Part 13

This gave Mr. Chadband his opportunity for continued speech. "My young friend, it is because you know nothing that you are to us a gem, a jewel. For what are you? Are you a beast of the field? No! Are you a fish of the river? No! You are a human boy! Oh, glorious to be a human boy! And why glorious, my young friend?"

Marvelous, to taciturn folk, is this flow of language. The little rill becomes a torrent, and soon there are waters to swim in. It seems to savor of the supernatural, being of the nature of creation out of nothing. And yet like many other wonderful things, it is easy when one knows how to do it.

The churchmen of those days joined with the wits in laughter which greeted the tinkers and the bakers who turned to prophesying on their own account. But now and then one of the zealous independents could give as keen a thrust as any which were received. It would be hard to find more delicate satire than in the description of Parson Two Tongues of the town of Fair Speech, who was much esteemed by his distinguished parishioners, My Lord Time-Server, Mr. Facing Both-Ways, and Mr. Anything. The parson was a man of good family, though his grandfather had been a waterman, and had thus learned the art of looking one way and rowing another. It is his parishioner Mr. Bye-Ends who propounds the question of ministerial ethics. "Suppose a minister, a worthy man, possessed of but a small benefice, has in his eye a greater, more fat and plump by far; he has also now an opportunity of getting it, yet so as being more studious, by preaching more zealously, and because the temper of the people requires it, by altering some of his principles, for my part I see no reason but a man may do this (provided he has a call), aye, and a great deal more besides, and be an honest man." As for changing his principles to suit the times, Mr. Bye-Ends argues that it shows that the minister "is of a self-sacrificing temper."

The argument for conformity is put so plausibly that it is calculated to deceive the very elect; and then as if by mere inadvertence we are allowed a glimpse of the seamy side. It is evident that the wits were not all banished from the conventicles.

* * * * *

To those who are acquainted only with the pale and interesting tea-drinking parsons of nineteenth-century English fiction, there is something surprising in the clergymen one meets in the pages of Fielding. They are all in such rude health! There is not a suggestion of nervous prostration nor of minister's sore throat. Not one of them seems to be in need of a vacation; perhaps because they are out of doors all the time. Their professional duties were doubtless done, but they are not obtruded on the reader's attention.

The odious Chaplain Thwackum is chiefly remembered for his argument with the free-thinker Square. Square having asserted that honor might exist independently of religion, Thwackum refutes him in a manner most satisfactory. "When I mention religion I mean the Christian religion, and not only the Christian religion but the Protestant religion, and not only the Protestant religion but the religion of the Church of England; and when I mention honor I mean that mode of divine grace which is dependent on that religion."

"Thwackum," says the Gentle Reader, "was, after all, an unworldly man. He was content to remain a mere hanger-on of the church when he was capable of thoughts which were really in great demand. I have been looking over a huge controversial volume by an author of that day, and I found nothing but Thwackum argument expanded and illustrated. The author was made a bishop for it."

As for Parson Trulliber, the Falstaff of divines, the less said about him the better. The curate Barnabas is a more pleasing character, though hardly an example of spirituality. He reminds one of the good parson who, in his desire for moderation, prayed that the Lord might lead his people "in the safe middle path between right and wrong."

When Joseph Andrews confessed his sins to him, Barnabas was divided between his eagerness to do his professional duty to the sinner, and the desire to prepare the punch for the company downstairs, a work in which he particularly excelled.

"Barnabas asked him if he forgave his enemies 'as a Christian ought.'

"Joseph desired to know what that forgiveness was.

"'That is,' answered Barnabas, 'to forgive them--as--it is to forgive them as--in short, to forgive them as a Christian.'

"Joseph replied 'He forgave them as much as he could.'

"'Well! Well!' said Barnabas, 'that will do!' He then demanded of him if he had any more sins unrepented of, and if he had, to repent of them as fast as he could; ... for some company was waiting below in the parlor where the ingredients for punch were all in readiness, for that no one could squeeze the oranges till he came."

Barnabas would have been shocked at the demands of the Methodists for immediate repentance, but on this occasion he was led into almost equal urgency.

But Fielding more than atones for all the rest by the creation of Parson Adams. Dear, delightful Parson Adams! to know him is to love him! In him the Church of England appears a little out at the elbows, but in good heart. With the appetite of a ploughman, and "a fist rather less than the knuckle of an ox," he represents the true church militant. He has a pipe in his mouth, and a short great coat which half conceals his cassock, which he had "torn some ten years ago in passing over a stile." But however uncanonical his attire, his heart is in the right place.

What a different world Parson Adams lived in from that of George Eliot's Amos Barton, bewildered with thoughts which he could not express. "'Mr. Barton,' said his rural parishioner, 'can preach as good a sermon as need be when he writes it down, but when he tries to preach without book he rambles about, and every now and then flounders like a sheep as has cast itself and can't get on its legs.'"

