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A POEM.
Foolscap 8vo. 6s.
CHAPMAN AND HALL, 193, PICCADILLY.
Ending, therefore, and preparing once more to quit England, I venture
to leave in your hands this book, the most mature of my works, and the
one into which my highest convictions upon Life and Art have entered:
that as, through my various efforts in literature and steps in life,
you have believed in me, borne with me, and been generous to me, far
beyond the common uses of mere relationship or sympathy of mind, so you
may kindly accept, in sight of the public, this poor sign of esteem,
gratitude, and affection, from
Of writing many books there is no end;
And I who have written much in prose and verse
For others’ uses, will write now for mine,—
Will write my story for my better self,
As when you paint your portrait for a friend,
Who keeps it in a drawer and looks at it
Long after he has ceased to love you, just
To hold together what he was and is.
I, writing thus, am still what men call young;
I have not so far left the coasts of life
To travel inland, that I cannot hear
That murmur of the outer Infinite
Which unweaned babies smile at in their sleep
When wondered at for smiling; not so far,
But still I catch my mother at her post
Beside the nursery-door, with finger up,
‘Hush, hush—here’s too much noise!’ while her sweet eyes
Leap forward, taking part against her word
[2]
In the child’s riot. Still I sit and feel
My father’s slow hand, when she had left us both,
Stroke out my childish curls across his knee;
And hear Assunta’s daily jest (she knew
He liked it better than a better jest)
Inquire how many golden scudi went
To make such ringlets. O my father’s hand,
Stroke the poor hair down, stroke it heavily,—
Draw, press the child’s head closer to thy knee!
I’m still too young, too young, to sit alone.
I write. My mother was a Florentine,
Whose rare blue eyes were shut from seeing me
When scarcely I was four years old; my life,
A poor spark snatched up from a failing lamp
Which went out therefore. She was weak and frail;
She could not bear the joy of giving life—
The mother’s rapture slew her. If her kiss
Had left a longer weight upon my lips,
It might have steadied the uneasy breath,
And reconciled and fraternised my soul
With the new order. As it was, indeed,
I felt a mother-want about the world,
And still went seeking, like a bleating lamb
Left out at night, in shutting up the fold,—
As restless as a nest-deserted bird
Grown chill through something being away, though what
It knows not. I, Aurora Leigh, was born
To make my father sadder, and myself
Not overjoyous, truly. Women know
[3]
The way to rear up children, (to be just,)
They know a simple, merry, tender knack
Of tying sashes, fitting baby-shoes,
And stringing pretty words that make no sense,
And kissing full sense into empty words;
Which things are corals to cut life upon,
Although such trifles: children learn by such,
Love’s holy earnest in a pretty play,
And get not over-early solemnised,—
But seeing, as in a rose-bush, Love’s Divine,
Which burns and hurts not,—not a single bloom,—
Become aware and unafraid of Love.
Such good do mothers. Fathers love as well
—Mine did, I know,—but still with heavier brains,
And wills more consciously responsible,
And not as wisely, since less foolishly;
So mothers have God’s licence to be missed.
My father was an austere Englishman,
Who, after a dry life-time spent at home
In college-learning, law, and parish talk,
Was flooded with a passion unaware,
His whole provisioned and complacent past
Drowned out from him that moment. As he stood
In Florence, where he had come to spend a month
And note the secret of Da Vinci’s drains,
He musing somewhat absently perhaps
Some English question ... whether men should pay
The unpopular but necessary tax
With left or right hand—in the alien sun
[4]
In that great square of the Santissima,
There drifted past him (scarcely marked enough
To move his comfortable island-scorn,)
A train of priestly banners, cross and psalm,—
The white-veiled rose-crowned maidens holding up
Tall tapers, weighty for such wrists, aslant
To the blue luminous tremor of the air,
And letting drop the white wax as they went
To eat the bishop’s wafer at the church;
From which long trail of chanting priests and girls,
A face flashed like a cymbal on his face,
And shook with silent clangour brain and heart,
Transfiguring him to music. Thus, even thus,
He too received his sacramental gift
With eucharistic meanings; for he loved.
And thus beloved, she died. I’ve heard it said
That but to see him in the first surprise
Of widower and father, nursing me,
Unmothered little child of four years old,
His large man’s hands afraid to touch my curls,
As if the gold would tarnish,—his grave lips
Contriving such a miserable smile,
As if he knew needs must, or I should die,
And yet ’twas hard,—would almost make the stones
Cry out for pity. There’s a verse he set
In Santa Croce to her memory,
‘Weep for an infant too young to weep much
When death removed this mother’—stops the mirth
To-day, on women’s faces when they walk
[5]
With rosy children hanging on their gowns,
Under the cloister, to escape the sun
That scorches in the piazza. After which,
He left our Florence, and made haste to hide
Himself, his prattling child, and silent grief,
Among the mountains above Pelago;
Because unmothered babes, he thought, had need
Of mother nature more than others use,
And Pan’s white goats, with udders warm and full
Of mystic contemplations, come to feed
Poor milkless lips of orphans like his own—
Such scholar-scraps he talked, I’ve heard from friends,
For even prosaic men, who wear grief long,
Will get to wear it as a hat aside
With a flower stuck in’t. Father, then, and child,
We lived among the mountains many years,
God’s silence on the outside of the house,
And we, who did not speak too loud, within;
And old Assunta to make up the fire,
Crossing herself whene’er a sudden flame
Which lightened from the firewood, made alive
That picture of my mother on the wall.
The painter drew it after she was dead;
And when the face was finished, throat and hands,
Her cameriera carried him, in hate
Of the English-fashioned shroud, the last brocade
She dressed in at the Pitti. ‘He should paint
No sadder thing than that,’ she swore, ‘to wrong
Her poor signora.’ Therefore very strange
The effect was. I, a little child, would crouch
[6]
For hours upon the floor, with knees drawn up,
And gaze across them, half in terror, half
In adoration, at the picture there,—
That swan-like supernatural white life,
Just sailing upward from the red stiff silk
Which seemed to have no part in it, nor power
To keep it from quite breaking out of bounds:
For hours I sate and stared. Assunta’s awe
And my poor father’s melancholy eyes
Still pointed that way. That way, went my thoughts
When wandering beyond sight. And as I grew
In years, I mixed, confused, unconsciously,
Whatever I last read or heard or dreamed,
Abhorrent, admirable, beautiful,
Pathetical, or ghastly, or grotesque,
With still that face ... which did not therefore change,
But kept the mystic level of all forms
And fears and admirations; was by turns
Ghost, fiend, and angel, fairy, witch, and sprite,—
A dauntless Muse who eyes a dreadful Fate,
A loving Psyche who loses sight of Love,
A still Medusa, with mild milky brows
All curdled and all clothed upon with snakes
Whose slime falls fast as sweat will; or, anon,
Our Lady of the Passion, stabbed with swords
Where the Babe sucked; or, Lamia in her first
Moonlighted pallor, ere she shrunk and blinked,
And, shuddering, wriggled down to the unclean;
Or, my own mother, leaving her last smile
In her last kiss, upon the baby-mouth
[7]
My father pushed down on the bed for that,—
Or my dead mother, without smile or kiss,
Buried at Florence. All which images,
Concentred on the picture, glassed themselves
Before my meditative childhood, ... as
The incoherencies of change and death
Are represented fully, mixed and merged,
In the smooth fair mystery of perpetual Life.
And while I stared away my childish wits
Upon my mother’s picture, (ah, poor child!)
My father, who through love had suddenly
Thrown off the old conventions, broken loose
From chin-bands of the soul, like Lazarus,
Yet had no time to learn to talk and walk
Or grow anew familiar with the sun,—
Who had reached to freedom, not to action, lived,
But lived as one entranced, with thoughts, not aims,—
Whom love had unmade from a common man
But not completed to an uncommon man,—
My father taught me what he had learnt the best
Before he died and left me,—grief and love.
And, seeing we had books among the hills,
Strong words of counselling souls, confederate
With vocal pines and waters,—out of books
He taught me all the ignorance of men,
And how God laughs in heaven when any man
Says ‘Here I’m learned; this, I understand;
In that, I am never caught at fault or doubt.’
He sent the schools to school, demonstrating
[8]
A fool will pass for such through one mistake,
While a philosopher will pass for such,
Through said mistakes being ventured in the gross
And heaped up to a system.
I am like,
They tell me, my dear father. Broader brows
Howbeit, upon a slenderer undergrowth
Of delicate features,—paler, near as grave;
But then my mother’s smile breaks up the whole,
And makes it better sometimes than itself.
So, nine full years, our days were hid with God
Among his mountains. I was just thirteen,
Still growing like the plants from unseen roots
In tongue-tied Springs,—and suddenly awoke
To full life and its needs and agonies,
With an intense, strong, struggling heart beside
A stone-dead father. Life, struck sharp on death,
Makes awful lightning. His last word was, ‘Love—’
‘Love, my child, love, love!’—(then he had done with grief)
‘Love, my child.’ Ere I answered he was gone,
And none was left to love in all the world.
There, ended childhood: what succeeded next
I recollect as, after fevers, men
Thread back the passage of delirium,
Missing the turn still, baffled by the door;
Smooth endless days, notched here and there with knives;
A weary, wormy darkness, spurred i’ the flank
[9]
With flame, that it should eat and end itself
Like some tormented scorpion. Then, at last,
I do remember clearly, how there came
A stranger with authority, not right,
(I thought not) who commanded, caught me up
From old Assunta’s neck; how, with a shriek,
She let me go,—while I, with ears too full
Of my father’s silence, to shriek back a word,
In all a child’s astonishment at grief
Stared at the wharfage where she stood and moaned,
My poor Assunta, where she stood and moaned!
The white walls, the blue hills, my Italy,
Drawn backward from the shuddering steamer-deck,
Like one in anger drawing back her skirts
Which suppliants catch at. Then the bitter sea
Inexorably pushed between us both,
And sweeping up the ship with my despair
Threw us out as a pasture to the stars.
Ten nights and days we voyaged on the deep;
Ten nights and days, without the common face
Of any day or night; the moon and sun
Cut off from the green reconciling earth,
To starve into a blind ferocity
And glare unnatural; the very sky
(Dropping its bell-net down upon the sea
As if no human heart should scape alive,)
Bedraggled with the desolating salt,
Until it seemed no more that holy heaven
To which my father went. All new, and strange—
[10]
The universe turned stranger, for a child.
Then, land!—then, England! oh, the frosty cliffs
Looked cold upon me. Could I find a home
Among those mean red houses through the fog?
And when I heard my father’s language first
From alien lips which had no kiss for mine,
I wept aloud, then laughed, then wept, then wept,—
And some one near me said the child was mad
Through much sea-sickness. The train swept us on.
Was this my father’s England? the great isle?
The ground seemed cut up from the fellowship
Of verdure, field from field, as man from man;
The skies themselves looked low and positive,
As almost you could touch them with a hand,
And dared to do it, they were so far off
From God’s celestial crystals; all things, blurred
And dull and vague. Did Shakspeare and his mates
Absorb the light here?—not a hill or stone
With heart to strike a radiant colour up
Or active outline on the indifferent air!
