“Mrs Pontifex had no sense of humour, at least I can call to mind no signs of this, but her husband had plenty of fun in him, though few would have guessed it from his appearance. I remember my father once sent me down to his workship to get some glue, and I happened to come when old Pontifex was in the act of scolding his boy. He had got the lad—a pudding-headed fellow—by the ear and was saying, “What? Lost again—smothered o’ wit.” (I believe it was the boy who was himself supposed to be a wandering soul, and who was thus addressed as lost.)”
Samuel Butler contrasts Mrs. Pontifex and Mr. Pontifex’s personalities. The discrepancy between the two gathers that their inclination for hilarity is deviating. Also, the dissimilarity indicates that in matrimony the couples can be very dissimilar. Perhaps, it is the reconciliation of variances that warranties the sustenance of the matrimonial. Otherwise, the disparities could spawn combats among couples.
“In a year or two more came Waterloo and the European peace. Then Mr George Pontifex went abroad more than once. I remember seeing at Battersby in after years the diary which he kept on the first of these occasions. It is a characteristic document. I felt as I read it that the author before starting had made up his mind to admire only what he thought it would be creditable in him to admire, to look at nature and art only through the spectacles that had been handed down to him by generation after generation of prigs and impostors. The first glimpse of Mont Blanc threw Mr Pontifex into a conventional ecstasy. “My feelings I cannot express. I gasped, yet hardly dared to breathe, as I viewed for the first time the monarch of the mountains. I seemed to fancy the genius seated on his stupendous throne far above his aspiring brethren and in his solitary might defying the universe.”
This passage incorporates a historical allusion when it cites “waterloo and the European peace.” These epic mileposts persuaded Mr. George Pontifex’s standpoint which is abridged in his assessment of “Mont Black”. It is palpable that he is awestruck by the spectacle of the mesmeric mountains. The idiosyncratic outlooks entered in his diary portray him as a beholden man who venerates the mountains. Also, the admittances in the diary render him an articulate man who can broach his sentiments through rhetorical meticulousness.
“The hymn had engaged my attention; when it was over I had time to take stock of the congregation. They were chiefly farmers—fat, very well-to-do folk, who had come some of them with their wives and children from outlying farms two and three miles away; haters of popery and of anything which any one might choose to say was popish; good, sensible fellows who detested theory of any kind, whose ideal was the maintenance of the status quo with perhaps a loving reminiscence of old war times, and a sense of wrong that the weather was not more completely under their control, who desired higher prices and cheaper wages, but otherwise were most contented when things were changing least; tolerators, if not lovers, of all that was familiar, haters of all that was unfamiliar; they would have been equally horrified at hearing the Christian religion doubted, and at seeing it practised.”
Samuel Butler’s portrayal of the congregants renders them classic zealots with a proclivity for equilibrium. The congregants are gratified with ‘status quo’ for it would not dislocate the diminuendos of social ranks among them. Furthermore the ‘status quo’ who safeguard that their prices are optimized to the impairment of the laborers who are given lesser wages. The congregants’ repugnance for unacquainted dynamics means that they are antipathetic to change; thus, would dissent it obstinately. Undoubtedly, the congregants misuse Christianity as a conduit to cement ‘status quo.’
