A SHORT SIDELOOK AT THE ELECTION
The brisk Election-day, unlike that wearisome but instructive canvass
of the Englishman in his castle vicatim, teaches little; and its
humours are those of a badly managed Christmas pantomime without a
columbine—old tricks, no graces. Nevertheless, things hang together so
that it cannot be passed over with a bare statement of the fact of the
Liberal-Radical defeat in Bevisham: the day was not without fruit in
time to come for him whom his commiserating admirers of the non-voting
sex all round the borough called the poor dear commander. Beauchamp’s
holiday out of England had incited Dr. Shrapnel to break a positive
restriction put upon him by Jenny Denham, and actively pursue the
canvass and the harangue in person; by which conduct, as Jenny had
foreseen, many temperate electors were alienated from Commander
Beauchamp, though no doubt the Radicals were made compact: for they may
be the skirmishing faction—poor scattered fragments, none of them
sufficiently downright for the other; each outstripping each;
rudimentary emperors, elementary prophets, inspired physicians,
nostrum-devouring patients, whatsoever you will; and still here and
there a man shall arise to march them in close columns, if they can but
trust him; in perfect subordination, a model even for Tories while they
keep shoulder to shoulder. And to behold such a disciplined body is
intoxicating to the eye of a leader accustomed to count ahead upon
vapourish abstractions, and therefore predisposed to add a couple of
noughts to every tangible figure in his grasp. Thus will a realized
fifty become five hundred or five thousand to him: the very sense of
number is instinct with multiplication in his mind; and those years far
on in advance, which he has been looking to with some fatigue to the
optics, will suddenly and rollickingly roll up to him at the shutting
of his eyes in a temporary fit of gratification. So, by looking and by
not looking, he achieves his phantom victory—embraces his cloud.
Dr. Shrapnel conceived that the day was to be a Radical success; and
he, a citizen aged and exercised in reverses, so rounded by the habit
of them indeed as to tumble and recover himself on the wind of the blow
that struck him, was, it must be acknowledged, staggered and cast down
when he saw Beauchamp drop, knowing full well his regiment had polled
to a man. Radicals poll early; they would poll at cockcrow if they
might; they dance on the morning. As for their chagrin at noon, you
will find descriptions of it in the poet’s Inferno. They are for
lifting our clay soil on a lever of Archimedes, and are not great
mathematicians. They have perchance a foot of our earth, and
perpetually do they seem to be producing an effect, perpetually does
the whole land roll back on them. You have not surely to be reminded
that it hurts them; the weight is immense. Dr. Shrapnel, however,
speedily looked out again on his vast horizon, though prostrate. He
regained his height of stature with no man’s help. Success was but
postponed for a generation or two. Is it so very distant? Gaze on it
with the eye of our parent orb! “I shall not see it here; you may,” he
said to Jenny Denham; and he fortified his outlook by saying to Mr.
Lydiard that the Tories of our time walked, or rather stuck, in the
track of the Radicals of a generation back. Note, then, that Radicals,
always marching to the triumph, never taste it; and for Tories it is
Dead Sea fruit, ashes in their mouths! Those Liberals, those
temporisers, compromisers, a concourse of atoms! glorify themselves in
the animal satisfaction of sucking the juice of the fruit, for which
they pay with their souls. They have no true cohesion, for they have no
vital principle.
Mr. Lydiard being a Liberal, bade the doctor not to forget the work of
the Liberals, who touched on Tory and Radical with a pretty steady
swing, from side to side, in the manner of the pendulum of a clock,
which is the clock’s life, remember that. The Liberals are the
professors of the practicable in politics.
“A suitable image for time-servers!” Dr. Shrapnel exclaimed, intolerant
of any mention of the Liberals as a party, especially in the hour of
Radical discomfiture, when the fact that compromisers should exist
exasperates men of a principle. “Your Liberals are the band of Pyrrhus,
an army of bastards, mercenaries professing the practicable for pay.
They know us the motive force, the Tories the resisting power, and they
feign to aid us in battering our enemy, that they may stop the shock.
