The Trials of a Country Parson — Edition Insights

them, a new book to get up, a new code to study. Then there are the pupil teachers to look after, and returns to make up, and all the dull routine which has to be got through.

How _can_ an elementary schoolmaster in a remote country village be a reading-man, or what motive has he to get out of the narrow groove in which he has been brought up? The best teachers, as a rule, are they who know their work best and very little indeed outside it. “How is it that at Dumpfield they don’t get a larger grant?” I asked one day of an inspector noted for his shrewdness and good sense. “Surely Coxe is by far the ablest and most brilliant teacher for miles round; he is almost a man of genius?” “Precisely so,” was the reply, “the man’s out of place. These brilliant men with a touch of genius are a nuisance in an elementary school. My dear fellow, never let a _man of views_ come into your school. Keep him out. Beware of the being who is for revolutionizing spelling and grammar!”

Mr. Petticogge is not a man of genius, only a better sort of elementary schoolmaster, and entirely absorbed in his work. He, too, as all the members of his fraternity do, occupies a position of isolation, and between him and the parson there is just so much in common as to make each hold aloof from the other without making either of them congenial to their other neighbours. As for the rest of friend Burney’s neighbours, take them in the gross, and you may say of them what the ticket-of-leave man said of the Ten Commandments; “They’re rather a poor lot and you can’t make much out of ’em.” I know no class of men who are less sociable than the smaller farmers, as we reckon smallness in the East. I mean the men who hold a couple of hundred acres and under. It has often been laid to the charge of the great occupiers in West Norfolk and elsewhere that in the good times they were lavish beyond all reason in their hospitalities. I believe there never has been anything of the sort among the smaller men; they are not unfriendly, they are not wanting in cordiality, but they are not companionable.

It is my privilege to know some who are notable exceptions to the all but universal rule. I have not far to go from my own door to find one whom I never pay a visit to without pleasure and profit, one who has for many years been a great reader of Lord Tennyson’s poems, has strong opinions on politics and the questions of the day, a thoughtful, resolute, and true-hearted woman, who farms a hundred acres of land without a bailiff, and, among other evidences of her good taste and intelligence, is a diligent reader of the _Spectator_. But such are few and far between.

It is one of the trials of the country parson that, as soon as he passes out of the stratum to which the labourer belongs, he finds himself in a stratum where there is nothing that has any of the interest of originality, picturesqueness, or even passion. The people who live and move in that stratum are dismally like the ticket-of-leave man’s ten commandments. My neighbours hardly believe me when I tell them I can see, even among the smaller farmers, much to admire, much to respect, and something to love; but I do not wonder that many a country parson “can’t make much out of ’em.” These men are having rather a hard life just now, but they have _not_ to learn the most elementary lessons of thrift and frugality. As a class they have always practised these virtues, and as a class they are far less complaining than those who belong to the higher stratum; they bear their burdens silently, perhaps too silently, and they tell you that it’s no good grumbling--“that,” one of them said to me, “only makes things worse, ’cause it makes _you_ worse!” Take them all in all, they whom I have elsewhere called _the little ones_ are usually those of his parishioners with whom the parson seldom comes into unpleasant relations; they are usually very hard at work, very practical, very straightforward, and very seldom indeed prone to give themselves airs.