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<h2> Book Two </h2>
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<h2> Chapter XVII </h2>
<h3> In Which the Story Pauses a Little </h3>
<p>"THIS Rector of Broxton is little better than a pagan!" I hear one of my
readers exclaim. "How much more edifying it would have been if you had
made him give Arthur some truly spiritual advice! You might have put into
his mouth the most beautiful things—quite as good as reading a
sermon."</p>
<p>Certainly I could, if I held it the highest vocation of the novelist to
represent things as they never have been and never will be. Then, of
course, I might refashion life and character entirely after my own liking;
I might select the most unexceptionable type of clergyman and put my own
admirable opinions into his mouth on all occasions. But it happens, on the
contrary, that my strongest effort is to avoid any such arbitrary picture,
and to give a faithful account of men and things as they have mirrored
themselves in my mind. The mirror is doubtless defective, the outlines
will sometimes be disturbed, the reflection faint or confused; but I feel
as much bound to tell you as precisely as I can what that reflection is,
as if I were in the witness-box, narrating my experience on oath.</p>
<p>Sixty years ago—it is a long time, so no wonder things have changed—all
clergymen were not zealous; indeed, there is reason to believe that the
number of zealous clergymen was small, and it is probable that if one
among the small minority had owned the livings of Broxton and Hayslope in
the year 1799, you would have liked him no better than you like Mr.
Irwine. Ten to one, you would have thought him a tasteless, indiscreet,
methodistical man. It is so very rarely that facts hit that nice medium
required by our own enlightened opinions and refined taste! Perhaps you
will say, "Do improve the facts a little, then; make them more accordant
with those correct views which it is our privilege to possess. The world
is not just what we like; do touch it up with a tasteful pencil, and make
believe it is not quite such a mixed entangled affair. Let all people who
hold unexceptionable opinions act unexceptionably. Let your most faulty
characters always be on the wrong side, and your virtuous ones on the
right. Then we shall see at a glance whom we are to condemn and whom we
are to approve. Then we shall be able to admire, without the slightest
disturbance of our prepossessions: we shall hate and despise with that
true ruminant relish which belongs to undoubting confidence."</p>
<p>But, my good friend, what will you do then with your fellow-parishioner
who opposes your husband in the vestry? With your newly appointed vicar,
whose style of preaching you find painfully below that of his regretted
predecessor? With the honest servant who worries your soul with her one
failing? With your neighbour, Mrs. Green, who was really kind to you in
your last illness, but has said several ill-natured things about you since
your convalescence? Nay, with your excellent husband himself, who has
other irritating habits besides that of not wiping his shoes? These
fellow-mortals, every one, must be accepted as they are: you can neither
straighten their noses, nor brighten their wit, nor rectify their
dispositions; and it is these people—amongst whom your life is
passed—that it is needful you should tolerate, pity, and love: it is
these more or less ugly, stupid, inconsistent people whose movements of
goodness you should be able to admire—for whom you should cherish
all possible hopes, all possible patience. And I would not, even if I had
the choice, be the clever novelist who could create a world so much better
than this, in which we get up in the morning to do our daily work, that
you would be likely to turn a harder, colder eye on the dusty streets and
the common green fields—on the real breathing men and women, who can
be chilled by your indifference or injured by your prejudice; who can be
cheered and helped onward by your fellow-feeling, your forbearance, your
outspoken, brave justice.</p>
<p>So I am content to tell my simple story, without trying to make things
seem better than they were; dreading nothing, indeed, but falsity, which,
in spite of one's best efforts, there is reason to dread. Falsehood is so
easy, truth so difficult. The pencil is conscious of a delightful facility
in drawing a griffin—the longer the claws, and the larger the wings,
the better; but that marvellous facility which we mistook for genius is
apt to forsake us when we want to draw a real unexaggerated lion. Examine
your words well, and you will find that even when you have no motive to be
false, it is a very hard thing to say the exact truth, even about your own
immediate feelings—much harder than to say something fine about them
which is NOT the exact truth.</p>
<p>It is for this rare, precious quality of truthfulness that I delight in
many Dutch paintings, which lofty-minded people despise. I find a source
of delicious sympathy in these faithful pictures of a monotonous homely
existence, which has been the fate of so many more among my fellow-mortals
than a life of pomp or of absolute indigence, of tragic suffering or of
world-stirring actions. I turn, without shrinking, from cloud-borne
angels, from prophets, sibyls, and heroic warriors, to an old woman
bending over her flower-pot, or eating her solitary dinner, while the
noonday light, softened perhaps by a screen of leaves, falls on her
mob-cap, and just touches the rim of her spinning-wheel, and her stone
jug, and all those cheap common things which are the precious necessaries
of life to her—or I turn to that village wedding, kept between four
brown walls, where an awkward bridegroom opens the dance with a
high-shouldered, broad-faced bride, while elderly and middle-aged friends
look on, with very irregular noses and lips, and probably with quart-pots
in their hands, but with an expression of unmistakable contentment and
goodwill. "Foh!" says my idealistic friend, "what vulgar details! What
good is there in taking all these pains to give an exact likeness of old
women and clowns? What a low phase of life! What clumsy, ugly people!"</p>
<p>But bless us, things may be lovable that are not altogether handsome, I
hope? I am not at all sure that the majority of the human race have not
been ugly, and even among those "lords of their kind," the British, squat
figures, ill-shapen nostrils, and dingy complexions are not startling
exceptions. Yet there is a great deal of family love amongst us. I have a
friend or two whose class of features is such that the Apollo curl on the
summit of their brows would be decidedly trying; yet to my certain
knowledge tender hearts have beaten for them, and their miniatures—flattering,
but still not lovely—are kissed in secret by motherly lips. I have
seen many an excellent matron, who could have never in her best days have
been handsome, and yet she had a packet of yellow love-letters in a
private drawer, and sweet children showered kisses on her sallow cheeks.
