Middlemarch

“f, as I have, you also doe,
Vertue attired in woman see,
And dare love that, and say so too,
And forget the He and She;

And if this love, though placed so,
From prophane men you hide,
Which will no faith on this bestow,
Or, if they doe, deride:

Then you have done a braver thing
Than all the Worthies did,
And a braver thence will spring,
Which is, to keep that hid.”
—DR. DONNE.

Sir James Chettam’s mind was not fruitful in devices, but his growing
anxiety to “act on Brooke,” once brought close to his constant belief
in Dorothea’s capacity for influence, became formative, and issued in a
little plan; namely, to plead Celia’s indisposition as a reason for
fetching Dorothea by herself to the Hall, and to leave her at the
Grange with the carriage on the way, after making her fully aware of
the situation concerning the management of the estate.

In this way it happened that one day near four o’clock, when Mr. Brooke
and Ladislaw were seated in the library, the door opened and Mrs.
Casaubon was announced.

Will, the moment before, had been low in the depths of boredom, and,
obliged to help Mr. Brooke in arranging “documents” about hanging
sheep-stealers, was exemplifying the power our minds have of riding
several horses at once by inwardly arranging measures towards getting a
lodging for himself in Middlemarch and cutting short his constant
residence at the Grange; while there flitted through all these steadier
images a tickling vision of a sheep-stealing epic written with Homeric
particularity. When Mrs. Casaubon was announced he started up as from
an electric shock, and felt a tingling at his finger-ends. Any one
observing him would have seen a change in his complexion, in the
adjustment of his facial muscles, in the vividness of his glance, which
might have made them imagine that every molecule in his body had passed
the message of a magic touch. And so it had. For effective magic is
transcendent nature; and who shall measure the subtlety of those
touches which convey the quality of soul as well as body, and make a
man’s passion for one woman differ from his passion for another as joy
in the morning light over valley and river and white mountain-top
differs from joy among Chinese lanterns and glass panels? Will, too,
was made of very impressible stuff. The bow of a violin drawn near him
cleverly, would at one stroke change the aspect of the world for him,
and his point of view shifted as easily as his mood. Dorothea’s
entrance was the freshness of morning.

“Well, my dear, this is pleasant, now,” said Mr. Brooke, meeting and
kissing her. “You have left Casaubon with his books, I suppose. That’s
right. We must not have you getting too learned for a woman, you know.”

“There is no fear of that, uncle,” said Dorothea, turning to Will and
shaking hands with open cheerfulness, while she made no other form of
greeting, but went on answering her uncle. “I am very slow. When I want
to be busy with books, I am often playing truant among my thoughts. I
find it is not so easy to be learned as to plan cottages.”

She seated herself beside her uncle opposite to Will, and was evidently
preoccupied with something that made her almost unmindful of him. He
was ridiculously disappointed, as if he had imagined that her coming
had anything to do with him.

“Why, yes, my dear, it was quite your hobby to draw plans. But it was
good to break that off a little. Hobbies are apt to run away with us,
you know; it doesn’t do to be run away with. We must keep the reins. I
have never let myself be run away with; I always pulled up. That is
what I tell Ladislaw. He and I are alike, you know: he likes to go into
everything. We are working at capital punishment. We shall do a great
deal together, Ladislaw and I.”

“Yes,” said Dorothea, with characteristic directness, “Sir James has
been telling me that he is in hope of seeing a great change made soon
in your management of the estate—that you are thinking of having the
farms valued, and repairs made, and the cottages improved, so that
Tipton may look quite another place. Oh, how happy!”—she went on,
clasping her hands, with a return to that more childlike impetuous
manner, which had been subdued since her marriage. “If I were at home
still, I should take to riding again, that I might go about with you
and see all that! And you are going to engage Mr. Garth, who praised my
cottages, Sir James says.”

“Chettam is a little hasty, my dear,” said Mr. Brooke, coloring
slightly; “a little hasty, you know. I never said I should do anything
of the kind. I never said I should not do it, you know.”

“He only feels confident that you will do it,” said Dorothea, in a
voice as clear and unhesitating as that of a young chorister chanting a
credo, “because you mean to enter Parliament as a member who cares for
the improvement of the people, and one of the first things to be made
better is the state of the land and the laborers. Think of Kit Downes,
uncle, who lives with his wife and seven children in a house with one
sitting room and one bedroom hardly larger than this table!—and those
poor Dagleys, in their tumble-down farmhouse, where they live in the
back kitchen and leave the other rooms to the rats! That is one reason
why I did not like the pictures here, dear uncle—which you think me
stupid about. I used to come from the village with all that dirt and
coarse ugliness like a pain within me, and the simpering pictures in
the drawing-room seemed to me like a wicked attempt to find delight in
what is false, while we don’t mind how hard the truth is for the
neighbors outside our walls. I think we have no right to come forward
and urge wider changes for good, until we have tried to alter the evils
which lie under our own hands.”

