Book Two
Chapter XVII
In Which the Story Pauses a Little
"THIS Rector of Broxton is little better than a pagan!" I hear one
of my readers exclaim. "How much more edifying it would have been
if you had made him give Arthur some truly spiritual advice! You
might have put into his mouth the most beautiful things--quite as
good as reading a sermon."
Certainly I could, if I held it the highest vocation of the
novelist to represent things as they never have been and never
will be. Then, of course, I might refashion life and character
entirely after my own liking; I might select the most
unexceptionable type of clergyman and put my own admirable
opinions into his mouth on all occasions. But it happens, on the
contrary, that my strongest effort is to avoid any such arbitrary
picture, and to give a faithful account of men and things as they
have mirrored themselves in my mind. The mirror is doubtless
defective, the outlines will sometimes be disturbed, the
reflection faint or confused; but I feel as much bound to tell you
as precisely as I can what that reflection is, as if I were in the
witness-box, narrating my experience on oath.
Sixty years ago--it is a long time, so no wonder things have
changed--all clergymen were not zealous; indeed, there is reason
to believe that the number of zealous clergymen was small, and it
is probable that if one among the small minority had owned the
livings of Broxton and Hayslope in the year 1799, you would have
liked him no better than you like Mr. Irwine. Ten to one, you
would have thought him a tasteless, indiscreet, methodistical man.
It is so very rarely that facts hit that nice medium required by
our own enlightened opinions and refined taste! Perhaps you will
say, "Do improve the facts a little, then; make them more
accordant with those correct views which it is our privilege to
possess. The world is not just what we like; do touch it up with
a tasteful pencil, and make believe it is not quite such a mixed
entangled affair. Let all people who hold unexceptionable
opinions act unexceptionably. Let your most faulty characters
always be on the wrong side, and your virtuous ones on the right.
Then we shall see at a glance whom we are to condemn and whom we
are to approve. Then we shall be able to admire, without the
slightest disturbance of our prepossessions: we shall hate and
despise with that true ruminant relish which belongs to undoubting
confidence."
But, my good friend, what will you do then with your fellow-
parishioner who opposes your husband in the vestry? With your
newly appointed vicar, whose style of preaching you find painfully
below that of his regretted predecessor? With the honest servant
who worries your soul with her one failing? With your neighbour,
Mrs. Green, who was really kind to you in your last illness, but
has said several ill-natured things about you since your
convalescence? Nay, with your excellent husband himself, who has
other irritating habits besides that of not wiping his shoes?
These fellow-mortals, every one, must be accepted as they are: you
can neither straighten their noses, nor brighten their wit, nor
rectify their dispositions; and it is these people--amongst whom
your life is passed--that it is needful you should tolerate, pity,
and love: it is these more or less ugly, stupid, inconsistent
people whose movements of goodness you should be able to admire--
for whom you should cherish all possible hopes, all possible
patience. And I would not, even if I had the choice, be the
clever novelist who could create a world so much better than this,
in which we get up in the morning to do our daily work, that you
would be likely to turn a harder, colder eye on the dusty streets
and the common green fields--on the real breathing men and women,
who can be chilled by your indifference or injured by your
prejudice; who can be cheered and helped onward by your fellow-
feeling, your forbearance, your outspoken, brave justice.
So I am content to tell my simple story, without trying to make
things seem better than they were; dreading nothing, indeed, but
falsity, which, in spite of one's best efforts, there is reason to
dread. Falsehood is so easy, truth so difficult. The pencil is
conscious of a delightful facility in drawing a griffin--the
longer the claws, and the larger the wings, the better; but that
marvellous facility which we mistook for genius is apt to forsake
us when we want to draw a real unexaggerated lion. Examine your
words well, and you will find that even when you have no motive to
be false, it is a very hard thing to say the exact truth, even
about your own immediate feelings--much harder than to say
something fine about them which is NOT the exact truth.
It is for this rare, precious quality of truthfulness that I
delight in many Dutch paintings, which lofty-minded people
despise. I find a source of delicious sympathy in these faithful
pictures of a monotonous homely existence, which has been the fate
of so many more among my fellow-mortals than a life of pomp or of
absolute indigence, of tragic suffering or of world-stirring
actions. I turn, without shrinking, from cloud-borne angels, from
prophets, sibyls, and heroic warriors, to an old woman bending
over her flower-pot, or eating her solitary dinner, while the
noonday light, softened perhaps by a screen of leaves, falls on
her mob-cap, and just touches the rim of her spinning-wheel, and
her stone jug, and all those cheap common things which are the
precious necessaries of life to her--or I turn to that village
wedding, kept between four brown walls, where an awkward
bridegroom opens the dance with a high-shouldered, broad-faced
bride, while elderly and middle-aged friends look on, with very
irregular noses and lips, and probably with quart-pots in their
hands, but with an expression of unmistakable contentment and
goodwill. "Foh!" says my idealistic friend, "what vulgar details!
