The Latin Quarter of Paris was named after the use of Latin by scholars attending the university of Paris, the Sorbonne, founded the in the twelfth century. The rue Git-le-Coeur was a narrow medial street running from the rue Saint-André-des-Arts down to the quai de Grands-Augustins where it met the Seine, overlooking the ile de la Cite and the Palais de Justice. This part of the city has been in continuous occupation for two thousand years. The ruins of the Gallo-Roman themes (baths) from the first to third centuries, when Paris was still Lutéce just a block away on boulevard Saint-Michel. The street dates from the end of the twelfth century when it was called rue de Gilles-le-Queux or Gui-le-Queux (Queux: cuisinier, or chef), which over the centuries corrupted into “Git-le-Coeur.” Number 9 was rebuilt on old foundations in 1671 and originally occupied by the duc de Nivernais.
Number 9 was bought in 1933 by M. and Mme. M. L. Rachou who opened it as a class 13 residential hotel, the minimum standard. They never did give it a name. Mme. Rachou had begun life serving tables at the age of twelve in a country inn at Giverny frequented by Claude Monet. She became one of his favorites and got to know many artists and writers who came to visit him. Her husband shared her enjoyment of the company of artists, and they encouraged them to stay at their“ All through the Occupation they managed to keep the hotel Wendi?“ the privations and shortages of food. All was well until September 3 when M. Rachou was killed in a car accident; Madame had no choice but to carry on. Mme. Rachou had curly blue-rinsed hair and round apple cheeks.
Because she was so small she had to stand on an upturned wine case when serving behind the bar, her short arms folded over her pale blue housecoat with a smocked collar, engaging in conversation with residents but always with one ear listening for an unexpected creak of the floorboards of an unauthorized person entering the hotel door. Adjacent to the bistro was the small dining room, no longer used, which had a window onto the stairwell where she could literally reach out and grab someone by the ankle as they climbed the stairs. The hotel entrance was never locked, but the door made a terrible screeching sound when it closed. Someone attempting to close it quietly at night was regarded with great suspicion, and Madame would materialize in her white nightgown demanding, {‘b‘Monsieur? Que voulez-vous?” Easily visible from Madame’s position behind the bar was her switchboard, mounted on the wall across the hoom: forty-two small light bulbs, each with a ceramic label identifying a 00m number. If the bulb was dark, no power was being consumed; a dim light showed that the room’s 25-watt bulb was on. When a bulb flared, someone was exceeding their 40-watt power limit, and she headed for the stairs. Electricity in France was very expensive and she monitored its use carefully. The use of a tape recorder or other electric appliances inevitably blew the fuses and plunged the hotel into darkness. You could have your ower limit extended by a supplementary payment.
There was a Turkish chiotte on each floor beneath the stairwell, two raised ceramic footprints to stand on while you squatted. Sheets of newspaper torn from France-soir were provided in lieu of toilet paper: most people bought their own and brought it from their room. Someone kept making off with the newspaper, leading Burroughs to leave a sign: “To the nameless asshole who rips off the paper---stop! ” The toilets were filthy and smelled appalling; most residents preferred to piss in the sink in their rooms, including many of the women, who used buckets. There was one bath, but advance warning had to be given to allow for the water to heat, ind naturally there was a small surcharge. There was radiator heat all week but the plumbing was decrepit, subject to loud clankings and vibrations, and hot water was only provided on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday.
Each room had a small gas stove for cooking, and Mme. Rachou inevitably arrived at an inconvenient time with the meter reader. If you didn’t Want M. Dupré to wander into your room pushing a broom, you could opt out as Burroughs did. Most of the beds had straw mattresses; there was a sink and a large armoire. The curtains and bedspreads were changed each spring and the bed linen once a week.
on Celine:
The villa was set on a cliff, overlooking a great loop of the Seine and the dim spires of Paris. Bill and Allen were greeted at the gate by barking dogs Celine came out and locked the dogs up. “Are they dangerous?” asked Allen. “No,” Céline said, “I keep them for the noise,” but he did take them with him on a leash to the Village to protect him “from the Jews. The postmaster destroys my letters. The pharmacist won’t fill my prescription.” The dogs continued to bark and howl in their compound. Burroughs could see that Céline was the sort of person you could put down anywhere and he would immediately be on bad terms with his neighbors.
Although it was the middle of summer, Céline had several scarves wrapped around his neck and wore three unraveling, moth-eaten sweaters. He had long hair and there was brown mold under his fingernails. He was sixty-four years old, tall, thin, and very slight. Burroughs estimated he weighed only 125 pounds. He had gone to school in England and spoke perfectly accented English, but had not used the language for many years so they spoke in a broken mixture of French and English. Bed-springs stuck up from the overgrown grass near the gate and they sat outside on iron chairs at a rusty garden table. Madame Céline brought them glasses of beer. Céline was friendly and Allen and Bill were very respectful toward him. Céline clearly appreciated it, and the visit lasted for several hours; they got the impression that Céline did not get many Visitors even though his work was enjoying a critical revival at that time.
Bill told him about his periods of addiction to morphine and Celine told the story of how a boat he was on was torpedoed. To calm the hysterical passengers he lined them up and gave them all a shot of morphine, but they all began vomiting because he’d given them too much. Céline and Bill discussed the various prisons they had been in, and Céline said that one could only truly know a country by seeing its prisons. Burroughs agreed. His outrage at the brutality of the American justice system was a subject that he often turned to in conversation in the sixties, in particular the fact that America was (is) the only country in the world, bar none, in which children are sentenced to die in prison with no hope of parole for homicides committed when they were thirteen or fourteen years old. ll was a subject he cared about passionately.
They spoke about having a mother tongue. Celine said that it is very' different if you’re told you’re going to be shot in your own language than in another language. Hearing it in your mother tongue has more impact Bill was sure he was right about that. Naturally they discussed writing, but every writer they mentioned, Michaux, Beckett, Sartre, Celine would say “Oh, it is nothing, it is nothing, every year new little fish in the literary pond."
The Naked Lunch
Though he periodically added new sections to The Naked Lunch, not a great deal had happened on the publishing front since Burroughs had arrived in Paris. The first thing Allen Ginsberg had done on arrival was to show it to Maurice Girodias, but Girodias had turned it down. He returned it to Ginsberg and recalled, “It was such a mess that manuscript. You couldn’t physically read the stuff. [. . .] The ends of the pages were all eaten away by rats or something.” Ginsberg was very angry with him. Over the months Burroughs had continued to tinker with it, adding some material he found in the medical library on the rue Dragon, and some new routines. Terry Southern and Mason Hoffenberg had tried to interest Girodias in it a second time, but still without success. Then on October 25, 1958, in the Saturday issue of the Chicago Daily News, columnist Jack Mabley, in a piece headed “Filthy Writing on the Midway,” fulminated against a magazine that he identified only as being published by the University of Chicago, calling it “one of the foulest collections of printed filth I’ve seen publicly circulated.” Mabley concluded, “But the University of Chicago publishes the magazine. The trustees should take a long hard belt at what is being circulated under its sponsorship.”
Monday, June 26, 2017
Peas and umbrellas
In the Middle Ages, vegetables were thought to be indigestible, coarse fare fit for peasants. As for fruit- well, it was only in 1683 that Dr. Nicolas Venette became the first medical authority to say that it was good for you. He thereby made official the message that food writers had begun to preach in midcentury. In companion volumes, the 1651 Le Jardinier francais (The French Gardener) and the 1654 Les Delices de la campagne (The Delights of the Countryside), Nicolas de Bonnefons became the spokesperson for a vision of food and its preparation at the same time completely unlike anything previously imagined and uncannily familiar to us today because of food gurus such as Alice Waters: the finest, freshest ingredients prepared in the simplest possible way. Bonnefons was the first to encourage aristocrats to cultivate their gardens. During the second half of the century, kitchen gardens and fruit orchards sprang up on great estates all over France (the most famous of which, Le Potager du Roi, the King’s vegetable garden, has recently been re-created at Versailles). He also encouraged his readers to savor the full flavor of the glorious primary ingredients that they could produce in this manner. All his recipes concentrated on bringing out “the authentic taste that must be given to each ingredient” and on rejecting the use of extraneous flavorings that “disguise the central taste.” He complained that other cooks give all their soups the same flavor, whereas “a cabbage soup must be completely infused with the essence of cabbage, a turnip soup with turnip.”
The second half of the seventeenth century was a golden age for fruits and vegetables. Many more varieties than ever before began to be cultivated: sixty kinds of pears were available in France at the beginning of the seventeenth can my, but nearly four hundred in Bonnefon'’s day. Asparagus, artichokes, and spinach originally became important in French cuisine ; the strawberry was mentioned for the first time in a cookbook. Young, tender vegetables were the rage, which explains how the green pea became the superstar of them all. A crate of baby peas was formally presented to Louis XIV at Versailles in 1660; he adored them, and the royal craving set off a mania that lasted for half a century. Comedies lampooned the “madmen” willing to pay any price to get their hands on the first of the season; in May 1696, the King’s morganatic wife, the Marquise de Maintenon, portrayed the court as in a “frenzy": no one could talk about any. thing but the peas “already eaten, being eaten, and about to be eaten.” Better fruits and readily available sugar spelled jams and jellies. Today, French confitures are considered among the finest anywhere; their reputation began along with the craze for fine fruit, with the appearance of a number of books called confiturier: that described ways of drying and preserving-“en leur naturel,” in Bonnefons’ expression-all the newly abundant fruit.
By the end of the Sun King’s reign, his countrymen were eating many of the dishes that are still featured on the menus of restaurants today. In this respect, no cookbook was more of a trendsetter than Frangois Massialot’s 1691 volume, Le Cuisinier royal et bourgeois (Cooking for Royalty and for the Bourgeoisie). This was the next culinary bestseller after The French Cook; it was constantly reedited until the mid-eighteenth century. Massialot’s immensely readable book breaks new ground in many ways. it marks the consecration of a preparation that has played ever since a starring role in French cuisine: the stew. A few stewlike recipes-called hachis or haricots-had appeared in the sixteenth century. In the seventeenth century’s final decades, the modern word ragout began to be used, no longer as La Varenne still did to mean a sauce or a seasoning added to a preparation to give it what his English translator called a “haut gout," a taste that whet the appetite, but in its modern meaning, “a stew.”
The new approach to cooking meat might well have helped along by what is surely the seventeenth century’s original culinary invention: the pressure cooker.
and
At the end of the 17th century stylish Parisiennes were wearing increasingly elaborate and costly ensembles that made them ever more vulnerable to the vagaries of France's constantly changing climate. Marius' umbrellas gave women the chance to acquire a degree of independence they had not previously known. THey no longer needed to be accompanied by a servant holding something over their heads to protect them from the elements.
Little testimony has survived from three centuries ago concerning the ways in which newly created objects changed the daily lives of those who were the first to own them. In the case of the folding umbrella, we have letters from some of the female consumers who were its most enthusiastic proponents. Thus, in 1712, Louis XIV s Bavarian Sister-in-law, the Princesse Palatine, described for her relations in Germany the new umbrella their one can easily take everywhere, in case rain would happen to surprise you just as you are in the middle of a walk.”
The princess’s letter shows us that the folding umbrella performed what may have been its most significant initial function outside the urban setting in which its creator had advertised it. The princess makes plain that she considered the umbrella news-worthy mainly because it gave women for the first time ever the chance to do something we now take for granted: to be, whenever they felt like it, on their own outdoors, alone with their thoughts While they explored the gardens and landscapes of their country estates.
In France during the last decades of Louis XIV ’s reign, women writers were already promoting the idea that we come to know ourselves more fully as a result of an introspective communion with nature, a belief that much later became one of the founding tenets of Romanticism. Perhaps the earliest detailed evidence of the desire for a new way of being in nature is found in the correspondence of the Marquise de Sévigné. She complained bitterly about how often she risked “drowning” when she walked in unsettled weather with only a coat and hat for protection. On June 21, 1680, she described her plan to have little shelters, which she called "umbrellas” (this is one of the earliest uses of the word), put up in strategic spots on her estate. Thus protected, she would be free to spend time looking out “upon infinity.” Sévigne decided that her invention was so important that she should announce it to the relentlessly trendy readers of Le Mercare galam. Because of Marius’s invention, women of the next generation were able to walk about completely on their own in the country whenever and wherever they liked. They were able to gaze out “upon infinity” and then to record what they found there in their letters and their novels.
Design is sometimes defined as the union of form and function. We know that Marius got the style right since, three centuries later, the folding umbrellas we own today are little changed from his creation. And if we stop to consider all the different functions performed by his pocket invention, we might be tempted to call the umbrellas branded with the name of Jean Marius the most significant design of his very design-conscious age. How many designs have an impact on the history of literature as well as the history of shopping?
The second half of the seventeenth century was a golden age for fruits and vegetables. Many more varieties than ever before began to be cultivated: sixty kinds of pears were available in France at the beginning of the seventeenth can my, but nearly four hundred in Bonnefon'’s day. Asparagus, artichokes, and spinach originally became important in French cuisine ; the strawberry was mentioned for the first time in a cookbook. Young, tender vegetables were the rage, which explains how the green pea became the superstar of them all. A crate of baby peas was formally presented to Louis XIV at Versailles in 1660; he adored them, and the royal craving set off a mania that lasted for half a century. Comedies lampooned the “madmen” willing to pay any price to get their hands on the first of the season; in May 1696, the King’s morganatic wife, the Marquise de Maintenon, portrayed the court as in a “frenzy": no one could talk about any. thing but the peas “already eaten, being eaten, and about to be eaten.” Better fruits and readily available sugar spelled jams and jellies. Today, French confitures are considered among the finest anywhere; their reputation began along with the craze for fine fruit, with the appearance of a number of books called confiturier: that described ways of drying and preserving-“en leur naturel,” in Bonnefons’ expression-all the newly abundant fruit.
By the end of the Sun King’s reign, his countrymen were eating many of the dishes that are still featured on the menus of restaurants today. In this respect, no cookbook was more of a trendsetter than Frangois Massialot’s 1691 volume, Le Cuisinier royal et bourgeois (Cooking for Royalty and for the Bourgeoisie). This was the next culinary bestseller after The French Cook; it was constantly reedited until the mid-eighteenth century. Massialot’s immensely readable book breaks new ground in many ways. it marks the consecration of a preparation that has played ever since a starring role in French cuisine: the stew. A few stewlike recipes-called hachis or haricots-had appeared in the sixteenth century. In the seventeenth century’s final decades, the modern word ragout began to be used, no longer as La Varenne still did to mean a sauce or a seasoning added to a preparation to give it what his English translator called a “haut gout," a taste that whet the appetite, but in its modern meaning, “a stew.”
The new approach to cooking meat might well have helped along by what is surely the seventeenth century’s original culinary invention: the pressure cooker.
and
At the end of the 17th century stylish Parisiennes were wearing increasingly elaborate and costly ensembles that made them ever more vulnerable to the vagaries of France's constantly changing climate. Marius' umbrellas gave women the chance to acquire a degree of independence they had not previously known. THey no longer needed to be accompanied by a servant holding something over their heads to protect them from the elements.
Little testimony has survived from three centuries ago concerning the ways in which newly created objects changed the daily lives of those who were the first to own them. In the case of the folding umbrella, we have letters from some of the female consumers who were its most enthusiastic proponents. Thus, in 1712, Louis XIV s Bavarian Sister-in-law, the Princesse Palatine, described for her relations in Germany the new umbrella their one can easily take everywhere, in case rain would happen to surprise you just as you are in the middle of a walk.”
The princess’s letter shows us that the folding umbrella performed what may have been its most significant initial function outside the urban setting in which its creator had advertised it. The princess makes plain that she considered the umbrella news-worthy mainly because it gave women for the first time ever the chance to do something we now take for granted: to be, whenever they felt like it, on their own outdoors, alone with their thoughts While they explored the gardens and landscapes of their country estates.
