The Mill on the Floss
during this first half-year; for, by a singular coincidence, there had
been some negotiation concerning another pupil from the same
neighbourhood and it might further a decision in Mr Stelling’s favour,
if it were understood that young Tulliver, who, Mr Stelling observed in
conjugal privacy, was rather a rough cub, had made prodigious progress
in a short time. It was on this ground that he was severe with Tom
about his lessons; he was clearly a boy whose powers would never be
developed through the medium of the Latin grammar, without the
application of some sternness. Not that Mr Stelling was a
harsh-tempered or unkind man; quite the contrary. He was jocose with
Tom at table, and corrected his provincialisms and his deportment in
the most playful manner; but poor Tom was only the more cowed and
confused by this double novelty, for he had never been used to jokes at
all like Mr Stelling’s; and for the first time in his life he had a
painful sense that he was all wrong somehow. When Mr Stelling said, as
the roast-beef was being uncovered, “Now, Tulliver! which would you
rather decline, roast-beef or the Latin for it?” Tom, to whom in his
coolest moments a pun would have been a hard nut, was thrown into a
state of embarrassed alarm that made everything dim to him except the
feeling that he would rather not have anything to do with Latin; of
course he answered, “Roast-beef,” whereupon there followed much
laughter and some practical joking with the plates, from which Tom
gathered that he had in some mysterious way refused beef, and, in fact,
made himself appear “a silly.” If he could have seen a fellow-pupil
undergo these painful operations and survive them in good spirits, he
might sooner have taken them as a matter of course. But there are two
expensive forms of education, either of which a parent may procure for
his son by sending him as solitary pupil to a clergyman: one is the
enjoyment of the reverend gentleman’s undivided neglect; the other is
the endurance of the reverend gentleman’s undivided attention. It was
the latter privilege for which Mr Tulliver paid a high price in Tom’s
initiatory months at King’s Lorton.
That respectable miller and maltster had left Tom behind, and driven
homeward in a state of great mental satisfaction. He considered that it
was a happy moment for him when he had thought of asking Riley’s advice
about a tutor for Tom. Mr Stelling’s eyes were so wide open, and he
talked in such an off-hand, matter-of-fact way, answering every
difficult, slow remark of Mr Tulliver’s with, “I see, my good sir, I
see”; “To be sure, to be sure”; “You want your son to be a man who will
make his way in the world,”—that Mr Tulliver was delighted to find in
him a clergyman whose knowledge was so applicable to the everyday
affairs of this life. Except Counsellor Wylde, whom he had heard at the
last sessions, Mr Tulliver thought the Rev. Mr Stelling was the
shrewdest fellow he had ever met with,—not unlike Wylde, in fact; he
had the same way of sticking his thumbs in the armholes of his
waistcoat. Mr Tulliver was not by any means an exception in mistaking
brazenness for shrewdness; most laymen thought Stelling shrewd, and a
man of remarkable powers generally; it was chiefly by his clerical
brethren that he was considered rather a dull fellow. But he told Mr
Tulliver several stories about “Swing” and incendiarism, and asked his
advice about feeding pigs in so thoroughly secular and judicious a
manner, with so much polished glibness of tongue, that the miller
thought, here was the very thing he wanted for Tom. He had no doubt
this first-rate man was acquainted with every branch of information,
and knew exactly what Tom must learn in order to become a match for the
lawyers, which poor Mr Tulliver himself did _not_ know, and so was
necessarily thrown for self-direction on this wide kind of inference.
It is hardly fair to laugh at him, for I have known much more highly
instructed persons than he make inferences quite as wide, and not at
all wiser.
As for Mrs Tulliver, finding that Mrs Stelling’s views as to the airing
of linen and the frequent recurrence of hunger in a growing boy
entirely coincided with her own; moreover, that Mrs Stelling, though so
young a woman, and only anticipating her second confinement, had gone
through very nearly the same experience as herself with regard to the
behaviour and fundamental character of the monthly nurse,—she expressed
great contentment to her husband, when they drove away, at leaving Tom
with a woman who, in spite of her youth, seemed quite sensible and
motherly, and asked advice as prettily as could be.
“They must be very well off, though,” said Mrs Tulliver, “for
everything’s as nice as can be all over the house, and that watered
silk she had on cost a pretty penny. Sister Pullet has got one like
it.”
“Ah,” said Mr Tulliver, “he’s got some income besides the curacy, I
reckon. Perhaps her father allows ’em something. There’s Tom ’ull be
another hundred to him, and not much trouble either, by his own
account; he says teaching comes natural to him. That’s wonderful, now,”
added Mr Tulliver, turning his head on one side, and giving his horse a
meditative tickling on the flank.
Perhaps it was because teaching came naturally to Mr Stelling, that he
set about it with that uniformity of method and independence of
circumstances which distinguish the actions of animals understood to be
under the immediate teaching of nature. Mr Broderip’s amiable beaver,
as that charming naturalist tells us, busied himself as earnestly in
constructing a dam, in a room up three pair of stairs in London, as if
he had been laying his foundation in a stream or lake in Upper Canada.