I think I see my father’s sister stand
Upon the hall-step of her country-house
To give me welcome. She stood straight and calm,
Her somewhat narrow forehead braided tight
As if for taming accidental thoughts
From possible pulses; brown hair pricked with grey
By frigid use of life, (she was not old,
Although my father’s elder by a year)
[11]
A nose drawn sharply, yet in delicate lines;
A close mild mouth, a little soured about
The ends, through speaking unrequited loves,
Or peradventure niggardly half-truths;
Eyes of no colour,—once they might have smiled,
But never, never have forgot themselves
In smiling; cheeks, in which was yet a rose
Of perished summers, like a rose in a book,
Kept more for ruth than pleasure,—if past bloom,
Past fading also.
She had lived, we’ll say,
A harmless life, she called a virtuous life,
A quiet life, which was not life at all,
(But that, she had not lived enough to know)
Between the vicar and the county squires,
The lord-lieutenant looking down sometimes
From the empyreal, to assure their souls
Against chance-vulgarisms, and, in the abyss,
The apothecary looked on once a year,
To prove their soundness of humility.
The poor-club exercised her Christian gifts
Of knitting stockings, stitching petticoats,
Because we are of one flesh after all
And need one flannel, (with a proper sense
Of difference in the quality)—and still
The book-club, guarded from your modern trick
Of shaking dangerous questions from the crease,
Preserved her intellectual. She had lived
A sort of cage-bird life, born in a cage,
Accounting that to leap from perch to perch
[12]
Was act and joy enough for any bird.
Dear heaven, how silly are the things that live
In thickets, and eat berries!
I, alas,
A wild bird scarcely fledged, was brought to her cage,
And she was there to meet me. Very kind.
Bring the clean water; give out the fresh seed.
She stood upon the steps to welcome me,
Calm, in black garb. I clung about her neck,—
Young babes, who catch at every shred of wool
To draw the new light closer, catch and cling
Less blindly. In my ears, my father’s word
Hummed ignorantly, as the sea in shells,
‘Love, love, my child.’ She, black there with my grief,
Might feel my love—she was his sister once—
I clung to her. A moment, she seemed moved,
Kissed me with cold lips, suffered me to cling,
And drew me feebly through the hall, into
The room she sate in.
There, with some strange spasm
Of pain and passion, she wrung loose my hands
Imperiously, and held me at arm’s length,
And with two grey-steel naked-bladed eyes
Searched through my face,—ay, stabbed it through and through,
Through brows and cheeks and chin, as if to find
A wicked murderer in my innocent face,
If not here, there perhaps. Then, drawing breath,
She struggled for her ordinary calm,
[13]
And missed it rather,—told me not to shrink,
As if she had told me not to lie or swear,—
‘She loved my father, and would love me too
As long as I deserved it.’ Very kind.
I understood her meaning afterward;
She thought to find my mother in my face,
And questioned it for that. For she, my aunt,
Had loved my father truly, as she could,
And hated, with the gall of gentle souls,
My Tuscan mother, who had fooled away
A wise man from wise courses, a good man
From obvious duties, and, depriving her,
His sister, of the household precedence,
Had wronged his tenants, robbed his native land,
And made him mad, alike by life and death,
In love and sorrow. She had pored for years
What sort of woman could be suitable
To her sort of hate, to entertain it with;
And so, her very curiosity
Became hate too, and all the idealism
She ever used in life, was used for hate,
Till hate, so nourished, did exceed at last
The love from which it grew, in strength and heat,
And wrinkled her smooth conscience with a sense
Of disputable virtue (say not, sin)
When Christian doctrine was enforced at church.
And thus my father’s sister was to me
My mother’s hater. From that day, she did
[14]
Her duty to me, (I appreciate it
In her own word as spoken to herself)
Her duty, in large measure, well-pressed out,
But measured always. She was generous, bland,
More courteous than was tender, gave me still
The first place,—as if fearful that God’s saints
Would look down suddenly and say, ‘Herein
You missed a point, I think, through lack of love.’
Alas, a mother never is afraid
Of speaking angerly to any child,
Since love, she knows, is justified of love.
And I, I was a good child on the whole,
A meek and manageable child. Why not?
I did not live, to have the faults of life:
There seemed more true life in my father’s grave
Than in all England. Since that threw me off
Who fain would cleave, (his latest will, they say,
Consigned me to his land) I only thought
Of lying quiet there where I was thrown
Like sea-weed on the rocks, and suffer her
To prick me to a pattern with her pin,
Fibre from fibre, delicate leaf from leaf,
And dry out from my drowned anatomy
The last sea-salt left in me.
So it was.
I broke the copious curls upon my head
In braids, because she liked smooth-ordered hair.
I left off saying my sweet Tuscan words
Which still at any stirring of the heart
[15]
Came up to float across the English phrase,
As lilies, (Bene ... or che ch’è) because
She liked my father’s child to speak his tongue.
I learnt the collects and the catechism,
The creeds, from Athanasius back to Nice,
The Articles ... the Tracts against the times,
(By no means Buonaventure’s ‘Prick of Love,’)
And various popular synopses of
Inhuman doctrines never taught by John,
Because she liked instructed piety.
I learnt my complement of classic French
(Kept pure of Balzac and neologism,)
And German also, since she liked a range
Of liberal education,—tongues, not books.
I learnt a little algebra, a little
Of the mathematics,—brushed with extreme flounce
The circle of the sciences, because
She misliked women who are frivolous.
I learnt the royal genealogies
Of Oviedo, the internal laws
Of the Burmese empire, ... by how many feet
Mount Chimborazo outsoars Himmeleh,
What navigable river joins itself
To Lara, and what census of the year five
Was taken at Klagenfurt,—because she liked
A general insight into useful facts.
I learnt much music,—such as would have been
As quite impossible in Johnson’s day
As still it might be wished—fine sleights of hand
And unimagined fingering, shuffling off
[16]
The hearer’s soul through hurricanes of notes
To a noisy Tophet; and I drew ... costumes
From French engravings, nereids neatly draped,
With smirks of simmering godship,—I washed in
From nature, landscapes, (rather say, washed out.)
I danced the polka and Cellarius,
Spun glass, stuffed birds, and modelled flowers in wax,
Because she liked accomplishments in girls.
I read a score of books on womanhood
To prove, if women do not think at all,
They may teach thinking, (to a maiden-aunt
Or else the author)—books demonstrating
Their right of comprehending husband’s talk
When not too deep, and even of answering
With pretty ‘may it please you,’ or ‘so it is,’—
Their rapid insight and fine aptitude,
Particular worth and general missionariness,
As long as they keep quiet by the fire
And never say ‘no’ when the world says ‘ay,’
For that is fatal,—their angelic reach
Of virtue, chiefly used to sit and darn,
And fatten household sinners,—their, in brief,
Potential faculty in everything
Of abdicating power in it: she owned
She liked a woman to be womanly,
And English women, she thanked God and sighed,
(Some people always sigh in thanking God)
Were models to the universe. And last
I learnt cross-stitch, because she did not like
To see me wear the night with empty hands,
[17]
A-doing nothing. So, my shepherdess
Was something after all, (the pastoral saints
Be praised for’t) leaning lovelorn with pink eyes
To match her shoes, when I mistook the silks;
Her head uncrushed by that round weight of hat
So strangely similar to the tortoise-shell
Which slew the tragic poet.
By the way,
The works of women are symbolical.
We sew, sew, prick our fingers, dull our sight,
Producing what? A pair of slippers, sir,
To put on when you’re weary—or a stool
To stumble over and vex you ... ‘curse that stool!’
Or else at best, a cushion, where you lean
And sleep, and dream of something we are not,
But would be for your sake. Alas, alas!
This hurts most, this ... that, after all, we are paid
The worth of our work, perhaps.
In looking down
Those years of education, (to return)
I wonder if Brinvilliers suffered more
In the water-torture, ... flood succeeding flood
To drench the incapable throat and split the veins ...
Than I did. Certain of your feebler souls
Go out in such a process; many pine
To a sick, inodorous light; my own endured:
I had relations in the Unseen, and drew
The elemental nutriment and heat
From nature, as earth feels the sun at nights,
Or as a babe sucks surely in the dark.
[18]
I kept the life, thrust on me, on the outside
Of the inner life, with all its ample room
For heart and lungs, for will and intellect,
Inviolable by conventions. God,
I thank thee for that grace of thine!
At first,
I felt no life which was not patience,—did
The thing she bade me, without heed to a thing
Beyond it, sate in just the chair she placed,
With back against the window, to exclude
The sight of the great lime-tree on the lawn,
Which seemed to have come on purpose from the woods
To bring the house a message,—ay, and walked
Demurely in her carpeted low rooms,
As if I should not, harkening my own steps,
Misdoubt I was alive. I read her books,
Was civil to her cousin, Romney Leigh,
Gave ear to her vicar, tea to her visitors,
And heard them whisper, when I changed a cup,
(I blushed for joy at that)—‘The Italian child,
For all her blue eyes and her quiet ways,
Thrives ill in England: she is paler yet
Than when we came the last time; she will die.’
‘Will die.’ My cousin, Romney Leigh, blushed too,
With sudden anger, and approaching me
Said low between his teeth—‘You’re wicked now?
You wish to die and leave the world a-dusk
For others, with your naughty light blown out?’
[19]
I looked into his face defyingly.
He might have known, that, being what I was,
’Twas natural to like to get away
As far as dead folk can; and then indeed
Some people make no trouble when they die.
He turned and went abruptly, slammed the door
And shut his dog out.
Romney, Romney Leigh.
I have not named my cousin hitherto,
And yet I used him as a sort of friend;
My elder by few years, but cold and shy
And absent ... tender, when he thought of it,
Which scarcely was imperative, grave betimes,
As well as early master of Leigh Hall,
Whereof the nightmare sate upon his youth
Repressing all its seasonable delights,
And agonising with a ghastly sense
Of universal hideous want and wrong
To incriminate possession. When he came
From college to the country, very oft
He crossed the hills on visits to my aunt,
With gifts of blue grapes from the hothouses,
A book in one hand,—mere statistics, (if
I chanced to lift the cover) count of all
The goats whose beards are sprouting down toward hell,
Against God’s separating judgment-hour.
And she, she almost loved him,—even allowed
That sometimes he should seem to sigh my way;
It made him easier to be pitiful,
And sighing was his gift. So, undisturbed
[20]
At whiles she let him shut my music up
And push my needles down, and lead me out
To see in that south angle of the house
The figs grow black as if by a Tuscan rock,
On some light pretext. She would turn her head
At other moments, go to fetch a thing,
And leave me breath enough to speak with him,
For his sake; it was simple.
Sometimes too
He would have saved me utterly, it seemed,
He stood and looked so.
Once, he stood so near
He dropped a sudden hand upon my head
Bent down on woman’s work, as soft as rain—
But then I rose and shook it off as fire,
The stranger’s touch that took my father’s place,
Yet dared seem soft.
