Delphi Complete Works of George Eliot (Illustrated) (266 page)

‘No! - something else before all that,’ said Felix, again startling the audience into looking at him. But the speaker glanced coldly at him and went on.

‘That’s what Sir Francis Burdett went in for fifteen years ago; and it’s the right thing for us, if it was Tomfool who went in for it. You must lay hold of such handles as you can. I don’t believe much in Liberal aristocrats; but if there’s any fine carved gold-headed stick of an aristocrat will make a broom-stick of himself, I’ll lose no time but I’ll sweep with him. And that’s what I think about Transome. And if any of you have acquaintance among county voters, give ‘em a hint that you wish ‘em to vote for Transome.’

At the last word, the speaker stepped down from his slight eminence, and walked away rapidly, like a man whose leisure was exhausted, and who must go about his business. But he had left an appetite in his audience for further oratory, and one of them seemed to express a general sentiment as he turned immediately to Felix, and said, ‘Come, sir, what do you say?’

Felix did at once what he would very likely have done without being asked - he stepped on to the stone, and took off his cap by an instinctive prompting that always led him to speak uncovered. The effect of his figure in relief against the stone background was unlike that of the previous speaker. He was considerably taller, his head and neck were more massive, and the expression of his mouth and eyes was something very different from the mere acuteness and rather hard-lipped antagonism of the trades-union man. Felix Holt’s face had the look of the habitual meditative abstraction from objects of mere personal vanity or desire, which is the peculiar stamp of culture, and makes a very roughly-cut face worthy to be called ‘the human face divine’. Even lions and dogs know a distinction between men’s glances; and doubtless those Duffield men, in the expectation with which they looked up at Felix, were unconsciously influenced by the grandeur of his full yet firm mouth, and the calm clearness of his grey eyes, which were somehow unlike what they were accustomed to see along with an old brown velveteen coat, and an absence of chin-propping. When he began to speak, the contrast of voice was still stronger than that of appearance. The man in the flannel shirt had not been heard - had probably not cared to be heard - beyond the immediate group of listeners. But Felix at once drew the attention of persons comparatively at a distance.

‘In my opinion,’ he said, almost the moment after he was addressed, ‘that was a true word spoken by our friend when he said the great question was how to give every man a man’s share in life. But I think he expects voting to do more towards it than I do. I want the working men to have power. I’m a working man myself, and I don’t want to be anything else. But there are two sorts of power. There’s a power to do mischief - to undo what has been done with great expense and labour, to waste and destroy, to be cruel to the weak, to lie and quarrel, and to talk poisonous nonsense. That’s the sort of power that ignorant numbers have. It never made a joint stool or planted a potato. Do you think it’s likely to do much towards governing a great country, and making wise laws, and giving shelter, food, and clothes to millions of men? Ignorant power comes in the end to the same thing as wicked power; it makes misery. It’s another sort of power that I want us working men to have, and I can see plainly enough that our all having votes will do little towards it at present. I hope we, or the children that come after us, will get plenty of political power some time. I tell everybody plainly, I hope there will be great changes, and that some time, whether we live to see it or not, men will have come to be ashamed of things they’re proud of now. But I should like to convince you that votes would never give you political power worth having while things are as they are now, and that if you go the right way to work you may get power sooner without votes. Perhaps all you who hear me are sober men, who try to learn as much of the nature of things as you can, and to be as little like fools as possible. A fool or idiot is one who expects things to happen that never can happen; he pours milk into a can without a bottom, and expects the milk to stay there. The more of such vain expectations a man has, the more he is of a fool or idiot. And if any working man expects a vote to do for him what it never can do, he’s foolish to that amount, if no more. I think that’s clear enough, eh?’

‘Hear, hear,’ said several voices, but they were not those of the original group; they belonged to some strollers who had been attracted by Felix Holt’s vibrating voice, and were Tories from the Crown. Among them was Christian, who was smoking a cigar with a pleasure he always felt in being among people who did not know him, and doubtless took him to be something higher than he really was. Hearers from the Fox and Hounds also were slowly adding themselves to the nucleus. Felix, accessible to the pleasure of being listened to, went on with more and more animation -

‘The way to get rid of folly is to get rid of vain expectations, and of thoughts that don’t agree with the nature of things. The men who have had true thoughts about water, and what it will do when it is turned into steam and under all sorts of circumstances, have made themselves a great power in the world: they are turning the wheels of engines that will help to change most things. But no engines would have done, if there had been false notions about the way water would act. Now, all the schemes about voting, and districts, and annual parliaments, and the rest, are engines, and the water or steam - the force that is to work them - must come out of human nature - out of men’s passions, feelings, desires. Whether the engines will do good work or bad depends on these feelings; and if we have false expectations about men’s characters, we are very much like the idiot who thinks he’ll carry milk in a can without a bottom. In my opinion, the notions about what mere voting will do are very much of that sort.’

‘That’s very fine,’ said a man in dirty fustian, with a scornful laugh. ‘But how are we to get the power without votes?’

‘I’ll tell you what’s the greatest power under heaven,’ said Felix, ‘and that is public opinion - the ruling belief in society about what is right and what is wrong, what is honourable and what is shameful. That’s the steam that is to work the engines. How can political freedom make us better any more than a religion we don’t believe in, if people laugh and wink when they see men abuse and defile it? And while public opinion is what it is - while men have no better beliefs about public duty - while corruption is not felt to be a damning disgrace - while men are not ashamed in parliament and out of it to make public questions which concern the welfare of millions a mere screen for their own petty private ends, - I say, no fresh scheme of voting will much mend our condition. For, take us working men of all sorts. Suppose out of every hundred who had a vote there were thirty who had some soberness, some sense to choose with, some good feeling to make them wish the right thing for all. And suppose there were seventy out of the hundred who were, half of them, not sober, who had no sense to choose one thing in politics more than another, and who had so little good feeling in them that they wasted on their own drinking the money that should have helped to feed and clothe their wives and children; and another half of them who, if they didn’t drink, were too ignorant or mean or stupid to see any good for themselves better than pocketing a five-shilling piece when it was offered them. Where would be the political power of the thirty sober men? The power would lie with the seventy drunken and stupid votes; and I’ll tell you what sort of men would get the power - what sort of men would end by returning whom they pleased to parliament.’

