Barchester Towers

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There was a quiet earnestness about Mr. Arabin, as he
half-acknowledged and half-defended himself from the charge brought
against him, which surprised Eleanor. She had been used all her life
to listen to clerical discussion, but the points at issue between the
disputants had so seldom been of more than temporal significance as
to have left on her mind no feeling of reverence for such subjects.
There had always been a hard worldly leaven of the love either of
income or of power in the strains she had heard; there had been no
panting for the truth; no aspirations after religious purity. It had
always been taken for granted by those around her that they were
indubitably right; that there was no ground for doubt; that the hard
uphill work of ascertaining what the duty of a clergyman should be
had been already accomplished in full; and that what remained for an
active militant parson to do was to hold his own against all comers.
Her father, it is true, was an exception to this, but then he was
so essentially anti-militant in all things that she classed him in
her own mind apart from all others. She had never argued the matter
within herself, or considered whether this common tone was or was not
faulty; but she was sick of it without knowing that she was so. And
now she found to her surprise, and not without a certain pleasurable
excitement, that this new-comer among them spoke in a manner very
different from that to which she was accustomed.

"It is so easy to condemn," said he, continuing the thread of his
thoughts. "I know no life that must be so delicious as that of a
writer for newspapers, or a leading member of the opposition--to
thunder forth accusations against men in power; to show up the worst
side of everything that is produced; to pick holes in every coat;
to be indignant, sarcastic, jocose, moral, or supercilious; to damn
with faint praise, or crush with open calumny! What can be so easy as
this when the critic has to be responsible for nothing? You condemn
what I do, but put yourself in my position and do the reverse, and
then see if I cannot condemn you."

"Oh, Mr. Arabin, I do not condemn you."

"Pardon me, you do, Mrs. Bold--you as one of the world; you are now
the opposition member; you are now composing your leading article,
and well and bitterly you do it. 'Let dogs delight to bark and
bite'--you fitly begin with an elegant quotation--'but if we are to
have a church at all, in heaven's name let the pastors who preside
over it keep their hands from each other's throats. Lawyers can live
without befouling each other's names; doctors do not fight duels.
Why is it that clergymen alone should indulge themselves in such
unrestrained liberty of abuse against each other?' and so you go on
reviling us for our ungodly quarrels, our sectarian propensities,
and scandalous differences. It will, however, give you no trouble to
write another article next week in which we, or some of us, shall be
twitted with an unseemly apathy in matters of our vocation. It will
not fall on you to reconcile the discrepancy; your readers will
never ask you how the poor parson is to be urgent in season and out
of season and yet never come in contact with men who think widely
differently from him. You, when you condemn this foreign treaty, or
that official arrangement, will have to incur no blame for the graver
faults of any different measure. It is so easy to condemn--and so
pleasant too, for eulogy charms no listeners as detraction does."

Eleanor only half-followed him in his raillery, but she caught his
meaning. "I know I ought to apologize for presuming to criticize
you," she said, "but I was thinking with sorrow of the ill-will that
has lately come among us at Barchester, and I spoke more freely than
I should have done."

"Peace on earth and goodwill among men, are, like heaven, promises
for the future;" said he, following rather his own thoughts than
hers. "When that prophecy is accomplished, there will no longer be
any need for clergymen."

Here they were interrupted by the archdeacon, whose voice was heard
from the cellar shouting to the vicar.

"Arabin, Arabin,"--and then, turning to his wife, who was apparently
at his elbow--"where has he gone to? This cellar is perfectly
abominable. It would be murder to put a bottle of wine into it till
it has been roofed, walled, and floored. How on earth old Goodenough
ever got on with it I cannot guess. But then Goodenough never had a
glass of wine that any man could drink."

"What is it, Archdeacon?" said the vicar, running downstairs and
leaving Eleanor above to her meditations.

"This cellar must be roofed, walled, and floored," repeated the
archdeacon. "Now mind what I say, and don't let the architect
persuade you that it will do; half of these fellows know nothing
about wine. This place as it is now would be damp and cold in winter
and hot and muggy in summer. I wouldn't give a straw for the best
wine that ever was vinted, after it had lain here a couple of years."

Mr. Arabin assented and promised that the cellar should be
reconstructed according to the archdeacon's receipt.

