Chapter XVIII
"Oh, sir, the loftiest hopes on earth
Draw lots with meaner hopes: heroic breasts,
Breathing bad air, ran risk of pestilence;
Or, lacking lime-juice when they cross the Line,
May languish with the scurvy."
Some weeks passed after this conversation before the
question of the chaplaincy gathered any practical import
for Lydgate, and without telling himself the reason, he
deferred the predetermination on which side he should give
his vote. It would really have been a matter of total
indifference to him — that is to say, he would have taken the
more convenient side, and given his vote for the
appointment of Tyke without any hesitation — if he had not
cared personally for Mr. Farebrother.
But his liking for the Vicar of St. Botolph's grew with
growing acquaintanceship. That, entering into Lydgate's
position as a new-comer who had his own professional
objects to secure, Mr. Farebrother should have taken pains
rather to warn off than to obtain his interest, showed an
unusual delicacy and generosity, which Lydgate's nature was
keenly alive to. It went along with other points of
conduct in Mr. Fare brother which were exceptionally fine,
and made his character resemble those southern landscapes
which seem divided between natural grandeur and social
slovenliness. Very few men could have been as filial and
chivalrous as he was to the mother, aunt, and sister, whose
dependence on him had in many ways shaped his life rather
uneasily for himself; few
men who feel the pressure of
small needs are so nobly resolute not to dress up their
inevitably self-interested desires in a pretext of better
motives. In these matters he was conscious that his life
would bear the closest scrutiny; and perhaps the
consciousness encouraged a little defiance towards the
critical strictness of persons whose celestial intimacies
seemed not to improve their domestic manners, and whose
lofty aims were not needed to account for their actions.
Then, his preaching was ingenious and pithy, like the
preaching of the English Church in its robust age, and his
sermons were delivered without book. People outside his
parish went to hear him; and, since to fill the church was
always the most difficult part of a clergyman's function,
here was another ground for a careless sense of
superiority. Besides, he was a likable man: sweet-tempered, ready-witted, frank, without grins of suppressed
bitterness or other conversational flavors which make half
of us an affliction to our friends. Lydgate liked him
heartily, and wished for his friendship.
With this feeling uppermost, he continued to waive the
question of the chaplaincy, and to persuade himself that it
was not only no proper business of his, but likely enough
never to vex him with a demand for his vote. Lydgate, at
Mr. Bulstrode's request, wag laying down plans for the
internal arrangements of the new hospital, and the two were
often in consultation. The banker was always presupposing
that he could count in general on Lydgate as a coadjutor,
but made no special recurrence to the coming decision
between Tyke and Farebrother. When the General Board of
the Infirmary had met, however, and Lydgate had notice that
the question of the chaplaincy was thrown on a council of
the directors and medical men, to meet on the following
Friday, he had a vexed sense that he must make up his mind
on this trivial Middlemarch business. He could not help
hearing within him the distinct declaration that Bulstrode
was prime minister, and that the Tyke affair was a question
of office or no office; and he could not help an equally
pronounced dislike to giving up the prospect of office.
For his observation was constantly confirming Mr.
Farebrother's assurance that the banker would
not
overlook opposition. "Confound their petty politics!" was
one of his thoughts for three mornings in the meditative
process of shaving, when he had begun to feel that he must
really hold a court of conscience on this matter. Certainly
there were valid things to be said against the election of
Mr. Farebrother: he had too much on his hands already,
especially considering how much time he spent on non-clerical occupations. Then again it was a continually
repeated shock, disturbing Lydgate's esteem, that the Vicar
should obviously play for the sake of money, liking the play
indeed, but evidently liking some end which it served. Mr.
Farebrother contended on theory for the desirability of all
games, and said that Englishmen's wit was stagnant for want
of them; but Lydgate felt certain that he would have played
very much less but for the money. There was a billiard-room
at the Green Dragon, which some anxious mothers and wives
regarded as the chief temptation in Middlemarch. The Vicar
was a first-rate billiard-player, and though he did not
frequent the Green Dragon, there were reports that he had
sometimes been there in the daytime and had won money. And
as to the chaplaincy, he did not pretend that he cared for
it, except for the sake of the forty pounds. Lydgate was no
Puritan, but he did not care for play, and winning money at
it had always seemed a meanness to him; besides, he had an
ideal of life which made this subservience of conduct to the
gaining of small sums thoroughly hateful to him. Hitherto
in his own life his wants had been supplied without any
trouble to himself, and his first impulse was always to be
liberal with half-crowns as matters of no importance to a
gentleman; it had never occurred to him to devise a plan for
getting half-crowns. He had always known in a general way
that he was not rich, but he had never felt poor, and he had
no power of imagining the part which the want of money plays
in determining the actions of men. Money had never been a
motive to him. Hence he was not ready to frame excuses for
this deliberate pursuit of small gains. It was altogether
repulsive to him, and he never entered into any calculation
of the ratio between the Vicar's income and his more or less
necessary
expenditure. It was possible that he would
not have made sue h a calculation in his own case.
