Lord Ormont and His Aminta — Volume 2Meredith, George
General
Lord Ormont and His Aminta — Volume 2
Meredith, George
English fiction -- 19th century
Ideas, new-born and naked original ideas, are acceptable at no time to
the humanity they visit to help uplift, it from the state of beast. In
the England of that, period original or unknown ideas were a smoking
brimstone to the nose, dread Arabian afrites, invisible in the air,
jumping out of vases, armed for the slaughter of the venerable and the
cherished, the ivy-clad and celestially haloed. They carried the
dishevelled Maenad's torch. A step with them, and we were on the
Phlegethon waters of the French Revolution. For a publication of simple
ideas men were seized, tried at law, mulcted, imprisoned, and not
pardoned after the term of punishment; their names were branded: the
horned elect butted at them; he who alluded to them offered them up,
wittingly or not, to be damned in the nose of the public for an
execrable brimstone stench.
Lord Ormont broke through his shouts or grunts at Aminta's report of the
secretary's ideas on various topics, particularly the proposal that the
lords of the land should head the land in a revolutionary effort to make
law of his crazy, top-heavy notions, with a self-satisfied ejaculation:
'He has not favoured me with any of these puffballs of his.'
The deduction was, that the author sagaciously considered them adapted
for the ear of a woman; they were womanish--i.e. flighty, gossamer. To
the host of males, all ideas are female until they are made facts.
This idea, proposing it to our aristocracy to take up his other ideas,
or reject them on pain of the forfeiture of their caste and headship with
the generations to follow, and a total displacing of them in history by
certain notorious, frowzy, scrubby pamphleteers and publishers, Lord
Ormont thought amazingly comical. English nobles heading the weavers,
cobblers, and barbers of England! He laughed, but he said, 'Charlotte
would listen to that.'
The dread, high-sitting Lady Charlotte was, in his lofty thinking,
a woman, and would therefore listen to nonsense, if it happened to
strike a particular set of bells hanging in her cranium. She patronized
blasphemous and traitorous law-breakers, just to keep up the pluck of the
people, not with a notion of maintaining our English aristocracy eminent
in history.
Lady Charlotte, however, would be the foremost to swoop down on the
secretary's ideas about the education of women.
On that subject, Aminta said she did not know what to think.
Now, if a man states the matter he thinks, and a woman does but listen,
whether inclining to agree or not, a perceptible stamp is left on soft
wax. Lord Ormont told her so, with cavalier kindness.
She confessed 'she did not know what to think,' when the secretary
proposed the education and collocation of boys and girls in one group,
never separated, declaring it the only way for them to learn to know and
to respect one another. They were to learn together, play together, have
matches together, as a scheme for stopping the mischief between them.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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