Delphi Complete Works of George Eliot (Illustrated) (640 page)

Rather than, say, some twenty million lots

Of fellow-Britons toiling all to make

That nation, that community, whereon

You feed and thrive and talk philosophy.

I am no optimist whose fate must hang

On hard pretence that pain is beautiful

And agony explained for men at ease

By virtue’s exercise in pitying it.

But this I hold: that he who takes one gift

Made for him by the hopeful work of man,

Who tastes sweet bread, walks where he will unarmed,

His shield and warrant the invisible law,

Who owns a hearth and household charities,

Who clothes his body and his sentient soul

With skill and thoughts of men, and yet denies

A human good worth toiling for, is cursed

With worse negation than the poet feigned

In Mephistopheles. The Devil spins

His wire-drawn argument against all good

With sense of brimstone as his private lot,

And never drew a solace from the Earth. “

Laertes fuming paused, and Guildenstern

Took up with cooler skill the fusillade:

“ I meet your deadliest challenge, Rosencranz —

Where get, you say, a binding law, a rule

Enforced by sanction, an Ideal throned

With thunder in its hand? I answer, there

Whence every faith and rule has drawn its force

Since human consciousness awaking owned

An Outward, whose unconquerable sway

Resisted first and then subdued desire

By pressure of the dire Impossible

Urging to possible ends the active soul

And shaping so its terror and its love.

Why, you have said it — threats and promises

Depend on each man’s sentience for their force:

All sacred rules, imagined or revealed,

Can have no form or potency apart

From the percipient and emotive mind.

God, duty, love, submission, fellowship,

Must first be framed in man, as music is,

Before they live outside him as a law.

And still they grow and shape themselves anew,

With fuller concentration in their life

Of inward and of outward energies.

Blending to make the last result called Man,

Which means, not this or that philosopher

Looking through beauty into blankness, not

The swindler who has sent his fruitful lie

By the last telegram: it means the tide

Of needs reciprocal, toil, trust, and love —

The surging multitude of human claims

Which make “a presence not to be put by”

Above the horizon of the general soul.

Is inward reason shrunk to subtleties,

And inward wisdom pining passion-starved? —

The outward Reason has the world in store,

Regenerates passion with the stress of want,

Regenerates knowledge with discovery,

Shows sly rapacious Self a blunderer,

Widens dependence, knits the social whole

In sensible relation more defined.

Do Boards and dirty-handed millionaires

Govern the planetary system ? — sway

The pressure of the Universe ? — decide

That man henceforth shall retrogress to ape,

Emptied of every sympathetic thrill

The All has wrought up in him? dam up henceforth

The flood of human claims as private force

To turn their wheels and make a private hell

For fish-pond to their mercantile domain?

What are they but a parasitic growth

On the vast real and ideal world

Of man and nature blent in one divine?

Why, take your closing dirge — say evil grows

And good is dwindling; science mere decay,

Mere dissolution of ideal wholes

Which through the ages past alone have made

The earth and firmament of human faith;

Say, the small arc of Being we call man

Is near its mergence, what seems growing life

Nought but a hurrying change toward lower types,

The ready rankness of degeneracy.

Well, they who mourn for the world’s dying good

May take their common sorrows for a rock,

On it erect religion and a church,

A worship, rites, and passionate piety —

The worship of the Rest though crucified

And God-forsaken in its dying pangs;

The sacramental rites of fellowship

In common woe; visions that purify

Through admiration and despairing love

Which keep their spiritual life intact

Beneath the murderous clutches of disproof

And feed a martyr-strength.”

“ Religion high! “

(Rosencranz here) ‘‘but with communicants

Few as the cedars upon Lebanon —

A child might count them. What the world demands

Is faith coercive of the multitude.”

“ Tush, Guildenstern, you granted him too much,”

Burst in Laertes; “I will never grant

One inch of law to feeble blasphemies

Which hold no higher ratio to life —

Full vigorous human life that peopled earth

And wrought and fought and loved and bravely died —

Than the sick morning glooms of debauchees.

Old nations breed old children, wizened babes

Whose youth is languid and incredulous,

Weary of life without the will to die;

Their passions visionary appetites

Of bloodless spectres wailing that the world

Far lack of substance slips from out their grasp;

Their thoughts the withered husks of all things dead,

Holding no force of germs instinct with life,

Which never hesitates but moves and grows.

Yet hear them boast in screams their godlike ill,

Excess of knowing! Fie on you, Rosencranz!

You lend your brains and fine-dividing tongue

For bass-notes to this shrivelled crudity,

This immature decrepitude that strains

To fill our ears and claim the prize of strength

For mere unmanliness. Out on them all! —

Wits, puling minstrels, and philosophers,

Who living softly prate of suicide,

And suck the commonwealth to feed their ease

While they vent epigrams and threnodies,

Mocking or wailing all the eager work.

Which makes that public store whereon they feed.

Is wisdom flattened sense and mere distaste?

Why, any superstition warm with love,

Inspired with purpose, wild with energy

That streams resistless through its ready frame,

Has more of human truth within its life

Than souls that look through colour into naught —

Whose brain, too unimpassioned for delight,

Has feeble ticklings of a vanity

Which finds the universe beneath its mark,

And scorning the blue heavens as merely blue

Can only say, ‘ What then ? ‘ — pre-eminent

In wondrous want of likeness to their kind,

Founding that worship of sterility

Whose one supreme is vacillating Will

Which makes the Light, then says, ‘ ‘T were better not.’“

Here rash Laertes brought his Handel-strain

As of some angry Polypheme, to pause;

And Osric, shocked at ardours out of taste,

Relieved the audience with a tenor voice

And delicate delivery.

“ For me,

I range myself in line with Rosencranz

Against all schemes, religious or profane,

That flaunt a Good as pretext for a lash

To flog us all who have the better taste,

Into conformity, requiring me

At peril of the thong and sharp disgrace

To care how mere Philistines pass their lives;

Whether the English pauper-total grows

From one to two before the naughts; how far

Teuton will outbreed Roman; if the class

Of Proletaires will make a federal band

To bind all Europe and America,

Throw, in their wrestling, every government,

Snatch the world’s purse and keep the guillotine:

Or else (admitting these are casualties)