And now, when the question of voting had come, this
repulsive fact told more strongly against Mr. Farebrother
than it had done before. One would know much better what to
do if men's characters were more consistent, and especially
if one's friends were invariably fit for any function they
desired to undertake! Lydgate was convinced that if there
had been no valid objection to Mr. Farebrother, he would
have voted for him, whatever Bulstrode might have felt on
the subject: he did not intend to be a vassal of
Bulstrode's. On the other hand, there was Tyke, a man
entirely given to his clerical office, who was simply curate
at a chapel of ease in St. Peter's parish, and had time for
extra duty. Nobody had anything to say against Mr. Tyke,
except that they could not bear him, and suspected him of
cant. Really, from his point of view, Bulstrode was
thoroughly justified.
But whichever way Lydgate began to incline, there was
something to make him wince; and being a proud man, he was a
little exasperated at being obliged to wince. He did not
like frustrating his own best purposes by getting on bad
terms with Bulstrode; he did not like voting against
Farebrother, and helping to deprive him of function and
salary; and the question occurred whether the additional
forty pounds might not leave the Vicar free from that
ignoble care about winning at cards. Moreover, Lydgate did
not like the consciousness that in voting for Tyke he should
be voting on the side obviously convenient for himself. But
would the end really be his own convenience? Other people
would say so, and would allege that he was currying favor
with Bulstrode for the sake of making himself important and
getting on in the world. What then? He for his own part
knew that if his personal prospects simply had beet concerned,
he would not have eared a rotten nut for the
banker's friendship or enmity. What he really cared for was
a medium for his work, a vehicle for his ideas; and after
all, was he not bound to prefer the object of getting a good
hospital, where he could demonstrate the specific
distinctions of fever
and test therapeutic results,
before anything else connected with this chaplaincy? For
the first time Lydgate was feeling the hampering threadlike
pressure of small social conditions, and their frustrating
complexity. At the end of his inward debate, when he set
out for the hospital, his hope was really in the chance that
discussion might somehow give a new aspect to the question,
and make the scale dip so as to exclude the necessity for
voting. I think he trusted a little also to the energy
which is begotten by circumstances — some feeling rushing
warmly and making resolve easy, while debate in cool blood
had only made it more difficult. However it was, he did not
distinctly say to himself on which side he would vote; and
all the while he was inwardly resenting the subjection which
had been forced upon him. It would have seemed beforehand
like a ridiculous piece of bad logic that he, with his
unmixed resolutions of independence and his select purposes,
would find himself at the very outset in the grasp of petty
alternatives, each of which was repugnant to him. In his
student's chambers, he had prearranged his social action
quite differently.
Lydgate was late in setting out, but Dr. Sprague, the
two other surgeons, and several of the directors had arrived
early; Mr. Bulstrode, treasurer and chairman, being among
those who were still absent. The conversation seemed to
imply that the issue was problematical, and that a majority
for Tyke was not so certain as had been generally supposed.
The two physicians, for a wonder, turned out to be
unanimous, or rather, though of different minds, they
concurred in action. Dr. Sprague, the rugged and weighty,
was, as every one had foreseen, an adherent of Mr.
Farebrother. The Doctor was more than suspected of having
no religion, but somehow Middlemarch tolerated this
deficiency in him as if he had been a Lord Chancellor;
indeed it is probable that his professional weight was the
more believed in, the world-old association of cleverness
with the evil principle being still potent in the minds even
of lady-patients who had the strictest ideas of frilling and
sentiment. It was perhaps this negation in the Doctor which
made his neighbors call him hard-headed and dry-witted;
conditions of texture which were also held favorable to the
storing of judgments connected with drugs. At all
events, it is certain that if any medical man had come to
Middlemarch with the reputation of having very definite
religious views, of being given to prayer, and of otherwise
showing an active piety, there would have been a general
presumption against his medical skill.