In France during the last decades of Louis XIV ’s reign, women writers were already promoting the idea that we come to know ourselves more fully as a result of an introspective communion with nature, a belief that much later became one of the founding tenets of Romanticism. Perhaps the earliest detailed evidence of the desire for a new way of being in nature is found in the correspondence of the Marquise de Sévigné. She complained bitterly about how often she risked “drowning” when she walked in unsettled weather with only a coat and hat for protection. On June 21, 1680, she described her plan to have little shelters, which she called "umbrellas” (this is one of the earliest uses of the word), put up in strategic spots on her estate. Thus protected, she would be free to spend time looking out “upon infinity.” Sévigne decided that her invention was so important that she should announce it to the relentlessly trendy readers of Le Mercare galam. Because of Marius’s invention, women of the next generation were able to walk about completely on their own in the country whenever and wherever they liked. They were able to gaze out “upon infinity” and then to record what they found there in their letters and their novels.
Design is sometimes defined as the union of form and function. We know that Marius got the style right since, three centuries later, the folding umbrellas we own today are little changed from his creation. And if we stop to consider all the different functions performed by his pocket invention, we might be tempted to call the umbrellas branded with the name of Jean Marius the most significant design of his very design-conscious age. How many designs have an impact on the history of literature as well as the history of shopping?
Friday, June 16, 2017
Gordon Wood on Conspiratorial mindsets
From: The Idea of America
Hofstadter said his use of “paranoid style” was not intended to suggest any medical or clinical significance; he meant only to use the term metaphorically to describe “a way of seeing the world and of expressing oneself.” Medically, as he pointed out, paranoia is defined as a chronic mental disorder characterized by systematized delusions of persecution. However overly suspicious and apocalyptical in expression American paranoid spokesmen may have been, said Hofstadter, they could not be described as “certifiable lunatics.” Yet-and it was a very big, drawn-out yet-this style was not quite normal; it was, Hofstadter wrote, “a distorted style” and thus “a possible signal that may alert us to a distorted judgment.” It indicated that some kind of “political pathology” was at work; it was a recurrent mode of expression in American public life “which has frequently been linked with movements of suspicious discontent.” Although believers in conspiracy may not have been crazy, they were persons, Hofstadter suggested, who had perverse and fanciful views of reality and were thus fit subjects for the application of some sort of “depth psychology.”
Other historians, sharing Hofstadter’s assumption that politics was often “a projective arena for feelings and impulses that are only marginally related to the manifest issues,” also sought to relate Americans. recurring fears of conspiracy to some underlying social or psychological process.‘ Some thought “that fear of conspiracy characterizes periods when traditional social and moral values are undergoing change” and therefore focused on the unusual fluidity of American society. People who were unsure of their identity and status, socially disrupted or alienated in some way, were, it seemed, especially susceptible to conspiratorial interpretations of events. Possibly, suggested David Brion Davis, who has most meticulously uncovered the conspiratorial fears of nineteenth” century Americans, various groups, from Anti-Masons to opponents of the Slave Power, found in the paranoid style a common means of expressing their different torments and troubles. Obviously, historians were careful to note, the great numbers of people who relied on such imagery of subversion--from Abraham Lincoln to Justice Robert H. Jackson-could not be dismissed as “Charlatans, crackpots, and the disaffected.” Davis in particular warned against any facile assumption “that the fear of subversion is always generated by internal, psychological needs." Despite such qualifications and cautions, however, the implications of these historical accounts of the paranoid style were clear: Americans seemed prone to fears of subversion, and these fears were symptomatic of severe social and psychological strains.
Once America’s paranoid style was revealed to be so prevalent, its connection with the ideology of the Revolution became inevitable. Not only was Bailyn’s account of the colonists’ fears of conspiracy widely reprinted, but historians now suggested that the Revolution had set “the basic pattern” of the paranoid style. “Is it possible,” asked Davis, “that the circumstances of the Revolution conditioned Americans to think of resistance to a dark subversive force as the essential ingredient of their national identity. With the paranoid style associated with the ideology of the Revolution in this way, historians were quick to find traces of it everywhere in their sources. Although Bailyn had stressed in his Ideological Origins the rational basis of the colonists’ fears, the term “paranoia” soon proliferated in historical writings on the Revolution. “The insurgent Whig ideology,” it now seemed clear, “had a frenzied, even paranoid cast to it,” and leaders like John Adams and Thomas Jefferson were even accused of suffering from some form of paranoia. The mounting evidence could lead to only one conclusion: “The era of the American Revolution was a period of political paranoia” in which “visions of conspiracy were endemic.”
In many cases these references to paranoia were clearly metaphorical, But given the current interest in psychohistory, it is not surprising that other references to paranoia have taken on an authentically psychological character, presuming a close connection between paranoid thinking and particular psychic sensibilities. Some historians, while acknowledging that the American Whigs’ belief in a ministerial design against their liberties may have had some rational and conscious sources, have emphasized that “the fear of conspiracy also had roots buried deeply in the innermost recesses of the psyches of numerous Americans.” Certain types of colonists unconsciously experienced tensions and anxieties over their personal autonomy and sexual identities that may very well have shaped their public fears and fostered their sense of conspiracies endangering them.
Other writers, taking Bailyn’s argument as a “point of departure,” have attempted a stark and quite literal “psychological interpretation of the coming of the Revolution,” even going so far as to suggest that the Revolutionary leaders were clinically paranoiac-that is, that they were suffering from actual delusions of persecution and were unable to assess reality in a rational fashion. Far from being profoundly reasonable men, they were “prone to emotional instability, predisposed to psychological problems, vulnerable to them under the goad of an appropriate precipitant,” like the Stamp Act, which left “in its wake the paranoid delusions that Britain was conspiring to enslave Americans.”
and
Conspiracies like those of Charles II’s Cabal became less matters of fact and more matters of inference. Accounts of plots by court or government were no longer descriptions of actual events but interpretations of otherwise puzzling concatenations of events. By the eighteenth century conspiracy was not simply a means of explaining how rulers were deposed; it had become a common means of explaining how rulers and others directing political events really operated. It was a term used not so much by those intimate with the sources of political events as by those removed from the events and, like Farquhar’s Scrub, bewildered by them.
Unlike the schemes of antiquity and the Renaissance, which flowed from the simplicity and limitedness of politics, the conspiratorial interpretations of the Augustan Age flowed from the expansion and increasing complexity of the political world. Unprecedented demographic and economic developments in early modern Europe were massively altering the nature of society and politics. There were more people more distanced from one another and from the apparent centers of political decision making. The conceptual worlds of many individuals were being broadened and transformed. The more people became strangers to one another and the less they knew of one another’s hearts, the more suspicious and mistrustful they became, ready as never before in Western history to see deceit and deception at work. Relationships between superiors and subordinates, rulers and ruled, formerly taken for granted, now became disturbingly problematical, and people became uncertain of who was who and who was doing what. Growing proportions of the population were more politically conscious and more concerned with what ‘seemed to be the abused power and privileges of ruling elites. Impassioned efforts were made everywhere to arouse “the vigilance of the public eye” against those few men “who cannot exist without a scheme in their heads,” those “turbulent, scheming, maliciously cunning, plotters of mischief.” The warnings against rulers grew more anxious and fearful, the expressions of suspicion more frenzied and strident, because assumptions about how public affairs operated became more and more separated from reality. It was easy for a fifteenth century nobleman, describing political events, to say that “it will be sufficient to speak of the high-ranking people, for it is through them that God’s power and justice are made known.” But by the eighteenth century this tracing of all events back to the ambitions and actions of only the high-ranking leaders was being stretched to the breaking point. Society was composed not simply of great men and their retainers but of numerous groups, interests, and “classes” whose actions could not be easily deciphered. Human affairs were more complicated, more interdependent, and more impersonal than they had ever been in Western history.
Yet at this very moment when the world was outrunning man’s capacity to explain it in personal terms, in terms of the passions and schemes of individuals, the most enlightened of the age were priding themselves on their ability to do just that. The widespread resort to conspiratorial interpretations grew out of this contradiction.
CONSPIRATORIAL INTERPRETATIONs- attributing events to the concerted designs of willful individuals-became a major means by which educated men in the early modern period ordered and gave meaning to their political world. Far from being symptomatic of irrationality, this conspiratorial mode of explanation represented an enlightened stage in Western man’s long struggle to comprehend his social reality. It flowed from the scientific promise of the Enlightenment and represented an effort, perhaps in retrospect a last desperate effort, to hold men personally and morally responsible for their actions.
Personalistic explanations had, of course. long been characteristic of premodern European society and are still characteristic of primitive peoples. Premodern men lacked our modern repertory of explanations and could not rely on those impersonal forces such as industrialization, modernization, or the “stream of history’ that we so blithely invoke to account for complicated combinations of events. They were unable, as we say, to “rise to the conception of movements.” For that different, distant world the question asked of an event was not “How did it happen?” but “Who did it?”
Yet despite this stress on persons rather than processes, premodern men always realized that much of what happened was beyond human agency and understanding. Even those classical and Renaissance writers who stressed that events were due to “the wisdoms and follies, the virtues and vices of individuals who made decisions” built their histories and tragic dramas around the extent to which such heroic individuals could prevail against unknown fortune. Ultimately the world seemed uncontrollable and unpredictable, ruled by mysterious forces of fate or chance foreshadowed in inscrutability. At the opening of the modern era, Protestant reformers invoked divine providence and the omnipotence of God in order to stamp out the traditional popular reliance on luck and magic and to renew a sense of design and moral purpose in the world. Life, they held, was not a lottery but the working out of God’s purpose and judgments, or “special providences.” Men were morally responsible for events; even natural catastrophes like earthquakes and floods were seen as divine punishments for human misbehavior. Still, it remained evident that life was uncertain and precarious and that God moved in very mysterious ways. As the Puritan Increase Mather observed as late as 1684, “Things many times come to pass contrary to humane probabilities and the rational Conjectures and expectations of men.” Nature itself was not always consistent, for things sometimes acted “otherwise than according to their natures and proper inclinations.” Humans might glimpse those parts of God’s design that he chose to reveal, but ultimately they could never “be able fullv to understand by what Rules the Holy and Wise God ordereth all events Prosperous and adverse which come to pass in the world.” If there was comfort in knowing that what seemed chaotic, fortuitous, or accidental was in reality directed by God, it nonetheless remained true that the “ways of Providence are unsearchable.”
At the very time that Mather was writing, however, God was preparing to “let Newton be”: the treatise that was to be enlarged into the first book of the Princzpia was completed in 1684. Of course, the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century-or, more accurately, the new Western consciousness of which that revolution was the most important expression-did not make all immediately light. Yet many people now had less fear of chaos and contingency and greater confidence in their ability to understand events, so much so that sophisticates like George Savile, marquis of Halifax, could even warn against “that common error of applying God's judgments upon particular occasions." The world lost some of its mystery and became more manipulatable. Although the new science tended to remove man from the center of the physical universe at the same time it brought him to the center of human affairs in ways that even classical and Renaissance thinkers had scarcely conceived of. It promised him the capacity to predict and control not only nature but his own society, and it proceeded to make him directly and consciously responsible for the course of human events. Ultimately the implications of this momentous shift created the cultural matrix out of which eighteenth-century conspiratorial interpretations developed.
The new science assumed a world of mechanistic cause and effect in which what happens does so only because something else happened before. Philosophers since Aristotle had talked of causes but never before in terms of such machine-like regularity, of such chains of consequences. “When the world became a machine,” writes Jacob Bronowski, “ [cause] became the god within the machine.” Mechanistic causality became the paradigm in which the enlightened analysis of all behavior and events now had to take place. Cause was something that produced an effect; every effect had a cause; the cause and its effect were integrally related. Such thinking created a new world of laws, measurements, predictions and constancies or regularities of behavior-all dependent on the same causes producing the same effects. “The knowledge of particular phe- nomena may gratify a barren curiosity,” Samuel Stanhope Smith told a generation of Princeton students, “but they are of little real use, except, as they tend to establish some general law, which will enable the accurate observer to predict similar effects in all time to come, in similar circum~ stances, and to depend upon the result. Such general laws alone deserve the name of science.”
The change in consciousness came slowly, confusedly, and reluctantly. Few were immediately willing to abandon belief in the directing providence of God. Newton himself endeavored to preserve God’s autonomy. “A God without dominion, providence, and final causes,” he said, “is nothing but Fate and Nature.” In fact, the Christian belief that nature was ordered by God’s will was an essential presupposition of early modern science. Yet despite the continued stress by Newton’s followers on God’s control over the workings of nature, many eighteenth-century philosophers gradually came to picture the deity as a clockmaker, and some even went so far as to deny that God had anything at all to do with the physical movement of the universe. The logic of the new science implied a world that ran itself.
To posit the independence of the natural world was exciting enough; to conceive of a human world without God’s judgments and providences was simply breathtaking: it was in fact what centrally defined the Enlightenment. The work of John Locke and other philosophers opened reflective minds to the startling supposition that society, though no doubt ordained in principle by God, was man’s own creation-formed and sustained, and thus alterable, by human beings acting autonomously and purposefully. It came to seem that if men could understand the natural order that God had made, then perhaps they could eventually understand the social order that they themselves had made. From the successes of natural science, or what the eighteenth century termed natural philosophy, grew the conviction that moral laws-the chains of cause and effect in human behavior-could be discovered that would match those of the physical world. Thus was generated eighteenth-century moral philosophy-the search for the unifomities and regularities of man’s behavior that has proliferated into the various social sciences of our own time. Finding the laws of behavior became the consuming passion of the Enlightenment In such a liberal and learned world there could no longer be any place for miracles or the random happenings of chance. Chance, it was now said, was “only a name to cover our ignorance of the cause of any event.” God may have remained the primary cause of things, but in the minds of the enlightened he had left men to work out the causes and effects of their lives free from his special interventions. All that happened in society was to be reduced to the strictly human level of men’s motivations and goals. “Humanity,” said William Warburton in I727, “is the only cause of human vicissitudes.” The source of man’s calamities, wrote Constantin Francois de Chasseboeuf, comte de Volney, in I791, lay not in “the distant heavens . . . it resides in man himself, he carries it with him in the inward recesses of his own heart.”Such beliefs worked their way through every variety of intellectual endeavor in the age. They produced not only a new genre of literature-the novel with its authorial control and design-but also a new kind of man-centered causal history, one based on the same assumptions as the age’s conspiratorial interpretations.” English history since the Revolution of 1688, as Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke, saw it from the vantage point of the 1730s, was “not the effect of ignorance, mistakes, or what we call chance, but of design and scheme in those who had the sway at that time.” This could be proved by seeing “events that stand recorded in history . . . as they followed one another, or as they produced one another, causes or effects, immediate or remote.” “History supplies the defects of our own experience” and demonstrates that there are really no such things as accidents; “it shows us causes as in fact they were laid, with their immediate effects: and it enables us to guess at future events.” “History,” said Edward Gibbon simply, “is the science of causes and effects.” Extending this concept from the realm of natural phenomena into the moral world of human affairs was not an easy matter. Natural philosophers like Newton had sought to stave off the numbing necessitarianism implied in a starkly mechanistic conception of cause and effect by positing various God-inspired “active principles” as the causal agents of motion, gravity, heat, and the like. Even those later eighteenth-century scientists who saw nature as self-contained and requiring no divine intervention whatsoever still presumed various energizing powers in matter itself.” The need for some sort of active principle in human affairs was felt even more acutely, for the new mechanistic philosophy posed a threat to what Arthur O. Lovejoy has called the “intense ethical inwardness” of Western Christendom. The belief “that whatever moves and acts does so mechanically and necessarily” was ultimately incompatible with personalistic thinking and cast doubt on man’s moral responsibility for his actions.38 If human affairs were really the consequence of one thing repeatedly and predictably following upon another, the social world would become as determined as the physical world seemed to be. Theologians like Jonathan Edwards welcomed this logic and subtly used the new cause-and-effect philosophy to justify God’s sovereignty. But other moral philosophers had no desire to create a secular version of divine providence or to destroy the voluntarism of either God or man, and thus sought to find a place for free will in the operations of the machine. They did so not by repudiating the paradigm of cause and effect but by trying to identify causes in human affairs with the motives, mind, or will of individuals. Just as natural scientists like Cadwallader Colden, believing that in a mechanistic physical world "there must be some power or force, or principle of Action,” groped toward a modern concept of energy, so too did moral philosophers seek to discover the powers or principles of action that lay behind the sequences of human affairs-in effect, looking within the minds and hearts of men for the moral counterpart of Colden’s physical energy.
