The Mill on the Floss (22 page)

"They must be very well off, though," said Mrs. Tulliver, "for
everything's as nice as can be all over the house, and that watered
silk she had on cost a pretty penny. Sister Pullet has got one like
it."

"Ah," said Mr. Tulliver, "he's got some income besides the
curacy, I reckon. Perhaps her father allows 'em something. There's
Tom 'ull be another hundred to him, and not much trouble either, by
his own account; he says teaching comes natural to him. That's
wonderful, now," added Mr. Tulliver, turning his head on one side,
and giving his horse a meditative tickling on the flank.

Perhaps it was because teaching came naturally to Mr. Stelling,
that he set about it with that uniformity of method and
independence of circumstances which distinguish the actions of
animals understood to be under the immediate teaching of nature.
Mr. Broderip's amiable beaver, as that charming naturalist tells
us, busied himself as earnestly in constructing a dam, in a room up
three pair of stairs in London, as if he had been laying his
foundation in a stream or lake in Upper Canada. It was "Binny's"
function to build; the absence of water or of possible progeny was
an accident for which he was not accountable. With the same
unerring instinct Mr. Stelling set to work at his natural method of
instilling the Eton Grammar and Euclid into the mind of Tom
Tulliver. This, he considered, was the only basis of solid
instruction; all other means of education were mere charlatanism,
and could produce nothing better than smatterers. Fixed on this
firm basis, a man might observe the display of various or special
knowledge made by irregularly educated people with a pitying smile;
all that sort of thing was very well, but it was impossible these
people could form sound opinions. In holding this conviction Mr.
Stelling was not biassed, as some tutors have been, by the
excessive accuracy or extent of his own scholarship; and as to his
views about Euclid, no opinion could have been freer from personal
partiality. Mr. Stelling was very far from being led astray by
enthusiasm, either religious or intellectual; on the other hand, he
had no secret belief that everything was humbug. He thought
religion was a very excellent thing, and Aristotle a great
authority, and deaneries and prebends useful institutions, and
Great Britain the providential bulwark of Protestantism, and faith
in the unseen a great support to afflicted minds; he believed in
all these things, as a Swiss hotel-keeper believes in the beauty of
the scenery around him, and in the pleasure it gives to artistic
visitors. And in the same way Mr. Stelling believed in his method
of education; he had no doubt that he was doing the very best thing
for Mr. Tulliver's boy. Of course, when the miller talked of
"mapping" and "summing" in a vague and diffident manner, Mr
Stelling had set his mind at rest by an assurance that he
understood what was wanted; for how was it possible the good man
could form any reasonable judgment about the matter? Mr Stelling's
duty was to teach the lad in the only right way,–indeed he knew no
other; he had not wasted his time in the acquirement of anything
abnormal.

He very soon set down poor Tom as a thoroughly stupid lad; for
though by hard labor he could get particular declensions into his
brain, anything so abstract as the relation between cases and
terminations could by no means get such a lodgment there as to
enable him to recognize a chance genitive or dative. This struck
Mr. Stelling as something more than natural stupidity; he suspected
obstinacy, or at any rate indifference, and lectured Tom severely
on his want of thorough application. "You feel no interest in what
you're doing, sir," Mr. Stelling would say, and the reproach was
painfully true. Tom had never found any difficulty in discerning a
pointer from a setter, when once he had been told the distinction,
and his perceptive powers were not at all deficient. I fancy they
were quite as strong as those of the Rev. Mr. Stelling; for Tom
could predict with accuracy what number of horses were cantering
behind him, he could throw a stone right into the centre of a given
ripple, he could guess to a fraction how many lengths of his stick
it would take to reach across the playground, and could draw almost
perfect squares on his slate without any measurement. But Mr.
Stelling took no note of these things; he only observed that Tom's
faculties failed him before the abstractions hideously symbolized
to him in the pages of the Eton Grammar, and that he was in a state
bordering on idiocy with regard to the demonstration that two given
triangles must be equal, though he could discern with great
promptitude and certainty the fact that they
were
equal.
Whence Mr. Stelling concluded that Tom's brain, being peculiarly
impervious to etymology and demonstrations, was peculiarly in need
of being ploughed and harrowed by these patent implements; it was
his favorite metaphor, that the classics and geometry constituted
that culture of the mind which prepared it for the reception of any
subsequent crop. I say nothing against Mr. Stelling's theory; if we
are to have one regimen for all minds, his seems to me as good as
any other. I only know it turned out as uncomfortably for Tom
Tulliver as if he had been plied with cheese in order to remedy a
gastric weakness which prevented him from digesting it. It is
astonishing what a different result one gets by changing the
metaphor! Once call the brain an intellectual stomach, and one's
ingenious conception of the classics and geometry as ploughs and
harrows seems to settle nothing. But then it is open to some one
else to follow great authorities, and call the mind a sheet of
white paper or a mirror, in which case one's knowledge of the
digestive process becomes quite irrelevant. It was doubtless an
ingenious idea to call the camel the ship of the desert, but it
would hardly lead one far in training that useful beast. O
Aristotle! if you had had the advantage of being "the freshest
modern" instead of the greatest ancient, would you not have mingled
your praise of metaphorical speech, as a sign of high intelligence,
with a lamentation that intelligence so rarely shows itself in
speech without metaphor,–that we can so seldom declare what a thing
is, except by saying it is something else?

