The Mill on the Floss

Variation of Protestantism Unknown to Bossuet

Journeying down the Rhone on a summer’s day, you have perhaps felt the
sunshine made dreary by those ruined villages which stud the banks in
certain parts of its course, telling how the swift river once rose,
like an angry, destroying god, sweeping down the feeble generations
whose breath is in their nostrils, and making their dwellings a
desolation. Strange contrast, you may have thought, between the effect
produced on us by these dismal remnants of commonplace houses, which in
their best days were but the sign of a sordid life, belonging in all
its details to our own vulgar era, and the effect produced by those
ruins on the castled Rhine, which have crumbled and mellowed into such
harmony with the green and rocky steeps that they seem to have a
natural fitness, like the mountain-pine; nay, even in the day when they
were built they must have had this fitness, as if they had been raised
by an earth-born race, who had inherited from their mighty parent a
sublime instinct of form. And that was a day of romance; If those
robber-barons were somewhat grim and drunken ogres, they had a certain
grandeur of the wild beast in them,—they were forest boars with tusks,
tearing and rending, not the ordinary domestic grunter; they
represented the demon forces forever in collision with beauty, virtue,
and the gentle uses of life; they made a fine contrast in the picture
with the wandering minstrel, the soft-lipped princess, the pious
recluse, and the timid Israelite. That was a time of colour, when the
sunlight fell on glancing steel and floating banners; a time of
adventure and fierce struggle,—nay, of living, religious art and
religious enthusiasm; for were not cathedrals built in those days, and
did not great emperors leave their Western palaces to die before the
infidel strongholds in the sacred East? Therefore it is that these
Rhine castles thrill me with a sense of poetry; they belong to the
grand historic life of humanity, and raise up for me the vision of an
echo. But these dead-tinted, hollow-eyed, angular skeletons of villages
on the Rhone oppress me with the feeling that human life—very much of
it—is a narrow, ugly, grovelling existence, which even calamity does
not elevate, but rather tends to exhibit in all its bare vulgarity of
conception; and I have a cruel conviction that the lives these ruins
are the traces of were part of a gross sum of obscure vitality, that
will be swept into the same oblivion with the generations of ants and
beavers.

Perhaps something akin to this oppressive feeling may have weighed upon
you in watching this old-fashioned family life on the banks of the
Floss, which even sorrow hardly suffices to lift above the level of the
tragi-comic. It is a sordid life, you say, this of the Tullivers and
Dodsons, irradiated by no sublime principles, no romantic visions, no
active, self-renouncing faith; moved by none of those wild,
uncontrollable passions which create the dark shadows of misery and
crime; without that primitive, rough simplicity of wants, that hard,
submissive, ill-paid toil, that childlike spelling-out of what nature
has written, which gives its poetry to peasant life. Here one has
conventional worldly notions and habits without instruction and without
polish, surely the most prosaic form of human life; proud
respectability in a gig of unfashionable build; worldliness without
side-dishes. Observing these people narrowly, even when the iron hand
of misfortune has shaken them from their unquestioning hold on the
world, one sees little trace of religion, still less of a distinctively
Christian creed. Their belief in the Unseen, so far as it manifests
itself at all, seems to be rather a pagan kind; their moral notions,
though held with strong tenacity, seem to have no standard beyond
hereditary custom. You could not live among such people; you are
stifled for want of an outlet toward something beautiful, great, or
noble; you are irritated with these dull men and women, as a kind of
population out of keeping with the earth on which they live,—with this
rich plain where the great river flows forever onward, and links the
small pulse of the old English town with the beatings of the world’s
mighty heart. A vigorous superstition, that lashes its gods or lashes
its own back, seems to be more congruous with the mystery of the human
lot, than the mental condition of these emmet-like Dodsons and
Tullivers.

I share with you this sense of oppressive narrowness; but it is
necessary that we should feel it, if we care to understand how it acted
on the lives of Tom and Maggie,—how it has acted on young natures in
many generations, that in the onward tendency of human things have
risen above the mental level of the generation before them, to which
they have been nevertheless tied by the strongest fibres of their
hearts. The suffering, whether of martyr or victim, which belongs to
every historical advance of mankind, is represented in this way in
every town, and by hundreds of obscure hearths; and we need not shrink
from this comparison of small things with great; for does not science
tell us that its highest striving is after the ascertainment of a unity
which shall bind the smallest things with the greatest? In natural
science, I have understood, there is nothing petty to the mind that has
a large vision of relations, and to which every single object suggests
a vast sum of conditions. It is surely the same with the observation of
human life.

