poor?” Oh dear yes! of course they do. It is so very demoralizing to
help a lame dog over a stile. It does so pauperize a broken-down couple
to whom the Poor Law Guardians allow three shillings a week and half
a stone of flour, if you give them a sack of potatoes about Christmas
time. It corrupts and degrades Biddy Bundle to bestow an old petticoat
upon her when she is shivering with the cold, and it takes all
self-respect and independence from the unruly bosom of Dick the fiddler
to offer him your old hat or a shabby pair of trousers. The truest,
wisest, most far-sighted and most magnanimous charity is to let Harry
Dobbs have “an order for the house” when he is out of work and short of
coals--Harry Dobbs, who set himself against all the laws of political
economy, and married at eighteen, when he had not the wherewithal to
buy the chairs and tables. So we country parsons are a demoralizing
force in the body politic forsooth, because we cannot bear to see poor
people starve at our gates. We have been known actually to give soup
to a reckless couple guilty of twelve children; actually soup! And we
have dropped corrupting shillings into trembling hands, only because
they were trembling, and distributed ounces of tobacco to the inmates
of the Union, and poisoned the souls of old beldames with gratuitous
half-pounds of tea. And we counsel people to come to church, when they
would much rather go to the public-house, and we coddle them and warm
them now and then, and instead of leaving them to learn manliness and
independence and self-reliance on twelve shillings a week, we step
between them and the consequences of their own improvidence, and we
disturb the action of the beautiful laws of the universe, and where
we see the ponderous wheels of Juggernaut just going to roll over a
helpless imbecile who has tripped and dropped, we must needs make a
clutch at him and pull him out by the scruff of the neck, and tell
him to get up and not do it again. And all this is _demoralizing_ and
_pauperizing_, is it?
Out upon you! you miserable prigs with your chatter and babble! _You_
to talk of the parson’s narrowness and his bigotry and his cant?
_You_ to sneer at him for being the slave of a superstition? _You_ to
pose as the only thinkers with all the logic of all the philosophers
on your side, all the logic and never a crumb of common sense to
back it? Bigotry and intolerance and cant and class jealousy and
scorn--that refuge for the intellectually destitute and the blustering
coward--where will you find them in all their most bitter and sour
and hateful intensity, if not among the new lights, the self-styled
economists? And we have to sit mum and let brainless pretenders
superciliously put us out of court with a self-complacent wave of the
hand, as they give utterance to perky platitudes about the clergy
pauperizing the working man. No, Mr. Dandy Dryskull. No! this gospel of
yours, a little trying to listen to, is being found out; ours will see
the end of it.
You preach Sir Andrew and his love of law,
And we the Saviour and His law of love!
I, for one, hereby proclaim and declare that I intend to help the sick
and aged and struggling poor whenever I have the chance, and as far
as I have the means, and I hope the day will never come when I shall
cease to think without shame of him who is said to have made it his
boast that he had never given a beggar a penny in his life. I am free
to confess that I draw the line somewhere. I do draw the line at the
tramp--I do find it necessary to be uncompromising there. Indeed I keep
a big dog for the tramp, and that dog, inasmuch as he passes his happy
life in a country parsonage--that dog, I say, is _not_ muzzled.
“But don’t you get imposed upon? Don’t you get asked to replace dead
horses and cows and pigs and donkeys, that never walked on four legs
and no mortal eye ever saw in the land of the living?”
Of course we do! Is it a prerogative of the country parson to be duped
by a swindler? Oh, Mr. Worldly Wiseman, were you never taken in?
Never! Then, sir, I could not have you for a son-in-law! As for us--we
country parsons--we do occasionally get imposed upon in very absurd
and contemptible fashion. Sometimes we submit to be bled with our eyes
open. A bungling bumpkin has managed to get his horse’s leg broken
by his own stupidity. We know that the fellow was jiggling the poor
brute’s teeth out of his mouth at the time, or the animal would never
have shown himself as great an idiot as his master. But there stands
the master horseless, with the tears in his eyes, and we know all about
him and the hard struggle he has had to keep things going, and we say
to ourselves, “I wonder what would happen to _me_ if my horse dropped
down dead some fine morning. Who would help _me_ to another? and what
then?” So we pull out the sovereign, and give the fellow a note to
somebody else, and that is how we demoralize _him_.
