Silas Marner quotes

In that far-off time superstition clung easily round every person or thing that was at all unwonted, or even intermittent and occasional merely, like the visits of the pedlar or the knife-grinder.

No one knew where wandering men had their homes or their origin; and how was a man to be explained unless you at least knew somebody who knew his father and mother?

To the peasants of old times, the world outside their own direct experience was a region of vagueness and mystery:

… that the bag held nothing but flaxen thread, or else the long rolls of strong linen spun from that thread, was not quite sure that this trade of weaving, indispensable though it was, could be carried on entirely without the help of the Evil One.

In that far-off time superstition clung easily round every person or thing that was at all unwonted, or even intermittent and occasional merely, like the visits of the pedlar or the knife-grinder.

No one knew where wandering men had their homes or their origin; and how was a man to be explained unless you at least knew somebody who knew his father and mother?

And the years had rolled on without producing any change in the impressions of the neighbours concerning Marner, except the change from novelty to habit.

At the end of fifteen years the Raveloe men said just the same things about Silas Marner as at the beginning: they did not say them quite so often, but they believed them much more strongly when they did say them.

There was only one important addition which the years had brought: it was, that Master Marner had laid by a fine sight of money somewhere, and that he could buy up “bigger men” than himself.

… and listened with longing wonder when William declared that he had possessed unshaken assurance ever since, in the period of his conversion, he had dreamed that he saw the words “calling and election sure” standing by themselves on a white page in the open Bible.

Such colloquies have occupied many a pair of pale-faced weavers, whose unnurtured souls have been like young winged things, fluttering forsaken in the twilight.

It had seemed to the unsuspecting Silas that the friendship had suffered no chill even from his formation of another attachment of a closer kind.

but to him this would have been an effort of independent thought such as he had never known; and he must have made the effort at a moment when all his energies were turned into the anguish of disappointed faith.

If there is an angel who records the sorrows of men as well as their sins, he knows how many and deep are the sorrows that spring from false ideas for which no man is culpable.

Marner went home, and for a whole day sat alone, stunned by despair, without any impulse to go to Sarah and attempt to win her belief in his innocence.

these things had been the channel of divine influences to Marner—they were the fostering home of his religious emotions—they were Christianity and God’s kingdom upon earth.

A weaver who finds hard words in his hymnbook knows nothing of abstractions; as the little child knows nothing of parental love, but only knows one face and one lap towards which it stretches its arms for refuge and nurture.

And what could be more unlike that Lantern Yard world than the world in Raveloe?—orchards looking lazy with neglected plenty; the large church in the wide churchyard, which men gazed at lounging at their own doors in service-time;

… had vainly trusted in among the streets and at the prayer-meetings, was very far away from this land in which he had taken refuge, where men lived in careless abundance, knowing and needing nothing of that trust, which, for him, had been turned to bitterness.

The little light he possessed spread its beams so narrowly, that frustrated belief was a curtain broad enough to create for him the blackness of night.

His first movement after the shock had been to work in his loom; and he went on with this unremittingly, never asking himself why, now he was come to Raveloe, he worked far on into the night to finish the tale of Mrs.

Osgood’s table-linen sooner than she expected—without contemplating beforehand the money she would put into his hand for the work. He seemed to weave, like the spider, from pure impulse, without reflection.

Every man’s work, pursued steadily, tends in this way to become an end in itself, and so to bridge over the loveless chasms of his life.

Silas’s hand satisfied itself with throwing the shuttle, and his eye with seeing the little squares in the cloth complete themselves under his effort. Then there were the calls of hunger;

The weaver’s hand had known the touch of hard-won money even before the palm had grown to its full breadth; for twenty years, mysterious money had stood to him as the symbol of earthly good, and the immediate object of toil.

He had seemed to love it little in the years when every penny had its purpose for him; for he loved the purpose then.

But now, when all purpose was gone, that habit of looking towards the money and grasping it with a sense of fulfilled effort made a loam that was deep enough for the seeds of desire;

for twenty years, mysterious money had stood to him as the symbol of earthly good, and the immediate object of toil. He had seemed to love it little in the years when every penny had its purpose for him; for he loved the purpose then.

