The change in Tom’s opinions and objects of interest brought him now
into more intimate relations with a set of whom he had as yet seen
little. For want of a better name, we may call them “the party of
progress.” At their parties, instead of practical jokes, and boisterous
mirth, and talk of boats, and bats, and guns, and horses, the highest
and deepest questions of morals, and politics, and metaphysics, were
discussed, and discussed with a freshness and enthusiasm which is apt
to wear off when doing has to take the place of talking, but has a
strange charm of its own while it lasts, and is looked back to with
loving regret by those for whom it is no longer a possibility.
With this set Tom soon fraternized, and drank in many new ideas, and
took to himself also many new crotchets besides those with which he
was really weighted. Almost all his new acquaintances were Liberal in
politics, but a few only were ready to go all lengths with him. They
were all Union men, and Tom, of course, followed the fashion, and soon
propounded theories in that institution which gained him the name of
Chartist Brown.
There was a strong mixture of self-conceit in it all. He had a kind
of idea that he had discovered something which it was creditable to
have discovered, and that it was a very fine thing to have all these
feelings for, and sympathies with, “the masses,” and to believe in
democracy, and “glorious humanity,” and “a good time coming,” and I
know not what other big matters. And, although it startled and pained
him at first to hear himself called ugly names, which he had hated
and despised from his youth up, and to know that many of his old
acquaintances looked upon him, not simply as a madman, but as a madman
with snobbish proclivities; yet, when the first plunge was over, there
was a good deal on the other hand which tickled his vanity, and was far
from being unpleasant.
To do him justice, however, the disagreeables were such that, had
there not been some genuine belief at the bottom, he would certainly
have been headed back very speedily into the fold of political and
social orthodoxy. As it was, amidst the cloud of sophisms, and
platitudes, and big one-sided ideas half-mastered, which filled his
thoughts and overflowed in his talk, there was growing in him and
taking firmer hold on him daily a true and broad sympathy for men as
men, and especially for poor men as poor men, and a righteous and
burning hatred against all laws, customs, or notions, which, according
to his light, either were or seemed to be setting aside, or putting
anything else in the place of, or above the man. It was with him the
natural outgrowth of the child’s and boy’s training (though his father
would have been much astonished to be told so), and the instincts of
those early days were now getting rapidly set into habits and faiths,
and becoming a part of himself.
In this stage of his life, as in so many former ones, Tom got great
help from his intercourse with Hardy, now the rising tutor of the
college. Hardy was travelling much the same road himself as our hero,
but was somewhat further on, and had come into it from a different
country, and through quite other obstacles. Their early lives had
been so different; and, both by nature and from long and severe
self-restraint and discipline, Hardy was much the less impetuous and
demonstrative of the two. He did not rush out, therefore (as Tom was
too much inclined to do), the moment he had seized hold of the end of
a new idea which he felt to be good for _him_ and what _he_ wanted,
and brandish it in the face of all comers, and think himself a traitor
to the truth if he wasn’t trying to make everybody he met with eat it.
Hardy, on the contrary, would test his new idea, and turn it over, and
prove it as far as he could, and try to get hold of the whole of it,
and ruthlessly strip off any tinsel or rose-pink sentiment with which
it might happen to be mixed up.
Often and often did Tom suffer under this severe method, and rebel
against it, and accuse his friend, both to his face and in his own
secret thought, of coldness, and want of faith, and all manner of other
sins of omission and commission. In the end, however, he generally came
round, with more or less of rebellion, according to the severity of
the treatment, and acknowledged that, when Hardy brought him down from
riding the high horse, it was not without good reason, and that the
dust in which he was rolled was always most wholesome dust.
For instance, there was no phrase more frequently in the mouths of the
party of progress than “the good cause.” It was a fine big-sounding
phrase, which could be used with great effect in perorations of
speeches at the Union, and was sufficiently indefinite to be easily
defended from ordinary attacks, while it saved him who used it the
trouble of ascertaining accurately for himself or settling for his
hearers what it really did mean. But, however satisfactory it might
be before promiscuous audiences, and so long as vehement assertion or
declaration was all that was required to uphold it, this same “good
cause” was liable to come to much grief when it had to get itself
defined. Hardy was particularly given to persecution on this subject,
when he could get Tom, and, perhaps, one or two others, in a quiet
room by themselves. While professing the utmost sympathy for “the good
cause,” and a hope as strong as theirs that all its enemies might find
themselves suspended to lamp-posts as soon as possible, he would pursue
it into corners from which escape was most difficult, asking it and its
supporters what it exactly was, and driving them from one cloud-land to
another, and from “the good cause” to the “people’s cause,” “the cause
of labor,” and other like troublesome definitions, until the great
idea seemed to have no shape or existence any longer even in their own
brains.
But Hardy’s persecution, provoking as it was for the time, never went
to the undermining of any real conviction in the minds of his juniors,
or the shaking of anything which did not need shaking, but only helped
them to clear their ideas and brains as to what they were talking and
thinking about, and gave them glimpses—soon clouded over again, but
most useful, nevertheless—of the truth, that there were a good many
knotty questions to be solved before a man could be quite sure that he
had found out the way to set the world thoroughly to rights, and heal
all the ills that flesh is heir to.
