The Essays of "George Eliot": CompleteEliot, George
History
The Essays of "George Eliot": Complete
Eliot, George
Literature -- History and criticism
his eye, bedewed with love, rested, too, with something of ancestral
pride, on the undimmed motto of the family—‘LOIAUTE.’”
The slightest matters have their vulgarity fumigated out of them by the
same elevated style. Commonplace people would say that a copy of
Shakespeare lay on a drawing-room table; but the authoress of “The
Enigma,” bent on edifying periphrasis, tells you that there lay on the
table, “that fund of human thought and feeling, which teaches the heart
through the little name, ‘Shakespeare.’” A watchman sees a light burning
in an upper window rather longer than usual, and thinks that people are
foolish to sit up late when they have an opportunity of going to bed;
but, lest this fact should seem too low and common, it is presented to us
in the following striking and metaphysical manner: “He marvelled—as a man
_will_ think for others in a necessarily separate personality,
consequently (though disallowing it) in false mental premise—how
differently _he_ should act, how gladly _he_ should prize the rest so
lightly held of within.” A footman—an ordinary Jeames, with large calves
and aspirated vowels—answers the door-bell, and the opportunity is seized
to tell you that he was a “type of the large class of pampered menials,
who follow the curse of Cain—‘vagabonds’ on the face of the earth, and
whose estimate of the human class varies in the graduated scale of money
and expenditure. . . . These, and such as these, O England, be the false
lights of thy morbid civilization!” We have heard of various “false
lights,” from Dr. Cumming to Robert Owen, from Dr. Pusey to the
Spirit-rappers, but we never before heard of the false light that
emanates from plush and powder.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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