SOME EARLY SUNDAYS
All the Sundays of my childhood came to life again when, driving from T——, we passed the mouth of a grassy by-road, a little way down which stood the church of my earliest worshippings. We were due to drink tea at my grandfather's old home, now occupied by one of his great-grandsons, and had scant time for more lingerings on the way if we were to keep our appointment punctually; but the sight of the familiar square, squat tower was too much for me, and I said to M. and Mr B.: "Oh, I must, I must have just one look!" They drove me into the lane and, scrambling down, I ran up the path through the churchyard, glancing from side to side at the same old tombstones and grassy mounds, numbering baby graves of our own household amongst them, every one with its memories of Sunday loiterers sitting and standing about until all friends had passed and the bells had stopped; and my objective was a rood-screen, which not only had a lively story to it, but had persuaded me in the course of years that it was possibly a treasure of ecclesiastical art worth finding by one now educated to know its value. I might have been disappointed if I had seen it; I certainly was deeply disappointed at not seeing it. A wicket gate in the porch was locked against me. I ran along the wall and tried to peer into the windows, but I could see nothing, except my mental picture of the past—the three-decker, the carved screen, the two square pews in the chancel, the open seats outside.
It is rather curious that they were open seats at that time of day, when otherwise the church was quite early Victorian in its ways. I know that in the next decade, when the zeal for church restoration became noticeable, the stubborn defence of vested interests in the hereditary pews was the greatest obstacle to be overcome, and I have known it prove insuperable for nearly a decade more. Even the pews in the chancel of the church here at H——, one sacred to the old-maid daughters of the rector (when in residence, which was only for a small portion of the year), the other occupied by one of my uncles and his family, were open; not like the spacious room, with panelled walls and blue silk curtains all round above the level of his tall head, in which my maternal grandfather maintained at public worship the same privacy that he enjoyed at home. It is true that every seat, except the hard "free" forms at the back, belonged to a certain house, as legally and exclusively as the walled box which it had superseded; but there was a republican aspect, generally abhorrent to genteel persons, in the uniform open benches, which marked no divisions of caste between the highest and the lowest; the old box, on the contrary, indicated the status of its owner almost as accurately as his house. The carpet, cushions, hassocks, curtains were part of his personal establishment; if he were a big man, he would probably have a stove within the luxurious enclosure, by which to doze in comfort when the weather was cold. And it was usual for the wall immediately above him to be more or less covered with tablets to the memory of his deceased ancestors. When he died himself, the blue or red curtains which had preserved his nobility from the gaze of vulgar worshippers would be changed for hangings of black cloth, and the mourning hatchment would be put up.
In this little church the organist was the National School master, down at the bottom of the building, and his instrument in my time was a concertina. There was no vestry. The parson put his things on in the chancel (in one church that I knew he first dragged his things out of the altar, which made a convenient store-chest for the loose "properties" of the place), his sacerdotal toilet being performed quite openly before the assembled congregation, in front of a looking-glass hung upon a chancel pillar; the interest we took in this piece of ritual was great or greater according as the man was shy and nervous or self-confident and vain. The canopied three-decker embraced the whole area of ritual proper, except on the rare occasions—the three enjoined by the rubric, I suppose—when Holy Communion was celebrated. In the bottom pen the clerk bawled the responses, in the middle one the parson recited prayers and lessons, in the upper (having changed his surplice for a black gown) he preached.
