Chapter I
A Variation of Protestantism Unknown to Bossuet
Journeying down the Rhone on a summer's day, you have perhaps felt thesunshine made dreary by those ruined villages which stud the banks incertain parts of its course, telling how the swift river once rose,like an angry, destroying god, sweeping down the feeble generationswhose breath is in their nostrils, and making their dwellings adesolation. Strange contrast, you may have thought, between theeffect produced on us by these dismal remnants of commonplacehouses, which in their best days were but the sign of a sordid life,belonging in all its details to our own vulgar era, and the effectproduced by those ruins on the castled Rhine, which have crumbled andmellowed into such harmony with the green and rocky steeps that theyseem to have a natural fitness, like the mountain-pine; nay, even inthe day when they were built they must have had this fitness, as ifthey had been raised by an earth-born race, who had inherited fromtheir mighty parent a sublime instinct of form. And that was a day ofromance; If those robber-barons were somewhat grim and drunken ogres,they had a certain grandeur of the wild beast in them,--they wereforest boars with tusks, tearing and rending, not the ordinarydomestic grunter; they represented the demon forces forever incollision with beauty, virtue, and the gentle uses of life; they madea fine contrast in the picture with the wandering minstrel, thesoft-lipped princess, the pious recluse, and the timid Israelite. Thatwas a time of color, when the sunlight fell on glancing steel andfloating banners; a time of adventure and fierce struggle,--nay, ofliving, religious art and religious enthusiasm; for were notcathedrals built in those days, and did not great emperors leave theirWestern palaces to die before the infidel strongholds in the sacredEast? Therefore it is that these Rhine castles thrill me with a senseof poetry; they belong to the grand historic life of humanity, andraise up for me the vision of an echo. But these dead-tinted,hollow-eyed, angular skeletons of villages on the Rhone oppress mewith the feeling that human life--very much of it--is a narrow, ugly,grovelling existence, which even calamity does not elevate, but rathertends to exhibit in all its bare vulgarity of conception and I have acruel conviction that the lives these ruins are the traces of werepart of a gross sum of obscure vitality, that will be swept into thesame oblivion with the generations of ants and beavers.
Perhaps something akin to this oppressive feeling may have weighedupon you in watching this old-fashioned family life on the banks ofthe Floss, which even sorrow hardly suffices to lift above the levelof the tragi-comic. It is a sordid life, you say, this of theTullivers and Dodsons, irradiated by no sublime principles, noromantic visions, no active, self-renouncing faith; moved by none ofthose wild, uncontrollable passions which create the dark shadows ofmisery and crime; without that primitive, rough simplicity of wants,that hard, submissive, ill-paid toil, that childlike spelling-out ofwhat nature has written, which gives its poetry to peasant life. Hereone has conventional worldly notions and habits without instructionand without polish, surely the most prosaic form of human life; proudrespectability in a gig of unfashionable build; worldliness withoutside-dishes. Observing these people narrowly, even when the iron handof misfortune has shaken them from their unquestioning hold on theworld, one sees little trace of religion, still less of adistinctively Christian creed. Their belief in the Unseen, so far asit manifests itself at all, seems to be rather a pagan kind; theirmoral notions, though held with strong tenacity, seem to have nostandard beyond hereditary custom. You could not live among suchpeople; you are stifled for want of an outlet toward somethingbeautiful, great, or noble; you are irritated with these dull men andwomen, as a kind of population out of keeping with the earth on whichthey live,--with this rich plain where the great river flows foreveronward, and links the small pulse of the old English town with thebeatings of the world's mighty heart. A vigorous superstition, thatlashes its gods or lashes its own back, seems to be more congruouswith the mystery of the human lot, than the mental condition of theseemmet-like Dodsons and Tullivers.
I share with you this sense of oppressive narrowness; but it isnecessary that we should feel it, if we care to understand how itacted on the lives of Tom and Maggie,--how it has acted on youngnatures in many generations, that in the onward tendency of humanthings have risen above the mental level of the generation beforethem, to which they have been nevertheless tied by the strongestfibres of their hearts. The suffering, whether of martyr or victim,which belongs to every historical advance of mankind, is representedin this way in every town, and by hundreds of obscure hearths; and weneed not shrink from this comparison of small things with great; fordoes not science tell us that its highest striving is after theascertainment of a unity which shall bind the smallest things with thegreatest? In natural science, I have understood, there is nothingpetty to the mind that has a large vision of relations, and to whichevery single object suggests a vast sum of conditions. It is surelythe same with the observation of human life.
