"What a pity such a woman should be wasted in believing lies!" thought the doctor. "How much better it would be if she would look things in the face, and resolve to live as she can, doing her best and enduring her worst, and waiting for the end! And yet, seeing color is not the thing itself, and only in the brain whose eye looks upon it, why should I think it better? why should she not shine in the color of her fancy? why should she grow gray because the color is only in herself? We are but bubbles flying from the round of Nature's mill-wheel. Our joys and griefs are the colors that play upon the bubbles. Their throbs and ripples and changes are our music and poetry, and their bursting is our endless repose. Let us waver and float and shine in the sun; let us bear pitifully and be kind; for the night cometh, and there an end."
But in the sad silence, he and the lady were perhaps drifting further and further apart!
"I did not mean," he said, plunging into what came first, "that I could not enjoy verse of the kind you prefer—as verse. I took the matter by the more serious handle, because, evidently, you accepted the tone and the scope of it. I have a weakness for honesty."
"There is something not right about you, though, Mr. Faber—if I could find it out," said Miss Meredith. "You can not mean you enjoy any thing you do not believe in?"
"Surely there are many things one can enjoy without believing in them?"
"On the contrary, it seems to me that enjoying a thing is only another word for believing in it. If I thought the sweetest air on the violin had no truth in it, I could not listen to it a moment longer."
"Of course the air has all the truth it pretends to—the truth, that is, of the relations of sounds and of intervals—also, of course, the truth of its relation as a whole to that creative something in the human mind which gave birth to it."
"That is not all it pretends. It pretends that the something it gives birth to in the human mind is also a true thing."
"Is there not then another way also, in which the violin may be said to be true? Its tone throughout is of suffering: does it not mourn that neither what gives rise to it, nor what it gives rise to, is any thing but a lovely vapor—the phantom of an existence not to be lived, only to be dreamed? Does it not mourn that a man, though necessarily in harmony with the laws under which he lives, yet can not be sufficiently conscious of that harmony to keep him from straining after his dream?"
"Ah!" said Miss Meredith, "then there is strife in the kingdom, and it can not stand!"