Usually the parson was a curate, domestically familiar to us; sometimes he was the stout and stately rector. When he came to the beautiful embowered house that at other times wore blinds over its windows, and his haughty high-nosed daughters to that chancel pew which at other times stood empty, then it behoved the parish, literally, to sit up. With him we were comparatively at ease, but confronted with them we simply shook in our shoes. They did their parish work with vigour while they were about it. The "poor" were visited all round, scolded for their injudicious management of households on ten or twelve shillings a week, which, they were assured, would be an ample income if "crowdy" (a kind of meal porridge, I think—we never heard of it except from them) were substituted for the unnecessary luxuries they indulged in; and I believe the rectory kitchen doled broken victuals to the deserving. My father nursed a man's grudge against these well-meaning women chiefly on account of the crowdy suggestion so persistently thrust upon his farm labourers; the offensive word was so often on his lips that I have never forgotten it. He was always contrasting the existing régime with that of the late rector, who used to like to play whist and ride to hounds with him, and of whom I remember nothing but the fact of his death. My father and I, driving past the rectory gates, saw a gig slowly moving up and down before them. "Hullo!" said father, pulling up. "What's the matter?" The man in charge of the gig mournfully shook his head. "You don't say so?" father ejaculated, with even greater mournfulness. That was all. It meant that the doctor was inside, and that the rector was dying.
The existing régime, however, did not leave us out in the cold. The rector came at least once during his visit to his parish, and his daughters once, to call on us—cake-and-wine calls—and similarly honoured the houses of the other village gentry. The old man was as affable as he knew how to be; the entertaining of the old-young ladies was the formidable affair. If there was not time to set things in apple-pie order before they reached the front door, what flurry and fret and vexation of heart! Well for me if I was not doing punishment on the stairs at that awful moment!
But the story of the rood-screen that I so wanted to see, and could not, is the vivid memory of all.
The rector was in residence. He was putting on his robes in the chancel, before the looking-glass, with the dignified leisureliness that was his wont. The congregation was coming in. Amongst them was a lady from one of the farmhouses (called "The Manor," an ancient house which her family lived, instead of died, in, surrounded by a moat of stagnant water covered with arsenic-green duckweed—which house, or its site, there was not time to look for), and she was followed by a domestic pet, a raven. She knelt to her preliminary prayer. Rising from her knees she beheld the presumptuous bird sitting on the desk edge of her pew, regarding her quizzically with his head cocked to one side. I was watching him in ecstasy, but she—a gentle, fair woman, whose face as I then saw it I could identify in a crowd to-day—flushed crimson with consternation and shame. She put out a flurried hand to secure him, but he hopped out of her reach; further efforts resulted in his free flight through the church to perch on the top of the screen. There he sat, and defied the congregation to catch him—to the passionate delight, I am sure, of every child present. His poor mistress, however, was overwhelmed. She sat still, trembling and cowering, her cheeks like peonies; and the rector, when he realised the situation, was furious.
"Brown! Brown!" he shouted down the church.
The stalwart schoolmaster arose from where he sat with his pupils under the tower, and advanced up the aisle with a pole in his hand. It may have been the punitive rod with which he could crack the pate of the farthest National School boy without leaving his own seat to do it, or it may have been the church broomstick; anyway, it was long enough to reach the top of the screen.
"Bong on to him, Brown!" commanded the rector in loud imperious tones—he meant "bang on to him," but his accents as well as his words ring down the grooves of time as distinctly as if heard but yesterday. "Bong on to him!"
Brown wielded the clumsy weapon as desired, and it fell with force upon the spot from which the raven deftly hopped at the last moment. The bird was quite self-possessed in the midst of the excitement; each time he measured the direction of the pole, watched its approach, and skipped over or under it in the nick of time, and he chuckled and jeered as if it were a game of play. His demeanour, and its contrast with the increasing wildness of the schoolmaster's blows and of the outraged rector's temper, made the scene so exquisitely funny that I can laugh now when I think of it. I suppose I laughed then, for the irrepressible hilarity of the congregation, confessing its sympathy with the rebel against high authority, was an aggravation of the bird's offence too serious for words. I am sorry I cannot recall how the episode ended, but, of course, the raven was defeated somehow; what I can never forget is the splendid time he gave us first. He was better than the donkey which made another red-letter Sunday for us. This animal, grazing in the churchyard, put his head through the open door in the middle of sermon time. Not content with a decorous survey of the congregation he suddenly uttered his raucous bray—hee-haw!—as if in sarcastic comment upon the preacher's words.
