Delphi Complete Works of George Eliot (Illustrated) (637 page)

Where inward vision over impulse reigns,

Widening its life with separate life discerned,

A Like unlike, a Self that self restrains.

His years with others must the sweeter be

For those brief days he spent in loving me.

X.

His sorrow was my sorrow, and his joy

Sent little leaps and laughs through all my frame;

My doll seemed lifeless and no girlish toy

Had any reason when my brother came.

I knelt with him at marbles, marked his fling

Cut the ringed stem and make the apple drop,

Or watched him winding close the spiral string

That looped the orbits of the humming top.

Grasped by such fellowship my vagrant thought

Ceased with dream-fruit dream-wishes to fulfil;

My aëry-picturing fantasy was taught

Subjection to the harder, truer skill

That seeks with deeds to grave a thought-tracked line,

And by What is, What will be to define.

XI.

School parted us; we never found again

That childish world where our two spirits mingled

Like scents from varying roses that remain

One sweetness, nor can evermore be singled.

Yet the twin habit of that early time

Lingered for long about the heart and tongue:

We had been natives of one happy clime

And its dear accent to our utterance clung.

Till the dire years whose awful name is Change

Had grasped our souls still yearning in divorce,

And pitiless shaped them in two forms that range

Two elements which sever their life’s course.

But were another childhood-world my share,

I would be born a little sister there.”

STRADIVARIUS
.

Your soul was lifted by the wings today

Hearing the master of the violin:

You praised him, praised the great Sabastian too

Who made that fine Chaconne; but did you think

Of old Antonio Stradivari?--him

Who a good century and a half ago

Put his true work in that brown instrument

And by the nice adjustment of its frame

Gave it responsive life, continuous

With the master’s finger-tips and perfected

Like them by delicate rectitude of use.

That plain white-aproned man, who stood at work

Patient and accurate full fourscore years,

Cherished his sight and touch by temperance,

And since keen sense is love of perfectness

Made perfect violins, the needed paths

For inspiration and high mastery.

No simpler man than he; he never cried,

“why was I born to this monotonous task

Of making violins?” or flung them down

To suit with hurling act well-hurled curse

At labor on such perishable stuff.

Hence neighbors in Cremona held him dull,

Called him a slave, a mill-horse, a machine.

Naldo, a painter of eclectic school,

Knowing all tricks of style at thirty-one,

And weary of them, while Antonio

At sixty-nine wrought placidly his best,

Making the violin you heard today--

Naldo would tease him oft to tell his aims.

“Perhaps thou hast some pleasant vice to feed-

the love of louis d’ors in heaps of four,

Each violin a heap--I’ve naught to blame;

My vices waste such heaps. But then, why work

With painful nicety?”

Antonio then:

“I like the gold--well, yes--but not for meals.

And as my stomach, so my eye and hand,

And inward sense that works along with both,

Have hunger that can never feed on coin.

Who draws a line and satisfies his soul,

Making it crooked where it should be straight?

Antonio Stradivari has an eye

That winces at false work and loves the true.”

Then Naldo: “‘Tis a petty kind of fame

At best, that comes of making violins;

And saves no masses, either. Thou wilt go

To purgatory none the less.”

But he:

“‘Twere purgatory here to make them ill;

And for my fame--when any master holds

‘Twixt chin and hand a violin of mine,

He will be glad that Stradivari lived,

Made violins, and made them of the best.

The masters only know whose work is good:

They will choose mine, and while God gives them skill

I give them instruments to play upon,

God choosing me to help him.

“What! Were God

at fault for violins, thou absent?”

“Yes;

He were at fault for Stradivari’s work.”

“Why, many hold Giuseppe’s violins

As good as thine.”

“May be: they are different.

His quality declines: he spoils his hand

With over-drinking. But were his the best,

He could not work for two. My work is mine,

And, heresy or not, if my hand slacked

I should rob God--since his is fullest good--

Leaving a blank instead of violins.

I say, not God himself can make man’s best

Without best men to help him.

‘Tis God gives skill,

But not without men’s hands: he could not make

Antonio Stradivari’s violins

Without Antonio. Get thee to thy easel.”

A COLLEGE BREAKFAST-PART
Y

Young Hamlet, not the hesitating Dane,

But one named after him, who lately strove

For honours at our English Wittenberg, —

Blonde, metaphysical, and sensuous,

Questioning all things and yet half convinced

Credulity were better; held inert

‘Twixt fascinations of all opposites,

And half suspecting that the mightiest soul

(Perhaps his own?) was union of extremes,

Having no choice but choice of everything:

As, drinking deep to-day for love of wine,

To-morrow half a Brahmin, scorning life

As mere illusion, yearning for that True

Which has no qualities; another day

Finding the fount of grace in sacraments.

And purest reflex of the light divine

In gem-bossed pyx and broidered chasuble,

Resolved to wear no stockings and to fast

With arms extended, waiting ecstasy;

But getting cramps instead, and needing change,

A would-be pagan next:

Young Hamlet sat

A guest with five of somewhat riper age

At breakfast with Horatio, a friend

With few opinions, but of faithful heart,

Quick to detect the fibrous spreading roots

Of character that feed men’s theories,

Yet cloaking weaknesses with charity

And ready in all service save rebuke.

