The Mill on the Floss
hard, real life,—the unhappy-looking father, seated at the dull
breakfast-table; the childish, bewildered mother; the little sordid
tasks that filled the hours, or the more oppressive emptiness of weary,
joyless leisure; the need of some tender, demonstrative love; the cruel
sense that Tom didn’t mind what she thought or felt, and that they were
no longer playfellows together; the privation of all pleasant things
that had come to _her_ more than to others,—she wanted some key that
would enable her to understand, and in understanding, to endure, the
heavy weight that had fallen on her young heart. If she had been taught
“real learning and wisdom, such as great men knew,” she thought she
should have held the secrets of life; if she had only books, that she
might learn for herself what wise men knew! Saints and martyrs had
never interested Maggie so much as sages and poets. She knew little of
saints and martyrs, and had gathered, as a general result of her
teaching, that they were a temporary provision against the spread of
Catholicism, and had all died at Smithfield.
In one of these meditations it occurred to her that she had forgotten
Tom’s school-books, which had been sent home in his trunk. But she
found the stock unaccountably shrunk down to the few old ones which had
been well thumbed,—the Latin Dictionary and Grammar, a Delectus, a torn
Eutropius, the well-worn Virgil, Aldrich’s Logic, and the exasperating
Euclid. Still, Latin, Euclid, and Logic would surely be a considerable
step in masculine wisdom,—in that knowledge which made men contented,
and even glad to live. Not that the yearning for effectual wisdom was
quite unmixed; a certain mirage would now and then rise on the desert
of the future, in which she seemed to see herself honoured for her
surprising attainments. And so the poor child, with her soul’s hunger
and her illusions of self-flattery, began to nibble at this
thick-rinded fruit of the tree of knowledge, filling her vacant hours
with Latin, geometry, and the forms of the syllogism, and feeling a
gleam of triumph now and then that her understanding was quite equal to
these peculiarly masculine studies. For a week or two she went on
resolutely enough, though with an occasional sinking of heart, as if
she had set out toward the Promised Land alone, and found it a thirsty,
trackless, uncertain journey. In the severity of her early resolution,
she would take Aldrich out into the fields, and then look off her book
toward the sky, where the lark was twinkling, or to the reeds and
bushes by the river, from which the waterfowl rustled forth on its
anxious, awkward flight,—with a startled sense that the relation
between Aldrich and this living world was extremely remote for her. The
discouragement deepened as the days went on, and the eager heart gained
faster and faster on the patient mind. Somehow, when she sat at the
window with her book, her eyes _would_ fix themselves blankly on the
outdoor sunshine; then they would fill with tears, and sometimes, if
her mother was not in the room, the studies would all end in sobbing.
She rebelled against her lot, she fainted under its loneliness, and
fits even of anger and hatred toward her father and mother, who were so
unlike what she would have them to be; toward Tom, who checked her, and
met her thought or feeling always by some thwarting difference,—would
flow out over her affections and conscience like a lava stream, and
frighten her with a sense that it was not difficult for her to become a
demon. Then her brain would be busy with wild romances of a flight from
home in search of something less sordid and dreary; she would go to
some great man—Walter Scott, perhaps—and tell him how wretched and how
clever she was, and he would surely do something for her. But, in the
middle of her vision, her father would perhaps enter the room for the
evening, and, surprised that she sat still without noticing him, would
say complainingly, “Come, am I to fetch my slippers myself?” The voice
pierced through Maggie like a sword; there was another sadness besides
her own, and she had been thinking of turning her back on it and
forsaking it.
This afternoon, the sight of Bob’s cheerful freckled face had given her
discontent a new direction. She thought it was part of the hardship of
her life that there was laid upon her the burthen of larger wants than
others seemed to feel,—that she had to endure this wide, hopeless
yearning for that something, whatever it was, that was greatest and
best on this earth. She wished she could have been like Bob, with his
easily satisfied ignorance, or like Tom, who had something to do on
which he could fix his mind with a steady purpose, and disregard
everything else. Poor child! as she leaned her head against the
window-frame, with her hands clasped tighter and tighter, and her foot
beating the ground, she was as lonely in her trouble as if she had been
the only girl in the civilised world of that day who had come out of
her school-life with a soul untrained for inevitable struggles, with no
other part of her inherited share in the hard-won treasures of thought
which generations of painful toil have laid up for the race of men,
than shreds and patches of feeble literature and false history, with
much futile information about Saxon and other kings of doubtful
example, but unhappily quite without that knowledge of the irreversible
laws within and without her, which, governing the habits, becomes
morality, and developing the feelings of submission and dependence,
becomes religion,—as lonely in her trouble as if every other girl
besides herself had been cherished and watched over by elder minds, not
forgetful of their own early time, when need was keen and impulse
strong.