But many funny things happened in church which we did not understand to be funny, and therefore found no amusement in. The spectacle of the parson's hat and gloves, perhaps also his overcoat and umbrella, on the communion-table did not raise a smile, not to mention frowns. A companion picture of the old clerk holding up the lid of the same table while he dragged forth from its depths a black bottle and tilted it before one unclosed eye, to see if it contained sufficient sacramental wine for an impending celebration, passed almost unnoticed. Conversations in the vulgar tongue, audible to all, were of almost daily occurrence—or I should say weekly occurrence, for whoever heard of non-Sunday matins or evensong in those easy-going times? Oh yes, they were known of course in cathedrals and the more civilised centres of life—the "Tracts for the Times" had been stirring up what the writers called "our afflicted church" for many a year—but not in such out-of-the-world villages as those in and about which my early years were spent.
There was no rigid ecclesiastical etiquette, no rigid ecclesiastical discipline, observed in those days, and the dullness of a child's Sundays was sensibly mitigated thereby. I remember an occasion when the parson (not Canon W., of the raven episode) was reading the psalms verse and verse about with the clerk beneath him. Suddenly the latter, instead of reciting his verse, remarked aloud: "You've turned over two leaves, sir." "No, I haven't," was the equally loud and composed reply. "Yes, you have," rejoined the clerk. They had quite an altercation, carried on exactly as if they had been out on the road. The rector of the parish where my maternal grandparents lived was the same sort of free-and-easy person. I was told that once, with the benediction hardly out of his mouth, he leaned over the ledge of the pulpit to hail a gentleman of the congregation before he should get away. "Come home with me," the rector publicly invited his friend, "I've got a prime haunch of venison for dinner." I remember his way with candidates for confirmation: "Your mother can hear your catechism." And it is my belief that the bishops asked no questions of the men who royally entertained them on their visitations. You could not imagine a rector dining on venison and waited on by liveried servants being subjected to the indignity of an inquiry as to how he performed his duties.
Parsons and squires—Church and State—combined to keep the common lay person in his place. In league they governed the rural communities, by whom their authority was unquestioned. It was a benevolent despotism, as a rule, like that of the majority of the slave-owning aristocracy of America, who were also in the enjoyment (tempered by "Uncle Tom's Cabin," and other annoying portents) of their feudal powers at the time; but, as with the slave system, it took small account of the human rights of the lower "orders" and in the hands of the naturally arrogant was often grossly abused.
A squire's wife of our neighbourhood, when she went out of church—and no one presumed to go before her—used to mount a little rise of ground near the porch, and there stand to receive the obeisances of "the poor." One by one they filed before her, dropping the trembling curtsy with that deprecating, serf-like air which one is thankful to know will never be worn again by man or woman of British blood; and according as they performed their act of homage, or satisfied her mind when she chose to stop and question them, so would they be rewarded in the dispensation of her doles—doles that might well demoralise poor things whose lives were all toil from beginning to end, and who perhaps never enjoyed a full meal until they ate it on Christmas Day in the workhouse, which was the refuge of their declining years.
This squire's wife (I saw her home and the church in the park again, still the appanage of her family) was typical of her class. They all regarded their villages as a queen would regard her kingdom. The squire looked after the menfolk and saw that his tenants voted Whig or Tory, as the case might be. But the homes were the care of the lady of the great house—where there was one. Often she was a second mother to them, feeling a responsibility for their well-being almost as great as for that of her own establishment. A godmother to babies, a nurse to the sick, the kind patroness of girls going out to service, a succourer in crises of trouble, an indispensable adviser in all-important affairs—I have known such and heard of more; but whether of this sort or of that which took the line of the arbitrary schoolmistress, it was invariably her aim to lead her protégées in the way that they should go. The parson was her henchman, as she was his backer. He made his reports and she acted upon them. "You were not at church on Sunday, Jane. How was that?" The chapel—making its way into the most conservative villages (but I knew one where the rights of the lord of the manor enabled him to keep it uncontaminated by both chapels and public-houses—he bracketed them together—up to the end of the sixties)—was contemptuously ignored as long as it was possible to do so. Jane had to go to church regularly, or forfeit the favour of authority and the incalculable advantages that went with it.
