Felix Holt

Felix Holt, The Radical
George Eliot
1866
Introduction
FIVE-AND-THIRTY years ago the glory had not yet departed from the
old coach-roads; the great roadside inns were still brilliant with
well-polished tankards, the smiling glances of pretty barmaids, and the
repartees of jocose ostlers; the mail still announced itself by the merry
notes of the horn; the hedge-cutter or the rick-thatcher might still know
the exact hour by the unfailing yet otherwise meteoric apparition of the
peagreen Tally-ho or the yellow Independent; and elderly gentlemen in
pony-chaises, quartering nervously to make way for the rolling
swinging swiftness, had not ceased to remark that times were finely
changed since they used to see the pack-horses and hear the tinkling of
their bells on their very highway.
In those days there were pocket boroughs, a Birmingham unrepresented
in parliament and compelled to make strong representations out of it,
unrepealed corn laws, three-and-sixpenny letters, a brawny and
many-breeding pauperism, and other departed evils; but there were
some pleasant things too, which have also departed. Non omnia
grandior aetas quae fugiamus habet, says the wise goddess: you have
not the best of it in all things, O youngsters! the elderly man has his
enviable memories, and not the least of them is the memory of a long
journey in mid-spring or autumn on the outside of a stage-coach.
Posterity may be shot, like a bullet through a tube, by atmospheric
pressure from Winchester to Newcastle: that is a fine result to have
among our hopes; but the slow old-fashioned way of getting from one
end of our country to the other is the better thing to have in the memory.
The tube-journey can never lend much to picture and narrative; it is as
barren as an exclamatory O! Whereas the happy outside passenger

seated on the box from the dawn to the gloaming gathered enough
stories of English life, enough of English labours in town and country,
enough aspects of earth and sky, to make episodes for a modern
Odyssey. Suppose only that his journey took him through that central
plain, watered at one extremity by the Avon, at the other by the Trent.
As the morning silvered the meadows with their long lines of bushy
willows marking the watercourses, or burnished the golden com-ricks
clustered near the long roofs of some midland homestead, he saw the
full-uddered cows driven from their pasture to the early milking.
Perhaps it was the shepherd, head-servant of the farm, who drove them,
his sheep-dog following with a heedless unofficial air of a beadle in
undress. The shepherd with a slow and slouching walk, timed by the
walk of grazing beasts, moved aside, as if unwillingly, throwing out a
monosyllabic hint to his cattle; his glance, accustomed to rest on things
very near the earth, seemed to lift itself with difficulty to the coachman.
Mail or stage coach for him belonged to that mysterious distant system
of things called 'Goverment', which, whatever it might be, was no
business of his, any more than the most out-lying nebula or the
coal-sacks of the southern hemisphere: his solar system was the parish;
the master's temper and the casualties of lambing-time were his region
of storms. He cut his bread and bacon with his pocket-knife, and felt no
bittemess except in the matter of pauper labourers and the bad-luck that
sent contrarious seasons and the sheep-rot. He and his cows were soon
left behind, and the homestead too, with its pond overhung by
elder-trees, its untidy kitchen-garden and cone-shaped yew-tree arbour.
But everywhere the bushy hedgerows wasted the land with their
straggling beauty, shrouded the grassy borders of the pastures with
cat-kined hazels, and tossed their long blackberry branches on the
cornfields. Perhaps they were white with May, or starred with pale pink
dogroses; perhaps the urchins were already nutting amongst them, or
gathering the plenteous crabs. It was worth the journey only to see
those hedgerows, the liberal homes of unmarketable beauty - of the
purple-blossomed ruby-berried nightshade, of the wild convulvulus
climbing and spreading in tendrilled strength till it made a great curtain
of pale-green hearts and white trumpets, of the many-tubed
honeysuckle which, in its most delicate fragrance, hid a charm more
subtle and penetrating than beauty. Even if it were winter the

hedgerows showed their coral, the scarlet haws, the deep-crimson hips,
with lingering brown leaves to make a resting-place for the jewels of
the hoar-frost. Such hedgerows were often as tall as the labourers'
cottages dotted along the lanes, or clustered into a small hamlet, their
little dingy windows telling, like thick-filmed eyes, of nothing but the
darkness within. The passenger on the coach-box, bowled along above
such a hamlet, saw chiefly the roofs of it: probably it turned its back on
the road, and seemed to lie away