At last Maggie’s eyes glanced down on the books that lay on the
window-shelf, and she half forsook her reverie to turn over listlessly
the leaves of the “Portrait Gallery,” but she soon pushed this aside to
examine the little row of books tied together with string. “Beauties of
the Spectator,” “Rasselas,” “Economy of Human Life,” “Gregory’s
Letters,”—she knew the sort of matter that was inside all these; the
“Christian Year,”—that seemed to be a hymnbook, and she laid it down
again; but _Thomas à Kempis?_—the name had come across her in her
reading, and she felt the satisfaction, which every one knows, of
getting some ideas to attach to a name that strays solitary in the
memory. She took up the little, old, clumsy book with some curiosity;
it had the corners turned down in many places, and some hand, now
forever quiet, had made at certain passages strong pen-and-ink marks,
long since browned by time. Maggie turned from leaf to leaf, and read
where the quiet hand pointed: “Know that the love of thyself doth hurt
thee more than anything in the world.... If thou seekest this or that,
and wouldst be here or there to enjoy thy own will and pleasure, thou
shalt never be quiet nor free from care; for in everything somewhat
will be wanting, and in every place there will be some that will cross
thee.... Both above and below, which way soever thou dost turn thee,
everywhere thou shalt find the Cross; and everywhere of necessity thou
must have patience, if thou wilt have inward peace, and enjoy an
everlasting crown.... If thou desirest to mount unto this height, thou
must set out courageously, and lay the axe to the root, that thou
mayest pluck up and destroy that hidden inordinate inclination to
thyself, and unto all private and earthly good. On this sin, that a man
inordinately loveth himself, almost all dependeth, whatsoever is
thoroughly to be overcome; which evil being once overcome and subdued,
there will presently ensue great peace and tranquillity.... It is but
little thou sufferest in comparison of them that have suffered so much,
were so strongly tempted, so grievously afflicted, so many ways tried
and exercised. Thou oughtest therefore to call to mind the more heavy
sufferings of others, that thou mayest the easier bear thy little
adversities. And if they seem not little unto thee, beware lest thy
impatience be the cause thereof.... Blessed are those ears that receive
the whispers of the divine voice, and listen not to the whisperings of
the world. Blessed are those ears which hearken not unto the voice
which soundeth outwardly, but unto the Truth, which teacheth inwardly.”
A strange thrill of awe passed through Maggie while she read, as if she
had been wakened in the night by a strain of solemn music, telling of
beings whose souls had been astir while hers was in stupor. She went on
from one brown mark to another, where the quiet hand seemed to point,
hardly conscious that she was reading, seeming rather to listen while a
low voice said;
“Why dost thou here gaze about, since this is not the place of thy
rest? In heaven ought to be thy dwelling, and all earthly things are to
be looked on as they forward thy journey thither. All things pass away,
and thou together with them. Beware thou cleavest not unto them, lest
thou be entangled and perish.... If a man should give all his
substance, yet it is as nothing. And if he should do great penances,
yet are they but little. And if he should attain to all knowledge, he
is yet far off. And if he should be of great virtue, and very fervent
devotion, yet is there much wanting; to wit, one thing, which is most
necessary for him. What is that? That having left all, he leave
himself, and go wholly out of himself, and retain nothing of
self-love.... I have often said unto thee, and now again I say the
same, Forsake thyself, resign thyself, and thou shalt enjoy much inward
peace.... Then shall all vain imaginations, evil perturbations, and
superfluous cares fly away; then shall immoderate fear leave thee, and
inordinate love shall die.”
Maggie drew a long breath and pushed her heavy hair back, as if to see
a sudden vision more clearly. Here, then, was a secret of life that
would enable her to renounce all other secrets; here was a sublime
height to be reached without the help of outward things; here was
insight, and strength, and conquest, to be won by means entirely within
her own soul, where a supreme Teacher was waiting to be heard. It
flashed through her like the suddenly apprehended solution of a
problem, that all the miseries of her young life had come from fixing
her heart on her own pleasure, as if that were the central necessity of
the universe; and for the first time she saw the possibility of
shifting the position from which she looked at the gratification of her
own desires,—of taking her stand out of herself, and looking at her own
life as an insignificant part of a divinely guided whole. She read on
and on in the old book, devouring eagerly the dialogues with the
invisible Teacher, the pattern of sorrow, the source of all strength;
returning to it after she had been called away, and reading till the
sun went down behind the willows. With all the hurry of an imagination
that could never rest in the present, she sat in the deepening twilight
forming plans of self-humiliation and entire devotedness; and in the
ardor of first discovery, renunciation seemed to her the entrance into
that satisfaction which she had so long been craving in vain. She had
not perceived—how could she until she had lived longer?—the inmost
truth of the old monk’s out-pourings, that renunciation remains sorrow,
though a sorrow borne willingly. Maggie was still panting for
happiness, and was in ecstasy because she had found the key to it. She
knew nothing of doctrines and systems, of mysticism or quietism; but
this voice out of the far-off middle ages was the direct communication
of a human soul’s belief and experience, and came to Maggie as an
unquestioned message.
I suppose that is the reason why the small old-fashioned book, for