BOOK 4 CHAPTER 1

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    A Variation of Protestantism Unknown to Bossuet

    JOURNEYING down the Rh?ne on a summers day, you have perhaps felt the sunshine made dreary by those ruined villages which stud the banks iain parts of its course, telling how the swift river once rose, like an angry, destroying god sweeping down the feeble geions whose breath is in their nostrils and making their dwellings a desolation. Strange trast, you may have thought, between the effect produced on us by these dismal remnants of onplace houses, whi their best days were but the sign of a sordid life, belonging in all its details to our own vulgar era - and the effect produced by those ruins on the castled Rhine which have crumbled and mellowed into such harmony with the green and rocky steeps, that they seem to have a natural fitness, like the mountain pine: nay, even in the day when they were built t<big>藏书网</big>hey must have had this fitness, as if they had been raised by ah-born race who had ied from their mighty parent a sublime instinct of form. And that was a day of romance! If those robber barons were somewhat grim and drunken ogres, they had a certain grandeur of the wild beast in them - they were forest boars with tusks tearing and rending, not the ordinary domestic gruhey represehe demon forces for ever in collision with beauty, virtue, and the gentle uses of life: they made a fine trast in the picture with the wandering mihe soft-lipped princess, the pious recluse and the timid Israelite. That was a time of colour when the sunlight fell on glang steel and floating banners: a time of adventure and fierce struggle - nay, of living, religious art and religious enthusiasm; for were not cathedrals built in those days and did not great emperors leave their western palaces to die before the irongholds in the sacred east? Therefore it is that these Rhine castles thrill me with a sense of poetry: they belong to the grand historic life of humanity, and raise up for me the vision of an epoch. But these dead-tinted, hollow-eyed, angular skeletons of villages on the Rh?ne, oppress me with the feeling that human life - very much of it - is a narrow, ugly, grovellience, which even calamity does not elevate, but rather tends to exhibit in all its bare vulgarity of ception; and I have a cruel vi that the lives these ruins are the traces of were part of a gross sum of obscure vitality, that will be swept into the same oblivion with the geions of ants and beavers. Perhaps something akin to this oppressive feeling may have weighed upon you in watg this old-fashioned family life on the banks of the Floss, which even sorrow hardly suffices to lift above the level of the tragi-ic. It is a s<var></var>ordid life, you say, this of the Tullivers and Dodsons - irradiated by no sublime principles, no romantic visions, no active, self-renoung faith - moved by none of those wild, untrollable passions which create the dark shadows of misery and crime - without that primitive rough simplicity of wants, that hard submissive ill-paid toil, that child-like spelling-out of what nature has written, which gives its poetry to peasant life. Here, one has ventional worldly notions and habits without instru and without polish - surely the most prosai of human life: proud respectability in a gig of unfashionable build: worldliness without side-dishes.  these people narrowly, evehe iron hand of misfortune has shaken them from their uioning hold on the world, one sees little trace ion, still less of a distinctively Christian creed. Their belief in the unseen, so far as it mas itself at all, seems to be rather of a pagan kind: their moral notions, though held with strong tenacity, seem to have no standard beyond hereditary . You could not live among such people; you are stifled for want of an outlet towards somethiiful, great, or noble: you are irritated with these dull men and women, as a kind of population out of keeping with the earth on which they live - with this rich plaihe great river flows for ever onward and links the small pulse of the old English town with the beatings of the worlds mighty heart. A vigorous superstition that lashes its gods or lashes its own back, seems to be more gruous with the mystery of the human lot, than the mental dition of these emmet-like Dodsons and Tullivers.

    I share with you this sense of oppressive narrowness; but it is necessary that we should feel it, if we care to uand how it acted on the lives of Tom and Maggie - how it has acted on young natures in many geions, that in the onward tendency of human things have risen above the mental level of the geion before them, to which they have beeheless tied by the stro fibres of their hearts. The suffering, whether of martyr or victim, which belongs to every historical advanankind, is represented in this way iown and by hundreds of obscure hearths: and we need not shrink from this parison of small things with great; for does not sce tell us that its highest striving is after the ascertai of a unity which shall bind the smallest things with the greatest? In natural sce, I have uood, there is nothiy to the mind that has a large vision of relations, and to which every single object suggests a vast sum of ditions. It is surely the same with the observation of human life.

