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- Herausgeber: e-artnow Collections
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
Kindred Psyches and Strangers – 4 Classic Fiction Novels presents a captivating exploration of human consciousness and social intricacies through an amalgamation of literary styles that range from the psychological insights of Victorian realism to the impactful narratives of early modernism. This collection brings together works that, while diverse in their rhetorical approaches, converge on the universal themes of personal identity and societal norms. The anthology thrives in its exploration of the nuanced dance between conformity and self-expression, often dramatized in settings that subtly critique the prevailing cultural ethos. Each novel in this compendium is renowned for its poignant examination of the human condition, providing both incisive social critique and introspective depth. The collective works of George Eliot, Louis Couperus, and D. H. Lawrence reflect a rich tapestry of historical and cultural influences. Eliot's profound character studies pair harmoniously with Couperus's exploration of the impressions of the Dutch fin de siècle, while Lawrence's modernist sensibilities provide a robust counterpoint, invigorating the reader with his avant-garde perspective. Each author bears witness to dynamic cultural movements, from Victorian and Dutch realism to proto-modernist innovation, enriching the anthology's thematic landscape with their unique literary heritages and intellectual vigour, making it an essential convergence for scholars and enthusiasts alike. This anthology offers readers an invaluable opportunity to immerse themselves in a dialogue across epochs, harmonizing disparate voices to illuminate the shared human experience. By traversing through the cultural and thematic spectrums of these novels, readers will gain profound insights into their shared narratives and differing styles. Highly recommended for its educational richness, Kindred Psyches and Strangers encourages critical engagement, prompting readers to reflect on the ever-evolving dynamics of identity and cultural conformity. This collection promises an enriching expedition across literary traditions, providing a wealth of perspectives within a singular package. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - An Introduction draws the threads together, discussing why these diverse authors and texts belong in one collection. - Historical Context explores the cultural and intellectual currents that shaped these works, offering insight into the shared (or contrasting) eras that influenced each writer. - A collective Analysis highlights common themes, stylistic variations, and significant crossovers in tone and technique, tying together writers from different backgrounds. - Reflection questions encourage readers to compare the different voices and perspectives within the collection, fostering a richer understanding of the overarching conversation.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2026
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Kindred Psyches and Strangers – 4 Classic Fiction Novels
Table of Contents
Introduction
What binds The Mill on the Floss, Sons and Lovers, Small Souls, and Dr. Adriaan is a sustained concern with the inner life as it meets the claims of family, society, and moral feeling. Even their titles suggest a world in which character is shaped through relation: sons, lovers, souls, a named individual, and a mill set against the flow of circumstance. Together these works propose that fiction can trace not only outward events but the subtle pressures that make a person recognizable to others and elusive to themselves. They belong together as studies of kinship, attachment, and the difficult formation of a self within inherited structures.
Across the collection, domestic life appears less as a settled refuge than as the primary stage on which temperament, loyalty, and conflict become legible. George Eliot and David Herbert Lawrence are both represented by works whose titles immediately signal intimate bonds, while Louis Couperus and Louis Marie-Anne Couperus introduce a language of collective inwardness and singular personality. This combination creates a rich conversation between the household and the psyche. Family feeling becomes inseparable from questions of dependence, expectation, and emotional interpretation, so that private experience carries a larger significance about the way communities imagine duty, desire, and belonging.
A recurring motif implied by these works is the tension between individuality and the social environments that define value. The Mill on the Floss evokes a setting where place and memory may shape destiny, while Sons and Lovers points to attachments that nurture and constrain at once. Small Souls suggests a social field attentive to gradations of feeling, vanity, fragility, or aspiration, and Dr. Adriaan centers attention on the moral and psychological weight borne by a single life. Read together, the novels explore how identity is negotiated under pressure, not as a fixed essence but as something continually tested by intimacy, judgment, and the desire for self-command.
The collection also gains force from its productive contrasts in tone and perspective. George Eliot’s title joins landscape and human striving, inviting a broad moral frame; David Herbert Lawrence’s joins family role and erotic attachment, implying heightened emotional immediacy. Louis Couperus’s Small Souls carries a finely social resonance, attentive to the subtle scale of interior and collective life, whereas Dr. Adriaan promises concentration upon an individual consciousness or case. These differences matter because they prevent any single formula from dominating. Instead, the books illuminate one another by showing how psychological fiction can be expansive or concentrated, communal or singular, lyrical in atmosphere or exacting in personal focus.
Taken together, these works suggest that the most consequential dramas are often those enacted in conversation, memory, resentment, longing, and care. Their shared world is one in which moral life is inseparable from emotional life, and where the smallest inflection of feeling may alter the meaning of a bond. Such fiction does not treat character as static; it follows the gradual accumulation of pressures by which people misunderstand one another, cling to one another, and seek forms of freedom that remain entangled with obligation. The result is a collection unified less by external resemblance than by a common seriousness about what it means to live among other minds.
That seriousness helps explain the collection’s continuing resonance. Contemporary readers remain alert to the ways family structures influence identity, to the costs of social conformity, and to the complicated traffic between personal aspiration and inherited roles. These novels speak to such concerns in forms that are both intimate and expansive, turning inwardness into a way of understanding culture itself. They remind modern audiences that psychological depth is not an escape from history or society but one of the clearest means of perceiving them. In this sense, the collection retains artistic and intellectual vitality by showing how private feeling participates in shared worlds.
As a whole, Kindred Psyches and Strangers presents fiction as an art of relation: between self and family, desire and duty, singular temperament and the broader currents of social life. The Mill on the Floss, Sons and Lovers, Small Souls, and Dr. Adriaan each approach these relations from a distinct angle, yet all are committed to rendering the complexities of attachment with unusual gravity. Their conversation is not reducible to sameness; it depends on variation, on the movement from one emotional register to another. What emerges is a composite portrait of human connectedness, revealing how closeness can console, expose, diminish, and deepen the life of the mind.
Historical Context
Socio-Political Landscape
George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss emerges from early nineteenth-century provincial England, a society governed by property, family hierarchy, and the moral authority of local opinion. Though written later in the Victorian period, the novel reconstructs a world shaped by legal and economic structures that left women dependent on kinship and reputation. Commercial risk, debt, and inheritance frame domestic life as intensely political forces. Eliot presents a culture in which class mobility is possible yet precarious, and where education, gender expectation, and religious respectability determine who may speak, choose, or recover from public disgrace.