Certainly the religious and moral ideas of the Dodsons and Tulliverswere of too specific a kind to be arrived at deductively, from thestatement that they were part of the Protestant population of GreatBritain. Their theory of life had its core of soundness, as alltheories must have on which decent and prosperous families have beenreared and have flourished; but it had the very slightest tincture oftheology. If, in the maiden days of the Dodson sisters, their Biblesopened more easily at some parts than others, it was because of driedtulip-petals, which had been distributed quite impartially, withoutpreference for the historical, devotional, or doctrinal. Theirreligion was of a simple, semi-pagan kind, but there was no heresy init,--if heresy properly means choice,--for they didn't know there wasany other religion, except that of chapel-goers, which appeared to runin families, like asthma. How _should_ they know? The vicar of theirpleasant rural parish was not a controversialist, but a good hand atwhist, and one who had a joke always ready for a blooming femaleparishioner. The religion of the Dodsons consisted in reveringwhatever was customary and respectable; it was necessary to bebaptized, else one could not be buried in the church-yard, and to takethe sacrament before death, as a security against more dimlyunderstood perils; but it was of equal necessity to have the properpall-bearers and well-cured hams at one's funeral, and to leave anunimpeachable will. A Dodson would not be taxed with the omission ofanything that was becoming, or that belonged to that eternal fitnessof things which was plainly indicated in the practice of the mostsubstantial parishioners, and in the family traditions,--such asobedience to parents, faithfulness to kindred, industry, rigidhonesty, thrift, the thorough scouring of wooden and copper utensils,the hoarding of coins likely to disappear from the currency, theproduction of first-rate commodities for the market, and the generalpreference of whatever was home-made. The Dodsons were a very proudrace, and their pride lay in the utter frustration of all desire totax them with a breach of traditional duty or propriety. A wholesomepride in many respects, since it identified honor with perfectintegrity, thoroughness of work, and faithfulness to admitted rules;and society owes some worthy qualities in many of her members tomothers of the Dodson class, who made their butter and their fromentywell, and would have felt disgraced to make it otherwise. To be honestand poor was never a Dodson motto, still less to seem rich thoughbeing poor; rather, the family badge was to be honest and rich, andnot only rich, but richer than was supposed. To live respected, andhave the proper bearers at your funeral, was an achievement of theends of existence that would be entirely nullified if, on the readingof your will, you sank in the opinion of your fellow-men, either byturning out to be poorer than they expected, or by leaving your moneyin a capricious manner, without strict regard to degrees of kin. Theright thing must always be done toward kindred. The right thing was tocorrect them severely, if they were other than a credit to the family,but still not to alienate from them the smallest rightful share in thefamily shoebuckles and other property. A conspicuous quality in theDodson character was its genuineness; its vices and virtues alike werephases of a proud honest egoism, which had a hearty dislike towhatever made against its own credit and interest, and would befrankly hard of speech to inconvenient ”kin,” but would never forsakeor ignore them,--would not let them want bread, but only require themto eat it with bitter herbs.
The same sort of traditional belief ran in the Tulliver veins, but itwas carried in richer blood, having elements of generous imprudence,warm affection, and hot-tempered rashness. Mr. Tulliver's grandfatherhad been heard to say that he was descended from one Ralph Tulliver, awonderfully clever fellow, who had ruined himself. It is likely enoughthat the clever Ralph was a high liver, rode spirited horses, and wasvery decidedly of his own opinion. On the other hand, nobody had everheard of a Dodson who had ruined himself; it was not the way of thatfamily.
If such were the views of life on which the Dodsons and Tullivers hadbeen reared in the praiseworthy past of Pitt and high prices, you willinfer from what you already know concerning the state of society inSt. Ogg's, that there had been no highly modifying influence to act onthem in their maturer life. It was still possible, even in that latertime of anti-Catholic preaching, for people to hold many pagan ideas,and believe themselves good church-people, notwithstanding; so we needhardly feel any surprise at the fact that Mr. Tulliver, though aregular church-goer, recorded his vindictiveness on the fly-leaf ofhis Bible. It was not that any harm could be said concerning the vicarof that charming rural parish to which Dorlcote Mill belonged; he wasa man of excellent family, an irreproachable bachelor, of elegantpursuits,--had taken honors, and held a fellowship. Mr. Tulliverregarded him with dutiful respect, as he did everything else belongingto the church-service; but he considered that church was one thing andcommon-sense another, and he wanted nobody to tell _him_ whatcommonsense was. Certain seeds which are required to find a nidus forthemselves under unfavorable circumstances have been supplied bynature with an apparatus of hooks, so that they will get a hold onvery unreceptive surfaces. The spiritual seed which had been scatteredover Mr. Tulliver had apparently been destitute of any correspondingprovision, and had slipped off to the winds again, from a totalabsence of hooks.