Something had vexed you before you came in,
you looked cross. And that made you begin to dispute with Mr. Ladislaw.
You hurt me very much when you look so, Tertius.”
“Do I? Then I am a brute,” said Lydgate, caressing her penitently.
“What vexed you?”
“Oh, outdoor things—business.” It was really a letter insisting on the
payment of a bill for furniture. But Rosamond was expecting to have a
baby, and Lydgate wished to save her from any perturbation.
CHAPTER XLVII.
Was never true love loved in vain,
For truest love is highest gain.
No art can make it: it must spring
Where elements are fostering.
So in heaven’s spot and hour
Springs the little native flower,
Downward root and upward eye,
Shapen by the earth and sky.
It happened to be on a Saturday evening that Will Ladislaw had that
little discussion with Lydgate. Its effect when he went to his own
rooms was to make him sit up half the night, thinking over again, under
a new irritation, all that he had before thought of his having settled
in Middlemarch and harnessed himself with Mr. Brooke. Hesitations
before he had taken the step had since turned into susceptibility to
every hint that he would have been wiser not to take it; and hence came
his heat towards Lydgate—a heat which still kept him restless. Was he
not making a fool of himself?—and at a time when he was more than ever
conscious of being something better than a fool? And for what end?
Well, for no definite end. True, he had dreamy visions of
possibilities: there is no human being who having both passions and
thoughts does not think in consequence of his passions—does not find
images rising in his mind which soothe the passion with hope or sting
it with dread. But this, which happens to us all, happens to some with
a wide difference; and Will was not one of those whose wit “keeps the
roadway:” he had his bypaths where there were little joys of his own
choosing, such as gentlemen cantering on the highroad might have
thought rather idiotic. The way in which he made a sort of happiness
for himself out of his feeling for Dorothea was an example of this. It
may seem strange, but it is the fact, that the ordinary vulgar vision
of which Mr. Casaubon suspected him—namely, that Dorothea might become
a widow, and that the interest he had established in her mind might
turn into acceptance of him as a husband—had no tempting, arresting
power over him; he did not live in the scenery of such an event, and
follow it out, as we all do with that imagined “otherwise” which is our
practical heaven. It was not only that he was unwilling to entertain
thoughts which could be accused of baseness, and was already uneasy in
the sense that he had to justify himself from the charge of
ingratitude—the latent consciousness of many other barriers between
himself and Dorothea besides the existence of her husband, had helped
to turn away his imagination from speculating on what might befall Mr.
Casaubon. And there were yet other reasons. Will, we know, could not
bear the thought of any flaw appearing in his crystal: he was at once
exasperated and delighted by the calm freedom with which Dorothea
looked at him and spoke to him, and there was something so exquisite in
thinking of her just as she was, that he could not long for a change
which must somehow change her. Do we not shun the street version of a
fine melody?—or shrink from the news that the rarity—some bit of
chiselling or engraving perhaps—which we have dwelt on even with
exultation in the trouble it has cost us to snatch glimpses of it, is
really not an uncommon thing, and may be obtained as an every-day
possession? Our good depends on the quality and breadth of our emotion;
and to Will, a creature who cared little for what are called the solid
things of life and greatly for its subtler influences, to have within
him such a feeling as he had towards Dorothea, was like the inheritance
of a fortune. What others might have called the futility of his
passion, made an additional delight for his imagination: he was
conscious of a generous movement, and of verifying in his own
experience that higher love-poetry which had charmed his fancy.
Dorothea, he said to himself, was forever enthroned in his soul: no
other woman could sit higher than her footstool; and if he could have
written out in immortal syllables the effect she wrought within him, he
might have boasted after the example of old Drayton, that,—
“Queens hereafter might be glad to live
Upon the alms of her superfluous praise.”
But this result was questionable. And what else could he do for
Dorothea? What was his devotion worth to her? It was impossible to
tell. He would not go out of her reach. He saw no creature among her
friends to whom he could believe that she spoke with the same simple
confidence as to him. She had once said that she would like him to
stay; and stay he would, whatever fire-breathing dragons might hiss
around her.
This had always been the conclusion of Will’s hesitations. But he was
not without contradictoriness and rebellion even towards his own
resolve. He had often got irritated, as he was on this particular
night, by some outside demonstration that his public exertions with Mr.
Brooke as a chief could not seem as heroic as he would like them to be,
and this was always associated with the other ground of irritation—that
notwithstanding his sacrifice of dignity for Dorothea’s sake, he could
hardly ever see her. Whereupon, not being able to contradict these
unpleasant facts, he contradicted his own strongest bias and said, “I
am a fool.”
Nevertheless, since the inward debate necessarily turned on Dorothea,
he ended, as he had done before, only by getting a livelier sense of
what her presence would be to him; and suddenly reflecting that the
morrow would be Sunday, he determined to go to Lowick Church and see
her. He slept upon that idea, but when he was dressing in the rational
morning light, Objection said—
“That will be a virtual defiance of Mr. Casaubon’s prohibition to visit
Lowick, and Dorothea will be displeased.”
“Nonsense!” argued Inclination, “it would be too monstrous for him to
hinder me from going out to a pretty country church on a spring
morning. And Dorothea will be glad.”
“It will be clear to Mr. Casaubon that you have come either to annoy
him or to see Dorothea.”
“It is not true that I go to annoy him, and why should I not go to see
Dorothea? Is he to have everything to himself and be always
comfortable? Let him smart a little, as other people are obliged to do.
I have always liked the quaintness of the church and congregation;
besides, I know the Tuckers: I shall go into their pew.”
Having silenced Objection by force of unreason, Will walked to Lowick
as if he had been on the way to Paradise, crossing Halsell Common and
skirting the wood, where the sunlight fell broadly under the budding
boughs, bringing out the beauties of moss and lichen, and fresh green
growths piercing the brown. Everything seemed to know that it was