Mr. Arabin
The Rev. Francis Arabin, fellow of Lazarus, late professor of
poetry at Oxford, and present vicar of St. Ewold, in the diocese
of Barchester, must now be introduced personally to the reader. He
is worthy of a new volume, and as he will fill a conspicuous place
in it, it is desirable that he should be made to stand before the
reader's eye by the aid of such portraiture as the author is able
to produce.
It is to be regretted that no mental method of daguerreotype or
photography has yet been discovered by which the characters of men
can be reduced to writing and put into grammatical language with
an unerring precision of truthful description. How often does the
novelist feel, ay, and the historian also and the biographer, that
he has conceived within his mind and accurately depicted on the
tablet of his brain the full character and personage of a man, and
that nevertheless, when he flies to pen and ink to perpetuate the
portrait, his words forsake, elude, disappoint, and play the deuce
with him, till at the end of a dozen pages the man described has no
more resemblance to the man conceived than the sign-board at the
corner of the street has to the Duke of Cambridge.
And yet such mechanical descriptive skill would hardly give more
satisfaction to the reader than the skill of the photographer does to
the anxious mother desirous to possess an absolute duplicate of her
beloved child. The likeness is indeed true, but it is a dull, dead,
unfeeling, inauspicious likeness. The face is indeed there, and those
looking at it will know at once whose image it is, but the owner of
the face will not be proud of the resemblance.
There is no royal road to learning, no short cut to the acquirement
of any valuable art. Let photographers and daguerreotypers do what
they will, and improve as they may with further skill on that which
skill has already done, they will never achieve a portrait of the
human face divine. Let biographers, novelists, and the rest of us
groan as we may under the burdens which we so often feel too heavy
for our shoulders; we must either bear them up like men, or own
ourselves too weak for the work we have undertaken. There is no way
of writing well and also of writing easily.
_Labor omnia vincit improbus_. Such should be the chosen motto of
every labourer, and it may be that labour, if adequately enduring,
may suffice at last to produce even some not untrue resemblance of
the Rev. Francis Arabin.
Of his doings in the world, and of the sort of fame which he has
achieved, enough has been already said. It has also been said that he
is forty years of age, and still unmarried. He was the younger son of
a country gentleman of small fortune in the north of England. At an
early age he went to Winchester, and was intended by his father for
New College; but though studious as a boy, he was not studious within
the prescribed limits, and at the age of eighteen he left school with
a character for talent, but without a scholarship. All that he had
obtained, over and above the advantage of his character, was a gold
medal for English verse, and hence was derived a strong presumption
on the part of his friends that he was destined to add another name
to the imperishable list of English poets.
From Winchester he went to Oxford, and was entered as a commoner at
Balliol. Here his special career very soon commenced. He utterly
eschewed the society of fast men, gave no wine-parties, kept no
horses, rowed no boats, joined no rows, and was the pride of his
college tutor. Such at least was his career till he had taken his
little go, and then he commenced a course of action which, though not
less creditable to himself as a man, was hardly so much to the taste
of the tutor. He became a member of a vigorous debating society, and
rendered himself remarkable there for humorous energy. Though always
in earnest, yet his earnestness was always droll. To be true in his
ideas, unanswerable in his syllogisms, and just in his aspirations
was not enough for him. He had failed, failed in his own opinion as
well as that of others when others came to know him, if he could not
reduce the arguments of his opponents to an absurdity and conquer
both by wit and reason. To say that his object was ever to raise a
laugh would be most untrue. He hated such common and unnecessary
evidence of satisfaction on the part of his hearers. A joke that
required to be laughed at was, with him, not worth uttering. He
could appreciate by a keener sense than that of his ears the success
of his wit, and would see in the eyes of his auditors whether or no
he was understood and appreciated.
He had been a religious lad before he left school. That is, he had
addicted himself to a party in religion, and having done so had
received that benefit which most men do who become partisans in such
a cause. We are much too apt to look at schism in our church as an
unmitigated evil. Moderate schism, if there may be such a thing, at
any rate calls attention to the subject, draws in supporters who
would otherwise have been inattentive to the matter, and teaches
men to think upon religion. How great an amount of good of this
description has followed that movement in the Church of England which
commenced with the publication of Froude's Remains!