Or another comes at night-time and wants to speak to us on very
particular business, and implores us to tide him over a real
difficulty, and.... “What? do you mean to say, you lend fellows money?”
Yes. I mean to say I have even done that and very very rarely repented
of it, and I mean to say there are men, and women too, to whom I would
lend money again if I had it; but it does not follow that I would lend
it to everybody, least of all that I would lend it to you, Mr. Worldly
Wiseman. Try it on, sir! Try it on! and see whether you would depart
triumphant from the interview!
Moreover, the country parson has always to pay a little--just a very
little--more than any one else for most things that come to his door.
The market has always risen when he wants to buy, and has always
suddenly fallen when he wants to sell. The small man’s oats are
invariably superior to any one’s when he has a small parcel to dispose
of to the parson. As to the price of hay, when the parson has to buy
it, that is truly startling. I never see half a rood of carrots growing
in a labourer’s allotment, but I feel sure I shall have to buy those
carrots before Christmas, and sorry as I am to observe how rarely any
fruit trees are ever planted in a poor man’s garden, I reflect that
perhaps it is just as well, for already the damsons and the apples
that besiege the rectory are almost overwhelming. I never ask what
becomes of them, but it is morally and physically impossible that they
should be eaten under this roof. “But, my dear, you must buy Widow
Coe’s damsons; nobody else will, you know!” This is what I am told is
“considering the poor people”; that is our way of putting it. You, Mr.
Worldly Wiseman, you call it demoralizing them.
Then, too, the country parson is expected to “encourage the local
industries.” I wonder whether they make pillow-lace in Bedfordshire
as they did once. If they do, and especially if the demand for it in
the outer world has waned, the country parsons’ wives in that part of
England must have a very trying time of it.
Once, when I was in the merry twenties, a dirty old hag with an evil
report, but no worse than other people, except that she was an old
slut, knocked at my back door and asked to see “The Lady Shepherd.”
Mrs. Triplet was a Mormonite, at any rate her husband was; and it
was credibly believed that Mrs. Triplet herself had been baptized by
immersion in a horsepond in the dead of night, dressed as Godiva was
dressed during her famous ride, and seated, not upon a palfrey, but
upon a jackass. How Triplet could ever have been converted to a belief
in polygamy with his experience of the married state, I am entirely
unable to explain. But Mrs. Triplet came to our door and asked for
“The Lady Shepherd.” It was a delicate piece of flattery. She must
have thought over it a long time. Was not the parson the shepherd?
a bad one it might be, a hireling, a blind leader of the blind, but
still a shepherd. Then his wife must needs be a shepherdess--and she
did not look like it--or a sheep--No! that wouldn’t do at all--or
the shepherd’s lady--and shepherds don’t have ladies; or--happy
thought!--the Lady Shepherd.
Accordingly Mrs. Triplet asked for the Lady Shepherd. Mrs. Triplet in
former times had been a tailor’s hand, and in that capacity had made
a few shillings a week by odd jobs for the Cambridge tailors in term
time; but she had married, and now she lived too far away in the wilds
to be able to continue at her old employment, and being a bad manager,
she soon had to cast about for some new source of income. In the more
comfortable cottages in the eastern counties you may often see laid
out before the fire a mat of peculiar construction which sometimes
looks like a small mattress in difficulties. It is made from selvages
and clippings, the refuse of the tailor’s workshop; these strips of
cloth are cut into lengths of two or three inches long by half an
inch wide, and are knitted or tightly tied together with string, the
variously coloured scraps being arranged in patterns according to the
genius and taste of the artist. The complex structure when completed is
stuffed with the clippings too small to be worked up on the outside,
and the mass is then subjected to a process of thumping and stamping
and pulling and hammering till at last there exudes--yes! that is
the correct term, whatever you may say--a lumpy bundle, which in its
pillowy and billowy entirety is called a hearthrug. The thing will last
for generations, it never wears out, and it takes years of continuous
stamping upon it before you can anyhow get it flat. It was one of these
triumphs of industry that Mrs. Triplet desired to turn an honest penny
by. Would her ladyship come and look at it _in situ_?
