Page:The spirit of place, and other essays, Meynell, 1899.djvu/72

58 had sunk into a degradation never reached before, inasmuch as it was degraded in relation to that of men. It would matter little indeed that Mrs. Primrose "could read any English book without much spelling" if her husband and son were as definitely limited to journeyman's field-labour as she was to the pickling and the gooseberry wine. Any of those industries is a better and more liberal business than unselect reading, for instance, or than unselect writing. Therefore let me not be misunderstood to complain too indiscriminately of that century or of an unlettered state. What is really unhandsome is the new, slovenly, and corrupt inequality whereinto the century had fallen.

That the mother of daughters and sons should be fatuous, a village worldling, suspicious, ambitious, ill-bred, ignorant, gross, insolent, foul-mouthed, pushing, importunate, and a fool, seems natural, almost innocently natural, in Goldsmith's story; the squalid Mrs. Primrose is all this. He is still able, through his Vicar, in the most charmingly humorous passage in the book, to praise her for her "prudence, economy, and obedience." Her other, more disgusting, characteristics give her husband an occasion for rebuking her as "Woman!" This is done, for