Barchester Towers

A >> Anthony Trollope >> Barchester Towers


Such was Mr. Arabin, the new vicar of St. Ewold, who is going to stay
with the Grantlys at Plumstead Episcopi.

Mr. Arabin reached Plumstead the day before Mr. Harding and Eleanor,
and the Grantly family were thus enabled to make his acquaintance and
discuss his qualifications before the arrival of the other guests.
Griselda was surprised to find that he looked so young, but she told
Florinda her younger sister, when they had retired for the night,
that he did not talk at all like a young man: and she decided with
the authority that seventeen has over sixteen that he was not at all
nice, although his eyes were lovely. As usual, sixteen implicitly
acceded to the dictum of seventeen in such a matter, and said that he
certainly was not nice. They then branched off on the relative merits
of other clerical bachelors in the vicinity, and both determined
without any feeling of jealousy between them that a certain Rev.
Augustus Green was by many degrees the most estimable of the lot. The
gentleman in question had certainly much in his favour, as, having
a comfortable allowance from his father, he could devote the whole
proceeds of his curacy to violet gloves and unexceptionable neck ties.
Having thus fixedly resolved that the new-comer had nothing about him
to shake the pre-eminence of the exalted Green, the two girls went to
sleep in each other's arms, contented with themselves and the world.

Mrs. Grantly at first sight came to much the same conclusion about
her husband's favourite as her daughters had done, though, in seeking
to measure his relative value, she did not compare him to Mr. Green;
indeed, she made no comparison by name between him and anyone else;
but she remarked to her husband that one person's swans were very
often another person's geese, thereby clearly showing that Mr. Arabin
had not yet proved his qualifications in swanhood to her
satisfaction.

"Well, Susan," said he, rather offended at hearing his friend spoken
of so disrespectfully, "if you take Mr. Arabin for a goose, I cannot
say that I think very highly of your discrimination."

"A goose! No, of course, he's not a goose. I've no doubt he's a very
clever man. But you're so matter-of-fact, Archdeacon, when it suits
your purpose, that one can't trust oneself to any _facon de parler_.
I've no doubt Mr. Arabin is a very valuable man--at Oxford--and that
he'll be a good vicar at St. Ewold. All I mean is that, having passed
one evening with him, I don't find him to be absolutely a paragon. In
the first place, if I am not mistaken, he is a little inclined to be
conceited."

"Of all the men that I know intimately," said the archdeacon, "Arabin
is, in my opinion, the most free from any taint of self-conceit. His
fault is that he's too diffident."

"Perhaps so," said the lady; "only I must own I did not find it out
this evening."

Nothing further was said about him. Dr. Grantly thought that his
wife was abusing Mr. Arabin merely because he had praised him, and
Mrs. Grantly knew that it was useless arguing for or against any
person in favour of or in opposition to whom the archdeacon had
already pronounced a strong opinion.

In truth, they were both right. Mr. Arabin was a diffident man in
social intercourse with those whom he did not intimately know; when
placed in situations which it was his business to fill, and discussing
matters with which it was his duty to be conversant, Mr. Arabin was
from habit brazen-faced enough. When standing on a platform in Exeter
Hall, no man would be less mazed than he by the eyes of the crowd
before him, for such was the work which his profession had called on
him to perform; but he shrank from a strong expression of opinion in
general society, and his doing so not uncommonly made it appear that
he considered the company not worth the trouble of his energy. He
was averse to dictate when the place did not seem to him to justify
dictation, and as those subjects on which people wished to hear
him speak were such as he was accustomed to treat with decision,
he generally shunned the traps there were laid to allure him into
discussion, and, by doing so, not infrequently subjected himself to
such charges as those brought against him by Mrs. Grantly.

Mr. Arabin, as he sat at his open window, enjoying the delicious
moonlight and gazing at the gray towers of the church, which stood
almost within the rectory grounds, little dreamed that he was the
subject of so many friendly or unfriendly criticisms. Considering
how much we are all given to discuss the characters of others, and
discuss them often not in the strictest spirit of charity, it is
singular how little we are inclined to think that others can speak
ill-naturedly of us, and how angry and hurt we are when proof reaches
us that they have done so. It is hardly too much to say that we all
of us occasionally speak of our dearest friends in a manner in which
those dearest friends would very little like to hear themselves
mentioned, and that we nevertheless expect that our dearest friends
shall invariably speak of us as though they were blind to all our
faults, but keenly alive to every shade of our virtues.