"And, Arabin, look here; was such an attempt at a kitchen grate ever
seen?"

"The grate is really very bad," said Mrs. Grantly. "I am sure the
priestess won't approve of it, when she is brought home to the scene
of her future duties. Really, Mr. Arabin, no priestess accustomed to
such an excellent well as that above could put up with such a grate
as this."

"If there must be a priestess at St. Ewold's at all, Mrs. Grantly, I
think we will leave her to her well and not call down her divine
wrath on any of the imperfections rising from our human poverty.
However, I own I am amenable to the attractions of a well-cooked
dinner, and the grate shall certainly be changed."

By this time the archdeacon had again ascended, and was now in the
dining-room. "Arabin," said he, speaking in his usual loud, clear
voice and with that tone of dictation which was so common to him,
"you must positively alter this dining-room--that is, remodel it
altogether. Look here, it is just sixteen feet by fifteen; did any
man ever hear of a dining-room of such proportions!" The archdeacon
stepped the room long-ways and cross-ways with ponderous steps, as
though a certain amount of ecclesiastical dignity could be imparted
even to such an occupation as that by the manner of doing it.
"Barely sixteen; you may call it a square."

"It would do very well for a round table," suggested the ex-warden.

Now there was something peculiarly unorthodox, in the archdeacon's
estimation, in the idea of a round table. He had always been
accustomed to a goodly board of decent length, comfortably elongating
itself according to the number of the guests, nearly black
with perpetual rubbing, and as bright as a mirror. Now round
dinner-tables are generally of oak, or else of such new construction
as not to have acquired the peculiar hue which was so pleasing to
him. He connected them with what he called the nasty newfangled
method of leaving a cloth on the table, as though to warn people that
they were not to sit long. In his eyes there was something democratic
and parvenu in a round table. He imagined that dissenters and
calico-printers chiefly used them, and perhaps a few literary lions
more conspicuous for their wit than their gentility. He was a little
flurried at the idea of such an article being introduced into the
diocese by a protege of his own, and at the instigation of his
father-in-law.

"A round dinner-table," said he with some heat, "is the most
abominable article of furniture that ever was invented. I hope that
Arabin has more taste than to allow such a thing in his house."

Poor Mr. Harding felt himself completely snubbed, and of course said
nothing further; but Mr. Arabin, who had yielded submissively in the
small matters of the cellar and kitchen grate, found himself obliged
to oppose reforms which might be of a nature too expensive for his
pocket.

"But it seems to me, Archdeacon, that I can't very well lengthen the
room without pulling down the wall, and if I pull down the wall, I
must build it up again; then if I throw out a bow on this side, I
must do the same on the other, and if I do it for the ground floor,
I must carry it up to the floor above. That will be putting a new
front to the house and will cost, I suppose, a couple of hundred
pounds. The ecclesiastical commissioners will hardly assist me when
they hear that my grievance consists in having a dining-room only
sixteen feet long."

The archdeacon proceeded to explain that nothing would be easier than
adding six feet to the front of the dining-room without touching
any other room in the house. Such irregularities of construction in
small country-houses were, he said, rather graceful than otherwise,
and he offered to pay for the whole thing out of his own pocket if
it cost more than forty pounds. Mr. Arabin, however, was firm, and,
although the archdeacon fussed and fumed about it, would not give
way. Forty pounds, he said, was a matter of serious moment to
him, and his friends, if under such circumstances they would be
good-natured enough to come to him at all, must put up with the
misery of a square room. He was willing to compromise matters by
disclaiming any intention of having a round table.

"But," said Mrs. Grantly, "what if the priestess insists on having
both the rooms enlarged?"

"The priestess in that case must do it for herself, Mrs. Grantly."

"I have no doubt she will be well able to do so," replied the lady;
"to do that and many more wonderful things. I am quite sure that the
priestess of St. Ewold, when she does come, won't come empty-handed."

Mr. Arabin, however, did not appear well inclined to enter into
speculative expenses on such a chance as this, and therefore any
material alterations in the house, the cost of which could not fairly
be made to lie at the door either of the ecclesiastical commissioners
or of the estate of the late incumbent, were tabooed. With this
essential exception, the archdeacon ordered, suggested, and carried
all points before him in a manner very much to his own satisfaction.
A close observer, had there been one there, might have seen that his
wife had been quite as useful in the matter as himself. No one knew
better than Mrs. Grantly the appurtenances necessary to a comfortable
house. She did not, however, think it necessary to lay claim to any
of the glory which her lord and master was so ready to appropriate as
his own.

