Home Again - George MacDonald

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and never doubt themselves a prize for any woman. They color their notion of themselves with their ideal, and then mistake the one for the other. The mass of weaknesses and conceits that compose their being they compress into their ideal mold of man, and then regard the shape as their own. What composes it they do not heed.

      No man, however, could look in the refined face of Walter Colman and imagine him cherishing sordid views of life. Asked what of all things he most admired, he might truly answer, “The imaginative intellect.” He was a fledgling poet. He worshiped what he called thoughts, would rave about a thought in the abstract, apostrophize an uncaught idea. When a concrete thinkable one fell to him, he was jubilant over the isolate thing, and with his joy value had nothing to do. He would stand wrapped in the delight of what he counted its beauty, and yet more in the delight that his was the mind that had generated such a meteor! To be able to think pretty things was to him a gigantic distinction! A thought that could never be soul to any action, would be more valuable to him than the perception of some vitality of relation demanding the activity of the whole being. He would call thoughts the stars that glorify the firmament of humanity, but the stars of his firmament were merely atmospheric—pretty fancies, external likenesses. That the grandest thing in the world is to be an accepted poet, is the despotic craze of a vast number of the weak-minded and half-made of both sexes. It feeds poetic fountains of plentiful yield, but insipid and enfeebling flow, the mere sweat of weakness under the stimulus of self-admiration.

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      Walter was the very antipode of the Molly he counted commonplace, one outside the region of poetry; she had a passion for turning a think into a thing. She had a strong instinctive feeling that she was in the world to do something, and she saw that if nobody tried to keep things right, they would go terribly wrong: what then could she be there for but to set or keep things right! and if she could do nothing with the big things, she must be the busier with the little things! Besides, who could tell how much the little might have to do with the big things! The whole machine depended on every tiny wheel! She could not order the clouds, but she could keep some weeds from growing, and then when the rain came, they would not take away the good of it!

      The world might be divided into those who let things go, and those who do not; into the forces and facts, the slaves and fancies; those who are always doing something on God’s creative lines, and those that are always grumbling and striving against them.

      “Another penny for your thought, Walter!” said Molly.

      “I am not going to deal with you. This time you would not think it worth a penny! Why are you so inquisitive about my thoughts?”

      “I want to know what you meant when you said the other day that thoughts were better than things.”

      Walter hesitated. The question was an inclined plane leading to unknown depths of argument!

      “See, Walter,” said Molly, “here is a narcissus—a pheasant’s eye: tell me the thought that is better than this thing!”

      How troublesome girls were when they asked questions!

      “Well,” he said, not very logically, “that narcissus has nothing but air around it; my thought of the narcissus has mind around it.”

      “Then a thought is better than a thing because it has thought round about it?”

      “Well, yes.”

      “Did the thing come there of itself, or did it come of God’s thinking?”

      “Of God’s thinking.”

      “And God is always the same?”

      “Yes.”

      “Then God’s thought is about the narcissus still—and the narcissus is better than your thought of it!”

      Walter was silent.

      “I should so like to understand!” said Molly. “If you have a thought more beautiful than the narcissus, Walter, I should like to see it! Only if I could see it, it would be a thing, would it not? A thing must be a think before it be a thing. A thing is a ripe think, and must be better than a think—except it lose something in ripening—which may very well be with man’s thoughts, but hardly with God’s! I will keep in front of the things, and look through them to the thoughts behind them. I want to understand! If a thing were not a thought first, it would not be worth anything! And everything has to be thought about, else we don’t see what it is! I haven’t got it quite!”

      Instead of replying, Walter rose, and they walked to the house side by side in silence.

      “Could a thought be worth anything that God had never cared to think?” said Molly to herself as they went.

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      Mr. Colman and his adopted daughter were fast friends—so fast and so near that they could talk together about Walter, though but the adoptive brother of the one, and the real son of the other. Richard had inherited, apparently, his wife’s love to Molly, and added to it his own; but their union had its root in the perfect truthfulness of the two. Real approximation, real union must ever be in proportion to mutual truthfulness. It was quite after the usual fashion, therefore, between them, when Molly began, to tell her father about the conversation she had had with Walter.

      “What first made you think, Molly, of such a difference between thoughts and things?” asked Mr. Colman.

      “I know quite well,” answered Molly. “You remember our visit to your old school-friend, Mr. Dobson?”

      “Of course; perfectly.”

      Mr. Dobson was a worthy clergyman, doing his weary best in a rural parish.

      “And you remember Mrs. Evermore?”

      “Yes.”

      “You thought her name a funny one; but you said it ought to have been ‘Nevermore,’’ because she seemed never to get any further!”

      “Come, come, Molly! that won’t do! It was you, not I, that said such a spiteful thing!” “It was true any way!” answered Molly; “and you agreed with me; so if I said it first, you said it last! Well, I had to study this Mrs. Evermore. From morning to night she was evermore on the hunt after new fancies. She watched for them, stalked them, followed them like a boy with a butterfly-net She caught them too, of the sort she wanted, plentifully. But none ever came to anything, so far as I could see. She never did anything with one of them. Whatever she caught had a cage to itself, where it sat on ‘the all-alone-stone.’ Every other moment, while you and Mr. Dobson were talking, she would cry ‘oh! oh! o—o—oh!’ and pull out her note-book, which was the cork-box in which she pinned her butterflies. She must have had a whole museum of ideas! The most accidental resemblance between words would suffice to start one: after it she would go, catch it, pin it down, and call it a correspondence. Now and then a very pretty notion would fall to her net, and often a silly one; but all were equally game to her. I found her amusing and interesting for two days, but then began to see she only led nothing nowhere. She was touchy, and jealous, and said things that disgusted me; never did anything for anybody; and though she hunted religious ideas most, never seemed to imagine they could have anything to do with her life. It was only the fineness of a good thought even that she seemed to prize. She would startle you any moment by an exclamation of delight at some religious fancy or sentimentality, and down it most go in her book, but it went no further than her book: she was just as common as before, vulgar even, in her judgments of motives and actions. She seemed made for a refined and delicate woman, but not

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