We fight, they profit. What are they? Stranded Whigs, crotchetty
manufacturers; dissentient religionists; the half-minded, the
hare-hearted; the I would and I would-not—shifty creatures, with
youth’s enthusiasm decaying in them, and a purse beginning to jingle;
fearing lest we do too much for safety, our enemy not enough for
safety. They a party? Let them take action and see! _We_ stand a
thousand defeats; they not one! Compromise begat them. Once let them
leave sucking the teats of compromise, yea, once put on the air of men
who fight and die for a cause, they fly to pieces. And whither the
fragments? Chiefly, my friend, into the _Tory_ ranks. Seriously so I
say. You between future and past are for the present—but with the
hunted look behind of all godless livers in the present. You Liberals
are Tories with foresight, Radicals without faith. You start, in fear
of Toryism, on an errand of Radicalism, and in fear of Radicalism to
Toryism you draw back. There is your pendulum-swing!”
Lectures to this effect were delivered by Dr. Shrapnel throughout the
day, for his private spiritual solace it may be supposed, unto Lydiard,
Turbot, Beauchamp, or whomsoever the man chancing to be near him, and
never did Sir Oracle wear so extraordinary a garb. The favourite
missiles of the day were flour-bags. Dr. Shrapnel’s uncommon height,
and his outrageous long brown coat, would have been sufficient to
attract them, without the reputation he had for desiring to subvert
everything old English. The first discharges gave him the appearance of
a thawing snowman. Drenchings of water turned the flour to ribs of
paste, and in colour at least he looked legitimately the cook’s own
spitted hare, escaped from her basting ladle, elongated on two legs. It
ensued that whenever he was caught sight of, as he walked unconcernedly
about, the young street-professors of the decorative arts were seized
with a frenzy to add their share to the whitening of him, until he
might have been taken for a miller that had gone bodily through his
meal. The popular cry proclaimed him a ghost, and he walked like one,
impassive, blanched, and silent amid the uproar of mobs of jolly
ruffians, for each of whom it was a point of honour to have a shy at
old Shrapnel.
Clad in this preparation of pie-crust, he called from time to time at
Beauchamp’s hotel, and renewed his monologue upon that Radical empire
in the future which was for ever in the future for the pioneers of men,
yet not the less their empire. “Do we live in our bodies?” quoth he,
replying to his fiery interrogation: “Ay, the Tories! the Liberals!”
_They_ lived in their bodies. Not one syllable of personal consolation
did he vouchsafe to Beauchamp. He did not imagine it could be required
by a man who had bathed in the pure springs of Radicalism; and it
should be remarked that Beauchamp deceived him by imitating his air of
happy abstraction, or subordination of the faculties to a distant view,
comparable to a ship’s crew in difficulties receiving the report of the
man at the masthead. Beauchamp deceived Miss Denham too, and himself,
by saying, as if he cherished the philosophy of defeat, besides the
resolution to fight on:
“It’s only a skirmish lost, and that counts for nothing in a battle
without end: it must be incessant.”
“But does incessant battling keep the intellect clear?” was her
memorable answer.
He glanced at Lydiard, to indicate that it came of that gentleman’s
influence upon her mind. It was impossible for him to think that women
thought. The idea of a pretty woman exercising her mind independently,
and moreover moving him to examine his own, made him smile. Could a
sweet-faced girl, the nearest to Renée in grace of manner and in
feature of all women known to him, originate a sentence that would set
him reflecting? He was unable to forget it, though he allowed her no
credit for it.
On the other hand, his admiration of her devotedness to Dr. Shrapnel
was unbounded. There shone a strictly feminine quality! according to
the romantic visions of the sex entertained by Commander Beauchamp, and
by others who would be the objects of it. But not alone the passive
virtues were exhibited by Jenny Denham: she proved that she had high
courage. No remonstrance could restrain Dr. Shrapnel from going out to
watch the struggle, and she went with him as a matter of course on each
occasion. Her dress bore witness to her running the gauntlet beside
him.
“It was not thrown at me purposely,” she said, to quiet Beauchamp’s
wrath. She saved the doctor from being rough mobbed. Once when they
were surrounded she fastened his arm under hers, and by simply moving
on with an unswerving air of serenity obtained a passage for him. So
much did she make herself respected, that the gallant rascals became
emulous in dexterity to avoid powdering her, by loudly execrating any
but dead shots at the detested one, and certain boys were maltreated
for an ardour involving clumsiness. A young genius of this horde
conceiving, in the spirit of the inventors of our improved modern
ordnance, that it was vain to cast missiles which left a thing
standing, hurled a stone wrapped in paper. It missed its mark. Jenny
said nothing about it. The day closed with a comfortable fight or two
in by-quarters of the town, probably to prove that an undaunted English
spirit, spite of fickle Fortune, survived in our muscles.