Such efforts to reconcile the search for laws of human behavior with the commitment to moral capability lay behind the numerous controversies over free will that bedeviled the eighteenth century. To be enlightened, it seemed, was to try one’s hand at writing an essay on what David Hume called “the most contentious question of metaphysics”--the question of liberty and necessity. Despite all the bitter polemics between the libertarians and the necessitarians, however, both sides were caught up in the new thinking about causality. Both assumed, as Hume pointed out, that “the conjunction between motives and voluntary actions is as regular and uniform, as that between the cause and effect in any part of nature.” Men’s motives or will thus became the starting point in the sequential chain of causes and effects in human affairs. All human actions and events could now be seen scientifically as the products of men’s intentions. If they were not, if men “are not necessarily determined by motives,” then, said the Scottish moralist Thomas Reid, “all their actions must be capricious.” Only by identifying causes with motives was any sort of human science and predictability possible, and only then could morality be preserved in the new, mechanistic causal world.
Since it was “granted on all hands, that moral good and evil lie in the state of mind, or prevailing internal disposition of the agent,” searching out the causes of social events meant discovering in these agents the motives, the “voluntary choice and design,” that led them to act-the energizing principle, the inner springs of their behavior. “Every moral event must have an answerable cause. . . . Every such event must then have a moral cause?“ Moral deeds implied moral doers; when things happen in society, individuals with particular intentions, often called “designs,” must be at the bottom of them. All social processes could be reduced to specific individual passions and interests. “Ambition and avarice,” wrote the Revolutionary historian Mercy Otis Warren, “are the leading springs which generally actuate the restless mind. From these primary sources of corruption have arisen all the rapine and confusion, the depredation and ruin, that have spread distress over the face of the earth from the days of Nimrod to Cesar, and from Cesar to an arbitrary prince of the house of Brunswick.” This widespread belief that explanations of social phenomena must be sought in the moral nature of man himself ultimately reduced all eighteenth-century moral philosophy-its history and its social analysis-to what would come to be called psychology.
Once men’s designs were identified as the causes of human events, the new paradigm of causality worked to intensify and give a scientific gloss to the classic concern with the human heart and the ethical inwardness of Christian culture. Indeed, never before or since in Western history has man been held so directly and morally responsible for the events of his world. Because the new idea of causality presumed a homogeneous identity, an “indissoluble connection,” between causes and effects, it became difficult to think of social effects, however remote in time, that were not morally linked to particular causes-that is, to particular human designs. There could be no more in the effects than existed in the causes. “Outward actions being determined by the will,” they partook “of the nature of moral good or evil only with reference to their cause, viz. internal volition.”
It could now be taken for granted that the cause and the effect were so intimately related that they necessarily shared the same moral qualities. Whatever the particular moral character of the cause-that is, the motive or inclination of the actor-“the effect appears to be of the same kind.”44 Good intentions and beliefs would therefore result in good actions; evil motives caused evil actions. Of course, mistakes might happen, and occasionally actions “proceeded not from design.” But continued or regular moral actions could follow only from similar moral intentions. Only by assuming this close relationship between causes and effects-“this inference from motives to voluntary actions; from characters to conduct,” said Hume-was the eighteenth-century science of human behavior made possible.”
This presumed moral identity between cause and effect, between motive and deed, accounts for the excited reaction of moralists to Bernard Mandeville’s satiric paradox of “private Vices, publick benefits.” MandeVille was unusual for his time in grasping the complexity of public events and the ways in which political effects could outrun and differ from their causes. “We ought,” he wrote, “to forebear judging rashly of ministers and their actions, especially when we are unacquainted with every circumstance of an affair. Measures may be rightly concerted, and such casualties intervene. as mav make the best design miscarry. . . . Humane Understanding is too shallow to foresee the result of what is subject to many variations.”“’ Such skepticism could not be easily tolerated by that enlightened and moral age. Mandeville and all those who would ignore private intentions in favor of public results threatened to unhinge both man’s moral responsibility for his actions and the homogeneous relation that presumably existed between cause and effect. To break the necessary moral connection between cause and effect, to make evil the author of good and Vice versa, would be, it was said, “to confound all differences of character, to destroy all distinction between right and wrong, and to make the most malicious and the most benevolent being of precisely the same temper and disposition.”
Mandeville clearly perceived that much of human activity had become an “incomprehensible Chain of Causes.” But he, like others of his time, had no better way of describing the multitude of complicated and criss-crossing causal chains he saw than to invoke the traditional Protestant concept of “providence.” For those who would be enlightened and scientific, this resort to the mysterious hand of God was no explanation of human affairs at all but rather a step backward into darkness. Things happened, as John Adams noted, by human volition, either “by Accident or Design.” Some confusing event or effect might be passed off as an accident-the result of somebody’s mistaken intention-but a series of events that seemed to form a pattern could be no accident. Having only the alternative of “providence” as an impersonal abstraction to describe systematic linkages of human actions, the most enlightened of the age could only conclude that regular patterns of behavior were the consequences of concerted human intentions-that is, the result of a number of people coming together to promote a collective design or conspiracy. The human mind, it seemed to Jonathan Edwards, had a natural disposition, “when it sees a thing begin to be,” not only “to conclude certainly, that there is a Cause of it,” but also, “if it sees a thing to be in a very orderly, regular and exact manner to conclude that some Design regulated and disposed it.” Although Edwards was arguing here for God’s “exact regulation of a very great multitude of particulars,” a similar leap from a particular cause to a general design was made by eighteenth-century theists who sought to account for the regularity of human actions by the coincident purposes not of God but of human beings”
Many enlightened thinkers of the eighteenth century could therefore no more accept the seeming chaos and contingency of events than could the Puritans. Like the Puritans, they presumed the existence of an ordering power lying beneath the apparently confused surface of events-not God’s concealed will, of course, but natural causes embodied in the bid den intentions and wills of men. Those who saw only random chance in events simply did not know enough about these hidden human wills. Just as devout Puritans believed that nothing occurred without God’s providence, so the liberal-minded believed that nothing occurred without some person willing it. Earlier, men had sought to decipher the concealed or partially revealed will of God; now they sought to understand the cone cealed or partially exposed wills of human beings. That, in a nutshell, was what being enlightened was all about.
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Such were the presuppositions and circumstances that explain the propensity of Anglo-Americans and others in the eighteenth century to resort to conspiratorial interpretations of events. The belief in plots Was not a symptom of disturbed minds but a rational attempt to explain human phenomena in terms of human intentions and to maintain moral coherence in the affairs of men. This mode of thinking was neither pathological nor uniquely American. Certainly, the American Revolution cannot serve as an adequate context for comprehending the obsession with conspiratorial beliefs. Perhaps we can perceive better their larger place in Western history by examining, however briefly, the newer modes of causal explanation that gradually came to replace them.
Well before the close of the eighteenth century, even while conspiratorial interpretations were flourishing under the aegis of enlightened science, alternative ways of explaining events were taking form, prompted by dynamic social changes that were stretching and contorting any simple linkage between human intentions and actions, causes and effects. The expanding, interdependent economic order obviously relied on the activity of thousands upon thousands of insignificant producers and traders whose various and conflicting motives could hardly be deciphered, let alone judged. The growing number of persons and interests participating in politics made causal evaluations ever more difficult. Causes seemed farther and farther removed from their consequences, sometimes disappearing altogether into a distant murkiness. As a result, the inferences of plots and deceptions used to close the widening gap between events and the presumed designs of particular individuals became even more elaborate and contrived. Many were still sure that every social effect, every political event, had to have a purposive human agent as a cause. But men now distinguished more frequently between “remote” and “proximate” causes and between “immediate” and “permanent” effects. Although many continued to assume that the relationship between causes and their effects was intrinsic and morally homogeneous, some moralists noted bewilderingly and sometimes cynically how personal vices like self-love and self-interest could have contrary, indeed beneficial, consequences for society. Men everywhere wrestled with the demands the changing social reality was placing on their thought. Some suggested that self-love might even be a virtue; others complained of “a kind of mandevillian chemistry” that converted avarice into benevolence; still others questioned the presumed identity between private motives and public consequences.” Little of this was followed out in any systematic way in the Anglo-American world until the appearance in the latter half of the eighteenth century of that remarkable group of Scottish intellectuals who worked out, in an extraordinary series of writings, a new understanding of the relationship between individuals and events. These Scottish “social scientists" did not and could not by themselves create a new way of conceiving of human affairs, but their writings were an especially clear crystallization of the changes gradually taking place in Western consciousness during the last third of the eighteenth century. Adam Ferguson, Adam Smith, and John Millar sought to undermine what Duncan Forbes has called “a dominant characteristic of the historical thought of the age”' the “tendency to explain events in terms of conscious action by individuals.” These Scottish moral philosophers had come to realize more clearly than most eighteenth-century thinkers that men pursuing their own particular aims were led by an “invisible hand” into promoting an end that was no part of their intentions. Traditional historians, complained Ferguson in his History of Civil Society, had seen all events as the “effect of design. An author and a work, like cause and effect, are perpetually coupled together.” But reality was not so simple. Men, “in striving to remove inconveniencies, or to gain apparent and contiguous advantages, arrive at ends which even their imagination could not anticipate, . .. and nations stumble upon establishments, which are indeed the result 0: human action. but not the execution of any human design.”
Such momentous insights would in time help to transform all social and historical thinking in the Western world. But it took more than the writings of philosophers-it took the experiencing of tumultuous events-to shake most European intellectuals out of their accustomed ways of thinking. The French Revolution, more than any other single event, changed the consciousness of Europe. The Revolution was simply too convulsive and too sprawling, involving the participation of too man), masses of people, to be easily confined within conventional personals. tie and rationalistic modes of explanation. For the most sensitive European intellectuals, the Revolution became the cataclysm that shattered once and for all the traditional moral affinity between cause and effect, motives and behavior. That the actions of liberal, enlightened, and well-intentioned men could produce such horror, terror, and chaos, that so much promise could result in so much tragedy, became, said Shelley, “tbs master theme of the epoch in which we live.” What the French Revolution revealed, wrote Wordsworth, speaking for a generation of disillusioned intellectuals, was “this awful truth” that “sin and crime are apt to start from their very opposite qualities?” Many European thinkers continued of course, to describe what happened as the deliberate consequence of the desires and ambitions of individuals. But the scale and complexity of the Revolution now required conspiratorial interpretations of an unprecedented sort, No small group of particular plotters could account for its tumult and mass movements; only elaborately organized secret societies, like the Illuminati or the Freemasons, involving thousands of individuals linked by sinister designs, could be behind the Europe-wide upheaval.”
Although such conspiratorial interpretations of the Revolution were everywhere, the best minds-Hegel’s in particular-now knew that the jumble of events that made up the Revolution were so complex and overwhelming that they could no longer be explained simply as the products of personal intention. For these thinkers, history could no longer be a combination of individual events managed by particular persons, but had to become a complicated flow or process, a “stream,” that swept men along.
THe story of this vast transformation in the way men explain events is central to the history of modern Western thought. Indeed, so huge and complicated is it that our easy generalizations are apt to miss its confused and agonized significance for individuals and to neglect the piecemeal ways in which it was worked out in the minds of people--~not great philosophers like Hegel or Adam Smith, but more ordinary people, clergymen, writers, and politicians caught up in the problems and polemics of the moment.
Certainly late eighteenth-century Americans did not experience this transformation in consciousness as rapidly and to the same extent as Europeans, but it is evident that some were coming to realize that the social and moral order was not as intelligible as it once had been.
Hofstadter said his use of “paranoid style” was not intended to suggest any medical or clinical significance; he meant only to use the term metaphorically to describe “a way of seeing the world and of expressing oneself.” Medically, as he pointed out, paranoia is defined as a chronic mental disorder characterized by systematized delusions of persecution. However overly suspicious and apocalyptical in expression American paranoid spokesmen may have been, said Hofstadter, they could not be described as “certifiable lunatics.” Yet-and it was a very big, drawn-out yet-this style was not quite normal; it was, Hofstadter wrote, “a distorted style” and thus “a possible signal that may alert us to a distorted judgment.” It indicated that some kind of “political pathology” was at work; it was a recurrent mode of expression in American public life “which has frequently been linked with movements of suspicious discontent.” Although believers in conspiracy may not have been crazy, they were persons, Hofstadter suggested, who had perverse and fanciful views of reality and were thus fit subjects for the application of some sort of “depth psychology.”
Other historians, sharing Hofstadter’s assumption that politics was often “a projective arena for feelings and impulses that are only marginally related to the manifest issues,” also sought to relate Americans. recurring fears of conspiracy to some underlying social or psychological process.‘ Some thought “that fear of conspiracy characterizes periods when traditional social and moral values are undergoing change” and therefore focused on the unusual fluidity of American society. People who were unsure of their identity and status, socially disrupted or alienated in some way, were, it seemed, especially susceptible to conspiratorial interpretations of events. Possibly, suggested David Brion Davis, who has most meticulously uncovered the conspiratorial fears of nineteenth” century Americans, various groups, from Anti-Masons to opponents of the Slave Power, found in the paranoid style a common means of expressing their different torments and troubles. Obviously, historians were careful to note, the great numbers of people who relied on such imagery of subversion--from Abraham Lincoln to Justice Robert H. Jackson-could not be dismissed as “Charlatans, crackpots, and the disaffected.” Davis in particular warned against any facile assumption “that the fear of subversion is always generated by internal, psychological needs." Despite such qualifications and cautions, however, the implications of these historical accounts of the paranoid style were clear: Americans seemed prone to fears of subversion, and these fears were symptomatic of severe social and psychological strains.
Once America’s paranoid style was revealed to be so prevalent, its connection with the ideology of the Revolution became inevitable. Not only was Bailyn’s account of the colonists’ fears of conspiracy widely reprinted, but historians now suggested that the Revolution had set “the basic pattern” of the paranoid style. “Is it possible,” asked Davis, “that the circumstances of the Revolution conditioned Americans to think of resistance to a dark subversive force as the essential ingredient of their national identity. With the paranoid style associated with the ideology of the Revolution in this way, historians were quick to find traces of it everywhere in their sources. Although Bailyn had stressed in his Ideological Origins the rational basis of the colonists’ fears, the term “paranoia” soon proliferated in historical writings on the Revolution. “The insurgent Whig ideology,” it now seemed clear, “had a frenzied, even paranoid cast to it,” and leaders like John Adams and Thomas Jefferson were even accused of suffering from some form of paranoia. The mounting evidence could lead to only one conclusion: “The era of the American Revolution was a period of political paranoia” in which “visions of conspiracy were endemic.”
In many cases these references to paranoia were clearly metaphorical, But given the current interest in psychohistory, it is not surprising that other references to paranoia have taken on an authentically psychological character, presuming a close connection between paranoid thinking and particular psychic sensibilities. Some historians, while acknowledging that the American Whigs’ belief in a ministerial design against their liberties may have had some rational and conscious sources, have emphasized that “the fear of conspiracy also had roots buried deeply in the innermost recesses of the psyches of numerous Americans.” Certain types of colonists unconsciously experienced tensions and anxieties over their personal autonomy and sexual identities that may very well have shaped their public fears and fostered their sense of conspiracies endangering them.
Other writers, taking Bailyn’s argument as a “point of departure,” have attempted a stark and quite literal “psychological interpretation of the coming of the Revolution,” even going so far as to suggest that the Revolutionary leaders were clinically paranoiac-that is, that they were suffering from actual delusions of persecution and were unable to assess reality in a rational fashion. Far from being profoundly reasonable men, they were “prone to emotional instability, predisposed to psychological problems, vulnerable to them under the goad of an appropriate precipitant,” like the Stamp Act, which left “in its wake the paranoid delusions that Britain was conspiring to enslave Americans.”
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Conspiracies like those of Charles II’s Cabal became less matters of fact and more matters of inference. Accounts of plots by court or government were no longer descriptions of actual events but interpretations of otherwise puzzling concatenations of events. By the eighteenth century conspiracy was not simply a means of explaining how rulers were deposed; it had become a common means of explaining how rulers and others directing political events really operated. It was a term used not so much by those intimate with the sources of political events as by those removed from the events and, like Farquhar’s Scrub, bewildered by them.