D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers is rooted in the industrial Midlands at the turn of the twentieth century, when coal mining organized labor, family life, and masculine identity. The novel reflects tensions between working-class collectivism and aspirations toward cultural self-improvement associated with lower-middle-class respectability. Economic hardship, domestic conflict, and the bodily dangers of industrial labor shape the Morel household from within. Lawrence places intimate feeling against a background of class division and uneven modernization, registering debates about marriage, authority, and social advancement without treating politics as separate from the emotional and material pressures of everyday life.
Louis Couperus’s Small Souls and Dr. Adriaan belong to a Dutch fin-de-siècle and early twentieth-century milieu marked by a constitutional monarchy, colonial wealth, bourgeois self-scrutiny, and unease about social decline. In these novels, political authority appears less through public institutions than through elite households, family prestige, and the codes of a class anxious about status. Couperus depicts social life as regulated by convention, gossip, and inherited obligation, while broader modern pressures unsettle older certainties. His world registers debates about marriage, morality, and psychological strain as symptoms of a society whose governing structures remain formal, yet inwardly fragile and exhausted.
Intellectual & Aesthetic Currents
Eliot wrote under the influence of realism, moral philosophy, and a historically minded approach to character. In The Mill on the Floss, she combines close social observation with an analytical concern for sympathy, memory, and the limits imposed by circumstance. The novel reflects Victorian engagements with religion after doctrinal certainty, especially the effort to preserve ethical seriousness without simplistic judgment. Its narrator’s breadth of vision and interest in developmental process align private emotion with social causation. Eliot’s art is therefore both psychologically attentive and intellectually disciplined, seeking not romantic idealization but a humane understanding of conflicting duties and desires.
Sons and Lovers stands at the meeting point of late realism and literary modernity. Lawrence draws on psychological introspection, intense sensory writing, and a new frankness about desire, turning the family novel inward toward emotional dependence and conflict. The book absorbs currents associated with early psychoanalytic thinking without becoming a doctrinal case study; instead it dramatizes attachment, rivalry, and ambivalence through rhythm, imagery, and bodily detail. Its treatment of landscape and industry also transforms external setting into felt experience. Lawrence’s innovation lies in making social class, sexuality, and consciousness interact as one unstable, vividly embodied field.
In Small Souls and Dr. Adriaan, Couperus works within a cosmopolitan fin-de-siècle atmosphere shaped by realism, naturalism, decadence, and emerging psychological fiction. His prose attends to nervous states, social performance, and subtle forms of weakness or drift, treating personality as unstable and often overdetermined by family habit. Rather than emphasizing public action, he explores inward life, atmosphere, and the slow corrosion of certainty. These novels reflect an aesthetic interested in ennui, fragility, and cultivated surfaces, yet they also retain a cool diagnostic precision. Couperus turns bourgeois domesticity into a site where modern consciousness appears strained, self-divided, and historically transitional.
Legacy & Reassessment Across Time
The Mill on the Floss has been repeatedly reassessed as both a canonical Victorian realist novel and a searching account of female intellect constrained by social form. Early admiration often centered on Eliot’s moral seriousness and lifelike provincial setting; later criticism emphasized Maggie Tulliver’s struggle within gendered expectations, reading the novel through feminist and historicist frameworks. Scholars have also examined its treatment of memory, narration, and the relation between sympathy and judgment. Adaptations for stage, television, and radio have tended to foreground emotional conflict, while criticism continues to debate how fully Eliot’s ethical vision resists or reproduces the limitations her heroine faces.
Sons and Lovers initially drew notice for its candor and intensity, and over time became central to discussions of modern sexuality, class, and psychological fiction. Mid-twentieth-century readers frequently approached it through psychoanalytic language, especially in relation to maternal attachment, though later scholarship complicated such readings by stressing industrial culture, masculinity, and the representation of women. The novel’s status has oscillated between autobiographical document and formally crafted art. Film and television adaptations have helped fix its place in public memory, yet critical debate persists over whether its emotional insight is inseparable from, or compromised by, its uneven judgments about desire and intimacy.
Small Souls and Dr. Adriaan have undergone a slower but significant revaluation, especially as Couperus’s reputation expanded beyond a narrowly national frame. Once read chiefly as acute portraits of aristocratic or bourgeois decline, they are now more often discussed as sophisticated studies of social performance, psychological fragility, and fin-de-siècle modernity. Critics have revisited Couperus’s narrative detachment, his handling of family systems, and his subtle irony toward respectable surfaces. Their afterlife has been sustained less by major adaptation than by scholarly recovery, translation, and renewed interest in Dutch literature’s place within broader European realism and early modern psychological prose.
Kindred Psyches and Strangers – 4 Classic Fiction Novels
Familial Bonds and Psychological Inheritance
Inner Life, Social Constraint and Isolation
George Eliot
The Mill on the Floss
BOOK FIRST BOY AND GIRL.
Chapter I. Outside Dorlcote Mill
A wide plain, where the broadening Floss hurries on between its green banks to the sea, and the loving tide, rushing to meet it, checks its passage with an impetuous embrace. On this mighty tide the black ships—laden with the fresh-scented fir-planks, with rounded sacks of oil-bearing seed, or with the dark glitter of coal—are borne along to the town of St Ogg’s, which shows its aged, fluted red roofs and the broad gables of its wharves between the low wooded hill and the river-brink, tingeing the water with a soft purple hue under the transient glance of this February sun. Far away on each hand stretch the rich pastures, and the patches of dark earth made ready for the seed of broad-leaved green crops, or touched already with the tint of the tender-bladed autumn-sown corn. There is a remnant still of last year’s golden clusters of beehive-ricks rising at intervals beyond the hedgerows; and everywhere the hedgerows are studded with trees; the distant ships seem to be lifting their masts and stretching their red-brown sails close among the branches of the spreading ash. Just by the red-roofed town the tributary Ripple flows with a lively current into the Floss. How lovely the little river is, with its dark changing wavelets! It seems to me like a living companion while I wander along the bank, and listen to its low, placid voice, as to the voice of one who is deaf and loving. I remember those large dipping willows. I remember the stone bridge.
