The Mill on the Floss

Chapter 1

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 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 color, 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

baptized, 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 honor 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 honors, 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 unfavorable 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.