As for the women, they never look the thing they are reputed to be, save in fashion, and sometimes in beauty. A woman who goes to public meetings and makes speeches on all kinds of subjects, tough as well as doubtful, presents herself in society with the look of an old maid and the address of a shy schoolgirl. A sour kind of essayist, who finds everything wrong and nothing in its place, has a face like the full moon and looks as if she fed on cream and b.u.t.ter. A novelist who sails very near the wind, and on whom the critics are severe by principle, is as quiet as a Quakeress in her conversation and as demure as a nun in her bearing; while a writer of religious tracts has her gowns from Paris and gives small suppers out of the proceeds. The public character and the private being of almost every person in the world differ widely from each other; and the hero of history who is also the hero to his valet has yet to be found.
Some people call this difference inconsistency, and some manysidedness; to some it argues unreality, to others it is but the necessary consequence of a complex human nature, and a sign that the mind needs the rest of alternation just as much as the body. We cannot be always in the same groove, never changing our att.i.tude nor object.
Is it inconsistency or supplement, contradiction or compensation? The sterner moralists, and those whose minds dwell on tares, say the former; those who look for wheat even on the stony ground and among thorns a.s.sert the latter. Anyhow, it is certain that those who desire ideals and who like to worship heroes would do well to content themselves with adoration at a long range. Distance lends enchantment, and ignorance is bliss in more cases than one. Heroism at home is something like the delicacy of Brobdingnag, or the grandiosity of Lilliput; and the undress of the domestic hearth is more favourable to personal comfort than to public glory. To keep our ideals intact we ought to keep them unknown. Our G.o.ddesses should not be seen eating beefsteaks and drinking stout; our poets are their best in print, and social small-talk does not come like truths divine mended from their tongue; our sages and philanthropists gain nothing, and may lose much, by being rashly followed to their firesides. Yet a man"s good work and brave word are, in any case, part of his real self, though they may not be the whole; and even if he is not true metal all through, his gold, so far as it goes, counts for more than its alloy, and his public heroism overtops his private puerility.
_SEINE-FISHING._
Few braver or hardier men are to be found in England than the Cornish fishermen. Their business, at all times hazardous, is doubly so on a coast so dangerous as theirs, where the charm of scenery is bought at the expense of security. Isolated rocks which are set up like teeth close round the jagged cliffs and far out from sh.o.r.e, cropping up at intervals anywhere between Penzance and Scilly; sunken rocks which are more perilous because more treacherous; strong currents which on the calmest day keep the sea where they flow in perpetual turmoil; a singularly tumultuous and changeable sea, where the ground-swell of the Atlantic sweeps on in long waves which break into a surf that would swamp any boat put out, even when there is not a breath of surface-wind stirring; for the most part a very narrow channel to the coves, a mere water-path as one may call it, beset by rocks which would break the boats to splinters if they were thrown against them--all these circ.u.mstances make the trade of the Cornish fishermen exceptionally dangerous; but they also make the men themselves exceptionally resolute and daring. They are true fighters with nature for food; and, like the miners, they feel when they set out to their work that they may never come back from it alive.
No man can predict what the sea will be an hour or two hence. Its character changes with each fluctuation of the tide; and a calm and halcyon lake may have become fierce and angry and tempest-tossed when the ebb turns and the flow sets in. There are times too, when a boat caught by the wind and drifted into a current would be as helpless as a cork in a mill-race; and when a whole fleet of fishing-boats might be blown out to sea, with perhaps half their number capsized. But, as a rule, having learnt caution with their hardihood from the very magnitude of the dangers which surround them, these Cornish men suffer as little by shipwreck as do the fishermen of safer bays; and though each cove has its own sad story, and every rock its victim, the worst cases of wreck have been those of larger vessels which have mistaken lights, or steered too close in sh.o.r.e, or been lost in the fogs that are so frequent about the Land"s End. Or they may have been caught by the wind and the tide and driven dead on to a lee sh.o.r.e; as so often happens in the bay between Hartland and Padstow Points.
