Chapter XVI
All that in woman is adored
In thy fair self I find —
For the whole sex can but afford
The handsome and the kind.
SIR CHARLES SEDLEY.
The question whether Mr. Tyke should be appointed as
salaried chaplain to the hospital was an exciting topic to
the Middlemarchers; and Lydgate heard it discussed in a way
that threw much light on the power exercised in the town by
Mr. Bulstrode. The banker was evidently a ruler, but there
was an opposition party, and even among his supporters
there were some who allowed it to be seen that their support
was a compromise, and who frankly stated their impression
that the general scheme of things, and especially the
casualties of trade, required you to hold a candle to the
devil.
Mr. Bulstrode's power was not due simply to his being a
country banker, who knew the financial secrets of most
traders in the town and could touch the springs of their
credit; it was fortified by a beneficence that was at once
ready and severe — ready to confer obligations, and severe
in watching the result. He had gathered, as an industrious
man always at his post, a chief share in administering the
town charities, and his private charities were both minute
and abundant. He would take a great deal of pains about
apprenticing Tegg the shoemaker's son, and he would watch
over Tegg's church-going; he would defend Mrs. Strype the
washerwoman against Stubbs's unjust exaction on the score of
her drying-ground, and he would himself-scrutinize a
calumny against Mrs. Strype. His private minor loans were
numerous, but he would inquire strictly into the
circumstances both before and after. In this way a man
gathers a domain in his neighbors' hope and fear as well as
gratitude; and power, when once it has got into that subtle
region, propagates itself, spreading out of all proportion
to its external means. It was a principle with Mr.
Bulstrode to gain as much power as possible, that he might
use it for the glory of God. He went through a great deal
of spiritual conflict and inward argument in order to
adjust his motives, and make clear to himself what God's
glory required. But, as we have seen, his motives were not
always rightly appreciated. There were many crass minds in
Middlemarch whose reflective scales could only weigh things
in the lump; and they had a strong suspicion that since Mr.
Bulstrode could not enjoy life in their fashion, eating and
drinking so little as he did, and worreting himself about
everything, he must have a sort of vampire's feast in the
sense of mastery.
The subject of the chaplaincy came up at Mr. Vincy's
table when Lydgate was dining there, and the family
connection with Mr. Bulstrode did not, he observed, prevent
some freedom of remark even on the part of the host
himself, though his reasons against the proposed arrangement
turned entirely on his objection to Mr. Tyke's sermons,
which were all doctrine, and his preference for Mr.
Farebrother, whose sermons were free from that taint. Mr.
Vincy liked well enough the
notion of the chaplain's
having a salary, supposing it were given to Farebrother, who
was as good a little fellow as ever breathed, and the best
preacher anywhere, and companionable too.
"What line shall you take, then?" said Mr. Chichely, the
coroner, a great coursing comrade of Mr. Vincy's.
"Oh, I'm precious glad I'm not one of the Directors now.
I shall vote for referring the matter to the Directors and
the Medical Board together. I shall roll some of my
responsibility on your shoulders, Doctor," said Mr. Vincy,
glancing first at Dr. Sprague, the senior physician of the
town, and then at Lydgate who sat opposite. " You medical
gentlemen must consult which sort of black draught you will
prescribe, eh, Mr. Lydgate?"
"I know little of either," said Lydgate; "but in
general, appointments are apt to be made too much a question
of personal liking. The fittest man for a particular post
is not always the best fellow or the most agreeable.
Sometimes, if you wanted to get a reform, your only way
would be to pension off the good fellows whom everybody is
fond of, and put them out of the question."
Dr. Sprague, who was considered the physician of most
"weight," though Dr. Minchin was usually said to have more
"penetration," divested his large heavy face of all
expression, and looked at his wine-glass while Lydgate was
speaking. Whatever was not problematical and suspected
about this young man — for example, a certain showiness as to
foreign ideas, and a disposition to unsettle what had been
settled and forgotten by his elders — was positively
unwelcome to a physician whose standing had been fixed
thirty years before by a treatise on Meningitis, of which at
least one copy marked " own " was bound in calf. For my
part I have some fellow-feeling with Dr. Sprague: one's
self-satisfaction is an untaxed kind of property which it is
very unpleasant to find deprecated.