Dorothea had gathered emotion as she went on, and had forgotten
everything except the relief of pouring forth her feelings, unchecked:
an experience once habitual with her, but hardly ever present since her
marriage, which had been a perpetual struggle of energy with fear. For
the moment, Will’s admiration was accompanied with a chilling sense of
remoteness. A man is seldom ashamed of feeling that he cannot love a
woman so well when he sees a certain greatness in her: nature having
intended greatness for men. But nature has sometimes made sad
oversights in carrying out her intention; as in the case of good Mr.
Brooke, whose masculine consciousness was at this moment in rather a
stammering condition under the eloquence of his niece. He could not
immediately find any other mode of expressing himself than that of
rising, fixing his eye-glass, and fingering the papers before him. At
last he said—

“There is something in what you say, my dear, something in what you
say—but not everything—eh, Ladislaw? You and I don’t like our pictures
and statues being found fault with. Young ladies are a little ardent,
you know—a little one-sided, my dear. Fine art, poetry, that kind of
thing, elevates a nation—emollit mores—you understand a little Latin
now. But—eh? what?”

These interrogatives were addressed to the footman who had come in to
say that the keeper had found one of Dagley’s boys with a leveret in
his hand just killed.

“I’ll come, I’ll come. I shall let him off easily, you know,” said Mr.
Brooke aside to Dorothea, shuffling away very cheerfully.

“I hope you feel how right this change is that I—that Sir James wishes
for,” said Dorothea to Will, as soon as her uncle was gone.

“I do, now I have heard you speak about it. I shall not forget what you
have said. But can you think of something else at this moment? I may
not have another opportunity of speaking to you about what has
occurred,” said Will, rising with a movement of impatience, and holding
the back of his chair with both hands.

“Pray tell me what it is,” said Dorothea, anxiously, also rising and
going to the open window, where Monk was looking in, panting and
wagging his tail. She leaned her back against the window-frame, and
laid her hand on the dog’s head; for though, as we know, she was not
fond of pets that must be held in the hands or trodden on, she was
always attentive to the feelings of dogs, and very polite if she had to
decline their advances.

Will followed her only with his eyes and said, “I presume you know that
Mr. Casaubon has forbidden me to go to his house.”

“No, I did not,” said Dorothea, after a moment’s pause. She was
evidently much moved. “I am very, very sorry,” she added, mournfully.
She was thinking of what Will had no knowledge of—the conversation
between her and her husband in the darkness; and she was anew smitten
with hopelessness that she could influence Mr. Casaubon’s action. But
the marked expression of her sorrow convinced Will that it was not all
given to him personally, and that Dorothea had not been visited by the
idea that Mr. Casaubon’s dislike and jealousy of him turned upon
herself. He felt an odd mixture of delight and vexation: of delight
that he could dwell and be cherished in her thought as in a pure home,
without suspicion and without stint—of vexation because he was of too
little account with her, was not formidable enough, was treated with an
unhesitating benevolence which did not flatter him. But his dread of
any change in Dorothea was stronger than his discontent, and he began
to speak again in a tone of mere explanation.

“Mr. Casaubon’s reason is, his displeasure at my taking a position here
which he considers unsuited to my rank as his cousin. I have told him
that I cannot give way on this point. It is a little too hard on me to
expect that my course in life is to be hampered by prejudices which I
think ridiculous. Obligation may be stretched till it is no better than
a brand of slavery stamped on us when we were too young to know its
meaning. I would not have accepted the position if I had not meant to
make it useful and honorable. I am not bound to regard family dignity
in any other light.”

Dorothea felt wretched. She thought her husband altogether in the
wrong, on more grounds than Will had mentioned.

“It is better for us not to speak on the subject,” she said, with a
tremulousness not common in her voice, “since you and Mr. Casaubon
disagree. You intend to remain?” She was looking out on the lawn, with
melancholy meditation.

“Yes; but I shall hardly ever see you now,” said Will, in a tone of
almost boyish complaint.

“No,” said Dorothea, turning her eyes full upon him, “hardly ever. But
I shall hear of you. I shall know what you are doing for my uncle.”

