# The poems of George Eliot (Crowell, 1884)/A Minor Prophet

A MINOR PROPHET.
I HAVE a friend, a vegetarian seer, By name Elias Baptist Butterworth, A harmless, bland, disinterested man, Whose ancestors in Cromwell's day believed The Second Advent certain in five years, But when King Charles the Second came instead, Revised their date and sought another world: I mean—not heaven but—America. A fervid stock, whose generous hope embraced The fortunes of mankind, not stopping short At rise of leather, or the fall of gold, Nor listening to the voices of the time As housewives listen to a cackling hen, With wonder whether she has laid her egg On their own nest-egg. Still they did insist Somewhat too wearisomely on the joys Of their Millennium, when coats and hats Would all be of one pattern, books and songs All fit for Sundays, and the casual talk As good as sermons preached extempore.
And in Elias the ancestral zeal Breathes strong as ever, only modified By Transatlantic air and modern thought. You could not pass him in the street and fail To note his shoulders' long declivity. Beard to the waist, swan-neck, and large pale eyes; Or, when he lifts his hat, to mark his hair ​Brushed back to show his great capacity— A full grain's length at the angle of the brow Proving him witty, while the shallower men Only seem witty in their repartees. Not that he 's vain, but that his doctrine needs The testimony of his frontal lobe.
On all points he adopts the latest views; Takes for the key of universal Mind The "levitation" of stout gentlemen; Believes the Rappings are not spirits' work, But the Thought-atmosphere's, a stream of brains In correlated force of raps, as proved By motion, heat, and science generally; The spectrum, for example, which has shown The selfsame metals in the sun as here; So the Thought-atmosphere is everywhere: High truths that glimmered under other names To ancient sages, whence good scholarship Applied to Eleusinian mysteries— The Vedas—Tripitaka—Vendidad— Might furnish weaker proof for weaker minds That Thought was rapping in the hoary past, And might have edified the Greeks by raps At the greater Dionysia, if their ears Had not been filled with Sophoclean verse. And when all Earth is vegetarian— When, lacking butchers, quadrupeds die out, And less Thought-atmosphere is reabsorbed By nerves of insects parasitical, Those higher truths, seized now by higher minds But not expressed (the insects hindering), Will either flash out into eloquence. Or better still, be comprehensible By rappings simply, without need of roots. ​'T is on this theme—the vegetarian world— That good Elias willingly expands: He loves to tell in mildly nasal tones And vowels stretched to suit the widest views, The future fortunes of our infant Earth— When it will be too full of human kind To have the room for wilder animals. Saith he, Sahara will be populous With families of gentlemen retired From commerce in more Central Africa, Who order coolness as we order coal. And have a lobe anterior strong enough To think away the sand-storms. Science thus Will leave no spot on this terraqueous globe Unfit to be inhabited by man. The chief of animals: all meaner brutes Will have been smoked and elbowed out of life. No lions then shall lap Caffrarian pools, Or shake the Atlas with their midnight roar: Even the slow, slime-loving crocodile, The last of animals to take a hint, Will then retire forever from a scene Where public feeling strongly sets against him. Fishes may lead carnivorous lives obscure, But must not dream of culinary rank Or being dished in good society. Imagination in that distant age, Aiming at fiction called historical, Will vainly try to reconstruct the times When it was men's preposterous delight To sit astride live horses, which consumed Materials for incalculable cakes; When there were milkmaids who drew milk from cows With udders kept abnormal for that end Since the rude mythopœic period ​Of Aryan dairymen, who did not blush To call their milkmaid and their daughter one— Helplessly gazing at the Milky Way, Nor dreaming of the astral cocoa-nuts Quite at the service of posterity. 'T is to be feared, though, that the duller boys, Much given to anachronisms and nuts (Elias has confessed boys will be boys), May write a jockey for a centaur, think Europa's suitor was an Irish bull, Æsop a journalist who wrote up Fox, And Bruin a chief swindler upon 'Change. Boys will be boys, but dogs will all be moral, With longer alimentary canals Suited to diet vegetarian. The uglier breeds will fade from memory, Or, being palæontological, Live but as portraits in large learned books, Distasteful to the feelings of an age Nourished on purest beauty. Earth will hold No stupid brutes, no cheerful queernesses, No naïve cunning, grave absurdity. Wart-pigs with tender and parental grunts, Wombats much flattened as to their contour, Perhaps from too much crushing in the ark, But taking meekly that fatality; The serious cranes, unstung by ridicule; Long-headed, short-legged, solemn-looking curs, (Wise, silent critics of a flippant age); The silly straddling foals, the weak-brained geese Hissing fallaciously at sound of wheels— All these rude products will have disappeared Along with every faulty human type. By dint of diet vegetarian All will be harmony of hue and line, ​Bodies and minds all perfect, limbs well-turned, And talk quite free from aught erroneous.
