by George Eliot
Scenes of Clerical Life
Scenes of Clerical Life
George Eliot
This page copyright � 2002 Blackmask Online.
http://www.blackmask.com
VOL. I. THE SAD FORTUNES OF THE REV. AMOS BARTON.
CHAPTER I.
CHAPTER II.
CHAPTER III.
CHAPTER IV.
CHAPTER V.
CHAPTER VI.
CHAPTER VII.
CHAPTER VIII.
CHAPTER IX.
CHAPTER X.
CONCLUSION.
MR GILFIL'S LOVE-STORY
CHAPTER I.
CHAPTER II.
CHAPTER III.
CHAPTER IV.
CHAPTER V.
CHAPTER VI.
CHAPTER VII.
CHAPTER VIII.
CHAPTER IX.
CHAPTER X.
CHAPTER XI.
CHAPTER XII.
CHAPTER XIII.
CHAPTER XIV.
CHAPTER XV.
CHAPTER XVI.
CHAPTER XVII.
VOL. II. MR GILFIL'S LOVE-STORY
CHAPTER XVIII.
CHAPTER XIX.
CHAPTER XX.
CHAPTER XXI.
EPILOGUE.
JANET'S REPENTANCE
CHAPTER I.
CHAPTER II.
CHAPTER III.
CHAPTER IV.
CHAPTER V.
CHAPTER VI.
CHAPTER VII.
CHAPTER VIII.
CHAPTER IX.
GRAND ENTERTAINMENT!!!
CHAPTER X.
CHAPTER XI.
CHAPTER XII.
CHAPTER XIII.
CHAPTER XIV.
CHAPTER XV.
CHAPTER XVI.
CHAPTER XVII.
CHAPTER XVIII.
CHAPTER XIX.
CHAPTER XX.
CHAPTER XXI.
CHAPTER XXII.
CHAPTER XXIII.
CHAPTER XXIV.
CHAPTER XXV.
CHAPTER XXVI.
CHAPTER XXVII.
CHAPTER XXVIII.
VOL. I. THE SAD FORTUNES OF THE REV. AMOS BARTON.
CHAPTER I.
Shepperton Church was a very different-looking building five-and-twenty years
ago. To be sure, its substantial stone tower looks at you through its
intelligent eye, the clock, with the friendly expression of former days; but in
everything else what changes! Now there is a wide span of slated roof flanking
the old steeple; the windows are tall and symmetrical; the outer doors are
resplendent with oak-graining, the inner doors reverentially noiseless with a
garment of red baize; and the walls, you are convinced, no lichen will ever
again effect a settlement on�they are smooth and innutrient as the summit of the
Rev. Amos Barton's head, after ten years of baldness and supererogatory soap.
Pass through the baize doors and you will see the nave filled with well-shaped
benches, understood to be free seats; while in certain eligible corners, less
directly under the fire of the clergyman's eye, there are pews reserved for the
Shepperton gentility. Ample galleries are supported on iron pillars, and in one
of them stands the crowning glory, the very clasp or aigrette of Shepperton
church-adornment� namely, an organ, not very much out of repair, on which a
collector of small rents, differentiated by the force of circumstances into an
organist, will accompany the alacrity of your departure after the blessing, by a
sacred minuet or an easy "Gloria."
Immense improvement! says the well-regulated mind, which unintermittingly
rejoices in the New Police, the Tithe Commutation Act, the pennypost, and all
guarantees of human advancement, and has no moments when conservative-reforming
intellect takes a nap, while imagination does a little Toryism by the sly,
revelling in regret that dear, old, brown, crumbling, picturesque inefficiency
is everywhere giving place to spick-and-span new-painted, new-varnished
efficiency, which will yield endless diagrams, plans, elevations, and sections,
but alas! no picture. Mine, I fear, is not a well-regulated mind: it has an
occasional tenderness for old abuses; it lingers with a certain fondness over
the days of nasal clerks and top-booted parsons, and has a sigh for the departed
shades of vulgar errors. So it is not surprising that I recall with a fond
sadness Shepperton Church as it was in the old days, with its outer coat of
rough stucco, its red-tiled roof, its heterogeneous windows patched with
desultory bits of painted glass, and its little flight of steps with their
wooden rail running up the outer wall, and leading to the school-children's
gallery.
