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TWO PARSONS
“Two
Parsons” was written by Woolf as two miniature biographies of English
ministers she encountered through their journals many years after their
deaths. The first biography was on James Woodforde, and his portion of the
“Two Parsons” essay was eventually re-published as “Life Itself.” The
second mini-biography is on John Skinner; this text from the original “Two
Parsons” appears below.
II
THE REV. JOHN SKINNER
A whole world
separates Woodforde, who was born in 1740 and died in 1803, from Skinner,
who was born in 1772 and died in 1839.
For the few
years that separated the two parsons are those momentous years that separate
the eighteenth century from the nineteenth. Camerton, it is true, lying in
the heart of Somersetshire, was a village of the greatest antiquity;
nevertheless, before five pages of the diary are turned we read of
coal-works, and how there was a great shouting at the coal-works because a
fresh vein of coal had been discovered, and the proprietors had given money
to the workmen to celebrate an event which promised such prosperity to the
village. Then, though the country gentlemen seemed set as firmly in their
seats as ever, it happened that the manor house at Camerton, with all the
rights and duties pertaining to it, was in the hands of the Jarretts, whose
fortune was derived from the Jamaica trade. This novelty, this incursion of
an element quite unknown to Woodforde in his day, had its disturbing
influence no doubt upon the character of Skinner himself. Irritable,
nervous, apprehensive, he seems to embody, even before the age itself had
come into existence, all the strife and unrest of our distracted times. He
stands, dressed in the prosaic and unbecoming stocks and pantaloons of the
early nineteenth century, at the parting of the ways. Behind him lay order
and discipline and all the virtues of the heroic past, but directly he left
his study he was faced with drunkenness and immorality; with indiscipline
and irreligion; with Methodism and Roman Catholicism; with the Reform Bill
and the Catholic Emancipation Act, with a mob clamouring for freedom, with
the overthrow of all that was decent and established and right. Tormented
and querulous, at the same time conscientious and able, he stands at the
parting of the ways, unwilling to yield an inch, unable to concede a point,
harsh, peremptory, apprehensive, and without hope.
Private sorrow
had increased the natural acerbity of his temper. His wife had died young,
leaving him with four small children, and of these the best-loved, Laura, a
child who shared his tastes and would have sweetened his life, for she
already kept a diary and had arranged a cabinet of shells with the utmost
neatness, died too. But these losses, though they served nominally to make
him love God the better, in practice led him to hate men more. By the time
the diary opens in 1822 he was fixed in his opinion that the mass of men are
unjust and malicious, and that the people of Camerton are more corrupt even
than the mass of men. But by that date he was also fixed in his
profession. Fate had taken him from the lawyer's office, where he would
have been in his element, dealing out justice, filling up forms, keeping
strictly to the letter of the law, and had planted him at Camerton among
churchwardens and farmers, the Gullicks and the Padfields, the old woman who
had dropsy, the idiot boy, and the dwarf. Nevertheless, however sordid his
tasks and disgusting his parishioners, he had his duty to them; and with
them he would remain. Whatever insults he suffered, he would live up to his
principles, uphold the right, protect the poor, and punish the wrongdoer.
By the time the diary opens, this strenuous and unhappy career is in full
swing.
Perhaps the
village of Camerton in the year 1822, with its coal- mines and the
disturbance they brought, was no fair sample of English village life.
Certainly it is difficult, as one follows the Rector on his daily rounds, to
indulge in pleasant dreams about the quaintness and amenity of old English
rural life. Here, for instance, he was called to see Mrs. Gooch--a woman of
weak mind, who had been locked up alone in her cottage and fallen into the
fire and was in agony. "Why do you not help me, I say? Why do you not help
me?" she cried. And the Rector, as he heard her screams, knew that she had
come to this through no fault of her own. Her efforts to keep a home
together had led to drink, and so she had lost her reason, and what with the
squabbles between the Poor Law officials and the family as to who should
support her, what with her husband's extravagance and drunkenness, she had
been left alone, had fallen into the fire, and so died. Who was to blame?