Unlike the schemes of antiquity and the Renaissance, which flowed from the simplicity and limitedness of politics, the conspiratorial interpretations of the Augustan Age flowed from the expansion and increasing complexity of the political world. Unprecedented demographic and economic developments in early modern Europe were massively altering the nature of society and politics. There were more people more distanced from one another and from the apparent centers of political decision making. The conceptual worlds of many individuals were being broadened and transformed. The more people became strangers to one another and the less they knew of one another’s hearts, the more suspicious and mistrustful they became, ready as never before in Western history to see deceit and deception at work. Relationships between superiors and subordinates, rulers and ruled, formerly taken for granted, now became disturbingly problematical, and people became uncertain of who was who and who was doing what. Growing proportions of the population were more politically conscious and more concerned with what ‘seemed to be the abused power and privileges of ruling elites. Impassioned efforts were made everywhere to arouse “the vigilance of the public eye” against those few men “who cannot exist without a scheme in their heads,” those “turbulent, scheming, maliciously cunning, plotters of mischief.” The warnings against rulers grew more anxious and fearful, the expressions of suspicion more frenzied and strident, because assumptions about how public affairs operated became more and more separated from reality. It was easy for a fifteenth century nobleman, describing political events, to say that “it will be sufficient to speak of the high-ranking people, for it is through them that God’s power and justice are made known.” But by the eighteenth century this tracing of all events back to the ambitions and actions of only the high-ranking leaders was being stretched to the breaking point. Society was composed not simply of great men and their retainers but of numerous groups, interests, and “classes” whose actions could not be easily deciphered. Human affairs were more complicated, more interdependent, and more impersonal than they had ever been in Western history.
Yet at this very moment when the world was outrunning man’s capacity to explain it in personal terms, in terms of the passions and schemes of individuals, the most enlightened of the age were priding themselves on their ability to do just that. The widespread resort to conspiratorial interpretations grew out of this contradiction.
CONSPIRATORIAL INTERPRETATIONs- attributing events to the concerted designs of willful individuals-became a major means by which educated men in the early modern period ordered and gave meaning to their political world. Far from being symptomatic of irrationality, this conspiratorial mode of explanation represented an enlightened stage in Western man’s long struggle to comprehend his social reality. It flowed from the scientific promise of the Enlightenment and represented an effort, perhaps in retrospect a last desperate effort, to hold men personally and morally responsible for their actions.
Personalistic explanations had, of course. long been characteristic of premodern European society and are still characteristic of primitive peoples. Premodern men lacked our modern repertory of explanations and could not rely on those impersonal forces such as industrialization, modernization, or the “stream of history’ that we so blithely invoke to account for complicated combinations of events. They were unable, as we say, to “rise to the conception of movements.” For that different, distant world the question asked of an event was not “How did it happen?” but “Who did it?”
Yet despite this stress on persons rather than processes, premodern men always realized that much of what happened was beyond human agency and understanding. Even those classical and Renaissance writers who stressed that events were due to “the wisdoms and follies, the virtues and vices of individuals who made decisions” built their histories and tragic dramas around the extent to which such heroic individuals could prevail against unknown fortune. Ultimately the world seemed uncontrollable and unpredictable, ruled by mysterious forces of fate or chance foreshadowed in inscrutability. At the opening of the modern era, Protestant reformers invoked divine providence and the omnipotence of God in order to stamp out the traditional popular reliance on luck and magic and to renew a sense of design and moral purpose in the world. Life, they held, was not a lottery but the working out of God’s purpose and judgments, or “special providences.” Men were morally responsible for events; even natural catastrophes like earthquakes and floods were seen as divine punishments for human misbehavior. Still, it remained evident that life was uncertain and precarious and that God moved in very mysterious ways. As the Puritan Increase Mather observed as late as 1684, “Things many times come to pass contrary to humane probabilities and the rational Conjectures and expectations of men.” Nature itself was not always consistent, for things sometimes acted “otherwise than according to their natures and proper inclinations.” Humans might glimpse those parts of God’s design that he chose to reveal, but ultimately they could never “be able fullv to understand by what Rules the Holy and Wise God ordereth all events Prosperous and adverse which come to pass in the world.” If there was comfort in knowing that what seemed chaotic, fortuitous, or accidental was in reality directed by God, it nonetheless remained true that the “ways of Providence are unsearchable.”
At the very time that Mather was writing, however, God was preparing to “let Newton be”: the treatise that was to be enlarged into the first book of the Princzpia was completed in 1684. Of course, the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century-or, more accurately, the new Western consciousness of which that revolution was the most important expression-did not make all immediately light. Yet many people now had less fear of chaos and contingency and greater confidence in their ability to understand events, so much so that sophisticates like George Savile, marquis of Halifax, could even warn against “that common error of applying God's judgments upon particular occasions." The world lost some of its mystery and became more manipulatable. Although the new science tended to remove man from the center of the physical universe at the same time it brought him to the center of human affairs in ways that even classical and Renaissance thinkers had scarcely conceived of. It promised him the capacity to predict and control not only nature but his own society, and it proceeded to make him directly and consciously responsible for the course of human events. Ultimately the implications of this momentous shift created the cultural matrix out of which eighteenth-century conspiratorial interpretations developed.
The new science assumed a world of mechanistic cause and effect in which what happens does so only because something else happened before. Philosophers since Aristotle had talked of causes but never before in terms of such machine-like regularity, of such chains of consequences. “When the world became a machine,” writes Jacob Bronowski, “ [cause] became the god within the machine.” Mechanistic causality became the paradigm in which the enlightened analysis of all behavior and events now had to take place. Cause was something that produced an effect; every effect had a cause; the cause and its effect were integrally related. Such thinking created a new world of laws, measurements, predictions and constancies or regularities of behavior-all dependent on the same causes producing the same effects. “The knowledge of particular phe- nomena may gratify a barren curiosity,” Samuel Stanhope Smith told a generation of Princeton students, “but they are of little real use, except, as they tend to establish some general law, which will enable the accurate observer to predict similar effects in all time to come, in similar circum~ stances, and to depend upon the result. Such general laws alone deserve the name of science.”
The change in consciousness came slowly, confusedly, and reluctantly. Few were immediately willing to abandon belief in the directing providence of God. Newton himself endeavored to preserve God’s autonomy. “A God without dominion, providence, and final causes,” he said, “is nothing but Fate and Nature.” In fact, the Christian belief that nature was ordered by God’s will was an essential presupposition of early modern science. Yet despite the continued stress by Newton’s followers on God’s control over the workings of nature, many eighteenth-century philosophers gradually came to picture the deity as a clockmaker, and some even went so far as to deny that God had anything at all to do with the physical movement of the universe. The logic of the new science implied a world that ran itself.
To posit the independence of the natural world was exciting enough; to conceive of a human world without God’s judgments and providences was simply breathtaking: it was in fact what centrally defined the Enlightenment. The work of John Locke and other philosophers opened reflective minds to the startling supposition that society, though no doubt ordained in principle by God, was man’s own creation-formed and sustained, and thus alterable, by human beings acting autonomously and purposefully. It came to seem that if men could understand the natural order that God had made, then perhaps they could eventually understand the social order that they themselves had made. From the successes of natural science, or what the eighteenth century termed natural philosophy, grew the conviction that moral laws-the chains of cause and effect in human behavior-could be discovered that would match those of the physical world. Thus was generated eighteenth-century moral philosophy-the search for the unifomities and regularities of man’s behavior that has proliferated into the various social sciences of our own time. Finding the laws of behavior became the consuming passion of the Enlightenment In such a liberal and learned world there could no longer be any place for miracles or the random happenings of chance. Chance, it was now said, was “only a name to cover our ignorance of the cause of any event.” God may have remained the primary cause of things, but in the minds of the enlightened he had left men to work out the causes and effects of their lives free from his special interventions. All that happened in society was to be reduced to the strictly human level of men’s motivations and goals. “Humanity,” said William Warburton in I727, “is the only cause of human vicissitudes.” The source of man’s calamities, wrote Constantin Francois de Chasseboeuf, comte de Volney, in I791, lay not in “the distant heavens . . . it resides in man himself, he carries it with him in the inward recesses of his own heart.”Such beliefs worked their way through every variety of intellectual endeavor in the age. They produced not only a new genre of literature-the novel with its authorial control and design-but also a new kind of man-centered causal history, one based on the same assumptions as the age’s conspiratorial interpretations.” English history since the Revolution of 1688, as Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke, saw it from the vantage point of the 1730s, was “not the effect of ignorance, mistakes, or what we call chance, but of design and scheme in those who had the sway at that time.” This could be proved by seeing “events that stand recorded in history . . . as they followed one another, or as they produced one another, causes or effects, immediate or remote.” “History supplies the defects of our own experience” and demonstrates that there are really no such things as accidents; “it shows us causes as in fact they were laid, with their immediate effects: and it enables us to guess at future events.” “History,” said Edward Gibbon simply, “is the science of causes and effects.” Extending this concept from the realm of natural phenomena into the moral world of human affairs was not an easy matter. Natural philosophers like Newton had sought to stave off the numbing necessitarianism implied in a starkly mechanistic conception of cause and effect by positing various God-inspired “active principles” as the causal agents of motion, gravity, heat, and the like. Even those later eighteenth-century scientists who saw nature as self-contained and requiring no divine intervention whatsoever still presumed various energizing powers in matter itself.” The need for some sort of active principle in human affairs was felt even more acutely, for the new mechanistic philosophy posed a threat to what Arthur O. Lovejoy has called the “intense ethical inwardness” of Western Christendom. The belief “that whatever moves and acts does so mechanically and necessarily” was ultimately incompatible with personalistic thinking and cast doubt on man’s moral responsibility for his actions.38 If human affairs were really the consequence of one thing repeatedly and predictably following upon another, the social world would become as determined as the physical world seemed to be. Theologians like Jonathan Edwards welcomed this logic and subtly used the new cause-and-effect philosophy to justify God’s sovereignty. But other moral philosophers had no desire to create a secular version of divine providence or to destroy the voluntarism of either God or man, and thus sought to find a place for free will in the operations of the machine. They did so not by repudiating the paradigm of cause and effect but by trying to identify causes in human affairs with the motives, mind, or will of individuals. Just as natural scientists like Cadwallader Colden, believing that in a mechanistic physical world "there must be some power or force, or principle of Action,” groped toward a modern concept of energy, so too did moral philosophers seek to discover the powers or principles of action that lay behind the sequences of human affairs-in effect, looking within the minds and hearts of men for the moral counterpart of Colden’s physical energy.
Such efforts to reconcile the search for laws of human behavior with the commitment to moral capability lay behind the numerous controversies over free will that bedeviled the eighteenth century. To be enlightened, it seemed, was to try one’s hand at writing an essay on what David Hume called “the most contentious question of metaphysics”--the question of liberty and necessity. Despite all the bitter polemics between the libertarians and the necessitarians, however, both sides were caught up in the new thinking about causality. Both assumed, as Hume pointed out, that “the conjunction between motives and voluntary actions is as regular and uniform, as that between the cause and effect in any part of nature.” Men’s motives or will thus became the starting point in the sequential chain of causes and effects in human affairs. All human actions and events could now be seen scientifically as the products of men’s intentions. If they were not, if men “are not necessarily determined by motives,” then, said the Scottish moralist Thomas Reid, “all their actions must be capricious.” Only by identifying causes with motives was any sort of human science and predictability possible, and only then could morality be preserved in the new, mechanistic causal world.
Since it was “granted on all hands, that moral good and evil lie in the state of mind, or prevailing internal disposition of the agent,” searching out the causes of social events meant discovering in these agents the motives, the “voluntary choice and design,” that led them to act-the energizing principle, the inner springs of their behavior. “Every moral event must have an answerable cause. . . . Every such event must then have a moral cause?“ Moral deeds implied moral doers; when things happen in society, individuals with particular intentions, often called “designs,” must be at the bottom of them. All social processes could be reduced to specific individual passions and interests. “Ambition and avarice,” wrote the Revolutionary historian Mercy Otis Warren, “are the leading springs which generally actuate the restless mind. From these primary sources of corruption have arisen all the rapine and confusion, the depredation and ruin, that have spread distress over the face of the earth from the days of Nimrod to Cesar, and from Cesar to an arbitrary prince of the house of Brunswick.” This widespread belief that explanations of social phenomena must be sought in the moral nature of man himself ultimately reduced all eighteenth-century moral philosophy-its history and its social analysis-to what would come to be called psychology.
Once men’s designs were identified as the causes of human events, the new paradigm of causality worked to intensify and give a scientific gloss to the classic concern with the human heart and the ethical inwardness of Christian culture. Indeed, never before or since in Western history has man been held so directly and morally responsible for the events of his world. Because the new idea of causality presumed a homogeneous identity, an “indissoluble connection,” between causes and effects, it became difficult to think of social effects, however remote in time, that were not morally linked to particular causes-that is, to particular human designs. There could be no more in the effects than existed in the causes. “Outward actions being determined by the will,” they partook “of the nature of moral good or evil only with reference to their cause, viz. internal volition.”
It could now be taken for granted that the cause and the effect were so intimately related that they necessarily shared the same moral qualities. Whatever the particular moral character of the cause-that is, the motive or inclination of the actor-“the effect appears to be of the same kind.”44 Good intentions and beliefs would therefore result in good actions; evil motives caused evil actions. Of course, mistakes might happen, and occasionally actions “proceeded not from design.” But continued or regular moral actions could follow only from similar moral intentions. Only by assuming this close relationship between causes and effects-“this inference from motives to voluntary actions; from characters to conduct,” said Hume-was the eighteenth-century science of human behavior made possible.”
This presumed moral identity between cause and effect, between motive and deed, accounts for the excited reaction of moralists to Bernard Mandeville’s satiric paradox of “private Vices, publick benefits.” MandeVille was unusual for his time in grasping the complexity of public events and the ways in which political effects could outrun and differ from their causes. “We ought,” he wrote, “to forebear judging rashly of ministers and their actions, especially when we are unacquainted with every circumstance of an affair. Measures may be rightly concerted, and such casualties intervene. as mav make the best design miscarry. . . . Humane Understanding is too shallow to foresee the result of what is subject to many variations.”“’ Such skepticism could not be easily tolerated by that enlightened and moral age. Mandeville and all those who would ignore private intentions in favor of public results threatened to unhinge both man’s moral responsibility for his actions and the homogeneous relation that presumably existed between cause and effect. To break the necessary moral connection between cause and effect, to make evil the author of good and Vice versa, would be, it was said, “to confound all differences of character, to destroy all distinction between right and wrong, and to make the most malicious and the most benevolent being of precisely the same temper and disposition.”
Mandeville clearly perceived that much of human activity had become an “incomprehensible Chain of Causes.” But he, like others of his time, had no better way of describing the multitude of complicated and criss-crossing causal chains he saw than to invoke the traditional Protestant concept of “providence.” For those who would be enlightened and scientific, this resort to the mysterious hand of God was no explanation of human affairs at all but rather a step backward into darkness. Things happened, as John Adams noted, by human volition, either “by Accident or Design.” Some confusing event or effect might be passed off as an accident-the result of somebody’s mistaken intention-but a series of events that seemed to form a pattern could be no accident. Having only the alternative of “providence” as an impersonal abstraction to describe systematic linkages of human actions, the most enlightened of the age could only conclude that regular patterns of behavior were the consequences of concerted human intentions-that is, the result of a number of people coming together to promote a collective design or conspiracy. The human mind, it seemed to Jonathan Edwards, had a natural disposition, “when it sees a thing begin to be,” not only “to conclude certainly, that there is a Cause of it,” but also, “if it sees a thing to be in a very orderly, regular and exact manner to conclude that some Design regulated and disposed it.” Although Edwards was arguing here for God’s “exact regulation of a very great multitude of particulars,” a similar leap from a particular cause to a general design was made by eighteenth-century theists who sought to account for the regularity of human actions by the coincident purposes not of God but of human beings”
Many enlightened thinkers of the eighteenth century could therefore no more accept the seeming chaos and contingency of events than could the Puritans. Like the Puritans, they presumed the existence of an ordering power lying beneath the apparently confused surface of events-not God’s concealed will, of course, but natural causes embodied in the bid den intentions and wills of men. Those who saw only random chance in events simply did not know enough about these hidden human wills. Just as devout Puritans believed that nothing occurred without God’s providence, so the liberal-minded believed that nothing occurred without some person willing it. Earlier, men had sought to decipher the concealed or partially revealed will of God; now they sought to understand the cone cealed or partially exposed wills of human beings. That, in a nutshell, was what being enlightened was all about.
and
Such were the presuppositions and circumstances that explain the propensity of Anglo-Americans and others in the eighteenth century to resort to conspiratorial interpretations of events. The belief in plots Was not a symptom of disturbed minds but a rational attempt to explain human phenomena in terms of human intentions and to maintain moral coherence in the affairs of men. This mode of thinking was neither pathological nor uniquely American. Certainly, the American Revolution cannot serve as an adequate context for comprehending the obsession with conspiratorial beliefs. Perhaps we can perceive better their larger place in Western history by examining, however briefly, the newer modes of causal explanation that gradually came to replace them.
