_ 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
[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. _