Great Galileo with his optic tube
A century ago, displaced this Earth
From apprehension's Centre, and made out
The planets' swimming circles and the Sun
And beyond that, motion of infinite space
Sphere upon sphere, in which our spinning world
Green grass and yellow desert, mountains white
And whelming depths of bluest sea, is but
A speck in a kind of star-broth, rightly seen.
They would have burned him for his saying so,
Save that the sage, in fear of God and strong
In hope of life, gainsaid his own surmise,
Submitted him to doctors of the Church
Who deal in other truths and mysteries.
It was one step, I say, to displace Man
From the just centre of the sum of things-
But quite another step to strike at God
Who made us as we are, so fearfully
And wonderfully made our intellects,
Our tireless quest to know, but also made
Our fmitude, within His Mystery,
His soft, dark, infinite space, wherein we rest
When all our questions finish and our brain
Dies into weeping, as my own taxed mind
Died in dissecting the Ephemera.
I found their forms, those dancing specks of life,
The one-day flies, I gave my years to them,
Who live one day's space, never know the night.
I ask myself, did Galileo know
Fear, when he saw the gleaming globes in space,
Like unto mine, whose lens revealed to me-
Not the chill glory of Heaven's Infinite-
But all the swarming, all the seething motes
The basilisks, the armoured cockatrice,
We cannot see, but are in their degrees-
Why not?-to their own apprehension-
I dare not speak it-why not microcosms
As much as Man, poor man, whose ruffled pride
Cannot abide the Infinite's questioning
From smallest as from greatest?
[Desunt cetera. ]
Chapter 12
What is a House? So strong-so square
Making a Warmth inside the Winds
We walk with lowered eyelids there
And silent go-behind the blinds
Yet hearts may tap like loaded bombs
Yet brains may shrill in carpet-hush
And windows fly from silent rooms
And walls break outwards-with a rush-
-CHRISTABEL LAMOTTE
They stood on the pavement and looked up at the carved letters over the porch: BETHANY. It was a sunny day in April. They were awkward with each other, standing at a distance. The house was spick and span, three storeys high, with sash windows. Prettily sprigged curtains hung on carved wooden rings from a brass rail. Inside the front window a maidenhair fern stood in a large Minton pot. On the front door, painted a deep Delft blue, hung a sinuous brass dolphin door-knocker. There were buds on the roses and a sea of forget-me-nots at their feet. There was a frieze of bricks with moulded sunflowers between storeys. Every brick breathed fresh air; each had been stripped and drenched with blow-torch and high-speed jet, so that the house lay revealed beneath its original skin. "It's a good restoration job," said Maud. "It makes you feel funny. A simulacrum."
"Like a fibre-glass copy of the sphinx."
"Exactly. You can just see a very Victorian fireplace in there. I can't tell if it's an original or a vamped-up one from a demolition lot."
They looked up at the bland or blind face of Bethany.
"It would have been sootier. It would have looked older. When it was younger."
"A postmodern quotation-" There was a porch now, with the first tendrils of a very new clematis advancing up it, a porch of new white wooden arches, a miniature bower.
Out of here she had come, stepping rapidly, in a swirl of determined black skirts, lips tight with determination, hands compressed on her reticule, eyes wide with fear, with hope, wild, how? Had he come down the road from St Matthias Church, in his tall hat and his frock coat? Had she, the other, peered through her rimmed glasses from an upper window, her eyes blurring?
"I've never been much interested in places-or things-with associations-"
"Nor I. I'm a textual scholar. I rather deplore the modern feminist attitude to private lives."
"If you're going to be stringently analytical," Roland said, "don't you have to?"
"You can be psychoanalytic without being personal-"Maud said. Roland did not challenge her. It was he who had suggested they come to Richmond to discuss what to do next, and now they were here, the sight of the little house was indeed disturbing. He suggested that they go into the church at the end of the road, a huge Victorian barn, containing modern glass-walled galleries and a quiet coffee bar. The church was full of children's activities, prancing and bedizened clowns, fairies and ballerinas, easels and scraping violins and piping recorders. They settled in the coffee bar, in a reminiscent patch of stained-glass light.
Nothing had been heard from Sir George since they had despatched their fervent thank-yous in January. Maud had taught a difficult term. Roland had applied for jobs-one in Hong Kong, one in Barcelona, one in Amsterdam. He had little hope of these-he had once seen a copy of Blackadder's standard reference for him, lying around in the Ash factory, which praised his diligence and thoroughness and caution, making him sound thoroughly dull. They had agreed, Roland and Maud, to say nothing to anyone, and to do nothing until they either heard from Sir George or saw each other again.
Roland had said to Maud, on that last cold day in Lincoln, that it looked as though perhaps Christabel had contemplated accompanying Randolph on his natural history expedition to North Yorkshire in June 1859. This had seemed obvious to him; he had not taken into account Maud's complete lack of knowledge of R. H. Ash's movements. He elaborated. Ash had been gone for a month, travelling alone, walking along shores and cliffs, studying geology and marine life. He was to have been accompanied by Francis Tugwell, the clergyman author of Anemones of the British Coast, but illness had prevented Mr Tugwell from coming. Critics ascribed to this studious month, Roland told Maud, a shift in the subject-matter of Ash's poetry, from history to natural history, so to speak. Roland himself did not subscribe to this view. It was part of a general intellectual movement at the time. The Origin of Species was published in 1859. Ash's friend Michelet, the great historian, had at this time taken to nature study and had written four books related to the four elements-La Mer (water), La Montagne (earth), L'Oiseau (air), and L'Insecte (fire, since insects lived in the hot underneath). Ash's "natural" poems were like these, or like Turner's late great paintings of elemental light.