And I believe there have been plenty of young heroes, of middle stature
and feeble beards, who have felt quite sure they could never love anything
more insignificant than a Diana, and yet have found themselves in middle
life happily settled with a wife who waddles. Yes! Thank God; human
feeling is like the mighty rivers that bless the earth: it does not wait
for beauty—it flows with resistless force and brings beauty with it.</p>
<p>All honour and reverence to the divine beauty of form! Let us cultivate it
to the utmost in men, women, and children—in our gardens and in our
houses. But let us love that other beauty too, which lies in no secret of
proportion, but in the secret of deep human sympathy. Paint us an angel,
if you can, with a floating violet robe, and a face paled by the celestial
light; paint us yet oftener a Madonna, turning her mild face upward and
opening her arms to welcome the divine glory; but do not impose on us any
aesthetic rules which shall banish from the region of Art those old women
scraping carrots with their work-worn hands, those heavy clowns taking
holiday in a dingy pot-house, those rounded backs and stupid
weather-beaten faces that have bent over the spade and done the rough work
of the world—those homes with their tin pans, their brown pitchers,
their rough curs, and their clusters of onions. In this world there are so
many of these common coarse people, who have no picturesque sentimental
wretchedness! It is so needful we should remember their existence, else we
may happen to leave them quite out of our religion and philosophy and
frame lofty theories which only fit a world of extremes. Therefore, let
Art always remind us of them; therefore let us always have men ready to
give the loving pains of a life to the faithful representing of
commonplace things—men who see beauty in these commonplace things,
and delight in showing how kindly the light of heaven falls on them. There
are few prophets in the world; few sublimely beautiful women; few heroes.
I can't afford to give all my love and reverence to such rarities: I want
a great deal of those feelings for my every-day fellow-men, especially for
the few in the foreground of the great multitude, whose faces I know,
whose hands I touch for whom I have to make way with kindly courtesy.
Neither are picturesque lazzaroni or romantic criminals half so frequent
as your common labourer, who gets his own bread and eats it vulgarly but
creditably with his own pocket-knife. It is more needful that I should
have a fibre of sympathy connecting me with that vulgar citizen who weighs
out my sugar in a vilely assorted cravat and waistcoat, than with the
handsomest rascal in red scarf and green feathers—more needful that
my heart should swell with loving admiration at some trait of gentle
goodness in the faulty people who sit at the same hearth with me, or in
the clergyman of my own parish, who is perhaps rather too corpulent and in
other respects is not an Oberlin or a Tillotson, than at the deeds of
heroes whom I shall never know except by hearsay, or at the sublimest
abstract of all clerical graces that was ever conceived by an able
novelist.</p>
<p>And so I come back to Mr. Irwine, with whom I desire you to be in perfect
charity, far as he may be from satisfying your demands on the clerical
character. Perhaps you think he was not—as he ought to have been—a
living demonstration of the benefits attached to a national church? But I
am not sure of that; at least I know that the people in Broxton and
Hayslope would have been very sorry to part with their clergyman, and that
most faces brightened at his approach; and until it can be proved that
hatred is a better thing for the soul than love, I must believe that Mr.