But the more cautious the men are the less money they make; and though life is certainly more than meat, life without meat at all, or with only an insufficient quant.i.ty, is rather a miserable affair. The material well-being of the poor fellows who live in those picturesque little coves which are the delight and the despair of artists is not in a very satisfactory condition. By the law of aggregation, unification, whatever we like to call it--the law of the present day by which individuals are absorbed into bodies that work for wages for one master, instead of each man working for himself for his own hand--the independent fishermen are daily becoming fewer. Save at Whitesand Bay, where there is a "poor man"s seine" and "a rich man"s seine," almost all the seine nets belong now to companies or partnerships of rich men; and in very few have the men themselves any share.
Fishermen"s seines are not well regarded by the wealthy leaseholders of the cove and foresh.o.r.e; and the leaseholder has very large legal rights and powers which it would be idle to blame him for exercising.
The cots are his, and the capstan is his, and the right of landing is his; thus he can put on the screw when he wants to have things his own way, and can threaten evictions, and the withdrawal of the right to the capstan and to the landing-place, if the men will not go on his seine, but choose either a united one of their own or independent drift or trawl nets. Some, it is said, even object to the men fishing at all, at any rate during the seine season; some have raised the annual rent per boat for cove rights to three or four times its old rate; and some go through a round of surly suspicion and irritating supervision during the "bulking" days, and higgle jealously over the small share allowed to the hands in the catch. So that, on the whole, the Cornish fisherman of the smaller coves has not much to boast of beside his courage and good heart, and a st.u.r.dy independence and honesty specially noticeable.
We know of no more animated scene than seine-fishing. From the first act to the last there is a quaint old-world flavour about it inexpressibly charming to people used to the prosaic life of modern cities. The "huers" who stand on the hills watching for the first appearance of the "school," and who make known what they see either by signals or calling through a huge metal trumpet, the sound of which no one who has once heard it can ever forget; the smartness of the men dressing the seine-boats which carry the huge net with all its appurtenances; their quiet but eager watching for the school to come within practicable distance--that is, into sufficiently shoal water, and where the bottom is fairly level (else the fish all escape from under the net); the casting or shooting of the seine enclosing the school, and then the "tucking" or lifting the fish from the sea to the boats--every stage is full of interest; but this last is the prettiest of all.
Imagine a moonlight night--low water at midnight--when the tucking begins. The boat cannot come up to the ordinary landing, which is only a roughly-paved causeway dipping by a gradual descent into the sea; so those who would share in the sport are fain to take the fisherman"s path along the cliff and drop into the boat off the rocks. These rocks are never very safe. Even the men themselves, trained to them as they are from boyhood, sometimes slip on their slanting, broken, seaweed-covered surfaces, when, if they cannot swim and are not helped, all is over for them in this life; and for strangers they are difficult at the best of times. But on an obscurely lighted night, and after heavy rain, they are doubly risky. The incoming wave lifts the boat a few inches higher and nearer; and you must catch the exact moment and make a spring before she drifts off again with the ebb. The row across the little bay is beautiful. The grey cliffs look solemn and majestic in the pale light of the moon; the shadows are deep and unfathomable; everywhere you see black rocks standing out from the steely sea, and little lines of breakers mark the place of the sunken rocks. In the distance shine the magnificent Lizard Lights, and the red and white revolving light of the terrible Wolf Rock flashes on the horizon; the moon touches the sea with silver, and the waves as they rise and fall seem like molten metal in the heavy sluggish rhythm of their flow. Only round the foot of the cliffs and about the rocks they break into spray that serves as high lights against the sombre grey and black of the landscape. You pull across to the opposite point, and then round into another smaller bay where the cliffs rise sheer, and the seine net is cast. You come into a little fleet of fishing-boats set round on the outside of a circle of corks, within which is the master-boat, where all hands are a.s.sembled pulling at the net, to draw it closer. It is a stirring sight. Some dozen or more stalwart fellows are hauling on the lines with the sailors" cheery cry and the sailors"
exuberant goodwill. Every now and then the master"s voice cries out "Break! break my sons!" when they shorten hold and go over to the other side of the boat, pulling themselves gradually aslant again, till the same order of "Break! break!" shows that their purchase is too slack. At last the net is hauled up close enough, and then the fun begins.
