MR ARABIN
The Reverend 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. And as
he will fill a conspicuous place in this volume, 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 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 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 already been 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 his 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 auditory 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 of 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 its
supporters who would otherwise have been inattentive to the matter,
and teaches men to think about religion. How great an amount of
good of this description has followed that movement of 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 eclat. 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 first 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 the 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 a while that he might meditate in complete peace on the
step which appeared for 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. Every thing 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; but it cost him
much to get over the idea of 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 early 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 on the spot which he had selected. But
Providence was good to him; and there, in that all but desolate
place, on the storm-beat shore of that distant sea, he met one who
gradually changed 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 the 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 a 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 a very young men, 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 any one who
looked on the two things as incompatible. When he found Mr Arabin
was a half Roman, he began to regret all that he 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 which
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 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, high for beauty,
and the formation of the forehead too massive and heavy: but his
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 then
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
any one 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 facon 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 brazed-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 unfrequently 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 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 was 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, those 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 all.
It will be said that no time can have been fitted for such desires
on his part as this, 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 to
secure 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 search.
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 an income of some L 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 the 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. Also, 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, but when such a
conviction was too late to be of service to him. He discovered,
when much was 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 in 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 of
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 thought 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 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 bed-room,
he sat there sad, at his open window, repining within himself that
he also had no wife, no bairns, no soft award of lawn duly mown for
him to be 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.