Now the lady shepherd is a woman of business, which the shepherd,
notoriously, is not, and if she had gone alone no great harm would
have come of the interview; but on that unlucky day the shepherd and
his lady resolved to go together. That is a course which no shepherd
and shepherdess should ever be persuaded to follow. Two men will often
help one another when associated in a difficult enterprise; two women
will almost always do better together than single-handed, but a man
and a woman working together will always get in one another’s way. On
the occasion referred to the quick-witted old crone saw her chance in
a moment, and commenced to play off one of her visitors against the
other with consummate skill. From a hole beneath the narrow stairs she
dragged the massive structure, and slowly unfolding it before our eyes
commenced to stamp upon it in a kind of hideous demon dance, gazing at
it fondly from time to time as if she could hardly bear to part with it.
In those days the fashion of wearing gay clothing had only just gone
out among the male sex. For, less than forty years ago, we used to
appear, on state occasions, in blue dress coats and brass buttons, and
at great gatherings you might see green coats and brown ones, mulberry
coats and chocolate ones, and there was a certain iridescence that
gave a peculiarly sprightly look to an assembly even of males in those
days, which has all passed away now. Hence when Mrs. Triplet displayed
her _exhibit_ we found ourselves gazing at a very gaudy spectacle.
“There, lady! And I made the pattern all myself, I did. Many’s the
night I’ve laid awake thinking of it. Ah! them bottle-greens was
hard to get, they was; gentlefolks has give up wearing greens. But
that yaller rose, lady. Ain’t _that_ a yaller rose?” For once in her
life the lady shepherd lost her nerve. Spasms of hysterical laughter
wrestled within her, and her flushed face and contorted frame betrayed
the conflict that was raging. How would it end? in the rupture of a
vein or in shrieks of uncontrollable merriment? The shepherd was in
terror; he stooped to the foolishest flattery; he went as near lying
as a shepherd could without literally lying; but comedy changed to
tragedy when from his lean purse he desperately plucked his very last
sovereign, and giving it to that guileful old sorceress, ordered her to
bring that hearth-rug to the parsonage without delay.
Next week--the very next week--came a pressing offer from another
parishioner of another of these articles of home manufacture; next
month came a third, though the price had dropped fifty per cent.,
which was accepted with exultant thankfulness. There was positively no
stopping the activity of the new industry; until, before three months
were over, six of these fearful contrivances had been all but forced
upon us, one of them travelling to our door in a donkey-cart and one in
a wheel-barrow--the lady shepherd being told she might have them at her
own price, and pay for them at her own convenience--only have them she
must: the makers could by no means take them away.
“Well, but you had nobody but yourselves to thank. How could you be so
weak and silly?”
That may be very true. But do not our trials--our smaller
trials--become so just because we have only ourselves to thank for
them? We in the wilderness are exposed to temptations which go some way
to make us silly and soft-hearted. Somehow, few of us are certain to
keep our hearts as hard as the nether millstone. I do not pretend to be
one of the seven sages: what I do say is that we country parsons have
our trials.
It is, however, when the country parson has to buy a horse that he
finds himself tried to the uttermost. Day after day, from all points
of the compass, there appear at his gate the cunningest of the cunning
and the sharpest of the sharp; and if at the end of a week the parson
has not arrived at the settled conviction that he is three parts of
a fool, it is impossible for him to dispute that the whole fraternity
of horsey men feel no manner of doubt that he is so. Now, I don’t
like to be thought a fool: not many men do, unless they hope to gain
something by it. The instinct of self-preservation or the hope of a
kingdom might induce me to play the part of Brutus; but in my secret
heart I should be buoyed up by the proud consciousness of superior
wisdom. When, however, it comes to a long line of rogues--one after
another for days and days without any collusion--continuing to tell
you to your face, almost in so many words, that you certainly are a
fool--it really ceases to be monotonous and becomes, after a while,
vexatious. The fellows are so clever, too; they have such an enviable
fluency of speech; they are possessed of such a rich fund of anecdote,
such an easy play of fancy, such a readiness of apt illustration, and
such a magnificent command of facial contortion, expressive of the
subtlest movements of the heart and brain, that you cannot but feel how
immeasurably inferior you are to the dullest of them in dialectic. But
why should a man, when he asks you to try his charger, bring it round
to the door-step, tempting you to get up on the off side?--what does
he gain by it? Why should he tell you that “this hoss was a _twin_ with
that as Captain Dixie drives in his dog-cart”? Why should he assure
you, upon his sacred honour, “that Roman nose will come square when the
horse gets to be six years old--they always do”? or that “you always
find bay horses turn chestnut if they’re clipped badly”?