I used him for a friend
Before I ever knew him for a friend.
’Twas better, ’twas worse also, afterward:
We came so close, we saw our differences
Too intimately. Always Romney Leigh
Was looking for the worms, I for the gods.
A godlike nature his; the gods look down,
Incurious of themselves; and certainly
’Tis well I should remember, how, those days,
I was a worm too, and he looked on me.
A little by his act perhaps, yet more
By something in me, surely not my will,
[21]
I did not die. But slowly, as one in swoon,
To whom life creeps back in the form of death,
With a sense of separation, a blind pain
Of blank obstruction, and a roar i’ the ears
Of visionary chariots which retreat
As earth grows clearer ... slowly, by degrees,
I woke, rose up ... where was I? in the world;
For uses, therefore, I must count worth while.
I had a little chamber in the house,
As green as any privet-hedge a bird
Might choose to build in, though the nest itself
Could show but dead-brown sticks and straws; the walls
Were green, the carpet was pure green, the straight
Small bed was curtained greenly, and the folds
Hung green about the window, which let in
The out-door world with all its greenery.
You could not push your head out and escape
A dash of dawn-dew from the honeysuckle,
But so you were baptised into the grace
And privilege of seeing....
First, the lime,
(I had enough, there, of the lime, be sure,—
My morning-dream was often hummed away
By the bees in it;) past the lime, the lawn,
Which, after sweeping broadly round the house,
Went trickling through the shrubberies in a stream
Of tender turf, and wore and lost itself
Among the acacias, over which, you saw
The irregular line of elms by the deep lane
[22]
Which stopped the grounds and dammed the overflow
Of arbutus and laurel. Out of sight
The lane was; sunk so deep, no foreign tramp
Nor drover of wild ponies out of Wales
Could guess if lady’s hall or tenant’s lodge
Dispensed such odours,—though his stick well-crooked
Might reach the lowest trail of blossoming briar
Which dipped upon the wall. Behind the elms,
And through their tops, you saw the folded hills
Striped up and down with hedges, (burly oaks
Projecting from the lines to show themselves)
Through which my cousin Romney’s chimneys smoked
As still as when a silent mouth in frost
Breathes—showing where the woodlands hid Leigh Hall;
While, far above, a jut of table-land,
A promontory without water, stretched,—
You could not catch it if the days were thick,
Or took it for a cloud; but, otherwise
The vigorous sun would catch it up at eve
And use it for an anvil till he had filled
The shelves of heaven with burning thunderbolts,
And proved he need not rest so early:—then,
When all his setting trouble was resolved
To a trance of passive glory, you might see
In apparition on the golden sky
(Alas, my Giotto’s background!) the sheep run
Along the fine clear outline, small as mice
That run along a witch’s scarlet thread.
Not a grand nature. Not my chestnut-woods
[23]
Of Vallombrosa, cleaving by the spurs
To the precipices. Not my headlong leaps
Of waters, that cry out for joy or fear
In leaping through the palpitating pines,
Like a white soul tossed out to eternity
With thrills of time upon it. Not indeed
My multitudinous mountains, sitting in
The magic circle, with the mutual touch
Electric, panting from their full deep hearts
Beneath the influent heavens, and waiting for
Communion and commission. Italy
Is one thing, England one.
On English ground
You understand the letter ... ere the fall,
How Adam lived in a garden. All the fields
Are tied up fast with hedges, nosegay-like;
The hills are crumpled plains,—the plains, parterres,—
The trees, round, woolly, ready to be clipped;
And if you seek for any wilderness
You find, at best, a park. A nature tamed
And grown domestic like a barn-door fowl,
Which does not awe you with its claws and beak,
Nor tempt you to an eyrie too high up,
But which, in cackling, sets you thinking of
Your eggs to-morrow at breakfast, in the pause
Of finer meditation.
Rather say,
A sweet familiar nature, stealing in
As a dog might, or child, to touch your hand
Or pluck your gown, and humbly mind you so
[24]
Of presence and affection, excellent
For inner uses, from the things without.
I could not be unthankful, I who was
Entreated thus and holpen. In the room
I speak of, ere the house was well awake,
And also after it was well asleep,
I sate alone, and drew the blessing in
Of all that nature. With a gradual step,
A stir among the leaves, a breath, a ray,
It came in softly, while the angels made
A place for it beside me. The moon came,
And swept my chamber clean of foolish thoughts.
The sun came, saying, ‘Shall I lift this light
Against the lime-tree, and you will not look?
I make the birds sing—listen!... but, for you,
God never hears your voice, excepting when
You lie upon the bed at nights and weep.’
Then, something moved me. Then, I wakened up
More slowly than I verily write now,
But wholly, at last, I wakened, opened wide
The window and my soul, and let the airs
And out-door sights sweep gradual gospels in,
Regenerating what I was. O Life,
How oft we throw it off and think,—‘Enough,
Enough of life in so much!—here’s a cause
For rupture;—herein we must break with Life,
Or be ourselves unworthy; here we are wronged,
Maimed, spoiled for aspiration: farewell Life!’
[25]
—And so, as froward babes, we hide our eyes
And think all ended.—Then, Life calls to us
In some transformed, apocryphal, new voice,
Above us, or below us, or around....
Perhaps we name it Nature’s voice, or Love’s,
Tricking ourselves, because we are more ashamed
To own our compensations than our griefs:
Still, Life’s voice!—still, we make our peace with Life.
And I, so young then, was not sullen. Soon
I used to get up early, just to sit
And watch the morning quicken in the grey,
And hear the silence open like a flower,
Leaf after leaf,—and stroke with listless hand
The woodbine through the window, till at last
I came to do it with a sort of love,
At foolish unaware: whereat I smiled,—
A melancholy smile, to catch myself
Smiling for joy.
Capacity for joy
Admits temptation. It seemed, next, worth while
To dodge the sharp sword set against my life;
To slip down stairs through all the sleepy house,
As mute as any dream there, and escape
As a soul from the body, out of doors,—
Glide through the shrubberies, drop into the lane,
And wander on the hills an hour or two,
Then back again before the house should stir.
Or else I sate on in my chamber green,
[26]
And lived my life, and thought my thoughts, and prayed
My prayers without the vicar; read my books,
Without considering whether they were fit
To do me good. Mark, there. We get no good
By being ungenerous, even to a book,
And calculating profits ... so much help
By so much reading. It is rather when
We gloriously forget ourselves, and plunge
Soul-forward, headlong, into a book’s profound,
Impassioned for its beauty and salt of truth—
’Tis then we get the right good from a book.
I read much. What my father taught before
From many a volume, Love re-emphasised
Upon the self-same pages: Theophrast
Grew tender with the memory of his eyes,
And Ælian made mine wet. The trick of Greek
And Latin, he had taught me, as he would
Have taught me wrestling or the game of fives
If such he had known,—most like a shipwrecked man
Who heaps his single platter with goats’ cheese
And scarlet berries; or like any man
Who loves but one, and so gives all at once,
Because he has it, rather than because
He counts it worthy. Thus, my father gave;
And thus, as did the women formerly
By young Achilles, when they pinned the veil
Across the boy’s audacious front, and swept
With tuneful laughs the silver-fretted rocks,
He wrapt his little daughter in his large
[27]
Man’s doublet, careless did it fit or no.
But, after I had read for memory,
I read for hope. The path my father’s foot
Had trod me out, which suddenly broke off,
(What time he dropped the wallet of the flesh
And passed) alone I carried on, and set
My child-heart ’gainst the thorny underwood,
To reach the grassy shelter of the trees.
Ah, babe i’ the wood, without a brother-babe!
My own self-pity, like the red-breast bird,
Flies back to cover all that past with leaves.
Sublimest danger, over which none weeps,
When any young wayfaring soul goes forth
Alone, unconscious of the perilous road,
The day-sun dazzling in his limpid eyes,
To thrust his own way, he an alien, through
The world of books! Ah, you!—you think it fine,
You clap hands—‘A fair day!’—you cheer him on,
As if the worst, could happen, were to rest
Too long beside a fountain. Yet, behold,
Behold!—the world of books is still the world;
And worldlings in it are less merciful
And more puissant. For the wicked there
Are winged like angels. Every knife that strikes,
Is edged from elemental fire to assail
A spiritual life. The beautiful seems right
By force of beauty, and the feeble wrong
Because of weakness. Power is justified,
[28]
Though armed against St. Michael. Many a crown
Covers bald foreheads. In the book-world, true,
There’s no lack, neither, of God’s saints and kings,
That shake the ashes of the grave aside
From their calm locks, and undiscomfited
Look stedfast truths against Time’s changing mask.
True, many a prophet teaches in the roads;
True, many a seer pulls down the flaming heavens
Upon his own head in strong martyrdom,
In order to light men a moment’s space.
But stay!—who judges?—who distinguishes
’Twixt Saul and Nahash justly, at first sight,
And leaves king Saul precisely at the sin,
To serve king David? who discerns at once
The sound of the trumpets, when the trumpets blow
For Alaric as well as Charlemagne?
Who judges prophets, and can tell true seers
From conjurors? The child, there? Would you leave
That child to wander in a battle-field
And push his innocent smile against the guns?
Or even in the catacombs, ... his torch
Grown ragged in the fluttering air, and all
The dark a-mutter round him? not a child!
I read books bad and good—some bad and good
At once: good aims not always make good books:
Well-tempered spades turn up ill-smelling soils
In digging vineyards, even: books, that prove
God’s being so definitely, that man’s doubt
Grows self-defined the other side the line,
[29]
Made atheist by suggestion; moral books,
Exasperating to license; genial books,
Discounting from the human dignity;
And merry books, which set you weeping when
The sun shines,—ay, and melancholy books,
Which make you laugh that any one should weep
In this disjointed life, for one wrong more.
The world of books is still the world, I write,
And both worlds have God’s providence, thank God,
To keep and hearten: with some struggle, indeed,
Among the breakers, some hard swimming through
The deeps—I lost breath in my soul sometimes,
And cried, ‘God save me if there’s any God,’
But, even so, God saved me; and, being dashed
From error on to error, every turn
Still brought me nearer to the central truth.
I thought so. All this anguish in the thick
Of men’s opinions ... press and counterpress,
Now up, now down, now underfoot, and now
Emergent ... all the best of it, perhaps,
But throws you back upon a noble trust
And use of your own instinct,—merely proves
Pure reason stronger than bare inference
At strongest. Try it,—fix against heaven’s wall
Your scaling ladders of high logic—mount
Step by step!—Sight goes faster; that still ray
Which strikes out from you, how, you cannot tell,
And why, you know not—(did you eliminate,
[30]
That such as you, indeed, should analyse?)
Goes straight and fast as light, and high as God.