Irwine's influence in his parish was a more wholesome one than that of the
zealous Mr. Ryde, who came there twenty years afterwards, when Mr. Irwine
had been gathered to his fathers. It is true, Mr. Ryde insisted strongly
on the doctrines of the Reformation, visited his flock a great deal in
their own homes, and was severe in rebuking the aberrations of the flesh—put
a stop, indeed, to the Christmas rounds of the church singers, as
promoting drunkenness and too light a handling of sacred things. But I
gathered from Adam Bede, to whom I talked of these matters in his old age,
that few clergymen could be less successful in winning the hearts of their
parishioners than Mr. Ryde. They learned a great many notions about
doctrine from him, so that almost every church-goer under fifty began to
distinguish as well between the genuine gospel and what did not come
precisely up to that standard, as if he had been born and bred a
Dissenter; and for some time after his arrival there seemed to be quite a
religious movement in that quiet rural district. "But," said Adam, "I've
seen pretty clear, ever since I was a young un, as religion's something
else besides notions. It isn't notions sets people doing the right thing—it's
feelings. It's the same with the notions in religion as it is with
math'matics—a man may be able to work problems straight off in's
head as he sits by the fire and smokes his pipe, but if he has to make a
machine or a building, he must have a will and a resolution and love
something else better than his own ease. Somehow, the congregation began
to fall off, and people began to speak light o' Mr. Ryde. I believe he
meant right at bottom; but, you see, he was sourish-tempered, and was for
beating down prices with the people as worked for him; and his preaching
wouldn't go down well with that sauce. And he wanted to be like my lord
judge i' the parish, punishing folks for doing wrong; and he scolded 'em
from the pulpit as if he'd been a Ranter, and yet he couldn't abide the
Dissenters, and was a deal more set against 'em than Mr. Irwine was. And
then he didn't keep within his income, for he seemed to think at first
go-off that six hundred a-year was to make him as big a man as Mr.
Donnithorne. That's a sore mischief I've often seen with the poor curates
jumping into a bit of a living all of a sudden. Mr. Ryde was a deal
thought on at a distance, I believe, and he wrote books, but as for
math'matics and the natur o' things, he was as ignorant as a woman. He was
very knowing about doctrines, and used to call 'em the bulwarks of the
Reformation; but I've always mistrusted that sort o' learning as leaves
folks foolish and unreasonable about business. Now Mester Irwine was as
different as could be: as quick!—he understood what you meant in a
minute, and he knew all about building, and could see when you'd made a
good job. And he behaved as much like a gentleman to the farmers, and th'
old women, and the labourers, as he did to the gentry. You never saw HIM
interfering and scolding, and trying to play th' emperor. Ah, he was a
fine man as ever you set eyes on; and so kind to's mother and sisters.
That poor sickly Miss Anne—he seemed to think more of her than of
anybody else in the world. There wasn't a soul in the parish had a word to
say against him; and his servants stayed with him till they were so old
and pottering, he had to hire other folks to do their work."</p>
<p>"Well," I said, "that was an excellent way of preaching in the weekdays;
but I daresay, if your old friend Mr. Irwine were to come to life again,
and get into the pulpit next Sunday, you would be rather ashamed that he
didn't preach better after all your praise of him."</p>
<p>"Nay, nay," said Adam, broadening his chest and throwing himself back in
his chair, as if he were ready to meet all inferences, "nobody has ever
heard me say Mr. Irwine was much of a preacher. He didn't go into deep
speritial experience; and I know there s a deal in a man's inward life as
you can't measure by the square, and say, 'Do this and that 'll follow,'
and, 'Do that and this 'll follow.' There's things go on in the soul, and
times when feelings come into you like a rushing mighty wind, as the
Scripture says, and part your life in two a'most, so you look back on
yourself as if you was somebody else. Those are things as you can't bottle
up in a 'do this' and 'do that'; and I'll go so far with the strongest
Methodist ever you'll find. That shows me there's deep speritial things in
religion. You can't make much out wi' talking about it, but you feel it.