    Certainly, the religious and moral ideas of the Dodsons and Tullivers were of too specific a kind to be arrived at deductively, from the statement that they were part of the Protestant population of Great Britain. Their theory of life had its core of soundness, as all theories must have on which det and prosperous families have been reared and have flourished; but it had the very slightest tincture of theology. If, in the maiden days of the Dodson sisters, their bibles opened more easily at some parts than others, it was because of dried tulip petals, which had been distributed quite impartially, without preference for the historical, devotional, or doal. Their religion was of a simple, semi-pagan kind, but there was no heresy in it, if heresy properly means choice, for they didnt know there was any other religion, except that of chapel-goers, which appeared to run in families, like asthma. How should they know? The vicar of their pleasant rural parish was not a troversialist, but a good hand at whist, and one who had a joke always ready for a blooming female parishiohe religion of the Dodsons sisted in revering whatever was ary and respectable: it was necessary to be baptised, else one could not be buried in the churchyard, and to take the sacrament before death as a security against more dimly uood perils; but it was of equal y to have the proper pall-bearers and well-cured hams at ones funeral, and to leave an unimpeachable will. A Dodson would n<code></code>ot be taxed with the omission of anything that was being, or that beloo that eternal fitness of things which lainly indicated in the practice of the most substantial parishioners, and in the family traditions - such as obedieo parents, faithfulo kindred, industry, rigid hoy, thrift, the thh sc of wooden and copper utensils, the h of s likely to disappear from the currency, the produ of first-rate odities for the market, and the general preference for whatever was homemade. The Dodsons were a very proud race, and their pride lay ier frustration of all desire to tax them with a breach of traditional duty or propriety. A wholesome pride in many respects; si identified honour with perfetegrity, thhness of work, and faithfulo admitted rules; and society owes some worthy qualities in many of her members to mothers of the Dodson class, who made their butter and their fromenty well and would have felt disgraced to make it otherwise. To be ho and poor was never a Dodson motto, still less, to seem rich though being poor; rather, the family badge was to be ho and rich, and not only rich, but richer than was supposed. To live respected and have the proper bearers at your funeral was an achievement of the ends of existehat would be entirely nullified if on the reading of your Will, you sank in the opinion of your fellow-meher by turning out to be poorer than they expected or by leaving your money in a caprianner without strict regard to degrees of kin. The right thing must always be doowards kihe right thing was to correct them severely, if they were other than a credit to the family, but still not to alienate from them the smallest rightful share in the family shoe-buckles and other property. A spicuous quality in the Dodson character was its ge<details></details>nuineness: its vices and virtues alike were phrases of a proud, ho egoism which had a hearty dislike to whatever made against its ow and i, and would be frankly hard of speech to inve `kin but would never forsake hem - would not let them want bread, but only require them to eat it with bitter herbs.

    The same sort of traditional belief ran iulliver veins, but it was carried in richer blood, having elements of generous imprudence, warm affe and hot-tempered rashness. Mr Tullive<q>?9９lib.</q>rs grandfather had been heard to say that he was desded from one Ralph Tulliver, a wonderfully clever fellow who had ruined himself. - It is likely enough that the clever Ralph was a high liver, rode spirited horses, and was very decidedly of his own opinion. Oher hand, nobody had ever heard of a Dodson who had ruined himself: it was not the way of that family.

    If such were the views of life on which the Dodsons and Tullivers had been reared in the praiseworthy past of Pitt and high prices, you will infer from what you already know ing the state of society in St Oggs that there had been no highly modifying influeo a them in their maturer life. It was still possible, even in that later time of anti-Catholic preag, for people to hold many pagan ideas and believe themselves good church people notwithstanding: so we need hardly feel any surprise at the fact that Mr Tulliver, though a regular church-goer, recorded his vindictiveness on the fly-leaf of his Bible. It was not that any harm could be said ing the vicar of that charming rural parish to which Dorlill belonged: he was a man of excellent family, an irreproachable bachelor, of elegant pursuits, had taken honours, and held a fellowship: Mr Tulliver regarded him with dutiful respect, as he did everything else belonging to the church-service; but he sidered that church was ohing and on sense another, and he wanted nobody to tell him what on sense was. Certain seeds which are required to find a nidus for themselves under unfavourable circumstances have been supplied by nature with an apparatus of hooks, so that they will get a hold on very uive surfaces. The spiritual seed which had been scattered over Mr Tulliver had apparently beeute of any corresponding provision, and had slipped off to the winds again from a total absence of hooks.

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