It did not occur to Mr. Arabin that he was spoken of at all. It
seemed to him, when he compared himself with his host, that he was a
person of so little consequence to any, that he was worth no one's
words or thoughts. He was utterly alone in the world as regarded
domestic ties and those inner familiar relations which are hardly
possible between others than husbands and wives, parents and children,
or brothers and sisters. He had often discussed with himself the
necessity of such bonds for a man's happiness in this world, and had
generally satisfied himself with the answer that happiness in this
world is not a necessity. Herein he deceived himself, or rather tried
to do so. He, like others, yearned for the enjoyment of whatever he
saw enjoyable, and though he attempted, with the modern stoicism of
so many Christians, to make himself believe that joy and sorrow were
matters which here should be held as perfectly indifferent, these
things were not indifferent to him. He was tired of his Oxford rooms
and his college life. He regarded the wife and children of his friend
with something like envy; he all but coveted the pleasant drawing-room,
with its pretty windows opening on to lawns and flower-beds, the
apparel of the comfortable house, and--above all--the air of home which
encompassed it all.

It will be said that no time can have been so fitted for such desires
on his part as this, when he had just possessed himself of a country
parish, of a living among fields and gardens, of a house which a wife
would grace. It is true there was a difference between the opulence
of Plumstead and the modest economy of St. Ewold, but surely Mr.
Arabin was not a man to sigh after wealth! Of all men, his friends
would have unanimously declared he was the last to do so. But how
little our friends know us! In his period of stoical rejection of
this world's happiness, he had cast from him as utter dross all
anxiety as to fortune. He had, as it were, proclaimed himself to be
indifferent to promotion, and those who chiefly admired his talents,
and would mainly have exerted themselves to secure to them their
deserved reward, had taken him at his word. And now, if the truth
must out, he felt himself disappointed--disappointed not by them
but by himself. The daydream of his youth was over, and at the age
of forty he felt that he was not fit to work in the spirit of an
apostle. He had mistaken himself, and learned his mistake when it
was past remedy. He had professed himself indifferent to mitres and
diaconal residences, to rich livings and pleasant glebes, and now
he had to own to himself that he was sighing for the good things of
other men on whom, in his pride, he had ventured to look down.

Not for wealth, in its vulgar sense, had he ever sighed; not for the
enjoyment of rich things had he ever longed; but for the allotted
share of worldly bliss which a wife, and children, and happy home
could give him, for that usual amount of comfort which he had
ventured to reject as unnecessary for him, he did now feel that he
would have been wiser to have searched.

He knew that his talents, his position, and his friends would have
won for him promotion, had he put himself in the way of winning
it. Instead of doing so, he had allowed himself to be persuaded to
accept a living which would give him an income of some L300 a year
should he, by marrying, throw up his fellowship. Such, at the age of
forty, was the worldly result of labour which the world had chosen
to regard as successful. The world also thought that Mr. Arabin was,
in his own estimation, sufficiently paid. Alas! Alas! The world was
mistaken, and Mr. Arabin was beginning to ascertain that such was the
case.

And here may I beg the reader not to be hard in his judgement upon
this man. Is not the state at which he has arrived the natural
result of efforts to reach that which is not the condition of
humanity? Is not modern stoicism, built though it be on Christianity,
as great an outrage on human nature as was the stoicism of the
ancients? The philosophy of Zeno was built on true laws, but on true
laws misunderstood and therefore misapplied. It is the same with our
Stoics here, who would teach us that wealth and worldly comfort and
happiness on earth are not worth the search. Alas, for a doctrine which
can find no believing pupils and no true teachers!

The case of Mr. Arabin was the more singular, as he belonged to
a branch of the Church of England well inclined to regard its
temporalities with avowed favour, and had habitually lived with
men who were accustomed to much worldly comfort. But such was his
idiosyncrasy that these very facts had produced within him, in early
life, a state of mind that was not natural to him. He was content to
be a High Churchman, if he could be so on principles of his own and
could strike out a course showing a marked difference from those with
whom he consorted. He was ready to be a partisan as long as he was
allowed to have a course of action and of thought unlike that of his
party. His party had indulged him, and he began to feel that his
party was right and himself wrong, just when such a conviction was
too late to be of service to him. He discovered, when such discovery
was no longer serviceable, that it would have been worth his while
to have worked for the usual pay assigned to work in this world and
have earned a wife and children, with a carriage for them to sit in;
to have earned a pleasant dining-room, in which his friends could
drink his wine, and the power of walking up the high street of his
country town, with the knowledge that all its tradesmen would have
gladly welcomed him within their doors. Other men arrived at those
convictions in their start in life and so worked up to them. To him
they had come when they were too late to be of use.