Mr. Purnell, the miserly magistrate, who was all for cutting down the
allowance paid to the poor, or Hicks the Overseer, who was notoriously
harsh, or the alehouses, or the Methodists, or what? At any rate the Rector
had done his duty. However he might be hated for it, he always stood up for
the rights of the down- trodden; he always told people of their faults, and
convicted them of evil. Then there was Mrs. Somer, who kept a house of
ill-fame and was bringing up her daughters to the same profession. Then
there was Farmer Lippeatt, who, turned out of the Red Post at midnight, dead
drunk, missed his way, fell into a quarry, and died of a broken breastbone.
Wherever one turned there was suffering, wherever one looked one found
cruelty behind that suffering. Mr. and Mrs. Hicks, for example, the
Overseers, let an infirm pauper lie for ten days in the Poor House without
care, "so that maggots had bred in his flesh and eaten great holes in his
body". His only attendant was an old woman, who was so failing that she was
unable to lift him. Happily the pauper died. Happily poor Garratt, the
miner, died too. For to add to the evils of drink and poverty and the
cholera there was constant peril from the mine itself. Accidents were common
and the means of treating them elementary. A fall of coal had broken
Garratt's back, but he lingered on, though exposed to the crude methods of
country surgeons, from January to November, when at last death released
him. Both the stern Rector and the flippant Lady of the Manor, to do them
justice, were ready with their half-crowns, with their soups and their
medicines, and visited sick-beds without fail. But even allowing for the
natural asperity of Mr. Skinner's temper, it would need a very rosy pen and
a very kindly eye to make a smiling picture of life in the village of
Camerton a century ago. Half-crowns and soup went a very little way to
remedy matters; sermons and denunciations made them perhaps even worse.
The Rector
found refuge from Camerton neither in dissipation like some of his
neighbours, nor in sport like others. Occasionally he drove over to dine
with a brother cleric, but he noted acrimoniously that the entertainment was
"better suited to Grosvenor Square than a clergyman's home--French dishes
and French wines in profusion", and records with a note of exclamation that
it was eleven o'clock before he drove home. When his children were young he
sometimes walked with them in the fields, or amused himself by making them a
boat, or rubbed up his Latin in an epitaph for the tomb of some pet dog or
tame pigeon. And sometimes he leant back peacefully and listened to Mrs.
Fenwick as she sang the songs of Moore to her husband's accompaniment on the
flute. But even such harmless pleasures were poisoned with suspicion. A
farmer stared insolently as he passed; someone threw a stone from a window;
Mrs. Jarrett clearly concealed some evil purpose behind her cordiality. No,
the only refuge from Camerton lay in Camalodunum. The more he thought of it
the more certain he became that he had the singular good fortune to live on
the identical spot where lived the father of Caractacus, where Ostorius
established his colony, where Arthur had fought the traitor Modred, where
Alfred very nearly came in his misfortunes. Camerton was undoubtedly the
Camalodunum of Tacitus. Shut up in his study alone with his documents,
copying, comparing, proving indefatigably, he was safe, at rest, even
happy. He was also, he became convinced, on the track of an important
etymological discovery, by which it could be proved that there was a secret
significance "in every letter that entered into the composition of Celtic
names". No archbishop was as content in his palace as Skinner the antiquary
was content in his cell. To these pursuits he owed, too, those rare and
delightful visits to Stourhead, the seat of Sir Richard Hoare, when at last
he mixed with men of his own calibre, and met the gentlemen who were engaged
in examining the antiquities of Wiltshire. However hard it froze, however
high the snow lay heaped on the roads, Skinner rode over to Stourhead; and
sat in the library, with a violent cold, but in perfect content, making
extracts from Seneca, and extracts from Diodorum Siculus, and extracts from
Ptolemy's Geography, or scornfully disposed of some rash and ill- informed
fellow-antiquary who had the temerity to assert that Camalodunum was really
situated at Colchester. On he went with his extracts, with his theories,
with his proofs, in spite of the malicious present of a rusty nail wrapped
in paper from his parishioners, in spite of the laughing warning of his
host: "Oh, Skinner, you will bring everything at last to Camalodunum; be
content with what you have already discovered; if you fancy too much you
will weaken the authority of real facts". Skinner replied with a sixth
letter thirty-four pages long; for Sir Richard did not know how necessary
Camalodunum had become to an embittered man who had daily to encounter Hicks
the Overseer and Purnell the magistrate, the brothels, the ale-houses, the
Methodists, the dropsies and bad legs of Camerton. Even the floods were
mitigated if one could reflect that thus Camalodunum must have looked in the
time of the Britons.