Lydgate's remark, however, did not meet the sense of the
company. Mr. Vincy said, that if he could have his way,
he would not put disagreeable fellows anywhere.
"Hang your reforms!" said Mr. Chichely. "There's no
greater humbug in the world. You never hear of a reform,
but it means some trick to put in new men. I hope you are
not one of the `Lancet's' men, Mr. Lydgate — wanting to take
the coronership out of the hands of the legal profession:
your words appear to point that way."
"I disapprove of Wakley," interposed Dr. Sprague, "no
man more: he is an ill-intentioned fellow, who would
sacrifice the respectability of the profession, which
everybody knows depends on the London Colleges, for the sake
of getting some notoriety for himself. There are men who
don't mind about being kicked blue if they can only get
talked about. But Wakley is right sometimes," the Doctor
added, judicially. "I could mention one or two points in
which Wakley is in the right."
"Oh, well," said Mr. Chichely, "I blame no man for
standing up in favor of his own cloth; but, coming to
argument, I should like to know how a coroner is to judge of
evidence if he has not had a legal training?"
"In my opinion," said Lydgate, "legal training only
makes a man more incompetent in questions that require
knowledge a of another kind. People talk about evidence as
if it could really be weighed in scales by a blind Justice.
No man can judge what is good evidence on any particular
subject, unless he knows that subject well. A lawyer is no
better than an old woman at a post-mortem examination.
How is he to know the action of a poison? You might as well
say that scanning verse will teach you to scan the potato
crops."
"You are aware, I suppose, that it is not the coroner's
business to conduct the post-mortem, but only to take
the evidence of the medical witness?" said Mr. Chichely,
with some scorn.
"Who is often almost as ignorant as the coroner
himself," said Lydgate. "Questions of medical jurisprudence
ought not to be left to the chance of decent knowledge in a
medical witness, and the coroner ought not to be a man who
will believe that strychnine will destroy the coats of the
stomach if an ignorant practitioner happens to tell him so."
Lydgate had really lost sight of the fact that Mr.
Chichely was his Majesty's coroner, and ended innocently
with the question, "Don't you agree with me, Dr. Sprague?"
"To a certain extent — with regard to populous districts,
and in the metropolis," said the Doctor. "But I hope it
will be long before this part of the country loses the
services of my friend Chichely, even though it might get the
best man in our profession to succeed him. I am sure Vincy
will agree with me."
"Yes, yes, give me a coroner who is a good coursing
man," said Mr. Vincy, jovially. "And in my opinion, you're
safest with a lawyer. Nobody can know everything. Most
things are `visitation of God.' And as to poisoning, why,
what you want to know is the law. Come, shall we join the
ladies?"
Lydgate's private opinion was that Mr. Chichely might be
the very coroner without bias as to the coats of the
stomach, but he had not meant to be personal. This was one
of the difficulties of moving in good Middlemarch society:
it was dangerous to insist on knowledge as a qualification
for any salaried office. Fred Vincy had called Lydgate a
prig, and now Mr. Chichely was inclined to call him prick-eared; especially when, in the drawing-room, he seemed to be
making himself eminently agreeable to Rosamond, whom he had
easily monopolized in a
tête-à-tête, since Mrs. Vincy
herself sat at the tea-table. She resigned no domestic
function to her daughter; and the matron's blooming good-natured face, with the two volatile pink strings floating
from her fine throat, and her cheery manners to husband and
children, was certainly among the great attractions of the
Vincy house — attractions which made it all the easier to
fall in love with the daughter. The tinge of unpretentious,
inoffensive vulgarity in Mrs. Vincy gave more effect to
Rosamond's refinement, which was beyond what Lydgate had
expected.
Certainly, small feet and perfectly turned shoulders aid
the impression of refined manners, and the right thing said
seems quite astonishingly right when it is accompanied with
exquisite curves of lip and eyelid. And Rosamond could say
the right
thing; for she was clever with that sort of
cleverness which catches every tone except the humorous.
Happily she never attempted to joke, and this perhaps was
the most decisive mark of her cleverness.
She and Lydgate readily got into conversation. He
regretted that he had not heard her sing the other day at
Stone Court. The only pleasure he allowed himself during
the latter part of his stay in Paris was to go and hear
music.
"You have studied music, probably?" said Rosamond.