But now, when all purpose was gone, that habit of looking towards the money and grasping it with a sense of fulfilled effort made a loam that was deep enough for the seeds of desire; and as Silas walked homeward across the fields in the twilight, he drew out the money and thought it was brighter in the gathering gloom.

About this time an incident happened which seemed to open a possibility of some fellowship with his neighbours.

but the money had come to mark off his weaving into periods, and the money not only grew, but it remained with him.

He began to think it was conscious of him, as his loom was, and he would on no account have exchanged those coins, which had become his familiars, for other coins with unknown faces.

He handled them, he counted them, till their form and colour were like the satisfaction of a thirst to him; but it was only in the night, when his work was done, that he drew them out to enjoy their companionship.

Gradually the guineas, the crowns, and the half-crowns grew to a heap, and Marner drew less and less for his own wants, trying to solve the problem of keeping himself strong enough to work sixteen hours a-day on as small an outlay as possible.

Have not men, shut up in solitary imprisonment, found an interest in marking the moments by straight strokes of a certain length on the wall, until the growth of the sum of straight strokes, arranged in triangles, has become a mastering purpose?

Do we not wile away moments of inanity or fatigued waiting by repeating some trivial movement or sound, until the repetition has bred a want, which is incipient habit?

His life had reduced itself to the functions of weaving and hoarding, without any contemplation of an end towards which the functions tended.

The same sort of process has perhaps been undergone by wiser men, when they have been cut off from faith and love⁠—only, instead of a loom and a heap of guineas, they have had some erudite research, some ingenious project, or some well-knit theory.

Strangely Marner’s face and figure shrank and bent themselves into a constant mechanical relation to the objects of his life, so that he produced the same sort of impression as a handle or a crooked tube, which has no meaning standing apart.

and he was so withered and yellow, that, though he was not yet forty, the children always called him “Old Master Marner.”

Yet even in this stage of withering a little incident happened, which showed that the sap of affection was not all gone.

It was one of his daily tasks to fetch his water from a well a couple of fields off, and for this purpose, ever since he came to Raveloe, he had had a brown earthenware pot, which he held as his most precious utensil among …

Silas picked up the pieces and carried them home with grief in his heart.

The brown pot could never be of use to him any more, but he stuck the bits together and propped the ruin in its old place for a memorial.

This is the history of Silas Marner, until the fifteenth year after he came to Raveloe.

Godfrey stood, still with his back to the fire, uneasily moving his fingers among the contents of his side-pockets, and looking at the floor.

That big muscular frame of his held plenty of animal courage, but helped him to no decision when the dangers to be braved were such as could neither be knocked down nor throttled.

His natural irresolution and moral cowardice were exaggerated by a position in which dreaded consequences seemed to press equally on all sides, and his irritation had no sooner provoked him to defy Dunstan and anticipate all possible betrayals, than the miseries he must bring on …

… and left him without motive for trying to recover his better self, he could imagine no future for himself on the other side of confession but that of “ ’listing for a soldier”—the most desperate step, short of suicide, in the eyes of respectable families.

No! he would rather trust to casualties than to his own resolve⁠—rather go on sitting at the feast, and sipping the wine he loved, though with the sword hanging over him and terror in his heart, than rush away into the cold darkness where there was no pleasure left.

The utmost concession to Dunstan about the horse began to seem easy, compared with the fulfilment of his own threat. But his pride would not let him recommence the conversation otherwise than by continuing the quarrel.

“Not it,” said Dunstan. “I’m always lucky in my weather. It might rain if you wanted to go yourself. You never hold trumps, you know—I always do.

You’ve got the beauty, you see, and I’ve got the luck, so you must keep me by you for your crooked sixpence; you’ll ne-ver get along without me.

”

“Make your tender heart easy,” said Dunstan, opening the door. “You never knew me see double when I’d got a bargain to make; it ’ud spoil the fun.

Besides, whenever I fall, I’m warranted to fall on my legs.

”

That other reason was the fact that the morning’s meet was near Batherley, the market-town where the unhappy woman lived, whose image became more odious to him every day; and to his thought the whole vicinage was haunted by her.

The yoke a man creates for himself by wrongdoing will breed hate in the kindliest nature; and the good-humoured, affectionate-hearted Godfrey Cass was fast becoming a bitter man, visited by cruel wishes, that seemed to enter, and depart, and enter again, like demons who had found in him a ready-garnished home.