With ebb of breakfast and the cider-cup

Came high debate: the others seated there

Were Osric, spinner of fine sentences,

A delicate insect creeping over life

Feeding on molecules of floral breath,

And weaving gossamer to trap the sun;

Laertes ardent, rash, and radical;

Discursive Rosencranz, grave Guildenstern,

And he for whom the social meal was made —

The polished priest, a tolerant listener,

Disposed to give a hearing to the lost,

And breakfast with them ere they went below.

From alpine metaphysic glaciers first

The talk sprang copious; the themes were old,

But so is human breath, so infant eyes,

The daily nurslings of creative light.

Small words held mighty meanings: Matter, Force,

Self, Not-self, Being, Seeming, Space and Time —

Plebeian toilers on the dusty road

Of daily traffic, turned to Genii

And cloudy giants darkening sun and moon.

Creation was reversed in human talk:

None said, “ Let Darkness be,” but Darkness was;

And in it weltered with Teutonic ease,

An argumentative Leviathan,

Blowing cascades from out his element,

The thunderous Rosencranz, till

‘‘Truce, I beg!’’

Said Osric, with nice accent. “ I abhor

That battling of the ghosts, that strife of terms

For utmost lack of colour, form, and breath.

That tasteless squabbling called Philosophy

As if a blue-winged butterfly afloat

For just three days above the Italian fields,

Poising in sunshine, fluttering toward its bride,

Should fast and speculate, considering

What were if it were not?” or what now is

Instead of that which seems to be itself?

Its deepest wisdom surely were to be

A sipping, marrying, blue-winged butterfly;

Since utmost speculation on itself

Were but a three days’ living of worse sort —

A bruising struggle all within the bounds

Of butterfly existence.”

“ I protest, “

Burst in Laertes, “against arguments

That start with calling me a butterfly,

A bubble, spark, or other metaphor

Which carries your conclusions as a phrase

In quibbling law will carry property.

Put a thin sucker for my human lips

Fed at a mother’s breast, who now needs food

That I will earn for her: put bubbles blown

From frothy thinking, for the joy, the love,

The wants, the pity, and the fellowship

(The ocean deeps I might say, were I bent

On bandying metaphors) that make a man —

Why, rhetoric brings within your easy reach

Conclusions worthy of — a butterfly.

The universe, I hold, is no charade,

No acted pun unriddled by a word,

Nor pain a decimal diminishing

With hocus-pocus of a dot or nought.

For those who know it, pain is solely pain:

Not any letters of the alphabet

Wrought syllogistically pattern-wise,

Nor any cluster of fine images,

Nor any missing of their figured dance

By blundering molecules. Analysis

May show you the right physic for the ill,

Teaching the molecules to find their dance,

Instead of sipping at the heart of flowers.

But spare me your analogies, that hold

Such insight as the figure of a crow

And bar of music put to signify

A crowbar.”

Said the Priest, “There I agree —

Would add that sacramental grace is grace

Which to be known must first be felt, with all

The strengthening influxes that come by prayer.

I note this passingly — would not delay

The conversation’s tenor, save to hint

That taking stand with Rosencranz one sees

Final equivalence of all we name

Our Good and Ill — their difference meanwhile

Being inborn prejudice that plumps you down

An Ego, brings a weight into your scale

Forcing a standard. That restless weight

Obstinate, irremovable by thought,

Persisting through disproof, an ache, a need

That spaceless stays where sharp analysis

Has shown a plenum filled without it — what

If this, to use your phrase, were just that Being

Not looking solely, grasping from the dark,

Weighing the difference you call Ego? This

Gives you persistence, regulates the flux

With strict relation rooted in the All.

Who is he of your late philosophers

Takes the true name of Being to be Will?

I — nay, the Church objects nought, is content:

Reason has reached its utmost negative,

Physic and metaphysic meet in the inane

And backward shrink to intense prejudice,

Making their absolute and homogene

A loaded relative, a choice to be

Whatever is — supposed, a What is not.

The Church demands no more, has standing room

And basis for her doctrine: this (no more) —

That the strong bias which we name the Soul,

Though fed and clad by dissoluble waves

Has antecedent quality, and rules

By veto or consent the strife of thought,

Making arbitrament that we call faith.”

Here was brief silence, till young Hamlet spoke.

“ I crave direction, Father, how to know

The sign of that imperative whose right

To sway my act in face of thronging doubts

Were an oracular gem in price beyond

Urim and Thummim lost to Israel.

That bias of the soul, that conquering die

Loaded with golden emphasis of Will —

How find it where resolve, once made, becomes

The rash exclusion of an opposite

Which draws the stronger as I turn aloof.”

“ I think I hear a bias in your words,”

The Priest said mildly, — “that strong natural bent

Which we call hunger. What more positive

Than appetite? — of spirit or of flesh,

I care not — ‘ sense of need ‘ were truer phrase.

You hunger for authoritative right,

And yet discern no difference of tones,

No weight of rod that marks imperial rule?

Laertes granting, I will put your case

In analogic form: the doctors hold

Hunger which gives no relish — save caprice

That tasting venison fancies mellow pears —