Human feeling
I stumbled upon a chapter unlike any I've encountered in a novel before.
Weekly Three
HEAR: “Cruiser” by Red House Painters (2001)
READ: I started the week by accidentally making 5 pounds of chicken couscous (I forgot how much it expands). Here’s the recipe if you want a easy “meal-prep” dish. BTW, I add black beans.
VIEW: A corrupt NYPD cop tells his story.
No. 69: Human feeling
While reading George Eliot’s Adam Bede this week, I stumbled upon a chapter unlike any I’ve encountered in a novel before. The author pauses her story to make a direct address to the reader, and what she says is nothing short of an essay on our failure and our need to love each other above all else. And not just those who are easiest to love.
In her day, the address would have been directed at an elitist British society, the biggest group of novel-readers then, for they had money, education, and leisure time. That the author felt the need to pause her story and make the following address underlines the severity of close-minded classism that dominated “sophisticated” social circles during the Victorian era.
All that she wrote in 1859 still applies today, evidence enough of Eliot’s progressiveness and force-of-nature intelligence. With some knowledge of the general mood of the educated classes during this moment in history—one of false enlightenment rooted in disdain for the cruder lifestyles of peasants—we’re able to add even more color to the brilliant mind of this brave writer, who wrote under a male pen name in order to be taken seriously.
Eliot saw plainly the evil behind the accepted ideas of her day, something easy to do in retrospect, but near-impossible in the present moment for all but the most acute, clear-minded, and compassionate thinkers. Themes of tolerance, empathy, love, inclusivity, and body positivity are there. And, to reiterate, this was written in the year 1859.
To give some context, the chapter comes after a young man, Arthur Donnithorne, visits the village priest (rector), Mr. Irwine, for advice about a peasant girl who he is unwisely flirting with — unwise because he is a high-born gentleman landowner and she is the daughter of one of his tenant farmers. The conversation proceeds without Donnithorne mentioning his situation — he is too embarrassed — which leaves us with a jovial conversation between young man and priest that avoids the point entirely. In keeping with his character, the priest talks earnestly, with the casualness of a longtime friend, which is perhaps not as “priestly” as the so-called pious readers of Eliot’s day might have desired. The author, sensing this, bring us to chapter 17:
In which the Story pauses a little
“This Rector of Broxton is little better than a pagan!” I hear one of my readers exclaim. “How much more edifying it would have been if you had made him give Arthur some truly spiritual advice. You might have put into his mouth the most beautiful things — quite as good as reading a sermon.”
Certainly I could, if i held it the highest vocation of the novelist to represent things as they never have been and never will be. Then, of course, I might refashion life and character entirely after my own liking; I might select the most unexceptionable type of clergyman, and put my own admirable opinions into his mouth on all occasions. But it happens, to the contrary, that my strongest effort is to avoid such an arbitrary picture, and to give a faithful account of men and things as they have mirrored themselves in my mind. The mirror is doubtless defective; the outlines will sometimes be disturbed, the reflection faint or confused; but I feel as much bound to tell you as precisely as I can what that reflection is, as if I were in the witness-box narrating my experience on oath.
Sixty years ago — it is a long time, so no wonder things have changed — all clergymen were not zealous; indeed, there is reason to believe that the number of zealous clergymen was small, and it is probably that if one among the small majority had owned the livings of Broxton and Hayslope in the year 1799, you would have liked him no better than you like Mr. Irwine. Ten to one, you would have thought him a tasteless, indiscreet, methodistical man. It is so very rarely that facts hit that nice medium required by our own enlightened opinions and refined taste! Perhaps you will say, “Do improve the facts a little, then; make them more accordant with those correct views which it is our privilege to possess. The world is not just what we like; do touch it up with a tasteful pencil, and make believe it is not quite such a mixed entangled affair. Let all people who hold unexceptionable opinions act unexceptionably. Let all your most faulty characters always be on the wrong side, and your virtuous ones on the right. Then we shall see at a glance whom we are to condemn, and whom we are to approve. Then we shall be able to admire, without the slightest disturbance of our prepossessions: we shall hate and despise with that true ruminant relish which belongs to undoubting confidence.”
