Do not the scientists teach that no two atoms are in absolute contact with each other; that some interval separates every molecule from its next of kin? Certainly this is inherent in the office and function of the country parson, that he is not quite in touch with any one in his parish if he be a really earnest and conscientious parson. He is too good for the average happy-go-lucky fellow who wants to be let alone. There is nothing to gain by insulting him. “He’s that pig-headed he don’t seem to mind nothing—only swearing at him!” You cannot get him to take a side in a quarrel. He speaks out very unpleasant truths in public and private. He occupies a social position that is sometimes anomalous. He has a provoking knack of taking things by the right handle. He does not believe in the almighty dollar, as men of sense ought to believe; and he is usually in the right when it comes to a dispute in a vestry meeting because he is the only man in the parish that thinks of preparing himself for the discussion beforehand. This isolation extends not merely to matters social and intellectual; it is much more observable in the domain of sentiment. A rustic cannot at all understand what motive a man can possibly have for being a bookworm; he suspects a student of being engaged in some impious researches. “To hear that there Reverend of ours in the pulpit you might think we was all right. But, bless you! he ain’t same as other folk. He do keep a horoscope top o’ his house to look at the stares and sich.”
Not one man in a hundred of the labourers reads a book, and only when a book is new with a gaudy outside does he seem to value it even as a chattel. That any one should ever have any conceivable use for a big book is to him incomprehensible.
“If I might be so bold, sir,” said Jabez, an intelligent father of a family with some very bright children who are “won’erful for’ard in their larning,” “If I might be so bold, might I ask if you’ve really read all these grit books?” “No, Jabez; and I should be a bigger dunce than I am if I ever tried to. I keep them to use; they’re my tools, like your spade and hoe. What’s that thing called that I saw in your hand the other day when you were working at the draining job? You don’t often use that tool I think, do you?” “Well, no. But then we don’t get a job o’ draining now same as we used. I mean to say as a man may go ten years at a stretch and never lay a drain-tile.” “Well, then how about the use of his tools all this time?” Jabez smiled, slowly put his hand to his head, saw the point, and yet didn’t see it. “But, lawk sir! that’s somehow different. I can’t see what yow can du wi’ a grit book like this here.” It was a massive volume of Littré’s great dictionary, which I had just taken down to consult; it certainly did look portentous. “Why, Jabez, that’s a dictionary—a French dictionary. If I want to know all about a French word, you know, I look it up here. Sometimes I don’t find exactly what I want; then I go to that book, which is another French dictionary; and if....” I saw by the blank look in honest Jabez’ face that it was all in vain. “Want to know ... all about ... words.... Why you ain’t agoing to fix no drain-tiles with them sort o’ things. Now that du wholly pet me aywt, that du.”
I think no one who has not tried painfully to lift and lead others can have the least notion of the difficulty which the country parson has to contend with in the extreme thinness of the stratum in which the rural intellect moves. Since the schools have given more attention to geography, and since emigration has brought us now and then some entertaining letters from those who have emigrated to “furren parts,” the people have slowly learnt to think of a wider area of space than heretofore they could imagine. Though even now their notions of geography are almost as vague as their notions of astronomy; I have never seen a map in an agricultural labourer’s cottage. But their absolute ignorance of history amounts to an incapacity of conceiving the reality of anything that may have happened in past time. What their grandfathers have told them, that is to them history—everything before that is not so much as fable; it is not romance, it is a formless void, it is chaos. The worst of it is that they have no curiosity about the past. The same is true of their knowledge of anything approaching to the rudiments of physical science; it simply does not exist. A belief in the Ptolemaic system is universal in Arcady. I suspect that they think less about these things than they did. “That there old Gladstone, lawk! he’s a deep un he is! He’s as deep as the Pole Star he is!” said Solomon Bunch to me one day. “Pole Star?” I asked in surprise, “Where is the Pole Star, Sol?” “Lawks! I dunno; I’ve heard tell o’ the Pole Star as the deep un ever sin’ I was a booy!”
It is this narrowness in their range of ideas that makes it so hard for the townsman to become an effective speaker to the labourers. You could not make a greater mistake than by assuming you have only to use plain language to our rustics. So far from it, they love nothing better than sonorous words, the longer the better. It is when he attempts to make his audience follow a chain of reasoning that the orator fails most hopelessly, or when he comes to his illustrations. The poor people know so little, they read nothing, their experience is so confined, that one is very hard put to it to find a simile that is intelligible.
“Young David stood before the monarch’s throne. With harp in hand he touched the chords, like some later Scald he sang his saga to King Saul!” It really was rather fine—plain and simple too, monosyllabic, terse, and with a musical sibillation. Unfortunately one of the worthy preacher’s hearers told me afterwards with some displeasure that “he didn’t hold wi’ David being all sing-songing and scolding, he’d no opinion o’ that.” The stories of the queer mistakes which our hearers make in interpreting our sermons are simply endless, sometimes almost incredible. Nevertheless, no invention of the most inveterate story-teller could equal the facts which are matters of weekly experience.
“As yow was a saying in your sarment, ’tarnal mowing won’t du wirout ’tarnal making—yow mind that! yer ses, an’ I did mind it tu, an’ we got up that hay surprising!” Mr. Perry had just a little misconceived my words. I had quoted from Philip Van Arteveldt. “He that lacks time to mourn, lacks time to mend. Eternity mourns that.”
Not many months ago I was visiting a good simple old man who was death-stricken, and had been long lingering on the verge of the dark river. “I’ve been a thinking, sir, of that little hymn as you said about the old devil when he was took bad. I should like to hear that again.” I was equal to the occasion.
The devil was sick—the devil a saint would be;
The devil got well—not a bit of a saint was he!
[It was necessary to soften down the language of the original!]