Adam Bede
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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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?”
“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.”
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.”
Chapter XVIII
Church
“Hetty, Hetty, don’t you know church begins at two, and it’s gone half
after one a’ready? Have you got nothing better to think on this good
Sunday as poor old Thias Bede’s to be put into the ground, and him
drownded i’ th’ dead o’ the night, as it’s enough to make one’s back
run cold, but you must be ’dizening yourself as if there was a wedding
i’stid of a funeral?”
“Well, Aunt,” said Hetty, “I can’t be ready so soon as everybody else,
when I’ve got Totty’s things to put on. And I’d ever such work to make
her stand still.”
Hetty was coming downstairs, and Mrs. Poyser, in her plain bonnet and
shawl, was standing below. If ever a girl looked as if she had been
made of roses, that girl was Hetty in her Sunday hat and frock. For her
hat was trimmed with pink, and her frock had pink spots, sprinkled on a
white ground. There was nothing but pink and white about her, except in
her dark hair and eyes and her little buckled shoes. Mrs. Poyser was
provoked at herself, for she could hardly keep from smiling, as any
mortal is inclined to do at the sight of pretty round things. So she
turned without speaking, and joined the group outside the house door,
followed by Hetty, whose heart was fluttering so at the thought of some
one she expected to see at church that she hardly felt the ground she
trod on.
And now the little procession set off. Mr. Poyser was in his Sunday
suit of drab, with a red-and-green waistcoat and a green watch-ribbon