But, my good friend, what will you do the with your fellow-parishioner who opposes your husband in the vestry? — with your newly appointed vicar, whose style of preaching you find painfully below that of his regretted predecessor? — with the honest servant who worries your soul with her one failing? — with your neighbor, Mrs. Green, who was really kind to you in your last illness, but has said several ill-natured things about you since your convalescence? — nay, with your excellent husband himself, who has other irritating habits besides that of not wiping his shoes? These fellow-mortals, every one, must be accepted as they are: you can neither straighten their noses, nor brighten their wit, nor rectify their dispositions; and it is these people — amongst whom your life is passed — that it is needful you should tolerate, pity, and love: it is these more or less ugly, stupid, inconsistent people, whose movements of goodness you should be able to admire — for whom you should cherish all possible hopes, all possible patience. And I would not, even if I had the choice, be the clever novelist who could create a world so much better than this, in which we get up in the morning to do our daily work, that you would be likely to turn a harder, colder eye on the dusty streets and the common green fields — on the real breathing men and women, who can be chilled by your indifference or injured by your prejudice; who can be cheered and helped onward by your fellow-feeling, your forbearance, your outspoken, brave justice.
So I am content to tell my simple story, without trying to make things seem better than they were; dreading nothing, indeed, but falsity, which in spite of one’s best efforts, there is reason to dread. Falsehood is so easy, truth so difficult. The pencil is conscious of a delightful facility in drawing a griffin — the longer the claws, and the larger the wings, the better; but that marvelous facility which we mistook for genius is apt to forsake us when we want to draw a real unexaggerated lion. Examine your words well, and you will find that even when you have no motive to be false, it is a very hard thing to say the exact truth, even about your own immediate feelings — much harder than to say something fine about them which is not the exact truth.
It is for this rare, precious quality of truthfulness that I delight in many Dutch paintings, which lofty-minded people despise. I find a source of delicious sympathy in these faithful pictures of a monotonous homely existence, which has been the fate of so many more among my fellow-mortals than a life of pomp or of absolute indigence, of tragic suffering or of world-stirring actions. I turn, without shrinking, from could-borne angels, from prophets, sibyls, and heroic warriors, to an old woman bending over her flowerpot, or eating her solitary dinner, while the noonday light, softened perhaps by a screen of leaves, falls on her mob-cap, and just touches the rim of her spinning-wheel, and her stone jug, and all those cheap common things which are the precious necessaries of life to her; — or I turn to that village wedding, kept between four brown walls, where an awkward bride-groom opens the dance with a high-shouldered, broad-faced bride, while elderly and middle-aged friends look on, with very irregular noses and lips, and probably with quart-pots in their hands, but with an expression of unmistakable contentment and goodwill. “Foh!” says my idealistic friend, “what vulgar details! What good is there in taking all these pains to give an exact likeness of old women and clowns? What a low phase of life! — what clumsy, ugly, people!”
But bless us, things may be lovable that are not altogether handsome, I hope? I am not at all sure that the majority of the human race have not been ugly, and even among those “lords of their kind,” the British, squat figures, ill-shapen nostrils, and dingy complexions are not startling exceptions. Yet there is a great deal of family love amongst us. I have a friend or two whose class of features is such that the Apollo curl on the summit of their brows would be decidedly trying; yet to my certain knowledge tender hearts have beaten for them, and their miniatures — flattering, but still not lovely — are kissed in secret by motherly lips. I have seen many an excellent matron, who could never in her best days have been handsome, and yet she had a packet of yellow love-letters in a private drawer, and sweet children showered kisses on her sallow cheeks. And I believe there have been plenty of young heroes, of middle stature and feeble beards, who have felt quite sure they could never love anything more insignificant than a Diana, and yet have found themselves in middle life happily settled with a wife who waddles! Yes! thank God; human feeling is like the mighty rivers that bless the earth: it does not wait for beauty — it flows with resistless force and brings beauty with it.