All the boats engaged form a close circle round the inner line of corks, which is now a little sea of silver where the imprisoned pilchards beat and flutter, producing a sound for which we have no satisfactory onomatopoetic word. In moonlight this little sea is silver; in torchlight it is of fire with varied colours flashing through the redder gleams; and in the dark it is a sea of phosph.o.r.escent light, each mesh of the net, each fish, each seaweed illuminated as if traced in flame. Every one is now busy. The men dip in baskets, or maunds, expressly made for this purpose, and ladle out the quivering fish by hundreds into the boats. In a few moments they are standing leg-deep in pilchards. Every one on the spot is pressed into the service, and even a boat manned by nothing more stalwart than one or two half-sick and half-frightened women receives its orders; and "Hold on ladies! all hands hold on to the boat," serves to keep one of the busiest of the tucking-boats in equilibrium.
The men, for all their hearty work, are like a party of schoolboys at play. Their humour may be rough, but it is never meant to be rude; their goodwill is sincere, for they have a share, however small, in the success of the catch; and the more they tuck, the more they will have for their wives and families to live on through the winter. It is their harvest-time; and they are as jocund as harvesters proverbially are. There is no stint of volunteer labour either. Men who have been working hard all day on their own account go out at midnight to lend a hand to their mates at the seine. Even though the take is for a hard-fisted master who would count fins if he could, and who would refuse his men a head apiece if he thought his orders would be carried out, they are all honestly glad. They remember the time when a rich school was the wealth of the whole cove, and when a string of fresh pilchards would be given freely to any one coming to the cove at the time of bulking, or, as we should call it, storing.
Still, whatever of economic value there may be in this exploitation of labour, it has its mournful side in the loss of individual value which it includes. And no one can help feeling this who listens to the talk of the elder fishermen, sorrowfully comparing the old days of personal independence and generous lordship with the present ones of wages and a wide-awake lesseeship, conscious of its legal rights and determined to act on them.
When all the fish have been tucked there is nothing for it but to row home again in the freshening morning air. The tide is rising now, and the moon is waning. The rocks look blacker, the grey moss-grown cliffs more solemn, more mysterious, the white surf breaking about them is higher and sharper than when you set out; and the boom of the sea thundering through cave and channel has a sound in it that makes you feel as if land and your own bed would be preferable to an open boat at the mercy of the Atlantic surges. The tide has so far risen that you can land nearer to the paved causeway than before; but even now you have to wait for the flow of the wave, then make a spring on to the black and slimy rocks, which would be creditable to trained gymnastic powers. So you go home, under the first streaks of dawn, wet through and scaly, and smelling abominably of fish dashed with a streak of tar for a richer kind of compound.
The whole place however, will smell of fish to-morrow and for many to-morrows. When the tucking-boats are brought in, then the women take their turn, and pack the pilchards in the fish-cellars or salting-houses. Here they are said to be in "bulk," all laid on their sides with their noses pointing outwards; layers of salt alternating with layers of fish. Their great market is Italy, where they serve as favourite Lenten fare. The Italians believe them to be smoked, and hence call them _fumados_. This word the dear thick-headed British sailor has caught up, according to his wont, and translated into "fair maids;" and "fair maids"--p.r.o.nounced firmads--is the popular name of salted pilchards all through Cornwall.