These men would not try these fictions upon any one else; why should
I suffer for being a country parson by being told a long story--with
the most religious seriousness--of “that there horse as Mr. Abel had,
that stopped growing in his fore-quarters when he was two and went on
growing with his hind-quarters till he was seven--that hoss that they
called Kangaroo, ’cause he’d jump anything--anything under a church
tower, only you had to give him his head”? I used to get much more
irritated by this kind of thing when I was less mellowed by age than I
am: and I have learnt to be more tolerant even of a horse-dealer than
I once was. In an outburst of indignation one day, I turned angrily
upon one of the fraternity, and said to him, “Man! how can you go on
lying in this way; why won’t you deal fairly, instead of always trying
to take people in?” The man was not a bit offended--indeed he smiled
quite kindly upon me. “Lor,’ sir, do you suppose _we_ never get took
in?” I am fully persuaded that horse-dealer thought I was going to try
the confidence trick with him.
* * * * *
I am often assured by my town friends that the _loneliness_ of my
country life must be very trying. I reply with perfect truth that I
have never known what it is to feel lonely except in London. Some years
ago one Sunday afternoon I was compelled to consult an eminent oculist.
When the cab drove up to the great man’s door in Cardross Square, his
eminence was at the window in a brown study, with his elbows leaning
on the wire blind, the tip of his nose flattened against the pane, his
eyes vacantly staring at nothing. When we were shown into his presence,
the forlorn and desolate expression on that forsaken man’s face was
quite shocking to the nerves. A painter who could have reproduced the
look of aimless and despairing woe might have made a name for ever.
When people talk to me of loneliness I always instinctively recall
the image of that famous oculist in the heart of London on a Sunday
afternoon. Ever since that day I have never been able to get over a
horror of wire blinds. Happily, they are articles of furniture which
have almost gone out now, but they used to be fearfully common. Even
now the Londoner thinks it _de rigueur_ to darken the windows of his
sitting-room on the ground floor; and in furnished lodgings you must
have wire blinds. Why is this? When I ask the question I am told that
you _must_ have wire blinds: if you didn’t, people would look in.
In the country we never have wire blinds, and yet nobody looks in;
therefore you call our life lonely. But loneliness is not the simple
product of external circumstances--it is the outcome of a morbid
temperament, creating for itself a sense of vacuity, whatever may be a
man’s surroundings.
To sit on rocks, to muse on flood and fell,
To climb the trackless mountain, &c.
I suppose we all know that wishy-washy stuff, so there is no need to go
on with the quotation.
What _is_ trying in the country parson’s life is its _isolation_. That
is a very different thing from saying that he lives a lonely life.
The parson who is conscientiously trying to do his duty in a country
parish occupies a unique position. He is a man, and yet he must be
something more than man, and something less too. He must be more than
man in that he must be free from human passions and human weaknesses,
or the whole neighbourhood is shocked by his frailty; he must be
something less than man in his tastes and amusements and way of life,
or there will be those who will be sure to denounce him as a worldling
who ought never to have taken orders. If he be a man of birth and
refinement, he is sure to be reported of as proud and haughty; if he
be not quite a gentleman, he will be snubbed and flouted outrageously.
