Adam Bede
were some transparencies that made a great effect in honour of
Britannia, and Pitt, and the Loamshire Militia, and, above all, the
‘generous youth,’ the hero of the day. Don’t you think you should get
up something of the same sort to astonish our weak minds?”
The opportunity was gone. While Arthur was hesitating, the rope to
which he might have clung had drifted away—he must trust now to his own
swimming.
In ten minutes from that time, Mr. Irwine was called for on business,
and Arthur, bidding him good-bye, mounted his horse again with a sense
of dissatisfaction, which he tried to quell by determining to set off
for Eagledale without an hour’s delay.
Book Second
Chapter XVII
In Which the Story Pauses a Little
“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.”
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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!”
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.
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.
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