One cannot imagine Parson Adams floundering about, under any circumstances. There is a sturdy strength and directness about all he says and does. His simplicity is endearing but never savors of weakness.

He sets great store by his manuscript sermons, for which he seeks a publisher. The curate Barnabas throws cold water on his plans. The age, he says, is so wicked that nobody reads sermons;

"'Would you think it, Mr. Adams, I intended to print a volume of sermons, myself, and they had the approbation of three bishops, but what do you think the bookseller offered me?'

"'Twelve guineas,' cried Adams.

"'Nay,' answered Barnabas, 'the dog refused me a concordance in exchange.... To be concise with you, three bishops said they were the best sermons that were ever writ; but indeed there are a pretty moderate number printed already, and they are not all sold yet.'"

The theology of Parson Adams was genially human. "'Can anything,' he said, 'be more derogatory to the honor of God than for men to imagine that the all-wise Being will hereafter say to the good and virtuous, Notwithstanding the purity of thy life, notwithstanding the constant rule of virtue and goodness in which thou walkedst upon earth; still, as thou didst not believe everything in the true orthodox manner, thy want of faith shall condemn thee? Or, on the other side, can any doctrine be more pernicious in society than the persuasion that it will be a good plea for a villain at the last day,--"Lord, it is true I never obeyed any of Thy commandments; yet punish me not, for I believe in them all?"'"

This was not sound doctrine in the opinion of the itinerant bookseller. "'I am afraid,' he said, 'that you will find a backwardness in the trade to engage in a book which the clergy would be certain to cry down.'"

The good parson had the clerical weakness for reading sermons in season and out of season. At a festive gathering there was a call for speeches, to which it was objected that no one was prepared for an address; "'Unless,' turning to Adams, 'you have a sermon about you.'

"'Sir,' said Adams, 'I never travel without one, for fear of what might happen.'"

Like other clergymen, he dabbled occasionally in politics. "'On all proper seasons, such as at the approach of an election, I throw a suitable dash or two into my sermons, which I have the pleasure to hear is not disagreeable to Sir Thomas and the other honest gentlemen, my neighbors.'"

At one time he actively labored for the election of young Sir Thomas Booby, who had lately returned from his travels. He was elected, "'and a fine Parliament man he was. They tell me he made speeches of an hour long, and I have been told very fine ones; but he could never persuade Parliament to be of his opinion.'"

Estimable, eloquent Sir Thomas Booby! How many orators have found the same result following their speeches of an hour long!

To the returned traveler who had engaged in a controversy with him, Parson Adams gave expression to his literary faith.

"'Master of mine, perhaps I have traveled a great deal further than you, without the assistance of a ship. Do you imagine sailing by different cities or countries is traveling. I can go further in an afternoon than you in a twelve-month. What, I suppose you have seen the pillars of Hercules and perhaps the walls of Carthage?... You have sailed among the Cyclades and passed the famous straits which took their name from the unfortunate Helle, so sweetly described by Apollonius Rhodius; you have passed the very spot where Dædalus fell into the sea; you have doubtless traversed the Euxine, and called at Colchis to see if there was another golden fleece.'

"'Not I, truly,' said the gentleman. 'I never touched at any of these places.'

"'But I have been in all these,' replied Adams.

"'Then you have been in the Indies, for there are no such places, I'll be sworn, either in the West Indies or in the Levant.'

"'Pray, where is the Levant?' quoth Adams.

"'Oho! You're a pretty traveler and not to know the Levant. You must not tip me for a traveler, it won't go here.'

"'Since thou art so dull as to misunderstand me,' quoth Adams, 'I will inform thee. The traveling I mean is in books, the only kind of traveling by which any knowledge is acquired.'"

"There is a great deal to be said in defense of that opinion," says the Gentle Reader.

* * * * *

To turn from Parson Adams to the Vicar of Wakefield is to experience a change of spiritual climate. Parson Adams was a good man, and so was Dr. Primrose; otherwise they were quite different. Was piety ever made more attractive to restless, over-driven people than in the person of the dear, non-resistant vicar. Here was a man who might be reviled and persecuted,--but he never could be hurried.

The Gentle Reader rejoices in the peace of the opening chapters. "The year was spent in moral and rural amusements. We had no revolutions to fear, no fatigues to undergo, all our adventures were by the fireside, and all our migrations were from the blue bed to the brown." And good-natured Mrs. Primrose, absorbed in making pickles and gooseberry wine, and with her ability to read any English book without much spelling, was an ideal minister's wife, before the days of missionary societies and general information. It was only her frivolous daughters who were brought into society, where there was talk of "pictures, taste, Shakespeare, and the musical glasses." These subjects not then being supposed to have any esoteric, religious significance, which it was the duty of the minister's wife to discover and disseminate, she busied herself with her domestic concerns without any haunting sense that she was neglecting the weightier matters. The vicar's favorite sermons were in praise of matrimony, and he preached out of a happy experience.

