Middlemarch
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