Scenes of Clerical Life

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, with its

outer coat of rough stucco, its red-tiled roof, its heterogeneous windows

patched with desultory bits of painted glass, and its little flight of

steps with their wooden rail running up the outer wall, and leading to

the school-children's gallery.

Then inside, what dear old quaintnesses! which I began to look at with

delight, even when I was so crude a members of the congregation, that my

nurse found it necessary to provide for the reinforcement of my

devotional patience by smuggling bread-and-butter into the sacred

edifice. There was the chancel, guarded by two little cherubims looking

uncomfortably squeezed between arch and wall, and adorned with the

escutcheons of the Oldinport family, which showed me inexhaustible

possibilities of meaning in their blood-red hands, their death's-heads

and cross-bones, their leopards' paws, and Maltese crosses. There were

inscriptions on the panels of the singing-gallery, telling of

benefactions to the poor of Shepperton, with an involuted elegance of

capitals and final flourishes, which my alphabetic erudition traced with

ever-new delight. No benches in those days; but huge roomy pews, round

which devout church-goers sat during 'lessons', trying to look anywhere

else than into each other's eyes. No low partitions allowing you, with a

dreary absence of contrast and mystery, to see everything at all moments;

but tall dark panels, under whose shadow I sank with a sense of

retirement through the Litany, only to feel with more intensity my burst

into the conspicuousness of public life when I was made to stand up on

the seat during the psalms or the singing. And the singing was no

mechanical affair of official routine; it had a drama. As the moment of

psalmody approached, by some process to me as mysterious and untraceable

as the opening of the flowers or the breaking-out of the stars, a slate

appeared in front of the gallery, advertising in bold characters the

psalm about to be sung, lest the sonorous announcement of the clerk

should still leave the bucolic mind in doubt on that head. Then followed

the migration of the clerk to the gallery, where, in company with a

bassoon, two key-bugles, a carpenter understood to have an amazing power

of singing 'counter', and two lesser musical stars, he formed the

complement of a choir regarded in Shepperton as one of distinguished

attraction, occasionally known to draw hearers from the next parish. The

innovation of hymn-books was as yet undreamed of; even the New Version

was regarded with a sort of melancholy tolerance, as part of the common

degeneracy in a time when prices had dwindled, and a cotton gown was no

longer stout enough to last a lifetime; for the lyrical taste of the best

heads in Shepperton had been formed on Sternhold and Hopkins. But the

greatest triumphs of the Shepperton choir were reserved for the Sundays

when the slate announced an ANTHEM, with a dignified abstinence from

particularization, both words and music lying far beyond the reach of the

most ambitious amateur in the congregation: an anthem in which the

key-bugles always ran away at a great pace, while the bassoon every now

and then boomed a flying shot after them.

As for the clergyman, Mr. Gilfil, an excellent old gentleman, who smoked

very long pipes and preached very short sermons, I must not speak of him,

or I might be tempted to tell the story of his life, which had its little

romance, as most lives have between the ages of teetotum and tobacco. And

at present I am concerned with quite another sort of clergyman--the Rev.

Amos Barton, who did not come to Shepperton until long after Mr. Gilfil

had departed this life--until after an interval in which Evangelicalism

and the Catholic Question had begun to agitate the rustic mind with

controversial debates. A Popish blacksmith had produced a strong

Protestant reaction by declaring that, as soon as the Emancipation Bill

was passed, he should do a great stroke of business in gridirons; and the

disinclination of the Shepperton parishioners generally to dim the unique

glory of St Lawrence, rendered the Church and Constitution an affair of

their business and bosoms. A zealous Evangelical preacher had made the

old sounding-board vibrate with quite a different sort of elocution from

Mr. Gilfil's; the hymn-book had almost superseded the Old and New

Versions; and the great square pews were crowded with new faces from

distant corners of the parish--perhaps from Dissenting chapels.

