Delphi Complete Works of George Eliot (Illustrated) (634 page)

Than love’s obedience, said, with accent meek, —

“Monsignor, I know well that were it known

To all the world how high my love had flown,

There would be few who would not deem me mad,

Or say my mind the falsest image had

Of my condition and your loftiness.

But Heaven has seen that for no moment’s space

Have I forgotten you to be the king,

Or me myself to be a lowly thing —

A little lark, enamoured of the sky,

That soared to sing, to break its breast, and die.

But, as you better know than I, the heart

In choosing chooseth not its own desert,

But that great merit which attracteth it:

‘Tis law, I struggled, but I must submit,

And having seen a worth all worth above,

I loved you, love you, and shall always love.

But that doth mean, my will is ever yours,

Not only when your will my good insures,

But if it wrought me what the world calls harm:

Fire, wounds, would wear from your dear will a charm.

That you will be my knight is full content,

And for that kiss, — I pray, first, for the queen’s consent.”

Her answer, given with such firm gentleness,

Pleased the queen well, and made her hold no less

Of Lisa’s merit than the king had held.

And so, all cloudy threats of grief dispelled,

There was betrothal made that very morn

‘Twixt Perdicone, youthful, brave, well-born,

And Lisa whom he loved; she loving well

The lot that from obedience befell.

The queen a rare betrothal ring on each

Bestowed, and other gems, with gracious speech.

And, that no joy might lack, the king, who knew

The youth was poor, gave him rich Ceffalù

And Cataletta, — large and fruitful lands, —

Adding much promise when he joined their hands.

At last he said to Lisa, with an air

Gallant yet noble, “Now we claim our share

From your sweet love, a share which is not small;

For in the sacrament one crumb is all.”

Then, taking her small face his hands between,

He kissed her on the brow with kiss serene, —

Fit seal to that pure vision her young soul had seen.

And many witnessed that King Pedro kept

His royal promise.  Perdicone stept

To many honors honorably won,

Living with Lisa in true union.

Throughout his life, the king still took delight

To call himself fair Lisa’s faithful knight;

And never wore in field or tournament

A scarf or emblem, save by Lisa sent.

Such deeds made subjects loyal in that land;

They joyed that one so worthy to command,

So chivalrous and gentle, had become

The king of Sicily, and filled the room

Of Frenchmen, who abused the Church’s trust,

Till, in a righteous vengeance on their lust,

Messina rose, with God, and with the dagger’s thrust.

L’ENVOI.

Reader, this story pleased me long ago

In the bright pages of Boccaccio;

And where the author of a good we know,

Let us not fail to pay the grateful thanks we owe.

A MINOR PROPHET
.

I HAVE a friend, a vegetarian seer,

By name Elias Baptist Butterworth,

A harmless, bland, disinterested man,

Whose ancestors in Cromwell’s day believed

The Second Advent certain in five years,

But when King Charles the Second came instead,

Revised their date and sought another world:

I mean — not heaven but — America.

A fervid stock, whose generous hope embraced

The fortunes of mankind, not stopping short

At rise of leather, or the fall of gold,

Nor listening to the voices of the time

As housewives listen to a cackling hen,

With wonder whether she has laid her egg

On their own nest-egg. Still they did insist

Somewhat too wearisomely on the joys

Of their Millennium, when coats and hats

Would all be of one pattern, books and songs

All fit for Sundays, and the casual talk

As good as sermons preached extempore.

And in Elias the ancestral zeal

Breathes strong as ever, only modified

By Transatlantic air and modern thought.

You could not pass him in the street and fail

To note his shoulders’ long declivity,

Beard to the waist, swan-neck, and large pale eyes;

Or, when he lifts his hat, to mark his hair

Brushed back to show his great capacity —

A full grain’s length at the angle of the brow

Proving him witty, while the shallower men

Only seemed witty in their repartees.

Not that he’s vain, but that his doctrine needs

The testimony of his frontal lobe.

On all points he adopts the latest views;

Takes for the key of universal Mind

The “levitation” of stout gentlemen;

Believes the Rappings are not spirits’ work,

But the Thought-atmosphere’s, a stream of brains

In correlated force of raps, as proved

By motion, heat, and science generally;

The spectrum, for example, which has shown

The self-same metals in the sun as here;

So the Thought-atmosphere is everywhere:

High truths that glimmered under other names

To ancient sages, whence good scholarship

Applied to Eleusinian mysteries —

The Vedas — Tripitaka — Vendidad —

Might furnish weaker proof for weaker minds

That Thought was rapping in the hoary past,

And might have edified the Greeks by raps

At the greater Dionysia, if their ears

Had not been filled with Sophoclean verse.