As a boy young Arabin took up the cudgels on the side of the
Tractarians, and at Oxford he sat for a while at the feet of the
great Newman. To this cause he lent all his faculties. For it he
concocted verses, for it he made speeches, for it he scintillated
the brightest sparks of his quiet wit. For it he ate and drank and
dressed and had his being. In due process of time he took his degree
and wrote himself B.A., but he did not do so with any remarkable
amount of academical éclat. He had occupied himself too much
with High Church matters and the polemics, politics, and outward
demonstrations usually concurrent with High Churchmanship to devote
himself with sufficient vigour to the acquisition of a double first.
He was not a double first, nor even a first class man, but he
revenged himself on the university by putting firsts and double
firsts out of fashion for the year and laughing down a species of
pedantry which, at the age of twenty-three, leaves no room in a man's
mind for graver subjects than conic sections or Greek accents.
Greek accents, however, and conic sections were esteemed necessaries
at Balliol, and there was no admittance there for Mr. Arabin within
the list of its fellows. Lazarus, however, the richest and most
comfortable abode of Oxford dons, opened its bosom to the young
champion of a church militant. Mr. Arabin was ordained, and became
a fellow soon after taking his degree, and shortly after that was
chosen professor of poetry.
And now came the moment of his great danger. After many mental
struggles, and an agony of doubt which may be well surmised, the
great prophet of the Tractarians confessed himself a Roman Catholic.
Mr. Newman left the Church of England and with him carried many a
waverer. He did not carry off Mr. Arabin, but the escape which that
gentleman had was a very narrow one. He left Oxford for awhile that
he might meditate in complete peace on the step which appeared to him
to be all but unavoidable, and shut himself up in a little village on
the sea-shore of one of our remotest counties, that he might learn
by communing with his own soul whether or no he could with a safe
conscience remain within the pale of his mother church.
Things would have gone badly with him there had he been left entirely
to himself. Everything was against him: all his worldly interests
required him to remain a Protestant, and he looked on his worldly
interests as a legion of foes, to get the better of whom was a point
of extremest honour. In his then state of ecstatic agony such a
conquest would have cost him little; he could easily have thrown away
all his livelihood; but it cost him much to get over the idea that by
choosing the Church of England he should be open in his own mind to
the charge that he had been led to such a choice by unworthy motives.
Then his heart was against him: he loved with a strong and eager love
the man who had hitherto been his guide, and yearned to follow his
footsteps. His tastes were against him: the ceremonies and pomps of
the Church of Rome, their august feasts and solemn fasts, invited
his imagination and pleased his eye. His flesh was against him:
how great an aid would it be to a poor, weak, wavering man to be
constrained to high moral duties, self-denial, obedience, and
chastity by laws which were certain in their enactments, and not to
be broken without loud, palpable, unmistakable sin! Then his faith
was against him: he required to believe so much; panted so eagerly to
give signs of his belief; deemed it so insufficient to wash himself
simply in the waters of Jordan; that some great deed, such as that
of forsaking everything for a true Church, had for him allurements
almost past withstanding.
Mr. Arabin was at this time a very young man, and when he left Oxford
for his far retreat was much too confident in his powers of fence,
and too apt to look down on the ordinary sense of ordinary people,
to expect aid in the battle that he had to fight from any chance
inhabitants of the spot which he had selected. But Providence was
good to him; there, in that all but desolate place, on the storm-beat
shore of that distant sea, he met one who gradually calmed his mind,
quieted his imagination, and taught him something of a Christian's
duty. When Mr. Arabin left Oxford, he was inclined to look upon the
rural clergymen of most English parishes almost with contempt. It
was his ambition, should he remain within the fold of their church,
to do somewhat towards redeeming and rectifying their inferiority and
to assist in infusing energy and faith into the hearts of Christian
ministers, who were, as he thought, too often satisfied to go through
life without much show of either.
And yet it was from such a one that Mr. Arabin in his extremest need
received that aid which he so much required. It was from the poor
curate of a small Cornish parish that he first learnt to know that
the highest laws for the governance of a Christian's duty must act
from within and not from without; that no man can become a serviceable
servant solely by obedience to written edicts; and that the safety
which he was about to seek within the gates of Rome was no other
than the selfish freedom from personal danger which the bad soldier
attempts to gain who counterfeits illness on the eve of battle.