“I shall know hardly anything about you,” said Will. “No one will tell
me anything.”

“Oh, my life is very simple,” said Dorothea, her lips curling with an
exquisite smile, which irradiated her melancholy. “I am always at
Lowick.”

“That is a dreadful imprisonment,” said Will, impetuously.

“No, don’t think that,” said Dorothea. “I have no longings.”

He did not speak, but she replied to some change in his expression. “I
mean, for myself. Except that I should like not to have so much more
than my share without doing anything for others. But I have a belief of
my own, and it comforts me.”

“What is that?” said Will, rather jealous of the belief.

“That by desiring what is perfectly good, even when we don’t quite know
what it is and cannot do what we would, we are part of the divine power
against evil—widening the skirts of light and making the struggle with
darkness narrower.”

“That is a beautiful mysticism—it is a—”

“Please not to call it by any name,” said Dorothea, putting out her
hands entreatingly. “You will say it is Persian, or something else
geographical. It is my life. I have found it out, and cannot part with
it. I have always been finding out my religion since I was a little
girl. I used to pray so much—now I hardly ever pray. I try not to have
desires merely for myself, because they may not be good for others, and
I have too much already. I only told you, that you might know quite
well how my days go at Lowick.”

“God bless you for telling me!” said Will, ardently, and rather
wondering at himself. They were looking at each other like two fond
children who were talking confidentially of birds.

“What is your religion?” said Dorothea. “I mean—not what you know
about religion, but the belief that helps you most?”

“To love what is good and beautiful when I see it,” said Will. “But I
am a rebel: I don’t feel bound, as you do, to submit to what I don’t
like.”

“But if you like what is good, that comes to the same thing,” said
Dorothea, smiling.

“Now you are subtle,” said Will.

“Yes; Mr. Casaubon often says I am too subtle. I don’t feel as if I
were subtle,” said Dorothea, playfully. “But how long my uncle is! I
must go and look for him. I must really go on to the Hall. Celia is
expecting me.”

Will offered to tell Mr. Brooke, who presently came and said that he
would step into the carriage and go with Dorothea as far as Dagley’s,
to speak about the small delinquent who had been caught with the
leveret. Dorothea renewed the subject of the estate as they drove
along, but Mr. Brooke, not being taken unawares, got the talk under his
own control.

“Chettam, now,” he replied; “he finds fault with me, my dear; but I
should not preserve my game if it were not for Chettam, and he can’t
say that that expense is for the sake of the tenants, you know. It’s a
little against my feeling:—poaching, now, if you come to look into it—I
have often thought of getting up the subject. Not long ago, Flavell,
the Methodist preacher, was brought up for knocking down a hare that
came across his path when he and his wife were walking out together. He
was pretty quick, and knocked it on the neck.”

“That was very brutal, I think,” said Dorothea.

“Well, now, it seemed rather black to me, I confess, in a Methodist
preacher, you know. And Johnson said, ‘You may judge what a hypocrite
he is.’ And upon my word, I thought Flavell looked very little like
‘the highest style of man’—as somebody calls the Christian—Young, the
poet Young, I think—you know Young? Well, now, Flavell in his shabby
black gaiters, pleading that he thought the Lord had sent him and his
wife a good dinner, and he had a right to knock it down, though not a
mighty hunter before the Lord, as Nimrod was—I assure you it was rather
comic: Fielding would have made something of it—or Scott, now—Scott
might have worked it up. But really, when I came to think of it, I
couldn’t help liking that the fellow should have a bit of hare to say
grace over. It’s all a matter of prejudice—prejudice with the law on
its side, you know—about the stick and the gaiters, and so on. However,
it doesn’t do to reason about things; and law is law. But I got Johnson
to be quiet, and I hushed the matter up. I doubt whether Chettam would
not have been more severe, and yet he comes down on me as if I were the
hardest man in the county. But here we are at Dagley’s.”

Mr. Brooke got down at a farmyard-gate, and Dorothea drove on. It is
wonderful how much uglier things will look when we only suspect that we
are blamed for them. Even our own persons in the glass are apt to
change their aspect for us after we have heard some frank remark on
their less admirable points; and on the other hand it is astonishing
how pleasantly conscience takes our encroachments on those who never
complain or have nobody to complain for them. Dagley’s homestead never
before looked so dismal to Mr. Brooke as it did today, with his mind
thus sore about the fault-finding of the “Trumpet,” echoed by Sir
James.