The pilchard fishery begins as early as June or July; but then it is further out to sea, sometimes twenty miles out. According to the old saying,
When the corn is in the shock The fish are at the rock;
harvest-time, which means from August to the end of October, being the main season for pilchard-fishing in shoal-water close at home. There are some choice bits of picturesque life still left to us in faraway places where the ordinary tourist has not penetrated; but nothing is more picturesque than seine-fishing in one of the wilder Cornish coves, when the tucking goes on at midnight, either by moonlight or torchlight, or only by the phosph.o.r.escent illumination of the sea itself. No artist that we can remember at this moment has yet painted it; but it is a subject which would well repay careful study and loving handling.
_THE DISCONTENTED WOMAN._
The discontented woman would seem to be becoming an unpleasantly familiar type of character. A really contented woman, thoroughly well pleased with her duties and her destiny, may almost be said to be the exception rather than the rule in these days of tumultuous revolt against all fixed conditions, and vagrant energies searching for interest in new spheres of thought and action. It seems impossible to satisfy the discontented woman by any means short of changing the whole order of nature and society for her benefit. And even then the chances are that she would get wearied of her new work, and, like Alexander, would weep for more worlds to rearrange according to her liking--with the power to take or to leave the duties she had voluntarily a.s.sumed, as she claims now the power of discarding those which have been hers from the beginning. As things are, nothing contents her; and the keynote which shall put her in harmony with existing conditions, or make her ready to bear the disagreeable burdens which she has been obliged to carry from Eve"s time downward, has yet to be found. If she is unmarried, she is discontented at the want of romance in her life; her main desire is to exchange her father"s house for a home of her own; her pride is pained at the prospect of being left an old maid unsought by men; and her instincts rebel at the thought that she may never know maternity, the strongest desire of the average woman.
But if she is married, the causes of her discontent are multiplied indefinitely, and where she was out of harmony with one circ.u.mstance she is now in discord with twenty. She is discontented on all sides; because her husband is not her lover, and marriage is not perpetual courtship; because he is so irritable that life with him is like walking among thorns if she makes the mistake of a hair"s-breadth; or because he is so imperturbably good-natured that he maddens her with his stolidity, and cannot be made jealous even when she flirts before his eyes. Or she is discontented because she has so many household duties to perform--the dinner to order, the books to keep, the servants to manage; because she has not enough liberty, or because she has too much responsibility; because she has so few servants that she has to work with her own hands, or because she has so many that she is at her wit"s end to find occupation for them all, not to speak of discipline and good management.
As a mother, she is discontented at the loss of personal freedom compelled by her condition; at the physical annoyances and mental anxieties included in the list of her nursery grievances. She would probably fret grievously if she had no children at all, but she frets quite as much when they come. In the former case she is humiliated, in the latter inconvenienced, and in both discontented. Indeed, the way in which so many women deliver up their children to the supreme control of hired nurses proves practically enough the depth of their discontent with maternity when they have it.
If the discontented woman is rich, she speaks despondingly of the difficulties included in the fit ordering of large means; if she is poor, life has no joys worth having when frequent change of scene is unattainable, and the milliner"s bill is a domestic calamity that has to be conscientiously staved off by rigorous curtailment. If she lives in London, she laments the want of freedom and fresh air for the children, and makes the unhappy father, toiling at his City office from ten till seven, feel himself responsible for the pale cheeks and attenuated legs which are probably to be referred to injudicious diet and the frequency of juvenile dissipations. But if she is in the country, then all the charm of existence is centred in London and its thoroughfares, and not the finest scenery in the world is to be compared with the attractions of the shops in Regent Street or the crowds thronging Cheapside.