Mr. Arabin returned to Oxford a humbler but a better and a happier
man, and from that time forth he put his shoulder to the wheel
as a clergyman of the Church for which he had been educated. The
intercourse of those among whom he familiarly lived kept him staunch
to the principles of that system of the Church to which he had always
belonged. Since his severance from Mr. Newman, no one had had so
strong an influence over him as the head of his college. During
the time of his expected apostasy Dr. Gwynne had not felt much
predisposition in favour of the young fellow. Though a High
Churchman himself within moderate limits, Dr. Gwynne felt no sympathy
with men who could not satisfy their faiths with the Thirty-nine
Articles. He regarded the enthusiasm of such as Newman as a state of
mind more nearly allied to madness than to religion, and when he saw
it evinced by very young men, he was inclined to attribute a good
deal of it to vanity. Dr. Gwynne himself, though a religious man, was
also a thoroughly practical man of the world, and he regarded with
no favourable eye the tenets of anyone who looked on the two things
as incompatible. When he found that Mr. Arabin was a half Roman, he
began to regret all he had done towards bestowing a fellowship on
so unworthy a recipient; and when again he learnt that Mr. Arabin
would probably complete his journey to Rome, he regarded with some
satisfaction the fact that in such case the fellowship would be again
vacant.
When, however, Mr. Arabin returned and professed himself a confirmed
Protestant, the Master of Lazarus again opened his arms to him, and
gradually he became the pet of the college. For some little time he
was saturnine, silent, and unwilling to take any prominent part in
university broils, but gradually his mind recovered, or rather made
its tone, and he became known as a man always ready at a moment's
notice to take up the cudgels in opposition to anything that savoured
of an evangelical bearing. He was great in sermons, great on
platforms, great at after-dinner conversations, and always pleasant
as well as great. He took delight in elections, served on committees,
opposed tooth and nail all projects of university reform, and talked
jovially over his glass of port of the ruin to be anticipated by the
Church and of the sacrilege daily committed by the Whigs. The ordeal
through which he had gone in resisting the blandishments of the lady
of Rome had certainly done much towards the strengthening of his
character. Although in small and outward matters he was self-confident
enough, nevertheless in things affecting the inner man he aimed at a
humility of spirit which would never have been attractive to him but
for that visit to the coast of Cornwall. This visit he now repeated
every year.
Such is an interior view of Mr. Arabin at the time when he accepted
the living of St. Ewold. Exteriorly, he was not a remarkable person.
He was above the middle height, well-made, and very active. His hair,
which had been jet black, was now tinged with gray, but his face
bore no sign of years. It would perhaps be wrong to say that he was
handsome, but his face was nevertheless pleasant to look upon. The
cheek-bones were rather too high for beauty, and the formation of the
forehead too massive and heavy: but the eyes, nose, and mouth were
perfect. There was a continual play of lambent fire about his eyes,
which gave promise of either pathos or humour whenever he essayed to
speak, and that promise was rarely broken. There was a gentle play
about his mouth which declared that his wit never descended to sarcasm,
and that there was no ill-nature in his repartee.
Mr. Arabin was a popular man among women, but more so as a general
than a special favourite. Living as a fellow at Oxford, marriage with
him had been out of the question, and it may be doubted whether he had
ever allowed his heart to be touched. Though belonging to a church in
which celibacy is not the required lot of its ministers, he had come
to regard himself as one of those clergymen to whom to be a bachelor
is almost a necessity. He had never looked for parochial duty, and his
career at Oxford was utterly incompatible with such domestic joys as
a wife and nursery. He looked on women, therefore, in the same light
that one sees them regarded by many Romish priests. He liked to have
near him that which was pretty and amusing, but women generally were
little more to him than children. He talked to them without putting
out all his powers, and listened to them without any idea that what he
should hear from them could either actuate his conduct or influence
his opinion.
Such was Mr. Arabin, the new vicar of St. Ewold, who is going to stay
with the Grantlys at Plumstead Episcopi.
Mr. Arabin reached Plumstead the day before Mr. Harding and Eleanor,
and the Grantly family were thus enabled to make his acquaintance and
discuss his qualifications before the arrival of the other guests.
Griselda was surprised to find that he looked so young, but she told
Florinda her younger sister, when they had retired for the night,
that he did not talk at all like a young man: and she decided with
the authority that seventeen has over sixteen that he was not at all
nice, although his eyes were lovely. As usual, sixteen implicitly
acceded to the dictum of seventeen in such a matter, and said that he
certainly was not nice. They then branched off on the relative merits
of other clerical bachelors in the vicinity, and both determined
without any feeling of jealousy between them that a certain Rev.
Augustus Green was by many degrees the most estimable of the lot. The
gentleman in question had certainly much in his favour, as, having
a comfortable allowance from his father, he could devote the whole
proceeds of his curacy to violet gloves and unexceptionable neck ties.
Having thus fixedly resolved that the new-comer had nothing about him
to shake the pre-eminence of the exalted Green, the two girls went to
sleep in each other's arms, contented with themselves and the world.