What was he to do this evening to pass the time? He might as well go to the Rainbow, and hear the talk about the cockfighting: everybody was there, and what else was there to be done?

Dunstan Cass, setting off in the raw morning, at the judiciously quiet pace of a man who is obliged to ride to cover on his hunter, had to take his way along the lane which, at its farther extremity, passed by the piece of unenclosed ground called the Stone-pit, where stood the cottage, once a stonecutter’s shed, now for fifteen years inhabited by Silas Marner.

The spot looked very dreary at this season, with the moist trodden clay about it, and the red, muddy water high up in the deserted quarry. That was Dunstan’s first thought as he approached it;

The sense of security more frequently springs from habit than from conviction, and for this reason it often subsists after such a change in the conditions as might have been expected to suggest alarm.

The lapse of time during which a given event has not happened, is, in this logic of habit, constantly alleged as a reason why the event should never happen, even when the lapse of time is precisely the added condition which makes the event imminent.

A man will tell you that he has worked in a mine for forty years unhurt by an accident as a reason why he should apprehend no danger, though the roof is beginning to sink;

and like all objects to which a man devotes himself, they had fashioned him into correspondence with themselves.

His loom, as he wrought in it without ceasing, had in its turn wrought on him, and confirmed more and more the monotonous craving for its monotonous response.

His gold, as he hung over it and saw it grow, gathered his power of loving together into a hard isolation like its own.

… soon as he was warm he began to think it would be a long while to wait till after supper before he drew out his guineas, and it would be pleasant to see them on the table before him as he ate his unwonted feast.

For joy is the best of wine, and Silas’s guineas were a golden wine of that sort.

He rose and placed his candle unsuspectingly on the floor near his loom, swept away the sand without noticing any change, and removed the bricks.

he looked in his brick oven where he laid his sticks. When there was no other place to be searched, he kneeled down again and felt once more all round the hole.

There was no untried refuge left for a moment’s shelter from the terrible truth.

Yes, there was a sort of refuge which always comes with the prostration of thought under an overpowering passion:

At last he shook so violently that he let fall the candle, and lifted his hands to his head, trying to steady himself, that he might think. Had he put his gold somewhere else, by a sudden resolution last night, and then forgotten it?

A man falling into dark waters seeks a momentary footing even on sliding stones; and Silas, by acting as if he believed in false hopes, warded off the moment of despair.

He searched in every corner, he turned his bed over, and shook it, and kneaded it; he looked in his brick oven where he laid his sticks.

didn’t the gold lie there after all? The table was bare. Then he turned and looked behind him—looked all round his dwelling, seeming to strain his brown eyes after some possible appearance of the bags where he had already sought them in vain.

He could see every object in his cottage⁠—and his gold was not there.

Again he put his trembling hands to his head, and gave a wild ringing scream, the cry of desolation. For a few moments after, he stood motionless; but the cry had relieved him from the first maddening pressure of the truth.

“Come, come,” said the landlord; “let the cow alone.

The truth lies atween you: you’re both right and both wrong, as I allays say.

And as for the cow’s being Mr. Lammeter’s, I say nothing to that; but this I say, as the Rainbow’s the Rainbow.

“Aye, aye,” said Mr. Macey, who felt very well satisfied with this attack on youthful presumption; “you’re right there, Tookey: there’s allays two ’pinions; there’s the ’pinion a man has of himsen, and there’s the ’pinion other folks have on him.

There’d be two ’pinions about a cracked bell, if the bell could hear itself.

”

and I says to myself, ‘Is’t the meanin’ or the words as makes folks fast i’ wedlock?’ For the parson meant right, and the bride and bridegroom meant right.

But then, when I come to think on it, meanin’ goes but a little way i’ most things, for you may mean to stick things together and your glue may be bad, and then where are you?

And so I says to mysen, ‘It isn’t the meanin’, it’s the glue.’ And I was worreted as if I’d got three bells to pull at once, when we went into the vestry, and they begun to sign their names.

… to his Raveloe neighbours, of sitting in the warmth of a hearth not his own, and feeling the presence of faces and voices which were his nearest promise of help, had doubtless its influence on Marner, in spite of his passionate preoccupation with his loss.

Our consciousness rarely registers the beginning of a growth within us any more than without us: there have been many circulations of the sap before we detect the smallest sign of the bud.