Certainly the religious and moral ideas of the Dodsons and Tullivers
were of too specific a kind to be arrived at deductively, from the
statement that they were part of the Protestant population of Great
Britain. Their theory of life had its core of soundness, as all
theories must have on which decent and prosperous families have been
reared and have flourished; but it had the very slightest tincture of
theology. If, in the maiden days of the Dodson sisters, their Bibles
opened more easily at some parts than others, it was because of dried
tulip-petals, which had been distributed quite impartially, without
preference for the historical, devotional, or doctrinal. Their religion
was of a simple, semi-pagan kind, but there was no heresy in it,—if
heresy properly means choice,—for they didn’t know there was any other
religion, except that of chapel-goers, which appeared to run in
families, like asthma. How should they know? The vicar of their
pleasant rural parish was not a controversialist, but a good hand at
whist, and one who had a joke always ready for a blooming female
parishioner. The religion of the Dodsons consisted in revering whatever
was customary and respectable; it was necessary to be baptised, else
one could not be buried in the church-yard, and to take the sacrament
before death, as a security against more dimly understood perils; but
it was of equal necessity to have the proper pall-bearers and
well-cured hams at one’s funeral, and to leave an unimpeachable will. A
Dodson would not be taxed with the omission of anything that was
becoming, or that belonged to that eternal fitness of things which was
plainly indicated in the practice of the most substantial parishioners,
and in the family traditions,—such as obedience to parents,
faithfulness to kindred, industry, rigid honesty, thrift, the thorough
scouring of wooden and copper utensils, the hoarding of coins likely to
disappear from the currency, the production of first-rate commodities
for the market, and the general preference of whatever was home-made.
The Dodsons were a very proud race, and their pride lay in the utter
frustration of all desire to tax them with a breach of traditional duty
or propriety. A wholesome pride in many respects, since it identified
honour with perfect integrity, thoroughness of work, and faithfulness
to admitted rules; and society owes some worthy qualities in many of
her members to mothers of the Dodson class, who made their butter and
their fromenty well, and would have felt disgraced to make it
otherwise. To be honest and poor was never a Dodson motto, still less
to seem rich though being poor; rather, the family badge was to be
honest and rich, and not only rich, but richer than was supposed. To
live respected, and have the proper bearers at your funeral, was an
achievement of the ends of existence that would be entirely nullified
if, on the reading of your will, you sank in the opinion of your
fellow-men, either by turning out to be poorer than they expected, or
by leaving your money in a capricious manner, without strict regard to
degrees of kin. The right thing must always be done toward kindred. The
right thing was to correct them severely, if they were other than a
credit to the family, but still not to alienate from them the smallest
rightful share in the family shoebuckles and other property. A
conspicuous quality in the Dodson character was its genuineness; its
vices and virtues alike were phases of a proud honest egoism, which had
a hearty dislike to whatever made against its own credit and interest,
and would be frankly hard of speech to inconvenient “kin,” but would
never forsake or ignore them,—would not let them want bread, but only
require them to eat it with bitter herbs.

The same sort of traditional belief ran in the Tulliver veins, but it
was carried in richer blood, having elements of generous imprudence,
warm affection, and hot-tempered rashness. Mr Tulliver’s grandfather
had been heard to say that he was descended from one Ralph Tulliver, a
wonderfully clever fellow, who had ruined himself. It is likely enough
that the clever Ralph was a high liver, rode spirited horses, and was
very decidedly of his own opinion. On the other hand, nobody had ever
heard of a Dodson who had ruined himself; it was not the way of that
family.

If such were the views of life on which the Dodsons and Tullivers had
been reared in the praiseworthy past of Pitt and high prices, you will
infer from what you already know concerning the state of society in St
Ogg’s, that there had been no highly modifying influence to act on them
in their maturer life. It was still possible, even in that later time
of anti-Catholic preaching, for people to hold many pagan ideas, and
believe themselves good church-people, notwithstanding; so we need
hardly feel any surprise at the fact that Mr Tulliver, though a regular
church-goer, recorded his vindictiveness on the fly-leaf of his Bible.
It was not that any harm could be said concerning the vicar of that
charming rural parish to which Dorlcote Mill belonged; he was a man of
excellent family, an irreproachable bachelor, of elegant pursuits,—had
taken honours, and held a fellowship. Mr Tulliver regarded him with
dutiful respect, as he did everything else belonging to the
church-service; but he considered that church was one thing and
common-sense another, and he wanted nobody to tell him what
commonsense was. Certain seeds which are required to find a nidus for
themselves under unfavourable circumstances have been supplied by
nature with an apparatus of hooks, so that they will get a hold on very
unreceptive surfaces. The spiritual seed which had been scattered over
Mr Tulliver had apparently been destitute of any corresponding
provision, and had slipped off to the winds again, from a total absence
of hooks.