And this is Dorlcote Mill. I must stand a minute or two here on the bridge and look at it, though the clouds are threatening, and it is far on in the afternoon. Even in this leafless time of departing February it is pleasant to look at,—perhaps the chill, damp season adds a charm to the trimly kept, comfortable dwelling-house, as old as the elms and chestnuts that shelter it from the northern blast. The stream is brimful now, and lies high in this little withy plantation, and half drowns the grassy fringe of the croft in front of the house. As I look at the full stream, the vivid grass, the delicate bright-green powder softening the outline of the great trunks and branches that gleam from under the bare purple boughs, I am in love with moistness, and envy the white ducks that are dipping their heads far into the water here among the withes, unmindful of the awkward appearance they make in the drier world above.
The rush of the water and the booming of the mill bring a dreamy deafness, which seems to heighten the peacefulness of the scene. They are like a great curtain of sound, shutting one out from the world beyond. And now there is the thunder of the huge covered wagon coming home with sacks of grain. That honest wagoner is thinking of his dinner, getting sadly dry in the oven at this late hour; but he will not touch it till he has fed his horses,—the strong, submissive, meek-eyed beasts, who, I fancy, are looking mild reproach at him from between their blinkers, that he should crack his whip at them in that awful manner as if they needed that hint! See how they stretch their shoulders up the slope toward the bridge, with all the more energy because they are so near home. Look at their grand shaggy feet that seem to grasp the firm earth, at the patient strength of their necks, bowed under the heavy collar, at the mighty muscles of their struggling haunches! I should like well to hear them neigh over their hardly-earned feed of corn, and see them, with their moist necks freed from the harness, dipping their eager nostrils into the muddy pond. Now they are on the bridge, and down they go again at a swifter pace, and the arch of the covered wagon disappears at the turning behind the trees.
Now I can turn my eyes toward the mill again, and watch the unresting wheel sending out its diamond jets of water. That little girl is watching it too; she has been standing on just the same spot at the edge of the water ever since I paused on the bridge. And that queer white cur with the brown ear seems to be leaping and barking in ineffectual remonstrance with the wheel; perhaps he is jealous because his playfellow in the beaver bonnet is so rapt in its movement. It is time the little playfellow went in, I think; and there is a very bright fire to tempt her: the red light shines out under the deepening gray of the sky. It is time, too, for me to leave off resting my arms on the cold stone of this bridge....
Ah, my arms are really benumbed. I have been pressing my elbows on the arms of my chair, and dreaming that I was standing on the bridge in front of Dorlcote Mill, as it looked one February afternoon many years ago. Before I dozed off, I was going to tell you what Mr and Mrs Tulliver were talking about, as they sat by the bright fire in the left-hand parlour, on that very afternoon I have been dreaming of.
Chapter II. Mr Tulliver, of Dorlcote Mill, Declares His Resolution about Tom
“What I want, you know,” said Mr Tulliver,—“what I want is to give Tom a good eddication; an eddication as’ll be a bread to him. That was what I was thinking of when I gave notice for him to leave the academy at Lady-day. I mean to put him to a downright good school at Midsummer. The two years at th’ academy ’ud ha’ done well enough, if I’d meant to make a miller and farmer of him, for he’s had a fine sight more schoolin’ nor I ever got. All the learnin’ my father ever paid for was a bit o’ birch at one end and the alphabet at th’ other. But I should like Tom to be a bit of a scholard, so as he might be up to the tricks o’ these fellows as talk fine and write with a flourish. It ’ud be a help to me wi’ these lawsuits, and arbitrations, and things. I wouldn’t make a downright lawyer o’ the lad,—I should be sorry for him to be a raskill,—but a sort o’ engineer, or a surveyor, or an auctioneer and vallyer, like Riley, or one o’ them smartish businesses as are all profits and no outlay, only for a big watch-chain and a high stool. They’re pretty nigh all one, and they’re not far off being even wi’ the law, I believe; for Riley looks Lawyer Wakem i’ the face as hard as one cat looks another. He’s none frightened at him.”
Mr Tulliver was speaking to his wife, a blond comely woman in a fan-shaped cap (I am afraid to think how long it is since fan-shaped caps were worn, they must be so near coming in again. At that time, when Mrs Tulliver was nearly forty, they were new at St Ogg’s, and considered sweet things).
“Well, Mr Tulliver, you know best: I’ve no objections. But hadn’t I better kill a couple o’ fowl, and have th’ aunts and uncles to dinner next week, so as you may hear what sister Glegg and sister Pullet have got to say about it? There’s a couple o’ fowl wants killing!”
“You may kill every fowl i’ the yard if you like, Bessy; but I shall ask neither aunt nor uncle what I’m to do wi’ my own lad,” said Mr Tulliver, defiantly.
“Dear heart!” said Mrs Tulliver, shocked at this sanguinary rhetoric, “how can you talk so, Mr Tulliver? But it’s your way to speak disrespectful o’ my family; and sister Glegg throws all the blame upo’ me, though I’m sure I’m as innocent as the babe unborn. For nobody’s ever heard me say as it wasn’t lucky for my children to have aunts and uncles as can live independent. Howiver, if Tom’s to go to a new school, I should like him to go where I can wash him and mend him; else he might as well have calico as linen, for they’d be one as yallow as th’ other before they’d been washed half-a-dozen times. And then, when the box is goin’ back’ard and forrard, I could send the lad a cake, or a pork-pie, or an apple; for he can do with an extry bit, bless him! whether they stint him at the meals or no. My children can eat as much victuals as most, thank God!”
“Well, well, we won’t send him out o’ reach o’ the carrier’s cart, if other things fit in,” said Mr Tulliver. “But you mustn’t put a spoke i’ the wheel about the washin,’ if we can’t get a school near enough. That’s the fault I have to find wi’ you, Bessy; if you see a stick i’ the road, you’re allays thinkin’ you can’t step over it. You’d want me not to hire a good wagoner, ’cause he’d got a mole on his face.”
