The Mill on the Floss
which you need only pay sixpence at a book-stall, works miracles to
this day, turning bitter waters into sweetness; while expensive sermons
and treatises, newly issued, leave all things as they were before. It
was written down by a hand that waited for the heart’s prompting; it is
the chronicle of a solitary, hidden anguish, struggle, trust, and
triumph, not written on velvet cushions to teach endurance to those who
are treading with bleeding feet on the stones. And so it remains to all
time a lasting record of human needs and human consolations; the voice
of a brother who, ages ago, felt and suffered and renounced,—in the
cloister, perhaps, with serge gown and tonsured head, with much
chanting and long fasts, and with a fashion of speech different from
ours,—but under the same silent far-off heavens, and with the same
passionate desires, the same strivings, the same failures, the same
weariness.
In writing the history of unfashionable families, one is apt to fall
into a tone of emphasis which is very far from being the tone of good
society, where principles and beliefs are not only of an extremely
moderate kind, but are always presupposed, no subjects being eligible
but such as can be touched with a light and graceful irony. But then
good society has its claret and its velvet carpets, its
dinner-engagements six weeks deep, its opera and its faëry ball-rooms;
rides off its _ennui_ on thoroughbred horses; lounges at the club; has
to keep clear of crinoline vortices; gets its science done by Faraday,
and its religion by the superior clergy who are to be met in the best
houses,—how should it have time or need for belief and emphasis? But
good society, floated on gossamer wings of light irony, is of very
expensive production; requiring nothing less than a wide and arduous
national life condensed in unfragrant deafening factories, cramping
itself in mines, sweating at furnaces, grinding, hammering, weaving
under more or less oppression of carbonic acid, or else, spread over
sheepwalks, and scattered in lonely houses and huts on the clayey or
chalky corn-lands, where the rainy days look dreary. This wide national
life is based entirely on emphasis,—the emphasis of want, which urges
it into all the activities necessary for the maintenance of good
society and light irony; it spends its heavy years often in a chill,
uncarpeted fashion, amidst family discord unsoftened by long corridors.
Under such circumstances, there are many among its myriads of souls who
have absolutely needed an emphatic belief, life in this unpleasurable
shape demanding some solution even to unspeculative minds,—just as you
inquire into the stuffing of your couch when anything galls you there,
whereas eider-down and perfect French springs excite no question. Some
have an emphatic belief in alcohol, and seek their _ekstasis_ or
outside standing-ground in gin; but the rest require something that
good society calls “enthusiasm,” something that will present motives in
an entire absence of high prizes; something that will give patience and
feed human love when the limbs ache with weariness, and human looks are
hard upon us; something, clearly, that lies outside personal desires,
that includes resignation for ourselves and active love for what is not
ourselves. Now and then that sort of enthusiasm finds a far-echoing
voice that comes from an experience springing out of the deepest need;
and it was by being brought within the long lingering vibrations of
such a voice that Maggie, with her girl’s face and unnoted sorrows,
found an effort and a hope that helped her through years of loneliness,
making out a faith for herself without the aid of established
authorities and appointed guides; for they were not at hand, and her
need was pressing. From what you know of her, you will not be surprised
that she threw some exaggeration and wilfulness, some pride and
impetuosity, even into her self-renunciation; her own life was still a
drama for her, in which she demanded of herself that her part should be
played with intensity. And so it came to pass that she often lost the
spirit of humility by being excessive in the outward act; she often
strove after too high a flight, and came down with her poor little
half-fledged wings dabbled in the mud. For example, she not only
determined to work at plain sewing, that she might contribute something
toward the fund in the tin box, but she went, in the first instance, in
her zeal of self-mortification, to ask for it at a linen shop in St
Ogg’s, instead of getting it in a more quiet and indirect way; and
could see nothing but what was entirely wrong and unkind, nay,
persecuting, in Tom’s reproof of her for this unnecessary act. “I don’t
like _my_ sister to do such things,” said Tom, “_I’ll_ take care that
the debts are paid, without your lowering yourself in that way.” Surely
there was some tenderness and bravery mingled with the worldliness and
self-assertion of that little speech; but Maggie held it as dross,
overlooking the grains of gold, and took Tom’s rebuke as one of her
outward crosses. Tom was very hard to her, she used to think, in her
long night-watchings,—to her who had always loved him so; and then she
strove to be contented with that hardness, and to require nothing. That
is the path we all like when we set out on our abandonment of
egoism,—the path of martyrdom and endurance, where the palm-branches
grow, rather than the steep highway of tolerance, just allowance, and
self-blame, where there are no leafy honours to be gathered and worn.
