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Surely all other leisure is hurry compared with a sunny walk through the fields from ‘afternoon church’, — as such walks used to be in those old leisurely times, when the boat, gliding sleepily along the canal, was the newest locomotive wonder; when Sunday books had most of them old brown-leather covers, and opened with remarkable precision always in one place. Leisure is gone — gone where the spinning-wheels are gone, and the pack-horses, and the slow waggons, and the pedlars, who brought bargains to the door on sunny afternoons. Ingenious philosophers tell you, perhaps, that the great work of the steam-engine is to create leisure for mankind. Do not believe them: it only creates a vacuum for eager thought to rush in. Even idleness is eager now — eager for amusement: prone to excursion-trains, art-museums, periodical literature, and exciting novels: prone even to scientific theorizing, and cursory peeps through microscopes. Old Leisure was quite a different personage: he only read one newspaper, innocent of leaders, and was free from that periodicity of sensations which we call post-time. He was a contemplative, rather stout gentleman, of excellent digestion, — of quiet perceptions, undiseased by hypothesis: happy in his inability to know the causes of things, preferring the things themselves. He lived chiefly in the country, among pleasant seats and homesteads, and was fond of sauntering by the fruit-tree wall, and scenting the apricots when they were warmed by the morning sunshine, or of sheltering himself under the orchard boughs at noon, when the summer pears were falling. He knew nothing of week-day services, and thought none the worse of the Sunday sermon if it allowed him to sleep from the text to the blessing — liking the afternoon service best, the prayers were the shortest, and not ashamed to say so; for he had an easy, jolly conscience, broad-backed like himself, and able to carry a great deal of beer or port-wine, — not being made squeamish by doubts and qualms and lofty aspirations. Life was not a task to him, but a sinecure: he fingered the guineas in his pocket, and ate his dinners, and slept the sleep of the irresponsible; for had he not kept up his charter by going to church on the Sunday afternoons? Fine old Leisure! Do not be severe upon him, and judge him by our modern standard: he never went to Exeter Hall, or heard a popular preacher, or read Tracts for the Times or Sartor Resartus.

George Eliot, Adam Bede, Book Sixth, chapter 50.

I finished Adam Bede last night.

It’s a wonderfully humanist work and excels in those two qualities that I enjoy reading in Eliot, namely, her descriptions of bucolic nineteenth century life and that pervasive human sympathy which characterizes all of her work.

Though it’s sure to take me a while with my schedule, I’m eager to get on to Middlemarch now.

That is a simple scene, reader.  But it is almost certain that you, too, have been in love — perhaps, even, more than once, though you may not choose to say so to all your feminine friends.  If so, you will no more think the slight words, the timid looks, the tremulous touches, by which two human souls approach each other gradually, like two little quivering rain-streams, before they mingle into one — you will no more think these things trivial than you will think the first-detected signs of coming spring trivial, though they be but a faint, indescribable something in the air and in the song of the birds, and the tiniest perceptible budding on the hedgerow branches.  Those slight words and looks and touches are part of the soul’s language; and the finest language, I believe, is chiefly made up of unimposing words, such as ‘light’, ‘sound’, ‘stars’, ‘music’, — words really not worth looking at, or hearing, in themselves, any more than ‘chips’ or ‘sawdust’: it is only that they happen to be the signs of something unspeakably great and beautiful.  I am of opinion that love is a great and beautiful thing too; and if you agree with me, the smallest signs of it will not be chips and sawdust to you: they will rather be like those little words, ‘light’ and ‘music’, stirring the long-winding fibres of your memory, and enriching your present with your most precious past.

George Eliot, Adam Bede, Book Sixth, chapter 50.

It would be a poor result of all our anguish and our wrestling, if we won nothing but our old selves at the end of it — if we could return to the same blind loves, the same self-confident blame, the same light thoughts of human suffering, the same frivolous gossip over blighted human lives, the same feeble sense of that Unknown towards which we have sent forth irrepressible cries in our loneliness. Let us rather be thankful that our sorrow lives in us as an indestructible force, only changing its form, as forces do, and passing from pain into sympathy — the one poor word which includes all our best insight and our best love.

