Felix Holt | Page 3

were broad fields and homesteads, and fine old woods
covering a rising ground, or stretching far by the roadside, allowing
only peeps at the park and mansion which they shut in from the
working-day world. In these midland districts the traveller passed
rapidly from one phase of English life to another: after looking down
on a village dingy with coal-dust, noisy with the shaking of looms, he
might skirt a parish all of fields, high hedges, and deep-rutted lanes;
after the coach had rattled over the pavement of a manufacturing town,
the scene of riots and trades-union meetings, it would take him in
another ten minutes into a rural region, where the neighbourhood of the
town was only felt in the advantages of a near market for corn, cheese,
and hay, and where men with a considerable banking account were
accustomed to say that 'they never meddled with politics themselves'.
The busy scenes of the shuttle and the wheel, of the roaring furnace, of
the shaft and the pulley, seemed to make but crowded nests in the midst
of the large-spaced, slow-moving life of homesteads and far-away
cottages and oak-sheltered parks. Looking at the dwellings scattered
amongst the woody flats and the ploughed uplands, under the low grey
sky which overhung them with an unchanging stillness as if Time itself
were pausing, it was easy for the traveller to conceive that town and
country had no pulse in common, except where the handlooms made a
far-reaching straggling fringe about the great centres of manufacture;
that till the agitation about the Catholics in '29, rural Englishmen had
hardly known more of Catholics than of the fossil mammals; and that
their notion of Reform was a confused combination of rick-burners,
trades-union, Nottingham riots, and in general whatever required the
calling-out of the yeomanry. It was still easier to see that, for the most
part, they resisted the rotation of crops and stood by their fallows: and
the coachman would perhaps tell how in one parish an innovating
farmer, who talked of Sir Humphrey Davy, had been fairly driven out
by popular dislike, as if he had been a confounded Radical; and how,
the parson having one Sunday preached from the words, 'Plough up the
fallow-ground of your hearts', the people thought he had made the text
out of his own head, otherwise it would never have come 'so pat' on a
matter of business; but when they found it in the Bible at home, some

said it was an argument for fallows (else why should the Bible mention
fallows?), but a few of the weaker sort were shaken, and thought it was
an argument that fallows should be done away with, else the Bible
would have said, 'Let your hearts lie fallow;' and the next morning the
parson had a stroke of apoplexy, which, as coincident with a dispute
about fallows, so set the parish against the innovating farmer and the
rotation of crops, that he could stand his ground no longer, and
transferred his lease.
The coachman was an excellent travelling companion and commentator
on the landscape; he could tell the names of sites and persons, and
explained the meaning of groups, as well as the shade of Virgil in a
more memorable journey; he had as many stories about parishes, and
the men and women in them, as the Wanderer in the 'Excursion', only
his style was different. His view of life had originally been genial, and
such as became a man who was well warmed within and without, and
held a position of easy, undisputed authority; but the recent initiation of
railways had embittered him: he now, as in a perpetual vision, saw the
ruined country strewn with shattered limbs, and regarded Mr
Huskisson's death as a proof of God's anger against Stephenson. 'Why,
every inn on the road would be shut up!' and at that word the coachman
looked before him with the blank gaze of one who had driven his coach
to the outermost edge of the universe, and saw his leaders plunging into
the abyss. Still he would soon relapse from the high prophetic strain to
the familiar one of narrative. He knew whose the land was wherever he
drove; what noblemen had half-ruined themselves by gambling; who
made handsome returns of rent; and who was at daggers-drawn with his
eldest son. He perhaps remembered the fathers of actual baronets, and
knew stories of their extravagant or stingy housekeeping; whom they
had married, whom they had horsewhipped, whether they were
particular about preserving their game, and whether they had had much
to do with canal companies. About any actual landed proprietor he
could also tell whether he was a Reformer or an anti-Reformer. That
was a distinction which had 'turned up' in latter times, and along with