The Mill on the Floss
humour or happy mood. The slight spurt of peevish susceptibility which
had escaped him in their first interview was a symptom of a perpetually
recurring mental ailment, half of it nervous irritability, half of it
the heart-bitterness produced by the sense of his deformity. In these
fits of susceptibility every glance seemed to him to be charged either
with offensive pity or with ill-repressed disgust; at the very least it
was an indifferent glance, and Philip felt indifference as a child of
the south feels the chill air of a northern spring. Poor Tom’s
blundering patronage when they were out of doors together would
sometimes make him turn upon the well-meaning lad quite savagely; and
his eyes, usually sad and quiet, would flash with anything but playful
lightning. No wonder Tom retained his suspicions of the humpback.
But Philip’s self-taught skill in drawing was another link between
them; for Tom found, to his disgust, that his new drawing-master gave
him no dogs and donkeys to draw, but brooks and rustic bridges and
ruins, all with a general softness of black-lead surface, indicating
that nature, if anything, was rather satiny; and as Tom’s feeling for
the picturesque in landscape was at present quite latent, it is not
surprising that Mr Goodrich’s productions seemed to him an
uninteresting form of art. Mr Tulliver, having a vague intention that
Tom should be put to some business which included the drawing out of
plans and maps, had complained to Mr Riley, when he saw him at Mudport,
that Tom seemed to be learning nothing of that sort; whereupon that
obliging adviser had suggested that Tom should have drawing-lessons. Mr
Tulliver must not mind paying extra for drawing; let Tom be made a good
draughtsman, and he would be able to turn his pencil to any purpose. So
it was ordered that Tom should have drawing-lessons; and whom should Mr
Stelling have selected as a master if not Mr Goodrich, who was
considered quite at the head of his profession within a circuit of
twelve miles round King’s Lorton? By which means Tom learned to make an
extremely fine point to his pencil, and to represent landscape with a
“broad generality,” which, doubtless from a narrow tendency in his mind
to details, he thought extremely dull.
All this, you remember, happened in those dark ages when there were no
schools of design; before schoolmasters were invariably men of
scrupulous integrity, and before the clergy were all men of enlarged
minds and varied culture. In those less favoured days, it is no fable
that there were other clergymen besides Mr Stelling who had narrow
intellects and large wants, and whose income, by a logical confusion to
which Fortune, being a female as well as blindfold, is peculiarly
liable, was proportioned not to their wants but to their intellect,
with which income has clearly no inherent relation. The problem these
gentlemen had to solve was to readjust the proportion between their
wants and their income; and since wants are not easily starved to
death, the simpler method appeared to be to raise their income. There
was but one way of doing this; any of those low callings in which men
are obliged to do good work at a low price were forbidden to clergymen;
was it their fault if their only resource was to turn out very poor
work at a high price? Besides, how should Mr Stelling be expected to
know that education was a delicate and difficult business, any more
than an animal endowed with a power of boring a hole through a rock
should be expected to have wide views of excavation? Mr Stelling’s
faculties had been early trained to boring in a straight line, and he
had no faculty to spare. But among Tom’s contemporaries, whose fathers
cast their sons on clerical instruction to find them ignorant after
many days, there were many far less lucky than Tom Tulliver. Education
was almost entirely a matter of luck—usually of ill-luck—in those
distant days. The state of mind in which you take a billiard-cue or a
dice-box in your hand is one of sober certainty compared with that of
old-fashioned fathers, like Mr Tulliver, when they selected a school or
a tutor for their sons. Excellent men, who had been forced all their
lives to spell on an impromptu-phonetic system, and having carried on a
successful business in spite of this disadvantage, had acquired money
enough to give their sons a better start in life than they had had
themselves, must necessarily take their chance as to the conscience and
the competence of the schoolmaster whose circular fell in their way,
and appeared to promise so much more than they would ever have thought
of asking for, including the return of linen, fork, and spoon. It was
happy for them if some ambitious draper of their acquaintance had not
brought up his son to the Church, and if that young gentleman, at the
age of four-and-twenty, had not closed his college dissipations by an
imprudent marriage; otherwise, these innocent fathers, desirous of
doing the best for their offspring, could only escape the draper’s son
by happening to be on the foundation of a grammar-school as yet
unvisited by commissioners, where two or three boys could have, all to
themselves, the advantages of a large and lofty building, together with
a head-master, toothless, dim-eyed and deaf, whose erudite
indistinctness and inattention were engrossed by them at the rate of
three hundred pounds a-head,—a ripe scholar, doubtless, when first
appointed; but all ripeness beneath the sun has a further stage less
esteemed in the market.
Tom Tulliver, then, compared with many other British youths of his time
who have since had to scramble through life with some fragments of more
or less relevant knowledge, and a great deal of strictly relevant
ignorance, was not so very unlucky. Mr Stelling was a broad-chested,
healthy man, with the bearing of a gentleman, a conviction that a
growing boy required a sufficiency of beef, and a certain hearty
kindness in him that made him like to see Tom looking well and enjoying
his dinner; not a man of refined conscience, or with any deep sense of
the infinite issues belonging to everyday duties, not quite competent
to his high offices; but incompetent gentlemen must live, and without
private fortune it is difficult to see how they could all live
genteelly if they had nothing to do with education or government.