Having gone through their work effectually and systematically, the
party returned to Plumstead well satisfied with their expedition.




CHAPTER XXII

The Thornes of Ullathorne


On the following Sunday Mr. Arabin was to read himself in at his new
church. It was agreed at the rectory that the archdeacon should go
over with him and assist at the reading desk, and that Mr. Harding
should take the archdeacon's duty at Plumstead Church. Mrs. Grantly
had her school and her buns to attend to, and professed that she could
not be spared, but Mrs. Bold was to accompany them. It was further
agreed also that they would lunch at the squire's house and return
home after the afternoon service.

Wilfred Thorne, Esq., of Ullathorne, was the squire of St.
Ewold's--or, rather, the squire of Ullathorne, for the domain of the
modern landlord was of wider notoriety than the fame of the ancient
saint. He was a fair specimen of what that race has come to in our
days which, a century ago, was, as we are told, fairly represented
by Squire Western. If that representation be a true one, few classes
of men can have made faster strides in improvement. Mr. Thorne,
however, was a man possessed of quite a sufficient number of foibles
to lay him open to much ridicule. He was still a bachelor, being
about fifty, and was not a little proud of his person. When living
at home at Ullathorne, there was not much room for such pride, and
there therefore he always looked like a gentleman and like that which
he certainly was, the first man in his parish. But during the month
or six weeks which he annually spent in London, he tried so hard
to look like a great man there also, which he certainly was not,
that he was put down as a fool by many at his club. He was a man of
considerable literary attainment in a certain way and on certain
subjects. His favourite authors were Montaigne and Burton, and he
knew more perhaps than any other man in his own county and the
next to it of the English essayists of the two last centuries. He
possessed complete sets of the Idler, the Spectator, the Tatler, the
Guardian, and the Rambler, and would discourse by hours together on
the superiority of such publications to anything which has since been
produced in our Edinburghs and Quarterlies. He was proficient in all
questions of genealogy, and knew enough of almost every gentleman's
family in England to say of what blood and lineage were descended
all those who had any claim to be considered as possessors of any
such luxuries. For blood and lineage he himself had a most profound
respect. He counted back his own ancestors to some period long
antecedent to the Conquest, and could tell you, if you would listen
to him, how it had come to pass that they, like Cedric the Saxon,
had been permitted to hold their own among the Norman barons. It was
not, according to his showing, on account of any weak complaisance on
the part of his family towards their Norman neighbours. Some Ealfried
of Ullathorne once fortified his own castle and held out, not only
that, but the then existing cathedral of Barchester also, against one
Geoffrey De Burgh, in the time of King John; and Mr. Thorne possessed
the whole history of the siege written on vellum and illuminated in
a most costly manner. It little signified that no one could read the
writing, as, had that been possible, no one could have understood the
language. Mr. Thorne could, however, give you all the particulars in
good English, and had no objection to do so.

It would be unjust to say that he looked down on men whose families
were of recent date. He did not do so. He frequently consorted with
such, and had chosen many of his friends from among them. But he
looked on them as great millionaires are apt to look on those who
have small incomes; as men who have Sophocles at their fingers' ends
regard those who know nothing of Greek. They might doubtless be good
sort of people, entitled to much praise for virtue, very admirable
for talent, highly respectable in every way, but they were without
the one great good gift. Such was Mr. Thorne's way of thinking on
this matter; nothing could atone for the loss of good blood; nothing
could neutralize its good effects. Few indeed were now possessed of
it, but the possession was on that account the more precious. It
was very pleasant to hear Mr. Thorne descant on this matter. Were
you in your ignorance to surmise that such a one was of a good family
because the head of his family was a baronet of an old date, he
would open his eyes with a delightful look of affected surprise, and
modestly remind you that baronetcies only dated from James I. He
would gently sigh if you spoke of the blood of the Fitzgeralds and De
Burghs; would hardly allow the claims of the Howards and Lowthers;
and has before now alluded to the Talbots as a family who had hardly
yet achieved the full honours of a pedigree.