Hardy treated another of his friend’s most favorite notions even
with less respect than this one of “the good cause.” Democracy, that
“universal democracy,” which their favorite author had recently
declared to be “an inevitable fact of the days in which we live,” was,
perhaps, on the whole the pet idea of the small section of liberal
young Oxford, with whom Tom was now hand and glove. They lost no
opportunity of worshipping it, and doing battle for it; and, indeed,
did most of them very truly believe that that state of the world which
this universal democracy was to bring about and which was coming no man
could say how soon, was to be in fact that age of peace and good-will
which men had dreamt of in all times, when the lion should lie down
with the kid, and nation should not vex nation any more.
After hearing something to this effect from Tom on several occasions,
Hardy cunningly lured him to his rooms on the pretence of talking over
the prospects of the boat club, and then, having seated him by the
fire, which he himself proceeded to assault gently with the poker,
propounded suddenly to him the question:
“Brown, I should like to know what you mean by ‘democracy?’”
Tom at once saw the trap into which he had fallen, and made several
efforts to break away, but unsuccessfully; and, being seated to a cup
of tea, and allowed to smoke, was then and there grievously oppressed,
and mangled, and sat upon, by his oldest and best friend. He took his
ground carefully, and propounded only what he felt sure that Hardy
himself would at once accept—what no man of any worth could possibly
take exception to. “He meant much more,” he said, “than this; but for
the present purpose it would be enough for him to say that, whatever
else it might mean, democracy in his mouth always meant that every man
should have a share in the government of his country.”
Hardy, seeming to acquiesce, and making a sudden change in the subject
of their talk, decoyed his innocent guest away from the thought
of democracy for a few minutes, by holding up to him the flag of
hero-worship, in which worship Tom was, of course, a sedulous believer.
Then, having involved him in most difficult country, his persecutor
opened fire upon him from masked batteries of the most deadly kind, the
guns being all from the armory of his own prophets.
“You long for the rule of the ablest man, everywhere, at all times?
To find your ablest man, and then give him power, and obey him—that
you hold to be about the highest act of wisdom which a nation can be
capable of?”
“Yes; and you know you believe that too, Hardy, just as firmly as I do.”
“I hope so. But then, how about our universal democracy, and every man
having a share in the government of his country?”
Tom felt that his flank was turned; in fact, the contrast of his two
beliefs had never struck him vividly before, and he was consequently
much confused. But Hardy went on tapping a big coal gently with the
poker, and gave him time to recover himself and collect his thoughts.
“I don’t mean, of course, that every man is to have an actual share in
the government,” he said at last.
“But every man is somehow to have a share; and, if not an actual one, I
can’t see what the proposition comes to.”
“I call it having a share in the government when a man has share in
saying who shall govern him.”
“Well, you’ll own that’s a very different thing. But, let’s see; will
that find our wisest governor for us—letting all the foolishest men in
the nation have a say as to who he is to be?”
“Come now, Hardy, I’ve heard you say that you are for manhood suffrage.”
“That’s another question; you let in another idea there. At present we
are considering whether the _vox populi_ is the best test for finding
your best man. I’m afraid all history is against you.”
“That’s a good joke. Now, there I defy you, Hardy.”
“Begin at the beginning, then, and let us see.”
“I suppose you’ll say, then, that the Egyptian and Babylonian empires
were better than the little Jewish republic.”
“Republic! well, let that pass. But I never heard that the Jews elected
Moses, or any of the judges.”
“Well, never mind the Jews; they’re an exceptional case: you can’t
argue from them.”
“I don’t admit that. I believe just the contrary. But go on.”
“Well, then, what do you say to the glorious Greek republics, with
Athens at the head of them?”
“I say that no nation ever treated their best men so badly. I see I
must put on a lecture in Aristophanes for your special benefit. Vain,
irritable, shallow, suspicious old Demus, with his two oboli in his
cheek, and doubting only between Cleon and the sausage-seller, which he
shall choose for his wisest man—not to govern, but to serve his whims
and caprices. You must call another witness, I think.”
“But that’s a caricature.”
“Take the picture, then, out of Thucydides, Plato, Xenophon, how you
will—you won’t mend the matter much. You shouldn’t go so fast, Brown;
you won’t mind my saying so, I know. You don’t get clear in your own
mind before you pitch into every one who comes across you, and so do
your own side (which I admit is mostly the right one) more harm than
good.”
Tom couldn’t stand being put down so summarily, and fought over the
ground from one country to another, from Rome to the United States,
with all the arguments he could muster, but with little success. That
unfortunate first admission of his, he felt it throughout, like a
mill-stone round his neck, and could not help admitting to himself,
when he left, that there was a good deal in Hardy’s concluding remark:
“You’ll find it rather a tough business to get your ‘universal
democracy,’ and ‘government by the wisest,’ to pull together in one
coach.”
Notwithstanding all such occasional reverses and cold baths, however,
Tom went on strengthening himself in his new opinions, and maintaining
them with all the zeal of a convert. The shelves of his bookcase, and
the walls of his room, soon began to show signs of the change which
was taking place in his ways of looking at men and things. Hitherto a
framed engraving of George III. had hung over his mantel-piece; but
early in this, his third year, the frame had disappeared for a few
days, and when it reappeared, the solemn face of John Milton looked
out from it, while the honest monarch had retired into a portfolio.
A facsimile of Magna Charta soon displaced a large colored print of
“A Day with the Pycheley;” and soon afterwards the death-warrant of
Charles I., with its grim and resolute rows of signatures and seals,
appeared on the wall in a place of honor, in the neighborhood of
Milton.