Or we get taken into confidence now and then, and get an insight into our Arcadians’ practical turn of mind. I was talking pleasantly to a good woman about her children. “Yes,” she said, “they’re all off my hands now, but I reckon I’ve had a expense-hive family. I don’t mean to say as it might not have been worse if they’d all lived, and we’d had to bring ’em all up, but my meaning is as they never seemed to die convenient. I had twins once, and they both died, you see, and we had the club money for both of ’em, but then one lived a fortnight after the other, and so that took two funerals, and that come expense-hive!”
It is very shocking to a sensitive person to hear the way in which the old people speak of their dead wives or husbands exactly as if they’d been horses or dogs. They are always proud of having been married more than once. “You didn’t think, Miss, as I’d had five wives, now did you? Ah! but I have though—leastways I buried five on ’em in the churchyard, that I did—and tree on ’em beewties!”[3] On another occasion I playfully suggested, “Don’t you mix up your husbands now and then, Mrs. Page, when you talk about them?” “Well, to tell you the truth, sir, I really du! But my third husband, he was a man! I don’t mix him up. He got killed, fighting—you’ve heerd tell o’ that I make no doubt. The others warn’t nothing to him. He’d ha’ mixed them up quick enough if they’d interfered wi’ him. Lawk ah! He’d ’a made nothing of ’em!”
Instances of this obtuseness to anything in the nature of poetic sentiment among our rustics might be multiplied indefinitely. Norfolk has never produced a single poet or romancer.[4] We have no local songs or ballads, no traditions of valour or nobleness, no legends of heroism or chivalry. In their place we have a frightfully long list of ferocious murderers: Thurtell, and Tawell, and Manning, and Greenacre, and Rush, and a dozen more whose names stand out pre-eminent in the horrible annals of crime. The temperament of the sons of Arcady is strangely callous to all the softer and gentler emotions.
* * * * *
There still remains something to say. In the minor difficulties with which the country parson has to deal, there is usually much that is grotesque, and this for the most part forces itself into prominence. When this is so, a wise man will not dwell too much upon the sad and depressing view of the situation; he will try and make the best of things as they are. There are trials that are, after all, bearable with a light heart. Unhappily there are others that make a man’s heart very heavy indeed, partly because he thinks they need not be, partly because he can see no hope of remedy. It is of these I hope to speak hereafter.
II.
THE TRIALS OF A COUNTRY PARSON.
“Ther’s times the world does look so queer,
Odd fancies come afore I call ’em,
An’ then agin, for half a year,
No preacher ’thout a call’s more solemn.”
In speaking of the trials of the country parson’s life in my last essay, I left much unsaid that needed saying. I rather shrank from dealing with matters which are outside the range of my own experience, and confined myself to such illustrations of the positions maintained as my own personal knowledge could supply. There are, however, some phases of the country parson’s life which I am perhaps less competent to dwell on than others who have been all their lives rustics, and because I would not willingly wound the feelings of those whom I honour and respect, therefore I am inclined to hang back and hold my peace and say nothing.
Why does not somebody else step in and take up the thread where I dropped it, deliver his testimony, and give us the record of his larger experience? Or shall we ask another question? How is it that people who have much to tell, so often have no faculty of setting it down in words and sentences? We boast of our advance in education, and yet what has it done for us—what is it doing for us?