It has been said that Mr. Arabin was a man of pleasantry, and it
may be thought that such a state of mind as that described would be
antagonistic to humour. But surely such is not the case. Wit is the
outward mental casing of the man, and has no more to do with the inner
mind of thoughts and feelings than have the rich brocaded garments of
the priest at the altar with the asceticism of the anchorite below
them, whose skin is tormented with sackcloth and whose body is
half-flayed with rods. Nay, will not such a one often rejoice more
than any other in the rich show of his outer apparel? Will it not be
food for his pride to feel that he groans inwardly while he shines
outwardly? So it is with the mental efforts which men make. Those
which they show forth daily to the world are often the opposites of
the inner workings of the spirit.

In the archdeacon's drawing-room, Mr. Arabin had sparkled with his
usual unaffected brilliancy, but when he retired to his bedroom, he
sat there sad, at his open window, repining within himself that he
also had no wife, no bairns, no soft sward of lawn duly mown for him
to lie on, no herd of attendant curates, no bowings from the banker's
clerks, no rich rectory. That apostleship that he had thought of had
evaded his grasp, and he was now only vicar of St. Ewold's, with a
taste for a mitre. Truly he had fallen between two stools.




CHAPTER XXI

St. Ewold's Parsonage


When Mr. Harding and Mrs. Bold reached the rectory on the following
morning, the archdeacon and his friend were at St. Ewold's. They
had gone over that the new vicar might inspect his church and be
introduced to the squire, and were not expected back before dinner.
Mr. Harding rambled out by himself and strolled, as was his wont at
Plumstead, about the lawn and round the church; and as he did so, the
two sisters naturally fell into conversation about Barchester.

There was not much sisterly confidence between them. Mrs. Grantly was
ten years older than Eleanor, and had been married while Eleanor was
yet a child. They had never, therefore, poured into each other's ears
their hopes and loves; and now that one was a wife and the other a
widow, it was not probable that they would begin to do so. They lived
too much asunder to be able to fall into that kind of intercourse
which makes confidence between sisters almost a necessity; moreover,
that which is so easy at eighteen is often very difficult at
twenty-eight. Mrs. Grantly knew this, and did not, therefore, expect
confidence from her sister; yet she longed to ask her whether in real
truth Mr. Slope was agreeable to her.

It was by no means difficult to turn the conversation to Mr. Slope.
That gentleman had become so famous at Barchester, had so much to
do with all clergymen connected with the city, and was so specially
concerned in the affairs of Mr. Harding, that it would have been odd
if Mr. Harding's daughters had not talked about him. Mrs. Grantly
was soon abusing him, which she did with her whole heart, and Mrs.
Bold was nearly as eager to defend him. She positively disliked the
man, would have been delighted to learn that he had taken himself off
so that she should never see him again, had indeed almost a fear of
him, and yet she constantly found herself taking his part. The abuse
of other people, and abuse of a nature that she felt to be unjust,
imposed this necessity on her, and at last made Mr. Slope's defence
an habitual course of argument with her.

From Mr. Slope the conversation turned to the Stanhopes, and Mrs.
Grantly was listening with some interest to Eleanor's account of the
family, when it dropped out that Mr. Slope made one of the party.

"What!" said the lady of the rectory. "Was Mr. Slope there too?"

Eleanor merely replied that such had been the case.

"Why, Eleanor, he must be very fond of you, I think; he seems to
follow you everywhere."

Even this did not open Eleanor's eyes. She merely laughed, and said
that she imagined Mr. Slope found other attraction at Dr. Stanhope's.
And so they parted. Mrs. Grantly felt quite convinced that the
odious match would take place, and Mrs. Bold as convinced that that
unfortunate chaplain, disagreeable as he must be allowed to be, was
more sinned against than sinning.

