บทที่ บทที่ 14 · 第14章

. Battersby-On-The-Hill was the name of the village of which Theobald was

now Rector. It contained 400 or 500 inhabitants, scattered over a

rather large area, and consisting entirely of farmers and agricultural

labourers. The Rectory was commodious, and placed on the brow of a hill

which gave it a delightful prospect. There was a fair sprinkling of

neighbours within visiting range, but with one or two exceptions they

were the clergymen and clergymen’s families of the surrounding

villages.

By these the Pontifexes were welcomed as great acquisitions to the

neighbourhood. Mr Pontifex, they said was so clever; he had been senior

classic and senior wrangler; a perfect genius in fact, and yet with so

much sound practical common sense as well. As son of such a

distinguished man as the great Mr Pontifex the publisher he would come

into a large property by-and-by. Was there not an elder brother? Yes,

but there would be so much that Theobald would probably get something

very considerable. Of course they would give dinner parties. And Mrs

Pontifex, what a charming woman she was; she was certainly not exactly

pretty perhaps, but then she had such a sweet smile and her manner was

so bright and winning. She was so devoted too to her husband and her

husband to her; they really did come up to one’s ideas of what lovers

used to be in days of old; it was rare to meet with such a pair in

these degenerate times; it was quite beautiful, etc., etc. Such were

the comments of the neighbours on the new arrivals.

As for Theobald’s own parishioners, the farmers were civil and the

labourers and their wives obsequious. There was a little dissent, the

legacy of a careless predecessor, but as Mrs Theobald said proudly, “I

think Theobald may be trusted to deal with _that_.” The church was then

an interesting specimen of late Norman, with some early English

additions. It was what in these days would be called in a very bad

state of repair, but forty or fifty years ago few churches were in good

repair. If there is one feature more characteristic of the present

generation than another it is that it has been a great restorer of

churches.

Horace preached church restoration in his ode:—

Delicta majorum immeritus lues,

Romane, donec templa refeceris

Aedesque labentes deorum et

Foeda nigro simulacra fumo.

Nothing went right with Rome for long together after the Augustan age,

but whether it was because she did restore the temples or because she

did not restore them I know not. They certainly went all wrong after

Constantine’s time and yet Rome is still a city of some importance.

I may say here that before Theobald had been many years at Battersby he

found scope for useful work in the rebuilding of Battersby church,

which he carried out at considerable cost, towards which he subscribed

liberally himself. He was his own architect, and this saved expense;

but architecture was not very well understood about the year 1834, when

Theobald commenced operations, and the result is not as satisfactory as

it would have been if he had waited a few years longer.

Every man’s work, whether it be literature or music or pictures or

architecture or anything else, is always a portrait of himself, and the

more he tries to conceal himself the more clearly will his character

appear in spite of him. I may very likely be condemning myself, all the

time that I am writing this book, for I know that whether I like it or

no I am portraying myself more surely than I am portraying any of the

characters whom I set before the reader. I am sorry that it is so, but

I cannot help it—after which sop to Nemesis I will say that Battersby

church in its amended form has always struck me as a better portrait of

Theobald than any sculptor or painter short of a great master would be

able to produce.

I remember staying with Theobald some six or seven months after he was

married, and while the old church was still standing. I went to church,

and felt as Naaman must have felt on certain occasions when he had to

accompany his master on his return after having been cured of his

leprosy. I have carried away a more vivid recollection of this and of

the people, than of Theobald’s sermon. Even now I can see the men in

blue smock frocks reaching to their heels, and more than one old woman

in a scarlet cloak; the row of stolid, dull, vacant plough-boys,

ungainly in build, uncomely in face, lifeless, apathetic, a race a good

deal more like the pre-revolution French peasant as described by

Carlyle than is pleasant to reflect upon—a race now supplanted by a

smarter, comelier and more hopeful generation, which has discovered

that it too has a right to as much happiness as it can get, and with

clearer ideas about the best means of getting it.

They shamble in one after another, with steaming breath, for it is

winter, and loud clattering of hob-nailed boots; they beat the snow

from off them as they enter, and through the opened door I catch a

momentary glimpse of a dreary leaden sky and snow-clad tombstones.

Somehow or other I find the strain which Handel has wedded to the words

“There the ploughman near at hand,” has got into my head and there is

no getting it out again. How marvellously old Handel understood these

people!

They bob to Theobald as they passed the reading desk (“The people

hereabouts are truly respectful,” whispered Christina to me, “they know

their betters.”), and take their seats in a long row against the wall.

The choir clamber up into the gallery with their instruments—a

violoncello, a clarinet and a trombone. I see them and soon I hear

them, for there is a hymn before the service, a wild strain, a remnant,

if I mistake not, of some pre-Reformation litany. I have heard what I

believe was its remote musical progenitor in the church of SS. Giovanni

e Paolo at Venice not five years since; and again I have heard it far

away in mid-Atlantic upon a grey sea-Sabbath in June, when neither

winds nor waves are stirring, so that the emigrants gather on deck, and

their plaintive psalm goes forth upon the silver haze of the sky, and

on the wilderness of a sea that has sighed till it can sigh no longer.

Or it may be heard at some Methodist Camp Meeting upon a Welsh

hillside, but in the churches it is gone for ever. If I were a musician

I would take it as the subject for the _adagio_ in a Wesleyan symphony.

Gone now are the clarinet, the violoncello and the trombone, wild

minstrelsy as of the doleful creatures in Ezekiel, discordant, but

infinitely pathetic. Gone is that scarebabe stentor, that bellowing

bull of Bashan the village blacksmith, gone is the melodious carpenter,

gone the brawny shepherd with the red hair, who roared more lustily

than all, until they came to the words, “Shepherds with your flocks

abiding,” when modesty covered him with confusion, and compelled him to

be silent, as though his own health were being drunk. They were doomed

and had a presentiment of evil, even when first I saw them, but they

had still a little lease of choir life remaining, and they roared out

[Illustration] wick-ed hands have pierced and nailed him, pierced and

nailed him to a tree.

but no description can give a proper idea of the effect. When I was

last in Battersby church there was a harmonium played by a

sweet-looking girl with a choir of school children around her, and they

chanted the canticles to the most correct of chants, and they sang

Hymns Ancient and Modern; the high pews were gone, nay, the very

gallery in which the old choir had sung was removed as an accursed

thing which might remind the people of the high places, and Theobald

was old, and Christina was lying under the yew trees in the churchyard.

But in the evening later on I saw three very old men come chuckling out

of a dissenting chapel, and surely enough they were my old friends the

blacksmith, the carpenter and the shepherd. There was a look of content

upon their faces which made me feel certain they had been singing; not

doubtless with the old glory of the violoncello, the clarinet and the

trombone, but still songs of Sion and no new fangled papistry.