Adam Bede
obscure and monotonous suffering. It was his large-hearted indulgence
that made him ignore his mother’s hardness towards her daughters, which
was the more striking from its contrast with her doting fondness
towards himself; he held it no virtue to frown at irremediable faults.
See the difference between the impression a man makes on you when you
walk by his side in familiar talk, or look at him in his home, and the
figure he makes when seen from a lofty historical level, or even in the
eyes of a critical neighbour who thinks of him as an embodied system or
opinion rather than as a man. Mr. Roe, the “travelling preacher”
stationed at Treddleston, had included Mr. Irwine in a general
statement concerning the Church clergy in the surrounding district,
whom he described as men given up to the lusts of the flesh and the
pride of life; hunting and shooting, and adorning their own houses;
asking what shall we eat, and what shall we drink, and wherewithal
shall we be clothed?—careless of dispensing the bread of life to their
flocks, preaching at best but a carnal and soul-benumbing morality, and
trafficking in the souls of men by receiving money for discharging the
pastoral office in parishes where they did not so much as look on the
faces of the people more than once a-year. The ecclesiastical
historian, too, looking into parliamentary reports of that period,
finds honourable members zealous for the Church, and untainted with any
sympathy for the “tribe of canting Methodists,” making statements
scarcely less melancholy than that of Mr. Roe. And it is impossible for
me to say that Mr. Irwine was altogether belied by the generic
classification assigned him. He really had no very lofty aims, no
theological enthusiasm: if I were closely questioned, I should be
obliged to confess that he felt no serious alarms about the souls of
his parishioners, and would have thought it a mere loss of time to talk
in a doctrinal and awakening manner to old “Feyther Taft,” or even to
Chad Cranage the blacksmith. If he had been in the habit of speaking
theoretically, he would perhaps have said that the only healthy form
religion could take in such minds was that of certain dim but strong
emotions, suffusing themselves as a hallowing influence over the family
affections and neighbourly duties. He thought the custom of baptism
more important than its doctrine, and that the religious benefits the
peasant drew from the church where his fathers worshipped and the
sacred piece of turf where they lay buried were but slightly dependent
on a clear understanding of the Liturgy or the sermon. Clearly the
rector was not what is called in these days an “earnest” man: he was
fonder of church history than of divinity, and had much more insight
into men’s characters than interest in their opinions; he was neither
laborious, nor obviously self-denying, nor very copious in alms-giving,
and his theology, you perceive, was lax. His mental palate, indeed, was
rather pagan, and found a savouriness in a quotation from Sophocles or
Theocritus that was quite absent from any text in Isaiah or Amos. But
if you feed your young setter on raw flesh, how can you wonder at its
retaining a relish for uncooked partridge in after-life? And Mr.
Irwine’s recollections of young enthusiasm and ambition were all
associated with poetry and ethics that lay aloof from the Bible.
On the other hand, I must plead, for I have an affectionate partiality
towards the rector’s memory, that he was not vindictive—and some
philanthropists have been so; that he was not intolerant—and there is a
rumour that some zealous theologians have not been altogether free from
that blemish; that although he would probably have declined to give his
body to be burned in any public cause, and was far from bestowing all
his goods to feed the poor, he had that charity which has sometimes
been lacking to very illustrious virtue—he was tender to other men’s
failings, and unwilling to impute evil. He was one of those men, and
they are not the commonest, of whom we can know the best only by
following them away from the marketplace, the platform, and the pulpit,
entering with them into their own homes, hearing the voice with which
they speak to the young and aged about their own hearthstone, and
witnessing their thoughtful care for the everyday wants of everyday
companions, who take all their kindness as a matter of course, and not
as a subject for panegyric.
Such men, happily, have lived in times when great abuses flourished,
and have sometimes even been the living representatives of the abuses.
That is a thought which might comfort us a little under the opposite
fact—that it is better sometimes _not_ to follow great reformers of
abuses beyond the threshold of their homes.
But whatever you may think of Mr. Irwine now, if you had met him that
June afternoon riding on his grey cob, with his dogs running beside
him—portly, upright, manly, with a good-natured smile on his finely
turned lips as he talked to his dashing young companion on the bay
mare, you must have felt that, however ill he harmonized with sound
theories of the clerical office, he somehow harmonized extremely well
with that peaceful landscape.
See them in the bright sunlight, interrupted every now and then by
rolling masses of cloud, ascending the slope from the Broxton side,
where the tall gables and elms of the rectory predominate over the tiny
whitewashed church. They will soon be in the parish of Hayslope; the
grey church-tower and village roofs lie before them to the left, and
farther on, to the right, they can just see the chimneys of the Hall
Farm.
Chapter VI
The Hall Farm
Evidently that gate is never opened, for the long grass and the great
hemlocks grow close against it, and if it were opened, it is so rusty
that the force necessary to turn it on its hinges would be likely to
pull down the square stone-built pillars, to the detriment of the two
stone lionesses which grin with a doubtful carnivorous affability above
a coat of arms surmounting each of the pillars. It would be easy
enough, by the aid of the nicks in the stone pillars, to climb over the
brick wall with its smooth stone coping; but by putting our eyes close
to the rusty bars of the gate, we can see the house well enough, and
all but the very corners of the grassy enclosure.