Well before the close of the eighteenth century, even while conspiratorial interpretations were flourishing under the aegis of enlightened science, alternative ways of explaining events were taking form, prompted by dynamic social changes that were stretching and contorting any simple linkage between human intentions and actions, causes and effects. The expanding, interdependent economic order obviously relied on the activity of thousands upon thousands of insignificant producers and traders whose various and conflicting motives could hardly be deciphered, let alone judged. The growing number of persons and interests participating in politics made causal evaluations ever more difficult. Causes seemed farther and farther removed from their consequences, sometimes disappearing altogether into a distant murkiness. As a result, the inferences of plots and deceptions used to close the widening gap between events and the presumed designs of particular individuals became even more elaborate and contrived. Many were still sure that every social effect, every political event, had to have a purposive human agent as a cause. But men now distinguished more frequently between “remote” and “proximate” causes and between “immediate” and “permanent” effects. Although many continued to assume that the relationship between causes and their effects was intrinsic and morally homogeneous, some moralists noted bewilderingly and sometimes cynically how personal vices like self-love and self-interest could have contrary, indeed beneficial, consequences for society. Men everywhere wrestled with the demands the changing social reality was placing on their thought. Some suggested that self-love might even be a virtue; others complained of “a kind of mandevillian chemistry” that converted avarice into benevolence; still others questioned the presumed identity between private motives and public consequences.” Little of this was followed out in any systematic way in the Anglo-American world until the appearance in the latter half of the eighteenth century of that remarkable group of Scottish intellectuals who worked out, in an extraordinary series of writings, a new understanding of the relationship between individuals and events. These Scottish “social scientists" did not and could not by themselves create a new way of conceiving of human affairs, but their writings were an especially clear crystallization of the changes gradually taking place in Western consciousness during the last third of the eighteenth century. Adam Ferguson, Adam Smith, and John Millar sought to undermine what Duncan Forbes has called “a dominant characteristic of the historical thought of the age”' the “tendency to explain events in terms of conscious action by individuals.” These Scottish moral philosophers had come to realize more clearly than most eighteenth-century thinkers that men pursuing their own particular aims were led by an “invisible hand” into promoting an end that was no part of their intentions. Traditional historians, complained Ferguson in his History of Civil Society, had seen all events as the “effect of design. An author and a work, like cause and effect, are perpetually coupled together.” But reality was not so simple. Men, “in striving to remove inconveniencies, or to gain apparent and contiguous advantages, arrive at ends which even their imagination could not anticipate, . .. and nations stumble upon establishments, which are indeed the result 0: human action. but not the execution of any human design.”
Such momentous insights would in time help to transform all social and historical thinking in the Western world. But it took more than the writings of philosophers-it took the experiencing of tumultuous events-to shake most European intellectuals out of their accustomed ways of thinking. The French Revolution, more than any other single event, changed the consciousness of Europe. The Revolution was simply too convulsive and too sprawling, involving the participation of too man), masses of people, to be easily confined within conventional personals. tie and rationalistic modes of explanation. For the most sensitive European intellectuals, the Revolution became the cataclysm that shattered once and for all the traditional moral affinity between cause and effect, motives and behavior. That the actions of liberal, enlightened, and well-intentioned men could produce such horror, terror, and chaos, that so much promise could result in so much tragedy, became, said Shelley, “tbs master theme of the epoch in which we live.” What the French Revolution revealed, wrote Wordsworth, speaking for a generation of disillusioned intellectuals, was “this awful truth” that “sin and crime are apt to start from their very opposite qualities?” Many European thinkers continued of course, to describe what happened as the deliberate consequence of the desires and ambitions of individuals. But the scale and complexity of the Revolution now required conspiratorial interpretations of an unprecedented sort, No small group of particular plotters could account for its tumult and mass movements; only elaborately organized secret societies, like the Illuminati or the Freemasons, involving thousands of individuals linked by sinister designs, could be behind the Europe-wide upheaval.”
Although such conspiratorial interpretations of the Revolution were everywhere, the best minds-Hegel’s in particular-now knew that the jumble of events that made up the Revolution were so complex and overwhelming that they could no longer be explained simply as the products of personal intention. For these thinkers, history could no longer be a combination of individual events managed by particular persons, but had to become a complicated flow or process, a “stream,” that swept men along.
THe story of this vast transformation in the way men explain events is central to the history of modern Western thought. Indeed, so huge and complicated is it that our easy generalizations are apt to miss its confused and agonized significance for individuals and to neglect the piecemeal ways in which it was worked out in the minds of people--~not great philosophers like Hegel or Adam Smith, but more ordinary people, clergymen, writers, and politicians caught up in the problems and polemics of the moment.
Certainly late eighteenth-century Americans did not experience this transformation in consciousness as rapidly and to the same extent as Europeans, but it is evident that some were coming to realize that the social and moral order was not as intelligible as it once had been.
and
Motives and intentions, Brown suggested, could no longer be crucial in judging moral responsibility, since “the causes that fashion men into instruments of happiness or misery, are numerous, complex, and operate upon a wide surface. . . . Every man is encompassed by numerous claims, and is the subject of intricate relations. . . . Human affairs are infinitely complicated.”
These American explorations into the relationship between aims and consequences were only small and modest examples of what was taking place generally in Western thought during the late eighteenth century. Others elsewhere were also becoming more and more conscious of the
complicatedness of human affairs. The growing awareness of the difficulty of delving into the human heart and the increasing unwillingness to esteem men simply for their aristocratic character were forcing moralists, sometimes imperceptibly, to shift the basis of judgment of human action from the motives and personal qualifications of the actors to the public consequences of their acts. The common practice of deducing motives from their effects in actions only furthered this transition and blurred what was happening. What counted now was less the beliefs and intentions or the “character,” of the actor and more the consequences of his actions or his contributions to human happiness. And any man, however much he lacked “character,” however ordinary and insignificant he may have been, could make such contributions.
These American explorations into the relationship between aims and consequences were only small and modest examples of what was taking place generally in Western thought during the late eighteenth century. Others elsewhere were also becoming more and more conscious of the
complicatedness of human affairs. The growing awareness of the difficulty of delving into the human heart and the increasing unwillingness to esteem men simply for their aristocratic character were forcing moralists, sometimes imperceptibly, to shift the basis of judgment of human action from the motives and personal qualifications of the actors to the public consequences of their acts. The common practice of deducing motives from their effects in actions only furthered this transition and blurred what was happening. What counted now was less the beliefs and intentions or the “character,” of the actor and more the consequences of his actions or his contributions to human happiness. And any man, however much he lacked “character,” however ordinary and insignificant he may have been, could make such contributions.
In just such shifts from motives to consequences was a democratic consciousness strengthened and what came to be called utilitarianism created. Naturally, for most people there remained no discrepancy between benevolent aims and good effects, and the familiar belief that private virtue was the obvious source of human happiness continued strong. But for Jeremy Bentham and other stark utilitarians, there could no longer be any such thing as good or bad motives: “If they are good or bad, it is only on account of their effects, good on account of their tendency to produce pleasure, or avert pain: bad, on account of their tendency to produce pain, or avert pleasure.”
Many Americans were reluctant to separate motives from consequences, causes from effects, in this unequivocal utilitarian manner. But by the early nineteenth century there were some, usually those most eager to disparage “aristocratic” heroic individuals and to magnify the popular “masses,” who increasingly emphasized what Bishop had clumsily called the “system” of society. Now it was described as the “natural order” or the “aggregate result” of events formed out of the diverse and clashing motives of countless insignificant individuals. Men no doubt caused this "aggregate result,” but they did so in large numbers and unthinkingly by following their particular natural inclinations.
Many Americans were reluctant to separate motives from consequences, causes from effects, in this unequivocal utilitarian manner. But by the early nineteenth century there were some, usually those most eager to disparage “aristocratic” heroic individuals and to magnify the popular “masses,” who increasingly emphasized what Bishop had clumsily called the “system” of society. Now it was described as the “natural order” or the “aggregate result” of events formed out of the diverse and clashing motives of countless insignificant individuals. Men no doubt caused this "aggregate result,” but they did so in large numbers and unthinkingly by following their particular natural inclinations.
Sunday, June 04, 2017
The last of Middlemarch
That was the bare fact which Bulstrode was now forced to see in
the rigid outline with which acts present themselves onlookers.
But for himself at that distant time, and even now in burning memory,
the fact was broken into little sequences, each justified as it came
by reasonings which seemed to prove it righteous. Bulstrode's course up
to that time had, he thought, been sanctioned by remarkable providences,
appearing to point the way for him to be the agent in making the
best use of a large property and withdrawing it from perversion.
Death and other striking dispositions, such as feminine trustfulness,
had come; and Bulstrode would have adopted Cromwell's words--
"Do you call these bare events? The Lord pity you!" The events
were comparatively small, but the essential condition was there--
namely, that they were in favor of his own ends. It was easy
for him to settle what was due from him to others by inquiring
what were God's intentions with regard to himself. Could it be
for God's service that this fortune should in any considerable
proportion go to a young woman and her husband who were given up
to the lightest pursuits, and might scatter it abroad in triviality--
people who seemed to lie outside the path of remarkable providences?
Bulstrode had never said to himself beforehand, "The daughter
shall not be found"--nevertheless when the moment came he kept
her existence hidden; and when other moments followed, he soothed
the mother with consolation in the probability that the unhappy
young woman might be no more.
There were hours in which Bulstrode felt that his action
was unrighteous; but how could he go back? He had mental exercises,
called himself nought laid hold on redemption, and went on in his
course of instrumentality. And after five years Death again came
to widen his path, by taking away his wife. He did gradually
withdraw his capital, but he did not make the sacrifices requisite
to put an end to the business, which was carried on for thirteen
years afterwards before it finally collapsed. Meanwhile Nicholas
Bulstrode had used his hundred thousand discreetly, and was
become provincially, solidly important--a banker, a Churchman,
a public benefactor; also a sleeping partner in trading concerns,
in which his ability was directed to economy in the raw material,
as in the case of the dyes which rotted Mr. Vincy's silk. And now,
when this respectability had lasted undisturbed for nearly thirty years--
when all that preceded it had long lain benumbed in the consciousness--
that past had risen and immersed his thought as if with the terrible
irruption of a new sense overburthening the feeble being.
Meanwhile, in his conversation with Raffles, he had learned
something momentous, something which entered actively into
the struggle of his longings and terrors. There, he thought,
lay an opening towards spiritual, perhaps towards material rescue.
The spiritual kind of rescue was a genuine need with him. There may
be coarse hypocrites, who consciously affect beliefs and emotions
for the sake of gulling the world, but Bulstrode was not one of them.
He was simply a man whose desires had been stronger than his
theoretic beliefs, and who had gradually explained the gratification
of his desires into satisfactory agreement with those beliefs.
If this be hypocrisy, it is a process which shows itself occasionally
in us all, to whatever confession we belong, and whether we
believe in the future perfection of our race or in the nearest
date fixed for the end of the world; whether we regard the earth
as a putrefying nidus for a saved remnant, including ourselves,
or have a passionate belief in the solidarity of mankind.
The service he could do to the cause of religion had been through
life the ground he alleged to himself for his choice of action:
it had been the motive which he had poured out in his prayers.
Who would use money and position better than he meant to use them?
Who could surpass him in self-abhorrence and exaltation of God's cause?
And to Mr. Bulstrode God's cause was something distinct from his own
rectitude of conduct: it enforced a discrimination of God's enemies,
who were to be used merely as instruments, and whom it would be
as well if possible to keep out of money and consequent influence.
Also, profitable investments in trades where the power of the prince
of this world showed its most active devices, became sanctified by a
right application of the profits in the hands of God's servant.
This implicit reasoning is essentially no more peculiar to evangelical
belief than the use of wide phrases for narrow motives is peculiar
to Englishmen. There is no general doctrine which is not capable
of eating out our morality if unchecked by the deep-seated habit
of direct fellow-feeling with individual fellow-men.
But a man who believes in something else than his own greed,
has necessarily a conscience or standard to which he more or less
adapts himself. Bulstrode's standard had been his serviceableness
to God's cause: "I am sinful and nought--a vessel to be consecrated
by use--but use me!"--had been the mould into which he had constrained
his immense need of being something important and predominating.
And now had come a moment in which that mould seemed in danger
of being broken and utterly cast away.
What if the acts he had reconciled himself to because they made
him a stronger instrument of the divine glory, were to become
the pretext of the scoffer, and a darkening of that glory?
If this were to be the ruling of Providence, he was cast out from
the temple as one who had brought unclean offerings.
He had long poured out utterances of repentance. But today a
repentance had come which was of a bitterer flavor, and a threatening
Providence urged him to a kind of propitiation which was not simply
a doctrinal transaction. The divine tribunal had changed its
aspect for him; self-prostration was no longer enough, and he must
bring restitution in his hand. It was really before his God that
Bulstrode was about to attempt such restitution as seemed possible:
a great dread had seized his susceptible frame, and the scorching
approach of shame wrought in him a new spiritual need. Night and day,
while the resurgent threatening past was making a conscience within him,
he was thinking by what means he could recover peace and trust--
by what sacrifice he could stay the rod. His belief in these
moments of dread was, that if he spontaneously did something right,
God would save him from the consequences of wrong-doing. For religion
can only change when the emotions which fill it are changed; and the
religion of personal fear remains nearly at the level of the savage.
and
That was the uneasy corner of Lydgate's consciousness while he
was reviewing the facts and resisting all reproach. If he
had been independent, this matter of a patient's treatment
and the distinct rule that he must do or see done that which he
believed best for the life committed to him, would have been
the point on which he would have been the sturdiest. As it was,
he had rested in the consideration that disobedience to his orders,
however it might have arisen, could not be considered a crime,
that in the dominant opinion obedience to his orders was just as
likely to be fatal, and that the affair was simply one of etiquette.
Whereas, again and again, in his time of freedom, he had denounced
the perversion of pathological doubt into moral doubt and had said--
"the purest experiment in treatment may still be conscientious:
my business is to take care of life, and to do the best I can
think of for it. Science is properly more scrupulous than dogma.
Dogma gives a charter to mistake, but the very breath of science
is a contest with mistake, and must keep the conscience alive."
Alas! the scientific conscience had got into the debasing company of
money obligation and selfish respects.
"Is there a medical man of them all in Middlemarch who would question
himself as I do?" said poor Lydgate, with a renewed outburst of
rebellion against the oppression of his lot. "And yet they will all
feel warranted in making a wide space between me and them, as if I
were a leper! My practice and my reputation are utterly damned--
I can see that. Even if I could be cleared by valid evidence,
it would make little difference to the blessed world here.
I have been set down as tainted and should be cheapened to them
all the same."
Already there had been abundant signs which had hitherto puzzled him,
that just when he had been paying off his debts and getting cheerfully
on his feet, the townsmen were avoiding him or looking strangely.
at him, and in two instances it came to his knowledge that patients
of his had called in another practitioner. The reasons were too
plain now. The general black-balling had begun.
No wonder that in Lydgate's energetic nature the sense of a
hopeless misconstruction easily turned into a dogged resistance.
The scowl which occasionally showed itself on his square brow was not
a meaningless accident. Already when he was re-entering the town
after that ride taken in the first hours of stinging pain, he was
setting his mind on remaining in Middlemarch in spite of the worst
that could be done against him. He would not retreat before calumny,
as if he submitted to it. He would face it to the utmost, and no act
of his should show that he was afraid. It belonged to the generosity
as well as defiant force of his nature that he resolved not to shrink
from showing to the full his sense of obligation to Bulstrode.