It was “Binny’s” function to build; the absence of water or of possible
progeny was an accident for which he was not accountable. With the same
unerring instinct Mr Stelling set to work at his natural method of
instilling the Eton Grammar and Euclid into the mind of Tom Tulliver.
This, he considered, was the only basis of solid instruction; all other
means of education were mere charlatanism, and could produce nothing
better than smatterers. Fixed on this firm basis, a man might observe
the display of various or special knowledge made by irregularly
educated people with a pitying smile; all that sort of thing was very
well, but it was impossible these people could form sound opinions. In
holding this conviction Mr Stelling was not biassed, as some tutors
have been, by the excessive accuracy or extent of his own scholarship;
and as to his views about Euclid, no opinion could have been freer from
personal partiality. Mr Stelling was very far from being led astray by
enthusiasm, either religious or intellectual; on the other hand, he had
no secret belief that everything was humbug. He thought religion was a
very excellent thing, and Aristotle a great authority, and deaneries
and prebends useful institutions, and Great Britain the providential
bulwark of Protestantism, and faith in the unseen a great support to
afflicted minds; he believed in all these things, as a Swiss
hotel-keeper believes in the beauty of the scenery around him, and in
the pleasure it gives to artistic visitors. And in the same way Mr
Stelling believed in his method of education; he had no doubt that he
was doing the very best thing for Mr Tulliver’s boy. Of course, when
the miller talked of “mapping” and “summing” in a vague and diffident
manner, Mr Stelling had set his mind at rest by an assurance that he
understood what was wanted; for how was it possible the good man could
form any reasonable judgment about the matter? Mr Stelling’s duty was
to teach the lad in the only right way,—indeed he knew no other; he had
not wasted his time in the acquirement of anything abnormal.
He very soon set down poor Tom as a thoroughly stupid lad; for though
by hard labour he could get particular declensions into his brain,
anything so abstract as the relation between cases and terminations
could by no means get such a lodgment there as to enable him to
recognise a chance genitive or dative. This struck Mr Stelling as
something more than natural stupidity; he suspected obstinacy, or at
any rate indifference, and lectured Tom severely on his want of
thorough application. “You feel no interest in what you’re doing, sir,”
Mr Stelling would say, and the reproach was painfully true. Tom had
never found any difficulty in discerning a pointer from a setter, when
once he had been told the distinction, and his perceptive powers were
not at all deficient. I fancy they were quite as strong as those of the
Rev. Mr Stelling; for Tom could predict with accuracy what number of
horses were cantering behind him, he could throw a stone right into the
centre of a given ripple, he could guess to a fraction how many lengths
of his stick it would take to reach across the playground, and could
draw almost perfect squares on his slate without any measurement. But
Mr Stelling took no note of these things; he only observed that Tom’s
faculties failed him before the abstractions hideously symbolised to
him in the pages of the Eton Grammar, and that he was in a state
bordering on idiocy with regard to the demonstration that two given
triangles must be equal, though he could discern with great promptitude
and certainty the fact that they _were_ equal. Whence Mr Stelling
concluded that Tom’s brain, being peculiarly impervious to etymology
and demonstrations, was peculiarly in need of being ploughed and
harrowed by these patent implements; it was his favourite metaphor,
that the classics and geometry constituted that culture of the mind
which prepared it for the reception of any subsequent crop. I say
nothing against Mr Stelling’s theory; if we are to have one regimen for
all minds, his seems to me as good as any other. I only know it turned
out as uncomfortably for Tom Tulliver as if he had been plied with
cheese in order to remedy a gastric weakness which prevented him from
digesting it. It is astonishing what a different result one gets by
changing the metaphor! Once call the brain an intellectual stomach, and
one’s ingenious conception of the classics and geometry as ploughs and
harrows seems to settle nothing. But then it is open to some one else
to follow great authorities, and call the mind a sheet of white paper
or a mirror, in which case one’s knowledge of the digestive process
becomes quite irrelevant. It was doubtless an ingenious idea to call
the camel the ship of the desert, but it would hardly lead one far in
training that useful beast. O Aristotle! if you had had the advantage
of being “the freshest modern” instead of the greatest ancient, would
you not have mingled your praise of metaphorical speech, as a sign of
high intelligence, with a lamentation that intelligence so rarely shows
itself in speech without metaphor,—that we can so seldom declare what a
thing is, except by saying it is something else?
Tom Tulliver, being abundant in no form of speech, did not use any
metaphor to declare his views as to the nature of Latin; he never
called it an instrument of torture; and it was not until he had got on
some way in the next half-year, and in the Delectus, that he was
advanced enough to call it a “bore” and “beastly stuff.” At present, in
relation to this demand that he should learn Latin declensions and
conjugations, Tom was in a state of as blank unimaginativeness
concerning the cause and tendency of his sufferings, as if he had been
an innocent shrewmouse imprisoned in the split trunk of an ash-tree in
order to cure lameness in cattle. It is doubtless almost incredible to
instructed minds of the present day that a boy of twelve, not belonging
strictly to “the masses,” who are now understood to have the monopoly