Thus far Elias in his seer's mantle: But at this climax in his prophecy My sinking spirits, fearing to be swamped, Urge me to speak. "High prospects these, my friend, Setting the weak carnivorous brain astretch; We will resume the thread another day." "To-morrow," cries Elias, "at this hour?" "No, not to-morrow—I shall have a cold— At least I feel some soreness—this endemic— Good-by."
No tears are sadder than the smile With which I quit Elias. Bitterly I feel that every change upon this earth Is bought with sacrifice. My yearnings fail To reach that high apocalyptic mount Which shows in bird's-eye view a perfect world, Or enter warmly into other joys Than those of faulty, struggling human kind. That strain upon my soul's too feeble wing Ends in ignoble floundering: I fall Into short-sighted pity for the men Who living in those perfect future times Will not know half the dear imperfect things That move my smiles and tears—will never know The fine old incongruities that raise My friendly laugh; the innocent conceits That like a needless eyeglass or black patch Give those who wear them harmless happiness; The twists and cracks in our poor earthenware, That touch me to more conscious fellowship (I am not myself the finest Parian) ​With my coevals. So poor Colin Clout, To whom raw onion gives prospective zest, Consoling hours of dampest wintry work, Could hardly fancy any regal joys Quite unimpregnate with the onion's scent: Perhaps his highest hopes are not all clear Of waftings from that energetic bulb: 'T is well that onion is not heresy. Speaking in parable, I am Colin Clout. A clinging flavor penetrates my life — My onion is imperfectness: I cleave To nature's blunders, evanescent types Which sages banish from Utopia. "Not worship beauty?" say you. Patience, friend! I worship in the temple with the rest; But by my hearth I keep a sacred nook For gnomes and dwarfs, duck-footed waddling elves Who stitched and hammered for the weary man In days of old. And in that piety I clothe ungainly forms inherited From toiling generations, daily bent At desk, or plough, or loom, or in the mine, In pioneering labors for the world. Nay, I am apt when floundering confused From too rash flight, to grasp at paradox, And pity future men who will not know A keen experience with pity blent, The pathos exquisite of lovely minds Hid in harsh forms—not penetrating them Like fire divine within a common bush Which glows transfigured by the heavenly guest, So that men put their shoes off; but encaged Like a sweet child within some thick-walled cell, Who leaps and fails to hold the window-bars, But having shown a little dimpled hand ​Is visited thenceforth by tender hearts Whose eyes keep watch about the prison walls. A foolish, nay, a wicked paradox! For purest pity is the eye of love Melting at sight of sorrow; and to grieve Because it sees no sorrow, shows a love Warped from its truer nature, turned to love Of merest habit, like the miser's greed. But I am Colin still: my prejudice Is for the flavor of my daily food. Not that I doubt the world is growing still As once it grew from Chaos and from Night; Or have a soul too shrunken for the hope Which dawned in human breasts, a double morn, With earliest watchings of the rising light Chasing the darkness; and through many an age Has raised the vision of a future time That stands an Angel with a face all mild Spearing the demon. I too rest in faith That man's perfection is the crowning flower, Toward which the urgent sap in life's great tree Is pressing—seen in puny blossoms now. But in the world's great morrows to expand With broadest petal and with deepest glow.