Felix had seen every face around him, and had particularly noticed a recent addition to his audience; but now he looked before him without appearing to fix his glance on any one. In spite of his cooling meditations an hour ago, his pulse was getting quickened by indignation, and the desire to crush what he hated was likely to vent itself in articulation. His tone became more biting.

‘They would be men who would undertake to do the business for a candidate, and return him: men who have no real opinions, but who pilfer the words of every opinion, and turn them into a cant which will serve their purpose at the moment; men who look out for dirty work to make their fortunes by, because dirty work wants little talent and no conscience; men who know aU the ins and outs of bribery, because there is not a cranny in their own souls where a bribe can’t enter. Such men as these will be the masters wherever there’s a majority of voters who care more for money, more for drink, more for some mean little end which is their own and nobody else’s, than for anything that has ever been called Right in the world. For suppose there’s a poor voter named Jack, who has seven children, and twelve or fifteen shillings a-week wages, perhaps less. Jack can’t read - I don’t say whose fault that is - he never had the chance to learn; he knows so little that he perhaps thinks God made the poor-laws, and if anybody said the pattem of the workhouse was laid down in the Testament, he wouldn’t be able to contradict them. What is poor Jack likely to do when he sees a smart stranger coming to him, who happens to be just one of those men that I say will be the masters till public opinion gets too hot for them? He’s a middle-sized man, we’ll say; stout, with coat upon coat of fine broadcloth, open enough to show a fine gold chain: none of your dark, scowling men, but one with an innocent pink-and-white skin and very smooth light hair - a most respectable man, who calls himself by a good, sound, well-known English name - as Green, or Baker, or Wilson, or, let us say, Johnson -’

Felix was interrupted by an explosion of laughter from a majority of the bystanders. Some eyes had been turned on Johnson, who stood on the right hand of Felix, at the very beginning of the description, and these were gradually followed by others, till at last every hearer’s attention was fixed on him, and the first burst of laughter from the two or three who knew the attorney’s name, let every one sufficiently into the secret to make the amusement common. Johnson, who had kept his ground till his name was mentioned, now turned away, looking unusually white after being unusually red, and feeling by an attorney’s instinct for his pocket-book, as if he felt it was a case for taking down the names of witnesses.

All the well-dressed hearers turned away too, thinking they had had the cream of the speech in the joke against Johnson, which, as a thing worth telling, helped to recall them to the scene of dinner.

‘Who is this Johnson?’ said Christian to a young man who had been standing near him, and had been one of the first to laugh. Christian’s curiosity had naturally been awakened by what might prove a golden opportunity.

‘O - a London attorney. He acts for Transome. That tremendous fellow at the comer there is some red-hot Radical demagogue, and Johnson has offended him, I suppose; else he wouldn’t have turned in that way on a man of their own party.’

‘I had heard there was a Johnson who was an understrapper of Jermyn’s,’ said Christian.

‘Well, so this man may have been for what I know. But he’s a London man now - a very busy fellow - on his own legs in Bedford Row. Ha ha! It’s capital, though, when these Liberals get a slap in the face from the working men they’re so very fond of.’

Another turn along the street enabled Christian to come to a resolution. Having seen Jermyn drive away an hour before, he was in no fear: he walked at once to the Fox and Hounds and asked to speak to Mr Johnson. A brief interview, in which Christian ascertained that he had before him the Johnson mentioned by the bill-sticker, issued in the appointment of a longer one at a later hour; and before they left Duffield they had come not exactly to a mutual understanding, but to an exchange of information mutually welcome.

Christian had been very cautious in the commencement, only intimating that he knew something important which some chance hints had induced him to think might be interesting to Mr Johnson, but that this entirely depended on how far he had a common interest with Mr Jermyn. Johnson replied that he had much business in which that gentleman was not concerned, but that to a certain extent they had a common interest. Probably then, Christian observed, the affairs of the Transome estate were part of the business in which Mr Jermyn and Mr Johnson might be understood to represent each other - in which case he need not detain Mr Johnson? At this hint Johnson could not conceal that he was becoming eager. He had no idea what Christian’s information was, but there were many grounds on which Johnson desired to know as much as he could about the Transome affairs independently of Jermyn. By little and little an understanding was arrived at. Christian told of his interview with Tommy Trounsem, and stated that if Johnson could show him whether the knowledge could have any legal value, he could bring evidence that a legitimate child of Bycliffe’s existed: he felt certain of this fact, and of his proof. Johnson explained, that in this case the death of the old bill-sticker would give the child the first valid claim to the Bycliffe heirship; that for his own part he should be glad to further a true claim, but that caution must be observed. How did Christian know that Jermyn was informed on this subject? Christian, more and more convinced that Johnson would be glad to counteract Jermyn, at length became explicit about Esther, but still withheld his own real name, and the nature of his relations with Bycliffe. He said he would bring the rest of his information when Mr Johnson took the case up seriously, and placed it in the hands of Bycliffe’s old lawyers - of course he would do that? Johnson replied that he would certainly do that; but that there were legal niceties which Mr Christian was probably not acquainted with; that Esther’s claim had not yet accrued; and that hurry was useless.