Mrs. Grantly at first sight came to much the same conclusion about
her husband's favourite as her daughters had done, though, in seeking
to measure his relative value, she did not compare him to Mr. Green;
indeed, she made no comparison by name between him and anyone else;
but she remarked to her husband that one person's swans were very
often another person's geese, thereby clearly showing that Mr. Arabin
had not yet proved his qualifications in swanhood to her
satisfaction.
"Well, Susan," said he, rather offended at hearing his friend spoken
of so disrespectfully, "if you take Mr. Arabin for a goose, I cannot
say that I think very highly of your discrimination."
"A goose! No, of course, he's not a goose. I've no doubt he's a very
clever man. But you're so matter-of-fact, Archdeacon, when it suits
your purpose, that one can't trust oneself to any _façon de parler_.
I've no doubt Mr. Arabin is a very valuable man--at Oxford--and that
he'll be a good vicar at St. Ewold. All I mean is that, having passed
one evening with him, I don't find him to be absolutely a paragon. In
the first place, if I am not mistaken, he is a little inclined to be
conceited."
"Of all the men that I know intimately," said the archdeacon, "Arabin
is, in my opinion, the most free from any taint of self-conceit. His
fault is that he's too diffident."
"Perhaps so," said the lady; "only I must own I did not find it out
this evening."
Nothing further was said about him. Dr. Grantly thought that his
wife was abusing Mr. Arabin merely because he had praised him, and
Mrs. Grantly knew that it was useless arguing for or against any
person in favour of or in opposition to whom the archdeacon had
already pronounced a strong opinion.
In truth, they were both right. Mr. Arabin was a diffident man in
social intercourse with those whom he did not intimately know; when
placed in situations which it was his business to fill, and discussing
matters with which it was his duty to be conversant, Mr. Arabin was
from habit brazen-faced enough. When standing on a platform in Exeter
Hall, no man would be less mazed than he by the eyes of the crowd
before him, for such was the work which his profession had called on
him to perform; but he shrank from a strong expression of opinion in
general society, and his doing so not uncommonly made it appear that
he considered the company not worth the trouble of his energy. He
was averse to dictate when the place did not seem to him to justify
dictation, and as those subjects on which people wished to hear
him speak were such as he was accustomed to treat with decision,
he generally shunned the traps there were laid to allure him into
discussion, and, by doing so, not infrequently subjected himself to
such charges as those brought against him by Mrs. Grantly.
Mr. Arabin, as he sat at his open window, enjoying the delicious
moonlight and gazing at the gray towers of the church, which stood
almost within the rectory grounds, little dreamed that he was the
subject of so many friendly or unfriendly criticisms. Considering
how much we are all given to discuss the characters of others, and
discuss them often not in the strictest spirit of charity, it is
singular how little we are inclined to think that others can speak
ill-naturedly of us, and how angry and hurt we are when proof reaches
us that they have done so. It is hardly too much to say that we all
of us occasionally speak of our dearest friends in a manner in which
those dearest friends would very little like to hear themselves
mentioned, and that we nevertheless expect that our dearest friends
shall invariably speak of us as though they were blind to all our
faults, but keenly alive to every shade of our virtues.
It did not occur to Mr. Arabin that he was spoken of at all. It
seemed to him, when he compared himself with his host, that he was a
person of so little consequence to any, that he was worth no one's
words or thoughts. He was utterly alone in the world as regarded
domestic ties and those inner familiar relations which are hardly
possible between others than husbands and wives, parents and children,
or brothers and sisters. He had often discussed with himself the
necessity of such bonds for a man's happiness in this world, and had
generally satisfied himself with the answer that happiness in this
world is not a necessity. Herein he deceived himself, or rather tried
to do so. He, like others, yearned for the enjoyment of whatever he
saw enjoyable, and though he attempted, with the modern stoicism of
so many Christians, to make himself believe that joy and sorrow were
matters which here should be held as perfectly indifferent, these
things were not indifferent to him. He was tired of his Oxford rooms
and his college life. He regarded the wife and children of his friend
with something like envy; he all but coveted the pleasant drawing-room,
with its pretty windows opening on to lawns and flower-beds, the
apparel of the comfortable house, and--above all--the air of home which
encompassed it all.
It will be said that no time can have been so fitted for such desires
on his part as this, when he had just possessed himself of a country
parish, of a living among fields and gardens, of a house which a wife
would grace. It is true there was a difference between the opulence
of Plumstead and the modest economy of St. Ewold, but surely Mr.