It is true that an observer, under that softening influence of the fine
arts which makes other people’s hardships picturesque, might have been
delighted with this homestead called Freeman’s End: the old house had
dormer-windows in the dark red roof, two of the chimneys were choked
with ivy, the large porch was blocked up with bundles of sticks, and
half the windows were closed with gray worm-eaten shutters about which
the jasmine-boughs grew in wild luxuriance; the mouldering garden wall
with hollyhocks peeping over it was a perfect study of highly mingled
subdued color, and there was an aged goat (kept doubtless on
interesting superstitious grounds) lying against the open back-kitchen
door. The mossy thatch of the cow-shed, the broken gray barn-doors, the
pauper laborers in ragged breeches who had nearly finished unloading a
wagon of corn into the barn ready for early thrashing; the scanty dairy
of cows being tethered for milking and leaving one half of the shed in
brown emptiness; the very pigs and white ducks seeming to wander about
the uneven neglected yard as if in low spirits from feeding on a too
meagre quality of rinsings,—all these objects under the quiet light of
a sky marbled with high clouds would have made a sort of picture which
we have all paused over as a “charming bit,” touching other
sensibilities than those which are stirred by the depression of the
agricultural interest, with the sad lack of farming capital, as seen
constantly in the newspapers of that time. But these troublesome
associations were just now strongly present to Mr. Brooke, and spoiled
the scene for him. Mr. Dagley himself made a figure in the landscape,
carrying a pitchfork and wearing his milking-hat—a very old beaver
flattened in front. His coat and breeches were the best he had, and he
would not have been wearing them on this weekday occasion if he had not
been to market and returned later than usual, having given himself the
rare treat of dining at the public table of the Blue Bull. How he came
to fall into this extravagance would perhaps be matter of wonderment to
himself on the morrow; but before dinner something in the state of the
country, a slight pause in the harvest before the Far Dips were cut,
the stories about the new King and the numerous handbills on the walls,
had seemed to warrant a little recklessness. It was a maxim about
Middlemarch, and regarded as self-evident, that good meat should have
good drink, which last Dagley interpreted as plenty of table ale well
followed up by rum-and-water. These liquors have so far truth in them
that they were not false enough to make poor Dagley seem merry: they
only made his discontent less tongue-tied than usual. He had also taken
too much in the shape of muddy political talk, a stimulant dangerously
disturbing to his farming conservatism, which consisted in holding that
whatever is, is bad, and any change is likely to be worse. He was
flushed, and his eyes had a decidedly quarrelsome stare as he stood
still grasping his pitchfork, while the landlord approached with his
easy shuffling walk, one hand in his trouser-pocket and the other
swinging round a thin walking-stick.

“Dagley, my good fellow,” began Mr. Brooke, conscious that he was going
to be very friendly about the boy.

“Oh, ay, I’m a good feller, am I? Thank ye, sir, thank ye,” said
Dagley, with a loud snarling irony which made Fag the sheep-dog stir
from his seat and prick his ears; but seeing Monk enter the yard after
some outside loitering, Fag seated himself again in an attitude of
observation. “I’m glad to hear I’m a good feller.”

Mr. Brooke reflected that it was market-day, and that his worthy tenant
had probably been dining, but saw no reason why he should not go on,
since he could take the precaution of repeating what he had to say to
Mrs. Dagley.

“Your little lad Jacob has been caught killing a leveret, Dagley: I
have told Johnson to lock him up in the empty stable an hour or two,
just to frighten him, you know. But he will be brought home by-and-by,
before night: and you’ll just look after him, will you, and give him a
reprimand, you know?”

“No, I woon’t: I’ll be dee’d if I’ll leather my boy to please you or
anybody else, not if you was twenty landlords istid o’ one, and that a
bad un.”

Dagley’s words were loud enough to summon his wife to the back-kitchen
door—the only entrance ever used, and one always open except in bad
weather—and Mr. Brooke, saying soothingly, “Well, well, I’ll speak to
your wife—I didn’t mean beating, you know,” turned to walk to the
house. But Dagley, only the more inclined to “have his say” with a
gentleman who walked away from him, followed at once, with Fag
slouching at his heels and sullenly evading some small and probably
charitable advances on the part of Monk.

“How do you do, Mrs. Dagley?” said Mr. Brooke, making some haste. “I
came to tell you about your boy: I don’t want you to give him the
stick, you know.” He was careful to speak quite plainly this time.

