ed. His son lives with him, and the house is full of
grandchildren. I do not say that it puzzles me to divine what is the
miller's view of life, because I think I know it. It is to make money
honestly, to bring up his grandchildren virtuously and comfortably, to
enjoy his daily work and his evening leisure. He is never idle, never
preoccupied. He enjoys getting the mill started, seeing the flour
stream into the sacks, he enjoys going to market, he enjoys going
prosperously to church on Sundays, he enjoys his paper and his pipe. He
has no exalted ideas, and he could not put a single emotion into words,
but he is thoroughly honest, upright, manly, kind, sensible. A perfect
life in many ways; and yet it is inconceivable to me that a man should
live thus, without an aim, without a hope, without an object. He would
think my own life even more inconceivable--that a man could
deliberately sit down day after day to construct a story about
imaginary people; and such respect as he feels for me, is mainly due to
the fact that my writings bring me in a larger income than he could
ever make from his mill. But of course he is a man who is normally
healthy, and such men as he are the props of rural life. He is a good
master, he sees that his men do their work, and are well housed. He is
not generous exactly, but he is neighbourly. The question is whether
such as he is the proper type of humanity. He represents the simple
virtues at their high-water mark. He is entirely contented, and his
desires are perfectly proportioned to their surroundings. He seems
indeed to be exactly what the human creature ought to be. And yet his
very virtues, his sense of justice and honesty, his sensible
kindliness, are the outcome of civilisation, and bear the stamp, in
reality, of the dreams of saints and sages and idealists--the men who
felt that things could be better, and who were made miserable by the
imperfections of the world. I cannot help wondering, in a whimsical
moment, what would have been the miller's thoughts of Christ, if he had
been confronted with Him in the flesh. He would have thought of Him
rather contemptuously, I think, as a bewildering, unpractical,
emotional man. The miller would not have felt the appeal of
unselfishness and unworldliness, because his ideal of life is tranquil
prosperity. He would have merely wondered why people could not hold
their tongues and mind their business: and yet he is a model citizen,
and would be deeply a