Dolores (2 page)

In the long run, the sixty years' run, she did
not settle for any received style, any received notion. She found her own voice by abandoning the voices of the past, the revered dead masters of dead prose. In
Dolores
she tested them. Fourteen years later, in
Pastors and Masters
, she had fully attained her own, if still shaky, tone. In the nineteen novels subsequent to
Dolores
George Eliot is mentioned once; a ridiculous and self-loving lady, Gertrude Doubleday in
Manservant and Maidservant
, fancies and encourages a resemblance between herself and the great Victorian, and serves tea under her portrait.

Comedy is the purge for the pretences of
Dolores
, for the verbose and the quasi-philosophic; comedy is the mode adopted for the later nineteen. It has already asserted itself in
Dolores
(and this may be what, in
Dolores
, finally interests us most): no novel with a character named Perdita Claverhouse can be entirely glum. In the satire of high-minded gentlemen like Mr Blackwood and Dr Cassell; in the verbal wars between the two sisters Mrs Hutton and Mrs Blackwood, acid antagonists; in the aggressive witty candour of Elsa Blackwood or the smoother more absurd wit of Felicia Murray—in these the comedy of the future is predicted. Mr Blackwood is a first run-through of the ninny type, like Peter Bateman in
Brothers and Sisters
; Sigismund
Claverhouse is the first of countless writers, culminating in Hereward Egerton in the nineteenth novel,
A God and his Gifts
; Elsa and Felicia are prototypes of the truth-speaking sophisticates who will offer their witty opposition to family tyrants in every subsequent work.

There are other minor foreshadowings, situational devices that will be used dozens of times, such as servants listening at keyholes (Julia, the serving woman of the Claverhouses) or fateful discovered documents (Perdita's tragic diary of her marriage, read after her death by her husband). But it is the comedy that counts. The proportion of melodrama to comedy in
Dolores
is, perhaps, three to one; in the later novels, this proportion is reversed and increased—for one page of heavy drama bristling with rhetoric there are ten or twenty where wit dominates. Not that the two elements are so sharply demarcated as this would sound: nonetheless the supreme moments in the novels are those when everything stops and pure comedy reigns.

It begins in
Dolores
, markedly with the chorus of schoolmistresses, whose wit must surely be Dame Ivy's own, unaided by her brother or anyone else. One cannot claim for the schoolmistresses the comic quality of, for example, the exchanges between Mortimer Lamb and the butler Bullivant in
Manservant and Maidservant
or the luncheon party in
Elders and Betters
. But one can claim a good deal. Here is the end of
Dolores:

“You are experienced in people's manners of offering their hands, then, Miss Cliff?” said Miss Greenlow, in tones of polite comment.

“Ah! The cat is out of the bag,” said Miss Dorington.

“No,” said Miss Cliff, with easy laughter. “I have no right to speak as one having authority.”

“Ah! That is all very well now,” said Miss Dorington. “You certainly spoke in an unguarded moment with no uncertain sound.”

“How many of us have that right, I wonder,” said Miss Lemaître.

“I suspect Miss Adam,” said Miss Greenlow, shaking her head.

“Miss Adam, you are a marked character,” said Miss Cliff.”

“Clearly we are right, Miss Lemaître,” said Miss Greenlow; as Miss Adam yielded without great unwillingness to the impulse to look conscious.

“Anyhow we are rude,” said Miss Dorrington genially.

“Oh, we can surely talk to young people, as old women may,” said Miss Cliff.

“If youth is the qualification, Miss Hutton is the fittest mark for our elderly interest,” said Miss Lemaître.

“Miss Hutton, can you meet our eyes? said Miss Adam, not without suggestion that this was beyond herself.

“Oh, we will acquit Miss Hutton. She is the most sensible of us all,” said Miss Cliff.

It is appropriate that this is the end of the novel. It is as if here, after the flounderings, the true voice has been found. It is this same voice which will be heard fourteen years later in
Pastors and Masters
and, developed, perfected, throughout the remarkable novels that follow.

Charles Burkhart

It is a daily thing: a silent, unvisited churchyard; bordering the garden of the parsonage; and holding a church whose age and interest spare our words; a few tombs fenced from their fellows, and marking generations of the family held as great; others naming primitive lives that grew and waned by the spot which harbours their silence; and at some moment of its lying in sight an open grave with its mourners.