“Dear heart!” said Mrs Tulliver, in mild surprise, “when did I iver make objections to a man because he’d got a mole on his face? I’m sure I’m rether fond o’ the moles; for my brother, as is dead an’ gone, had a mole on his brow. But I can’t remember your iver offering to hire a wagoner with a mole, Mr Tulliver. There was John Gibbs hadn’t a mole on his face no more nor you have, an’ I was all for having you hire him; an’ so you did hire him, an’ if he hadn’t died o’ th’ inflammation, as we paid Dr Turnbull for attending him, he’d very like ha’ been drivin’ the wagon now. He might have a mole somewhere out o’ sight, but how was I to know that, Mr Tulliver?”
“No, no, Bessy; I didn’t mean justly the mole; I meant it to stand for summat else; but niver mind—it’s puzzling work, talking is. What I’m thinking on, is how to find the right sort o’ school to send Tom to, for I might be ta’en in again, as I’ve been wi’ th’ academy. I’ll have nothing to do wi’ a ’cademy again: whativer school I send Tom to, it sha’n’t be a ’cademy; it shall be a place where the lads spend their time i’ summat else besides blacking the family’s shoes, and getting up the potatoes. It’s an uncommon puzzling thing to know what school to pick.”
Mr Tulliver paused a minute or two, and dived with both hands into his breeches pockets as if he hoped to find some suggestion there. Apparently he was not disappointed, for he presently said, “I know what I’ll do: I’ll talk it over wi’ Riley; he’s coming to-morrow, t’ arbitrate about the dam.”
“Well, Mr Tulliver, I’ve put the sheets out for the best bed, and Kezia’s got ’em hanging at the fire. They aren’t the best sheets, but they’re good enough for anybody to sleep in, be he who he will; for as for them best Holland sheets, I should repent buying ’em, only they’ll do to lay us out in. An’ if you was to die to-morrow, Mr Tulliver, they’re mangled beautiful, an’ all ready, an’ smell o’ lavender as it ’ud be a pleasure to lay ’em out; an’ they lie at the left-hand corner o’ the big oak linen-chest at the back: not as I should trust anybody to look ’em out but myself.”
As Mrs Tulliver uttered the last sentence, she drew a bright bunch of keys from her pocket, and singled out one, rubbing her thumb and finger up and down it with a placid smile while she looked at the clear fire. If Mr Tulliver had been a susceptible man in his conjugal relation, he might have supposed that she drew out the key to aid her imagination in anticipating the moment when he would be in a state to justify the production of the best Holland sheets. Happily he was not so; he was only susceptible in respect of his right to water-power; moreover, he had the marital habit of not listening very closely, and since his mention of Mr Riley, had been apparently occupied in a tactile examination of his woollen stockings.
“I think I’ve hit it, Bessy,” was his first remark after a short silence. “Riley’s as likely a man as any to know o’ some school; he’s had schooling himself, an’ goes about to all sorts o’ places, arbitratin’ and vallyin’ and that. And we shall have time to talk it over to-morrow night when the business is done. I want Tom to be such a sort o’ man as Riley, you know,—as can talk pretty nigh as well as if it was all wrote out for him, and knows a good lot o’ words as don’t mean much, so as you can’t lay hold of ’em i’ law; and a good solid knowledge o’ business too.”
“Well,” said Mrs Tulliver, “so far as talking proper, and knowing everything, and walking with a bend in his back, and setting his hair up, I shouldn’t mind the lad being brought up to that. But them fine-talking men from the big towns mostly wear the false shirt-fronts; they wear a frill till it’s all a mess, and then hide it with a bib; I know Riley does. And then, if Tom’s to go and live at Mudport, like Riley, he’ll have a house with a kitchen hardly big enough to turn in, an’ niver get a fresh egg for his breakfast, an’ sleep up three pair o’ stairs,—or four, for what I know,—and be burnt to death before he can get down.”
“No, no,” said Mr Tulliver, “I’ve no thoughts of his going to Mudport: I mean him to set up his office at St Ogg’s, close by us, an’ live at home. But,” continued Mr Tulliver after a pause, “what I’m a bit afraid on is, as Tom hasn’t got the right sort o’ brains for a smart fellow. I doubt he’s a bit slowish. He takes after your family, Bessy.”
“Yes, that he does,” said Mrs Tulliver, accepting the last proposition entirely on its own merits; “he’s wonderful for liking a deal o’ salt in his broth. That was my brother’s way, and my father’s before him.”
“It seems a bit a pity, though,” said Mr Tulliver, “as the lad should take after the mother’s side instead o’ the little wench. That’s the worst on’t wi’ crossing o’ breeds: you can never justly calkilate what’ll come on’t. The little un takes after my side, now: she’s twice as ’cute as Tom. Too ’cute for a woman, I’m afraid,” continued Mr Tulliver, turning his head dubiously first on one side and then on the other. “It’s no mischief much while she’s a little un; but an over-’cute woman’s no better nor a long-tailed sheep,—she’ll fetch none the bigger price for that.”
“Yes, it is a mischief while she’s a little un, Mr Tulliver, for it runs to naughtiness. How to keep her in a clean pinafore two hours together passes my cunning. An’ now you put me i’ mind,” continued Mrs Tulliver, rising and going to the window, “I don’t know where she is now, an’ it’s pretty nigh tea-time. Ah, I thought so,—wanderin’ up an’ down by the water, like a wild thing: She’ll tumble in some day.”
Mrs Tulliver rapped the window sharply, beckoned, and shook her head,—a process which she repeated more than once before she returned to her chair.
“You talk o’ ’cuteness, Mr Tulliver,” she observed as she sat down, “but I’m sure the child’s half an idiot i’ some things; for if I send her upstairs to fetch anything, she forgets what she’s gone for, an’ perhaps ’ull sit down on the floor i’ the sunshine an’ plait her hair an’ sing to herself like a Bedlam creatur’, all the while I’m waiting for her downstairs. That niver run i’ my family, thank God! no more nor a brown skin as makes her look like a mulatter. I don’t like to fly i’ the face o’ Providence, but it seems hard as I should have but one gell, an’ her so comical.”
“Pooh, nonsense!” said Mr Tulliver; “she’s a straight, black-eyed wench as anybody need wish to see. I don’t know i’ what she’s behind other folks’s children; and she can read almost as well as the parson.”
“But her hair won’t curl all I can do with it, and she’s so franzy about having it put i’ paper, and I’ve such work as never was to make her stand and have it pinched with th’ irons.”
“Cut it off—cut it off short,” said the father, rashly.