The cygnet finds the water; but the man
Is born in ignorance of his element,
And feels out blind at first, disorganised
By sin i’ the blood,—his spirit-insight dulled
And crossed by his sensations. Presently
We feel it quicken in the dark sometimes;
Then, mark, be reverent, be obedient,—
For those dumb motions of imperfect life
Are oracles of vital Deity
Attesting the Hereafter. Let who says
‘The soul’s a clean white paper,’ rather say,
A palimpsest, a prophet’s holograph
Defiled, erased and covered by a monk’s,—
The apocalypse, by a Longus! poring on
Which obscene text, we may discern perhaps
Some fair, fine trace of what was written once,
Some upstroke of an alpha and omega
Expressing the old scripture.
Books, books, books!
I had found the secret of a garret-room
Piled high with cases in my father’s name;
Piled high, packed large,—where, creeping in and out
Among the giant fossils of my past,
Like some small nimble mouse between the ribs
Of a mastodon, I nibbled here and there
At this or that box, pulling through the gap,
In heats of terror, haste, victorious joy,
[31]
The first book first. And how I felt it beat
Under my pillow, in the morning’s dark,
An hour before the sun would let me read!
My books!
At last, because the time was ripe,
I chanced upon the poets.
As the earth
Plunges in fury, when the internal fires
Have reached and pricked her heart, and, throwing flat
The marts and temples, the triumphal gates
And towers of observation, clears herself
To elemental freedom—thus, my soul,
At poetry’s divine first finger-touch,
Let go conventions and sprang up surprised,
Convicted of the great eternities
Before two worlds.
What’s this, Aurora Leigh,
You write so of the poets, and not laugh?
Those virtuous liars, dreamers after dark,
Exaggerators of the sun and moon,
And soothsayers in a tea-cup?
I write so
Of the only truth-tellers, now left to God,—
The only speakers of essential truth,
Opposed to relative, comparative,
And temporal truths; the only holders by
His sun-skirts, through conventional grey glooms;
The only teachers who instruct mankind,
From just a shadow on a charnel-wall,
To find man’s veritable stature out,
[32]
Erect, sublime,—the measure of a man,
And that’s the measure of an angel, says
The apostle. Ay, and while your common men
Build pyramids, gauge railroads, reign, reap, dine,
And dust the flaunty carpets of the world
For kings to walk on, or our senators,
The poet suddenly will catch them up
With his voice like a thunder ... ‘This is soul,
This is life, this word is being said in heaven,
Here’s God down on us! what are you about?’
How all those workers start amid their work,
Look round, look up, and feel, a moment’s space,
That carpet-dusting, though a pretty trade,
Is not the imperative labour after all.
My own best poets, am I one with you,
That thus I love you,—or but one through love?
Does all this smell of thyme about my feet
Conclude my visit to your holy hill
In personal presence, or but testify
The rustling of your vesture through my dreams
With influent odours? When my joy and pain,
My thought and aspiration, like the stops
Of pipe or flute, are absolutely dumb
If not melodious, do you play on me,
My pipers,—and if, sooth, you did not blow,
Would no sound come? or is the music mine,
As a man’s voice or breath is called his own,
Inbreathed by the Life-breather? There’s a doubt
For cloudy seasons!
[33]
But the sun was high
When first I felt my pulses set themselves
For concords; when the rhythmic turbulence
Of blood and brain swept outward upon words,
As wind upon the alders, blanching them
By turning up their under-natures till
They trembled in dilation. O delight
And triumph of the poet,—who would say
A man’s mere ‘yes,’ a woman’s common ‘no,’
A little human hope of that or this,
And says the word so that it burns you through
With a special revelation, shakes the heart
Of all the men and women in the world,
As if one came back from the dead and spoke,
With eyes too happy, a familiar thing
Become divine i’ the utterance! while for him
The poet, the speaker, he expands with joy;
The palpitating angel in his flesh
Thrills inly with consenting fellowship
To those innumerous spirits who sun themselves
Outside of time.
O life, O poetry,
—Which means life in life! cognisant of life
Beyond this blood-beat,—passionate for truth
Beyond these senses,—poetry, my life,—
My eagle, with both grappling feet still hot
From Zeus’s thunder, who has ravished me
Away from all the shepherds, sheep, and dogs,
And set me in the Olympian roar and round
Of luminous faces, for a cup-bearer,
[34]
To keep the mouths of all the godheads moist
For everlasting laughters,—I, myself,
Half drunk across the beaker, with their eyes!
How those gods look!
Enough so, Ganymede.
We shall not bear above a round or two—
We drop the golden cup at Heré’s foot
And swoon back to the earth,—and find ourselves
Face-down among the pine-cones, cold with dew,
While the dogs bark, and many a shepherd scoffs,
‘What’s come now to the youth?’ Such ups and downs
Have poets.
Am I such indeed? The name
Is royal, and to sign it like a queen,
Is what I dare not,—though some royal blood
Would seem to tingle in me now and then,
With sense of power and ache,—with imposthumes
And manias usual to the race. Howbeit
I dare not: ’tis too easy to go mad,
And ape a Bourbon in a crown of straws;
The thing’s too common.
Many fervent souls
Strike rhyme on rhyme, who would strike steel on steel
If steel had offered, in a restless heat
Of doing something. Many tender souls
Have strung their losses on a rhyming thread,
As children, cowslips:—the more pains they take,
The work more withers. Young men, ay, and maids,
Too often sow their wild oats in tame verse,
Before they sit down under their own vine
[35]
And live for use. Alas, near all the birds
Will sing at dawn,—and yet we do not take
The chaffering swallow for the holy lark.
In those days, though, I never analysed
Myself even. All analysis comes late.
You catch a sight of Nature, earliest,
In full front sun-face, and your eyelids wink
And drop before the wonder of’t; you miss
The form, through seeing the light. I lived, those days,
And wrote because I lived—unlicensed else:
My heart beat in my brain. Life’s violent flood
Abolished bounds,—and, which my neighbour’s field,
Which mine, what mattered? It is so in youth.
We play at leap-frog over the god Term;
The love within us and the love without
Are mixed, confounded; if we are loved or love,
We scarce distinguish. So, with other power.
Being acted on and acting seem the same:
In that first onrush of life’s chariot-wheels,
We know not if the forests move or we.
And so, like most young poets, in a flush
Of individual life, I poured myself
Along the veins of others, and achieved
Mere lifeless imitations of live verse,
And made the living answer for the dead,
Profaning nature. ‘Touch not, do not taste,
Nor handle,’—we’re too legal, who write young:
We beat the phorminx till we hurt our thumbs,
[36]
As if still ignorant of counterpoint;
We call the Muse.... ‘O Muse, benignant Muse!’—
As if we had seen her purple-braided head
With the eyes in it, start between the boughs
As often as a stag’s. What make-believe,
With so much earnest! what effete results,
From virile efforts! what cold wire-drawn odes,
From such white heats!—bucolics, where the cows
Would scare the writer if they splashed the mud
In lashing off the flies,—didactics, driven
Against the heels of what the master said;
And counterfeiting epics, shrill with trumps
A babe might blow between two straining cheeks
Of bubbled rose, to make his mother laugh;
And elegiac griefs, and songs of love,
Like cast-off nosegays picked up on the road,
The worse for being warm: all these things, writ
On happy mornings, with a morning heart,
That leaps for love, is active for resolve,
Weak for art only. Oft, the ancient forms
Will thrill, indeed, in carrying the young blood.
The wine-skins, now and then, a little warped,
Will crack even, as the new wine gurgles in.
Spare the old bottles!—spill not the new wine.
By Keats’s soul, the man who never stepped
In gradual progress like another man,
But, turning grandly on his central self,
Ensphered himself in twenty perfect years
And died, not young,—(the life of a long life,
[37]
Distilled to a mere drop, falling like a tear
Upon the world’s cold cheek to make it burn
For ever;) by that strong excepted soul,
I count it strange, and hard to understand,
That nearly all young poets should write old;
That Pope was sexagenarian at sixteen,
And beardless Byron academical,
And so with others. It may be, perhaps,
Such have not settled long and deep enough
In trance, to attain to clairvoyance,—and still
The memory mixes with the vision, spoils,
And works it turbid.
Or perhaps, again,
In order to discover the Muse-Sphinx,
The melancholy desert must sweep round,
Behind you, as before.—
For me, I wrote
False poems, like the rest, and thought them true,
Because myself was true in writing them.
I, peradventure, have writ true ones since
With less complacence.
But I could not hide
My quickening inner life from those at watch.
They saw a light at a window now and then,
They had not set there. Who had set it there?
My father’s sister started when she caught
My soul agaze in my eyes. She could not say
I had no business with a sort of soul,
But plainly she objected,—and demurred,
That souls were dangerous things to carry straight
[38]
Through all the spilt saltpetre of the world.
She said sometimes, ‘Aurora, have you done
Your task this morning?—have you read that book?
And are you ready for the crochet here?’—
As if she said, ‘I know there’s something wrong;
I know I have not ground you down enough
To flatten and bake you to a wholesome crust
For household uses and proprieties,
Before the rain has got into my barn
And set the grains a-sprouting. What, you’re green
With out-door impudence? you almost grow?’
To which I answered, ‘Would she hear my task,
And verify my abstract of the book?
And should I sit down to the crochet work?
Was such her pleasure?’ ... Then I sate and teased
The patient needle till it spilt the thread,
Which oozed off from it in meandering lace
From hour to hour. I was not, therefore, sad;
My soul was singing at a work apart
Behind the wall of sense, as safe from harm
As sings the lark when sucked up out of sight,
In vortices of glory and blue air.
And so, through forced work and spontaneous work,
The inner life informed the outer life,
Reduced the irregular blood to settled rhythms,
Made cool the forehead with fresh-sprinkling dreams,
And, rounding to the spheric soul the thin
Pined body, struck a colour up the cheeks,
[39]
Though somewhat faint. I clenched my brows across
My blue eyes greatening in the looking-glass,
And said, ‘We’ll live, Aurora! we’ll be strong.
The dogs are on us—but we will not die.’
Whoever lives true life, will love true love.
I learnt to love that England. Very oft,
Before the day was born, or otherwise
Through secret windings of the afternoons,
I threw my hunters off and plunged myself
Among the deep hills, as a hunted stag
Will take the waters, shivering with the fear
And passion of the course. And when, at last
Escaped,—so many a green slope built on slope
Betwixt me and the enemy’s house behind,
I dared to rest, or wander,—like a rest
Made sweeter for the step upon the grass,—
And view the ground’s most gentle dimplement,
(As if God’s finger touched but did not press
In making England!) such an up and down
Of verdure,—nothing too much up or down,
A ripple of land; such little hills, the sky
Can stoop to tenderly and the wheatfields climb;
Such nooks of valleys, lined with orchises,
Fed full of noises by invisible streams;
And open pastures, where you scarcely tell
White daisies from white dew,—at intervals
The mythic oaks and elm-trees standing out
Self-poised upon their prodigy of shade,—
I thought my father’s land was worthy too
[40]
Of being my Shakspeare’s.