What good is there in taking all these pains to give an exact
likeness of old women and clowns? What a low phase of life! What
clumsy, ugly people!"
But bless us, things may be lovable that are not altogether
handsome, I hope? I am not at all sure that the majority of the
human race have not been ugly, and even among those "lords of
their kind," the British, squat figures, ill-shapen nostrils, and
dingy complexions are not startling exceptions. Yet there is a
great deal of family love amongst us. I have a friend or two
whose class of features is such that the Apollo curl on the summit
of their brows would be decidedly trying; yet to my certain
knowledge tender hearts have beaten for them, and their
miniatures--flattering, but still not lovely--are kissed in secret
by motherly lips. I have seen many an excellent matron, who could
have never in her best days have been handsome, and yet she had a
packet of yellow love-letters in a private drawer, and sweet
children showered kisses on her sallow cheeks. And I believe
there have been plenty of young heroes, of middle stature and
feeble beards, who have felt quite sure they could never love
anything more insignificant than a Diana, and yet have found
themselves in middle life happily settled with a wife who waddles.
Yes! Thank God; human feeling is like the mighty rivers that
bless the earth: it does not wait for beauty--it flows with
resistless force and brings beauty with it.
All honour and reverence to the divine beauty of form! Let us
cultivate it to the utmost in men, women, and children--in our
gardens and in our houses. But let us love that other beauty too,
which lies in no secret of proportion, but in the secret of deep
human sympathy. Paint us an angel, if you can, with a floating
violet robe, and a face paled by the celestial light; paint us yet
oftener a Madonna, turning her mild face upward and opening her
arms to welcome the divine glory; but do not impose on us any
aesthetic rules which shall banish from the region of Art those
old women scraping carrots with their work-worn hands, those heavy
clowns taking holiday in a dingy pot-house, those rounded backs
and stupid weather-beaten faces that have bent over the spade and
done the rough work of the world--those homes with their tin pans,
their brown pitchers, their rough curs, and their clusters of
onions. In this world there are so many of these common coarse
people, who have no picturesque sentimental wretchedness! It is
so needful we should remember their existence, else we may happen
to leave them quite out of our religion and philosophy and frame
lofty theories which only fit a world of extremes. Therefore, let
Art always remind us of them; therefore let us always have men
ready to give the loving pains of a life to the faithful
representing of commonplace things--men who see beauty in these
commonplace things, and delight in showing how kindly the light of
heaven falls on them. There are few prophets in the world; few
sublimely beautiful women; few heroes. I can't afford to give all
my love and reverence to such rarities: I want a great deal of
those feelings for my every-day fellow-men, especially for the few
in the foreground of the great multitude, whose faces I know,
whose hands I touch for whom I have to make way with kindly
courtesy. Neither are picturesque lazzaroni or romantic criminals
half so frequent as your common labourer, who gets his own bread
and eats it vulgarly but creditably with his own pocket-knife. It
is more needful that I should have a fibre of sympathy connecting
me with that vulgar citizen who weighs out my sugar in a vilely
assorted cravat and waistcoat, than with the handsomest rascal in
red scarf and green feathers--more needful that my heart should
swell with loving admiration at some trait of gentle goodness in
the faulty people who sit at the same hearth with me, or in the
clergyman of my own parish, who is perhaps rather too corpulent
and in other respects is not an Oberlin or a Tillotson, than at
the deeds of heroes whom I shall never know except by hearsay, or
at the sublimest abstract of all clerical graces that was ever
conceived by an able novelist.