Tom Tulliver, being abundant in no form of speech, did not use
any metaphor to declare his views as to the nature of Latin; he
never called it an instrument of torture; and it was not until he
had got on some way in the next half-year, and in the Delectus,
that he was advanced enough to call it a "bore" and "beastly
stuff." At present, in relation to this demand that he should learn
Latin declensions and conjugations, Tom was in a state of as blank
unimaginativeness concerning the cause and tendency of his
sufferings, as if he had been an innocent shrewmouse imprisoned in
the split trunk of an ash-tree in order to cure lameness in cattle.
It is doubtless almost incredible to instructed minds of the
present day that a boy of twelve, not belonging strictly to "the
masses," who are now understood to have the monopoly of mental
darkness, should have had no distinct idea how there came to be
such a thing as Latin on this earth; yet so it was with Tom. It
would have taken a long while to make conceivable to him that there
ever existed a people who bought and sold sheep and oxen, and
transacted the every-day affairs of life, through the medium of
this language; and still longer to make him understand why he
should be called upon to learn it, when its connection with those
affairs had become entirely latent. So far as Tom had gained any
acquaintance with the Romans at Mr. Jacob's academy, his knowledge
was strictly correct, but it went no farther than the fact that
they were "in the New Testament"; and Mr. Stelling was not the man
to enfeeble and emasculate his pupil's mind by simplifying and
explaining, or to reduce the tonic effect of etymology by mixing it
with smattering, extraneous information, such as is given to
girls.

Yet, strange to say, under this vigorous treatment Tom became
more like a girl than he had ever been in his life before. He had a
large share of pride, which had hitherto found itself very
comfortable in the world, despising Old Goggles, and reposing in
the sense of unquestioned rights; but now this same pride met with
nothing but bruises and crushings. Tom was too clear-sighted not to
be aware that Mr. Stelling's standard of things was quite
different, was certainly something higher in the eyes of the world
than that of the people he had been living amongst, and that,
brought in contact with it, he, Tom Tulliver, appeared uncouth and
stupid; he was by no means indifferent to this, and his pride got
into an uneasy condition which quite nullified his boyish
self-satisfaction, and gave him something of the girl's
susceptibility. He was a very firm, not to say obstinate,
disposition, but there was no brute-like rebellion and recklessness
in his nature; the human sensibilities predominated, and if it had
occurred to him that he could enable himself to show some quickness
at his lessons, and so acquire Mr. Stelling's approbation, by
standing on one leg for an inconvenient length of time, or rapping
his head moderately against the wall, or any voluntary action of
that sort, he would certainly have tried it. But no; Tom had never
heard that these measures would brighten the understanding, or
strengthen the verbal memory; and he was not given to hypothesis
and experiment. It did occur to him that he could perhaps get some
help by praying for it; but as the prayers he said every evening
were forms learned by heart, he rather shrank from the novelty and
irregularity of introducing an extempore passage on a topic of
petition for which he was not aware of any precedent. But one day,
when he had broken down, for the fifth time, in the supines of the
third conjugation, and Mr. Stelling, convinced that this must be
carelessness, since it transcended the bounds of possible
stupidity, had lectured him very seriously, pointing out that if he
failed to seize the present golden opportunity of learning supines,
he would have to regret it when he became a man,–Tom, more
miserable than usual, determined to try his sole resource; and that
evening, after his usual form of prayer for his parents and "little
sister" (he had begun to pray for Maggie when she was a baby), and
that he might be able always to keep God's commandments, he added,
in the same low whisper, "and please to make me always remember my
Latin." He paused a little to consider how he should pray about
Euclid–whether he should ask to see what it meant, or whether there
was any other mental state which would be more applicable to the
case. But at last he added: "And make Mr. Stelling say I sha'n't do
Euclid any more. Amen."