In speaking once of a wide-spread race whose name had received
the honours of three coronets, scions from which sat for various
constituencies, some one of whose members had been in almost every
cabinet formed during the present century, a brilliant race such as
there are few in England, Mr. Thorne had called them all "dirt."
He had not intended any disrespect to these men. He admired them
in many senses, and allowed them their privileges without envy. He
had merely meant to express his feeling that the streams which ran
through their veins were not yet purified by time to that perfection,
had not become so genuine an ichor, as to be worthy of being called
blood in the genealogical sense.

When Mr. Arabin was first introduced to him, Mr. Thorne had
immediately suggested that he was one of the Arabins of Uphill
Stanton. Mr. Arabin replied that he was a very distant relative
of the family alluded to. To this Mr. Thorne surmised that the
relationship could not be very distant. Mr. Arabin assured him that
it was so distant that the families knew nothing of each other. Mr.
Thorne laughed his gentle laugh at this and told Mr. Arabin that
there was now existing no branch of his family separated from the
parent stock at an earlier date than the reign of Elizabeth, and
that therefore Mr. Arabin could not call himself distant. Mr. Arabin
himself was quite clearly an Arabin of Uphill Stanton.

"But," said the vicar, "Uphill Stanton has been sold to the De Greys
and has been in their hands for the last fifty years."

"And when it has been there one hundred and fifty, if it unluckily
remain there so long," said Mr. Thorne, "your descendants will not
be a whit the less entitled to describe themselves as being of the
family of Uphill Stanton. Thank God no De Grey can buy that--and
thank God no Arabin, and no Thorne, can sell it."

In politics Mr. Thorne was an unflinching conservative. He looked on
those fifty-three Trojans who, as Mr. Dod tells us, censured free
trade in November, 1852, as the only patriots left among the public
men of England. When that terrible crisis of free trade had arrived,
when the repeal of the Corn Laws was carried by those very men whom
Mr. Thorne had hitherto regarded as the only possible saviours of
his country, he was for a time paralysed. His country was lost; but
that was comparatively a small thing. Other countries had flourished
and fallen, and the human race still went on improving under God's
providence. But now all trust in human faith must forever be at an
end. Not only must ruin come, but it must come through the apostasy
of those who had been regarded as the truest of true believers.
Politics in England, as a pursuit for gentlemen, must be at an end.
Had Mr. Thorne been trodden under foot by a Whig, he could have
borne it as a Tory and a martyr, but to be so utterly thrown over
and deceived by those he had so earnestly supported, so thoroughly
trusted, was more than he could endure and live. He therefore ceased
to live as a politician, and refused to hold any converse with the
world at large on the state of the country.

Such were Mr. Thorne's impressions for the first two or three years
after Sir Robert Peel's apostasy, but by degrees his temper, as did
that of others, cooled down. He began once more to move about, to
frequent the bench and the market, and to be seen at dinners shoulder
to shoulder with some of those who had so cruelly betrayed him. It
was a necessity for him to live, and that plan of his for avoiding
the world did not answer. He, however, and others around him who
still maintained the same staunch principles of protection--men like
himself who were too true to flinch at the cry of a mob--had their
own way of consoling themselves. They were, and felt themselves to
be, the only true depositaries left of certain Eleusinian mysteries,
of certain deep and wondrous services of worship by which alone the
gods could be rightly approached. To them and them only was it now
given to know these things and to perpetuate them, if that might
still be done, by the careful and secret education of their children.

We have read how private and peculiar forms of worship have been
carried on from age to age in families which, to the outer world,
have apparently adhered to the services of some ordinary church. And
so by degrees it was with Mr. Thorne. He learnt at length to listen
calmly while protection was talked of as a thing dead, although he
knew within himself that it was still quick with a mystic life. Nor
was he without a certain pleasure that such knowledge, though given
to him, should be debarred from the multitude. He became accustomed
to hear even among country gentlemen that free trade was after all
not so bad, and to hear this without dispute, although conscious
within himself that everything good in England had gone with his old
palladium. He had within him something of the feeling of Cato, who
gloried that he could kill himself because Romans were no longer
worthy of their name. Mr. Thorne had no thought of killing himself,
being a Christian and still possessing his L4000 a year, but the
feeling was not on that account the less comfortable.