“How can you talk so, Mr Tulliver? She’s too big a gell—gone nine, and tall of her age—to have her hair cut short; an’ there’s her cousin Lucy’s got a row o’ curls round her head, an’ not a hair out o’ place. It seems hard as my sister Deane should have that pretty child; I’m sure Lucy takes more after me nor my own child does. Maggie, Maggie,” continued the mother, in a tone of half-coaxing fretfulness, as this small mistake of nature entered the room, “where’s the use o’ my telling you to keep away from the water? You’ll tumble in and be drownded some day, an’ then you’ll be sorry you didn’t do as mother told you.”
Maggie’s hair, as she threw off her bonnet, painfully confirmed her mother’s accusation. Mrs Tulliver, desiring her daughter to have a curled crop, “like other folks’s children,” had had it cut too short in front to be pushed behind the ears; and as it was usually straight an hour after it had been taken out of paper, Maggie was incessantly tossing her head to keep the dark, heavy locks out of her gleaming black eyes,—an action which gave her very much the air of a small Shetland pony.
“Oh, dear, oh, dear, Maggie, what are you thinkin’ of, to throw your bonnet down there? Take it upstairs, there’s a good gell, an’ let your hair be brushed, an’ put your other pinafore on, an’ change your shoes, do, for shame; an’ come an’ go on with your patchwork, like a little lady.”
“Oh, mother,” said Maggie, in a vehemently cross tone, “I don’t want to do my patchwork.”
“What! not your pretty patchwork, to make a counterpane for your aunt Glegg?”
“It’s foolish work,” said Maggie, with a toss of her mane,—“tearing things to pieces to sew ’em together again. And I don’t want to do anything for my aunt Glegg. I don’t like her.”
Exit Maggie, dragging her bonnet by the string, while Mr Tulliver laughs audibly.
“I wonder at you, as you’ll laugh at her, Mr Tulliver,” said the mother, with feeble fretfulness in her tone. “You encourage her i’ naughtiness. An’ her aunts will have it as it’s me spoils her.”
Mrs Tulliver was what is called a good-tempered person,—never cried, when she was a baby, on any slighter ground than hunger and pins; and from the cradle upward had been healthy, fair, plump, and dull-witted; in short, the flower of her family for beauty and amiability. But milk and mildness are not the best things for keeping, and when they turn only a little sour, they may disagree with young stomachs seriously. I have often wondered whether those early Madonnas of Raphael, with the blond faces and somewhat stupid expression, kept their placidity undisturbed when their strong-limbed, strong-willed boys got a little too old to do without clothing. I think they must have been given to feeble remonstrance, getting more and more peevish as it became more and more ineffectual.
Chapter III. Mr Riley Gives His Advice Concerning a School for Tom
The gentleman in the ample white cravat and shirt-frill, taking his brandy-and-water so pleasantly with his good friend Tulliver, is Mr Riley, a gentleman with a waxen complexion and fat hands, rather highly educated for an auctioneer and appraiser, but large-hearted enough to show a great deal of bonhomie toward simple country acquaintances of hospitable habits. Mr Riley spoke of such acquaintances kindly as “people of the old school.”
The conversation had come to a pause. Mr Tulliver, not without a particular reason, had abstained from a seventh recital of the cool retort by which Riley had shown himself too many for Dix, and how Wakem had had his comb cut for once in his life, now the business of the dam had been settled by arbitration, and how there never would have been any dispute at all about the height of water if everybody was what they should be, and Old Harry hadn’t made the lawyers. Mr Tulliver was, on the whole, a man of safe traditional opinions; but on one or two points he had trusted to his unassisted intellect, and had arrived at several questionable conclusions; amongst the rest, that rats, weevils, and lawyers were created by Old Harry. Unhappily he had no one to tell him that this was rampant Manichæism, else he might have seen his error. But to-day it was clear that the good principle was triumphant: this affair of the water-power had been a tangled business somehow, for all it seemed—look at it one way—as plain as water’s water; but, big a puzzle as it was, it hadn’t got the better of Riley. Mr Tulliver took his brandy-and-water a little stronger than usual, and, for a man who might be supposed to have a few hundreds lying idle at his banker’s, was rather incautiously open in expressing his high estimate of his friend’s business talents.
But the dam was a subject of conversation that would keep; it could always be taken up again at the same point, and exactly in the same condition; and there was another subject, as you know, on which Mr Tulliver was in pressing want of Mr Riley’s advice. This was his particular reason for remaining silent for a short space after his last draught, and rubbing his knees in a meditative manner. He was not a man to make an abrupt transition. This was a puzzling world, as he often said, and if you drive your wagon in a hurry, you may light on an awkward corner. Mr Riley, meanwhile, was not impatient. Why should he be? Even Hotspur, one would think, must have been patient in his slippers on a warm hearth, taking copious snuff, and sipping gratuitous brandy-and-water.
“There’s a thing I’ve got i’ my head,” said Mr Tulliver at last, in rather a lower tone than usual, as he turned his head and looked steadfastly at his companion.
“Ah!” said Mr Riley, in a tone of mild interest. He was a man with heavy waxen eyelids and high-arched eyebrows, looking exactly the same under all circumstances. This immovability of face, and the habit of taking a pinch of snuff before he gave an answer, made him trebly oracular to Mr Tulliver.
“It’s a very particular thing,” he went on; “it’s about my boy Tom.”
At the sound of this name, Maggie, who was seated on a low stool close by the fire, with a large book open on her lap, shook her heavy hair back and looked up eagerly. There were few sounds that roused Maggie when she was dreaming over her book, but Tom’s name served as well as the shrillest whistle; in an instant she was on the watch, with gleaming eyes, like a Skye terrier suspecting mischief, or at all events determined to fly at any one who threatened it toward Tom.
“You see, I want to put him to a new school at Midsummer,” said Mr Tulliver; “he’s comin’ away from the ’cademy at Lady-day, an’ I shall let him run loose for a quarter; but after that I want to send him to a downright good school, where they’ll make a scholard of him.”
“Well,” said Mr Riley, “there’s no greater advantage you can give him than a good education. Not,” he added, with polite significance,—“not that a man can’t be an excellent miller and farmer, and a shrewd, sensible fellow into the bargain, without much help from the schoolmaster.”