This question of country living is one that presses heavily on many a female mind; but we must believe that, in spite of the plausible reasons so often a.s.signed, the chief causes of discontent are want of employment and deadness of interest in the life that lies around. The husband makes himself happy with his rod and gun, with his garden or his books, with huntsmen or bricklayers, as his tastes lead him; but the wife--we are speaking of the wife given over to disappointment and discontent, for there are still, thank Heaven, bright, busy, happy women both in country and in town--sits over the fire in winter and by the empty hearth in summer, and finds all barren because she is without an occupation or an interest within doors or without. Ask her why she does not garden--if her circ.u.mstances are of the kind where hands are scarce and even a lady"s energies would do potent service among the flower beds; and she will tell you it makes her back ache, and she does not know a weed from a flower, and would be sure to pick up the young seedlings for chickweed and groundsel. And if she is rich and has hands about her who know their business and guard it jealously, she takes shelter behind her inability to do actual manual labour side by side with them.
Within doors active housekeeping is repulsive to her; and though her servants may be quasi-savages, she prefers the dirt and discomfort of idleness to the domestic pleasantness to be had by her own industry and practical a.s.sistance. Unless she has a special call towards some particular party in the Church, she does nothing in the parish, and seems to think philanthropy and help to one"s poorer neighbours part of the ecclesiastical machinery of the country, devolving on the Rectory alone. She gets bilious through inaction and heated rooms, and then says the place disagrees with her and will be the death of her before long. She cannot breathe among the mountains; the moor and plain are too exposed; the sea gives her a fit of melancholy whenever she looks at it, and she calls it cruel, crawling, hungry, with a pa.s.sion that sounds odd to those who love it; she hates the leafy tameness of the woods and longs for the freer uplands, the vigorous wolds, of her early days.
Wherever, in short, the discontented woman is, it is just where she would rather not be; and she holds fate and her husband cruel beyond words because she cannot be transplanted into the exact opposite of her present position. But mainly and above all she desires to be transplanted to London. If you were to get her confidence, she would perhaps tell you she thinks the advice of that sister who counselled the Lady of Groby to burn down the house, whereby her husband would be compelled to take her to town, the wisest and most to the purpose that one woman could give to another. So she mopes and moons through the days, finding no pleasure anywhere, taking no interest in anything, viewing herself as a wifely martyr and the oppressed victim of circ.u.mstances; and then she wonders that her husband is always ready to leave her company and that he evidently finds her more tiresome than delightful. If she would cultivate a little content she might probably change the aspect of things even to finding the mountains beautiful and the sea sublime; but dissatisfaction with her condition is the Nessus garment which clings to the unhappy creature like a second self, destroying all her happiness and the chief part of her usefulness.
Women of this cla.s.s say that they want more to do, and a wider field for their energies than any of those a.s.signed to them by the natural arrangement of personal and social duties. As administrators of the fortune which man earns, and as mothers--that is, as the directors, caretakers, and moulders of the future generation--they have as important functions as those performed by vestrymen and surgeons. But let that pa.s.s for the moment; the question is not where they ought to find their fitting occupation and their dearest interests, but where they profess a desire to do so. As it is, this desire for an enlarged sphere is one form among many which their discontent takes; yet when they are obliged to work, they bemoan their hardship in having to find their own food, and think that men should either take care of them gratuitously or make way for them chivalrously. In spite of Scripture, they find that the battle is to the strong and the race to the swift; and they do not like to be overcome by the one nor distanced by the other. Their idea of a clear stage is one that includes favour to their own side; yet they put on airs of indignation and profess themselves humiliated when men pay the homage of strength to their weakness and treat them as ladies rather than as equals.
Elsewhere they complain when they are thrust to the side by the superior force of the unG.o.dly s.e.x; and think themselves ill-used if fewer hours of labour--and that labour of what Mr. Carlyle called a "slim" and superficial kind--cannot command the market and hold the field against the better work and more continuous efforts of men.
There is nothing of which women speak with more bitterness than of the lower rates of payment usually accorded to their work; nothing wherein they seem to be so utterly incapable of judging of cause and effect; or of taking to heart the unchangeable truth that the best must necessarily win in the long run, and that the first condition of equality of payment is equality in the worth of the work done. If women would perfect themselves in those things which they do already before carrying their efforts into new fields, we cannot but think it would be better both for themselves and the world.
