pretend to omniscience, and when I don’t know a thing I am not ashamed
of asking questions. But our modern curates never ask questions.
“Inquire within upon everything,” seems to be stamped upon every line
of their placid faces. When I was a young curate I was very shy and
timid, and held my dear rector in some awe. It might have been hoped
that as the years went by I should have grown out of this weakness--but
no! I am horribly afraid of the _curates_ now. I dare hardly open my
mouth before my superiors, and that they are my superiors I should not
for a moment presume to question. I know my place, and I tremble lest
I should betray my silliness by speaking unadvisedly with my lips.
All this is very trying to a man who will never see sixty again. The
hoary head is no crown at all to the eyes of the young and learned.
They don’t yet cry out at me, “Go up, thou baldhead,” but I can’t help
suspecting that they’re only waiting to do it sooner or later. For
myself I have, unfortunately, never been able to afford to engage the
services of a clergyman who should assist me in my ministrations. So
much the worse for me, and so much the worse for my parish. When I am
no longer able to do my own pastoral work, I shall feel the pinch of
poverty; but I am resolved to be very meek to my curate when he shall
vouchsafe to take me under his protection. I will do as I am told.
It is a very serious fact, however, which we cannot but think of with
anxiety, that since the _Curate Market_ rose, as it did some fifteen or
twenty years ago, there has been a large incursion of young men into
the ministry of the Church of England who are not gentlemen by birth,
education, sentiment, or manners, and who bring into the profession
(regarded as a mere profession) no _capital_ of any sort--no capital
I mean of money, brains, culture, enthusiasm, or force of character.
This is bad enough, but there is a worse behind it. These young curates
almost invariably marry, and the last state of that man is worse than
the first. My friends assure me, and my observation confirms it, that
the domestic career of these young people is sometimes very pathetic.
Sanguine, affectionate, simple-minded and childlike, they learn the
hard lessons of life all too late, and their experience comes to them,
as Coleridge said, “like the stern lights of a ship, throwing a glare
only upon the path behind.” When their children come upon them with the
usual rapidity, it is but rarely that we country parsons keep these
married curates among us. They emigrate into the towns for the sake
of educating their progeny, or because they soon find out that there
is no hope of preferment for them among the villages. When there is no
family, or when the bride has brought her spouse some small accession
of income, the couple stay where they are for years till somebody gives
them a small living, and there they do as others do. But in the first
exuberance of youth, and when the youthful pair are highly delighted
with the position that has been acquired, _he_ is profoundly impressed
with the sense of his importance, and _she_ exalted at the notion of
having married a “clergyman and a gentleman;” _he_ is apt to be stuck
up, and _she_ is very apt to be huffy. It’s bad enough to be associated
officially with an underbred man, but it’s a great deal worse to find
yourself brought into social relations, which cannot be avoided, with
an underbred woman. The curate’s wife is sometimes a very dreadful
personage, but then most dreadful when she is a “young person” of your
own parish who has angled for the clerical stickleback and landed him.
The Rev. Percy De la Pole was a courtly gentleman, sensitive,
fastidious, and just a trifle, a little trifle, distant in his
demeanour. His curate, the Rev. Giles Goggs, was a worthy young fellow
enough, painstaking and assiduous, anxious to do his duty, and not
at all airified. We all liked him till Rebecca Busk overcame him.
Mr. De la Pole was cautious and reserved by temperament; but who has
never committed a mistake? In an evil hour--how could he have been so
imprudent?--he gently warned the curate against the wiles of Miss Busk
and her family, telling him that she was far from being a desirable
match, and going to the length of saying plainly that she was making
very indelicate advances. “All that may be quite true,” replied Mr.
Goggs, “but I am sure you will soon change your opinion. I come in now
to let you know that I am engaged to be married to Miss Busk.” From
that day our reverend neighbour had so bad a time of it that it is
commonly believed his valuable life was shortened by his sufferings.