“I believe you,” said Mr Tulliver, winking, and turning his head on one side; “but that’s where it is. I don’t mean Tom to be a miller and farmer. I see no fun i’ that. Why, if I made him a miller an’ farmer, he’d be expectin’ to take to the mill an’ the land, an’ a-hinting at me as it was time for me to lay by an’ think o’ my latter end. Nay, nay, I’ve seen enough o’ that wi’ sons. I’ll never pull my coat off before I go to bed. I shall give Tom an eddication an’ put him to a business, as he may make a nest for himself, an’ not want to push me out o’ mine. Pretty well if he gets it when I’m dead an’ gone. I sha’n’t be put off wi’ spoon-meat afore I’ve lost my teeth.”
This was evidently a point on which Mr Tulliver felt strongly; and the impetus which had given unusual rapidity and emphasis to his speech showed itself still unexhausted for some minutes afterward in a defiant motion of the head from side to side, and an occasional “Nay, nay,” like a subsiding growl.
These angry symptoms were keenly observed by Maggie, and cut her to the quick. Tom, it appeared, was supposed capable of turning his father out of doors, and of making the future in some way tragic by his wickedness. This was not to be borne; and Maggie jumped up from her stool, forgetting all about her heavy book, which fell with a bang within the fender, and going up between her father’s knees, said, in a half-crying, half-indignant voice,—
“Father, Tom wouldn’t be naughty to you ever; I know he wouldn’t.”
Mrs Tulliver was out of the room superintending a choice supper-dish, and Mr Tulliver’s heart was touched; so Maggie was not scolded about the book. Mr Riley quietly picked it up and looked at it, while the father laughed, with a certain tenderness in his hard-lined face, and patted his little girl on the back, and then held her hands and kept her between his knees.
“What! they mustn’t say any harm o’ Tom, eh?” said Mr Tulliver, looking at Maggie with a twinkling eye. Then, in a lower voice, turning to Mr Riley, as though Maggie couldn’t hear, “She understands what one’s talking about so as never was. And you should hear her read,—straight off, as if she knowed it all beforehand. And allays at her book! But it’s bad—it’s bad,” Mr Tulliver added sadly, checking this blamable exultation. “A woman’s no business wi’ being so clever; it’ll turn to trouble, I doubt. But bless you!”—here the exultation was clearly recovering the mastery,—“she’ll read the books and understand ’em better nor half the folks as are growed up.”
Maggie’s cheeks began to flush with triumphant excitement. She thought Mr Riley would have a respect for her now; it had been evident that he thought nothing of her before.
Mr Riley was turning over the leaves of the book, and she could make nothing of his face, with its high-arched eyebrows; but he presently looked at her, and said,—
“Come, come and tell me something about this book; here are some pictures,—I want to know what they mean.”
Maggie, with deepening colour, went without hesitation to Mr Riley’s elbow and looked over the book, eagerly seizing one corner, and tossing back her mane, while she said,—
“Oh, I’ll tell you what that means. It’s a dreadful picture, isn’t it? But I can’t help looking at it. That old woman in the water’s a witch,—they’ve put her in to find out whether she’s a witch or no; and if she swims she’s a witch, and if she’s drowned—and killed, you know—she’s innocent, and not a witch, but only a poor silly old woman. But what good would it do her then, you know, when she was drowned? Only, I suppose, she’d go to heaven, and God would make it up to her. And this dreadful blacksmith with his arms akimbo, laughing,—oh, isn’t he ugly?—I’ll tell you what he is. He’s the Devil really” (here Maggie’s voice became louder and more emphatic), “and not a right blacksmith; for the Devil takes the shape of wicked men, and walks about and sets people doing wicked things, and he’s oftener in the shape of a bad man than any other, because, you know, if people saw he was the Devil, and he roared at ’em, they’d run away, and he couldn’t make ’em do what he pleased.”
Mr Tulliver had listened to this exposition of Maggie’s with petrifying wonder.
“Why, what book is it the wench has got hold on?” he burst out at last.
“‘The History of the Devil,’ by Daniel Defoe,—not quite the right book for a little girl,” said Mr Riley. “How came it among your books, Mr Tulliver?”
Maggie looked hurt and discouraged, while her father said,—
“Why, it’s one o’ the books I bought at Partridge’s sale. They was all bound alike,—it’s a good binding, you see,—and I thought they’d be all good books. There’s Jeremy Taylor’s ‘Holy Living and Dying’ among ’em. I read in it often of a Sunday” (Mr Tulliver felt somehow a familiarity with that great writer, because his name was Jeremy); “and there’s a lot more of ’em,—sermons mostly, I think,—but they’ve all got the same covers, and I thought they were all o’ one sample, as you may say. But it seems one mustn’t judge by th’ outside. This is a puzzlin’ world.”
“Well,” said Mr Riley, in an admonitory, patronizing tone as he patted Maggie on the head, “I advise you to put by the ‘History of the Devil,’ and read some prettier book. Have you no prettier books?”
“Oh, yes,” said Maggie, reviving a little in the desire to vindicate the variety of her reading. “I know the reading in this book isn’t pretty; but I like the pictures, and I make stories to the pictures out of my own head, you know. But I’ve got ‘Æsop’s Fables,’ and a book about Kangaroos and things, and the ‘Pilgrim’s Progress....’”
“Ah, a beautiful book,” said Mr Riley; “you can’t read a better.”
“Well, but there’s a great deal about the Devil in that,” said Maggie, triumphantly, “and I’ll show you the picture of him in his true shape, as he fought with Christian.”
Maggie ran in an instant to the corner of the room, jumped on a chair, and reached down from the small bookcase a shabby old copy of Bunyan, which opened at once, without the least trouble of search, at the picture she wanted.
“Here he is,” she said, running back to Mr Riley, “and Tom coloured him for me with his paints when he was at home last holidays,—the body all black, you know, and the eyes red, like fire, because he’s all fire inside, and it shines out at his eyes.”
“Go, go!” said Mr Tulliver, peremptorily, beginning to feel rather uncomfortable at these free remarks on the personal appearance of a being powerful enough to create lawyers; “shut up the book, and let’s hear no more o’ such talk. It is as I thought—the child ’ull learn more mischief nor good wi’ the books. Go, go and see after your mother.”