It was true that the association with this man had been fatal to him--
true that if he had had the thousand pounds still in his hands with
all his debts unpaid he would have returned the money to Bulstrode,
and taken beggary rather than the rescue which had been sullied with
the suspicion of a bribe (for, remember, he was one of the proudest
among the sons of men)--nevertheless, he would not turn away from
this crushed fellow-mortal whose aid he had used, and make a pitiful
effort to get acquittal for himself by howling against another.
...
In Middlemarch a wife could not long remain ignorant that the town
held a bad opinion of her husband. No feminine intimate might carry
her friendship so far as to make a plain statement to the wife of the
unpleasant fact known or believed about her husband; but when a woman
with her thoughts much at leisure got them suddenly employed on
something grievously disadvantageous to her neighbors, various moral
impulses were called into play which tended to stimulate utterance.
Candor was one. To be candid, in Middlemarch phraseology, meant,
to use an early opportunity of letting your friends know that you
did not take a cheerful view of their capacity, their conduct,
or their position; and a robust candor never waited to be asked for
its opinion. Then, again, there was the love of truth--a wide phrase,
but meaning in this relation, a lively objection to seeing a wife
look happier than her husband's character warranted, or manifest
too much satisfaction in her lot--the poor thing should have some hint
given her that if she knew the truth she would have less complacency
in her bonnet, and in light dishes for a supper-party. Stronger
than all, there was the regard for a friend's moral improvement,
sometimes called her soul, which was likely to be benefited by remarks
tending to gloom, uttered with the accompaniment of pensive staring
at the furniture and a manner implying that the speaker would not tell
what was on her mind, from regard to the feelings of her hearer.
On the whole, one might say that an ardent charity was at work
setting the virtuous mind to make a neighbor unhappy for her good.
There were hardly any wives in Middlemarch whose matrimonial misfortunes
would in different ways be likely to call forth more of this moral
activity than Rosamond and her aunt Bulstrode. Mrs. Bulstrode
was not an object of dislike, and had never consciously injured any
human being. Men had always thought her a handsome comfortable woman,
and had reckoned it among the signs of Bulstrode's hypocrisy that he
had chosen a red-blooded Vincy, instead of a ghastly and melancholy
person suited to his low esteem for earthly pleasure. When the scandal
about her husband was disclosed they remarked of her--"Ah, poor woman!
She's as honest as the day--_she_ never suspected anything wrong
in him, you may depend on it." Women, who were intimate with her,
talked together much of "poor Harriet," imagined what her feelings
must be when she came to know everything, and conjectured how much
she had already come to know. There was no spiteful disposition
towards her; rather, there was a busy benevolence anxious to ascertain
what it would be well for her to feel and do under the circumstances,
which of course kept the imagination occupied with her character
and history from the times when she was Harriet Vincy till now.
With the review of Mrs. Bulstrode and her position it was inevitable
to associate Rosamond, whose prospects were under the same blight
with her aunt's. Rosamond was more severely criticised and less pitied,
though she too, as one of the good old Vincy family who had always
been known in Middlemarch, was regarded as a victim to marriage
with an interloper. The Vincys had their weaknesses, but then they
lay on the surface: there was never anything bad to be "found out"
concerning them. Mrs. Bulstrode was vindicated from any resemblance
to her husband. Harriet's faults were her own.
"She has always been showy," said Mrs. Hackbutt, making tea for
a small party, "though she has got into the way of putting her
religion forward, to conform to her husband; she has tried to hold
her head up above Middlemarch by making it known that she invites
clergymen and heaven-knows-who from Riverston and those places."
"We can hardly blame her for that," said Mrs. Sprague; "because few
of the best people in the town cared to associate with Balstrode,
and she must have somebody to sit down at her table."
"Mr. Thesiger has always countenanced him," said Mrs. Hackbutt.
"I think he must be sorry now."
"But he was never fond of him in his heart--that every one knows,"
said Mrs. Tom Toller. "Mr. Thesiger never goes into extremes.
He keeps to the truth in what is evangelical. It is only clergymen
like Mr. Tyke, who want to use Dissenting hymn-books and that low kind
of religion, who ever found Bulstrode to their taste."
"I understand, Mr. Tyke is in great distress about him,"
said Mrs. Hackbutt. "And well he may be: they say the Bulstrodes
have half kept the Tyke family."
"And of coarse it is a discredit to his doctrines," said Mrs. Sprague,
who was elderly, and old-fashioned in her opinions.
"People will not make a boast of being methodistical in Middlemarch
for a good while to come."
"I think we must not set down people's bad actions to their religion,"
said falcon-faced Mrs. Plymdale, who had been listening hitherto.
"Oh, my dear, we are forgetting," said Mrs. Sprague. "We ought
not to be talking of this before you."
"I am sure I have no reason to be partial," said Mrs. Plymdale,
coloring. "It's true Mr. Plymdale has always been on good terms
with Mr. Bulstrode, and Harriet Vincy was my friend long before
she married him. But I have always kept my own opinions and told
her where she was wrong, poor thing. Still, in point of religion,
I must say, Mr. Bulstrode might have done what he has, and worse,
and yet have been a man of no religion. I don't say that there
has not been a little too much of that--I like moderation myself.
But truth is truth. The men tried at the assizes are not all
over-religious, I suppose."
"Well," said Mrs. Hackbutt, wheeling adroitly, "all I can say is,
that I think she ought to separate from him."
"I can't say that," said Mrs. Sprague. "She took him for better
or worse, you know."
"But `worse' can never mean finding out that your husband is fit
for Newgate," said Mrs. Hackbutt. "Fancy living with such a man!
I should expect to be poisoned."
"Yes, I think myself it is an encouragement to crime if such men are
to be taken care of and waited on by good wives," said Mrs. Tom Toller.
"And a good wife poor Harriet has been," said Mrs. Plymdale.
"She thinks her husband the first of men. It's true he has never
denied her anything."
"Well, we shall see what she will do," said Mrs. Hackbutt.
"I suppose she knows nothing yet, poor creature. I do hope and trust
I shall not see her, for I should be frightened to death lest I
should say anything about her husband. Do you think any hint has
reached her?"
"I should hardly think so," said Mrs. Tom Toller. "We hear that he
is ill, and has never stirred out of the house since the meeting
on Thursday; but she was with her girls at church yesterday,
and they had new Tuscan bonnets. Her own had a feather in it.
I have never seen that her religion made any difference in her dress."
"She wears very neat patterns always," said Mrs. Plymdale,
a little stung. "And that feather I know she got dyed a pale
lavender on purpose to be consistent. I must say it of Harriet
that she wishes to do right."
"As to her knowing what has happened, it can't be kept from her long,"
said Mrs. Hackbutt. "The Vincys know, for Mr. Vincy was at the meeting.
It will he a great blow to him. There is his daughter as well
as his sister."
"Yes, indeed," said Mrs. Sprague. "Nobody supposes that Mr. Lydgate
can go on holding up his head in Middlemarch, things look so black
about the thousand pounds he took just at that man's death.
It really makes one shudder."
"Pride must have a fall," said Mrs. Hackbutt.
"I am not so sorry for Rosamond Vincy that was as I am for her aunt,"
said Mrs. Plymdale. "She needed a lesson."
"I suppose the Bulstrodes will go and live abroad somewhere,"
said Mrs. Sprague. "That is what is generally done when there is
anything disgraceful in a family."
"And a most deadly blow it will be to Harriet," said Mrs. Plymdale.
"If ever a woman was crushed, she will be. I pity her from my heart.
And with all her faults, few women are better. From a girl she had
the neatest ways, and was always good-hearted, and as open as the day.
You might look into her drawers when you would--always the same.
And so she has brought up Kate and Ellen. You may think how hard it
will be for her to go among foreigners."
"The doctor says that is what he should recommend the Lydgates to do,"
said Mrs. Sprague. "He says Lydgate ought to have kept among
the French."
"That would suit _her_ well enough, I dare say," said Mrs. Plymdale;
"there is that kind of lightness about her. But she got that from
her mother; she never got it from her aunt Bulstrode, who always
gave her good advice, and to my knowledge would rather have had
her marry elsewhere."
Mrs. Plymdale was in a situation which caused her some complication
of feeling. There had been not only her intimacy with Mrs. Bulstrode,
but also a profitable business relation of the great Plymdale dyeing
house with Mr. Bulstrode, which on the one hand would have inclined
her to desire that the mildest view of his character should be
the true one, but on the other, made her the more afraid of seeming
to palliate his culpability. Again, the late alliance of her family
with the Tollers had brought her in connection with the best circle,
which gratified her in every direction except in the inclination to
those serious views which she believed to be the best in another sense.
The sharp little woman's conscience was somewhat troubled in
the adjustment of these opposing "bests," and of her griefs and
satisfactions under late events, which were likely to humble those
who needed humbling, but also to fall heavily on her old friend whose
faults she would have preferred seeing on a background of prosperity.
Poor Mrs. Bulstrode, meanwhile, had been no further shaken by the
oncoming tread of calamity than in the busier stirring of that secret
uneasiness which had always been present in her since the last
visit of Raffles to The Shrubs. That the hateful man had come ill
to Stone Court, and that her husband had chosen to remain there
and watch over him, she allowed to be explained by the fact that
Raffles had been employed and aided in earlier-days, and that this
made a tie of benevolence towards him in his degraded helplessness;
and she had been since then innocently cheered by her husband's
more hopeful speech about his own health and ability to continue
his attention to business. The calm was disturbed when Lydgate had
brought him home ill from the meeting, and in spite of comforting
assurances during the next few days, she cried in private from
the conviction that her husband was not suffering from bodily
illness merely, but from something that afflicted his mind.
He would not allow her to read to him, and scarcely to sit with him,
alleging nervous susceptibility to sounds and movements; yet she
suspected that in shutting himself up in his private room he wanted
to be busy with his papers. Something, she felt sure, had happened.
Perhaps it was some great loss of money; and she was kept in the dark.
Not daring to question her husband, she said to Lydgate, on the fifth
day after the meeting, when she had not left home except to go to church--
"Mr. Lydgate, pray be open with me: I like to know the truth.
Has anything happened to Mr. Bulstrode?"
"Some little nervous shock," said Lydgate, evasively. He felt
that it was not for him to make the painful revelation.
"But what brought it on?" said Mrs. Bulstrode, looking directly
at him with her large dark eyes.
"There is often something poisonous in the air of public rooms,"
said Lydgate. "Strong men can stand it, but it tells on people
in proportion to the delicacy of their systems. It is often
impossible to account for the precise moment of an attack--or rather,
to say why the strength gives way at a particular moment."
Mrs. Bulstrode was not satisfied with this answer. There remained
in her the belief that some calamity had befallen her husband,
of which she was to be kept in ignorance; and it was in her nature
strongly to object to such concealment. She begged leave for her
daughters to sit with their father, and drove into the town to pay
some visits, conjecturing that if anything were known to have gone
wrong in Mr. Bulstrode's affairs, she should see or hear some sign
of it.
She called on Mrs. Thesiger, who was not at home, and then
drove to Mrs. Hackbutt's on the other side of the churchyard.
Mrs. Hackbutt saw her coming from an up-stairs window, and remembering
her former alarm lest she should meet Mrs. Bulstrode, felt almost
bound in consistency to send word that she was not at home;
but against that, there was a sudden strong desire within her for
the excitement of an interview in which she was quite determined
not to make the slightest allusion to what was in her mind.
Hence Mrs. Bulstrode was shown into the drawing-room, and Mrs. Hackbutt
went to her, with more tightness of lip and rubbing of her hands than
was usually observable in her, these being precautions adopted against
freedom of speech. She was resolved not to ask how Mr. Bulstrode was.
"I have not been anywhere except to church for nearly a week,"
said Mrs. Bulstrode, after a few introductory remarks.
"But Mr. Bulstrode was taken so ill at the meeting on Thursday
that I have not liked to leave the house."
Mrs. Hackbutt rubbed the back of one hand with the palm of the other
held against her chest, and let her eyes ramble over the pattern
on the rug.
"Was Mr. Hackbutt at the meeting?" persevered Mrs. Bulstrode.
"Yes, he was," said Mrs. Hackbutt, with the same attitude.
"The land is to be bought by subscription, I believe."
"Let us hope that there will be no more cases of cholera to be
buried in it," said Mrs. Bulstrode. "It is an awful visitation.
But I always think Middlemarch a very healthy spot. I suppose it
is being used to it from a child; but I never saw the town I should
like to live at better, and especially our end."
"I am sure I should be glad that you always should live at Middlemarch,
Mrs. Bulstrode," said Mrs. Hackbutt, with a slight sigh. "Still, we
must learn to resign ourselves, wherever our lot may be cast.
Though I am sure there will always be people in this town who will
wish you well."
Mrs. Hackbutt longed to say, "if you take my advice you will part
from your husband," but it seemed clear to her that the poor
woman knew nothing of the thunder ready to bolt on her head,
and she herself could do no more than prepare her a little.
Mrs. Bulstrode felt suddenly rather chill and trembling: there was
evidently something unusual behind this speech of Mrs. Hackbutt's;
but though she had set out with the desire to be fully informed,
she found herself unable now to pursue her brave purpose, and turning
the conversation by an inquiry about the young Hackbutts, she soon
took her leave saying that she was going to see Mrs. Plymdale.
On her way thither she tried to imagine that there might have been
some unusually warm sparring at the meeting between Mr. Bulstrode and
some of his frequent opponents--perhaps Mr. Hackbutt might have been
one of them. That would account for everything.
But when she was in conversation with Mrs. Plymdale that comforting
explanation seemed no longer tenable. "Selina" received her with a
pathetic affectionateness and a disposition to give edifying answers on
the commonest topics, which could hardly have reference to an ordinary
quarrel of which the most important consequence was a perturbation
of Mr. Bulstrode's health. Beforehand Mrs. Bulstrode had thought
that she would sooner question Mrs. Plymdale than any one else;
but she found to her surprise that an old friend is not always
the person whom it is easiest to make a confidant of: there was
the barrier of remembered communication under other circumstances--
there was the dislike of being pitied and informed by one who had been
long wont to allow her the superiority. For certain words of mysterious
appropriateness that Mrs. Plymdale let fall about her resolution
never to turn her back on her friends, convinced Mrs. Bulstrode
that what had happened must be some kind of misfortune, and instead
of being able to say with her native directness, "What is it that you
have in your mind?" she found herself anxious to get away before she
had heard anything more explicit. She began to have an agitating
certainty that the misfortune was something more than the mere
loss of money, being keenly sensitive to the fact that Selina now,
just as Mrs. Hackbutt had done before, avoided noticing what she said
about her husband, as they would have avoided noticing a personal blemish.
She said good-by with nervous haste, and told the coachman to drive
to Mr. Vincy's warehouse. In that short drive her dread gathered
so much force from the sense of darkness, that when she entered
the private counting-house where her brother sat at his desk,
her knees trembled and her usually florid face was deathly pale.
Something of the same effect was produced in him by the sight of her:
he rose from his seat to meet her, took her by the hand, and said,
with his impulsive rashness--
"God help you, Harriet! you know all."
That moment was perhaps worse than any which came after. It contained
that concentrated experience which in great crises of emotion
reveals the bias of a nature, and is prophetic of the ultimate
act which will end an intermediate struggle. Without that memory
of Raffles she might still have thought only of monetary ruin,
but now along with her brother's look and words there darted into
her mind the idea of some guilt in her husband--then, under the
working of terror came the image of her husband exposed to disgrace--
and then, after an instant of scorching shame in which she felt
only the eyes of the world, with one leap of her heart she was
at his side in mournful but unreproaching fellowship with shame
and isolation. All this went on within her in a mere flash of time--
while she sank into the chair, and raised her eyes to her brother,
who stood over her. "I know nothing, Walter. What is it?"
she said, faintly.
He told her everything, very inartificially, in slow fragments,
making her aware that the scandal went much beyond proof,
especially as to the end of Raffles.