Very oft alone,
Unlicensed; not unfrequently with leave
To walk the third with Romney and his friend
The rising painter, Vincent Carrington,
Whom men judge hardly, as bee-bonnetted,
Because he holds that, paint a body well,
You paint a soul by implication, like
The grand first Master. Pleasant walks! for if
He said ... ‘When I was last in Italy’ ...
It sounded as an instrument that’s played
Too far off for the tune—and yet it’s fine
To listen.
Ofter we walked only two,
If cousin Romney pleased to walk with me.
We read, or talked, or quarrelled, as it chanced:
We were not lovers, nor even friends well-matched—
Say rather, scholars upon different tracks,
And thinkers disagreed; he, overfull
Of what is, and I, haply, overbold
For what might be.
But then the thrushes sang,
And shook my pulses and the elms’ new leaves,—
And then I turned, and held my finger up,
And bade him mark that, howsoe’er the world
Went ill, as he related, certainly
The thrushes still sang in it.—At which word
His brow would soften,—and he bore with me
In melancholy patience, not unkind,
While, breaking into voluble ecstacy,
[41]
I flattered all the beauteous country round,
As poets use ... the skies, the clouds, the fields,
The happy violets hiding from the roads
The primroses run down to, carrying gold,—
The tangled hedgerows, where the cows push out
Impatient horns and tolerant churning mouths
’Twixt dripping ash-boughs,—hedgerows all alive
With birds and gnats and large white butterflies
Which look as if the May-flower had caught life
And palpitated forth upon the wind,—
Hills, vales, woods, netted in a silver mist,
Farms, granges, doubled up among the hills,
And cattle grazing in the watered vales,
And cottage-chimneys smoking from the woods,
And cottage-gardens smelling everywhere,
Confused with smell of orchards. ‘See,’ I said,
‘And see! is God not with us on the earth?
And shall we put Him down by aught we do?
Who says there’s nothing for the poor and vile
Save poverty and wickedness? behold!’
And ankle-deep in English grass I leaped,
And clapped my hands, and called all very fair.
In the beginning when God called all good,
Even then, was evil near us, it is writ.
But we, indeed, who call things good and fair,
The evil is upon us while we speak;
Deliver us from evil, let us pray.
[42]
Times followed one another. Came a morn
I stood upon the brink of twenty years,
And looked before and after, as I stood
Woman and artist,—either incomplete,
Both credulous of completion. There I held
The whole creation in my little cup,
And smiled with thirsty lips before I drank,
‘Good health to you and me, sweet neighbour mine,
And all these peoples.’
I was glad, that day;
The June was in me, with its multitudes
Of nightingales all singing in the dark,
And rosebuds reddening where the calyx split.
I felt so young, so strong, so sure of God!
So glad, I could not choose be very wise!
And, old at twenty, was inclined to pull
My childhood backward in a childish jest
To see the face of’t once more, and farewell!
In which fantastic mood I bounded forth
At early morning,—would not wait so long
[44]
As even to snatch my bonnet by the strings,
But, brushing a green trail across the lawn
With my gown in the dew, took will and way
Among the acacias of the shrubberies,
To fly my fancies in the open air
And keep my birthday, till my aunt awoke
To stop good dreams. Meanwhile I murmured on,
As honeyed bees keep humming to themselves;
‘The worthiest poets have remained uncrowned
Till death has bleached their foreheads to the bone,
And so with me it must be, unless I prove
Unworthy of the grand adversity,—
And certainly I would not fail so much.
What, therefore, if I crown myself to-day
In sport, not pride, to learn the feel of it,
Before my brows be numb as Dante’s own
To all the tender pricking of such leaves?
Such leaves! what leaves?’
I pulled the branches down,
To choose from.
‘Not the bay! I choose no bay;
The fates deny us if we are overbold:
Nor myrtle—which means chiefly love; and love
Is something awful which one dares not touch
So early o’ mornings. This verbena strains
The point of passionate fragrance; and hard by,
This guelder-rose, at far too slight a beck
Of the wind, will toss about her flower-apples.
Ah—there’s my choice,—that ivy on the wall,
That headlong ivy! not a leaf will grow
[45]
But thinking of a wreath. Large leaves, smooth leaves,
Serrated like my vines, and half as green.
I like such ivy; bold to leap a height
’Twas strong to climb! as good to grow on graves
As twist about a thyrsus; pretty too,
(And that’s not ill) when twisted round a comb,’
Thus speaking to myself, half singing it,
Because some thoughts are fashioned like a bell
To ring with once being touched, I drew a wreath
Drenched, blinding me with dew, across my brow,
And fastening it behind so, ... turning faced
... My public!—cousin Romney—with a mouth
Twice graver than his eyes.
I stood there fixed—
My arms up, like the caryatid, sole
Of some abolished temple, helplessly
Persistent in a gesture which derides
A former purpose. Yet my blush was flame,
As if from flax, not stone.
‘Aurora Leigh,
The earliest of Auroras!’
Hand stretched out
I clasped, as shipwrecked men will clasp a hand,
Indifferent to the sort of palm. The tide
Had caught me at my pastime, writing down
My foolish name too near upon the sea
Which drowned me with a blush as foolish. ‘You,
My cousin!’
The smile died out in his eyes
[46]
And dropped upon his lips, a cold dead weight,
For just a moment.... ‘Here’s a book, I found!
No name writ on it—poems, by the form;
Some Greek upon the margin,—lady’s Greek,
Without the accents. Read it? Not a word.
I saw at once the thing had witchcraft in’t
Whereof the reading calls up dangerous spirits;
I rather bring it to the witch.’
‘My book!
You found it‘....
‘In the hollow by the stream,
That beech leans down into—of which you said,
The Oread in it has a Naiad’s heart
And pines for waters.’
‘Thank you.’
‘Rather you,
My cousin! that I have seen you not too much
A witch, a poet, scholar, and the rest,
To be a woman also.’
With a glance
The smile rose in his eyes again, and touched
The ivy on my forehead, light as air.
I answered gravely, ‘Poets needs must be
Or men or women—more’s the pity.’
‘Ah,
But men, and still less women, happily,
Scarce need be poets. Keep to the green wreath,
Since even dreaming of the stone and bronze
Brings headaches, pretty cousin, and defiles
The clean white morning dresses.’
[47]
‘So you judge!
Because I love the beautiful, I must
Love pleasure chiefly, and be overcharged
For ease and whiteness! Well—you know the world,
And only miss your cousin; ’tis not much!—
But learn this: I would rather take my part
With God’s Dead, who afford to walk in white
Yet spread His glory, than keep quiet here,
And gather up my feet from even a step,
For fear to soil my gown in so much dust.
I choose to walk at all risks.—Here, if heads
That hold a rhythmic thought, must ache perforce,
For my part, I choose headaches,—and today’s
My birthday.’
‘Dear Aurora, choose instead
To cure such. You have balsams.’
‘I perceive!—
The headache is too noble for my sex.
You think the heartache would sound decenter,
Since that’s the woman’s special, proper ache,
And altogether tolerable, except
To a woman.’
Saying which, I loosed my wreath,
And, swinging it beside me as I walked,
Half petulant, half playful, as we walked,
I sent a sidelong look to find his thought,—
As falcon set on falconer’s finger may,
With sidelong head, and startled, braving eye,
Which means, ‘You’ll see—you’ll see! I’ll soon take flight—
[48]
You shall not hinder.’ He, as shaking out
His hand and answering ‘Fly then,’ did not speak,
Except by such a gesture. Silently
We paced, until, just coming into sight
Of the house-windows, he abruptly caught
At one end of the swinging wreath, and said
‘Aurora!’ There I stopped short, breath and all.
‘Aurora, let’s be serious, and throw by
This game of head and heart. Life means, be sure,
Both heart and head,—both active, both complete,
And both in earnest. Men and women make
The world, as head and heart make human life.
Work man, work woman, since there’s work to do
In this beleaguered earth, for head and heart,
And thought can never do the work of love!
But work for ends, I mean for uses; not
For such sleek fringes (do you call them ends?
Still less God’s glory) as we sew ourselves
Upon the velvet of those baldaquins
Held ’twixt us and the sun. That book of yours,
I have not read a page of; but I toss
A rose up—it falls calyx down, you see!...
The chances are that, being a woman, young,
And pure, with such a pair of large, calm eyes, ...
You write as well ... and ill ... upon the whole,
As other women. If as well, what then?
If even a little better, ... still, what then?
We want the Best in art now, or no art.
The time is done for facile settings up
[49]
Of minnow gods, nymphs here, and tritons there;
The polytheists have gone out in God,
That unity of Bests. No best, no God!—
And so with art, we say. Give art’s divine,
Direct, indubitable, real as grief,—
Or leave us to the grief we grow ourselves
Divine by overcoming with mere hope
And most prosaic patience. You, you are young
As Eve with nature’s daybreak on her face;
But this same world you are come to, dearest coz,
Has done with keeping birthdays, saves her wreaths
To hang upon her ruins,—and forgets
To rhyme the cry with which she still beats back
Those savage, hungry dogs that hunt her down
To the empty grave of Christ. The world’s hard pressed;
The sweat of labour in the early curse
Has (turning acrid in six thousand years)
Become the sweat of torture. Who has time,
An hour’s time ... think!... to sit upon a bank
And hear the cymbal tinkle in white hands?
When Egypt’s slain, I say, let Miriam sing!—
Before ... where’s Moses?’
‘Ah—exactly that!
Where’s Moses?—is a Moses to be found?—
You’ll seek him vainly in the bulrushes,
While I in vain touch cymbals. Yet, concede,
Such sounding brass has done some actual good,
(The application in a woman’s hand,
If that were credible, being scarcely spoilt,)
In colonising beehives.’
[50]
‘There it is!—
You play beside a death-bed like a child,
Yet measure to yourself a prophet’s place
To teach the living. None of all these things,
Can women understand. You generalise
Oh, nothing!—not even grief! Your quick-breathed hearts,
So sympathetic to the personal pang,
Close, on each separate knife-stroke, yielding up
A whole life at each wound; incapable
Of deepening, widening a large lap of life
To hold the world-full woe. The human race
To you means, such a child, or such a man,
You saw one morning waiting in the cold,
Beside that gate, perhaps. You gather up
A few such cases, and, when strong, sometimes
Will write of factories and of slaves, as if
Your father were a negro, and your son
A spinner in the mills. All’s yours and you,—
All, coloured with your blood, or otherwise
Just nothing to you. Why, I call you hard
To general suffering. Here’s the world half blind
With intellectual light, half brutalised
With civilisation, having caught the plague
In silks from Tarsus, shrieking east and west
Along a thousand railroads, mad with pain
And sin too!... does one woman of you all,
(You who weep easily) grow pale to see
This tiger shake his cage?—does one of you
Stand still from dancing, stop from stringing pearls,
And pine and die, because of the great sum
[51]
Of universal anguish?—Show me a tear
Wet as Cordelia’s, in eyes bright as yours,
Because the world is mad! You cannot count,
That you should weep for this account, not you!
You weep for what you know. A red-haired child
Sick in a fever, if you touch him once,
Though but so little as with a finger-tip,
Will set you weeping; but a million sick ...