Life is a bewildering tangle at the best, but the discontented woman is not the one to make it smoother. The craze for excitement and for unfeminine publicity of life has possessed her, to the temporary exclusion of many of the sweeter and more modest qualities which were once distinctively her own. She must have movement, action, fame, notoriety; and she must come to the front on public questions, no matter what the subject, to ventilate her theories and show the quality of her brain. She must be professional all the same as man, with M.D. after her name; and perhaps, before long, she will want to don a horsehair wig over her back hair, and address "My Lud" on behalf of some interesting criminal taken red-handed, or to follow the tortuous windings of Chancery practice. When that time comes, and as soon as the novelty has worn off, she will be sure to complain of the hardness of the grind and the woes of compet.i.tion; and the obscure female apothecary struggling for patients in a poor neighbourhood--the unemployed lady lawyer waiting in dingy chambers for the clients who never come--will look back with envy and regret to the time when women were cared for by men, protected and worked for, and had nothing more arduous to do than attend to the house, spend the money they did not earn and forbear to add to the anxieties they did not share. Could they get all the plums and none of the suet it would be fine enough; but we question whether they will find the battle of life as carried on in the lower ranks of the hitherto masculine professions one whit more enn.o.bling or inspiriting than it is now in their own special departments. Like the poor man who, being well, wished to be better, and came to the grave as the result, they do not know when they are well off; and in their search for excitement, and their discontent with the monotony, undutifulness and inaction which they have created for themselves, they run great danger of losing more than they can gain, and of only changing the name, while leaving untouched the real nature, of the disease under which they are suffering.
_ENGLISH CLERGYMEN IN FOREIGN WATERING-PLACES._
Those persons who object to the influence of the clergy in their parishes at home, and who dislike the idea of being laid hold of by the ecclesiastical crook and dragged perforce up steep ways and narrow paths, ought to visit some of our little outlying settlements in foreign parts. They might take a revengeful pleasure in seeing how the tables there are turned against the tyrants here, and how weak in the presence of his transmarine flock is the expatriated shepherd whose rod at home is oftentimes a rod of iron, and his crook more compelling than persuasive. Of all men the most to be pitied is surely the clergyman of one of those small English settlements which are scattered about France and Italy, Germany and Switzerland; and of all men of education, and what is meant by the position of a gentleman, he is the most in thraldom.
His very means of living depending on his congregation, he must first of all please that congregation and keep it in good humour. So, it may be said, must a clergyman in London whose income is from pew-rents and whose congregation are not his parishioners. But London is large; the tempers and thoughts of men are as numerous as the houses; there is room for all, and lines of affinity for all. The Broad Churchman will attract his hearers, and the Ritualist his, from out of the ma.s.s, as magnets attract steel filings; and each church will be filled with hearers who come there by preference. But in a small and stationary society, in a congregation already made and not specially attracted, yet by which he has to live, the clergyman finds himself more the servant than the leader, less the pastor than the thrall. He must "suit," else he is nowhere, and his bread and b.u.t.ter are vanishing points in his horizon; that is, he must preach and think, not according to the truth that is in him, but according to the views of the most influential of his hearers, and in attacking their souls he must touch tenderly their tempers.
These tempers are for the most part lions in the way difficult to propitiate. The elementary doctrines of Christianity must be preached of course, and sin must be held up as the thing to avoid, while virtue must be complimented as the thing to be followed, and a spiritual state of mind must be discreetly advocated. These are safe generalities; but the dangers of application are many. How to preach of duties to a body of men and women who have thrown off every national and local obligation?--who have left their estates to be managed by agents, their houses to be filled by strangers, who have given up their share of interest in the school and the village reading-room, the poor and the parish generally--men and women who have handed themselves over to indolence and pleasure-seeking, the luxurious enjoyment of a fine climate, the pleasant increase of income to be got by comparative cheapness of breadstuffs, and the abandonment of all those outgoings roughly comprised under the head of local duties and local obligations?--how, indeed? They have no duties to be reminded of in those moral generalizations which touch all and offend none; and the clergyman who should go into details affecting his congregation personally, who should preach against sloth and slander, pleasure-seeking and selfishness, would soon preach to empty pews and be cut by his friends as an impertinent going beyond his office.