On this ground it was (professionally speaking)
fortunate for Dr. Minchin that his religious sympathies were
of a general kind, and such as gave a distant medical
sanction to all serious sentiment, whether of Church or
Dissent, rather than any adhesion to particular tenets. If
Mr. Bulstrode insisted, as he was apt to do, on the Lutheran
doctrine of justification, as that by which a Church must
stand or fall, Dr. Minchin in return was quite sure that man
was not a mere machine or a fortuitous conjunction of atoms;
if Mrs. Wimple insisted on a particular providence in
relation to her stomach complaint, Dr. Minchin for his part
liked to keep the mental windows open and objected to fixed
limits; if the Unitarian brewer jested about the Athanasian
Creed, Dr. Minchin quoted Pope's " Essay on Man." He
objected to the rather free style of anecdote in which Dr.
Sprague indulged, preferring well-sanctioned quotations, and
liking refinement of all kinds: it was generally known that
he had some kinship to a bishop, and sometimes spent his
holidays at " the palace."
Dr. Minchin was soft-handed, pale-complexioned, and of
rounded outline, not to be distinguished from a mild
clergyman in appearance: whereas Dr. Sprague was
superfluously tall; his trousers got creased at the knees,
and showed an excess of boot at a time when straps seemed
necessary to any dignity of bearing; you heard him go in and
out, and up and down, as if he had come to see after the
roofing. In short, he had weight, and might be expected to
grapple with a disease and throw it; while Dr. Minchin might
be better able to detect it lurking and to circumvent it.
They enjoyed about equally the mysterious privilege of
medical reputation, and concealed with much etiquette their
contempt for each other's skill. Regarding themselves as
Middlemarch institutions, they were ready to combine against
all innovators, and against non-professionals given to
interference. On this ground they were both in their
hearts equally averse to Mr. Bulstrode, though Dr. Minchin
had never been in open hostility with him, and never
differed from him without elaborate explanation to Mrs.
Bulstrode, who had found that Dr. Minchin alone understood
her constitution. A layman who pried into the professional
conduct of medical men, and was always obtruding his
reforms, — though he was less directly embarrassing to the
two physicians than to the surgeon-apothecaries who attended
paupers by contract, was nevertheless offensive to the
professional nostril as such; and Dr. Minchin shared fully
in the new pique against Bulstrode, excited by his apparent
determination to patronize Lydgate. The long-established
practitioners, Mr. Wrench and Mr. Toller; were just now
standing apart and having a friendly colloquy, in which they
agreed that Lydgate was a jackanapes, just made to serve
Bulstrode's purpose. To non-medical friends they had
already concurred in praising the other young practitioner,
who had come into the town on Mr. Peacock's retirement
without further recommendation than his own merits and such
argument for solid professional acquirement as might be
gathered from his having apparently wasted no time on other
branches of knowledge. It was clear that Lydgate, by not
dispensing drugs, intended to cast imputations on his
equals, and also to obscure the limit between his own rank
as a general practitioner and that of the physicians, who,
in the interest of the profession, felt bound to maintain
its various grades, — especially against a man who had not
been to either of the English universities and enjoyed the
absence of anatomical and bedside study there, but came with
a libellous pretension to experience in Edinburgh and Paris,
where observation might be abundant indeed, but hardly
sound.
Thus it happened that on this occasion Bulstrode became
identified with Lydgate, and Lydgate with Tyke; and owing to
this variety of interchangeable names for the chaplaincy
question, diverse minds were enabled to form the same
judgment concerning it.
Dr. Sprague said at once bluntly. to the group
assembled when he entered, "I go for Farebrother. A salary,
with all
my heart. But why take it from the Vicar? He
has none too much — has to insure his life, besides keeping
house, and doing a vicar's charities. Put forty pounds in
his pocket and you'll do no harm. He's a good fellow, is
Farebrother, with as little of the parson about him as will
serve to carry orders."
"Ho, ho! Doctor," said old Mr. Powderell, a retired
iron-monger of some standing — his interjection being
something between a laugh and a Parliamentary disapproval; "
we must let you have your say. But what we have to consider
is not anybody's income — it's the souls of the poor sick
people" — here Mr. Powderell's voice and face had a sincere
pathos in them. "He is a real Gospel preacher, is Mr. Tyke.
I should vote against my conscience if I voted against Mr.
Tyke — I should indeed."