I am afraid some people behaved very cruelly, for they could not help
laughing. Mrs. Goggs took her revenge in the most vicious way. On all
public occasions she clasped the rector’s arm and looked up in his
face with the tenderest interest. She tripped across lawns at garden
parties to pluck him by the sleeve, screamed out with shrill delight
when he appeared, called him her dear old father confessor, giggled and
smirked and patted him, and fairly drove him out of the place at last
by finding that he had twice preached borrowed sermons, and keeping
the discovery back till the opportune moment arrived, when, at a large
wedding party, she shook her greasy little ringlets at him with a
wicked laugh, exclaiming, “Ah! you dear old sly-boots, when you can
speak like that why do you preach the Penny Pulpit to us?” The wretched
victim could not hold up his head after that, and when a kind neighbour
strongly advised him to dismiss the curate whose wife was unbearable,
the broken-down old gentleman feebly objected. “My dear friend, I may
have an opportunity of getting preferment for Mr. Goggs some day, but
in the meantime I have no power to send away my curate because his
wife--well, because his wife is _not nice_.”
It often happens that the parson has to go away from his parish for
some months, and he finds considerable difficulty in getting any one
to take charge of it during his absence. At the eleventh hour he is
compelled to take the last chance applicant. And behold, he and his
parishioners are given over to a _locum tenens_. This is nothing more
than saying that he has put himself into the power of a man with a
loose end.
When the worthy rector of Corton-in-the-Brake had reached his fiftieth
year, he obtained an accession of fortune and gave out that he intended
to marry. He furnished his house anew at a great expense, and found
no difficulty in getting a wife. Then he vowed that he would go to the
south of France for the winter, and get a curate. He was a prim and
punctilious personage, and he did not mean to deal shabbily with his
substitute. But two things he insisted on: first, that this _locum
tenens_ should be married, and secondly that he should be childless.
He got exactly the right man at last, a scholarly, well-dressed,
and evidently accomplished gentleman, who spoke of Mrs. Connor with
respectful confidence and affection, who had been married ten years,
and had no family, who made no difficulties except that the stables
were, he feared, inconveniently too small, but he would make shift.
With a mind relieved and a blissful honeymoon before him, the Rev.
John Morris set out for Nice--in the days when the railway system was
not as complete as now--and the Rev. Mr. Connor arrived at the rectory
the next Saturday afternoon. Mrs. Connor came too, with _fourteen
brindled bulldogs_--young and old. That was her speciality, and she
gave her whole mind to keeping the breed pure and making large sums
by every litter. During the following week appeared seven pupils, the
rejected of several public schools, who were committed to the care of
Mr. Connor to be kept out of their parents’ sight and to “prepare for
the University.” Mrs. Connor kept no female servants. Not a woman or a
girl dared pass the rectory gate. The Connors had a man cook and _men
housemaids_. The bulldogs would prowl about the neighbourhood in threes
and fours with a slow shuffling trot, sniffing, growling, turning their
hideous blood-shot eyes at you, undecided whether or not to tear you
limb from limb; and then passing on with menacing contempt. Sometimes
there were rumours of horrible fights; no one dared to separate the
brutes except Mrs. Connor. Once the two mightiest of the bulldogs got
“locked,” as the head man expressed it. “What did you do?” “Do? Why
I shrook out to Billy to hang on, and I called the Missus, and she
gave ’em the hot un, and they give in!” The _hot un_ turned out to be
a thin bar of steel with a wooden handle which was always kept ready
for use in the kitchen fire, and which Mrs. Connor had her own method
of applying red hot so as to paralyze the canine culprit without
blemishing him. But imagine the condition of that newly furnished
parsonage when the poor rector came back to his home.