His congregation too, composed of educated ladies and gentlemen, is sure to be critical, and therefore all but impossible to teach. If he inclines a hair"s breadth to the right or the left beyond the point at which they themselves stand, he is held to be unsound. His sermons are gravely canva.s.sed in the afternoon conclaves which meet at each other"s houses to discuss the excitement of the Sunday morning in the new arrivals or the new toilets. Has he dwelt on the humanity underlying the Christian faith? He is drifting into Socinianism; and those whose inclinations go for abstract dogmas well backed by brimstone say that he does not preach the Gospel. Has he exalted the functions of the minister, and tried to invest his office with a spiritual dignity and power that would furnish a good leverage over his flock? He is accused of sacerdotalism, and the free-citizen blood of his listening Erastians is up and flaming. Does he, to avoid these stumbling-blocks, wander into the deeper mysteries and discourse on things which no man can either explain or understand? He is accused of presumption and profanity, and is advised to stick to the Lord"s Prayer and the Sermon on the Mount. If he is earnest he is impertinent; if he is level he is cold. Each member of his congregation, subscribing a couple of guineas towards his support, feels as if he or she had claims to that amount over the body and soul and mind and powers of the poor parson in his or her pay; and the claim is generally worked out in snippets, not individually dangerous to life nor fortune, but inexpressibly aggravating, and as depressing as annoying. For the most part, the unhappy man is safest when he sticks to broad dogma, and leaves personal morality alone. And he is almost sure to be warmly applauded when he has a shy at science, and says that physicists are fools who a.s.sert more than they can prove, because they cannot show why an acorn should produce an oak, nor how the phenomena of thought are elaborated. This throwing of date-stones is sure to strike no listening djinn. The ma.s.s of the congregations sitting in the English Protestant churches built on foreign soil, know little and care less about the physical sciences; but it gives them a certain comfortable glow to think that they are so much better than those sinful and presumptuous men who work at bacteria and the spectroscope; and they hug themselves as they say, each man in his own soul, how much nicer it is to be dogmatically safe than intellectually learned.
Preaching personal morality indeed, with possible private application, would be rather difficult in dealing with a congregation not unfrequently made up of doubtful elements. Take that pretty young woman and her handsome _roue_-looking husband, who have come no one knows whence and are no one knows what, but who attend the services with praiseworthy punctuality, spend any amount of money, and are being gradually incorporated into the society of the place. The parson may have had private hints conveyed to him from his friends at home that, of the matrimonial conditions between the two, everything is real save the a.s.sumed "lines." But how is he to say so? They have made themselves valuable members of his congregation, and give larger donations than any one else. They have got the good will of the leading persons in the sacred community, and, having something to hide, are naturally careful to please, and are consequently popular.
He can scarcely give form and substance to the hints he has had conveyed to him; yet his conscience cries out on the one side, if his weakness binds him to silence on the other. In any case, how can he make himself the Nathan to this questionable David, and, holding forth on the need of virtuous living, thunder out, "Thou art the man!"? Let him try the experiment, and he will find a hornet"s nest nothing to it.
How too, can he preach honesty to men, perhaps his own churchwardens, who have outrun the constable and outwitted their creditors at one and the same time? How lecture women who flirt over the borders on the week days, but pay handsomely for their sittings on Sundays, on the crown with which Solomon endowed the lucky husband of the virtuous woman? He may wish to do all this; but his wife and children, and the supreme need of food and firing, step in between him and the higher functions of his calling; and he owns himself forced to accept the world as he finds it, sins and shortcomings with the rest, and to take heed lest he be eaten up by over-zeal or carried into personal darkness by his desire for his people"s light.