"Mr. Tyke's opponents have not asked any one to vote
against his conscience, I believe," said Mr. Hackbutt, a
rich tanner of fluent speech, whose glittering spectacles
and erect hair were turned with some severity towards
innocent Mr. Powderell. " But in my judgment it behoves us,
as Directors, to consider whether we will regard it as our
whole business to carry out propositions emanating from a
single quarter. Will any member of the committee aver that
he would have entertained the idea of displacing the
gentleman who has always discharged the function of chaplain
here, if it had not been suggested to him by parties whose
disposition it is to regard every institution of this town
as a machinery for carrying out their own views? I tax no
man's motives: let them lie between himself and a higher
Power; but I do say, that there are influences at work here
which are incompatible with genuine independence, and that a
crawling servility is usually dictated by circumstances
which gentlemen so conducting themselves could not afford
either morally or financially to avow. I myself am a
layman, but I have given no inconsiderable attention to the
divisions in the Church and — "
"Oh, damn the divisions!" burst in Mr. Frank Hawley,
lawyer and town-clerk, who rarely presented himself at the
board, but now looked in hurriedly, whip in hand. " We have
nothing to do with them here. Farebrother has been
doing the work — what there was — without pay, and if pay is
to be given, it should be given to him. I call it a
confounded job to take the thing away from Farebrother."
"I think it would be as well for gentlemen not to give
their remarks a personal bearing," said Mr. Plymdale. -"I
shall vote for the appointment of Mr. Tyke, but I should not
have known, if Mr. Hackbutt hadn't hinted it, that I was a
Servile Crawler."
"I disclaim any personalities. I expressly said, if I
may be allowed to repeat, or even to conclude what I was
about to say — "
"Ah, here's Minchin!" said Mr. Frank Hawley; at which
everybody turned away from Mr. Hackbutt, leaving him to feel
the uselessness of superior gifts in Middlemarch. " Come,
Doctor, I must have you on the right side, eh?"
"I hope so," said Dr. Minchin, nodding and shaking hands
here and there; " at whatever cost to my feelings."
"If there's any feeling here, it should be feeling for
the man who is turned out, I think," said Mr. Frank Hawley.
"I confess I have feelings on the other side also. I
have a divided esteem," said Dr. Minchin, rubbing his hands.
" I consider Mr. Tyke an exemplary man — none more so — and I
believe him to be proposed from unimpeachable motives. I,
for my part, wish that I could give him my vote. But I am
constrained to take a view of the case which gives the
preponderance to Mr. Farebrother's claims. He is an amiable
man, an able preacher, and has been longer among us."
Old Mr. Powderell looked on, sad and silent. Mr.
Plymdale settled his cravat, uneasily.
"You don't set up Farebrother as a pattern of what a
clergyman ought to be, I hope," said Mr. Larcher, the
eminent carrier, who had just come in. "I have no ill-will
towards him, but I think we owe something to the public, not
to speak of anything higher, in these appointments. In my
opinion Farebrother is too lax for a clergyman. I don't
wish to bring up particulars against him; but he will make a
little attendance here go as far as he can."
"And a devilish deal better than too much," said Mr.
Hawley, whose bad language was notorious in that part of the
county. "Sick people can't bear so much praying and
preaching. And that methodistical sort of religion is bad
for the spirits — bad for the inside, eh?" he added, turning
quickly round to the four medical men who were assembled.
But any answer was dispensed with by the entrance of
three gentlemen, with whom there were greetings more or less
cordial. These were the Reverend Edward Thesiger, Rector of
St. Peter's, Mr. Bulstrode, and our friend Mr. Brooke of
Tipton, who had lately allowed himself to be put on the
board of directors in his turn, but had never before
attended, his attendance now being due to Mr. Bulstrode's
exertions. Lydgate was the only person still expected.
Every one now sat down, Mr. Bulstrode presiding, pale
and self-restrained as usual. Mr. Thesiger, a moderate
evangelical, wished for the appointment of his friend Mr.
Tyke, a zealous able man, who, officiating at a chapel of
ease, had not a cure of souls too extensive to leave him
ample time for the new duty. It was desirable that
chaplaincies of this kind should be entered on with a
fervent intention: they were peculiar opportunities for
spiritual influence; and while it was good that a salary
should be allotted, there was the more need for scrupulous
watching lest the office should be perverted into a mere
question of salary. Mr. Thesiger's manner had so much quiet
propriety that objectors could only simmer in silence.
