Chapter: A Variation of Protestantism Unknown to Bossuet


Journeying down the Rhone on a summer's day, you have perhaps felt the
sunshine made dreary by those ruined villages which stud the banks in
certain parts of its course, telling how the swift river once rose,
like an angry, destroying god, sweeping down the feeble generations
whose breath is in their nostrils, and making their dwellings a
desolation. Strange contrast, you may have thought, between the
effect produced on us by these dismal remnants of commonplace
houses, which in their best days were but the sign of a sordid life,
belonging in all its details to our own vulgar era, and the effect
produced by those ruins on the castled Rhine, which have crumbled and
mellowed into such harmony with the green and rocky steeps that they
seem to have a natural fitness, like the mountain-pine; nay, even in
the day when they were built they must have had this fitness, as if
they had been raised by an earth-born race, who had inherited from
their mighty parent a sublime instinct of form. And that was a day of
romance; If those robber-barons were somewhat grim and drunken ogres,
they had a certain grandeur of the wild beast in them,--they were
forest boars with tusks, tearing and rending, not the ordinary
domestic grunter; they represented the demon forces forever in
collision with beauty, virtue, and the gentle uses of life; they made
a fine contrast in the picture with the wandering minstrel, the
soft-lipped princess, the pious recluse, and the timid Israelite. That
was a time of 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.

 That is one wacky chapter title, so let's explain that first. Bossuet refers to a French Bishop who was alive during the seventeenth century. And the chapter title is a reference to a book that Bossuet wrote, a history of English Protestantism. So the title is a weird way of saying that we're going to hear about a type of Protestantism that Bossuet didn't write about in his book. Also, the title of the fourth book, "Valley of Humiliation," is a reference to another book, Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. OK, moving on to this admittedly bizarre chapter... The narrator rambles for a bit about castles on the Rhine, a river in Germany. These castles are very romantic and cool. But then the narrator describes some houses on the Rhone River which are poor and run down and depressing. This is a giant metaphor about two different kinds of history: the romantic history of castles and adventure and the depressing history of anonymous poor people. OK, so all of this is just a set up for the narrator to start discussing the depressing lives of the families along the Floss. The narrator directly addresses the audience and notes that "we" probably would go crazy living among stupid, narrow-minded people like the Tullivers and the Wakems. But wait, there's more. The narrator agrees that Tom and Maggie's lives are really depressing . But the narrator says that we have to see all this stuff and to get these really detailed narratives in order to understand how the circumstances of Tom's and Maggie's existences effect them. Basically, circumstances like where they live and who their families help to make-up Tom's and Maggie's characters. Now we switch over to religion. The narrator gives us a lengthy run-down of the type of religion that the Dodson clan practices. The Dodson's are good Protestants. But religion isn't a matter of belief for the Dodsons, and others like them. It's a matter of habit, custom, and social respectability. The Dodson's major beliefs revolve around money and blood: always be thrifty and work hard and always be loyal to family. The Tullivers have the same beliefs and customs as the Dodsons, though they are a bit more emotional and prone to crazy schemes. Overall, the families populating St. Ogg's are essentially the same and St. Ogg's on the whole is really lacking in spirituality. Thus concludes the weirdest chapter in the book.