"People will talk," he said. "Even if a man has been acquitted by
a jury, they'll talk, and nod and wink--and as far as the world goes,
a man might often as well be guilty as not. It's a breakdown blow,
and it damages Lydgate as much as Bulstrode. I don't pretend to say
what is the truth. I only wish we had never heard the name of either
Bulstrode or Lydgate. You'd better have been a Vincy all your life,
and so had Rosamond." Mrs. Bulstrode made no reply.
"But you must bear up as well as you can, Harriet. People don't blame
_you_. And I'll stand by you whatever you make up your mind to do,"
said the brother, with rough but well-meaning affectionateness.
"Give me your arm to the carriage, Walter," said Mrs. Bulstrode.
"I feel very weak."
And when she got home she was obliged to say to her daughter, "I am
not well, my dear; I must go and lie down. Attend to your papa.
Leave me in quiet. I shall take no dinner."
She locked herself in her room. She needed time to get used to her
maimed consciousness, her poor lopped life, before she could walk
steadily to the place allotted her. A new searching light had fallen
on her husband's character, and she could not judge him leniently:
the twenty years in which she had believed in him and venerated
him by virtue of his concealments came back with particulars
that made them seem an odious deceit. He had married her with
that bad past life hidden behind him, and she had no faith left
to protest his innocence of the worst that was imputed to him.
Her honest ostentatious nature made the sharing of a merited
dishonor as bitter as it could be to any mortal.
But this imperfectly taught woman, whose phrases and habits were
an odd patchwork, had a loyal spirit within her. The man whose
prosperity she had shared through nearly half a life, and who
had unvaryingly cherished her--now that punishment had befallen
him it was not possible to her in any sense to forsake him.
There is a forsaking which still sits at the same board and lies
on the same couch with the forsaken soul, withering it the more by
unloving proximity. She knew, when she locked her door, that she
should unlock it ready to go down to her unhappy husband and espouse
his sorrow, and say of his guilt, I will mourn and not reproach.
But she needed time to gather up her strength; she needed to sob
out her farewell to all the gladness and pride of her life.
When she had resolved to go down, she prepared herself by some
little acts which might seem mere folly to a hard onlooker;
they were her way of expressing to all spectators visible or invisible
that she had begun a new life in which she embraced humiliation.
She took off all her ornaments and put on a plain black gown,
and instead of wearing her much-adorned cap and large bows of hair,
she brushed her hair down and put on a plain bonnet-cap, which made
her look suddenly like an early Methodist.
and
She had felt stung and
disappointed by Will's resolution to quit Middlemarch, for in spite
of what she knew and guessed about his admiration for Dorothea,
she secretly cherished the belief that he had, or would necessarily
come to have, much more admiration for herself; Rosamond being one
of those women who live much in the idea that each man they meet
would have preferred them if the preference had not been hopeless.
Mrs. Casaubon was all very well; but Will's interest in her dated before
he knew Mrs. Lydgate. Rosamond took his way of talking to herself,
which was a mixture of playful fault-finding and hyperbolical gallantry,
as the disguise of a deeper feeling; and in his presence she felt
that agreeable titillation of vanity and sense of romantic drama
which Lydgate's presence had no longer the magic to create.
She even fancied--what will not men and women fancy in these matters?--
that Will exaggerated his admiration for Mrs. Casaubon in order
to pique herself. In this way poor Rosamond's brain had been
busy before Will's departure. He would have made, she thought,
a much more suitable husband for her than she had found in Lydgate.
No notion could have been falser than this, for Rosamond's discontent
in her marriage was due to the conditions of marriage itself,
to its demand for self-suppression and tolerance, and not to the
nature of her husband; but the easy conception of an unreal Better
had a sentimental charm which diverted her ennui. She constructed
a little romance which was to vary the flatness of her life:
Will Ladislaw was always to be a bachelor and live near her,
always to be at her command, and have an understood though never
fully expressed passion for her, which would be sending out lambent
flames every now and then in interesting scenes. His departure
had been a proportionate disappointment, and had sadly increased
her weariness of Middlemarch; but at first she had the alternative
dream of pleasures in store from her intercourse with the family
at Quallingham. Since then the troubles of her married life
had deepened, and the absence of other relief encouraged her regretful
rumination over that thin romance which she had once fed on.
Men and women make sad mistakes about their own symptoms, taking their
vague uneasy longings, sometimes for genius, sometimes for religion,
and oftener still for a mighty love. Will Ladislaw had written
chatty letters, half to her and half to Lydgate, and she had replied:
their separation, she felt, was not likely to be final, and the change
she now most longed for was that Lydgate should go to live in London;
everything would be agreeable in London; and she had set to work
with quiet determination to win this result, when there came a sudden,
delightful promise which inspirited her.
the rigid outline with which acts present themselves onlookers.
But for himself at that distant time, and even now in burning memory,
the fact was broken into little sequences, each justified as it came
by reasonings which seemed to prove it righteous. Bulstrode's course up
to that time had, he thought, been sanctioned by remarkable providences,
appearing to point the way for him to be the agent in making the
best use of a large property and withdrawing it from perversion.
Death and other striking dispositions, such as feminine trustfulness,
had come; and Bulstrode would have adopted Cromwell's words--
"Do you call these bare events? The Lord pity you!" The events
were comparatively small, but the essential condition was there--
namely, that they were in favor of his own ends. It was easy
for him to settle what was due from him to others by inquiring
what were God's intentions with regard to himself. Could it be
for God's service that this fortune should in any considerable
proportion go to a young woman and her husband who were given up
to the lightest pursuits, and might scatter it abroad in triviality--
people who seemed to lie outside the path of remarkable providences?
Bulstrode had never said to himself beforehand, "The daughter
shall not be found"--nevertheless when the moment came he kept
her existence hidden; and when other moments followed, he soothed
the mother with consolation in the probability that the unhappy
young woman might be no more.
There were hours in which Bulstrode felt that his action
was unrighteous; but how could he go back? He had mental exercises,
called himself nought laid hold on redemption, and went on in his
course of instrumentality. And after five years Death again came
to widen his path, by taking away his wife. He did gradually
withdraw his capital, but he did not make the sacrifices requisite
to put an end to the business, which was carried on for thirteen
years afterwards before it finally collapsed. Meanwhile Nicholas
Bulstrode had used his hundred thousand discreetly, and was
become provincially, solidly important--a banker, a Churchman,
a public benefactor; also a sleeping partner in trading concerns,
in which his ability was directed to economy in the raw material,
as in the case of the dyes which rotted Mr. Vincy's silk. And now,
when this respectability had lasted undisturbed for nearly thirty years--
when all that preceded it had long lain benumbed in the consciousness--
that past had risen and immersed his thought as if with the terrible
irruption of a new sense overburthening the feeble being.
Meanwhile, in his conversation with Raffles, he had learned
something momentous, something which entered actively into
the struggle of his longings and terrors. There, he thought,
lay an opening towards spiritual, perhaps towards material rescue.
The spiritual kind of rescue was a genuine need with him. There may
be coarse hypocrites, who consciously affect beliefs and emotions
for the sake of gulling the world, but Bulstrode was not one of them.
He was simply a man whose desires had been stronger than his
theoretic beliefs, and who had gradually explained the gratification
of his desires into satisfactory agreement with those beliefs.
If this be hypocrisy, it is a process which shows itself occasionally
in us all, to whatever confession we belong, and whether we
believe in the future perfection of our race or in the nearest
date fixed for the end of the world; whether we regard the earth
as a putrefying nidus for a saved remnant, including ourselves,
or have a passionate belief in the solidarity of mankind.
The service he could do to the cause of religion had been through
life the ground he alleged to himself for his choice of action:
it had been the motive which he had poured out in his prayers.
Who would use money and position better than he meant to use them?
Who could surpass him in self-abhorrence and exaltation of God's cause?
And to Mr. Bulstrode God's cause was something distinct from his own
rectitude of conduct: it enforced a discrimination of God's enemies,
who were to be used merely as instruments, and whom it would be
as well if possible to keep out of money and consequent influence.
Also, profitable investments in trades where the power of the prince
of this world showed its most active devices, became sanctified by a
right application of the profits in the hands of God's servant.
This implicit reasoning is essentially no more peculiar to evangelical
belief than the use of wide phrases for narrow motives is peculiar
to Englishmen. There is no general doctrine which is not capable
of eating out our morality if unchecked by the deep-seated habit
of direct fellow-feeling with individual fellow-men.
But a man who believes in something else than his own greed,
has necessarily a conscience or standard to which he more or less
adapts himself. Bulstrode's standard had been his serviceableness
to God's cause: "I am sinful and nought--a vessel to be consecrated
by use--but use me!"--had been the mould into which he had constrained
his immense need of being something important and predominating.
And now had come a moment in which that mould seemed in danger
of being broken and utterly cast away.
What if the acts he had reconciled himself to because they made
him a stronger instrument of the divine glory, were to become
the pretext of the scoffer, and a darkening of that glory?
If this were to be the ruling of Providence, he was cast out from
the temple as one who had brought unclean offerings.
He had long poured out utterances of repentance. But today a
repentance had come which was of a bitterer flavor, and a threatening
Providence urged him to a kind of propitiation which was not simply
a doctrinal transaction. The divine tribunal had changed its
aspect for him; self-prostration was no longer enough, and he must
bring restitution in his hand. It was really before his God that
Bulstrode was about to attempt such restitution as seemed possible:
a great dread had seized his susceptible frame, and the scorching
approach of shame wrought in him a new spiritual need. Night and day,
while the resurgent threatening past was making a conscience within him,
he was thinking by what means he could recover peace and trust--
by what sacrifice he could stay the rod. His belief in these
moments of dread was, that if he spontaneously did something right,
God would save him from the consequences of wrong-doing. For religion
can only change when the emotions which fill it are changed; and the
religion of personal fear remains nearly at the level of the savage.
and
That was the uneasy corner of Lydgate's consciousness while he
was reviewing the facts and resisting all reproach. If he
had been independent, this matter of a patient's treatment
and the distinct rule that he must do or see done that which he
believed best for the life committed to him, would have been
the point on which he would have been the sturdiest. As it was,
he had rested in the consideration that disobedience to his orders,
however it might have arisen, could not be considered a crime,
that in the dominant opinion obedience to his orders was just as
likely to be fatal, and that the affair was simply one of etiquette.
Whereas, again and again, in his time of freedom, he had denounced
the perversion of pathological doubt into moral doubt and had said--
"the purest experiment in treatment may still be conscientious:
my business is to take care of life, and to do the best I can
think of for it. Science is properly more scrupulous than dogma.
Dogma gives a charter to mistake, but the very breath of science
is a contest with mistake, and must keep the conscience alive."
Alas! the scientific conscience had got into the debasing company of
money obligation and selfish respects.
"Is there a medical man of them all in Middlemarch who would question
himself as I do?" said poor Lydgate, with a renewed outburst of
rebellion against the oppression of his lot. "And yet they will all
feel warranted in making a wide space between me and them, as if I
were a leper! My practice and my reputation are utterly damned--
I can see that. Even if I could be cleared by valid evidence,
it would make little difference to the blessed world here.
I have been set down as tainted and should be cheapened to them
all the same."
Already there had been abundant signs which had hitherto puzzled him,
that just when he had been paying off his debts and getting cheerfully
on his feet, the townsmen were avoiding him or looking strangely.
at him, and in two instances it came to his knowledge that patients
of his had called in another practitioner. The reasons were too
plain now. The general black-balling had begun.
No wonder that in Lydgate's energetic nature the sense of a
hopeless misconstruction easily turned into a dogged resistance.
The scowl which occasionally showed itself on his square brow was not
a meaningless accident. Already when he was re-entering the town
after that ride taken in the first hours of stinging pain, he was
setting his mind on remaining in Middlemarch in spite of the worst
that could be done against him. He would not retreat before calumny,
as if he submitted to it. He would face it to the utmost, and no act
of his should show that he was afraid. It belonged to the generosity
as well as defiant force of his nature that he resolved not to shrink
from showing to the full his sense of obligation to Bulstrode.
It was true that the association with this man had been fatal to him--
true that if he had had the thousand pounds still in his hands with
all his debts unpaid he would have returned the money to Bulstrode,
and taken beggary rather than the rescue which had been sullied with
the suspicion of a bribe (for, remember, he was one of the proudest
among the sons of men)--nevertheless, he would not turn away from
this crushed fellow-mortal whose aid he had used, and make a pitiful
effort to get acquittal for himself by howling against another.
...
In Middlemarch a wife could not long remain ignorant that the town
held a bad opinion of her husband. No feminine intimate might carry
her friendship so far as to make a plain statement to the wife of the
unpleasant fact known or believed about her husband; but when a woman
with her thoughts much at leisure got them suddenly employed on
something grievously disadvantageous to her neighbors, various moral
impulses were called into play which tended to stimulate utterance.
Candor was one. To be candid, in Middlemarch phraseology, meant,
to use an early opportunity of letting your friends know that you
did not take a cheerful view of their capacity, their conduct,
or their position; and a robust candor never waited to be asked for
its opinion. Then, again, there was the love of truth--a wide phrase,
but meaning in this relation, a lively objection to seeing a wife
look happier than her husband's character warranted, or manifest
too much satisfaction in her lot--the poor thing should have some hint
given her that if she knew the truth she would have less complacency
in her bonnet, and in light dishes for a supper-party. Stronger
than all, there was the regard for a friend's moral improvement,
sometimes called her soul, which was likely to be benefited by remarks
tending to gloom, uttered with the accompaniment of pensive staring
at the furniture and a manner implying that the speaker would not tell
what was on her mind, from regard to the feelings of her hearer.
On the whole, one might say that an ardent charity was at work
setting the virtuous mind to make a neighbor unhappy for her good.
There were hardly any wives in Middlemarch whose matrimonial misfortunes
would in different ways be likely to call forth more of this moral
activity than Rosamond and her aunt Bulstrode. Mrs. Bulstrode
was not an object of dislike, and had never consciously injured any
human being. Men had always thought her a handsome comfortable woman,
and had reckoned it among the signs of Bulstrode's hypocrisy that he
had chosen a red-blooded Vincy, instead of a ghastly and melancholy
person suited to his low esteem for earthly pleasure. When the scandal
about her husband was disclosed they remarked of her--"Ah, poor woman!
She's as honest as the day--_she_ never suspected anything wrong
in him, you may depend on it." Women, who were intimate with her,
talked together much of "poor Harriet," imagined what her feelings
must be when she came to know everything, and conjectured how much
she had already come to know. There was no spiteful disposition
towards her; rather, there was a busy benevolence anxious to ascertain
what it would be well for her to feel and do under the circumstances,
which of course kept the imagination occupied with her character
and history from the times when she was Harriet Vincy till now.
With the review of Mrs. Bulstrode and her position it was inevitable
to associate Rosamond, whose prospects were under the same blight
with her aunt's. Rosamond was more severely criticised and less pitied,
though she too, as one of the good old Vincy family who had always
been known in Middlemarch, was regarded as a victim to marriage
with an interloper. The Vincys had their weaknesses, but then they
lay on the surface: there was never anything bad to be "found out"
concerning them. Mrs. Bulstrode was vindicated from any resemblance
to her husband. Harriet's faults were her own.
"She has always been showy," said Mrs. Hackbutt, making tea for
a small party, "though she has got into the way of putting her
religion forward, to conform to her husband; she has tried to hold
her head up above Middlemarch by making it known that she invites
clergymen and heaven-knows-who from Riverston and those places."
"We can hardly blame her for that," said Mrs. Sprague; "because few
of the best people in the town cared to associate with Balstrode,
and she must have somebody to sit down at her table."
"Mr. Thesiger has always countenanced him," said Mrs. Hackbutt.
"I think he must be sorry now."
"But he was never fond of him in his heart--that every one knows,"
said Mrs. Tom Toller. "Mr. Thesiger never goes into extremes.
He keeps to the truth in what is evangelical. It is only clergymen
like Mr. Tyke, who want to use Dissenting hymn-books and that low kind
of religion, who ever found Bulstrode to their taste."
"I understand, Mr. Tyke is in great distress about him,"
said Mrs. Hackbutt. "And well he may be: they say the Bulstrodes
have half kept the Tyke family."
"And of coarse it is a discredit to his doctrines," said Mrs. Sprague,
who was elderly, and old-fashioned in her opinions.
