Book 4 - Chapter 1 - Page 2

Tullivers and Dodsons, irradiated by no sublime principles, no
romantic visions, no active, self-renouncing faith; moved by none of
those wild, uncontrollable passions which create the dark shadows of
misery and crime; without that primitive, rough simplicity of wants,
that hard, submissive, ill-paid toil, that childlike spelling-out of
what nature has written, which gives its poetry to peasant life. Here
one has conventional worldly notions and habits without instruction
and without polish, surely the most prosaic form of human life; proud
respectability in a gig of unfashionable build; worldliness without
side-dishes. Observing these people narrowly, even when the iron hand
of misfortune has shaken them from their unquestioning hold on the
world, one sees little trace of religion, still less of a
distinctively Christian creed. Their belief in the Unseen, so far as
it manifests itself at all, seems to be rather a pagan kind; their
moral notions, though held with strong tenacity, seem to have no
standard beyond hereditary custom. You could not live among such
people; you are stifled for want of an outlet toward something
beautiful, great, or noble; you are irritated with these dull men and
women, as a kind of population out of keeping with the earth on which
they live,--with this rich plain where the great river flows forever
onward, and links the small pulse of the old English town with the
beatings of the world's mighty heart. A vigorous superstition, that
lashes its gods or lashes its own back, seems to be more congruous
with the mystery of the human lot, than the mental condition of these
emmet-like Dodsons and Tullivers.

I share with you this sense of oppressive narrowness; but it is
necessary that we should feel it, if we care to understand how it
acted on the lives of Tom and Maggie,--how it has acted on young
natures in many generations, that in the onward tendency of human
things have risen above the mental level of the generation before
them, to which they have been nevertheless tied by the strongest
fibres of their hearts. The suffering, whether of martyr or victim,
which belongs to every historical advance of mankind, is represented
in this way in every town, and by hundreds of obscure hearths; and we
need not shrink from this comparison of small things with great; for
does not science tell us that its highest striving is after the
ascertainment of a unity which shall bind the smallest things with the
greatest? In natural science, I have understood, there is nothing
petty to the mind that has a large vision of relations, and to which
every single object suggests a vast sum of conditions. It is surely
the same with the observation of human life.

Certainly the religious and moral