Scenes of Clerical Life | Page 2

this
modern method the style of George Eliot appears strange, impossible. It
does not occur to them that her method has virtues which lack to theirs.
They 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