"No, I know the notes of many birds, and I know many
melodies by ear; but the music that I don't know at all, and
have no notion about, delights me — affects me. How stupid
the world is that it does not make more use of such a
pleasure within its reach!"
"Yes, and you will find Middlemarch very tuneless.
There are hardly any good musicians. I only know two
gentlemen who sing at all well."
"I suppose it is the fashion to sing comic songs in a
rhythmic way, leaving you to fancy the tune — very much as if
it were tapped on a drum?"
"Ah, you have heard Mr. Bowyer," said Rosamond, with one
of her rare smiles. " But we are speaking very ill of our
neighbors."
Lydgate was almost forgetting that he must carry on the
conversation, in thinking how lovely this creature was, her
garment seeming to be made out of the faintest blue sky,
herself so immaculately blond, as if the petals of some
gigantic flower had just opened and disclosed her; and yet
with this infantine blondness showing so much ready, self-possessed grace. Since he had had the memory of Laure,
Lydgate had lost all taste for large-eyed silence: the
divine cow no longer attracted him, and Rosamond was her
very opposite. But he recalled himself.
"You will let me hear some music to-night, I hope."
"I will let you hear my attempts, if you like," said
Rosamond. "Papa is sure to insist on my singing. But I
shall tremble before you, who have heard the best singers in
Paris. I have heard very little: I have only once been to
London.
But our organist at St. Peter's is a good
musician, and I go on studying with him."
"Tell me what you saw in London."
"Very little." (A more naive girl would have said, "Oh,
everything!" But Rosamond knew better.) "A few of the
ordinary sights, such as raw country girls are always taken
to."
"Do you call yourself a raw country girl?" said Lydgate,
looking at her with an involuntary emphasis of admiration,
which made Rosamond blush with pleasure. But she remained
simply serious, turned her long neck a little, and put up
her hand to touch her wondrous hair-plaits — an habitual
gesture with her as pretty as any movements of a kitten's
paw. Not that Rosamond was in the least like a kitten: she
was a sylph caught young and educated at Mrs. Lemon's.
"I assure you my mind is raw," she said immediately; " I
pass at Middlemarch. I am not afraid of talking to our old
neighbors. But I am really afraid of you."
"An accomplished woman almost always knows more than we
men, though her knowledge is of a different sort. I am sure
you could teach me a thousand things — as an exquisite bird
could teach a bear if there were any common language between
them. Happily, there is a common language between women and
men, and so the bears can get taught."
"Ah, there is Fred beginning to strum! I must go and
hinder him from jarring all your nerves," said Rosamond,
moving to the other side of the room, where Fred having
opened the piano, at his father's desire, that Rosamond
might give them some music, was parenthetically performing "
Cherry Ripe!" with one hand. Able men who have passed their
examinations will do these things sometimes, not less than
the plucked Fred.
"Fred, pray defer your practising till to-morrow; you
will make Mr. Lydgate ill," said Rosamond. " He has an
ear."
Fred laughed, and went on with his tune to the end.
Rosamond turned to Lydgate, smiling gently, and said, "
You perceive, the bears will not always be taught."
"Now then, Rosy!" said Fred, springing from the stool
and twisting it upward for her, with a hearty
expectation of enjoyment. "Some good rousing tunes first."
Rosamond played admirably. Her master at Mrs. Lemon's
school (close to a county town with a memorable history that
had its relics in church and castle) was one of those
excellent musicians here and there to be found in our
provinces, worthy to compare with many a noted Kapellmeister
in a country which offers more plentiful conditions of
musical celebrity. Rosamond, with the executant's instinct,
had seized his manner of playing, and gave forth his large
rendering of noble music with the precision of an echo. It
was almost startling, heard for the first time. A hidden
soul seemed to be flowing forth from Rosamond's fingers; and
so indeed it was, since souls live on in perpetual echoes,
and to all fine expression there goes somewhere an
originating activity, if it be only that of an interpreter.
Lydgate was taken possession of, and began to believe in her
as something exceptional. After all, he thought, one need
not be surprised to find the rare conjunctions of nature
under circumstances apparently unfavorable: come where they
may, they always depend on conditions that are not obvious.
He sat looking at her, and did not rise to pay her any
compliments, leaving that to others, now that his admiration
was deepened.