Then inside, what dear old quaintnesses! which I began to look at with delight,
even when I was so crude a member of the congregation, that my nurse found it
necessary to provide for the reinforcement of my devotional patience by
smuggling bread-and-butter into the sacred edifice. There was the chancel,
guarded by two little cherubims looking uncomfortably squeezed between arch and
wall, and adorned with the escutcheons of the Oldinport family, which showed me
inexhaustible possibilities of meaning in their blood-red hands, their
death's-heads and cross-bones, their leopards' paws, and Maltese crosses. There
were inscriptions on the panels of the singing-gallery, telling of benefactions
to the poor of Shepperton, with an involuted elegance of capitals and final
flourishes, which my alphabetic erudition traced with ever-new delight. No
benches in those days; but huge roomy pews, round which devout church-goers sat
during "lessons," trying to look anywhere else than into each other's eyes. No
low partitions allowing you, with a dreary absence of contrast and mystery, to
see everything at all moments; but tall dark panels, under whose shadow I sank
with a sense of retirement through the Litany, only to feel with more intensity
my burst into the conspicuousness of public life when I was made to stand up on
the seat during the psalms or the singing.
And the singing was no mechanical affair of official routine; it had a drama. As
the moment of psalmody approached, by some process to me as mysterious and
untraceable as the opening of the flowers or the breaking-out of the stars, a
slate appeared in front of the gallery, advertising in bold characters the psalm
about to be sung, lest the sonorous announcement of the clerk should still leave
the bucolic mind in doubt on that head. Then followed the migration of the clerk
to the gallery, where, in company with a bassoon, two key-bugles, a carpenter
understood to have an amazing power of singing "counter," and two lesser musical
stars, he formed the complement of a choir regarded in Shepperton as one of
distinguished attraction, occasionally known to draw hearers from the next
parish. The innovation of hymn-books was as yet undreamed of; even the New
Version was regarded with a sort of melancholy tolerance, as part of the common
degeneracy in a time when prices had dwindled, and a cotton gown was no longer
stout enough to last a lifetime; for the lyrical taste of the best heads in
Shepperton had been formed on Sternhold and Hopkins. But the greatest triumphs
of the Shepperton choir were reserved for the Sundays when the slate announced
an Anthem, with a dignified abstinence from particularisation, both words and
music lying far beyond the reach of the most ambitious amateur in the
congregation:�an anthem in which the key-bugles always ran away at a great pace,
while the bassoon every now and then boomed a flying shot after them.
As for the clergyman, Mr Gilfil, an excellent old gentleman, who smoked very
long pipes and preached very short sermons, I must not speak of him, or I might
be tempted to tell the story of his life, which had its little romance, as most
lives have between the ages of teetotum and tobacco. And at present I am
concerned with quite another sort of clergyman�the Rev. Amos Barton, who did not
come to Shepperton until long after Mr Gilfil had departed this life�until after
an interval in which Evangelicalism and the Catholic Question had begun to
agitate the rustic mind with controversial debates. A Popish blacksmith had
produced a strong Protestant reaction by declaring that, as soon as the
Emancipation Bill was passed, he should do a great stroke of business in
gridirons; and the disinclination of the Shepperton parishioners generally to
dim the unique glory of St Lawrence, rendered the Church and Constitution an
affair of their business and bosoms. A zealous evangelical preacher had made the
old sounding-board vibrate with quite a different sort of elocution from Mr
Gilfil's; the hymn-book had almost superseded the Old and New Versions; and the
great square pews were crowded with new faces from distant corners of the
parish�perhaps from dissenting chapels.
You are not imagining, I hope, that Amos Barton was the incumbent of Shepperton.