The average country parson and his family has often to bear an amount
of patronizing impertinence which is sometimes very trying. Even the
squire and the parson do not always get on well together, and when
they do not, the parson is very much at the other’s mercy, and may
be thwarted and worried and humiliated almost to any extent by a
powerful, ill-conditioned, and unscrupulous landed proprietor. But it
is from the come-and-go people who hire the country houses which their
owners are compelled to let, that we suffer most. Not that this is
always the case, for it not unfrequently happens that the change in
the occupancy of a country mansion is a clear gain socially, morally,
and intellectually to a whole neighbourhood--when, in the place of a
necessitous Squire Western, and his cubs of sons and his half-educated
daughters, drearily impecunious, but not the less self-asserting and
supercilious, we get a family of gentle manners and culture and
accomplishments, and lo! it is as sunshine after rain. But sometimes
the new comers are a grievous infliction. Town-bred folk who emerge
from the back streets and have amassed money by a new hair-wash or an
improvement in sticking-plaster. Such as these are out of harmony with
their temporary surroundings: they giggle in the faces of the farmers’
daughters, ridicule the speech and manners of the labourers and their
wives, and grumble at everything. They cannot think of walking in the
dirty lanes, they are afraid of cows, and call children nasty little
things. These people’s hospitalities are very trying.
“Come, my boy. Have a cut at the venison. Don’t be afraid. You shall
have a good dinner for once; sha’n’t he, my dear? and as much champagne
as you like to put inside you?” It was a bottle-nosed Sir Gorgious
Midas who spoke, and his lady at the other end of the table gave me a
kindly wink as she caught my eye. But the wine was Gilby’s, and not his
best. These are the people who demoralize our country villages. They
introduce a vulgarity of tone quite indescribable, and the rapidity of
the change wrought in the sentiments and language of the rustics is
sometimes quite wonderful.
The rustics don’t like these come-and-go folk, but they get dazzled
by them notwithstanding; they resent the airs which the footmen and
ladies’ maids give themselves, but nevertheless they envy them and
think, “There’s my gal Polly--she’d be a lady if she was to get into
sich a house as that!” When they hear that up at the hall they play
tennis on Sunday afternoons, the old people are perplexed, and wonder
what the world is coming to; the boys and girls begin to think that
_their_ jolly time is near, when they too shall submit to no restraint,
and join the revel rout of scoffers. The sour puritan snarls out, “Ah!
there’s your gentlefolks, they don’t want no religion, they don’t--and
we don’t want no gentlefolks!” For your sour puritan somehow has always
a lurking sympathy with the Socialist programme, and it’s honey and
nuts to him to find out some new occasion for venting his spleen at
the things that are. But one and all look askance at the parson, and
inwardly chuckle that he is not having a pleasant time of it. “Our
Reverend’s been took down a bit, since that young gent at the Hall
lit his pipe in the church porch. ‘That ain’t seemly,’ says parson.
‘Dunno about that,’ says the tother, ‘but it _seems_ nice.’” Chorus,
half-giggle, half-sniggle.
Do not the scientists teach that no two atoms are in absolute contact
with each other; that some interval separates every molecule from its
next of kin? Certainly this is inherent in the office and function of
the country parson, that he is not _quite_ in touch with any one in his
parish if he be a really earnest and conscientious parson. He is too
good for the average happy-go-lucky fellow who wants to be let alone.
There is nothing to gain by insulting him. “He’s that pig-headed he
don’t seem to mind nothing--only swearing at him!” You cannot get him
to take a side in a quarrel. He speaks out very unpleasant truths in
public and private. He occupies a social position that is sometimes
anomalous. He has a provoking knack of taking things by the right
handle. He does not believe in the almighty dollar, as men of sense
ought to believe; and he is usually in the right when it comes to a
dispute in a vestry meeting because he is the only man in the parish
that thinks of preparing himself for the discussion beforehand. This
isolation extends not merely to matters social and intellectual; it is
much more observable in the domain of sentiment. A rustic cannot at all
understand what _motive_ a man can possibly have for being a bookworm;
he suspects a student of being engaged in some impious researches. “To
hear that there Reverend of ours in the pulpit you might think we was
all right. But, bless you! he ain’t same as other folk. He do keep a
horoscope top o’ his house to look at the stares and sich.”
Not one man in a hundred of the labourers reads a book, and only when
a book is new with a gaudy outside does he seem to value it even as a
chattel. That any one should ever have any conceivable use for a big
book is to him incomprehensible.