You are not imagining, I hope, that Amos Barton was the incumbent of

Shepperton. He was no such thing. Those were days when a man could hold

three small livings, starve a curate a-piece on two of them, and live

badly himself on the third. It was so with the Vicar of Shepperton; a

vicar given to bricks and mortar, and thereby running into debt far away

in a northern county--who executed his vicarial functions towards

Shepperton by pocketing the sum of thirty-five pounds ten per annum, the

net surplus remaining to him from the proceeds of that living, after the

disbursement of eighty pounds as the annual stipend of his curate. And

now, pray, can you solve me the following problem? Given a man with a

wife and six children: let him be obliged always to exhibit himself when

outside his own door in a suit of black broadcloth, such as will not

undermine the foundations of the Establishment by a paltry plebeian

glossiness or an unseemly whiteness at the edges; in a snowy cravat,

which is a serious investment of labour in the hemming, starching, and

ironing departments; and in a hat which shows no symptom of taking to the

hideous doctrine of expediency, and shaping itself according to

circumstances; let him have a parish large enough to create an external

necessity for abundant shoe-leather, and an internal necessity for

abundant beef and mutton, as well as poor enough to require frequent

priestly consolation in the shape of shillings and sixpences; and,

lastly, let him be compelled, by his own pride and other people's, to

dress his wife and children with gentility from bonnet-strings to

shoe-strings. By what process of division can the sum of eighty pounds

per annum be made to yield a quotient which will cover that man's weekly

expenses? This was the problem presented by the position of the Rev. Amos

Barton, as curate of Shepperton, rather more than twenty years ago.

What was thought of this problem, and of the man who had to work it out,

by some of the well-to-do inhabitants of Shepperton, two years or more

after Mr. Barton's arrival among them, you shall hear, if you will

accompany me to Cross Farm, and to the fireside of Mrs. Patten, a

childless old lady, who had got rich chiefly by the negative process of

spending nothing. Mrs. Patten's passive accumulation of wealth, through

all sorts of 'bad times', on the farm of which she had been sole tenant

since her husband's death, her epigrammatic neighbour, Mrs. Hackit,

sarcastically accounted for by supposing that 'sixpences grew on the

bents of Cross Farm;' while Mr. Hackit, expressing his views more

literally, reminded his wife that 'money breeds money'. Mr. and Mrs.

Hackit, from the neighbouring farm, are Mrs. Patten's guests this

evening; so is Mr. Pilgrim, the doctor from the nearest market-town, who,

though occasionally affecting aristocratic airs, and giving late dinners

with enigmatic side-dishes and poisonous port, is never so comfortable as

when he is relaxing his professional legs in one of those excellent

farmhouses where the mice are sleek and the mistress sickly. And he is at

this moment in clover.

For the flickering of Mrs. Patten's bright fire is reflected in her

bright copper tea-kettle, the home-made muffins glisten with an inviting

succulence, and Mrs. Patten's niece, a single lady of fifty, who has

refused the most ineligible offers out of devotion to her aged aunt, is

pouring the rich cream into the fragrant tea with a discreet liberality.

Reader! _did_ you ever taste such a cup of tea as Miss Gibbs is this

moment handing to Mr. Pilgrim? Do you know the dulcet strength, the

animating blandness of tea sufficiently blended with real farmhouse

cream? No--most likely you are a miserable town-bred reader, who think of

cream as a thinnish white fluid, delivered in infinitesimal pennyworths

down area steps; or perhaps, from a presentiment of calves' brains, you

refrain from any lacteal addition, and rasp your tongue with unmitigated

bohea. You have a vague idea of a milch cow as probably a white-plaster

animal standing in a butterman's window, and you know nothing of the

sweet history of genuine cream, such as Miss Gibbs's: how it was this

morning in the udders of the large sleek beasts, as they stood lowing a

patient entreaty under the milking-shed; how it fell with a pleasant

rhythm into Betty's pail, sending a delicious incense into the cool air;

how it was carried into that temple of moist cleanliness, the dairy,

where it quietly separated itself from the meaner elements of milk, and

lay in mellowed whiteness, ready for the skimming-dish which transferred

it to Miss Gibbs's glass cream-jug. If I am right in my conjecture, you

are unacquainted with the highest possibilities of tea; and Mr. Pilgrim,

who is holding that cup in his hands, has an idea beyond you.