An open grave with its mourners. It is a daily thing, but not to be denied our heed. Let us mark the figure foremost in the sombre throng, that clerical figure of heavy build and with bent head. That is the Reverend Cleveland Hutton, the vicar of the parish.

He is not very worthy of our words, the Reverend Cleveland Hutton. He is perhaps
less worthy than his parish would have held, and his appearance tends to suggest. The heaviness of build, which was interpreted in the light of feminine fondness for the cloth as a sign of mental and moral profundity, was on other interpretations simply heaviness. The expanse of his brow was due in smaller measure to developement of the brain beneath, than recession of the hair above. The unusual length of his hinder locks, though a feature which, as he was aware, has been in some cases an attribute of genius, was in his own to be referred, simply, to his directions to his barber. Even his Christian name, though to the rustic portion of the village it was an illustration of his removal from things common amongst remaining mankind, had been given him for no better reason than that it was his mother's maiden surname—a reason which even to his mother seemed to have appeared sufficient only in the case of a younger son, since his elder brother was known to his family as James. In his clerical character also he was one of many. He had discharged the duties of a curate till he was thirty-five; and his recent appointment to this country living, which he had himself been heard to allude to as his first step up the ladder of preferment, was likely to be his final one; and was due not less to the fact that his mother's cousin was connected with its patron, than to the
force of his personality, or the repute of the pamphlet he had published.

No; there was nothing in the Rev. Cleveland Hutton to mark him a man apart. But it does not follow there was nothing about him to be written or read. Our deepest experience is not less deep, that it is common to our race; and the heart of the Rev. Cleveland Hutton was not less wrung, as he watched the ebbing of the life that was to him of price, and wrestled in remembrance of the forgotten wrongs of tone and word, which even the supreme agony of remorse could not make as if they had not been, that it was an ordinary human heart, which had beaten for thirty-eight years in obedience to ordinary human daily things. It was a strong still face, from which he tore his eyes, turning again that its picture might defy the years with different days. There had been a strong, woman's heart to cleave to his own, through the struggles of the lingering unbeneficed time, the loss of his firstborn, and other things finding a place in his ordinary human lot. Standing by the open grave, dreading for the numbness of grief to pass, and leave him the facing of the future that was dark, he was as fitting a mark for compassion as if his name were to live.

Nor was compassion withheld. The mourners behind him are standing with lips set firm and with bowed heads. They are not his relatives:
for the Reverend Cleveland Hutton had a knack of becoming estranged from his kin. He had at times met occasion to borrow from them, or coercion to allow them to borrow from him, and had not met the rarer experience of averting regrettable results. The only member of his family present was his elder brother, the Reverend James Hutton; who, never holding business dealings with relatives on principle, did not find himself disqualified for conducting the burial service. They are all of the district's familiar dwellers; and they will serve, if patience can be held through seeming wandering, as an example of the power of this passage of the ordinary human lot upon the ordinary human heart.

If you had entered this straggling village, at the time—somewhere in the latter half of the nineteenth century—when its parsonage was the home of the Reverend Cleveland Hutton, you would have thought it well provided in the matter of its spiritual needs. It contained, besides its church of passable antiquity and interest, a Wesleyan chapel without such qualities, and a wooden building in a field; which from having been the barn of a now obsolete farmhouse, had come to be a sort of meeting-place at general disposal for religious ends. But it does not follow, because a place is well provided in the matter of religion, that it is equally furnished in such matters as charity and tolerance. It might
rather seem that Providence felt good equipment under both these heads an extravagant moral dower for a single spot, and was at some pains to avoid it. Bearing this in mind; and summoning thither our experience of ordinary human nature as wrought upon by minor religious disagreements, and of districts with a church with traditions in favour of a high ritual, an old-fashioned Wesleyan chapel, and such a peopling that every working man is an accounted unit in each congregation; let us turn our eyes on the figure behind the Reverend Cleveland Hutton. It is a figure similar in height and garb, but with a subtle suggestion of difference.

That is the minister of the Wesleyan Chapel.