It is easy for everybody else to look only at the ludicrous side,
but the clerical sufferer has to bear the real bitterness of such an
experience, and to him the mere damage to his property is the least
part of the business. Everybody says sulkily, “Why were we left to
such a man as that?” For the country parson has to answer for all the
sins and short-comings of those whom he leaves to represent himself;
all their indiscretions, their untidiness, their careless reading,
their bad preaching, their irreverence or their foolery, their
timidity or their violence, their ignorance or their escapades. One
man is horribly afraid of catching the measles; another “has never
been accustomed to cows” and will not go where they are; a third is a
woman-hater, and week by week bawls out strong language against the
other sex, beginning with Eden and ending with Babylon. The absentee
returns to find everything has been turned topsy-turvy. The _locum
tenens_ has set every one by the ears, altered the times of service,
broken your pony’s knees, had your dog poisoned for howling at the
moon, or kept a monkey in your drawing-room. People outside laugh, but
when you are the sufferer, and the conviction is forced upon you that
harm has been done which you cannot hope to see repaired, you are not
so likely to laugh as to do the other thing.
Shall I go on to dwell upon the aggrieved parishioner, the amenities
of the School Board, the anxieties of the school treat, the scenes at
the meetings of the Poor-law guardians, the faithful laity who come to
expostulate, to ask your views and to set you right? Shall I? Shall I
dwell upon the occasional sermons which some delegate from some society
comes and fulminates against you and your people? Nay! Silence on some
parts of our experience is golden.
* * * * *
When we have said all that need be said about the minor vexations and
worries which are incident to the country parson’s life, and which,
like all men who live in isolation, he is apt to exaggerate, there is
something still behind it all which only a few feel to be an evil at
all, and which those who do feel, for many good reasons, are shy of
speaking about; partly because they know it to be incurable, partly
because if they do touch upon it they are likely to be tabulated among
the dissatisfied, or are credited with unworthy motives which they know
in their hearts that they are not swayed by.
That which really makes the country parson’s position a cheerless and
trying one is its absolute _finality_. Dante’s famous line ought to
be carved upon the lintel of every country parsonage in England. When
the new rector on his induction takes the key of the church, locks
himself in, and tolls the bell, it is his own passing bell that he
is ringing. He is shutting himself out from any hope of a further
career upon earth. He is a man transported for life, to whom there
will come no reprieve. Whether he be the sprightly and sanguine young
bachelor of twenty-four who takes the family living; or the podgy
plebeian whose uncle the butcher has bought the advowson for a song;
or the college tutor, fastidious, highly cultured, even profoundly
learned, who has accepted university preferment; or the objectionable
and quarrelsome man, whom it was necessary to provide for by “sending
into the country”;--be he who he may, gifted or very much the reverse,
careless or earnest, slothful or zealous, genial, eloquent, wise, and
notoriously successful in his ministrations, or the veriest stick and
humdrum that ever snivelled through a homily--from the day that he
accepts a country benefice he is a shelved man, and is put upon the
retired list as surely as the commander in the navy who disappears on
half-pay. I do not mean only that the country parson is never promoted
to the higher dignities in the Church, or that cathedral preferment is
very rarely bestowed upon him; but I do mean that he is never moved
from the benefice in which he has once been planted. You may ply me
with instances to the contrary here and there, but they are instances
only numerous enough to illustrate the universality of the law which
prevails--_Once a country parson always a country parson_; where he
finds himself there he has to stay.
As long as the patronage of ecclesiastical preferment in the Church of
England remains in the hands it has remained in for a thousand years
and more, and as long as the tenure of the benefice continues to be
as it is and as it has been since feudal times, I can see no remedy
and no prospect that things should go on otherwise than they do now.
Give a man some future in whatever position you put him, and he will
be content to give you all his best energies, his time, his strength,
his fortune, in return for the chance of recognition that he may
sooner or later reasonably look forward to; but there is no surer way
of making the ablest man a _fainéant_ at the best, a soured and angry
revolutionist at the second best, and something even more odious and
degraded at the worst, than to shut him up in a cage like Sterne’s
starling, and bid him sing gaily and hop briskly from perch to perch
till the end of his days, with a due supply of sopped bread crumbs and
hemp seed found for him from hour to hour, and a sight of the outer
world granted him--only through the bars.