Mr. Irwine didn't go into those things—he preached short moral
sermons, and that was all. But then he acted pretty much up to what he
said; he didn't set up for being so different from other folks one day,
and then be as like 'em as two peas the next. And he made folks love him
and respect him, and that was better nor stirring up their gall wi' being
overbusy. Mrs. Poyser used to say—you know she would have her word
about everything—she said, Mr. Irwine was like a good meal o'
victual, you were the better for him without thinking on it, and Mr. Ryde
was like a dose o' physic, he gripped you and worreted you, and after all
he left you much the same."</p>
<p>"But didn't Mr. Ryde preach a great deal more about that spiritual part of
religion that you talk of, Adam? Couldn't you get more out of his sermons
than out of Mr. Irwine's?"</p>
<p>"Eh, I knowna. He preached a deal about doctrines. But I've seen pretty
clear, ever since I was a young un, as religion's something else besides
doctrines and notions. I look at it as if the doctrines was like finding
names for your feelings, so as you can talk of 'em when you've never known
'em, just as a man may talk o' tools when he knows their names, though
he's never so much as seen 'em, still less handled 'em. I've heard a deal
o' doctrine i' my time, for I used to go after the Dissenting preachers
along wi' Seth, when I was a lad o' seventeen, and got puzzling myself a
deal about th' Arminians and the Calvinists. The Wesleyans, you know, are
strong Arminians; and Seth, who could never abide anything harsh and was
always for hoping the best, held fast by the Wesleyans from the very
first; but I thought I could pick a hole or two in their notions, and I
got disputing wi' one o' the class leaders down at Treddles'on, and
harassed him so, first o' this side and then o' that, till at last he
said, 'Young man, it's the devil making use o' your pride and conceit as a
weapon to war against the simplicity o' the truth.' I couldn't help
laughing then, but as I was going home, I thought the man wasn't far
wrong. I began to see as all this weighing and sifting what this text
means and that text means, and whether folks are saved all by God's grace,
or whether there goes an ounce o' their own will to't, was no part o' real
religion at all. You may talk o' these things for hours on end, and you'll
only be all the more coxy and conceited for't. So I took to going nowhere
but to church, and hearing nobody but Mr. Irwine, for he said nothing but
what was good and what you'd be the wiser for remembering. And I found it
better for my soul to be humble before the mysteries o' God's dealings,
and not be making a clatter about what I could never understand. And
they're poor foolish questions after all; for what have we got either
inside or outside of us but what comes from God? If we've got a resolution
to do right, He gave it us, I reckon, first or last; but I see plain
enough we shall never do it without a resolution, and that's enough for
me."</p>
<p>Adam, you perceive, was a warm admirer, perhaps a partial judge, of Mr.
Irwine, as, happily, some of us still are of the people we have known
familiarly. Doubtless it will be despised as a weakness by that lofty
order of minds who pant after the ideal, and are oppressed by a general
sense that their emotions are of too exquisite a character to find fit
objects among their everyday fellowmen. I have often been favoured with
the confidence of these select natures, and find them to concur in the
experience that great men are overestimated and small men are
insupportable; that if you would love a woman without ever looking back on
your love as a folly, she must die while you are courting her; and if you
would maintain the slightest belief in human heroism, you must never make
a pilgrimage to see the hero. I confess I have often meanly shrunk from
confessing to these accomplished and acute gentlemen what my own
experience has been. I am afraid I have often smiled with hypocritical
assent, and gratified them with an epigram on the fleeting nature of our
illusions, which any one moderately acquainted with French literature can
command at a moment's notice. Human converse, I think some wise man has
remarked, is not rigidly sincere. But I herewith discharge my conscience,
and declare that I have had quite enthusiastic movements of admiration
towards old gentlemen who spoke the worst English, who were occasionally
fretful in their temper, and who had never moved in a higher sphere of
influence than that of parish overseer; and that the way in which I have
come to the conclusion that human nature is lovable—the way I have
learnt something of its deep pathos, its sublime mysteries—has been
by living a great deal among people more or less commonplace and vulgar,
of whom you would perhaps hear nothing very surprising if you were to
inquire about them in the neighbourhoods where they dwelt. Ten to one most
of the small shopkeepers in their vicinity saw nothing at all in them. For
I have observed this remarkable coincidence, that the select natures who
pant after the ideal, and find nothing in pantaloons or petticoats great
enough to command their reverence and love, are curiously in unison with
the narrowest and pettiest. For example, I have often heard Mr. Gedge, the
landlord of the Royal Oak, who used to turn a bloodshot eye on his
neighbours in the village of Shepperton, sum up his opinion of the people
in his own parish—and they were all the people he knew—in
these emphatic words: "Aye, sir, I've said it often, and I'll say it
again, they're a poor lot i' this parish—a poor lot, sir, big and
little." I think he had a dim idea that if he could migrate to a distant
parish, he might find neighbours worthy of him; and indeed he did
subsequently transfer himself to the Saracen's Head, which was doing a
thriving business in the back street of a neighbouring market-town. But,
oddly enough, he has found the people up that back street of precisely the
same stamp as the inhabitants of Shepperton—"a poor lot, sir, big
and little, and them as comes for a go o' gin are no better than them as
comes for a pint o' twopenny—a poor lot."</p>
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