You could as soon weep for the rule of three,
Or compound fractions. Therefore, this same world
Uncomprehended by you, must remain
Uninfluenced by you.—Women as you are,
Mere women, personal and passionate,
You give us doating mothers, and chaste wives,
Sublime Madonnas, and enduring saints!
We get no Christ from you,—and verily
We shall not get a poet, in my mind.’
‘With which conclusion you conclude’....
‘But this—
That you, Aurora, with the large live brow
And steady eyelids, cannot condescend
To play at art, as children play at swords,
To show a pretty spirit, chiefly admired
Because true action is impossible.
You never can be satisfied with praise
Which men give women when they judge a book
Not as mere work, but as mere woman’s work,
Expressing the comparative respect
Which means the absolute scorn. ‘Oh, excellent!
[52]
What grace! what facile turns! what fluent sweeps!
What delicate discernment ... almost thought!
The book does honour to the sex, we hold.
Among our female authors we make room
For this fair writer, and congratulate
The country that produces in these times
Such women, competent to ... spell.’
‘Stop there!’
I answered—burning through his thread of talk
With a quick flame of emotion,—‘You have read
My soul, if not my book, and argue well
I would not condescend ... we will not say
To such a kind of praise, (a worthless end
Is praise of all kinds) but to such a use
Of holy art and golden life. I am young,
And peradventure weak—you tell me so—
Through being a woman. And, for all the rest,
Take thanks for justice. I would rather dance
At fairs on tight-rope, till the babies dropped
Their gingerbread for joy,—than shift the types
For tolerable verse, intolerable
To men who act and suffer. Better far,
Pursue a frivolous trade by serious means,
Than a sublime art frivolously.’
‘You,
Choose nobler work than either, O moist eyes,
And hurrying lips, and heaving heart! We are young
Aurora, you and I. The world ... look round ...
The world, we’re come to late, is swollen hard
With perished generations and their sins:
[53]
The civiliser’s spade grinds horribly
On dead men’s bones, and cannot turn up soil
That’s otherwise than fetid. All success
Proves partial failure; all advance implies
What’s left behind; all triumph, something crushed
At the chariot-wheels; all government, some wrong:
And rich men make the poor, who curse the rich,
Who agonise together, rich and poor,
Under and over, in the social spasm
And crisis of the ages. Here’s an age,
That makes its own vocation! here, we have stepped
Across the bounds of time! here’s nought to see,
But just the rich man and just Lazarus,
And both in torments; with a mediate gulph,
Though not a hint of Abraham’s bosom. Who,
Being man and human, can stand calmly by
And view these things, and never tease his soul
For some great cure? No physic for this grief,
In all the earth and heavens too?’
‘You believe
In God, for your part?—ay? that He who makes,
Can make good things from ill things, best from worst,
As men plant tulips upon dunghills when
They wish them finest?’
‘True. A death-heat is
The same as life-heat, to be accurate;
And in all nature is no death at all,
As men account of death, as long as God
Stands witnessing for life perpetually,
By being just God. That’s abstract truth, I know,
[54]
Philosophy, or sympathy with God:
But I, I sympathise with man, not God,
I think I was a man for chiefly this;
And when I stand beside a dying bed,
It’s death to me. Observe,—it had not much
Consoled the race of mastodons to know
Before they went to fossil, that anon
Their place should quicken with the elephant;
They were not elephants but mastodons:
And I, a man, as men are now, and not
As men may be hereafter, feel with men
In the agonising present.’
‘Is it so,’
I said, ‘my cousin? is the world so bad,
While I hear nothing of it through the trees?
The world was always evil,—but so bad?’
‘So bad, Aurora. Dear, my soul is grey
With poring over the long sum of ill;
So much for vice, so much for discontent,
So much for the necessities of power,
So much for the connivances of fear,—
Coherent in statistical despairs
With such a total of distracted life, ...
To see it down in figures on a page,
Plain, silent, clear ... as God sees through the earth
The sense of all the graves!... that’s terrible
For one who is not God, and cannot right
The wrong he looks on. May I choose indeed
But vow away my years, my means, my aims,
[55]
Among the helpers, if there’s any help
In such a social strait? The common blood
That swings along my veins, is strong enough
To draw me to this duty.’
Then I spoke.
‘I have not stood long on the strand of life,
And these salt waters have had scarcely time
To creep so high up as to wet my feet.
I cannot judge these tides—I shall, perhaps.
A woman’s always younger than a man
At equal years, because she is disallowed
Maturing by the outdoor sun and air,
And kept in long-clothes past the age to walk.
Ah well, I know you men judge otherwise!
You think a woman ripens as a peach,—In
the cheeks, chiefly. Pass it to me now;
I’m young in age, and younger still, I think,
As a woman. But a child may say amen
To a bishop’s prayer and see the way it goes;
And I, incapable to loose the knot
Of social questions, can approve, applaud
August compassion, christian thoughts that shoot
Beyond the vulgar white of personal aims.
Accept my reverence.’
There he glowed on me
With all his face and eyes. ‘No other help?’
Said he—‘no more than so?’
‘What help?’ I asked.
‘You’d scorn my help,—as Nature’s self, you say,
Has scorned to put her music in my mouth,
[56]
Because a woman’s. Do you now turn round
And ask for what a woman cannot give?’
‘For what she only can, I turn and ask,’
He answered, catching up my hands in his,
And dropping on me from his high-eaved brow
The full weight of his soul,—‘I ask for love,
And that, she can; for life in fellowship
Through bitter duties—that, I know she can;
For wifehood ... will she?’
‘Now,’ I said, ‘may God
Be witness ’twixt us two!’ and with the word,
Meseemed I floated into a sudden light
Above his stature,—‘am I proved too weak
To stand alone, yet strong enough to bear
Such leaners on my shoulder? poor to think,
Yet rich enough to sympathise with thought?
Incompetent to sing, as blackbirds can,
Yet competent to love, like him?’
I paused:
Perhaps I darkened, as the light-house will
That turns upon the sea. ‘It’s always so!
Anything does for a wife.’
‘Aurora, dear,
And dearly honoured’ ... he pressed in at once
With eager utterance,—‘you translate me ill.
I do not contradict my thought of you
Which is most reverent, with another thought
Found less so. If your sex is weak for art,
(And I who said so, did but honour you
[57]
By using truth in courtship) it is strong
For life and duty. Place your fecund heart
In mine, and let us blossom for the world
That wants love’s colour in the grey of time.
With all my talk I can but set you where
You look down coldly on the arena-heaps
Of headless bodies, shapeless, indistinct!
The Judgment-Angel scarce would find his way
Through such a heap of generalised distress,
To the individual man with lips and eyes—
Much less Aurora. Ah, my sweet, come down,
And, hand in hand, we’ll go where yours shall touch
These victims, one by one! till, one by one,
The formless, nameless trunk of every man
Shall seem to wear a head, with hair you know,
And every woman catch your mother’s face
To melt you into passion.’
‘I am a girl,’
I answered slowly; ‘you do well to name
My mother’s face. Though far too early, alas,
God’s hand did interpose ’twixt it and me,
I know so much of love, as used to shine
In that face and another. Just so much;
No more indeed at all. I have not seen
So much love since, I pray you pardon me,
As answers even to make a marriage with,
In this cold land of England. What you love,
Is not a woman, Romney, but a cause:
You want a helpmate, not a mistress, sir,—
A wife to help your ends ... in her no end!
[58]
Your cause is noble, your ends excellent,
But I, being most unworthy of these and that,
Do otherwise conceive of love. Farewell.’
‘Farewell, Aurora? you reject me thus?’
He said.
‘Why, sir, you are married long ago.
You have a wife already whom you love,
Your social theory. Bless you both, I say.
For my part, I am scarcely meek enough
To be the handmaid of a lawful spouse.
Do I look a Hagar, think you?’
‘So, you jest!’
‘Nay so, I speak in earnest,’ I replied.
‘You treat of marriage too much like, at least,
A chief apostle; you would bear with you
A wife ... a sister ... shall we speak it out?
A sister of charity.’
‘Then, must it be
Indeed farewell? And was I so far wrong
In hope and in illusion, when I took
The woman to be nobler than the man,
Yourself the noblest woman,—in the use
And comprehension of what love is,—love,
That generates the likeness of itself
Through all heroic duties? so far wrong,
In saying bluntly, venturing truth on love,
Come, human creature, love and work with me,’—
Instead of, ‘Lady, thou art wondrous fair,
[59]
And, where the Graces walk before, the Muse
Will follow at the lighting of their eyes,
And where the Muse walks, lovers need to creep:
Turn round and love me, or I die of love.’
With quiet indignation I broke in.
‘You misconceive the question like a man,
Who sees a woman as the complement
Of his sex merely. You forget too much
That every creature, female as the male,
Stands single in responsible act and thought,
As also in birth and death. Whoever says
To a loyal woman, ‘Love and work with me,’
Will get fair answers, if the work and love,
Being good themselves, are good for her—the best
She was born for. Women of a softer mood,
Surprised by men when scarcely awake to life,
Will sometimes only hear the first word, love,
And catch up with it any kind of work,
Indifferent, so that dear love go with it:
I do not blame such women, though, for love,
They pick much oakum; earth’s fanatics make
Too frequently heaven’s saints. But me, your work
Is not the best for,—nor your love the best,
Nor able to commend the kind of work
For love’s sake merely. Ah, you force me, sir,
To be over-bold in speaking of myself,—
I, too, have my vocation,—work to do,
The heavens and earth have set me, since I changed
My father’s face for theirs,—and, though your world
[60]
Were twice as wretched as you represent,
Most serious work, most necessary work,
As any of the economists’. Reform,
Make trade a Christian possibility,
And individual right no general wrong;
Wipe out earth’s furrows of the Thine and Mine,
And leave one green, for men to play at bowls,
With innings for them all!... what then, indeed,
If mortals were not greater by the head
Than any of their prosperities? what then,
Unless the artist keep up open roads
Betwixt the seen and unseen,—bursting through
The best of your conventions with his best,
The speakable, imaginable best
God bids him speak, to prove what lies beyond
Both speech and imagination? A starved man
Exceeds a fat beast: we’ll not barter, sir,
The beautiful for barley.—And, even so,
I hold you will not compass your poor ends
Of barley-feeding and material ease,
Without a poet’s individualism
To work your universal. It takes a soul,
To move a body: it takes a high-souled man,
To move the masses ... even to a cleaner stye:
It takes the ideal, to blow a hair’s-breadth off
The dust of the actual.—Ah, your Fouriers failed,
Because not poets enough to understand
That life develops from within.——For me,
Perhaps I am not worthy, as you say,
Of work like this!... perhaps a woman’s soul
[61]
Aspires, and not creates! yet we aspire,
And yet I’ll try out your perhapses, sir;
And if I fail ... why, burn me up my straw
Like other false works—I’ll not ask for grace,
Your scorn is better, cousin Romney. I
Who love my art, would never wish it lower
To suit my stature. I may love my art.
