Complete Project Gutenberg Works of George Meredith eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 10,116 pages of information about Complete Project Gutenberg Works of George Meredith.

Complete Project Gutenberg Works of George Meredith eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 10,116 pages of information about Complete Project Gutenberg Works of George Meredith.

Ah then, seek to be loved, and banish Bull.  Believe in a future and banish that gross obscuration of you.  Decline to let that old-yeoman-turned alderman stand any longer for the national man.  Speaking to the brain of the country, one is sure of the power of a resolute sign from it to dismiss the brainless.  Banish him your revels and your debatings, prohibit him your Christmas, lend no ear either to his panics or his testiness, especially none to his rages; do not report him at all, and he will soon subside into his domestic, varied by pothouse, privacy.  The brain should lead, if there be a brain.  Once free of him, you will know that for half a century you have appeared bottom upward to mankind.  And you have wondered at the absence of love for you under so astounding a presentation.  Even in a Bull, beneficent as he can dream of being, when his notions are in a similar state of inversion, should be sheepish in hope for love.

He too, whom you call the Welshman, and deride for his delight in songful gatherings, harps to wild Wales, his Cambrian highlands, and not to England.  You have not yet, though he is orderly and serviceable, allured his imagination to the idea of England.  Despite the passion for his mountains and the boon of your raising of the interdict (within a hundred years) upon his pastors to harangue him in his native tongue, he gladly ships himself across the waters traversed by his Prince Madoc of tradition, and becomes contentedly a transatlantic citizen, a member of strange sects—­he so inveterate in faithfulness to the hoar and the legendary!—­Anything rather than Anglican.  The Cymry bear you no hatred; their affection likewise is undefined.  But there is reason to think that America has caught the imagination of the Cambrian Celt:  names of Welshmen are numerous in the small army of the States of the Union; and where men take soldier-service they are usually fixed, they and their children.  Here is one, not very deeply injured within a century, of ardent temperament, given to be songful and loving; he leaves you and forgets you.  Be certain that the material grounds of division are not all.  To pronounce it his childishness provokes the retort upon your presented shape.  He cannot admire it.  Gaelic Scots wind the same note of repulsion.

And your poets are in a like predicament.  Your poets are the most persuasive of springs to a lively general patriotism.  They are in the Celtic dilemma of standing at variance with Bull; they return him his hearty antipathy, are unable to be epical or lyrical of him, are condemned to expend their genius upon the abstract, the quaint, the picturesque.  Nature they read spiritually or sensually, always shrinkingly apart from him.  They swell to a resemblance of their patron if they stoop to woo his purse.  He has, on hearing how that poets bring praise to nations, as in fact he can now understand his Shakespeare to have done, been seen to thump the midriff and rally

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Complete Project Gutenberg Works of George Meredith from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.