All honour and reverence to the divine beauty of form! Let us cultivate it to the utmost in men, women, and children — in our gardens and in our houses. But let us love that other beauty too, which lies in no secret of proportion, but in the secret of deep human sympathy. Paint us an angel, if you can, with a floating violet robe, and a face paled by the celestial light; paint us yet oftener a Madonna, turning her mild face upward and opening her arms to welcome the divine glory; but do not impose on us any aesthetic rules which shall banish from the region of Art those old women scraping carrots with their work-worn hands, those heavy clowns taking holiday in a dingy pot-house, those rounded backs and stupid weather-beaten faces that have bent over the spade and done the rough work of the world — those homes and their tin pans, their brown pitchers, their rough curs, and their clusters of onions. In this world there are so many of these common coarse people, who have no picturesque sentimental wretchedness! It is so needful we should remember their existence, else we may happen to leave them quite out of our religion and philosophy, and frame lofty theories which only fit a world of extremes. Therefore let Art always remind us of them; therefore let us always have men ready to give the loving pains of life to the faithful representing of commonplace things, and delight in showing how kindly the light of heaven falls on them. There are few prophets in the world; few sublimely beautiful women; few heroes. I can’t afford to give all my love and reverence to such rarities: I want a great deal of those feelings for my everyday fellow-men, especially for the few in the foreground of the great multitude, whose faces I know, whose hands I touch, for whom I have to make way with kindly courtesy. Neither are picturesque lazzaroni or romantic criminals half so frequent as your common labourer, who gets his own bread, and eats it vulgarly but creditably with his own pocket-knife. It is more needful that I should have a fibre of sympathy connecting me with that vulgar citizen who weighs out my sugar in a vilely-assorted cravat and waistcoat, than with the handsomest rascal in red scarf and green feathers; — more needful that my heart should swell with loving admiration at some trait of gentle goodness in the faulty people who sit at the same hearth with me, or in the clergyman of my own parish, who is perhaps rather too corpulent, and in other respects is not an Oberlin or Tillotson, than at the deeds of heroes whom I shall never know except by hearsay, or at the sublimest abstract of all clerical graces that was ever conceived by an able novelist.
And so I come back to Mr. Irwine, with whom I desire you to be in perfect charity, far as he may be from satisfying your demands on the clerical character. Perhaps you think he was not — as he ought to have been — a living demonstration of the benefits attached to a national church? But I am not sure of that; at least I know that the people in Broxton and Hayslope would have been very sorry to part with their clergyman, and that most faces brightened at his approach; and until it can be proved that hatred is a better thing for the soul than love, I must believe that Mr. Irwine’s influence on his parish was a more wholesome one than that of the zealous Mr. Ryde, who came there twenty years afterwards, when Mr. Irwine had been gathered to his fathers. It is true, Mr. Ryde insisted strongly on the doctrines of the Reformation, visited his flock a great deal in their own homes, and was severe in rebuking the aberrations of the flesh — put a stop, indeed, to the Christmas rounds of the church singers, as promoting drunkness, and too light a handling of sacred things. But I gathered from Adam Bede, to whom I talked to of these matters in his old age, that few clergymen could be less successful in winning the hearts of their parishioners than Mr. Ryde. They learned a great many notions about doctrine from him, so that almost every church-goer under fifty began to distinguish as well between genuine gospel and what did not come precisely up to that standard, as if he had been born and bred a Dissenter; and for some time after his arrival there seemed to be quite a religious movement in that quiet rural district. “But,” said Adam, “I’ve seen pretty clear, ever since I was a young ‘un, as religion’s something else besides notions. It isn’t notions sets people doing the right thing — it’s feelings. It’s the same with the notions in religion as it is the math’matics, — a man may be able to work problems straight off in’s head as he sits by the fire and smokes his pipe; but if he has to make a machine or a building, he must have a will and resolution, and love something else better than his own ease. Somehow, the congregation began to fall off, and people began to speak light o’ Mr. Ryde. I believe he meant right at