Middlemarch George Eliot (essential reading txt) 📖

at the back of his head, while he looked at Mr. Brooke with an air of amused neutrality.

“Come, that’s rather good, you know,” said Mr. Brooke, taking up the paper and trying to bear the attack as easily as his neighbor did, but coloring and smiling rather nervously; “that about roaring himself red at rotten boroughs⁠—I never made a speech about rotten boroughs in my life. And as to roaring myself red and that kind of thing⁠—these men never understand what is good satire. Satire, you know, should be true up to a certain point. I recollect they said that in The Edinburgh somewhere⁠—it must be true up to a certain point.”

“Well, that is really a hit about the gates,” said Sir James, anxious to tread carefully. “Dagley complained to me the other day that he hadn’t got a decent gate on his farm. Garth has invented a new pattern of gate⁠—I wish you would try it. One ought to use some of one’s timber in that way.”

“You go in for fancy farming, you know, Chettam,” said Mr. Brooke, appearing to glance over the columns of the Trumpet. “That’s your hobby, and you don’t mind the expense.”

“I thought the most expensive hobby in the world was standing for Parliament,” said Mrs. Cadwallader. “They said the last unsuccessful candidate at Middlemarch⁠—Giles, wasn’t his name?⁠—spent ten thousand pounds and failed because he did not bribe enough. What a bitter reflection for a man!”

“Somebody was saying,” said the Rector, laughingly, “that East Retford was nothing to Middlemarch, for bribery.”

“Nothing of the kind,” said Mr. Brooke. “The Tories bribe, you know: Hawley and his set bribe with treating, hot codlings, and that sort of thing; and they bring the voters drunk to the poll. But they are not going to have it their own way in future⁠—not in future, you know. Middlemarch is a little backward, I admit⁠—the freemen are a little backward. But we shall educate them⁠—we shall bring them on, you know. The best people there are on our side.”

“Hawley says you have men on your side who will do you harm,” remarked Sir James. “He says Bulstrode the banker will do you harm.”

“And that if you got pelted,” interposed Mrs. Cadwallader, “half the rotten eggs would mean hatred of your committeeman. Good heavens! Think what it must be to be pelted for wrong opinions. And I seem to remember a story of a man they pretended to chair and let him fall into a dust-heap on purpose!”

“Pelting is nothing to their finding holes in one’s coat,” said the Rector. “I confess that’s what I should be afraid of, if we parsons had to stand at the hustings for preferment. I should be afraid of their reckoning up all my fishing days. Upon my word, I think the truth is the hardest missile one can be pelted with.”

“The fact is,” said Sir James, “if a man goes into public life he must be prepared for the consequences. He must make himself proof against calumny.”

“My dear Chettam, that is all very fine, you know,” said Mr. Brooke. “But how will you make yourself proof against calumny? You should read history⁠—look at ostracism, persecution, martyrdom, and that kind of thing. They always happen to the best men, you know. But what is that in Horace?⁠—fiat justitia, ruat⁠ ⁠… something or other.”

“Exactly,” said Sir James, with a little more heat than usual. “What I mean by being proof against calumny is being able to point to the fact as a contradiction.”

“And it is not martyrdom to pay bills that one has run into one’s self,” said Mrs. Cadwallader.

But it was Sir James’s evident annoyance that most stirred Mr. Brooke. “Well, you know, Chettam,” he said, rising, taking up his hat and leaning on his stick, “you and I have a different system. You are all for outlay with your farms. I don’t want to make out that my system is good under all circumstances⁠—under all circumstances, you know.”

“There ought to be a new valuation made from time to time,” said Sir James. “Returns are very well occasionally, but I like a fair valuation. What do you say, Cadwallader?”

“I agree with you. If I were Brooke, I would choke the Trumpet at once by getting Garth to make a new valuation of the farms, and giving him carte blanche about gates and repairs: that’s my view of the political situation,” said the Rector, broadening himself by sticking his thumbs in his armholes, and laughing towards Mr. Brooke.

“That’s a showy sort of thing to do, you know,” said Mr. Brooke. “But I should like you to tell me of another landlord who has distressed his tenants for arrears as little as I have. I let the old tenants stay on. I’m uncommonly easy, let me tell you, uncommonly easy. I have my own ideas, and I take my stand on them, you know. A man who does that is always charged with eccentricity, inconsistency, and that kind of thing. When I change my line of action, I shall follow my own ideas.”

After that, Mr. Brooke remembered that there was a packet which he had omitted to send off from the Grange, and he bade everybody hurriedly goodbye.

“I didn’t want to take a liberty with Brooke,” said Sir James; “I see he is nettled. But as to what he says about old tenants, in point of fact no new tenant would take the farms on the present terms.”

“I have a notion that he will be brought round in time,” said the Rector. “But you were pulling one way, Elinor, and we were pulling another. You wanted to frighten him away from expense, and we want to frighten him into it. Better let him try to be popular and see that his character as a landlord stands in his way. I don’t think it signifies two straws about the Pioneer, or Ladislaw, or Brooke’s speechifying to the Middlemarchers. But it does signify about the parishioners in Tipton being comfortable.”

“Excuse me, it is you two