And when all Earth is vegetarian —

When, lacking butchers, quadrupeds die out,

And less Thought-atmosphere is reabsorbed

By nerves of insects parasitical,

Those higher truths, seized now by higher minds

But not expressed (the insects hindering),

Will either flash out into eloquence,

Or better still, be comprehensible

By rappings simply, without need of roots.

‘T is on this theme — the vegetarian world —

That good Elias willingly expands:

He loves to tell in mildly nasal tones

And vowels stretched to suit the widest views,

The future fortunes of our infant Earth —

When it will be too full of human kind

To have the room for wilder animals.

Saith he, Sahara will be populous

With families of gentlemen retired

From commerce in more Central Africa,

Who order coolness as we order coal,

And have a lobe anterior strong enough

To think away the sand-storms. Science thus

Will leave no spot on this terraqueous globe

Unfit to be inhabited by man,

The chief of animals: all meaner brutes

Will have been smoked or elbowed out of life.

No lions then shall lap Caffrarian pools,

Or shake the Atlas with their midnight roar:

Even the slow, slime-loving crocodile,

The last of animals to take a hint,

Will then retire forever from a scene

Where public feeling strongly sets against him.

Fishes may lead carnivorous lives obscure,

But must not dream of culinary rank

Or being dished in good society.

Imagination in that distant age,

Aiming at fiction called historical,

Will vainly try to reconstruct the times

When it was man’s preposterous delight

To sit astride live horses, which consumed

Materials for incalculable cakes;

When there were milkmaids who drew milk from cows

With udders kept abnormal for that end

Since the rude mythopoeic period

Of Aryan dairymen who did not blush

To call their milkmaid and their daughter one —

Helplessly gazing at the Milky Way,

Nor dreaming of the astral cocoa-nuts

Quite at the service of posterity.

‘T is to be feared, though, that the duller boys.

Much given to anachronisms and nuts,

(Elias has confessed boys will be boys)

May write a jockey for a centaur, think

Europa’s suitor was an Irish bull,

^sop a journalist who wrote up Fox,

And Bruin a chief swindler upon ‘Change.

Boys will be boys, but dogs will all be moral.

With longer alimentary canals

Suited to diet vegetarian.

The uglier breeds will fade from memory,

Or, being palaeontological,

Live but as portraits in large learned books.

Distasteful to the feelings of an age

Nourished on purest beauty. Earth will hold

No stupid brutes, no cheerful queernesses,

No naive cunning, grave absurdity.

Wart-pigs with tender and parental grunts,

Wombats much flattened as to their contour,

Perhaps from too much crushing in the ark,

But taking meekly that fatality;

The serious cranes, unstrung by ridicule;

Long-headed, short-legged, solemn-looking curs,

(Wise, silent critics of a flippant age);

The silly straddling foals, the weak-brained geese

Hissing fallaciously at sound of wheels —

All these rude products will have disappeared

Along with every faulty human type.

By dint of diet vegetarian

All will be harmony of hue and line,

Bodies and minds all perfect, limbs well-turned,

And talk quite free from aught erroneous.

Thus far Elias in his seer’s mantle:

But at this climax in his prophecy

My sinking spirits, fearing to be swamped,

Urge me to speak. ‘‘ High prospects, these, my friend,

Setting the weak carnivorous brain astretch;

We will resume the thread another day.”

“ To-morrow,” cries Ellas, “at this hour?”

“ No, not to-morrow — I shall have a cold —

At least I feel some soreness — this endemic —

Good-by.”

No tears are sadder than the smile

With which I quit Elias. Bitterly

I feel that every change upon this earth

Is bought with sacrifice. My yearnings fail

To reach that high apocalyptic mount

Which shows in bird’s-eye view a perfect world,

Or enter warmly into other joys

Than those of faulty, struggling human kind.

That strain upon my soul’s too feeble wing

Ends in ignoble floundering: I fall

Into short-sighted pity for the men

Who living in those perfect future times

Will not know half the dear imperfect things

That move my smiles and tears — will never know

The fine old incongruities that raise

My friendly laugh; the innocent conceits

That like a needless eyeglass or black patch

Give those who wear them harmless happiness;

The twists and cracks in our poor earthenware,

That touch me to more conscious fellowship