Lord Ormont and His Aminta — Volume 2 — John Shaqi
Lord Ormont and His Aminta — Volume 2Meredith, George
General
Lord Ormont and His Aminta — Volume 2
Meredith, George
English fiction -- 19th century
Aminta reviewed perforce, dead against her will, certain of the near-to-
happiness ratings over-night. She thinned her lips, and her cheeks
glowed. An arm, on the plea of rescuing, had been round her. The choice
now offered her was, to yield to softness or to think. She took the
latter step, the single step of an unaccustomed foot, which women
educated simply to feet, will, upon extreme impulsion, take; and it held
a candle in a windy darkness. She saw no Justice there. The sensational
immensity touched sublime, short of that spirit of Justice required for
the true sublime. And void of Justice; what a sunless place is any
realm! Infants, the male and the female alike, first begin to know they
feel when it is refused them. When they know they feel, they have begun
to reflect. The void of Justice is a godless region. Women, to whom
the solitary thought has come as a blown candle, illumining the fringes
of their storm, ask themselves whether they are God's creatures or man's.
The question deals a sword-stroke of division between them and their
human masters. Young women, animated by the passions their feeling
bosoms of necessity breed, and under terror discover, do not distinguish
an abstract justice from a concrete. They are of the tribe too long
hereditarily enslaved to conceive an abstract. So it is with them, that
their God is the God of the slave, as it is with all but the bravest of
boys. He is a Thing to cry to, a Punisher, not much of a Supporter--the
Biblical Hebrew's right reading of Nature, favouring man, yet prompt to
confound him, and with woman for the instrument of vengeance. By such a
maze the blindfolded, are brought round to see Justice on earth. If
women can only believe in some soul of justice, they will feel they
belong to God--of the two; and the peril for them then is, that they will
set the one incomprehensible Power in opposition to the other, urging
them unsatisfied natures to make secret appeal away from man and his laws
altogether, at the cost of losing clear sight of the God who shines in
thought. It is a manner whereby the desperately harried among these
creatures of the petted heart arrive upon occasion at an agreeable,
almost reposeful, contemplation of the reverse of God.
There is little pleasure to be on the lecture-rostrum for a narrator
sensible to the pulses of his audience. Justice compels at times. In
truth, there are times when the foggy obscurities of the preacher are by
comparison broad daylight beside the whirling loose tissues of a woman
unexplained. Aminta was one born to prize rectitude, to walk on the
traced line uprightly; and while the dark rose overflowed the soft brown
of her cheeks, under musings upon her unlicenced heart's doings
overnight, she not only pleaded for woeful creatures of her sex burdened
as she and erring, she weighed them in the scales with men, and put her
heart where Justice pointed, sending men to kick aloft.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account