Mrs. Hackit declines cream; she has so long abstained from it with an eye

to the weekly butter-money, that abstinence, wedded to habit, has

begotten aversion. She is 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, which was as

sharp as his own lancet. She has brought her knitting--no frivolous fancy

knitting, but a substantial woollen stocking; the click-click of her

knitting-needles is the running accompaniment to all her conversation,

and in her utmost enjoyment of spoiling a friend's self-satisfaction, she

was never known to spoil a stocking. Mrs. Patten does not admire this

excessive click-clicking activity. Quiescence in an easy-chair, under the

sense of compound interest perpetually accumulating, has long seemed an

ample function to her, and she does her malevolence gently. She is a

pretty little old woman of eighty, with a close cap and tiny flat white

curls round her face, as natty and unsoiled and invariable as the waxen

image of a little old lady under a glass-case; once a lady's-maid, and

married for her beauty. She used to adore her husband, and now she adores

her money, cherishing a quiet blood-relation's hatred for her niece,

Janet Gibbs, who, she knows, expects a large legacy, and whom she is

determined to disappoint. Her money shall all go in a lump to a distant

relation of her husband's, and Janet shall be saved the trouble of

pretending to cry, by finding that she is left with a miserable pittance.

Mrs. Patten has more respect for her neighbour Mr. Hackit than for most

people. Mr. Hackit is a shrewd substantial man, whose advice about crops

is always worth listening to, and who is too well off to want to borrow

money.

And now that we are snug and warm with this little tea-party, while it is

freezing with February bitterness outside, we will listen to what they

are talking about.

'So,' said Mr. Pilgrim, with his mouth only half empty of muffin, 'you

had a row in Shepperton Church last Sunday. I was at Jim Hood's, the

bassoon-man's, this morning, attending his wife, and he swears he'll be

revenged on the parson--a confounded, methodistical, meddlesome chap, who

must be putting his finger in every pie. What was it all about?'

'O, a passill o' nonsense,' said Mr. Hackit, sticking one thumb between

the buttons of his capacious waistcoat, and retaining a pinch of snuff

with the other--for he was but moderately given to 'the cups that cheer

but not inebriate', and had already finished his tea; 'they began to sing

the wedding psalm for a new-married couple, as pretty a psalm an' as

pretty a tune as any in the prayer-book. It's been sung for every

new-married couple since I was a boy. And what can be better?' Here Mr.

Hackit stretched out his left arm, threw back his head, and broke into

melody--

'O what a happy thing it is,

And joyful for to see,

Brethren to dwell together in

Friendship and unity.

But Mr. Barton is all for th' hymns, and a sort o' music as I can't join

in at all.'

'And so,' said Mr. Pilgrim, recalling Mr. Hackit from lyrical

reminiscences to narrative, 'he called out Silence! did he? when he got

into the pulpit; and gave a hymn out himself to some meeting-house tune?'

'Yes,' said Mrs. Hackit, stooping towards the candle to pick up a stitch,

'and turned as red as a turkey-c**k. I often say, when he preaches about

meekness, he gives himself a slap in the face. He's like me--he's got a

temper of his own.'

'Rather a low-bred fellow, I think, Barton,' said Mr. Pilgrim, who hated

the Reverend Amos for two reasons--because he had called in a new doctor,

recently settled in Shepperton; and because, being himself a dabbler in

drugs, he had the credit of having cured a patient of Mr. Pilgrim's.

'They say his father was a Dissenting shoemaker; and he's half a

Dissenter himself. Why, doesn't he preach extempore in that cottage up

here, of a Sunday evening?'

