Middlemarch
man, and to drink a second glass of sherry quickly at no great interval
from the first was a surprise to his system which tended to scatter his
energies instead of collecting them. Pray pity him: so many English
gentlemen make themselves miserable by speechifying on entirely private
grounds! whereas Mr. Brooke wished to serve his country by standing for
Parliament—which, indeed, may also be done on private grounds, but
being once undertaken does absolutely demand some speechifying.
It was not about the beginning of his speech that Mr. Brooke was at all
anxious; this, he felt sure, would be all right; he should have it
quite pat, cut out as neatly as a set of couplets from Pope. Embarking
would be easy, but the vision of open sea that might come after was
alarming. “And questions, now,” hinted the demon just waking up in his
stomach, “somebody may put questions about the schedules.—Ladislaw,” he
continued, aloud, “just hand me the memorandum of the schedules.”
When Mr. Brooke presented himself on the balcony, the cheers were quite
loud enough to counterbalance the yells, groans, brayings, and other
expressions of adverse theory, which were so moderate that Mr. Standish
(decidedly an old bird) observed in the ear next to him, “This looks
dangerous, by God! Hawley has got some deeper plan than this.” Still,
the cheers were exhilarating, and no candidate could look more amiable
than Mr. Brooke, with the memorandum in his breast-pocket, his left
hand on the rail of the balcony, and his right trifling with his
eye-glass. The striking points in his appearance were his buff
waistcoat, short-clipped blond hair, and neutral physiognomy. He began
with some confidence.
“Gentlemen—Electors of Middlemarch!”
This was so much the right thing that a little pause after it seemed
natural.
“I’m uncommonly glad to be here—I was never so proud and happy in my
life—never so happy, you know.”
This was a bold figure of speech, but not exactly the right thing; for,
unhappily, the pat opening had slipped away—even couplets from Pope may
be but “fallings from us, vanishings,” when fear clutches us, and a
glass of sherry is hurrying like smoke among our ideas. Ladislaw, who
stood at the window behind the speaker, thought, “it’s all up now. The
only chance is that, since the best thing won’t always do, floundering
may answer for once.” Mr. Brooke, meanwhile, having lost other clews,
fell back on himself and his qualifications—always an appropriate
graceful subject for a candidate.
“I am a close neighbor of yours, my good friends—you’ve known me on the
bench a good while—I’ve always gone a good deal into public
questions—machinery, now, and machine-breaking—you’re many of you
concerned with machinery, and I’ve been going into that lately. It
won’t do, you know, breaking machines: everything must go on—trade,
manufactures, commerce, interchange of staples—that kind of thing—since
Adam Smith, that must go on. We must look all over the
globe:—‘Observation with extensive view,’ must look everywhere, ‘from
China to Peru,’ as somebody says—Johnson, I think, ‘The Rambler,’ you
know. That is what I have done up to a certain point—not as far as
Peru; but I’ve not always stayed at home—I saw it wouldn’t do. I’ve
been in the Levant, where some of your Middlemarch goods go—and then,
again, in the Baltic. The Baltic, now.”
Plying among his recollections in this way, Mr. Brooke might have got
along, easily to himself, and would have come back from the remotest
seas without trouble; but a diabolical procedure had been set up by the
enemy. At one and the same moment there had risen above the shoulders
of the crowd, nearly opposite Mr. Brooke, and within ten yards of him,
the effigy of himself: buff-colored waistcoat, eye-glass, and neutral
physiognomy, painted on rag; and there had arisen, apparently in the
air, like the note of the cuckoo, a parrot-like, Punch-voiced echo of
his words. Everybody looked up at the open windows in the houses at the
opposite angles of the converging streets; but they were either blank,
or filled by laughing listeners. The most innocent echo has an impish
mockery in it when it follows a gravely persistent speaker, and this
echo was not at all innocent; if it did not follow with the precision
of a natural echo, it had a wicked choice of the words it overtook. By
the time it said, “The Baltic, now,” the laugh which had been running
through the audience became a general shout, and but for the sobering
effects of party and that great public cause which the entanglement of
things had identified with “Brooke of Tipton,” the laugh might have
caught his committee. Mr. Bulstrode asked, reprehensively, what the new
police was doing; but a voice could not well be collared, and an attack
on the effigy of the candidate would have been too equivocal, since
Hawley probably meant it to be pelted.
Mr. Brooke himself was not in a position to be quickly conscious of
anything except a general slipping away of ideas within himself: he had
even a little singing in the ears, and he was the only person who had
not yet taken distinct account of the echo or discerned the image of
himself. Few things hold the perceptions more thoroughly captive than
anxiety about what we have got to say. Mr. Brooke heard the laughter;
but he had expected some Tory efforts at disturbance, and he was at
this moment additionally excited by the tickling, stinging sense that
his lost exordium was coming back to fetch him from the Baltic.
“That reminds me,” he went on, thrusting a hand into his side-pocket,
with an easy air, “if I wanted a precedent, you know—but we never want
a precedent for the right thing—but there is Chatham, now; I can’t say
I should have supported Chatham, or Pitt, the younger Pitt—he was not a
man of ideas, and we want ideas, you know.”