The slight suspicion with which his hearers at first listened to him, gradually melted away before the convincing simplicity of his distress:

“I’d rather let it be, please sir, at present,” said Godfrey, in alarm. “I think she’s a little offended with me just now, and I should like to speak for myself.

A man must manage these things for himself.

”

Let him forsake a decent craft that he may pursue the gentilities of a profession to which nature never called him, and his religion will infallibly be the worship of blessed Chance, which he will believe in as the mighty creator of success.

The evil principle deprecated in that religion is the orderly sequence by which the seed brings forth a crop after its kind.

And in this point of trusting to some throw of fortune’s dice, Godfrey can hardly be called specially old-fashioned.

Favourable Chance, I fancy, is the god of all men who follow their own devices instead of obeying a law they believe in.

Let even a polished man of these days get into a position he is ashamed to avow, and his mind will be bent on all the possible issues that may deliver him from the calculable results of that position.

But in reality it had been an eager life, filled with immediate purpose which fenced him in from the wide, cheerless unknown.

It had been a clinging life; and though the object round which its fibres had clung was a dead disrupted thing, it satisfied the need for clinging.

But now the fence was broken down—the support was snatched away. Marner’s thoughts could no longer move in their old round, and were baffled by a blank like that which meets a plodding ant when the earth has broken away on its homeward path.

and then they would try to cheer him by saying, “Well, Master Marner, you’re no worse off nor other poor folks, after all; and if you was to be crippled, the parish ’ud give you a ’lowance.”

I suppose one reason why we are seldom able to comfort our neighbours with our words is that our goodwill gets adulterated, in spite of ourselves, before it can pass our lips.

We can send black puddings and pettitoes without giving them a flavour of our own egoism; but language is a stream that is almost sure to smack of a mingled soil. There was a fair proportion of kindness in Raveloe;

I suppose one reason why we are seldom able to comfort our neighbours with our words is that our goodwill gets adulterated, in spite of ourselves, before it can pass our lips.

We can send black puddings and pettitoes without giving them a flavour of our own egoism; but language is a stream that is almost sure to smack of a mingled soil.

There was a fair proportion of kindness in Raveloe; but it was often of a beery and bungling sort, and took the shape least allied to the complimentary and hypocritical.

They had to knock loudly before Silas heard them; but when he did come to the door he showed no impatience, as he would once have done, at a visit that had been unasked for and unexpected.

Formerly, his heart had been as a locked casket with its treasure inside; but now the casket was empty, and the lock was broken.

Left groping in darkness, with his prop utterly gone, Silas had inevitably a sense, though a dull and half-despairing one, that if any help came to him it must come from without;

Her simple view of life and its comforts, by which she had tried to cheer him, was only like a report of unknown objects, which his imagination could not fashion.

The fountains of human love and of faith in a divine love had not yet been unlocked, and his soul was still the shrunken rivulet, with only this difference, that its little groove of sand was blocked up, and it wandered confusedly against dark obstruction.

And so, notwithstanding the honest persuasions of Mr. Macey and Dolly Winthrop, Silas spent his Christmas-day in loneliness, eating his meat in sadness of heart, though the meat had come to him as a neighbourly present.

And he sat in his robbed home through the livelong evening, not caring to close his shutters or lock his door, pressing his head between his hands and moaning, till the cold grasped him and told him that his fire was grey.

Nobody in this world but himself knew that he was the same Silas Marner who had once loved his fellow with tender love, and trusted in an unseen goodness.

Even to himself that past experience had become dim.

for the feast was not to end with a single evening, like a paltry town entertainment, where the whole supply of eatables is put on the table at once, and bedding is scanty.

The Red House was provisioned as if for a siege; and as for the spare featherbeds ready to be laid on floors, they were as plentiful as might naturally be expected in a family that had killed its own geese for many generations.

Godfrey Cass was looking forward to this New Year’s Eve with a foolish reckless longing, that made him half deaf to his importunate companion, Anxiety.

“Hold your tongue, and don’t worry me. I can see Nancy’s eyes, just as they will look at me, and feel her hand in mine already.”

But Anxiety went on, though in noisy Christmas company; refusing to be utterly quieted even by much drinking.

let her leave it to them as have got no fortin, and can’t help themselves.