'Tchuh!'--this was Mr. Hackit's favourite interjection--'that preaching

without book's no good, only when a man has a gift, and has the Bible at

his fingers' ends. It was all very well for Parry--he'd a gift; and in my

youth I've heard the Ranters out o' doors in Yorkshire go on for an hour

or two on end, without ever sticking fast a minute. There was one clever

chap, I remember, as used to say, "You're like the woodpigeon; it says

do, do, do all day, and never sets about any work itself." That's

bringing it home to people. But our parson's no gift at all that way; he

can preach as good a sermon as need be heard when he writes it down. But

when he tries to preach wi'out book, he rambles about, and doesn't stick

to his text; and every now and then he flounders about like a sheep as

has cast itself, and can't get on'ts legs again. You wouldn't like that,

Mrs. Patten, if you was to go to church now?'

'Eh, dear,' said Mrs. Patten, falling back in her chair, and lifting up

her little withered hands, 'what 'ud Mr. Gilfil say, if he was worthy to

know the changes as have come about i' the Church these last ten years? I

don't understand these new sort o' doctrines. When Mr. Barton comes to

see me, he talks about nothing but my sins and my need o' marcy. Now, Mr.

Hackit, I've never been a sinner. From the fust beginning, when I went

into service, I al'ys did my duty by my emplyers. I was a good wife as

any in the county--never aggravated my husband. The cheese-factor used to

say my cheese was al'ys to be depended on. I've known women, as their

cheeses swelled a shame to be seen, when their husbands had counted on

the cheese-money to make up their rent; and yet they'd three gowns to my

one. If I'm not to be saved, I know a many as are in a bad way. But it's

well for me as I can't go to church any longer, for if th' old singers

are to be done away with, there'll be nothing left as it was in Mr.

Patten's time; and what's more, I hear you've settled to pull the church

down and build it up new?'

Now the fact was that the Rev. Amos Barton, on his last visit to Mrs.

Patten, had urged her to enlarge her promised subscription of twenty

pounds, representing to her that she was only a steward of her riches,

and that she could not spend them more for the glory of God than by

giving a heavy subscription towards the rebuilding of Shepperton

Church--a practical precept which was not likely to smooth the way to her

acceptance of his theological doctrine. Mr. Hackit, who had more

doctrinal enlightenment than Mrs. Patten, had been a little shocked by

the heathenism of her speech, and was glad of the new turn given to the

subject by this question, addressed to him as church-warden and an

authority in all parochial matters.

'Ah,' he answered, 'the parson's bothered us into it at last, and we're

to begin pulling down this spring. But we haven't got money enough yet. I

was for waiting till we'd made up the sum, and, for my part, I think the

congregation's fell off o' late; though Mr. Barton says that's because

there's been no room for the people when they've come. You see, the

congregation got so large in Parry's time, the people stood in the

aisles; but there's never any crowd now, as I can see.'

'Well,' said Mrs. Hackit, whose good-nature began to act now that it was

a little in contradiction with the dominant tone of the conversation,

'_I_ like Mr. Barton. I think he's a good sort o' man, for all he's not

overburthen'd i' th' upper storey; and his wife's as nice a lady-like

woman as I'd wish to see. How nice she keeps her children! and little

enough money to do't with; and a delicate creatur'--six children, and

another a-coming. I don't know how they make both ends meet, I'm sure,

now her aunt has left 'em. But I sent 'em a cheese and a sack o' potatoes

last week; that's something towards filling the little mouths.'

'Ah!' said Mr. Hackit, 'and my wife makes Mr. Barton a good stiff glass

o' brandy-and-water, when he comes into supper after his cottage

preaching. The parson likes it; it puts a bit o' colour into 'is face,

and makes him look a deal handsomer.'

This allusion to brandy-and-water suggested to Miss Gibbs the

introduction of the liquor decanters, now that the tea was cleared away;

for in bucolic society five-and-twenty years ago, the human animal of the

male s*x was understood to be perpetually athirst, and 'something to

drink' was as necessary a 'condition of thought' as Time and Space.