Her singing was less remarkable? but also well trained,
and sweet to hear as a chime perfectly in tune. It is true
she sang "Meet me by moonlight," and "I've been roaming;"
for mortals must share the fashions of their time, and none
but the ancients can be always classical. But Rosamond
could also sing "Black-eyed Susan" with effect, or Haydn's
canzonets, or " Voi, che sapete," or "Batti, batti" — she
only wanted to know what her audience liked.
Her father looked round at the company, delighting in
their admiration. Her mother sat, like a Niobe before her
troubles, with her youngest little girl on her lap, softly
beating the child's hand up and down in time to the music.
And Fred, notwithstanding his general scepticism about Rosy,
listened to her music with perfect allegiance, wishing he
could do the same thing on his flute. It was the
pleasantest family party
that Lydgate had seen since he
came to Middlemarch. The Vincys had the readiness to enjoy,
the rejection of all anxiety, and the belief in life as a
merry lot, which made a house exceptional in most county
towns at that time, when Evangelicalism had east a certain
suspicion as of plague-infection over the few amusements
which survived in the provinces. At the Vincys' there was
always whist, and the card-tables stood ready now, making
some of the company secretly impatient of the music. Before
it ceased Mr. Farebrother came in — a handsome, broad-chested
but otherwise small man, about forty, whose black was very
threadbare: the brilliancy was all in his quick gray eyes.
He came like a pleasant change in the light, arresting
little Louisa with fatherly nonsense as she was being led
out of the room by Miss Morgan, greeting everybody with some
special word, and seeming to condense more talk into ten
minutes than had been held all through the evening. He
claimed from Lydgate the fulfilment of a promise to come and
see him. "I can't let you off, you know, because I have
some beetles to show you. We collectors feel an interest in
every new man till he has seen all we have to show him."
But soon he swerved to the whist-table, rubbing his
hands and saying, "Come now, let us be serious! Mr.
Lydgate? not play? Ah! you are too young and light for this
kind of thing."
Lydgate said to himself that the clergyman whose
abilities were so painful to Mr. Bulstrode, appeared to have
found an agreeable resort in this certainly not erudite
household. He could half understand it: the good-humor, the
good looks of elder and younger, and the provision for
passing the time without any labor of intelligence, might
make the house beguiling to people who had no particular use
for their odd hours.
Everything looked blooming and joyous except Miss
Morgan, who was brown, dull, and resigned, and altogether,
as Mrs. Vincy often said, just the sort of person for a
governess. Lydgate did not mean to pay many such visits
himself. They were a wretched waste of the evenings; and
now, when he had talked a little more to Rosamond, he meant
to excuse himself and go.
"You will not like us at Middlemarch, I feel sure," she
said, when the whist-players were settled. "We are very
stupid, and you have been used to something quite
different."
"I suppose all country towns are pretty much alike,"
said Lydgate. "But I have noticed that one always believes
one's own town to be more stupid than any other. I have
made up my mind to take Middlemarch as it comes, and shall
be much obliged if the town will take me in the same way. I
have certainly found some charms in it which are much
greater than I had expected."
"You mean the rides towards Tipton and Lowick; every one
is pleased with those," said Rosamond, with simplicity.
"No, I mean something much nearer to me."
Rosamond rose and reached her netting, and then said, "
Do you care about dancing at all? I am not quite sure
whether clever men ever dance."
"I would dance with you if you would allow me."
"Oh!" said Rosamond, with a slight deprecatory laugh. "
I was only going to say that we sometimes have dancing, and
I wanted to know whether you would feel insulted if you were
asked to come."
"Not on the condition I mentioned."
After this chat Lydgate thought that he was going, but
on moving towards the whist-tables, he got interested in
watching Mr. Farebrother's play, which was masterly, and
also his face, which was a striking mixture of the shrewd
and the mild. At ten o'clock supper was brought in (such
were the customs of Middlemarch), and there was punch-drinking; but Mr. Farebrother had only a glass of water. He
was winning, but there seemed to be no reason why the
renewal of rubbers should end, and Lydgate at last took his
leave.
But as it was not eleven o'clock, he chose to walk in
the brisk air towards the tower of St. Botolph's, Mr.