You’ll grant that even a woman may love art,
Seeing that to waste true love on anything,
Is womanly, past question.’
I retain
The very last word which I said, that day,
As you the creaking of the door, years past,
Which let upon you such disabling news
You ever after have been graver. He,
His eyes, the motions in his silent mouth,
Were fiery points on which my words were caught,
Transfixed for ever in my memory
For his sake, not their own. And yet I know
I did not love him ... nor he me ... that’s sure....
And what I said, is unrepented of,
As truth is always. Yet ... a princely man!—
If hard to me, heroic for himself!
He bears down on me through the slanting years,
The stronger for the distance. If he had loved,
Ay, loved me, with that retributive face, ...
I might have been a common woman now,
And happier, less known and less left alone;
Perhaps a better woman after all,—
With chubby children hanging on my neck
[62]
To keep me low and wise. Ah me, the vines
That bear such fruit, are proud to stoop with it.
The palm stands upright in a realm of sand.
And I, who spoke the truth then, stand upright,
Still worthy of having spoken out the truth,
By being content I spoke it, though it set
Him there, me here.—O woman’s vile remorse,
To hanker after a mere name, a show,
A supposition, a potential love!
Does every man who names love in our lives,
Become a power for that? is love’s true thing
So much best to us, that what personates love
Is next best? A potential love, forsooth!
We are not so vile. No, no—he cleaves, I think,
This man, this image, ... chiefly for the wrong
And shock he gave my life, in finding me
Precisely where the devil of my youth
Had set me, on those mountain-peaks of hope
All glittering with the dawn-dew, all erect
And famished for the morning,—saying, while
I looked for empire and much tribute, ‘Come,
I have some worthy work for thee below.
Come, sweep my barns, and keep my hospitals,—
And I will pay thee with a current coin
Which men give women.’
As we spoke, the grass
Was trod in haste beside us, and my aunt,
With smile distorted by the sun,—face, voice,
As much at issue with the summer-day
[63]
As if you brought a candle out of doors,—
Broke in with, ‘Romney, here!—My child, entreat
Your cousin to the house, and have your talk,
If girls must talk upon their birthdays. Come,’
He answered for me calmly, with pale lips
That seemed to motion for a smile in vain.
‘The talk is ended, madam, where we stand.
Your brother’s daughter has dismissed me here;
And all my answer can be better said
Beneath the trees, than wrong by such a word
Your house’s hospitalities. Farewell.’
With that he vanished. I could hear his heel
Ring bluntly in the lane, as down he leapt
The short way from us.—Then, a measured speech
Withdrew me. ‘What means this, Aurora Leigh?
My brother’s daughter has dismissed my guests?’
The lion in me felt the keeper’s voice,
Through all its quivering dewlaps: I was quelled
Before her,—meekened to the child she knew:
I prayed her pardon, said, ‘I had little thought
To give dismissal to a guest of hers,
In letting go a friend of mine, who came
To take me into service as a wife,—
No more than that, indeed.’
‘No more, no more?
Pray Heaven,’ she answered, ‘that I was not mad.
I could not mean to tell her to her face
[64]
That Romney Leigh had asked me for a wife,
And I refused him?’
‘Did he ask?’ I said;
‘I think he rather stooped to take me up
For certain uses which he found to do
For something called a wife. He never asked.’
‘What stuff!’ she answered; ‘are they queens, these girls?
They must have mantles, stitched with twenty silks,
Spread out upon the ground, before they’ll step
One footstep for the noblest lover born.’
‘But I am born,’ I said with firmness, ‘I,
To walk another way than his, dear aunt.’
‘You walk, you walk! A babe at thirteen months
Will walk as well as you,’ she cried in haste,
‘Without a steadying finger. Why, you child,
God help you, you are groping in the dark,
For all this sunlight. You suppose, perhaps,
That you, sole offspring of an opulent man,
Are rich and free to choose a way to walk?
You think, and it’s a reasonable thought,
That I besides, being well to do in life,
Will leave my handful in my niece’s hand
When death shall paralyse these fingers? Pray,
Pray, child,—albeit I know you love me not,—
As if you loved me, that I may not die!
For when I die and leave you, out you go,
(Unless I make room for you in my grave)
[65]
Unhoused, unfed, my dear, poor brother’s lamb,
(Ah heaven,—that pains!)—without a right to crop
A single blade of grass beneath these trees,
Or cast a lamb’s small shadow on the lawn,
Unfed, unfolded! Ah, my brother, here’s
The fruit you planted in your foreign loves!—
Ay, there’s the fruit he planted! never look
Astonished at me with your mother’s eyes,
For it was they, who set you where you are,
An undowered orphan. Child, your father’s choice
Of that said mother, disinherited
His daughter, his and hers. Men do not think
Of sons and daughters, when they fall in love,
So much more than of sisters; otherwise,
He would have paused to ponder what he did,
And shrunk before that clause in the entail
Excluding offspring by a foreign wife,
(The clause set up a hundred years ago
By a Leigh who wedded a French dancing-girl
And had his heart danced over in return);
But this man shrunk at nothing, never thought
Of you, Aurora, any more than me—
Your mother must have been a pretty thing,
For all the coarse Italian blacks and browns,
To make a good man, which my brother was,
Unchary of the duties to his house;
But so it fell indeed. Our cousin Vane,
Vane Leigh, the father of this Romney, wrote
Directly on your birth, to Italy,
‘I ask your baby daughter for my son
[66]
In whom the entail now merges by the law.
Betroth her to us out of love, instead
Of colder reasons, and she shall not lose
By love or law from henceforth’—so he wrote;
A generous cousin, was my cousin Vane.
Remember how he drew you to his knee
The year you came here, just before he died,
And hollowed out his hands to hold your cheeks,
And wished them redder,—you remember Vane?
And now his son who represents our house
And holds the fiefs and manors in his place,
To whom reverts my pittance when I die,
(Except a few books and a pair of shawls)
The boy is generous like him, and prepared
To carry out his kindest word and thought
To you, Aurora. Yes, a fine young man
Is Romney Leigh; although the sun of youth
Has shone too straight upon his brain, I know,
And fevered him with dreams of doing good
To good-for-nothing people. But a wife
Will put all right, and stroke his temples cool
With healthy touches’....
I broke in at that.
I could not lift my heavy heart to breathe
Till then, but then I raised it, and it fell
In broken words like these—‘No need to wait.
The dream of doing good to ... me, at least,
Is ended, without waiting for a wife
To cool the fever for him. We’ve escaped
That danger ... thank Heaven for it.’
[67]
‘You,’ she cried,
‘Have got a fever. What, I talk and talk
An hour long to you,—I instruct you how
You cannot eat or drink or stand or sit,
Or even die, like any decent wretch
In all this unroofed and unfurnished world,
Without your cousin,—and you still maintain
There’s room ’twixt him and you, for flirting fans
And running knots in eyebrows! You must have
A pattern lover sighing on his knee:
You do not count enough a noble heart,
Above book-patterns, which this very morn
Unclosed itself, in two dear fathers’ names,
To embrace your orphaned life! fie, fie! But stay,
I write a word, and counteract this sin.’
She would have turned to leave me, but I clung.
‘O sweet my father’s sister, hear my word
Before you write yours. Cousin Vane did well,
And cousin Romney well,—and I well too,
In casting back with all my strength and will
The good they meant me. O my God, my God!
God meant me good, too, when he hindered me
From saying ‘yes’ this morning. If you write
A word, it shall be ‘no.’ I say no, no!
I tie up ‘no’ upon His altar-horns,
Quite out of reach of perjury! At least
My soul is not a pauper; I can live
At least my soul’s life, without alms from men;
And if it must be in heaven instead of earth,
[68]
Let heaven look to it,—I am not afraid,’
She seized my hands with both hers, strained them fast,
And drew her probing and unscrupulous eyes
Right through me, body and heart. ‘Yet, foolish Sweet,
You love this man. I have watched you when he came,
And when he went, and when we’ve talked of him:
I am not old for nothing; I can tell
The weather-signs of love—you love this man.’
Girls blush, sometimes, because they are alive,
Half wishing they were dead to save the shame.
The sudden blush devours them, neck and brow;
They have drawn too near the fire of life, like gnats,
And flare up bodily, wings and all. What then?
Who’s sorry for a gnat ... or girl?
I blushed.
I feel the brand upon my forehead now
Strike hot, sear deep, as guiltless men may feel
The felon’s iron, say, and scorn the mark
Of what they are not. Most illogical
Irrational nature of our womanhood,
That blushes one way, feels another way,
And prays, perhaps, another! After all,
We cannot be the equal of the male,
Who rules his blood a little.
For although
I blushed indeed, as if I loved the man,
And her incisive smile, accrediting
That treason of false witness in my blush,
[69]
Did bow me downward like a swathe of grass
Below its level that struck me,—I attest
The conscious skies and all their daily suns,
I think I loved him not ... nor then, nor since....
Nor ever. Do we love the schoolmaster,
Being busy in the woods? much less, being poor,
The overseer of the parish? Do we keep
Our love, to pay our debts with?
White and cold
I grew next moment. As my blood recoiled
From that imputed ignominy, I made
My heart great with it. Then, at last, I spoke,—
Spoke veritable words, but passionate,
Too passionate perhaps ... ground up with sobs
To shapeless endings. She let fall my hands,
And took her smile off, in sedate disgust,
As peradventure she had touched a snake,—
A dead snake, mind!—and, turning round, replied,
‘We’ll leave Italian manners, if you please.
I think you had an English father, child,
And ought to find it possible to speak
A quiet ‘yes’ or ‘no,’ like English girls,
Without convulsions. In another month
We’ll take another answer ... no, or yes.’
With that, she left me in the garden-walk.
I had a father! yes, but long ago—
How long it seemed that moment. Oh, how far,
How far and safe, God, dost thou keep thy saints
When once gone from us! We may call against
[70]
The lighted windows of thy fair June-heaven
Where all the souls are happy,—and not one,
Not even my father, look from work or play
To ask, ‘Who is it that cries after us,
Below there, in the dusk?’ Yet formerly
He turned his face upon me quick enough,
If I said ‘father.’ Now I might cry loud;
The little lark reached higher with his song
Than I with crying. Oh, alone, alone,—
Not troubling any in heaven, nor any on earth,
I stood there in the garden, and looked up
The deaf blue sky that brings the roses out
On such June mornings.
You who keep account
Of crisis and transition in this life,
Set down the first time Nature says plain ‘no’
To some ‘yes’ in you, and walks over you
In gorgeous sweeps of scorn. We all begin
By singing with the birds, and running fast
With June-days, hand in hand: but once, for all,
The birds must sing against us, and the sun
Strike down upon us like a friend’s sword caught
By an enemy to slay us, while we read
The dear name on the blade which bites at us!—
That’s bitter and convincing: after that,
We seldom doubt that something in the large
Smooth order of creation, though no more
Than haply a man’s footstep, has gone wrong.