'Now, that cottage preaching,' said Mr. Pilgrim, mixing himself a strong

glass of 'cold without,' 'I was talking about it to our Parson Ely the

other day, and he doesn't approve of it at all. He said it did as much

harm as good to give a too familiar aspect to religious teaching. That

was what Ely said--it does as much harm as good to give a too familiar

aspect to religious teaching.'

Mr. Pilgrim generally spoke with an intermittent kind of splutter;

indeed, one of his patients had observed that it was a pity such a clever

man had a 'pediment' in his speech. But when he came to what he conceived

the pith of his argument or the point of his joke, he mouthed out his

words with slow emphasis; as a hen, when advertising her accouchement,

passes at irregular intervals from pianissimo semiquavers to fortissimo

crotchets. He thought this speech of Mr. Ely's particularly metaphysical

and profound, and the more decisive of the question because it was a

generality which represented no particulars to his mind.

'Well, I don't know about that,' said Mrs. Hackit, who had always the

courage of her opinion, 'but I know, some of our labourers and

stockingers as used never to come to church, come to the cottage, and

that's better than never hearing anything good from week's end to week's

end. And there's that Track Society's as Mr. Barton has begun--I've seen

more o' the poor people with going tracking, than all the time I've lived

in the parish before. And there'd need be something done among 'em; for

the drinking at them Benefit Clubs is shameful. There's hardly a steady

man or steady woman either, but what's a dissenter.'

During this speech of Mrs. Hackit's, Mr. Pilgrim had emitted a succession

of little snorts, something like the treble grunts of a guinea-pig, which

were always with him the sign of suppressed disapproval. But he never

contradicted Mrs. Hackit--a woman whose 'pot-luck' was always to be

relied on, and who on her side had unlimited reliance on bleeding,

blistering, and draughts.

Mrs. Patten, however, felt equal disapprobation, and had no reasons for

suppressing it.

'Well,' she remarked, 'I've heared of no good from interfering with one's

neighbours, poor or rich. And I hate the sight o' women going about

trapesing from house to house in all weathers, wet or dry, and coming in

with their petticoats dagged and their shoes all over mud. Janet wanted

to join in the tracking, but I told her I'd have nobody tracking out o'

my house; when I'm gone, she may do as she likes. I never dagged my

petticoats in _my_ life, and I've no opinion o' that sort o' religion.'

'No,' said Mr. Hackit, who was fond of soothing the acerbities of the

feminine mind with a jocose compliment, 'you held your petticoats so

high, to show your tight ankles: it isn't everybody as likes to show her

ankles.'

This joke met with general acceptance, even from the snubbed Janet, whose

ankles were only tight in the sense of looking extremely squeezed by her

boots. But Janet seemed always to identify herself with her aunt's

personality, holding her own under protest.

Under cover of the general laughter the gentlemen replenished their

glasses, Mr. Pilgrim attempting to give his the character of a

stirrup-cup by observing that he 'must be going'. Miss Gibbs seized this

opportunity of telling Mrs. Hackit that she suspected Betty, the

dairymaid, of frying the best bacon for the shepherd, when he sat up with

her to 'help brew'; whereupon Mrs. Hackit replied that she had always

thought Betty false; and Mrs. Patten said there was no bacon stolen when

_she_ was able to manage. Mr. Hackit, who often complained that he 'never

saw the like to women with their maids--he never had any trouble with his

men', avoided listening to this discussion, by raising the question of

vetches with Mr. Pilgrim. The stream of conversation had thus diverged:

and no more was said about the Rev. Amos Barton, who is the main object

of interest to us just now. So we may leave Cross Farm without waiting

till Mrs. Hackit, resolutely donning her clogs and wrappings, renders it

incumbent on Mr. Pilgrim also to fulfil his frequent threat of going.