Ch. 22: The Master of the Village

Moral effect of the great man--An orphaned village--The masters of the
village.--Elijah Raven--Strange appearance and character--Elijah's
house--The owls--Two rooms in the house--Elijah hardens with time--The
village club and its arbitrary secretary--Caleb dips the lambs and falls
ill--His claim on the club rejected--Elijah in court

In my roamings about the downs it is always a relief--a positive
pleasure in fact--to find myself in a village which has no squire or
other magnificent and munificent person who dominates everybody and
everything, and, if he chooses to do so, plays providence in the
community. I may have no personal objection to him--he is sometimes
almost if not quite human; what I heartily dislike is the effect of his
position (that of a giant among pigmies) on the lowly minds about him,
and the servility, hypocrisy, and parasitism which spring up and
flourish in his wide shadow whether he likes these moral weeds or not.
As a rule he likes them, since the poor devil has this in common with
the rest of us, that he likes to stand high in the general regard. But
how is he to know it unless he witnesses its outward beautiful signs
every day and every hour on every countenance he looks upon? Better, to
my mind, the severer conditions, the poverty and unmerited sufferings
which cannot be relieved, with the greater manliness and self-dependence
when the people are left to work out their own destiny. On this account
I was pleased to make the discovery on my first visit to Caleb's native
village that there was no magnate, or other big man, and no gentleman
except the parson, who was not a rich man. It was, so to speak, one of
the orphaned villages left to fend for itself and fight its own way in a
hard world, and had nobody even to give the customary blankets and sack
of coals to its old women. Nor was there any very big farmer in the
place, certainly no gentleman farmer; they were mostly small men, some
of them hardly to be distinguished in speech and appearance from their
hired labourers.

In these small isolated communities it is common to find men who have
succeeded in rising above the others and in establishing a sort of
mastery over them. They are not as a rule much more intelligent than the
others who are never able to better themselves; the main difference is
that they are harder and more grasping and have more self-control. These
qualities tell eventually, and set a man a little apart, a little higher
than the others, and he gets the taste of power, which reacts on him
like the first taste of blood on the big cat. Henceforward he has his
ideal, his definite goal, which is to get the upper hand--to be on top.
He may be, and generally is, an exceedingly unpleasant fellow to have
for a