Overworked Mrs. Dagley—a thin, worn woman, from whose life pleasure had
so entirely vanished that she had not even any Sunday clothes which
could give her satisfaction in preparing for church—had already had a
misunderstanding with her husband since he had come home, and was in
low spirits, expecting the worst. But her husband was beforehand in
answering.

“No, nor he woon’t hev the stick, whether you want it or no,” pursued
Dagley, throwing out his voice, as if he wanted it to hit hard. “You’ve
got no call to come an’ talk about sticks o’ these primises, as you
woon’t give a stick tow’rt mending. Go to Middlemarch to ax for your
charrickter.”

“You’d far better hold your tongue, Dagley,” said the wife, “and not
kick your own trough over. When a man as is father of a family has been
an’ spent money at market and made himself the worse for liquor, he’s
done enough mischief for one day. But I should like to know what my
boy’s done, sir.”

“Niver do you mind what he’s done,” said Dagley, more fiercely, “it’s
my business to speak, an’ not yourn. An’ I wull speak, too. I’ll hev my
say—supper or no. An’ what I say is, as I’ve lived upo’ your ground
from my father and grandfather afore me, an’ hev dropped our money
into’t, an’ me an’ my children might lie an’ rot on the ground for
top-dressin’ as we can’t find the money to buy, if the King wasn’t to
put a stop.”

“My good fellow, you’re drunk, you know,” said Mr. Brooke,
confidentially but not judiciously. “Another day, another day,” he
added, turning as if to go.

But Dagley immediately fronted him, and Fag at his heels growled low,
as his master’s voice grew louder and more insulting, while Monk also
drew close in silent dignified watch. The laborers on the wagon were
pausing to listen, and it seemed wiser to be quite passive than to
attempt a ridiculous flight pursued by a bawling man.

“I’m no more drunk nor you are, nor so much,” said Dagley. “I can carry
my liquor, an’ I know what I meean. An’ I meean as the King ’ull put a
stop to ’t, for them say it as knows it, as there’s to be a Rinform,
and them landlords as never done the right thing by their tenants ’ull
be treated i’ that way as they’ll hev to scuttle off. An’ there’s them
i’ Middlemarch knows what the Rinform is—an’ as knows who’ll hev to
scuttle. Says they, ‘I know who your landlord is.’ An’ says I, ‘I
hope you’re the better for knowin’ him, I arn’t.’ Says they, ‘He’s a
close-fisted un.’ ‘Ay ay,’ says I. ‘He’s a man for the Rinform,’ says
they. That’s what they says. An’ I made out what the Rinform were—an’
it were to send you an’ your likes a-scuttlin’ an’ wi’ pretty
strong-smellin’ things too. An’ you may do as you like now, for I’m
none afeard on you. An’ you’d better let my boy aloan, an’ look to
yoursen, afore the Rinform has got upo’ your back. That’s what I’n got
to say,” concluded Mr. Dagley, striking his fork into the ground with a
firmness which proved inconvenient as he tried to draw it up again.

At this last action Monk began to bark loudly, and it was a moment for
Mr. Brooke to escape. He walked out of the yard as quickly as he could,
in some amazement at the novelty of his situation. He had never been
insulted on his own land before, and had been inclined to regard
himself as a general favorite (we are all apt to do so, when we think
of our own amiability more than of what other people are likely to want
of us). When he had quarrelled with Caleb Garth twelve years before he
had thought that the tenants would be pleased at the landlord’s taking
everything into his own hands.

Some who follow the narrative of his experience may wonder at the
midnight darkness of Mr. Dagley; but nothing was easier in those times
than for an hereditary farmer of his grade to be ignorant, in spite
somehow of having a rector in the twin parish who was a gentleman to
the backbone, a curate nearer at hand who preached more learnedly than
the rector, a landlord who had gone into everything, especially fine
art and social improvement, and all the lights of Middlemarch only
three miles off. As to the facility with which mortals escape
knowledge, try an average acquaintance in the intellectual blaze of
London, and consider what that eligible person for a dinner-party would
have been if he had learned scant skill in “summing” from the
parish-clerk of Tipton, and read a chapter in the Bible with immense
difficulty, because such names as Isaiah or Apollos remained
unmanageable after twice spelling. Poor Dagley read a few verses
sometimes on a Sunday evening, and the world was at least not darker to
him than it had been before. Some things he knew thoroughly, namely,
the slovenly habits of farming, and the awkwardness of weather, stock
and crops, at Freeman’s End—so called apparently by way of sarcasm, to
imply that a man was free to quit it if he chose, but that there was no
earthly “beyond” open to him.