bottom; but, you see, he was sourish-tempered, and was for beating down prices with the people as worked for him; and his preaching wouldn’t go down well with that sauce. And he wanted to be like my lord judge i’ the parish, punishing folks for doing wrong; and he scolded ‘em from the pulpit as if he’d been a Ranter, and yet he couldn’t abide the Dissenters, and was a deal more set against ‘em than Mr. Irwine was. And then he didn’t keep within his income, for he seemed to think at first go-off that six hundred a year was to make him as big a man as Mr. Donnithorne: that’s sore mischief I’ve often seen with the poor curates jumping into a bit of a living all of a sudden. Mr. Ryde was a deal thought on at a distance, I believe, and he wrote books; but as for math’matics and the nature o’ things, he was as ignorant as a woman. He was very knowing about doctrines, and used to call ‘em the bulwarks of the Reformation; but I’ve always mistrusted that sort o’ learning as leaves folks foolish and unreasonable about business. Now Mester Irwine was as different as could be: as quick! — he understood what you meant in a minute; and he knew all about building, and could see when you’d made a good job. And he behaved as much like a gentleman to the farmers, and th’ old women and the labourers, as he did to the gentry. You never saw him interfering and scolding, and trying to play th’ emperor. Ah! he was a fine man as ever you set eyes on; and so kind to’s mother and sisters. That poor sickly Miss Anne — he seemed to think more of her than of anybody else in the world. There wasn’t a soul in the parish had a word to say against him; and his servants stayed with him till they were old and pottering, he had to hire other folks to do their work.”
[ . . . ]
Adam, you perceive, was a warm admirer, perhaps a partial judge, of Mr. Irwine, as, happily, some of use still are of the people we have known familiarly. Doubtless it will be despised as a weakness by that lofty order of minds who pant after the ideal, and are oppressed by a general sense that their emotions are of too exquisite a character to find fit objects among their everyday fellow-men. I have often been favoured with the confidence of these select natures, and find them concur in the experience that great men are overestimated and small men are insupportable; that if you would love a woman without ever looking back on your love as folly, she must die while you were courting her; and if you would maintain the slightest belief in human heroism, you must never make a pilgrimage to see the hero. I confess I have often meanly shrunk from confessing to these accomplished and acute gentlemen what my own experience has been. I am afraid I have often smiled with hypocritical assent, and gratified them with an epigram on the fleeting nature of our illusions, which anyone moderately acquainted with French literature can command at a moment’s notice. Human converse, I think some wise man has remarked, is not rigidly sincere. But I herewith discharge my conscience, and declare, that I have had quite enthusiastic movements of admiration towards old gentlemen who spoke the worst English, who were occasionally fretful in their temper, and who had never moved in a higher sphere of influence than that of parish overseer; and that the way in which I have come to the conclusion that human nature is lovable — the way I have learnt something of its deep pathos, its sublime mysteries — has been by living a great deal among people more or less commonplace and vulgar, of whom you would perhaps hear nothing very surprising if you were to inquire about them in the neighborhoods where they dwelt. Ten to one most of the small shopkeepers in their vicinity saw nothing at all in them. For I have observed this remarkable coincidence, that the select natures who pant after the ideal, and find nothing in pantaloons or petticoats great enough to command their reverence and love, are curiously in unison with the narrowest and the pettiest. For example, I have often heard Mr. Gedge, the landlord of the Royal Oak, who used to turn a blood-shot eye on his neighbors in the village Shepperton, sum up his opinion of the people in his own parish — and they were all the people he knew — in these emphatic words: “Ay, sir, I’ve said it often, and I’ll say it again, they’re a poor lot i’ this part — a poor lot, sir, big and little.” I think he had a dim idea that if he could migrate to a distance parish, he might find neighbors worthy of him; and indeed he did subsequently transfer himself to Saracen’s Head, which was doing thriving business in the back street of a neighboring market-town. But, oddly enough, he has found the people up that back street precisely the same stamp as the inhabitants of Shepperton — “a poor lot, sir, big and little, and them as comes for a go o’ gin are no better than them as comes for a pint o’ twopenny — a poor lot.” ♦