“Blast your ideas! we want the Bill,” said a loud rough voice from the
crowd below.
Immediately the invisible Punch, who had hitherto followed Mr. Brooke,
repeated, “Blast your ideas! we want the Bill.” The laugh was louder
than ever, and for the first time Mr. Brooke being himself silent,
heard distinctly the mocking echo. But it seemed to ridicule his
interrupter, and in that light was encouraging; so he replied with
amenity—
“There is something in what you say, my good friend, and what do we
meet for but to speak our minds—freedom of opinion, freedom of the
press, liberty—that kind of thing? The Bill, now—you shall have the
Bill”—here Mr. Brooke paused a moment to fix on his eye-glass and take
the paper from his breast-pocket, with a sense of being practical and
coming to particulars. The invisible Punch followed:—
“You shall have the Bill, Mr. Brooke, per electioneering contest, and a
seat outside Parliament as delivered, five thousand pounds, seven
shillings, and fourpence.”
Mr. Brooke, amid the roars of laughter, turned red, let his eye-glass
fall, and looking about him confusedly, saw the image of himself, which
had come nearer. The next moment he saw it dolorously bespattered with
eggs. His spirit rose a little, and his voice too.
“Buffoonery, tricks, ridicule the test of truth—all that is very
well”—here an unpleasant egg broke on Mr. Brooke’s shoulder, as the
echo said, “All that is very well;” then came a hail of eggs, chiefly
aimed at the image, but occasionally hitting the original, as if by
chance. There was a stream of new men pushing among the crowd;
whistles, yells, bellowings, and fifes made all the greater hubbub
because there was shouting and struggling to put them down. No voice
would have had wing enough to rise above the uproar, and Mr. Brooke,
disagreeably anointed, stood his ground no longer. The frustration
would have been less exasperating if it had been less gamesome and
boyish: a serious assault of which the newspaper reporter “can aver
that it endangered the learned gentleman’s ribs,” or can respectfully
bear witness to “the soles of that gentleman’s boots having been
visible above the railing,” has perhaps more consolations attached to
it.
Mr. Brooke re-entered the committee-room, saying, as carelessly as he
could, “This is a little too bad, you know. I should have got the ear
of the people by-and-by—but they didn’t give me time. I should have
gone into the Bill by-and-by, you know,” he added, glancing at
Ladislaw. “However, things will come all right at the nomination.”
But it was not resolved unanimously that things would come right; on
the contrary, the committee looked rather grim, and the political
personage from Brassing was writing busily, as if he were brewing new
devices.
“It was Bowyer who did it,” said Mr. Standish, evasively. “I know it as
well as if he had been advertised. He’s uncommonly good at
ventriloquism, and he did it uncommonly well, by God! Hawley has been
having him to dinner lately: there’s a fund of talent in Bowyer.”
“Well, you know, you never mentioned him to me, Standish, else I would
have invited him to dine,” said poor Mr. Brooke, who had gone through a
great deal of inviting for the good of his country.
“There’s not a more paltry fellow in Middlemarch than Bowyer,” said
Ladislaw, indignantly, “but it seems as if the paltry fellows were
always to turn the scale.”
Will was thoroughly out of temper with himself as well as with his
“principal,” and he went to shut himself in his rooms with a
half-formed resolve to throw up the “Pioneer” and Mr. Brooke together.
Why should he stay? If the impassable gulf between himself and Dorothea
were ever to be filled up, it must rather be by his going away and
getting into a thoroughly different position than by staying here and
slipping into deserved contempt as an understrapper of Brooke’s. Then
came the young dream of wonders that he might do—in five years, for
example: political writing, political speaking, would get a higher
value now public life was going to be wider and more national, and they
might give him such distinction that he would not seem to be asking
Dorothea to step down to him. Five years:—if he could only be sure that
she cared for him more than for others; if he could only make her aware
that he stood aloof until he could tell his love without lowering
himself—then he could go away easily, and begin a career which at
five-and-twenty seemed probable enough in the inward order of things,
where talent brings fame, and fame everything else which is delightful.
He could speak and he could write; he could master any subject if he
chose, and he meant always to take the side of reason and justice, on
which he would carry all his ardor. Why should he not one day be lifted
above the shoulders of the crowd, and feel that he had won that
eminence well? Without doubt he would leave Middlemarch, go to town,
and make himself fit for celebrity by “eating his dinners.”
But not immediately: not until some kind of sign had passed between him
and Dorothea. He could not be satisfied until she knew why, even if he
were the man she would choose to marry, he would not marry her. Hence
he must keep his post and bear with Mr. Brooke a little longer.
But he soon had reason to suspect that Mr. Brooke had anticipated him
in the wish to break up their connection. Deputations without and
voices within had concurred in inducing that philanthropist to take a
stronger measure than usual for the good of mankind; namely, to
withdraw in favor of another candidate, to whom he left the advantages
of his canvassing machinery. He himself called this a strong measure,
but observed that his health was less capable of sustaining excitement
than he had imagined.
“I have felt uneasy about the chest—it won’t do to carry that too far,”
he said to Ladislaw in explaining the affair. “I must pull up. Poor
Casaubon was a warning, you know. I’ve made some heavy advances, but