Morning service was, so to speak, the state service of the day. The heads of families attended, and the families themselves in force. The afternoon service was for servants and such, and nursemaids and governesses could take their charges to keep them occupied and out of the way; Sunday-schools were not invented, apparently, though we all had to say our collect and catechism to somebody at home. There was no service in the evening. The churches had no apparatus for lighting except with daylight. Sunday evening, in summer, was the time for long family walks, aimless strolls about the lanes and fields. It was the great opportunity for love-making with the young couples "keeping company." There was no visiting from house to house, as might be supposed, with families so much at leisure and so bored for want of something to do; it would have verged upon desecration of the Sabbath to have paid a call for the mere pleasure of it. No toys or story-books, and, of course, no games, were allowed to relieve the monotony of indoor hours. "Memoirs" represented the only human element in our Sunday literature, otherwise composed of volumes of sermons; and as the memoir was always of a clergyman, or some other saintly person, there were but two scraps of interest to be found in it—his portrait at one end and the account of what he died of at the other. Later, we had a servant who took in a missionary magazine full of pictures of black men swinging on hooks thrust through their backs, widows burning alive on pyres, missionaries being horribly tortured, cooked and eaten—all sorts of interesting things. She used to smuggle them to my bed, and, when my governess had retired from the room, instead of sleeping I would sit up and read them in the lingering light of the long days until night made the page a blank. But just now I am speaking of the years before I had a governess. A missionary magazine was a Sunday book, and my early Sundays did not know the joy of them.
However, taking one thing with another, those Sundays of the past were not so very dreadful. It is, indeed, open to question whether in essential matters we have greatly improved upon them. Certainly, the inconsistencies of Sabbatarian practice, as I remember them, were no greater than they are now. There was a lady of our acquaintance who had a gift for amateur millinery and a passion for smart bonnets and she once made one under my eye on a Sunday morning. It was understood that she would have imperilled her immortal soul by using needle and cotton, and she did not dream of doing that; she put it together entirely with pins. It took her twice as long, and disturbed the serenity of her mind twice as much, but by getting up early she managed to have it finished by church time, and then to wear it to church with an easy mind. But the same thing would be done—exactly parallel things are done—under my eye to-day, any Sunday of the year.
With regard to the moral practices of week-days, which are but those of Sunday carried over, either there were fewer subtle insincerities amongst the good people of the last generation or I have a keener eye for those which I see around me now. I remember that my elders of the fifties were much addicted to whist, and that a small money stake was necessary to the dignity of their game. They remained sober, friendly, gentlemanly, uncorrupted, allowing for the exceptions to every rule. Nowadays I play a round game with a family party, and one person will not touch a prize in the shape of a coin, but change the coin into "goods" and conscience is immediately satisfied. A clergyman once intimately associated with my household loved whist, but never played cards on principle; he got over the difficulty by sitting behind someone who did, and directing the latter's play with zeal. These are little instances.
At any rate the religious faith of the fifties as to which we were all children, young and old alike, it had one precious quality that it seems never likely to have again—it sufficed. Such as it was, we were satisfied with it. It made for peace and a contented mind. To be sure, we had heard of the "Tracts," and of a terrible bishop called Colenso; we ourselves learned Keble's hymns, with Mrs Alexander's, on Sundays; but we were happily undiscerning of the significance of these portents. They were no concern of ours. We no more expected them to have practical developments than he had expected an Indian Mutiny to result from a little fuss over greased cartridges. The Church of the Fifties, as an educational agent, is more despised to-day than any other institution of that date, but the old-fashioned parson had no spiritual worries to keep him awake o' nights and wear him out before his time; no more had we. Is it not possible that the despisers would give almost anything to be able to say the same?