And so I come back to Mr. Irwine, with whom I desire you to be in
perfect charity, far as he may be from satisfying your demands on
the clerical character. Perhaps you think he was not--as he ought
to have been--a living demonstration of the benefits attached to a
national church? But I am not sure of that; at least I know that
the people in Broxton and Hayslope would have been very sorry to
part with their clergyman, and that most faces brightened at his
approach; and until it can be proved that hatred is a better thing
for the soul than love, I must believe that Mr. Irwine's influence
in his parish was a more wholesome one than that of the zealous
Mr. Ryde, who came there twenty years afterwards, when Mr. Irwine
had been gathered to his fathers. It is true, Mr. Ryde insisted
strongly on the doctrines of the Reformation, visited his flock a
great deal in their own homes, and was severe in rebuking the
aberrations of the flesh--put a stop, indeed, to the Christmas
rounds of the church singers, as promoting drunkenness and too
light a handling of sacred things. But I gathered from Adam Bede,
to whom I talked of these matters in his old age, that few
clergymen could be less successful in winning the hearts of their
parishioners than Mr. Ryde. They learned a great many notions
about doctrine from him, so that almost every church-goer under
fifty began to distinguish as well between the genuine gospel and
what did not come precisely up to that standard, as if he had been
born and bred a Dissenter; and for some time after his arrival
there seemed to be quite a religious movement in that quiet rural
district. "But," said Adam, "I've seen pretty clear, ever since I
was a young un, as religion's something else besides notions. It
isn't notions sets people doing the right thing--it's feelings.
It's the same with the notions in religion as it is with
math'matics--a man may be able to work problems straight off in's
head as he sits by the fire and smokes his pipe, but if he has to
make a machine or a building, he must have a will and a resolution
and love something else better than his own ease. Somehow, the
congregation began to fall off, and people began to speak light o'
Mr. Ryde. I believe he meant right at bottom; but, you see, he
was sourish-tempered, and was for beating down prices with the
people as worked for him; and his preaching wouldn't go down well
with that sauce. And he wanted to be like my lord judge i' the
parish, punishing folks for doing wrong; and he scolded 'em from
the pulpit as if he'd been a Ranter, and yet he couldn't abide the
Dissenters, and was a deal more set against 'em than Mr. Irwine
was. And then he didn't keep within his income, for he seemed to
think at first go-off that six hundred a-year was to make him as
big a man as Mr. Donnithorne. That's a sore mischief I've often
seen with the poor curates jumping into a bit of a living all of a
sudden. Mr. Ryde was a deal thought on at a distance, I believe,
and he wrote books, but as for math'matics and the natur o'
things, he was as ignorant as a woman. He was very knowing about
doctrines, and used to call 'em the bulwarks of the Reformation;
but I've always mistrusted that sort o' learning as leaves folks
foolish and unreasonable about business. Now Mester Irwine was as
different as could be: as quick!--he understood what you meant in
a minute, and he knew all about building, and could see when you'd
made a good job. And he behaved as much like a gentleman to the
farmers, and th' old women, and the labourers, as he did to the
gentry. You never saw HIM interfering and scolding, and trying to
play th' emperor. Ah, he was a fine man as ever you set eyes on;
and so kind to's mother and sisters. That poor sickly Miss Anne--
he seemed to think more of her than of anybody else in the world.
There wasn't a soul in the parish had a word to say against him;
and his servants stayed with him till they were so old and
pottering, he had to hire other folks to do their work."
"Well," I said, "that was an excellent way of preaching in the
weekdays; but I daresay, if your old friend Mr. Irwine were to
come to life again, and get into the pulpit next Sunday, you would
be rather ashamed that he didn't preach better after all your
praise of him."
"Nay, nay," said Adam, broadening his chest and throwing himself
back in his chair, as if he were ready to meet all inferences,
"nobody has ever heard me say Mr. Irwine was much of a preacher.
He didn't go into deep speritial experience; and I know there s a
deal in a man's inward life as you can't measure by the square,
and say, 'Do this and that 'll follow,' and, 'Do that and this 'll
follow.' There's things go on in the soul, and times when
feelings come into you like a rushing mighty wind, as the
Scripture says, and part your life in two a'most, so you look back
on yourself as if you was somebody else. Those are things as you
can't bottle up in a 'do this' and 'do that'; and I'll go so far
with the strongest Methodist ever you'll find. That shows me
there's deep speritial things in religion. You can't make much
out wi' talking about it, but you feel it. Mr. Irwine didn't go
into those things--he preached short moral sermons, and that was
all. But then he acted pretty much up to what he said; he didn't
set up for being so different from other folks one day, and then
be as like 'em as two peas the next. And he made folks love him
and respect him, and that was better nor stirring up their gall
wi' being overbusy. Mrs. Poyser used to say--you know she would
have her word about everything--she said, Mr. Irwine was like a
good meal o' victual, you were the better for him without thinking
on it, and Mr. Ryde was like a dose o' physic, he gripped you and
worreted you, and after all he left you much the same."
"But didn't Mr. Ryde preach a great deal more about that spiritual
part of religion that you talk of, Adam? Couldn't you get more
out of his sermons than out of Mr. Irwine's?"