There is a something which appeals to our pity in every _carrière
manqué_. The statesman who made one false step, the soldier who at the
crisis of his life was out-generalled, the lawyer who began so well but
who proved not quite strong enough for the strain he had to bear--we
meet them now and then where we should least have expected to find
them, the obliterated heroes of the hour, and we say with a kindly
sigh, “This man might have had another chance.” But each of these has
had his chance; they have _worked up_ to a position and have forfeited
it when it has been proved they were in the wrong place; they have
gone into the battle of life, and the fortune of war has gone against
them; tried by the judgment of that world which is so “cold to all that
might have been,” they have been found wanting; they have had to step
aside, and make way for abler men than themselves. But up and down the
land in remote country parsonages--counting by the hundreds--there are
to be found those who have never had, and never will have, any chance
at all of showing what stuff is in them--sometimes men of real genius
shrivelled, men of noble intellect, its expansion arrested, men fitted
to lead and rule, men of force of character and power of mind, who from
the day that they entered upon the charge of a rural parish have had
never a chance of deliverance from
The dull mechanic pacing to and fro,
The set grey life and apathetic end.
You might as well expect from such as these that they should be able
to break away from their surroundings, or fail to be dwarfed and
cramped by them, as expect that Robinson Crusoe should develop into a
sagacious politician.
“Pathos,” did I say? How often have I heard the casual visitor to our
wilds exclaim with half-incredulous wonder, “What, _that_ Parkins?
Why, he used to walk the streets of Camford like a god! He carried all
before him. The younger dons used to say the world was at his feet--a
ball that he might kick over what goal he might please to choose. And
was that other really the great Dawkins, whose lectures we used to
hear of with such envy, we of St. Chad’s College, who had to content
ourselves with little Smug’s platitudes? Dawkins! How St. Mary’s used
to be crowded when he preached! Old Dr. Stokes used to say Dawkins had
too much fire and enthusiasm for Oxbridge. He called him Savonarola,
and he meant it for a sneer. And that’s Dawkins! How are the mighty
fallen!”
I lay innocent traps for my casuals now and then, when I can persuade
some of the effaced ones to come and dine with us, but it is often just
a little too sad. They are like the ghosts of the heroic dead. Men of
sixty, old before their time; the broad massive brow, with the bar of
Michael Angelo, is there, but--the eyes that used to flash and kindle
have grown dim and sleepy, those lips that curled with such fierce
scorn, or quivered with such glad playfulness or subtle drollery--it
seems as if it were yesterday--have become stiff and starched. Poverty
has come and hope has gone. Dawkins knew so little about the matter
that he actually believed he only required to get a _pied à terre_ such
as a college living would afford him, and a (nominal) income of £700
a year, and there would be a fresh world to conquer as easy to subdue
as the old Academic world which was under his feet. Poor Dawkins! Poor
Parkins! Poor any one who finds himself high and dry some fine morning
on his island home, while between him and the comrades who helped him
to his fate the distance widens; for him there is no escape, no sailing
back. There are the fruits of the earth, and the shade of the trees,
and the wreckage of other barks that have stranded there; but there is
no to-morrow with a different promise from to-day’s, nor even another
islet to look to when this one has been made the most of and explored,
only the resource of acquiescence as he muses on the things that were,
Gazing far out foamward.
Such men as these I have in my mind were never meant to be straitened
and poor. They never calculated upon six or eight children who have
to be educated; the real dreariness of the prospect, its crushing
unchangeableness only gradually reveals itself to them; they shut their
eyes not so much because they will not as because they _cannot_ believe
that such as they have no future. Their first experience of life led
up to the full conviction that character and brain-power _must_ sooner
or later bring a man to the first rank--what did it matter where a man
cast anchor for a time? So they burnt their ships bravely, “hope like
a fiery column before them, the dark side not yet turned.” But suppose
there was no scope for the brains and consequently no demand for them?
We in the wilderness have abundance of butter and eggs, but _keep_
these commodities long enough, and they infallibly grow a trifle stale.