Farebrother's church, which stood out dark, square, and
massive against the starlight. It was the oldest church in
Middlemarch; the living, however, was but a vicarage worth
barely four hundred a-year. Lydgate had heard that, and he
wondered now whether Mr. Farebrother cared about the money
he won at
cards; thinking, "He seems a very pleasant
fellow, but Bulstrode may have his good reasons." Many
things would be easier to Lydgate if it should turn out that
Mr. Bulstrode was generally justifiable. " What is his
religious doctrine to me, if he carries some good notions
along with it? One must use such brains as are\ to be
found."
These were actually Lydgate's first meditations as he
walked away from Mr. Vincy's, and on this ground I fear that
many ladies will consider him hardly worthy of their
attention. He thought of Rosamond and her music only in the
second place; and though, when her turn came, he dwelt on
the image of her for the rest of his walk, he felt no
agitation, and had no sense that any new current had set
into his life. He could not marry yet; he wished not to
marry for several years; and therefore he was not ready to
entertain the notion of being in love with a girl whom he
happened to admire. He did admire Rosamond exceedingly; but
that madness which had once beset him about Laure was not,
he thought, likely to recur in relation to any other woman
Certainly, if falling in love had been at all in question,
it would have been quite safe with a creature like this Miss
Vincy, who had just the kind of intelligence one would
desire in a woman — polished, refined, docile, lending itself
to finish in all the delicacies of life, and enshrined in a
body which expressed this with a force of demonstration that
excluded the need for other evidence. Lydgate felt sure
that if ever he married, his wife would have that feminine
radiance, that distinctive womanhood which must be classed
with flowers and music, that sort of beauty which by its
very nature was virtuous, being moulded only for pure and
delicate joys.
But since he did not mean to marry for the next five
years — his more pressing business was to look into Louis'
new book on Fever, which he was specially interested in,
because he had known Louis in Paris, and had followed many
anatomical demonstrations in order to ascertain the specific
differences of typhus and typhoid. He went home and read
far into the smallest hour, bringing a much more testing
vision of details and relations into this pathological study
than he had
ever thought it necessary to apply to the
complexities of love and marriage, these being subjects on
which he felt himself amply informed by literature, and that
traditional wisdom which is handed down in the genial
conversation of men. Whereas Fever had obscure conditions,
and gave him that delightful labor of the imagination which
is not mere arbitrariness, but the exercise of disciplined
power — combining and constructing with the clearest eye for
probabilities and the fullest obedience to knowledge; and
then, in yet more energetic alliance with impartial Nature,
standing aloof to invent tests by which to try its own work.
Many men have been praised as vividly imaginative on the
strength of their profuseness in indifferent drawing or
cheap narration: — reports of very poor talk going on in
distant orbs; or portraits of Lucifer coming down on his bad
errands as a large ugly man with bat's wings and spurts of
phosphoresence; or exaggerations of wantonness that seem to
reflect life in a diseased dream. But these kinds of
inspiration Lydgate regarded as rather vulgar and vinous
compared with the imagination that reveals subtle actions
inaccessible by any sort of lens, but tracked in that outer
darkness through long pathways of necessary sequence by the
inward light which is the last refinement of Energy, capable
of bathing even the ethereal atoms in its ideally
illuminated space. He for his part had tossed away all
cheap inventions where ignorance finds itself able and at
ease: he was enamoured of that arduous invention which is
the very eye of research, provisionally framing its object
and correcting it to more and more exactness of relation; he
wanted to pierce the obscurity of those minute processes
which prepare human misery and joy, those invisible
thoroughfares which are the first lurking-places of anguish,
mania, and crime, that delicate poise and transition which
determine the growth of happy or unhappy consciousness.
As he threw down his book, stretched his legs towards
the embers in the grate, and clasped his hands at the back
of his head, in that agreeable afterglow of excitement when
thought lapses from examination of a specific object into a
suffusive sense
of its connections with all the rest of
our existence — seems, as it were, to throw itself on its
back after vigorous swimming and float with the repose of
unexhausted strength — Lydgate felt a triumphant delight in
his studies, and something like pity for those less lucky
men who were not of his profession.