Look next at the mourner behind the Wesleyan minister—that broad-shouldered man with the air of the prosperous country gentleman. That is Mr Blackwood; who for some time has been a prominent figure of the neighbourhood; having found in it some years ago a roomy house at a reduced rent, and within easy distance of facilities for Wesleyan worship—adaptable conditions to his large family, straitened income, and the branch of dissent in which both he and his wife had received their nurture. Of his appearance there is little to be told beyond what is said. Mrs Blackwood was of the opinion that he looked like a member of parliament; and he could himself testify that on several occasions in the
train he had been taken for one. The senatorial suggestion about him had the excuse that this had once been his destiny. Family losses following his early marriage had cancelled the prospect; and Mr Blackwood, who had seconded with much compliance his parents' assumption of his insight into national conditions, recognised in a similar spirit that misfortune had averted the career for which he was moulded; and surrendered himself with what was felt a rather fine suppression of repining to the obscure but untaxing career of a country gentleman. This life was diversified by experience of more arduous nature. Mrs Blackwood was unable to be reconciled to the anomaly of public qualities withdrawn from the general advantage; and having strong feelings upon temperance and the deplorable significance of the spread of Roman Catholicism, was wont to urge him to the use of his accepted rhetorical gifts, upon which her views had an unwonted concurrence with those of relatives-inlaw. Further losses in substance having lessened facilities for country pleasures, he had greater resource to declamatory interests. Habit begot inclination; and brought into outline opinions in which he had acquiesced, in the same manner as in his own deliberative fitness; and the addressing of “meetings,” political, religious, and temperance, came to be the main interest of his leisure—in other words, of his life. Temperance and religion
encroached upon politics, as being less exacting mentally, and better adapted to the rather emotional and fervid discourse in which he felt his talents to lie; and at the time when this story opens he was recognised in Millfield as an amateur gentleman-evangelist, prepared to exercise his oratorical powers for the intangible advantage of his kind; in the chapel, the open air, or the building in the field; and whether at the request of the Wesleyan minister or in response to his own heart's prompting. This course of experience, involving the mingling with people of a lower social and mental level on a footing at once of pre-eminence and genial assumption of equality, had not been without effect upon him; and in many respects he was altered from the days when he was designed for a member of parliament. His manner had developed in the direction of freedom rather than polish, and the air of the open-handed country squire was lessening. His greeting to cottagers had grown from his former “Good day,” to a “Well, friend, how goes the world with you and yours?” or “Well, Rogers, I shall expect to see you at the meeting on Tuesday next.” He was rather over-prone to enter into talk, with a view to turning it to temperance or religion, with strangers in the train; and his arguments to prove to the Reverend Cleveland Hutton that a high ritual really involved idolatry, were marked by more sincerity
and emphasis than delicacy. But there was much that was gentle and genial about Mr Blackwood. Any labouring man of the district, even if he was a churchman, and could not but regard the Reverend Cleveland Hutton as the standing example of what human nature might attain, would have told you that he was “a real gentleman.” If he confounded the enjoyment of platform prominence with zeal for the souls of his fellows, and the emotions inspired by the sound of his own voice with the enthusiasm of inspiration, the confounding was innocent and honest: and to-day he forgot to view the Reverend Cleveland Hutton through the darkling haze cast by his high ritual, and stood simply with bowed head, and a heart that was full for his brother.

Let us next observe the mourner behind Mr Blackwood, who is also broad-shouldered, and also one of the familiar figures of the neighbourhood's gentry. That is Dr Cassell, the physician of the village and the district. On casting on him the first comprehensive glance of a stranger, you would hardly take him for a doctor. The indefinable air of the physician was wanting. His close-cropped hair and beard, his rubicund cheeks, and the general trend of his outward personality suggest the man of business. But he had as great a right to meet you on a physician's standing as the most professional-looking of his brethren; for he was a physician
not merely by virtue of choice and training, but by nature. As a boy of sixteen he had set a bone under the guidance of his instinct; and in the period to which he referred as “my commercial life”—in which, to divulge a fact which tended to escape himself, his influence on trade had been wielded indirectly through the faculties called into use by errands and accounts—his kindly amateur skill had won him some lasting gratitude. On his transition from commercial life to his present estate of prosperous country practitioner, though a part of his career as much as any other to his credit, he was not accustomed to dwell. His degrees were American; and his following of the text-books of an English medical course was marked by no pedantic devotion to the letter. His practical healing, it may be said, was not greatly less, that it was achieved under the direction of nature rather than of text-books.