As I say, Mr. Have-your-own-way is the best husband, and the only one I’d ever promise to obey.

I know it isn’t pleasant, when you’ve been used to living in a big way, and managing hogsheads and all that, to go and put your nose in by somebody else’s fireside, or to sit down by yourself to a scrag or a knuckle;

“There you go again! You’d come round to the same thing if one talked to you from Saturday night till Saturday morning.

It’ll be fine fun to see how you’ll master your husband and never raise your voice above the singing o’ the kettle all the while.

I like to see the men mastered!”

You’d come round to the same thing if one talked to you from Saturday night till Saturday morning. It’ll be fine fun to see how you’ll master your husband and never raise your voice above the singing o’ the kettle all the while.

I like to see the men mastered!

”

“I should say she didn’t,” said Mr. Macey, significantly. “Before I said ‘sniff,’ I took care to know as she’d say ‘snaff,’ and pretty quick too.

I wasn’t a-going to open my mouth, like a dog at a fly, and snap it to again, wi’ nothing to swaller.

”

… show her neat ankle in front, was long enough behind to be caught under the stately stamp of the Squire’s foot, so as to rend certain stitches at the waist, and cause much sisterly agitation in Priscilla’s mind, as well as serious concern in Nancy’s.

One’s thoughts may be much occupied with love-struggles, but hardly so as to be insensible to a disorder in the general framework of things.

Nancy had no sooner completed her duty in the figure they were dancing than she said to Godfrey, with a deep blush, that she must go and sit down till Priscilla could come to her;

But she would mar his pleasure: she would go in her dingy rags, with her faded face, once as handsome as the best, with her little child that had its father’s hair and eyes, and disclose herself to the Squire as his eldest son’s wife.

It is seldom that the miserable can help regarding their misery as a wrong inflicted by those who are less miserable.

Molly knew that the cause of her dingy rags was not her husband’s neglect, but the demon Opium to whom she was enslaved, body and soul, except in the lingering mother’s tenderness that refused to give him her hungry child. She knew this well;

“Oh, everything has been disagreeable tonight. I was tired to death of jigging and gallanting, and that bother about the hornpipes. And I’d got to dance with the other Miss Gunn,” said Godfrey, glad of the subterfuge his uncle had suggested to him.

The prevarication and white lies which a mind that keeps itself ambitiously pure is as uneasy under as a great artist under the false touches that no eye detects but his own, are worn as lightly as mere trimmings when once the actions have become a lie.

Godfrey reappeared in the White Parlour with dry feet, and, since the truth must be told, with a sense of relief and gladness that was too strong for painful thoughts to struggle with.

but his force of mind failed before the only two penal methods open to him, not only because it was painful to him to hurt Eppie, but because he trembled at a moment’s contention with her, lest she should love him the less for it.

Let even an affectionate Goliath get himself tied to a small tender thing, dreading to hurt it by pulling, and dreading still more to snap the cord, and which of the two, pray, will be master?

It was clear that Eppie, with her short toddling steps, must lead father Silas a pretty dance on any fine morning when circumstances favoured mischief.

In old days there were angels who came and took men by the hand and led them away from the city of destruction.

We see no white-winged angels now. But yet men are led away from threatening destruction: a hand is put into theirs, which leads them forth gently towards a calm and bright land, so that they look no more backward; and the hand may be a little child’s.

I cannot say that he was. The child was being taken care of, and would very likely be happy, as people in humble stations often were—happier, perhaps, than those brought up in luxury.

That famous ring that pricked its owner when he forgot duty and followed desire⁠—I wonder if it pricked very hard when he set out on the chase, or whether it pricked but lightly then, and only pierced to the quick when the chase had long been ended, and hope, folding her wings, looked backward and became regret?

Godfrey Cass’s cheek and eye were brighter than ever now. He was so undivided in his aims, that he seemed like a man of firmness. No Dunsey had come back:

yet to all who love human faces best for what they tell of human experience, Nancy’s beauty has a heightened interest.

Often the soul is ripened into fuller goodness while age has spread an ugly film, so that mere glances can never divine the preciousness of the fruit.

But the years have not been so cruel to Nancy. The firm yet placid mouth, the clear veracious glance of the brown eyes, speak now of a nature that has been tested and has kept its highest qualities;

For Silas would not consent to have a grate and oven added to his conveniences: he loved the old brick hearth as he had loved his brown pot—and was it not there when he had found Eppie?