"If I had not taken that turn when I was a lad," he
thought, "I might have got into some stupid draught-horse
work or other, and lived always in blinkers. I should never
have been happy in any profession that did not call forth
the highest intellectual strain, and yet keep me in good
warm contact with my neighbors. There is nothing like the
medical profession for that: one can have the exclusive
scientific life that touches the distance and befriend the
old fogies in the parish too. It is rather harder for a
clergyman: Farebrother seems to be an anomaly."
This last thought brought back the Vincys and all the
pictures of the evening. They floated in his mind agreeably
enough, and as he took up his bed-candle his lips were
curled with that incipient smile which is apt to accompany
agreeable recollections. He was an ardent fellow, but at
present his ardor was absorbed in love of his work and in
the ambition of making his life recognized as a factor in
the better life of mankind — like other heroes of science who
had nothing but an obscure country practice to begin with.
Poor Lydgate! or shall I say, Poor Rosamond! Each lived
in a world of which the other knew nothing. It had not
occurred to Lydgate that he had been a subject of eager
meditation to Rosamond, who had neither any reason for
throwing her marriage into distant perspective, nor any
pathological studies to divert her mind from that ruminating
habit, that inward repetition of looks, words, and phrases,
which makes a large part in the lives of most girls. He had
not meant to look at her or speak to her with more than the
inevitable amount of admiration and compliment which a man
must give to a beautiful girl; indeed, it seemed to him that
his enjoyment of her music had remained almost silent, for
he feared falling into the rudeness of telling her his great
surprise at her possession of such accomplishment. But
Rosamond had
registered every look and word, and
estimated them as the opening incidents of a preconceived
romance — incidents which gather value from the foreseen
development and climax. In Rosamond's romance it was not
necessary to imagine much about the inward life of the hero,
or of his serious business in the world: of course, he had a
profession and was clever, as well as sufficiently handsome;
but the piquant fact about Lydgate was his good birth, which
distinguished him from all Middlemarch admirers, and
presented marriage as a prospect of rising in rank and
getting a little nearer to that celestial condition on earth
in which she would have nothing to do with vulgar people,
and perhaps at last associate with relatives quite equal to
the county people who looked down on the Middlemarchers. It
was part of Rosamond's cleverness to discern very subtly the
faintest aroma of rank, and once when she had seen the Miss
Brookes accompanying their uncle at the county assizes, and
seated among the aristocracy, she had envied them,
notwithstanding their plain dress.
If you think it incredible that to imagine Lydgate as a
man of family could cause thrills of satisfaction which had
anything to do with the sense that she was in love with him,
I will ask you to use your power of comparison a little more
effectively, and consider whether red cloth and epaulets
have never had an influence of that sort. Our passions do
not live apart in locked chambers, but, dressed in their
small wardrobe of notions, bring their provisions to a
common table and mess together, feeding out of the common
store according to their appetite.
Rosamond, in fact, was entirely occupied not exactly
with Tertius Lydgate as he was in himself, but with his
relation to her; and it was excusable in a girl who was
accustomed to hear that all young men might, could, would
be, or actually were in love with her, to believe at once
that Lydgate could be no exception. His looks and words
meant more to her than other men's, because she cared more
for them: she thought of them diligently, and diligently
attended to that perfection of appearance, behavior,
sentiments, and all other
elegancies, which would find
in Lydgate a more adequate admirer than she had yet been
conscious of.
For Rosamond, though she would never do anything that
was disagreeable to her, was industrious; and now more than
ever she was active in sketching her landscapes and market-carts and portraits of friends, in practising her music, and
in being from morning till night her own standard of a
perfect lady, having always an audience in her own
consciousness, with sometimes the not unwelcome addition of
a more variable external audience in the numerous visitors
of the house. She found time also to read the best novels,
and even the second best, and she knew much poetry by heart.
Her favorite poem was "Lalla Rookh."
"The best girl in the world! He will be a happy fellow
who gets her!" was the sentiment of the elderly gentlemen
who visited the Vincys; and the rejected young men thought
of trying again, as is the fashion in country towns where
the horizon is not thick with coming rivals. But Mrs.
Plymdale thought that Rosamond had been educated to a
ridiculous pitch, for what was the use of accomplishments
which would be all laid aside as soon as she was married?
While her aunt Bulstrode, who had a sisterly faithfulness
towards her brother's family, had two sincere wishes for
Rosamond — that she might show a more serious turn of mind,
and that she might meet with a husband whose wealth
corresponded to her habits.