This peaceful scene bears the same relation to the trials that afterwards befell the good man that the prologue to the Book of Job does to the main part of it. Satan has his will with Job, so also it happened with Dr. Primrose. His banker absconds to Amsterdam, his daughter elopes with the wicked young squire who has the father thrown into prison, where he hears of the death of his wretched daughter who has been cast off by her betrayer. Troubles came thick and fast; yet did not the vicar hurry, nor for a moment change the even tenor of his way. It was the middle of the eighteenth century, when piety was not treated as an elemental force. It did not lift up its voice and cry out against injustice. The church was the patient Griselda married to the state, and the clergyman was a teacher of resignation.

Upon learning of his daughter's abduction, Dr. Primrose calls for his Bible and his staff, but he does not indulge in any haste unbecoming a clergyman. He finds time in his leisurely pursuit to discourse most judiciously and at considerable length on the royal prerogative. He remembers his duty to the landed gentry, and on his return from his unsuccessful quest remains several days to enjoy the squire's hospitality.

Was ever poetical justice done with more placidity and completeness than in the prison scene? The vicar, feeling that he is about to die, proceeds to address his fellow wretches. He falls naturally into an old sermon on the evils of free-thinking philosophy, that being the line of the least resistance. The discourse being finished, it is without surprise and yet with real pleasure that we learn that he does not die; nor is his son, who was about to be hanged, hanged at all; on the contrary, he appears not long after handsomely dressed in regimentals, and makes a modest and distant bow to Miss Wilmot, the heiress. That young lady had just arrived and was to be married next day to the wicked young squire, but on learning that young gentleman's perfidy, "'Oh goodness!' cried the lovely girl, 'how I have been deceived.'" The vicar's son being on the spot in his handsome regimentals, they are engaged in the presence of the company, and her affluent fortune is assured to this hitherto impecunious youth. And the daughter Olivia at the same time appears, it happening that she was not dead after all, and that she has papers to show that she is the lawful wife of the young squire. And the banker who ran away with the vicar's property has been captured and the money restored. In the mean time--for happy accidents never come singly--the wretch who was in the act of carrying off the younger daughter Sophy has been foiled by the opportune arrival of Mr. Burchell. And best of all, Mr. Burchell proves not to be Mr. Burchell at all, but the celebrated Sir William Thornhill, who is loyal to the constitution and a friend of the king. The Vicar is so far restored that he leaves the jail and partakes of a bountiful repast, at which the company is "as merry as affluence and innocence could make them."

Affluence as the providential, though sometimes long delayed, reward of innocence was a favorite thesis of eighteenth-century piety.

"It may sound very absurd," says the Gentle Reader, "to those who insist that all the happenings should be realistic; but the Vicar of Wakefield is a very real character, nevertheless; and he is the kind of a person for whom you would expect things to come out right in the end."

Quixotism

When Falstaff boasted that he was not only witty himself but the cause of wit in other men, he thought of himself more highly than he ought to have thought. The very fact that he was witty prevented him from the highest efficiency in stimulating others in that direction. The atmospheric currents of merriment move irresistibly toward a vacuum. Create a character altogether destitute of humor and the most sluggish intelligence is stirred in the effort to fill the void.

When we seek one who is the cause of wit in other men we pass by the jovial Falstaff and come to the preternaturally serious Don Quixote. Here we have not the chance outcropping of "the lighter vein," but the mother lode which the humorist finds inexhaustible. Don Quixote, with a lofty gravity which never for an instant relaxes, sets forth upon his mission. His is a soul impenetrable to mirth; but as he rides he enlivens the whole country-side. Everywhere merry eyes are watching him; boisterous laughter comes from the stables of village inns; from castle windows high-born ladies smile upon him; the peasants in the fields stand gaping and holding their sides; the countenances of the priests relax, and even the robbers salute the knight with mock courtesy. The dullest La Manchan is refreshed, and feels that he belongs to a choice coterie of wits.

Cervantes tells us that he intended only a burlesque on the books of chivalry which were in vogue in his day. Had he done no more than he intended, he would have amused his own generation and then have been forgotten. It would be too much to ask that we should read the endless tales about Amadis and Orlando, only that we might appreciate his clever parody of them. A satire lasts no longer than its object. It must shoot folly as it flies. To keep on shooting at a folly after it is dead is unsportsmanlike.

But though we have not read the old books of chivalry, we have all come in contact with Quixotism. I say we have all come in contact with it; but let no selfish, conventional persons be afraid lest they catch it. They are immune. They may do many foolish things, but they cannot possibly be quixotic. Quixotism is a malady possible only to generous minds.

