“He could pledge himself to eternity, but shrank from being bound to eleven o’clock on the morrow morning.”
Victor is convinced of his love for Nataly,[232]
“And he tested it to prove it by his readiness to die for her: which is heroically easier than the devotedly living, and has a weight of evidence in our internal Courts for surpassing the latter tedious performance.”
The occasion of the splendid housewarming at Lakelands is made into a text on the perils of feminism. In a crowded hall—[233]
“Chivalry stood. It is a breeched abstraction, sacrificing voluntarily and genially to the Fair, for a restoring of the balance between the sexes, that the division of good things be rather in the fair ones’ favor as they are to think: with the warning to them, that the establishment of their claim for equality puts an end to the priceless privileges of petticoats. Women must be mad, to provoke such a warning; and the majority of them submissively show their good sense.” (“With that innate submissiveness,” speaks up George Eliot, “of the goose, so beautifully corresponding to the strength of the gander.”)
Another evidence of bewildering perversity is equally apposite to the present moment of history. The Austrian Lieutenant Jenna is discoursing on the Italians and the habit of the captured of spending their enforced solitude in writing Memoirs:[234]
“My father said—the stout old Colonel—‘Prisons seem to make these Italians take an interest in themselves.’ ‘Oh!’ says my mother, ‘why can’t they be at peace with us?’ ‘That’s exactly the question,’ says my father, ‘we’re always putting to them.’ And so I say. Why can’t they let us smoke our cigars in peace?”
But England does not lag behind in the matter of the application of the intellect to practical questions. The country squires are excited over the approach of the open game season; moreover,—[235]
“The entire land (signifying all but all of those who occupy the situation of thinkers in it) may be said to have been exhaling the same thought in connection with September. Our England holds possession of a considerable portion of the globe, and it keeps the world in awe to see her bestowing so considerable a portion of intelligence upon her recreations. To prosecute them with her whole heart is an ingenious exhibition of her power.”
It is naturally the fate of the active to suffer from Philistine misapprehension, particularly when the activity is racial:[236]