George Eliot, Adam Bede, Book Sixth, chapter 50.

I’ve around thirty pages left in Adam Bede, but finding the time to finish them properly has been difficult, to say the least.

Bright February days have a stronger charm of hope about them than any other days in the year.  One likes to pause in the mild rays of the sun, and look over the gates at the patient plough–horses turning at the end of the furrow, and think that the beautiful year is all before one.  The birds seem to feel just the same: their notes are as clear as the clear air.  There are no leaves on the trees and hedgerows, but how green all the grassy fields are!  And the dark purplish brown of the ploughed earth and of the bare branches is beautiful too.  What a glad world this looks like, as one drives or rides along the valleys and over the hills!

George Eliot, Adam Bede, Book Fourth, chapter 35.

It is so very rarely that facts hit that nice medium required by our own enlightened opinions and refined taste! Perhaps you will say, ‘Do improve the facts a little, then; make them more accordant with those correct views which it is our privilege to possess. The world is not just what we like; do touch it up with a tasteful pencil, and make believe it is not quite such a mixed entangled affair. Let all people who hold unexceptionable opinions act unexceptionably. Let your most faulty characters always be on the wrong side, and your virtuous ones on the right. Then we shall see at a glance whom we are to condemn, and whom we are to approve. Then we shall be able to admire, without the slightest disturbance of our prepossessions: we shall hate and despise with that true ruminant relish which belongs to undoubting confidence.

But, my good friend, what will you do then with your fellow-parishioner who opposes your husband in the vestry? — with your newly-appointed vicar, whose style of preaching you find painfully below that of his regretted predecessor? — with the honest servant who worries your soul with her one failing? – with your neighbour, Mrs Green, who was really kind to you in your last illness, but has said several ill-natured things about you since your convalescence? — nay, with your excellent husband himself, who has other irritating habits besides that of not wiping his shoes? These fellow-mortals, every one, must be accepted as they are: you can neither straighten their noses, nor brighten their wit, nor rectify their dispositions; and it is these people — amongst whom your life is passed — that it is needful you should tolerate, pity, and love: it is these more or less ugly, stupid, inconsistent people, whose movements of goodness you should be able to admire — for whom you should cherish all possible hopes, all possible patience. And I would not, even if I had the choice, be the clever novelist who could create a world so much better than this, in which we get up in the morning to do our daily work, that you would be likely to turn a harder, colder eye on the dusty streets and the common green fields – on the real breathing men and women, who can be chilled by your indifference or injured by your prejudice; who can be cheered and helped onward by your fellow-feeling, your forbearance, your outspoken, brave justice.

George Eliot, Adam Bede, Book Second, chapter 17.

Was there a motive at work under this strange reluctance of Arthur’s which had a sort of backstairs influence, not admitted to himself?  Our mental business is carried on much in the same way as the business of the State: a great deal of hard work is done by agents who are not acknowledged.  In a piece of machinery, too, I believe there is often a small unnoticeable wheel which has a great deal to do with the motion of the large obvious ones.  Possibly there was some such unrecognized agent secretly busy in Arthur’s mind at this moment — possibly it was the fear lest he might hereafter find the fact of having made a confession to the Rector a serious annoyance, in case he should not be able quite to carry out his good resolutions?  I dare not assert that it was not so.  The human soul is a very complex thing.

George Eliot, Adam Bede, Book First, chapter 16.

It’s been a while since I posted about my reading.  I finished Wolf Solent in the summer, I think, then read A.S. Byatt’s The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye and I followed that up with Diana Wynne Jones’s Howl’s Moving Castle, which was, in a word, fantastic.  I messed around after that, before finally settling on Eliot’s Adam Bede, which I’ve been “highlighting” — to use the Kindle term, though as with most long fiction I alternate between a print edition and the Kindle version — though I haven’t yet posted any of it.