Listen to Don Quixote as he makes his plea before the duke and duchess. "I have redressed grievances, righted the injured, chastised the insolent, vanquished giants. My intentions have all been directed toward virtuous ends and to do good to all mankind. Now judge, most excellent duke and duchess, whether a person who makes it his study to practice all this deserves to be called a fool."

Our first instinct is to answer confidently, "Of course not! Such a character as you describe is what we call a hero or a saint." But the person whose moral enthusiasm has been tempered with a knowledge of the queer combinations of goodness and folly of which human nature is capable is more wary, and answers, "That depends."

In the case of Don Quixote it depends very much on the kind of world he lives in. If it should happen that in this world there are giants standing truculently at their castle doors, and forlorn maidens at every cross-roads waiting to be rescued, we will grant him the laurels that are due to the hero. But if La Mancha should not furnish these materials for his prowess,--then we must take a different view of the case.

The poor gentleman is mad, that is what the curate and the barber say; but when we listen to his conversation we are in doubt. If the curate could discourse half so eloquently he would have been a bishop long before this. The most that can be said is that he has some notions which are not in accordance with the facts, and that he acts accordingly; but if that were a proof of madness there would not be enough sane persons in the world to make strait-jackets for the rest. His chief peculiarity is that he takes himself with a seriousness that is absolute. All of us have thoughts which would not bear the test of strict examination. There are vagrant fancies and random impulses which, fortunately for our reputations, come to nothing. We are just on the verge of doing something absurd when we recognize the character of our proposed action; and our neighbors lose a pleasure. We comfort ourselves by the reflection that their loss is our gain. Don Quixote has no such inhibition; he carries out his own ideas to their logical conclusion.

The hero of Cervantes had muddled his wits by the reading of romances. Almost any kind of printed matter may have the same effect if one is not able to distinguish between what he has read and what he has actually experienced. One may read treatises on political economy until he mistakes the "economic man" who acts only according to the rules of enlightened self-interest for a creature of flesh and blood. One may read so many articles on the Rights of Women that he mistakes a hard-working American citizen who spends his summer in a down-town office, in order that his wife and daughter may go to Europe, for that odious monster the Tyrant Man. It is possible to read the Society columns of the daily newspapers till the reader does not know good society when he sees it. An estimable teacher in the public schools may devote herself so assiduously to pedagogical literature that she mistakes her school-room for a psychological laboratory, with results that are sufficiently tragical. There are excellent divines so learned in the history of the early church that they believe that semi-pelagianism is still the paramount issue. There were few men whose minds were, in general, better balanced than Mr. Gladstone's, yet what a fine example of Quixotism was that suggested by Queen Victoria's remark: "Mr. Gladstone always addresses me as if I were a public meeting." To address a woman as if she were a public meeting is the mistake of one who had devoted himself too much to political speeches.

A thoroughly healthy mind can endure a good deal of reading and a considerable amount of speculation with impunity. It does not take the ideas thus derived too seriously. It is continually making allowances, and every once in a while there is a general clearance. It is like a gun which expels the old cartridge as the new shot is fired. When the delicate mechanism for the expulsion of exploded opinions gets out of order the mind becomes the victim of "fixed ideas." The best idea becomes dangerous when it gets stuck. When the fixed ideas are of a noble and disinterested character we have a situation which excites at once the admiration of the moralist and the apprehension of the alienist. Perhaps this border-land between spiritual reality and intellectual hallucination belongs neither to the moralist nor to the alienist, but to the wise humorist. He laughs, but there is no bitterness or scorn in his laughter. It is mellow and human-hearted.

The world is full of people who have a faculty which enables them to believe whatever they wish. Thought is not, for them, a process which may go on indefinitely, a work in which they are collaborating with the universe. They do it all by themselves. It is the definite transaction of making up their minds. When the mind is made up it closes with a snap. After that, for an unwelcome idea to force an entrance would be a well-nigh impossible feat of intellectual burglary.

We sometimes speak of stubborn facts. Nonsense! A fact is a mere babe when compared with a stubborn theory. Let the theory, however extravagant in its origin, choose its own ground, and intrench itself in the mind of a well-meaning lady or gentleman of an argumentative turn, and I'll warrant you it can hold its own against a whole regiment of facts.

Did you ever attend a meeting of the society for the--perhaps I had better not mention the name of the society, lest I tread on your favorite Quixotism. Suffice it to say that it has a noble purpose. It aims at nothing less than the complete transformation of human society, by the use of means which, to say the least, seem quite inadequate.

After the minutes of the last meeting have been read, and the objects of the society have been once more stated with much detail, there is an opportunity for discussion from the floor.

"Perhaps there is some one who may give some new suggestions, or who may desire to ask a question."