The old books, Virgil, Euclid, and Aldrich—that wrinkled fruit of the
tree of knowledge—had been all laid by; for Maggie had turned her back
on the vain ambition to share the thoughts of the wise. In her first
ardor she flung away the books with a sort of triumph that she had
risen above the need of them; and if they had been her own, she would
have burned them, believing that she would never repent. She read so
eagerly and constantly in her three books, the Bible, Thomas à Kempis,
and the “Christian Year” (no longer rejected as a “hymn-book”), that
they filled her mind with a continual stream of rhythmic memories; and
she was too ardently learning to see all nature and life in the light
of her new faith, to need any other material for her mind to work on,
as she sat with her well-plied needle, making shirts and other
complicated stitchings, falsely called “plain,”—by no means plain to
Maggie, since wristband and sleeve and the like had a capability of
being sewed in wrong side outward in moments of mental wandering.
Hanging diligently over her sewing, Maggie was a sight any one might
have been pleased to look at. That new inward life of hers,
notwithstanding some volcanic upheavings of imprisoned passions, yet
shone out in her face with a tender soft light that mingled itself as
added loveliness with the gradually enriched colour and outline of her
blossoming youth. Her mother felt the change in her with a sort of
puzzled wonder that Maggie should be “growing up so good”; it was
amazing that this once “contrairy” child was become so submissive, so
backward to assert her own will. Maggie used to look up from her work
and find her mother’s eyes fixed upon her; they were watching and
waiting for the large young glance, as if her elder frame got some
needful warmth from it. The mother was getting fond of her tall, brown
girl,—the only bit of furniture now on which she could bestow her
anxiety and pride; and Maggie, in spite of her own ascetic wish to have
no personal adornment, was obliged to give way to her mother about her
hair, and submit to have the abundant black locks plaited into a
coronet on the summit of her head, after the pitiable fashion of those
antiquated times.
“Let your mother have that bit o’ pleasure, my dear,” said Mrs
Tulliver; “I’d trouble enough with your hair once.”
So Maggie, glad of anything that would soothe her mother, and cheer
their long day together, consented to the vain decoration, and showed a
queenly head above her old frocks, steadily refusing, however, to look
at herself in the glass. Mrs Tulliver liked to call the father’s
attention to Maggie’s hair and other unexpected virtues, but he had a
brusque reply to give.
“I knew well enough what she’d be, before now,—it’s nothing new to me.
But it’s a pity she isn’t made o’ commoner stuff; she’ll be thrown
away, I doubt,—there’ll be nobody to marry her as is fit for her.”
And Maggie’s graces of mind and body fed his gloom. He sat patiently
enough while she read him a chapter, or said something timidly when
they were alone together about trouble being turned into a blessing. He
took it all as part of his daughter’s goodness, which made his
misfortunes the sadder to him because they damaged her chance in life.
In a mind charged with an eager purpose and an unsatisfied
vindictiveness, there is no room for new feelings; Mr Tulliver did not
want spiritual consolation—he wanted to shake off the degradation of
debt, and to have his revenge.
BOOK FIFTH
WHEAT AND TARES.
Chapter I.
In the Red Deeps
The family sitting-room was a long room with a window at each end; one
looking toward the croft and along the Ripple to the banks of the
Floss, the other into the mill-yard. Maggie was sitting with her work
against the latter window when she saw Mr Wakem entering the yard, as
usual, on his fine black horse; but not alone, as usual. Some one was
with him,—a figure in a cloak, on a handsome pony. Maggie had hardly
time to feel that it was Philip come back, before they were in front of
the window, and he was raising his hat to her; while his father,
catching the movement by a side-glance, looked sharply round at them
both.
Maggie hurried away from the window and carried her work upstairs; for
Mr Wakem sometimes came in and inspected the books, and Maggie felt
that the meeting with Philip would be robbed of all pleasure in the
presence of the two fathers. Some day, perhaps, she could see him when
they could just shake hands, and she could tell him that she remembered
his goodness to Tom, and the things he had said to her in the old days,
though they could never be friends any more. It was not at all
agitating to Maggie to see Philip again; she retained her childish
gratitude and pity toward him, and remembered his cleverness; and in
the early weeks of her loneliness she had continually recalled the
image of him among the people who had been kind to her in life, often
wishing she had him for a brother and a teacher, as they had fancied it
might have been, in their talk together. But that sort of wishing had
been banished along with other dreams that savored of seeking her own
will; and she thought, besides, that Philip might be altered by his
life abroad,—he might have become worldly, and really not care about
her saying anything to him now. And yet his face was wonderfully little
altered,—it was only a larger, more manly copy of the pale,
small-featured boy’s face, with the gray eyes, and the boyish waving
brown hair; there was the old deformity to awaken the old pity; and
after all her meditations, Maggie felt that she really _should_ like to
say a few words to him. He might still be melancholy, as he always used
to be, and like her to look at him kindly. She wondered if he
remembered how he used to like her eyes; with that thought Maggie
glanced toward the square looking-glass which was condemned to hang
with its face toward the wall, and she half started from her seat to
reach it down; but she checked herself and snatched up her work, trying
to repress the rising wishes by forcing her memory to recall snatches
of hymns, until she saw Philip and his father returning along the road,
and she could go down again.