Maggie shut up the book at once, with a sense of disgrace, but not being inclined to see after her mother, she compromised the matter by going into a dark corner behind her father’s chair, and nursing her doll, toward which she had an occasional fit of fondness in Tom’s absence, neglecting its toilet, but lavishing so many warm kisses on it that the waxen cheeks had a wasted, unhealthy appearance.
“Did you ever hear the like on’t?” said Mr Tulliver, as Maggie retired. “It’s a pity but what she’d been the lad,—she’d ha’ been a match for the lawyers, she would. It’s the wonderful’st thing”—here he lowered his voice—“as I picked the mother because she wasn’t o’er ’cute—bein’ a good-looking woman too, an’ come of a rare family for managing; but I picked her from her sisters o’ purpose, ’cause she was a bit weak like; for I wasn’t agoin’ to be told the rights o’ things by my own fireside. But you see when a man’s got brains himself, there’s no knowing where they’ll run to; an’ a pleasant sort o’ soft woman may go on breeding you stupid lads and ’cute wenches, till it’s like as if the world was turned topsy-turvy. It’s an uncommon puzzlin’ thing.”
Mr Riley’s gravity gave way, and he shook a little under the application of his pinch of snuff before he said,—
“But your lad’s not stupid, is he? I saw him, when I was here last, busy making fishing-tackle; he seemed quite up to it.”
“Well, he isn’t not to say stupid,—he’s got a notion o’ things out o’ door, an’ a sort o’ common sense, as he’d lay hold o’ things by the right handle. But he’s slow with his tongue, you see, and he reads but poorly, and can’t abide the books, and spells all wrong, they tell me, an’ as shy as can be wi’ strangers, an’ you never hear him say ’cute things like the little wench. Now, what I want is to send him to a school where they’ll make him a bit nimble with his tongue and his pen, and make a smart chap of him. I want my son to be even wi’ these fellows as have got the start o’ me with having better schooling. Not but what, if the world had been left as God made it, I could ha’ seen my way, and held my own wi’ the best of ’em; but things have got so twisted round and wrapped up i’ unreasonable words, as aren’t a bit like ’em, as I’m clean at fault, often an’ often. Everything winds about so—the more straightforrad you are, the more you’re puzzled.”
Mr Tulliver took a draught, swallowed it slowly, and shook his head in a melancholy manner, conscious of exemplifying the truth that a perfectly sane intellect is hardly at home in this insane world.
“You’re quite in the right of it, Tulliver,” observed Mr Riley. “Better spend an extra hundred or two on your son’s education, than leave it him in your will. I know I should have tried to do so by a son of mine, if I’d had one, though, God knows, I haven’t your ready money to play with, Tulliver; and I have a houseful of daughters into the bargain.”
“I dare say, now, you know of a school as ’ud be just the thing for Tom,” said Mr Tulliver, not diverted from his purpose by any sympathy with Mr Riley’s deficiency of ready cash.
Mr Riley took a pinch of snuff, and kept Mr Tulliver in suspense by a silence that seemed deliberative, before he said,—
“I know of a very fine chance for any one that’s got the necessary money and that’s what you have, Tulliver. The fact is, I wouldn’t recommend any friend of mine to send a boy to a regular school, if he could afford to do better. But if any one wanted his boy to get superior instruction and training, where he would be the companion of his master, and that master a first rate fellow, I know his man. I wouldn’t mention the chance to everybody, because I don’t think everybody would succeed in getting it, if he were to try; but I mention it to you, Tulliver, between ourselves.”
The fixed inquiring glance with which Mr Tulliver had been watching his friend’s oracular face became quite eager.
“Ay, now, let’s hear,” he said, adjusting himself in his chair with the complacency of a person who is thought worthy of important communications.
“He’s an Oxford man,” said Mr Riley, sententiously, shutting his mouth close, and looking at Mr Tulliver to observe the effect of this stimulating information.
“What! a parson?” said Mr Tulliver, rather doubtfully.
“Yes, and an M.A. The bishop, I understand, thinks very highly of him: why, it was the bishop who got him his present curacy.”
“Ah?” said Mr Tulliver, to whom one thing was as wonderful as another concerning these unfamiliar phenomena. “But what can he want wi’ Tom, then?”
“Why, the fact is, he’s fond of teaching, and wishes to keep up his studies, and a clergyman has but little opportunity for that in his parochial duties. He’s willing to take one or two boys as pupils to fill up his time profitably. The boys would be quite of the family,—the finest thing in the world for them; under Stelling’s eye continually.”
“But do you think they’d give the poor lad twice o’ pudding?” said Mrs Tulliver, who was now in her place again. “He’s such a boy for pudding as never was; an’ a growing boy like that,—it’s dreadful to think o’ their stintin’ him.”
“And what money ’ud he want?” said Mr Tulliver, whose instinct told him that the services of this admirable M.A. would bear a high price.
“Why, I know of a clergyman who asks a hundred and fifty with his youngest pupils, and he’s not to be mentioned with Stelling, the man I speak of. I know, on good authority, that one of the chief people at Oxford said, Stelling might get the highest honours if he chose. But he didn’t care about university honours; he’s a quiet man—not noisy.”
“Ah, a deal better—a deal better,” said Mr Tulliver; “but a hundred and fifty’s an uncommon price. I never thought o’ paying so much as that.”
“A good education, let me tell you, Tulliver,—a good education is cheap at the money. But Stelling is moderate in his terms; he’s not a grasping man. I’ve no doubt he’d take your boy at a hundred, and that’s what you wouldn’t get many other clergymen to do. I’ll write to him about it, if you like.”
Mr Tulliver rubbed his knees, and looked at the carpet in a meditative manner.
“But belike he’s a bachelor,” observed Mrs Tulliver, in the interval; “an’ I’ve no opinion o’ housekeepers. There was my brother, as is dead an’ gone, had a housekeeper once, an’ she took half the feathers out o’ the best bed, an’ packed ’em up an’ sent ’em away. An’ it’s unknown the linen she made away with—Stott her name was. It ’ud break my heart to send Tom where there’s a housekeeper, an’ I hope you won’t think of it, Mr Tulliver.”