So he filled
three iron chests with ninety-eight volumes of manuscript. But by degrees
the manuscripts ceased to be entirely concerned with Camalodunum; they began
to be largely concerned with John Skinner. It was true that it was
important to establish the truth about Camalodunum, but it was also
important to establish the truth about John Skinner. In fifty years after
his death, when the diaries were published, people would know not only that
John Skinner was a great antiquary, but that he was a much wronged, much
suffering man. His diary became his confidante, as it was to become his
champion. For example, was he not the most affectionate of fathers, he
asked the diary? He had spent endless time and trouble on his sons; he had
sent them to Winchester and Cambridge, and yet now when the farmers were so
insolent about paying him his tithes, and gave him a broken-backed lamb for
his share, or fobbed him off with less than his due of cocks, his son Joseph
refused to help him. His son said that the people of Camerton laughed at
him; that he treated his children like servants; that he suspected evil
where none was meant. And then he opened a letter by chance and found a
bill for a broken gig; and then his sons lounged about smoking cigars when
they might have helped him to mount his drawings. In short, he could not
stand their presence in his house. He dismissed them in a fury to Bath.
When they had gone he could not help admitting that perhaps he had been at
fault. It was his querulous temper again--but then he had so much to make
him querulous. Mrs. Jarrett's peacock screamed under his window all night.
They jangled the church bells on purpose to annoy him. Still, he would try;
he would let them come back. So Joseph and Owen came back. And then the
old irritation overcame him again. He "could not help saying" something
about being idle, or drinking too much cider, upon which there was a
terrible scene and Joseph broke one of the parlour chairs. Owen took
Joseph's part. So did Anna. None of his children cared for him. Owen went
further. Owen said "I was a madman and ought to have a commission of lunacy
to investigate my conduct". And, further, Owen cut him to the quick by
pouring scorn on his verses, on his diaries and archaeological theories. He
said "No one would read the nonsense I had written. When I mentioned having
gained a prize at Trinity College . . . his reply was that none but the most
stupid fellows ever thought of writing for the college prize". Again there
was a terrible scene; again they were dismissed to Bath, followed by their
father's curses. And then Joseph fell ill with the family consumption. At
once his father was all tenderness and remorse. He sent for doctors, he
offered to take him for a sea trip to Ireland, he took him indeed to Weston
and went sailing with him on the sea. Once more the family came together.
And once more the querulous, exacting father could not help, for all his
concern, exasperating the children whom, in his own crabbed way, he yet
genuinely loved. The question of religion cropped up. Owen said his father
was no better than a Deist or a Socinian. And Joseph, lying ill upstairs,
said he was too tired for argument; he did not want his father to bring
drawings to show him; he did not want his father to read prayers to him, "he
would rather have some other person to converse with than me". So in the
crisis of their lives, when a father should have been closest to them, even
his children turned away from him. There was nothing left to live for. Yet
what had he done to make everyone hate him? Why did the farmers call him
mad? Why did Joseph say that no one would read what he wrote? Why did the
villagers tie tin cans to the tail of his dog? Why did the peacocks shriek
and the bells ring? Why was there no mercy shown to him and no respect and
no love? With agonising repetition the diary asks these questions; but
there was no answer. At last, one morning in December 1839, the Rector took
his gun, walked into the beech wood near his home, and shot himself dead.
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