The archdeacon of course heard before dinner that Eleanor had
remained the day before in Barchester with the view of meeting
Mr. Slope, and that she had so met him. He remembered how she had
positively stated that there were to be no guests at the Stanhopes,
and he did not hesitate to accuse her of deceit. Moreover, the fact,
or rather presumed fact, of her being deceitful on such a matter
spoke but too plainly in evidence against her as to her imputed crime
of receiving Mr. Slope as a lover.

"I am afraid that anything we can do will be too late," said the
archdeacon. "I own I am fairly surprised. I never liked your
sister's taste with regard to men, but still I did not give her
credit for--ugh!"

"And so soon, too," said Mrs. Grantly, who thought more, perhaps, of
her sister's indecorum in having a lover before she had put off her
weeds than her bad taste in having such a lover as Mr. Slope.

"Well, my dear, I shall be sorry to be harsh, or to do anything that
can hurt your father; but, positively, neither that man nor his wife
shall come within my doors."

Mrs. Grantly sighed, and then attempted to console herself and her
lord by remarking that, after all, the thing was not accomplished
yet. Now that Eleanor was at Plumstead, much might be done to wean
her from her fatal passion. Poor Eleanor!

The evening passed off without anything to make it remarkable. Mr.
Arabin discussed the parish of St. Ewold with the archdeacon, and
Mrs. Grantly and Mr. Harding, who knew the personages of the parish,
joined in. Eleanor also knew them, but she said little. Mr. Arabin
did not apparently take much notice of her, and she was not in a
humour to receive at that time with any special grace any special
favourite of her brother-in-law. Her first idea on reaching her
bedroom was that a much pleasanter family party might be met at Dr.
Stanhope's than at the rectory. She began to think that she was
getting tired of clergymen and their respectable, humdrum, wearisome
mode of living, and that after all, people in the outer world, who
had lived in Italy, London, or elsewhere, need not necessarily be
regarded as atrocious and abominable. The Stanhopes, she had thought,
were a giddy, thoughtless, extravagant set of people, but she had seen
nothing wrong about them and had, on the other hand, found that they
thoroughly knew how to make their house agreeable. It was a thousand
pities, she thought, that the archdeacon should not have a little
of the same _savoir vivre_. Mr. Arabin, as we have said, did not
apparently take much notice of her, but yet he did not go to bed
without feeling that he had been in company with a very pretty woman;
and as is the case with most bachelors, and some married men, regarded
the prospect of his month's visit at Plumstead in a pleasanter light
when he learnt that a very pretty woman was to share it with him.

Before they all retired it was settled that the whole party should
drive over on the following day to inspect the parsonage at St.
Ewold. The three clergymen were to discuss dilapidations, and the
two ladies were to lend their assistance in suggesting such changes
as might be necessary for a bachelor's abode.

Accordingly, soon after breakfast the carriage was at the door.
There was only room for four inside, and the archdeacon got upon the
box. Eleanor found herself opposite to Mr. Arabin, and was, therefore,
in a manner forced into conversation with him. They were soon on
comfortable terms together, and had she thought about it, she would
have thought that, in spite of his black cloth, Mr. Arabin would not
have been a bad addition to the Stanhope family party.

Now that the archdeacon was away they could all trifle. Mr. Harding
began by telling them in the most innocent manner imaginable an old
legend about Mr. Arabin's new parish. There was, he said, in days of
yore an illustrious priestess of St. Ewold, famed through the whole
country for curing all manner of diseases. She had a well, as all
priestesses have ever had, which well was extant to this day, and
shared in the minds of many of the people the sanctity which belonged
to the consecrated ground of the parish church. Mr. Arabin declared
that he should look on such tenets on the part of his parishioners as
anything but orthodox. And Mrs. Grantly replied that she so entirely
disagreed with him as to think that no parish was in a proper state
that had not its priestess as well as its priest. "The duties are
never well done," said she, "unless they are so divided."

"I suppose, Papa," said Eleanor, "that in the olden times the
priestess bore all the sway herself. Mr. Arabin, perhaps, thinks
that such might be too much the case now if a sacred lady were
admitted within the parish."

"I think, at any rate," said he, "that it is safer to run no such
risk. No priestly pride has ever exceeded that of sacerdotal females.
A very lowly curate I might, perhaps, essay to rule, but a curatess
would be sure to get the better of me."