Yet, see the patched and plodding citizen Waiting upon the pavement with the throng While some victorious world-hero makes Triumphal entry, and the peal of shouts And flash of faces 'neath uplifted hats Run like a storm of joy along the streets! He says, "God bless him!" almost with a sob, As the great hero passes; he is glad The world holds mighty men and mighty deeds; The music stirs his pulses like strong wine, ​The moving splendor touches him with awe— 'T is glory shed around the common weal, And he will pay his tribute willingly, Though with the pennies earned by sordid toil. Perhaps the hero's deeds have helped to bring A time when every honest citizen Shall wear a coat unpatched. And yet he feels More easy fellowship with neighbors there Who look on too; and he will soon relapse From noticing the banners and the steeds To think with pleasure there is just one bun Left in his pocket, that may serve to tempt The wide-eyed lad, whose weight is all too much For that young mother's arms: and then he falls To dreamy picturing of sunny days When he himself was a small big-cheeked lad In some far village where no heroes came, And stood a listener 'twixt his father's legs In the warm firelight, while the old folk talked And shook their heads and looked upon the floor; And he was puzzled, thinking life was fine— The bread and cheese so nice all through the year And Christmas sure to come. Oh that good time! He, could he choose, would have those days again And see the dear old-fashioned things once more. But soon the wheels and drums have all passed by And tramping feet are heard like sudden rain: The quiet startles our good citizen; He feels the child upon his arms, and knows He is with the people making holiday Because of hopes for better days to come. But Hope to him was like the brilliant west Telling of sunrise in a world unknown, And from that dazzling curtain of bright hues He turned to the familiar face of fields ​Lying all clear in the calm morning land. Maybe 't is wiser not to fix a lens Too scrutinizing on the glorious times When Barbarossa shall arise and shake His mountain, good King Arthur come again, And all the heroes of such giant soul That, living once to cheer mankind with hope, They had to sleep until the time was ripe For greater deeds to match their greater thought. Yet no! the earth yields nothing more Divine Than high prophetic vision—than the Seer Who fasting from man's meaner joy beholds The paths of beauteous order, and constructs A fairer type, to shame our low content. But prophecy is like potential sound Which turned to music seems a voice sublime From out the soul of light; but turns to noise In scrannel pipes, and makes all ears averse.
The faith that life on earth is being shaped To glorious ends, that order, justice, love, Mean man's completeness, mean effect as sure As roundness in the dew-drop—that great faith Is but the rushing and expanding stream Of thought, of feeling, fed by all the past. Our finest hope is finest memory, As they who love in age think youth is blest Because it has a life to fill with love. Full souls are double mirrors, making still An endless vista of fair things before Repeating things behind: so faith is strong Only when we are strong, shrinks when we shrink. It comes when music stirs us, and the chords Moving on some grand climax shake our souls With influx new that makes new energies. ​It comes in swellings of the heart and tears That rise at noble and at gentle deeds— At labors of the master-artist's hand Which, trembling, touches to a finer end, Trembling before an image seen within. It comes in moments of heroic love, Unjealous joy in joy not made for us— In conscious triumph of the good within Making us worship goodness that rebukes. Even our failures are a prophecy, Even our yearnings and our bitter tears After that fair and true we cannot grasp; As patriots who seem to die in vain Make liberty more sacred by their pangs.
Presentiment of better things on earth Sweeps in with every force that stirs our souls To admiration, self-renouncing love, Or thoughts, like light, that bind the world in one,— Sweeps like the sense of vastness, when at night We hear the roll and dash of waves that break Nearer and nearer with the rushing tide, Which rises to the level of the cliff Because the wide Atlantic rolls behind, Throbbing respondent to the far-off orbs.
1865