Scenes of Clerical Life | Page 2

may give us a little laboured masterpiece of art in which the vital principle is wanting. George Eliot was great because she gave us passages from life as it was lived in her day which will be vital so long as they are sympathetically read.
George Eliot can be simple enough when she goes straight forward with her narrative, as, for instance, in the scene of Milly Barton's death; then her English is clear and sweet for she writes from the heart. But take the opening chapter of the same story, and then you find her philosophical Latinity in full swing: the curious and interesting thing being that this otherwise ponderous work, which is quite of a sort to alarm a Frenchman, is entirely suffused by humour, and enshrines moreover the most charming character studies.
These lively and acute portraits drawn from English country life give its abiding value to George Eliot's work. Take the character of Mr. Pilgrim the doctor who 'is never so comfortable as when relaxing his professional legs in one of those excellent farmhouses where the mice are sleek and the mistress sickly;' or of Mrs. Hackit, '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.'
Or take Mrs. Patten, 'a pretty little old woman of eighty, with a close cap and tiny flat white curls round her face,' whose function is 'quiescence in an easy-chair under the sense of compound interest gradually accumulating,' and who 'does her malevolence gently;' or Mr. Hackit, a shrewd, substantial man, 'who was fond of soothing the acerbities of the feminine mind by a jocose compliment.' Where but in George Eliot would you get a tea-party described with such charming acceptance of whim?
George Eliot wrote poems at various times which showed she never could have won fame as a poet; but there are moments of her prose that prove she shared at times the poet's vision. Such a moment is that when the half broken-hearted little Catarina looks out on a windy night landscape lit by moonlight: 'The trees are harassed by that tossing motion when they would like to be at rest; the shivering grass makes her quake with sympathetic cold; the willows by the pool, bent low and white under that invisible harshness, seem agitated and helpless like herself.' The italicised sentence represents the high-water mark of George Eliot's prose; that passage alone should vindicate her imaginative power.
G. R.

CONTENTS
The Sad Fortunes of the Rev. Amos Barton
Mr. Gilfil's Love Story
Janet's Repentance

SCENES OF CLERICAL LIFE

THE SAD FORTUNES OF THE REV. AMOS BARTON
Chapter 1
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 penny-post, 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,