Mr. Brooke believed that everybody meant well in the
matter. He had not himself attended to the affairs of the
Infirmary, though he had a strong interest in whatever was
for the benefit of Middlemarch, and was most happy to meet
the gentlemen present on any public question — " any public
question, you know," Mr. Brooke repeated, with his nod of
perfect understanding. " I am a good deal occupied as a
magistrate, and in the collection of documentary evidence,
but I regard my time as being at the disposal of the
public — and, in short, my friends have convinced me that a
chaplain with a salary — a salary, you know — is a very good
thing, and I am happy
to be able to come here and vote
for the appointment of Mr. Tyke, who, I understand, is an
unexceptionable man, apostolic and eloquent and everything
of that kind — and I am the last man to withhold my vote —
under the circumstances, you know."
"It seems to me that you have been crammed with one side
of the question, Mr. Brooke," said Mr. Frank Hawley, who was
afraid of nobody, and was a Tory suspicious of
electioneering intentions. "You don't seem to know that one
of the worthiest men we have has been doing duty as chaplain
here for years without pay, and that Mr. Tyke is proposed to
supersede him."
"Excuse me, Mr. Hawley," said Mr. Bulstrode. " Mr.
Brooke has been fully informed of Mr. Farebrother's
character and position."
"By his enemies," flashed out Mr. Hawley.
"I trust there is no personal hostility concerned here,"
said Mr. Thesiger.
"I'll swear there is, though," retorted Mr. Hawley.
"Gentlemen," said Mr. Bulstrode, in a subdued tone, "
the merits of the question may be very briefly stated, and
if any one present doubts that every gentleman who is about
to give his vote has not been fully informed, I can now
recapitulate the considerations that should weigh on either
side."
"I don't see the good of that," said Mr. Hawley. "I
suppose we all know whom we mean to vote for. Any man who
wants to do justice does not wait till the last minute to
hear both sides of the question. I have no time to lose,
and I propose that the matter be put to the vote at once."
A brief but still hot discussion followed before each
person wrote "Tyke" or "Farebrother" on a piece of paper and
slipped it into a glass tumbler; and in the mean time Mr.
Bulstrode saw Lydgate enter.
"I perceive that the votes are equally divided at
present," said Mr. Bulstrode, in a clear biting voice.
Then, looking up at Lydgate —
"There is a casting-vote still to be given. It is
yours, Mr. Lydgate: will you be good enough to write?"
"The thing is settled now," said Mr. Wrench, rising. "
We all know how Mr. Lydgate will vote."
"You seem to speak with some peculiar meaning, sir,"
said Lydgate, rather defiantly, and keeping his pencil
suspended.
"I merely mean that you are expected to vote with Mr.
Bulstrode. Do you regard that meaning as offensive?"
"It may be offensive to others. But I shall not desist
from voting with him on that account."
Lydgate immediately wrote down "Tyke."
So the Rev. Walter Tyke became chaplain to the
Infirmary, and Lydgate continued to work with Mr. Bulstrode.
He was really uncertain whether Tyke were not the more
suitable candidate, and yet his consciousness told him that
if he had been quite free from indirect bias he should have
voted for Mr. Farebrother. The affair of the chaplaincy
remained a sore point in his memory as a case in which this
petty medium of Middlemarch had been too strong for him.
How could a man be satisfied with a decision between such
alternatives and under such circumstances? No more than he
can be satisfied with his hat, which he has chosen from
among such shapes as the resources of the age offer him,
wearing it at best with a resignation which is chiefly
supported by comparison.
But Mr. Farebrother met him with the same friendliness
as before. The character of the publican and sinner is not
always practically incompatible with that of the modern
Pharisee, for the majority of us scarcely see more
distinctly the faultiness of our own conduct than the
faultiness of our own arguments, or the dulness of our own
jokes. But the \ Vicar of St. Botolph's had certainly
escaped the slightest tincture of the Pharisee, and by dint
of admitting to himself that he was too much as other men
were, he had become remarkably unlike them in this — that he
could excuse other; for thinking slightly of him, and could
judge impartially of their conduct even when it told against
him.
"The world has been to strong for me, I know," he
said one day to Lydgate. " But then I am not a mighty
man —
I shall never be a man of renown. The choice of
Hercules is a pretty fable; but Prodicus makes it easy work
for the hero, as if the first resolves were enough. Another
story says that he came to hold the distaff, and at last
wore the Nessus shirt. I suppose one good resolve might
keep a man right if everybody else's resolve helped him."
The Vicar's talk was not always inspiriting: he had
escaped being a Pharisee, but he had not escaped that low
estimate of possibilities which we rather hastily arrive at
as an inference from our own failure. Lydgate thought that
there was a pitiable infirmity of will in Mr. Farebrother.