He was no such thing. Those were days when a man could hold three small livings,
starve a curate a-piece on two of them, and live badly himself on the third. It
was so with the Vicar of Shepperton; a vicar given to bricks and mortar, and
thereby running into debt far away in a northern country�who executed his
vicarial functions towards Shepperton by pocketing the sum of thirty-five pounds
ten per annum, the net surplus remaining to him from the proceeds of that
living, after the disbursement of eighty pounds as the annual stipend of his
curate. And now, pray, can you solve me the following problem? Given a man with
a wife and six children: let him be obliged always to exhibit himself when
outside his own door in a suit of black broadcloth, such as will not undermine
the foundations of the Establishment by a paltry plebeian glossiness or an
unseemly whiteness at the edges; in a snowy cravat, which is a serious
investment of labour in the hemming, starching, and ironing departments; and in
a hat which shows no symptom of taking to the hideous doctrine of expediency,
and shaping itself according to circumstances; let him have a parish large
enough to create an external necessity for abundant shoe-leather, and an
internal necessity for abundant beef and mutton, as well as poor enough to
require frequent priestly consolation in the shape of shillings and sixpences;
and, lastly, let him be compelled, by his own pride and other people's, to dress
his wife and children with gentility from bonnet-strings to shoe-strings. By
what process of division can the sum of eighty pounds per annum be made to yield
a quotient which will cover that man's weekly expenses? This was the problem
presented by the position of the Rev. Amos Barton, as curate of Shepperton,
rather more than twenty years ago.
What was thought of this problem, and of the man who had to work it out, by some
of the well-to-do inhabitants of Shepperton, two years or more after Mr Barton's
arrival among them, you shall hear, if you will accompany me to Cross Farm, and
to the fireside of Mrs Patten, a childless old lady, who had got rich chiefly by
the negative process of spending nothing. Mrs Patten's passive accumulation of
wealth, through all sorts of "bad times," on the farm of which she had been sole
tenant since her husband's death, her epigrammatic neighbour, Mrs Hackit,
sarcastically accounted for by supposing that "sixpences grew on the bents of
Cross Farm;" while Mr Hackit, expressing his views more literally, reminded his
wife that "money breeds money." Mr and Mrs Hackit, from the neighbouring farm,
are Mrs Patten's guests this evening; so is Mr Pilgrim, the doctor from the
nearest market-town, who, though occasionally affecting aristocratic airs, and
giving late dinners with enigmatic side-dishes and poisonous port, is never so
comfortable as when he is relaxing his professional legs in one of those
excellent farmhouses where the mice are sleek and the mistress sickly. And he is
at this moment in clover.
For the flickering of Mrs Patten's bright fire is reflected in her bright copper
tea-kettle, the home-made muffins glisten with an inviting succulence, and Mrs
Patten's niece, a single lady of fifty, who has refused the most ineligible
offers out of devotion to her aged aunt, is pouring the rich cream into the
fragrant tea with a discreet liberality.
Reader! did you ever taste such a cup of tea as Miss Gibbs is this moment
handing to Mr Pilgrim? Do you know the dulcet strength, the animating blandness
of tea sufficiently blended with real farmhouse cream? No�most likely you are a
miserable town-bred reader, who think of cream as a thinnish white fluid,
delivered in infinitesimal pennyworths down area steps; or perhaps, from a
presentiment of calves' brains, you refrain from any lacteal addition, and rasp
your tongue with unmitigated bohea. You have a vague idea of a milch cow as
probably a white-plaster animal standing in a butterman's window, and you know
nothing of the sweet history of genuine cream, such as Miss Gibb's: how it was
this morning in the udders of the large sleek beasts, as they stood lowing a
patient entreaty under the milking-shed; how it fell with a pleasant rhythm into
Betty's pail, sending a delicious incense into the cool air; how it was carried
into that temple of moist cleanliness, the dairy, where it quietly separated
itself from the meaner elements of milk, and lay in mellowed whiteness, ready
for the skimming-dish which transferred it to Miss Gibbs's glass cream-jug. If I
am right in my conjecture, you are unacquainted with the highest possibilities
of tea; and Mr Pilgrim, who is holding that cup in his hand, has an idea beyond
you.
Mrs Hackit declines cream; she has so long abstained from it with an eye to the
weekly butter-money, that abstinence, wedded to habit, has begotten aversion.
