- duce fruit for the multitude. And then, in speaking, grand
words come so easily, while thoughts—even little thoughts—flow so slowly!"
Mrs. Proudie herself is above all a politician, and justifies
her existence by turning her religious bigotry into the
channel of ecclesiastical polity, a procedure that well might
cause the gentle bishop to quake:[1]
"When Mrs. Proudie began to talk about the souls of the
people he always shook in his shoes. She had an eloquent way
of raising her voice over the word souls that was qualified to
make any ordinary man shake in his shoes."
She rejoices in an opportunity to condone with a member
of the Clerical Opposition over a disappointment she
has done her best to bring upon it:[2]
"'For, after all, Mrs. Arabin, what are the things of this
world?—dust beneath our feet, ashes between our teeth, grass
cut for the oven, vanity, vexation, and nothing more!'—well
pleased with which variety of Christian metaphors, Mrs. Proudie
walked on, still muttering, however, something about worms
and grubs, by which she intended to signify her own species
and the Dumbello and Grantly sects of it in particular."
George Eliot's zealots,—Dinah Morris, Savonarola,
Felix Holt, Daniel Deronda, are not ridiculed, except for
some sarcastic repartee put into the mouths of Mrs. Poyser
and Esther Lyon. Nor is the pseudo-scholar Casaubon,
though he is described as having a soul that "went on
fluttering in the swampy ground where it was hatched,
thinking of its wings and never flying," and on a certain
occasion, as slipping "again into the library, to chew a cud
of erudite mistake about Cush and Mizraim."