Arabin was not a man to sigh after wealth! Of all men, his friends
would have unanimously declared he was the last to do so. But how
little our friends know us! In his period of stoical rejection of
this world's happiness, he had cast from him as utter dross all
anxiety as to fortune. He had, as it were, proclaimed himself to be
indifferent to promotion, and those who chiefly admired his talents,
and would mainly have exerted themselves to secure to them their
deserved reward, had taken him at his word. And now, if the truth
must out, he felt himself disappointed--disappointed not by them
but by himself. The daydream of his youth was over, and at the age
of forty he felt that he was not fit to work in the spirit of an
apostle. He had mistaken himself, and learned his mistake when it
was past remedy. He had professed himself indifferent to mitres and
diaconal residences, to rich livings and pleasant glebes, and now
he had to own to himself that he was sighing for the good things of
other men on whom, in his pride, he had ventured to look down.
Not for wealth, in its vulgar sense, had he ever sighed; not for the
enjoyment of rich things had he ever longed; but for the allotted
share of worldly bliss which a wife, and children, and happy home
could give him, for that usual amount of comfort which he had
ventured to reject as unnecessary for him, he did now feel that he
would have been wiser to have searched.
He knew that his talents, his position, and his friends would have
won for him promotion, had he put himself in the way of winning
it. Instead of doing so, he had allowed himself to be persuaded to
accept a living which would give him an income of some £300 a year
should he, by marrying, throw up his fellowship. Such, at the age of
forty, was the worldly result of labour which the world had chosen
to regard as successful. The world also thought that Mr. Arabin was,
in his own estimation, sufficiently paid. Alas! Alas! The world was
mistaken, and Mr. Arabin was beginning to ascertain that such was the
case.
And here may I beg the reader not to be hard in his judgement upon
this man. Is not the state at which he has arrived the natural
result of efforts to reach that which is not the condition of
humanity? Is not modern stoicism, built though it be on Christianity,
as great an outrage on human nature as was the stoicism of the
ancients? The philosophy of Zeno was built on true laws, but on true
laws misunderstood and therefore misapplied. It is the same with our
Stoics here, who would teach us that wealth and worldly comfort and
happiness on earth are not worth the search. Alas, for a doctrine which
can find no believing pupils and no true teachers!
The case of Mr. Arabin was the more singular, as he belonged to
a branch of the Church of England well inclined to regard its
temporalities with avowed favour, and had habitually lived with
men who were accustomed to much worldly comfort. But such was his
idiosyncrasy that these very facts had produced within him, in early
life, a state of mind that was not natural to him. He was content to
be a High Churchman, if he could be so on principles of his own and
could strike out a course showing a marked difference from those with
whom he consorted. He was ready to be a partisan as long as he was
allowed to have a course of action and of thought unlike that of his
party. His party had indulged him, and he began to feel that his
party was right and himself wrong, just when such a conviction was
too late to be of service to him. He discovered, when such discovery
was no longer serviceable, that it would have been worth his while
to have worked for the usual pay assigned to work in this world and
have earned a wife and children, with a carriage for them to sit in;
to have earned a pleasant dining-room, in which his friends could
drink his wine, and the power of walking up the high street of his
country town, with the knowledge that all its tradesmen would have
gladly welcomed him within their doors. Other men arrived at those
convictions in their start in life and so worked up to them. To him
they had come when they were too late to be of use.
It has been said that Mr. Arabin was a man of pleasantry, and it
may be thought that such a state of mind as that described would be
antagonistic to humour. But surely such is not the case. Wit is the
outward mental casing of the man, and has no more to do with the inner
mind of thoughts and feelings than have the rich brocaded garments of
the priest at the altar with the asceticism of the anchorite below
them, whose skin is tormented with sackcloth and whose body is
half-flayed with rods. Nay, will not such a one often rejoice more
than any other in the rich show of his outer apparel? Will it not be
food for his pride to feel that he groans inwardly while he shines
outwardly? So it is with the mental efforts which men make. Those
which they show forth daily to the world are often the opposites of
the inner workings of the spirit.
In the archdeacon's drawing-room, Mr. Arabin had sparkled with his
usual unaffected brilliancy, but when he retired to his bedroom, he
sat there sad, at his open window, repining within himself that he
also had no wife, no bairns, no soft sward of lawn duly mown for him
to lie on, no herd of attendant curates, no bowings from the banker's
clerks, no rich rectory. That apostleship that he had thought of had
evaded his grasp, and he was now only vicar of St. Ewold's, with a
taste for a mitre. Truly he had fallen between two stools.