"There are certainly examples of such accidents happening," said Mrs.
Grantly. "They do say that there is a priestess at Barchester who is
very imperious in all things touching the altar. Perhaps the fear of
such a fate as that is before your eyes."

When they were joined by the archdeacon on the gravel before
the vicarage, they descended again to grave dullness. Not that
Archdeacon Grantly was a dull man, but his frolic humours were of
a cumbrous kind, and his wit, when he was witty, did not generally
extend itself to his auditors. On the present occasion he was soon
making speeches about wounded roofs and walls, which he declared to
be in want of some surgeon's art. There was not a partition that
he did not tap, nor a block of chimneys that he did not narrowly
examine; all water-pipes, flues, cisterns, and sewers underwent an
investigation; he even descended, in the care of his friend, so far
as to bore sundry boards in the floors with a bradawl.

Mr. Arabin accompanied him through the rooms, trying to look wise in
such domestic matters, and the other three also followed. Mrs. Grantly
showed that she had not herself been priestess of a parish twenty
years for nothing, and examined the bells and window-panes in a very
knowing way.

"You will, at any rate, have a beautiful prospect out of your own
window, if this is to be your private sanctum," said Eleanor. She
was standing at the lattice of a little room upstairs, from which the
view certainly was very lovely. It was from the back of the vicarage,
and there was nothing to interrupt the eye between the house and the
glorious gray pile of the cathedral. The intermediate ground, however,
was beautifully studded with timber. In the immediate foreground ran
the little river which afterwards skirted the city, and, just to the
right of the cathedral, the pointed gables and chimneys of Hiram's
Hospital peeped out of the elms which encompass it.

"Yes," said he, joining her. "I shall have a beautifully complete
view of my adversaries. I shall sit down before the hostile town and
fire away at them at a very pleasant distance. I shall just be able
to lodge a shot in the hospital, should the enemy ever get possession
of it, and as for the palace, I have it within full range."

"I never saw anything like you clergymen," said Eleanor; "You are
always thinking of fighting each other."

"Either that," said he, "or else supporting each other. The pity is
that we cannot do the one without the other. But are we not here
to fight? Is not ours a church militant? What is all our work but
fighting, and hard fighting, if it be well done?"

"But not with each other."

"That's as it may be. The same complaint which you make of me for
battling with another clergyman of our own church, the Mohammedan
would make against me for battling with the error of a priest of
Rome. Yet, surely, you would not be inclined to say that I should
be wrong to do battle with such as him. A pagan, too, with his
multiplicity of gods, would think it equally odd that the Christian
and the Mohammedan should disagree."

"Ah! But you wage your wars about trifles so bitterly."

"Wars about trifles," said he, "are always bitter, especially
among neighbours. When the differences are great, and the parties
comparative strangers, men quarrel with courtesy. What combatants
are ever so eager as two brothers?"

"But do not such contentions bring scandal on the church?"

"More scandal would fall on the church if there were no such
contentions. We have but one way to avoid them--by that of
acknowledging a common head of our church, whose word on all
points of doctrine shall be authoritative. Such a termination
of our difficulties is alluring enough. It has charms which are
irresistible to many, and all but irresistible, I own, to me."

"You speak now of the Church of Rome?" said Eleanor.

"No," said he, "not necessarily of the Church of Rome; but of a
church with a head. Had it pleased God to vouchsafe to us such a
church our path would have been easy. But easy paths have not been
thought good for us." He paused and stood silent for awhile, thinking
of the time when he had so nearly sacrificed all he had, his powers
of mind, his free agency, the fresh running waters of his mind's
fountain, his very inner self, for an easy path in which no fighting
would be needed; and then he continued: "What you say is partly true:
our contentions do bring on us some scandal. The outer world, though
it constantly reviles us for our human infirmities and throws in our
teeth the fact that being clergymen we are still no more than men,
demands of us that we should do our work with godlike perfection.
There is nothing god-like about us: we differ from each other with
the acerbity common to man; we triumph over each other with human
frailty; we allow differences on subjects of divine origin to produce
among us antipathies and enmities which are anything but divine. This
is all true. But what would you have in place of it? There is no
infallible head for a church on earth. This dream of believing man
has been tried, and we see in Italy and in Spain what has come of it.
Grant that there are and have been no bickerings within the pale of
the Pope's Church. Such an assumption would be utterly untrue, but
let us grant it, and then let us say which church has incurred the
heavier scandals."