Sometimes the poor man is in thrall to some one in particular rather than to his flock as a body; and there are times when this dominant power is a woman; in which case the many contrarieties besetting his position may be multiplied _ad infinitum_. Nothing can exceed the miserable subjection of a clergyman given over to the tender mercies of a feminine despot. She knows everything, and she governs as much as she knows. She makes herself the arbiter of his whole life, from his conscience to his children"s boots, and he can call neither his soul nor his home his own. She prescribes his doctrine, and takes care to let him know when he has transgressed the rules she has laid down for his guidance. She treats the hymns as part of her personal prerogative, and is violently offended if those having a ritualistic tendency are sung, or if those are taken whereof the tunes are too jaunty or the measure is too slow. The unfortunate man feels under her eye during the whole of the service, like a schoolboy under the eye of his preceptress; and he dare not even begin the opening sentences until she has rustled up the aisle and has said her private prayer quite comfortably. She holds over his head the terror of vague threats and shadowy misfortunes should he cross her will; but at the same time he does not find that running in her harness brings extra grist to his mill, nor that his way is the smoother because he treads in the footsteps she has marked out for him.
Sometimes she takes a craze against a voluntary; sometimes she objects to any approach to chanting; and if certain recalcitrants of the congregation, in possession of the harmonium, insist on their own methods against hers, she writes home to the Society and complains of the thin edge of the wedge and the Romanizing tendencies of her spiritual adviser. In any case she is a fearful infliction; and a church ruled by a female despot is about the most pitiable instance we know of insolent tyranny and broken-backed dependence.
But the clergymen serving these transmarine stations are not often themselves men of mark nor equal to their contemporaries at home. They are often sickly, which means a low amount of vital energy; oftener impecunious, which presupposes want of grip and precludes real independence. They are men whose career has been somehow arrested; and their natures have suffered in the blight that has befallen their hopes. Their whole life is more or less a compromise, now with conscience, now with character; and they have to wink at evils which they ought to denounce, and bear with annoyances which they ought to resent. In most cases they are obliged to eke out their scanty incomes by taking pupils; and here again the millstone round their necks is heavy, and they have to pay a large moral percentage on their pecuniary gains. If their pupils are of the age when boys begin to call themselves men, they have to keep a sharp look-out on them; and they suffer many things on the score of responsibility when that look-out is evaded, as it necessarily must be at times. As the characteristic quality of small societies is gossip, and as gossip always includes exaggeration, the peccadilloes of the young fellows are magnified into serious sins, and then bound as a burden on the back of the poor cleric in thrall to the idle imaginings of men and the foolish fears of women. One black sheep in the pupilary flock will do more damage to the reputation of the unhappy pastor who has them in hand than a dozen shining lights will do him good. Morality is a.s.sumed to be the free gift of the tutor to the pupil; and if the boy is bad the man is to blame for not having made that free-gift betimes.
Look at it how we will, the clergyman in charge of these foreign congregations has no very pleasant time of it. In a sense expatriated; his home ties growing daily weaker; his hope of home preferment reduced to _nil_; his liberty of conscience a dream of the past; and all the mystical power of his office going down in the conflict caused by the need of pew-rents, submission to tyrants, and dependence on the Home Society, he lives from year to year bemoaning the evil chances which have flung him on this barren, shifting, desolate strand, and becoming less and less fitted for England and English parochial work--that castle in the air, quiet and secure, which he is destined never to inhabit. He is touched too in part by the atmosphere of his surroundings; and to a congregation without duties a clergyman with views more accommodating than severe comes only too naturally as the appropriate pastor. The whole thing proves that thraldom to the means of living, or rather to the persons representing those means, damages all men alike--those in ca.s.sock and gown as well as those in slop and blouse--and that lay influence can, in certain circ.u.mstances, be just as tyrannical over the clerical conscience as clerical influence is apt to be tyrannical over lay living.
_OLD FRIENDS._