It is a very fine old place, of red brick, softened by a pale powdery
lichen, which has dispersed itself with happy irregularity, so as to
bring the red brick into terms of friendly companionship with the
limestone ornaments surrounding the three gables, the windows, and the
door-place. But the windows are patched with wooden panes, and the
door, I think, is like the gate—it is never opened. How it would groan
and grate against the stone floor if it were! For it is a solid, heavy,
handsome door, and must once have been in the habit of shutting with a
sonorous bang behind a liveried lackey, who had just seen his master
and mistress off the grounds in a carriage and pair.
But at present one might fancy the house in the early stage of a
chancery suit, and that the fruit from that grand double row of
walnut-trees on the right hand of the enclosure would fall and rot
among the grass, if it were not that we heard the booming bark of dogs
echoing from great buildings at the back. And now the half-weaned
calves that have been sheltering themselves in a gorse-built hovel
against the left-hand wall come out and set up a silly answer to that
terrible bark, doubtless supposing that it has reference to buckets of
milk.
Yes, the house must be inhabited, and we will see by whom; for
imagination is a licensed trespasser: it has no fear of dogs, but may
climb over walls and peep in at windows with impunity. Put your face to
one of the glass panes in the right-hand window: what do you see? A
large open fireplace, with rusty dogs in it, and a bare boarded floor;
at the far end, fleeces of wool stacked up; in the middle of the floor,
some empty corn-bags. That is the furniture of the dining-room. And
what through the left-hand window? Several clothes-horses, a pillion, a
spinning-wheel, and an old box wide open and stuffed full of coloured
rags. At the edge of this box there lies a great wooden doll, which, so
far as mutilation is concerned, bears a strong resemblance to the
finest Greek sculpture, and especially in the total loss of its nose.
Near it there is a little chair, and the butt end of a boy’s leather
long-lashed whip.
The history of the house is plain now. It was once the residence of a
country squire, whose family, probably dwindling down to mere
spinsterhood, got merged in the more territorial name of Donnithorne.
It was once the Hall; it is now the Hall Farm. Like the life in some
coast town that was once a watering-place, and is now a port, where the
genteel streets are silent and grass-grown, and the docks and
warehouses busy and resonant, the life at the Hall has changed its
focus, and no longer radiates from the parlour, but from the kitchen
and the farmyard.
Plenty of life there, though this is the drowsiest time of the year,
just before hay-harvest; and it is the drowsiest time of the day too,
for it is close upon three by the sun, and it is half-past three by
Mrs. Poyser’s handsome eight-day clock. But there is always a stronger
sense of life when the sun is brilliant after rain; and now he is
pouring down his beams, and making sparkles among the wet straw, and
lighting up every patch of vivid green moss on the red tiles of the
cow-shed, and turning even the muddy water that is hurrying along the
channel to the drain into a mirror for the yellow-billed ducks, who are
seizing the opportunity of getting a drink with as much body in it as
possible. There is quite a concert of noises; the great bull-dog,
chained against the stables, is thrown into furious exasperation by the
unwary approach of a cock too near the mouth of his kennel, and sends
forth a thundering bark, which is answered by two fox-hounds shut up in
the opposite cow-house; the old top-knotted hens, scratching with their
chicks among the straw, set up a sympathetic croaking as the
discomfited cock joins them; a sow with her brood, all very muddy as to
the legs, and curled as to the tail, throws in some deep staccato
notes; our friends the calves are bleating from the home croft; and,
under all, a fine ear discerns the continuous hum of human voices.
For the great barn-doors are thrown wide open, and men are busy there
mending the harness, under the superintendence of Mr. Goby, the
“whittaw,” otherwise saddler, who entertains them with the latest
Treddleston gossip. It is certainly rather an unfortunate day that
Alick, the shepherd, has chosen for having the whittaws, since the
morning turned out so wet; and Mrs. Poyser has spoken her mind pretty
strongly as to the dirt which the extra number of men’s shoes brought
into the house at dinnertime. Indeed, she has not yet recovered her
equanimity on the subject, though it is now nearly three hours since
dinner, and the house-floor is perfectly clean again; as clean as
everything else in that wonderful house-place, where the only chance of
collecting a few grains of dust would be to climb on the salt-coffer,
and put your finger on the high mantel-shelf on which the glittering
brass candlesticks are enjoying their summer sinecure; for at this time
of year, of course, every one goes to bed while it is yet light, or at
least light enough to discern the outline of objects after you have
bruised your shins against them. Surely nowhere else could an oak
clock-case and an oak table have got to such a polish by the hand:
genuine “elbow polish,” as Mrs. Poyser called it, for she thanked God
she never had any of your varnished rubbish in her house. Hetty Sorrel