Mr. Thorne was a sportsman, and had been active though not outrageous
in his sports. Previous to the great downfall of politics in his
county, he had supported the hunt by every means in his power. He
had preserved game till no goose or turkey could show a tail in the
parish of St. Ewold's. He had planted gorse covers with more care
than oaks and larches. He had been more anxious for the comfort of
his foxes than of his ewes and lambs. No meet had been more popular
than Ullathorne; no man's stables had been more liberally open to
the horses of distant men than Mr. Thorne's; no man had said more,
written more, or done more to keep the club up. The theory of
protection could expand itself so thoroughly in the practices of a
county hunt! But when the great ruin came; when the noble master of
the Barsetshire hounds supported the recreant minister in the House
of Lords and basely surrendered his truth, his manhood, his friends,
and his honour for the hope of a garter, then Mr. Thorne gave up the
hunt. He did not cut his covers, for that would not have been the
act of a gentleman. He did not kill his foxes, for that according
to his light would have been murder. He did not say that his covers
should not be drawn, or his earths stopped, for that would have been
illegal according to the by-laws prevailing among country gentlemen.
But he absented himself from home on the occasion of every meet at
Ullathorne, left the covers to their fate, and could not be persuaded
to take his pink coat out of his press, or his hunters out of his
stable. This lasted for two years, and then by degrees he came
round. He first appeared at a neighbouring meet on a pony, dressed
in his shooting-coat, as though he had trotted in by accident; then
he walked up one morning on foot to see his favourite gorse drawn,
and when his groom brought his mare out by chance, he did not
refuse to mount her. He was next persuaded, by one of the immortal
fifty-three, to bring his hunting materials over to the other side
of the county and take a fortnight with the hounds there; and
so gradually he returned to his old life. But in hunting as in
other things he was only supported by an inward feeling of mystic
superiority to those with whom he shared the common breath of outer
life.

Mr. Thorne did not live in solitude at Ullathorne. He had a sister,
who was ten years older than himself and who participated in his
prejudices and feelings so strongly that she was a living caricature
of all his foibles. She would not open a modern quarterly, did not
choose to see a magazine in her drawing-room, and would not have
polluted her fingers with a shred of the Times for any consideration.
She spoke of Addison, Swift, and Steele as though they were still
living, regarded Defoe as the best known novelist of his country,
and thought of Fielding as a young but meritorious novice in the
fields of romance. In poetry, she was familiar with names as late
as Dryden, and had once been seduced into reading "The Rape of the
Lock;" but she regarded Spenser as the purest type of her country's
literature in this line. Genealogy was her favourite insanity.
Those things which are the pride of most genealogists were to her
contemptible. Arms and mottoes set her beside herself. Ealfried of
Ullathorne had wanted no motto to assist him in cleaving to the
brisket Geoffrey De Burgh, and Ealfried's great grandfather, the
gigantic Ullafrid, had required no other arms than those which nature
gave him to hurl from the top of his own castle a cousin of the
base invading Norman. To her all modern English names were equally
insignificant: Hengist, Horsa, and such like had for her ears the
only true savour of nobility. She was not contented unless she
could go beyond the Saxons, and would certainly have christened her
children, had she had children, by the names of the ancient Britons.
In some respects she was not unlike Scott's Ulrica, and had she been
given to cursing, she would certainly have done so in the names of
Mista, Skogula, and Zernebock. Not having submitted to the embraces
of any polluting Norman, as poor Ulrica had done, and having
assisted no parricide, the milk of human kindness was not curdled
in her bosom. She never cursed therefore, but blessed rather. This,
however, she did in a strange uncouth Saxon manner that would have
been unintelligible to any peasants but her own.

As a politician, Miss Thorne had been so thoroughly disgusted with
public life by base deeds long antecedent to the Corn Law question
that that had but little moved her. In her estimation her brother
had been a fast young man, hurried away by a too ardent temperament
into democratic tendencies. Now happily he was brought to sounder
views by seeing the iniquity of the world. She had not yet reconciled
herself to the Reform Bill, and still groaned in spirit over the
defalcations of the Duke as touching the Catholic Emancipation. If
asked whom she thought the Queen should take as her counsellor, she
would probably have named Lord Eldon, and when reminded that that
venerable man was no longer present in the flesh to assist us, she
would probably have answered with a sigh that none now could help us
but the dead.