The fact that he got through his supines without mistake the
next day, encouraged him to persevere in this appendix to his
prayers, and neutralized any scepticism that might have arisen from
Mr. Stelling's continued demand for Euclid. But his faith broke
down under the apparent absence of all help when he got into the
irregular verbs. It seemed clear that Tom's despair under the
caprices of the present tense did not constitute a
nodus
worthy of interference, and since this was the climax of his
difficulties, where was the use of praying for help any longer? He
made up his mind to this conclusion in one of his dull, lonely
evenings, which he spent in the study, preparing his lessons for
the morrow. His eyes were apt to get dim over the page, though he
hated crying, and was ashamed of it; he couldn't help thinking with
some affection even of Spouncer, whom he used to fight and quarrel
with; he would have felt at home with Spouncer, and in a condition
of superiority. And then the mill, and the river, and Yap pricking
up his ears, ready to obey the least sign when Tom said, "Hoigh!"
would all come before him in a sort of calenture, when his fingers
played absently in his pocket with his great knife and his coil of
whipcord, and other relics of the past.

Tom, as I said, had never been so much like a girl in his life
before, and at that epoch of irregular verbs his spirit was further
depressed by a new means of mental development which had been
thought of for him out of school hours. Mrs. Stelling had lately
had her second baby, and as nothing could be more salutary for a
boy than to feel himself useful, Mrs. Stelling considered she was
doing Tom a service by setting him to watch the little cherub Laura
while the nurse was occupied with the sickly baby. It was quite a
pretty employment for Tom to take little Laura out in the sunniest
hour of the autumn day; it would help to make him feel that Lorton
Parsonage was a home for him, and that he was one of the family.
The little cherub Laura, not being an accomplished walker at
present, had a ribbon fastened round her waist, by which Tom held
her as if she had been a little dog during the minutes in which she
chose to walk; but as these were rare, he was for the most part
carrying this fine child round and round the garden, within sight
of Mrs. Stelling's window, according to orders. If any one
considers this unfair and even oppressive toward Tom, I beg him to
consider that there are feminine virtues which are with difficulty
combined, even if they are not incompatible. When the wife of a
poor curate contrives, under all her disadvantages, to dress
extremely well, and to have a style of coiffure which requires that
her nurse shall occasionally officiate as lady's-maid; when,
moreover, her dinner-parties and her drawing-room show that effort
at elegance and completeness of appointment to which ordinary women
might imagine a large income necessary, it would be unreasonable to
expect of her that she should employ a second nurse, or even act as
a nurse herself. Mr. Stelling knew better; he saw that his wife did
wonders already, and was proud of her. It was certainly not the
best thing in the world for young Tulliver's gait to carry a heavy
child, but he had plenty of exercise in long walks with himself,
and next half-year Mr. Stelling would see about having a
drilling-master. Among the many means whereby Mr. Stelling intended
to be more fortunate than the bulk of his fellow-men, he had
entirely given up that of having his own way in his own house. What
then? He had married "as kind a little soul as ever breathed,"
according to Mr. Riley, who had been acquainted with Mrs.
Stelling's blond ringlets and smiling demeanor throughout her
maiden life, and on the strength of that knowledge would have been
ready any day to pronounce that whatever domestic differences might
arise in her married life must be entirely Mr. Stelling's
fault.