People say with some indignation, “What a pity, what a shame, that
Parkins and Dawkins should be buried as they are!” No, that is not the
shame nor the pity; the shame is that, being buried, they should have
no hope of being dug up again. Yonder splendid _larva_ may potentially
be a much more splendid _imago_; let it bury itself by all means, but
do not keep it for ever below ground. Do not say to it, “Once there,
you must stop there, there and there only. For such as you there shall
be no change, your resting place shall inevitably be your grave.”
But if it be a melancholy spectacle to see the wreck of a man of great
intellect and noble nature, whom banishment in his prime and poverty
in his old age have blighted; scarcely less saddening is the sight of
the active and energetic young man of merely ordinary abilities to whom
a country living has come in his youth and vigour, and once for all
has stunted his growth and extinguished his ambition. There is no man
more out of place, and who takes longer to fit into his place, than
the worthy young clergyman who has been ordained to a town curacy,
kept for four or five years at all the routine work of a large town
parish, worked and admirably organized as--thank God!--most large town
parishes are, and who, at eight or nine and twenty, is dropped down
suddenly into a small village, and told that there he is to live and
die. He does not know a horse from a cow. He has had his regular work
mapped out for him by his superior officer as clearly as if he were a
policeman. He has been part of a very complex machinery, religious,
educational, eleemosynary. Every hour has been fully occupied, so
occupied that he has lost all the habits of reading and study which he
ever possessed. He has to preach at least one hundred sermons in the
course of the year, and there is not a single one in his very small
repertory that is in the least suitable for the new congregation; and
for the first time in his life he finds himself called upon to stand
alone with no one to consult, no one to lean on, no one to help him,
and in so much a worse condition than the aforesaid Robinson Crusoe
that the indigenous sons of the soil come and stare at him with an eye
to their chances of getting a meal out of him, or making a meal off
him, in the meantime doing, as the wicked always have done since the
Psalmist’s days, making mouths at him and ceasing not!
Talk of college dons being thrown away upon a handful of bumpkins! You
forget that the cultured Academic has almost always some resources
within himself, some tastes, some pursuits; and if he spends too
many hours in his library, at any rate his time does not hang so
very heavily upon his hands. When he goes among his people he will
always have something to tell them which they did not know before, and
something to inquire of them which they will be glad to tell him about.
But your young city curate pitchforked into a rural benefice when all
his sympathies and habits and training are of the streets streety, is
the most forlorn, melancholy, and dazed of all human creatures. An
omnibus driver compelled to keep a lighthouse could scarcely be more
deserving of our commiseration. Ask him in his moments of candour and
depression, when he realizes that he has reached the limit of his
earthly hopes, when he has been in his parsonage long enough to know
that he will never leave it for any other cure, when he realizes that
he must (by the nature of the case, and by the unalterable law which
prevails for such as he) wax poorer and poorer year by year, and that
men may come and men may go, but he will stay where he is till he
drops--ask him what he thinks of the bliss of a country living, its
independence, its calm, its sweetness, its security, above all, ask him
whether he does not think the great charm of his position is that he
can never be turned out of it, and I think you will find some of these
young fellows impatiently giving you just the answer you did _not_
expect. I am sure you will find _some_ among them who will reply: “It
is a useful life for a time. It is a happy life for a time. For a time
there is a joy in the country parson’s life which no other life can
offer; but we have come to see that this boasted fixity of tenure is
the weak point, not the strong one; it is movement we want among us,
not stagnation; the Parson’s Freehold is a fraud.”
Our vehement young friends in the first warmth of their conversion to
new ideas are apt to express themselves with more force than elegance,
and to push their elders somewhat rudely from behind. But they mean
what they say, and I am glad they are coming to think as they do. As
for us, the veterans who have lived through sixty summers and more,
there is no cloud of promise for us in the horizon. _We_ are not the
men who have anything to gain by any change; we know the corner of the
churchyards where our bones will lie. We do not delude ourselves; some
of us never looked for any career when we retired into the wilderness.
We asked for a refuge only, and that we have found.
Oh, Hope of all the ends of the earth, is it a small thing that for the
remainder of our days we are permitted to witness for Thee among the
poor and sad and lowly ones?