"Eh, I knowna. He preached a deal about doctrines. But I've seen
pretty clear, ever since I was a young un, as religion's something
else besides doctrines and notions. I look at it as if the
doctrines was like finding names for your feelings, so as you can
talk of 'em when you've never known 'em, just as a man may talk o'
tools when he knows their names, though he's never so much as seen
'em, still less handled 'em. I've heard a deal o' doctrine i' my
time, for I used to go after the Dissenting preachers along wi'
Seth, when I was a lad o' seventeen, and got puzzling myself a
deal about th' Arminians and the Calvinists. The Wesleyans, you
know, are strong Arminians; and Seth, who could never abide
anything harsh and was always for hoping the best, held fast by
the Wesleyans from the very first; but I thought I could pick a
hole or two in their notions, and I got disputing wi' one o' the
class leaders down at Treddles'on, and harassed him so, first o'
this side and then o' that, till at last he said, 'Young man, it's
the devil making use o' your pride and conceit as a weapon to war
against the simplicity o' the truth.' I couldn't help laughing
then, but as I was going home, I thought the man wasn't far wrong.
I began to see as all this weighing and sifting what this text
means and that text means, and whether folks are saved all by
God's grace, or whether there goes an ounce o' their own will
to't, was no part o' real religion at all. You may talk o' these
things for hours on end, and you'll only be all the more coxy and
conceited for't. So I took to going nowhere but to church, and
hearing nobody but Mr. Irwine, for he said notning but what was
good and what you'd be the wiser for remembering. And I found it
better for my soul to be humble before the mysteries o' God's
dealings, and not be making a clatter about what I could never
understand. And they're poor foolish questions after all; for
what have we got either inside or outside of us but what comes
from God? If we've got a resolution to do right, He gave it us, I
reckon, first or last; but I see plain enough we shall never do it
without a resolution, and that's enough for me."
Adam, you perceive, was a warm admirer, perhaps a partial judge,
of Mr. Irwine, as, happily, some of us still are of the people we
have known familiarly. Doubtless it will be despised as a
weakness by that lofty order of minds who pant after the ideal,
and are oppressed by a general sense that their emotions are of
too exquisite a character to find fit objects among their everyday
fellowmen. I have often been favoured with the confidence of
these select natures, and find them to concur in the experience
that great men are overestimated and small men are insupportable;
that if you would love a woman without ever looking back on your
love as a folly, she must die while you are courting her; and if
you would maintain the slightest belief in human heroism, you must
never make a pilgrimage to see the hero. I confess I have often
meanly shrunk from confessing to these accomplished and acute
gentlemen what my own experience has been. I am afraid I have
often smiled with hypocritical assent, and gratified them with an
epigram on the fleeting nature of our illusions, which any one
moderately acquainted with French literature can command at a
moment's notice. Human converse, I think some wise man has
remarked, is not rigidly sincere. But I herewith discharge my
conscience, and declare that I have had quite enthusiastic
movements of admiration towards old gentlemen who spoke the worst
English, who were occasionally fretful in their temper, and who
had never moved in a higher sphere of influence than that of
parish overseer; and that the way in which I have come to the
conclusion that human nature is lovable--the way I have learnt
something of its deep pathos, its sublime mysteries--has been by
living a great deal among people more or less commonplace and
vulgar, of whom you would perhaps hear nothing very surprising if
you were to inquire about them in the neighbourhoods where they
dwelt. Ten to one most of the small shopkeepers in their vicinity
saw nothing at all in them. For I have observed this remarkable
coincidence, that the select natures who pant after the ideal, and
find nothing in pantaloons or petticoats great enough to command
their reverence and love, are curiously in unison with the
narrowest and pettiest. For example, I have often heard Mr.
Gedge, the landlord of the Royal Oak, who used to turn a bloodshot
eye on his neighbours in the village of Shepperton, sum up his
opinion of the people in his own parish--and they were all the
people he knew--in these emphatic words: "Aye, sir, I've said it
often, and I'll say it again, they're a poor lot i' this parish--a
poor lot, sir, big and little." I think he had a dim idea that if
he could migrate to a distant parish, he might find neighbours
worthy of him; and indeed he did subsequently transfer himself to
the Saracen's Head, which was doing a thriving business in the
back street of a neighbouring market-town. But, oddly enough, he
has found the people up that back street of precisely the same
stamp as the inhabitants of Shepperton--"a poor lot, sir, big and
little, and them as comes for a go o' gin are no better than them
as comes for a pint o' twopenny--a poor lot."