"People will not make a boast of being methodistical in Middlemarch
for a good while to come."
"I think we must not set down people's bad actions to their religion,"
said falcon-faced Mrs. Plymdale, who had been listening hitherto.
"Oh, my dear, we are forgetting," said Mrs. Sprague. "We ought
not to be talking of this before you."
"I am sure I have no reason to be partial," said Mrs. Plymdale,
coloring. "It's true Mr. Plymdale has always been on good terms
with Mr. Bulstrode, and Harriet Vincy was my friend long before
she married him. But I have always kept my own opinions and told
her where she was wrong, poor thing. Still, in point of religion,
I must say, Mr. Bulstrode might have done what he has, and worse,
and yet have been a man of no religion. I don't say that there
has not been a little too much of that--I like moderation myself.
But truth is truth. The men tried at the assizes are not all
over-religious, I suppose."
"Well," said Mrs. Hackbutt, wheeling adroitly, "all I can say is,
that I think she ought to separate from him."
"I can't say that," said Mrs. Sprague. "She took him for better
or worse, you know."
"But `worse' can never mean finding out that your husband is fit
for Newgate," said Mrs. Hackbutt. "Fancy living with such a man!
I should expect to be poisoned."
"Yes, I think myself it is an encouragement to crime if such men are
to be taken care of and waited on by good wives," said Mrs. Tom Toller.
"And a good wife poor Harriet has been," said Mrs. Plymdale.
"She thinks her husband the first of men. It's true he has never
denied her anything."
"Well, we shall see what she will do," said Mrs. Hackbutt.
"I suppose she knows nothing yet, poor creature. I do hope and trust
I shall not see her, for I should be frightened to death lest I
should say anything about her husband. Do you think any hint has
reached her?"
"I should hardly think so," said Mrs. Tom Toller. "We hear that he
is ill, and has never stirred out of the house since the meeting
on Thursday; but she was with her girls at church yesterday,
and they had new Tuscan bonnets. Her own had a feather in it.
I have never seen that her religion made any difference in her dress."
"She wears very neat patterns always," said Mrs. Plymdale,
a little stung. "And that feather I know she got dyed a pale
lavender on purpose to be consistent. I must say it of Harriet
that she wishes to do right."
"As to her knowing what has happened, it can't be kept from her long,"
said Mrs. Hackbutt. "The Vincys know, for Mr. Vincy was at the meeting.
It will he a great blow to him. There is his daughter as well
as his sister."
"Yes, indeed," said Mrs. Sprague. "Nobody supposes that Mr. Lydgate
can go on holding up his head in Middlemarch, things look so black
about the thousand pounds he took just at that man's death.
It really makes one shudder."
"Pride must have a fall," said Mrs. Hackbutt.
"I am not so sorry for Rosamond Vincy that was as I am for her aunt,"
said Mrs. Plymdale. "She needed a lesson."
"I suppose the Bulstrodes will go and live abroad somewhere,"
said Mrs. Sprague. "That is what is generally done when there is
anything disgraceful in a family."
"And a most deadly blow it will be to Harriet," said Mrs. Plymdale.
"If ever a woman was crushed, she will be. I pity her from my heart.
And with all her faults, few women are better. From a girl she had
the neatest ways, and was always good-hearted, and as open as the day.
You might look into her drawers when you would--always the same.
And so she has brought up Kate and Ellen. You may think how hard it
will be for her to go among foreigners."
"The doctor says that is what he should recommend the Lydgates to do,"
said Mrs. Sprague. "He says Lydgate ought to have kept among
the French."
"That would suit _her_ well enough, I dare say," said Mrs. Plymdale;
"there is that kind of lightness about her. But she got that from
her mother; she never got it from her aunt Bulstrode, who always
gave her good advice, and to my knowledge would rather have had
her marry elsewhere."
Mrs. Plymdale was in a situation which caused her some complication
of feeling. There had been not only her intimacy with Mrs. Bulstrode,
but also a profitable business relation of the great Plymdale dyeing
house with Mr. Bulstrode, which on the one hand would have inclined
her to desire that the mildest view of his character should be
the true one, but on the other, made her the more afraid of seeming
to palliate his culpability. Again, the late alliance of her family
with the Tollers had brought her in connection with the best circle,
which gratified her in every direction except in the inclination to
those serious views which she believed to be the best in another sense.
The sharp little woman's conscience was somewhat troubled in
the adjustment of these opposing "bests," and of her griefs and
satisfactions under late events, which were likely to humble those
who needed humbling, but also to fall heavily on her old friend whose
faults she would have preferred seeing on a background of prosperity.
Poor Mrs. Bulstrode, meanwhile, had been no further shaken by the
oncoming tread of calamity than in the busier stirring of that secret
uneasiness which had always been present in her since the last
visit of Raffles to The Shrubs. That the hateful man had come ill
to Stone Court, and that her husband had chosen to remain there
and watch over him, she allowed to be explained by the fact that
Raffles had been employed and aided in earlier-days, and that this
made a tie of benevolence towards him in his degraded helplessness;
and she had been since then innocently cheered by her husband's
more hopeful speech about his own health and ability to continue
his attention to business. The calm was disturbed when Lydgate had
brought him home ill from the meeting, and in spite of comforting
assurances during the next few days, she cried in private from
the conviction that her husband was not suffering from bodily
illness merely, but from something that afflicted his mind.
He would not allow her to read to him, and scarcely to sit with him,
alleging nervous susceptibility to sounds and movements; yet she
suspected that in shutting himself up in his private room he wanted
to be busy with his papers. Something, she felt sure, had happened.
Perhaps it was some great loss of money; and she was kept in the dark.
Not daring to question her husband, she said to Lydgate, on the fifth
day after the meeting, when she had not left home except to go to church--
"Mr. Lydgate, pray be open with me: I like to know the truth.
Has anything happened to Mr. Bulstrode?"
"Some little nervous shock," said Lydgate, evasively. He felt
that it was not for him to make the painful revelation.
"But what brought it on?" said Mrs. Bulstrode, looking directly
at him with her large dark eyes.
"There is often something poisonous in the air of public rooms,"
said Lydgate. "Strong men can stand it, but it tells on people
in proportion to the delicacy of their systems. It is often
impossible to account for the precise moment of an attack--or rather,
to say why the strength gives way at a particular moment."
Mrs. Bulstrode was not satisfied with this answer. There remained
in her the belief that some calamity had befallen her husband,
of which she was to be kept in ignorance; and it was in her nature
strongly to object to such concealment. She begged leave for her
daughters to sit with their father, and drove into the town to pay
some visits, conjecturing that if anything were known to have gone
wrong in Mr. Bulstrode's affairs, she should see or hear some sign
of it.
She called on Mrs. Thesiger, who was not at home, and then
drove to Mrs. Hackbutt's on the other side of the churchyard.
Mrs. Hackbutt saw her coming from an up-stairs window, and remembering
her former alarm lest she should meet Mrs. Bulstrode, felt almost
bound in consistency to send word that she was not at home;
but against that, there was a sudden strong desire within her for
the excitement of an interview in which she was quite determined
not to make the slightest allusion to what was in her mind.
Hence Mrs. Bulstrode was shown into the drawing-room, and Mrs. Hackbutt
went to her, with more tightness of lip and rubbing of her hands than
was usually observable in her, these being precautions adopted against
freedom of speech. She was resolved not to ask how Mr. Bulstrode was.
"I have not been anywhere except to church for nearly a week,"
said Mrs. Bulstrode, after a few introductory remarks.
"But Mr. Bulstrode was taken so ill at the meeting on Thursday
that I have not liked to leave the house."
Mrs. Hackbutt rubbed the back of one hand with the palm of the other
held against her chest, and let her eyes ramble over the pattern
on the rug.
"Was Mr. Hackbutt at the meeting?" persevered Mrs. Bulstrode.
"Yes, he was," said Mrs. Hackbutt, with the same attitude.
"The land is to be bought by subscription, I believe."
"Let us hope that there will be no more cases of cholera to be
buried in it," said Mrs. Bulstrode. "It is an awful visitation.
But I always think Middlemarch a very healthy spot. I suppose it
is being used to it from a child; but I never saw the town I should
like to live at better, and especially our end."
"I am sure I should be glad that you always should live at Middlemarch,
Mrs. Bulstrode," said Mrs. Hackbutt, with a slight sigh. "Still, we
must learn to resign ourselves, wherever our lot may be cast.
Though I am sure there will always be people in this town who will
wish you well."
Mrs. Hackbutt longed to say, "if you take my advice you will part
from your husband," but it seemed clear to her that the poor
woman knew nothing of the thunder ready to bolt on her head,
and she herself could do no more than prepare her a little.
Mrs. Bulstrode felt suddenly rather chill and trembling: there was
evidently something unusual behind this speech of Mrs. Hackbutt's;
but though she had set out with the desire to be fully informed,
she found herself unable now to pursue her brave purpose, and turning
the conversation by an inquiry about the young Hackbutts, she soon
took her leave saying that she was going to see Mrs. Plymdale.
On her way thither she tried to imagine that there might have been
some unusually warm sparring at the meeting between Mr. Bulstrode and
some of his frequent opponents--perhaps Mr. Hackbutt might have been
one of them. That would account for everything.
But when she was in conversation with Mrs. Plymdale that comforting
explanation seemed no longer tenable. "Selina" received her with a
pathetic affectionateness and a disposition to give edifying answers on
the commonest topics, which could hardly have reference to an ordinary
quarrel of which the most important consequence was a perturbation
of Mr. Bulstrode's health. Beforehand Mrs. Bulstrode had thought
that she would sooner question Mrs. Plymdale than any one else;
but she found to her surprise that an old friend is not always
the person whom it is easiest to make a confidant of: there was
the barrier of remembered communication under other circumstances--
there was the dislike of being pitied and informed by one who had been
long wont to allow her the superiority. For certain words of mysterious
appropriateness that Mrs. Plymdale let fall about her resolution
never to turn her back on her friends, convinced Mrs. Bulstrode
that what had happened must be some kind of misfortune, and instead
of being able to say with her native directness, "What is it that you
have in your mind?" she found herself anxious to get away before she
had heard anything more explicit. She began to have an agitating
certainty that the misfortune was something more than the mere
loss of money, being keenly sensitive to the fact that Selina now,
just as Mrs. Hackbutt had done before, avoided noticing what she said
about her husband, as they would have avoided noticing a personal blemish.
She said good-by with nervous haste, and told the coachman to drive
to Mr. Vincy's warehouse. In that short drive her dread gathered
so much force from the sense of darkness, that when she entered
the private counting-house where her brother sat at his desk,
her knees trembled and her usually florid face was deathly pale.
Something of the same effect was produced in him by the sight of her:
he rose from his seat to meet her, took her by the hand, and said,
with his impulsive rashness--
"God help you, Harriet! you know all."
That moment was perhaps worse than any which came after. It contained
that concentrated experience which in great crises of emotion
reveals the bias of a nature, and is prophetic of the ultimate
act which will end an intermediate struggle. Without that memory
of Raffles she might still have thought only of monetary ruin,
but now along with her brother's look and words there darted into
her mind the idea of some guilt in her husband--then, under the
working of terror came the image of her husband exposed to disgrace--
and then, after an instant of scorching shame in which she felt
only the eyes of the world, with one leap of her heart she was
at his side in mournful but unreproaching fellowship with shame
and isolation. All this went on within her in a mere flash of time--
while she sank into the chair, and raised her eyes to her brother,
who stood over her. "I know nothing, Walter. What is it?"
she said, faintly.
He told her everything, very inartificially, in slow fragments,
making her aware that the scandal went much beyond proof,
especially as to the end of Raffles.
"People will talk," he said. "Even if a man has been acquitted by
a jury, they'll talk, and nod and wink--and as far as the world goes,
a man might often as well be guilty as not. It's a breakdown blow,
and it damages Lydgate as much as Bulstrode. I don't pretend to say
what is the truth. I only wish we had never heard the name of either
Bulstrode or Lydgate. You'd better have been a Vincy all your life,
and so had Rosamond." Mrs. Bulstrode made no reply.
"But you must bear up as well as you can, Harriet. People don't blame
_you_. And I'll stand by you whatever you make up your mind to do,"
said the brother, with rough but well-meaning affectionateness.
"Give me your arm to the carriage, Walter," said Mrs. Bulstrode.
"I feel very weak."
And when she got home she was obliged to say to her daughter, "I am
not well, my dear; I must go and lie down. Attend to your papa.
Leave me in quiet. I shall take no dinner."
She locked herself in her room. She needed time to get used to her
maimed consciousness, her poor lopped life, before she could walk
steadily to the place allotted her. A new searching light had fallen
on her husband's character, and she could not judge him leniently:
the twenty years in which she had believed in him and venerated
him by virtue of his concealments came back with particulars
that made them seem an odious deceit. He had married her with
that bad past life hidden behind him, and she had no faith left
to protest his innocence of the worst that was imputed to him.
Her honest ostentatious nature made the sharing of a merited
dishonor as bitter as it could be to any mortal.
But this imperfectly taught woman, whose phrases and habits were
an odd patchwork, had a loyal spirit within her. The man whose
prosperity she had shared through nearly half a life, and who
had unvaryingly cherished her--now that punishment had befallen
him it was not possible to her in any sense to forsake him.
There is a forsaking which still sits at the same board and lies
on the same couch with the forsaken soul, withering it the more by
unloving proximity. She knew, when she locked her door, that she
should unlock it ready to go down to her unhappy husband and espouse
his sorrow, and say of his guilt, I will mourn and not reproach.
But she needed time to gather up her strength; she needed to sob
out her farewell to all the gladness and pride of her life.
When she had resolved to go down, she prepared herself by some
little acts which might seem mere folly to a hard onlooker;
they were her way of expressing to all spectators visible or invisible
that she had begun a new life in which she embraced humiliation.
She took off all her ornaments and put on a plain black gown,
and instead of wearing her much-adorned cap and large bows of hair,
she brushed her hair down and put on a plain bonnet-cap, which made
her look suddenly like an early Methodist.
and
She had felt stung and
disappointed by Will's resolution to quit Middlemarch, for in spite
of what she knew and guessed about his admiration for Dorothea,
she secretly cherished the belief that he had, or would necessarily
come to have, much more admiration for herself; Rosamond being one
of those women who live much in the idea that each man they meet
would have preferred them if the preference had not been hopeless.
Mrs. Casaubon was all very well; but Will's interest in her dated before
he knew Mrs. Lydgate. Rosamond took his way of talking to herself,
which was a mixture of playful fault-finding and hyperbolical gallantry,
as the disguise of a deeper feeling; and in his presence she felt
that agreeable titillation of vanity and sense of romantic drama
which Lydgate's presence had no longer the magic to create.
She even fancied--what will not men and women fancy in these matters?--
that Will exaggerated his admiration for Mrs. Casaubon in order
to pique herself. In this way poor Rosamond's brain had been
busy before Will's departure. He would have made, she thought,
a much more suitable husband for her than she had found in Lydgate.
No notion could have been falser than this, for Rosamond's discontent
in her marriage was due to the conditions of marriage itself,
to its demand for self-suppression and tolerance, and not to the
nature of her husband; but the easy conception of an unreal Better
had a sentimental charm which diverted her ennui. She constructed
a little romance which was to vary the flatness of her life:
Will Ladislaw was always to be a bachelor and live near her,
always to be at her command, and have an understood though never
fully expressed passion for her, which would be sending out lambent
flames every now and then in interesting scenes. His departure
had been a proportionate disappointment, and had sadly increased
her weariness of Middlemarch; but at first she had the alternative
dream of pleasures in store from her intercourse with the family
at Quallingham. Since then the troubles of her married life
had deepened, and the absence of other relief encouraged her regretful
rumination over that thin romance which she had once fed on.
Men and women make sad mistakes about their own symptoms, taking their
vague uneasy longings, sometimes for genius, sometimes for religion,
and oftener still for a mighty love. Will Ladislaw had written
chatty letters, half to her and half to Lydgate, and she had replied:
their separation, she felt, was not likely to be final, and the change
she now most longed for was that Lydgate should go to live in London;
everything would be agreeable in London; and she had set to work
with quiet determination to win this result, when there came a sudden,
delightful promise which inspirited her.
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