Besides, it was the fault of Tom’s mental constitution that his
faculties could not be nourished on the sort of knowledge Mr Stelling
had to communicate. A boy born with a deficient power of apprehending
signs and abstractions must suffer the penalty of his congenital
deficiency, just as if he had been born with one leg shorter than the
other. A method of education sanctioned by the long practice of our
venerable ancestors was not to give way before the exceptional dulness
of a boy who was merely living at the time then present. And Mr
Stelling was convinced that a boy so stupid at signs and abstractions
must be stupid at everything else, even if that reverend gentleman
could have taught him everything else. It was the practice of our
venerable ancestors to apply that ingenious instrument the thumb-screw,
and to tighten and tighten it in order to elicit non-existent facts;
they had a fixed opinion to begin with, that the facts were existent,
and what had they to do but to tighten the thumb-screw? In like manner,
Mr Stelling had a fixed opinion that all boys with any capacity could
learn what it was the only regular thing to teach; if they were slow,
the thumb-screw must be tightened,—the exercises must be insisted on
with increased severity, and a page of Virgil be awarded as a penalty,
to encourage and stimulate a too languid inclination to Latin verse.
The thumb-screw was a little relaxed, however, during this second
half-year. Philip was so advanced in his studies, and so apt, that Mr
Stelling could obtain credit by his facility, which required little
help, much more easily than by the troublesome process of overcoming
Tom’s dulness. Gentlemen with broad chests and ambitious intentions do
sometimes disappoint their friends by failing to carry the world before
them. Perhaps it is that high achievements demand some other unusual
qualification besides an unusual desire for high prizes; perhaps it is
that these stalwart gentlemen are rather indolent, their _divinæ
particulum auræ_ being obstructed from soaring by a too hearty
appetite. Some reason or other there was why Mr Stelling deferred the
execution of many spirited projects,—why he did not begin the editing
of his Greek play, or any other work of scholarship, in his leisure
hours, but, after turning the key of his private study with much
resolution, sat down to one of Theodore Hook’s novels. Tom was
gradually allowed to shuffle through his lessons with less rigor, and
having Philip to help him, he was able to make some show of having
applied his mind in a confused and blundering way, without being
cross-examined into a betrayal that his mind had been entirely neutral
in the matter. He thought school much more bearable under this
modification of circumstances; and he went on contentedly enough,
picking up a promiscuous education chiefly from things that were not
intended as education at all. What was understood to be his education
was simply the practice of reading, writing, and spelling, carried on
by an elaborate appliance of unintelligible ideas, and by much failure
in the effort to learn by rote.
Nevertheless, there was a visible improvement in Tom under this
training; perhaps because he was not a boy in the abstract, existing
solely to illustrate the evils of a mistaken education, but a boy made
of flesh and blood, with dispositions not entirely at the mercy of
circumstances.
There was a great improvement in his bearing, for example; and some
credit on this score was due to Mr Poulter, the village schoolmaster,
who, being an old Peninsular soldier, was employed to drill Tom,—a
source of high mutual pleasure. Mr Poulter, who was understood by the
company at the Black Swan to have once struck terror into the hearts of
the French, was no longer personally formidable. He had rather a
shrunken appearance, and was tremulous in the mornings, not from age,
but from the extreme perversity of the King’s Lorton boys, which
nothing but gin could enable him to sustain with any firmness. Still,
he carried himself with martial erectness, had his clothes scrupulously
brushed, and his trousers tightly strapped; and on the Wednesday and
Saturday afternoons, when he came to Tom, he was always inspired with
gin and old memories, which gave him an exceptionally spirited air, as
of a superannuated charger who hears the drum. The drilling-lessons
were always protracted by episodes of warlike narrative, much more
interesting to Tom than Philip’s stories out of the Iliad; for there
were no cannon in the Iliad, and besides, Tom had felt some disgust on
learning that Hector and Achilles might possibly never have existed.
But the Duke of Wellington was really alive, and Bony had not been long
dead; therefore Mr Poulter’s reminiscences of the Peninsular War were
removed from all suspicion of being mythical. Mr Poulter, it appeared,
had been a conspicuous figure at Talavera, and had contributed not a
little to the peculiar terror with which his regiment of infantry was
regarded by the enemy. On afternoons when his memory was more
stimulated than usual, he remembered that the Duke of Wellington had
(in strict privacy, lest jealousies should be awakened) expressed his
esteem for that fine fellow Poulter. The very surgeon who attended him
in the hospital after he had received his gunshot-wound had been
profoundly impressed with the superiority of Mr Poulter’s flesh,—no
other flesh would have healed in anything like the same time. On less