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 nothing 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.”