Marner, Silas

Linen weaver at Raveloe. " Strangely Mamer's face and figure shrank and bent themselves into a constant mechanical relation to the objects of his life, so that he produced the same sort of impression as a handle or a crooked tube, which has no meaning standing apart. The prominent eyes that used to look trusting and dreamy, now looked as if they had been made to see only one kind of thing that was very small, like tiny grain, for which they hunted everywhere ; and he waa so withered and yellow, that, though he was not yet forty, the children always called him 'Old Master Marner '... Ch. ii. "Yet few men could be more harmless than poor Marner. In his truthful simple soul, not even the growing greed and worship of gold could beget any vice directly injurious to others. The light of his faith quite put out, and his affections made desolate, he had clung with all the force of his nature to his work and his money; and like all objects to which a man devotes himself, they had fashioned him into correspondence with themselves. His loom, as he wrought in it without ceasing, had in its turn wrought on him, and confirmed more and more the monotonous craving for its monotonous response. His gold, as he hung over it and saw it grow, gathered his power of loving together into a hard isolation like its own." In his youth he had been an artisan in a large manufacturing town where, in spite of the fact that he was subject to occasional cataleptic attacks, he led a contented life, his strong interests being his membership in a dissenting church, his friendship for William Dane, and his approaching marriage. Falsely accused of a robbery through his friend's treachery, and driven from church and home, he had wandered to Raveloe where he settled. With all faith in both men and religion lost through his cruel experience, he leads there a lonely life as a recluse and miser, his one pleasure the contemplation of the growing hoard of gold which he saves slowly by hard and constant toil. When his money is stolen, and the little golden-haired Eppie, an unclaimed child, comes, as he thinks, in place of the gold, he brings her up as his daughter, and through her needs and affection regains his joy in life. Note.—The plot of Silas Marner shows some marked resemblance to a Polish story by Kraszewski called Jermola the Potter. The similarity is most striking in the case of the central figure, Jermola, a deserted lonely old man left in poverty by the well-to-do family to which he had given a lifetime of service. Like Silas Marner, old Jermola finds a deserted infant near his hut, adopts it, and through love for it and the efforts which he has to make to support it, is restored to a happy and useful life. Unlike Silas, however, his life ends in tragedy, as the child is taken from him. (See also note under Silas Marner in Synopses.)

<em>Silas Marner</em>

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