She is a thin woman with a chronic liver-complaint, which would have secured her
Mr Pilgrim's entire regard and unreserved good word, even if he had not been in
awe of her tongue, which was as sharp as his own lanc
et. She has brought her
knitting�no frivolous fancy knitting, but a substantial woollen stocking; the
click-click of her knitting-needles is the running accompaniment to all her
conversation, and in her utmost enjoyment of spoiling a friend's
self-satisfaction, she was never known to spoil a stocking.
Mrs Patten does not admire this excessive click-clicking activity. Quiescence in
an easy-chair, under the sense of compound interest perpetually accumulating,
has long seemed an ample function to her, and she does her malevolence gently.
She is a pretty little old woman of eighty, with a close cap and tiny flat white
curls round her face, as natty and unsoiled and invariable as the waxen image of
a little old lady under a glass-case; once a lady's-maid, and married for her
beauty. She used to adore her husband, and now she adores her money, cherishing
a quiet blood-relation's hatred for her niece, Janet Gibbs, who, she knows,
expects a large legacy, and whom she is determined to disappoint. Her money
shall all go in a lump to a distant relation of her husband's, and Janet shall
be saved the trouble of pretending to cry, by finding that she is left with a
miserable pittance.
Mrs Patten has more respect for her neighbour Mr Hackit than for most people. Mr
Hackit is a shrewd substantial man, whose advice about crops is always worth
listening to, and who is too well off to want to borrow money.
And now that we are snug and warm with this little tea-party, while it is
freezing with February bitterness outside, we will listen to what they are
talking about.
"So," said Mr Pilgrim, with his mouth only half empty of muffin, "you had a row
in Shepperton church last Sunday. I was at Jem Hood's, the bassoon-man's, this
morning, attending his wife, and he swears he'll be revenged on the parson �a
confounded, methodistical, meddlesome chap, who must be putting his finger in
every pie. What was it all about?"
"O, a passill o' nonsense," said Mr Hackit, sticking one thumb between the
buttons of his capacious waistcoat, and retaining a pinch of snuff with the
other�for he was but moderately given to "the cups that cheer but not
inebriate," and had already finished his tea; "they began to sing the wedding
psalm for a new-married couple, as pretty a psalm an' as pretty a tune as any's
in the prayer-book. It's been sung for every new-married couple since I was a
boy. And what can be better?" Here Mr Hackit stretched out his left arm, threw
back his head, and broke into melody� "'O what a happy thing it is,
And joyful for to see,
Brethren to dwell together in
Friendship and unity.' But Mr Barton is all for th' hymns, and a sort o'
music as I can't join in at all."
"And so," said Mr Pilgrim, recalling Mr Hackit from lyrical reminiscences to
narrative, "he called out Silence! did he? when he got into the pulpit; and gave
a hymn out himself to some meeting-house tune?"
"Yes," said Mrs Hackit, stooping towards the candle to pick up a stitch, "and
turned as red as a turkey-cock. I often say, when he preaches about meeknes, he
gives himself a slap in the face. He's like me�he's got a temper of his own."
"Rather a low-bred fellow, I think, Barton," said Mr Pilgrim, who hated the
Reverend Amos for two reasons�because he had called in a new doctor, recently
settled in Shepperton; and because, being himself a dabbler in drugs, he had the
credit of having cured a patient of Mr Pilgrim's. "They say his father was a
dissenting shoemaker; and he's half a dissenter himself. Why, doesn't he preach
extempore in that cottage up here, of a Sunday evening?"
"Tchaw!"�this was Mr Hackit's favourite interjection �"that preaching without
book's no good, only when a man has a gift, and has the Bible at his fingers'
ends. It was all very well for Parry�he'd a gift; and in my youth I've heard the
Ranters out o' doors in Yorkshire go on for an hour or two on end, without ever
sticking fast a minute. There was one clever chap, I remember, as used to say,
'You're like the woodpigeon; it says do, do, do all day, and never sets about
any work itself.' That's bringing it home to people. But our parson's no gift at
all that way; he can preach as good a sermon as need be heard when he writes it
down. But when h� tries to preach wi'out book, he rambles about, and doesn't