The gods of the hearth exist for us still; and let all new faith be tolerant of that fetishism, lest it bruise its own roots.

Silas ate his dinner more silently than usual, soon laying down his knife and fork, and watching half-abstractedly Eppie’s play with Snap and the cat, by which her own dining was made rather a lengthy business.

and there’s the breaking o’ limbs; and them as ’ud do right and be sober have to suffer by them as are contrairy—eh, there’s trouble i’ this world, and there’s things as we can niver make out the rights on.

And all as we’ve got to do is to trusten, Master Marner⁠—to do the right thing as fur as we know, and to trusten.

For if us as knows so little can see a bit o’ good and rights, we may be sure as there’s a good and a rights bigger nor what we can know—I feel it i’ my own inside as it must be so.

“Nay, nay,” said Silas, “you’re i’ the right, Mrs. Winthrop—you’re i’ the right.

There’s good i’ this world⁠—I’ve a feeling o’ that now; and it makes a man feel as there’s a good more nor he can see, i’ spite o’ the trouble and the wickedness.

That drawing o’ the lots is dark; but the child was sent to me: there’s dealings with us—there’s dealings.”

And as for the farm, if anything turns out wrong, as it can’t but do in these times, there’s nothing kills a man so soon as having nobody to find fault with but himself.

It’s a deal the best way o’ being master, to let somebody else do the ordering, and keep the blaming in your own hands.

It ’ud save many a man a stroke, I believe.”

And as for staying tea, I can’t hear of it; for there’s this dairymaid, now she knows she’s to be married, turned Michaelmas, she’d as lief pour the new milk into the pig-trough as into the pans.

That’s the way with ’em all: it’s as if they thought the world ’ud be new-made because they’re to be married.

So come and let me put my bonnet on, and there’ll be time for us to walk round the garden while the horse is being put in.”

“I’m as glad as anything at your husband’s making that exchange o’ land with cousin Osgood, and beginning the dairying. It’s a thousand pities you didn’t do it before; for it’ll give you something to fill your mind.

There’s nothing like a dairy if folks want a bit o’ worrit to make the days pass.

For as for rubbing furniture, when you can once see your face in a table there’s nothing else to look for; but there’s always something fresh with the dairy;

“

I can do so little⁠—have I done it all well?

” is the perpetually recurring thought; and there are no voices calling her away from that soliloquy, no peremptory demands to divert energy from vain regret or superfluous scruple.

Why did his mind fly uneasily to that void, as if it were the sole reason why life was not thoroughly joyous to him?

I suppose it is the way with all men and women who reach middle age without the clear perception that life never can be thoroughly joyous: under the vague dullness of the grey hours, dissatisfaction seeks a definite object, and finds it in the privation of an untried good.

Dissatisfaction seated musingly on a childless hearth, thinks with envy of the father whose return is greeted by young voices—seated at the meal where the little heads rise one above another like nursery plants, it sees a black care hovering behind every one of them, …

She continued to stand, however, looking at the placid churchyard with the long shadows of the gravestones across the bright green hillocks, and at the glowing autumn colours of the Rectory trees beyond.

Before such calm external beauty the presence of a vague fear is more distinctly felt⁠—like a raven flapping its slow wing across the sunny air.

Nancy wished more and more that Godfrey would come in.

“I can’t say what I should have done about that, Godfrey. I should never have married anybody else.

But I wasn’t worth doing wrong for⁠—nothing is in this world.

Nothing is so good as it seems beforehand—not even our marrying wasn’t, you see.” There was a faint sad smile on Nancy’s face as she said the last words.

God gave her to me because you turned your back upon her, and He looks upon her as mine: you’ve no right to her!

When a man turns a blessing from his door, it falls to them as take it in.

”

At last Godfrey turned his head towards her, and their eyes met, dwelling in that meeting without any movement on either side.

That quiet mutual gaze of a trusting husband and wife is like the first moment of rest or refuge from a great weariness or a great danger⁠—not to be interfered with by speech or action which would distract the sensations from the fresh enjoyment of repose.

But presently he put out his hand, and as Nancy placed hers within it, he drew her towards him, and said—