“You may set your mind at rest on that score, Mrs Tulliver,” said Mr Riley, “for Stelling is married to as nice a little woman as any man need wish for a wife. There isn’t a kinder little soul in the world; I know her family well. She has very much your complexion,—light curly hair. She comes of a good Mudport family, and it’s not every offer that would have been acceptable in that quarter. But Stelling’s not an everyday man; rather a particular fellow as to the people he chooses to be connected with. But I think he would have no objection to take your son; I think he would not, on my representation.”
“I don’t know what he could have against the lad,” said Mrs Tulliver, with a slight touch of motherly indignation; “a nice fresh-skinned lad as anybody need wish to see.”
“But there’s one thing I’m thinking on,” said Mr Tulliver, turning his head on one side and looking at Mr Riley, after a long perusal of the carpet. “Wouldn’t a parson be almost too high-learnt to bring up a lad to be a man o’ business? My notion o’ the parsons was as they’d got a sort o’ learning as lay mostly out o’ sight. And that isn’t what I want for Tom. I want him to know figures, and write like print, and see into things quick, and know what folks mean, and how to wrap things up in words as aren’t actionable. It’s an uncommon fine thing, that is,” concluded Mr Tulliver, shaking his head, “when you can let a man know what you think of him without paying for it.”
“Oh, my dear Tulliver,” said Mr Riley, “you’re quite under a mistake about the clergy; all the best schoolmasters are of the clergy. The schoolmasters who are not clergymen are a very low set of men generally.”
“Ay, that Jacobs is, at the ’cademy,” interposed Mr Tulliver.
“To be sure,—men who have failed in other trades, most likely. Now, a clergyman is a gentleman by profession and education; and besides that, he has the knowledge that will ground a boy, and prepare him for entering on any career with credit. There may be some clergymen who are mere bookmen; but you may depend upon it, Stelling is not one of them,—a man that’s wide awake, let me tell you. Drop him a hint, and that’s enough. You talk of figures, now; you have only to say to Stelling, ‘I want my son to be a thorough arithmetician,’ and you may leave the rest to him.”
Mr Riley paused a moment, while Mr Tulliver, somewhat reassured as to clerical tutorship, was inwardly rehearsing to an imaginary Mr Stelling the statement, “I want my son to know ’rethmetic.”
“You see, my dear Tulliver,” Mr Riley continued, “when you get a thoroughly educated man, like Stelling, he’s at no loss to take up any branch of instruction. When a workman knows the use of his tools, he can make a door as well as a window.”
“Ay, that’s true,” said Mr Tulliver, almost convinced now that the clergy must be the best of schoolmasters.
“Well, I’ll tell you what I’ll do for you,” said Mr Riley, “and I wouldn’t do it for everybody. I’ll see Stelling’s father-in-law, or drop him a line when I get back to Mudport, to say that you wish to place your boy with his son-in-law, and I dare say Stelling will write to you, and send you his terms.”
“But there’s no hurry, is there?” said Mrs Tulliver; “for I hope, Mr Tulliver, you won’t let Tom begin at his new school before Midsummer. He began at the ’cademy at the Lady-day quarter, and you see what good’s come of it.”
“Ay, ay, Bessy, never brew wi’ bad malt upo’ Michaelmas day, else you’ll have a poor tap,” said Mr Tulliver, winking and smiling at Mr Riley, with the natural pride of a man who has a buxom wife conspicuously his inferior in intellect. “But it’s true there’s no hurry; you’ve hit it there, Bessy.”
“It might be as well not to defer the arrangement too long,” said Mr Riley, quietly, “for Stelling may have propositions from other parties, and I know he would not take more than two or three boarders, if so many. If I were you, I think I would enter on the subject with Stelling at once: there’s no necessity for sending the boy before Midsummer, but I would be on the safe side, and make sure that nobody forestalls you.”
“Ay, there’s summat in that,” said Mr Tulliver.
“Father,” broke in Maggie, who had stolen unperceived to her father’s elbow again, listening with parted lips, while she held her doll topsy-turvy, and crushed its nose against the wood of the chair,—“father, is it a long way off where Tom is to go? Sha’n’t we ever go to see him?”
“I don’t know, my wench,” said the father, tenderly. “Ask Mr Riley; he knows.”
Maggie came round promptly in front of Mr Riley, and said, “How far is it, please, sir?”
“Oh, a long, long way off,” that gentleman answered, being of opinion that children, when they are not naughty, should always be spoken to jocosely. “You must borrow the seven-leagued boots to get to him.”
“That’s nonsense!” said Maggie, tossing her head haughtily, and turning away, with the tears springing in her eyes. She began to dislike Mr Riley; it was evident he thought her silly and of no consequence.
“Hush, Maggie! for shame of you, asking questions and chattering,” said her mother. “Come and sit down on your little stool, and hold your tongue, do. But,” added Mrs Tulliver, who had her own alarm awakened, “is it so far off as I couldn’t wash him and mend him?”
“About fifteen miles; that’s all,” said Mr Riley. “You can drive there and back in a day quite comfortably. Or—Stelling is a hospitable, pleasant man—he’d be glad to have you stay.”
“But it’s too far off for the linen, I doubt,” said Mrs Tulliver, sadly.
The entrance of supper opportunely adjourned this difficulty, and relieved Mr Riley from the labour of suggesting some solution or compromise,—a labour which he would otherwise doubtless have undertaken; for, as you perceive, he was a man of very obliging manners. And he had really given himself the trouble of recommending Mr Stelling to his friend Tulliver without any positive expectation of a solid, definite advantage resulting to himself, notwithstanding the subtle indications to the contrary which might have misled a too sagacious observer. For there is nothing more widely misleading than sagacity if it happens to get on a wrong scent; and sagacity, persuaded that men usually act and speak from distinct motives, with a consciously proposed end in view, is certain to waste its energies on imaginary game.
Plotting covetousness and deliberate contrivance, in order to compass a selfish end, are nowhere abundant but in the world of the dramatist: they demand too intense a mental action for many of our fellow-parishioners to be guilty of them. It is easy enough to spoil the lives of our neighbours without taking so much trouble; we can do it by lazy acquiescence and lazy omission, by trivial falsities for which we hardly know a reason, by small frauds neutralised by small extravagances, by maladroit flatteries, and clumsily improvised insinuations. We live from hand to mouth, most of us, with a small family of immediate desires; we do little else than snatch a morsel to satisfy the hungry brood, rarely thinking of seed-corn or the next year’s crop.