Some tears fell down my cheeks, and then I smiled,
[71]
As those smile who have no face in the world
To smile back to them. I had lost a friend
In Romney Leigh; the thing was sure—a friend,
Who had looked at me most gently now and then,
And spoken of my favourite books ... ‘our books’ ...
With such a voice! Well, voice and look were now
More utterly shut out from me, I felt,
Than even my father’s. Romney now was turned
To a benefactor, to a generous man,
Who had tied himself to marry ... me, instead
Of such a woman, with low timorous lids
He lifted with a sudden word one day,
And left, perhaps, for my sake.—Ah, self-tied
By a contract,—male Iphigenia, bound
At a fatal Aulis, for the winds to change,
(But loose him—they’ll not change); he well might seem
A little cold and dominant in love!
He had a right to be dogmatical,
This poor, good Romney. Love, to him, was made
A simple law-clause. If I married him,
I would not dare to call my soul my own,
Which so he had bought and paid for: every thought
And every heart-beat down there in the bill,—
Not one found honestly deductible
From any use that pleased him! He might cut
My body into coins to give away
Among his other paupers; change my sons,
While I stood dumb as Griseld, for black babes
Or piteous foundlings; might unquestioned set
My right hand teaching in the Ragged Schools,
[72]
My left hand washing in the Public Baths,
What time my angel of the Ideal stretched
Both his to me in vain! I could not claim
The poor right of a mouse in a trap, to squeal,
And take so much as pity, from myself.
Farewell, good Romney! if I loved you even,
I could but ill afford to let you be
So generous to me. Farewell, friend, since friend
Betwixt us two, forsooth, must be a word
So heavily overladen. And, since help
Must come to me from those who love me not,
Farewell, all helpers—I must help myself,
And am alone from henceforth.—Then I stooped,
And lifted the soiled garland from the ground,
And set it on my head as bitterly
As when the Spanish king did crown the bones
Of his dead love. So be it. I preserve
That crown still,—in the drawer there! ’twas the first;
The rest are like it;—those Olympian crowns,
We run for, till we lose sight of the sun
In the dust of the racing chariots!
After that,
Before the evening fell, I had a note
Which ran,—‘Aurora, sweet Chaldean, you read
My meaning backward like your eastern books,
While I am from the west, dear. Read me now
A little plainer. Did you hate me quite
But yesterday? I loved you for my part;
I love you. If I spoke untenderly
[73]
This morning, my beloved, pardon it;
And comprehend me that I loved you so,
I set you on the level of my soul,
And overwashed you with the bitter brine
Of some habitual thoughts. Henceforth, my flower,
Be planted out of reach of any such,
And lean the side you please, with all your leaves!
Write woman’s verses and dream woman’s dreams;
But let me feel your perfume in my home,
To make my sabbath after working-days;
Bloom out your youth beside me,—be my wife.’
I wrote in answer—‘We, Chaldeans, discern
Still farther than we read. I know your heart,
And shut it like the holy book it is,
Reserved for mild-eyed saints to pore upon
Betwixt their prayers at vespers. Well, you’re right,
I did not surely hate you yesterday;
And yet I do not love you enough to-day
To wed you, cousin Romney. Take this word,
And let it stop you as a generous man
From speaking farther. You may tease, indeed,
And blow about my feelings, or my leaves,—
And here’s my aunt will help you with east winds,
And break a stalk, perhaps, tormenting me;
But certain flowers grow near as deep as trees,
And, cousin, you’ll not move my root, not you,
With all your confluent storms. Then let me grow
Within my wayside hedge, and pass your way!
This flower has never as much to say to you
[74]
As the antique tomb which said to travellers, ‘Pause,’
‘Siste, viator.’ Ending thus, I signed.
The next week passed in silence, so the next,
And several after: Romney did not come,
Nor my aunt chide me. I lived on and on,
As if my heart were kept beneath a glass,
And everybody stood, all eyes and ears,
To see and hear it tick. I could not sit,
Nor walk, nor take a book, nor lay it down,
Not sew on steadily, nor drop a stitch
And a sigh with it, but I felt her looks
Still cleaving to me, like the sucking asp
To Cleopatra’s breast, persistently
Through the intermittent pantings. Being observed,
When observation is not sympathy,
Is just being tortured. If she said a word,
A ‘thank you,’ or an ‘if it please you, dear,’
She meant a commination, or, at best,
An exorcism against the devildom
Which plainly held me. So with all the house.
Susannah could not stand and twist my hair,
Without such glancing at the looking-glass
To see my face there, that she missed the plait:
And John,—I never sent my plate for soup,
Or did not send it, but the foolish John
Resolved the problem, ’twixt his napkined thumbs,
Of what was signified by taking soup
Or choosing mackerel. Neighbours, who dropped in
On morning visits, feeling a joint wrong,
[75]
Smiled admonition, sate uneasily,
And talked with measured, emphasised reserve,
Of parish news, like doctors to the sick,
When not called in,—as if, with leave to speak,
They might say something. Nay, the very dog
Would watch me from his sun-patch on the floor,
In alternation with the large black fly
Not yet in reach of snapping. So I lived.
A Roman died so; smeared with honey, teased
By insects, stared to torture by the noon:
And many patient souls ’neath English roofs
Have died like Romans. I, in looking back,
Wish only, now, I had borne the plague of all
With meeker spirits than were rife in Rome.
For, on the sixth week, the dead sea broke up,
Dashed suddenly through beneath the heel of Him
Who stands upon the sea and earth, and swears
Time shall be nevermore. The clock struck nine
That morning, too,—no lark was out of tune;
The hidden farms among the hills, breathed straight
Their smoke toward heaven; the lime-tree scarcely stirred
Beneath the blue weight of the cloudless sky,
Though still the July air came floating through
The woodbine at my window, in and out,
With touches of the out-door country-news
For a bending forehead. There I sate, and wished
That morning-truce of God would last till eve,
Or longer. ‘Sleep,’ I thought, ‘late sleepers,—sleep,
[76]
And spare me yet, the burden of your eyes.’
Then, suddenly, a single ghastly shriek
Tore upwards from the bottom of the house.
Like one who wakens in a grave and shrieks,
The still house seemed to shriek itself alive,
And shudder through its passages and stairs
With slam of doors and clash of bells.—I sprang,
I stood up in the middle of the room,
And there confronted at my chamber-door,
A white face,—shivering, ineffectual lips.
‘Come, come,’ they tried to utter, and I went;
As if a ghost had drawn me at the point
Of a fiery finger through the uneven dark,
I went with reeling footsteps down the stair,
Nor asked a question.
There she sate, my aunt,—
Bolt upright in the chair beside her bed,
Whose pillow had no dint! she had used no bed
For that night’s sleeping ... yet slept well. My God,
The dumb derision of that grey, peaked face
Concluded something grave against the sun,
Which filled the chamber with its July burst
When Susan drew the curtains, ignorant
Of who sate open-eyed behind her. There,
She sate ... it sate ... we said ‘she’ yesterday ...
And held a letter with unbroken seal,
As Susan gave it to her hand last night:
All night she had held it. If its news referred
[77]
To duchies or to dunghills, not an inch
She’d budge, ’twas obvious, for such worthless odds:
Nor, though the stars were suns, and overburned
Their spheric limitations, swallowing up
Like wax the azure spaces, could they force
Those open eyes to wink once. What last sight
Had left them blank and flat so,—drawing out
The faculty of vision from the roots,
As nothing more, worth seeing, remained behind?
Were those the eyes that watched me, worried me?
That dogged me up and down the hours and days,
A beaten, breathless, miserable soul?
And did I pray, a half hour back, but so,
To escape the burden of those eyes ... those eyes?
‘Sleep late’ I said.—
Why now, indeed, they sleep.
God answers sharp and sudden on some prayers,
And thrusts the thing we have prayed for in our face,
A gauntlet with a gift in’t. Every wish
Is like a prayer ... with God.
I had my wish,—
To read and meditate the thing I would,
To fashion all my life upon my thought,
And marry, or not marry. Henceforth, none
Could disapprove me, vex me, hamper me.
Full ground-room, in this desert newly made,
For Babylon or Balbec,—when the breath,
Just choked with sand, returns, for building towns!
[78]
The heir came over on the funeral day,
And we two cousins met before the dead,
With two pale faces. Was it death or life
That moved us? When the will was read and done,
The official guest and witnesses withdrawn,
We rose up in a silence almost hard,
And looked at one another. Then I said,
‘Farewell, my cousin.’
But he touched, just touched
My hatstrings tied for going, (at the door
The carriage stood to take me) and said low,
His voice a little unsteady through his smile,
‘Siste, viator.’
‘Is there time,’ I asked,
‘In these last days of railroads, to stop short
Like Cæsar’s chariot (weighing half a ton)
On the Appian road, for morals?’
‘There is time,’
He answered grave, ‘for necessary words,
Inclusive, trust me, of no epitaph
On man or act, my cousin. We have read
A will, which gives you all the personal goods
And funded monies of your aunt.’
‘I thank
Her memory for it. With three hundred pounds
We buy in England even, clear standing-room
To stand and work in. Only two hours since,
I fancied I was poor.’
‘And, cousin, still
You’re richer than you fancy. The will says,
[79]
Three hundred pounds, and any other sum
Of which the said testatrix dies possessed.
I say she died possessed of other sums.’
‘Dear Romney, need we chronicle the pence?
I’m richer than I thought—that’s evident.
Enough so.’
‘Listen rather. You’ve to do
With business and a cousin,’ he resumed,
‘And both, I fear, need patience. Here’s the fact.
The other sum (there is another sum,
Unspecified in any will which dates
After possession, yet bequeathed as much
And clearly as those said three hundred pounds)
Is thirty thousand. You will have it paid
When?... where? My duty troubles you with words.’
He struck the iron when the bar was hot;
No wonder if my eyes sent out some sparks.
‘Pause there! I thank you. You are delicate
In glosing gifts;—but I, who share your blood,
Am rather made for giving, like yourself,
Than taking, like your pensioners. Farewell.’
He stopped me with a gesture of calm pride.
‘A Leigh,’ he said, ‘gives largesse and gives love,
But gloses neither: if a Leigh could glose,
He would not do it, moreover, to a Leigh,
With blood trained up along nine centuries
To hound and hate a lie, from eyes like yours.
[80]
And now we’ll make the rest as clear; your aunt
Possessed these monies.’
‘You will make it clear,
My cousin, as the honour of us both,
Or one of us speaks vainly—that’s not I.
My aunt possessed this sum,—inherited
From whom, and when? bring documents, prove dates.’
‘Why now indeed you throw your bonnet off,
As if you had time left for a logarithm!
The faith’s the want. Dear cousin, give me faith,
And you shall walk this road with silken shoes,
As clean as any lady of our house
Supposed the proudest. Oh, I comprehend
The whole position from your point of sight.
I oust you from your father’s halls and lands,
And make you poor by getting rich—that’s law;
Considering which, in common circumstance,
You would not scruple to accept from me
Some compensation, some sufficiency
Of income—that were justice; but, alas,
I love you ... that’s mere nature!—you reject
My love ... that’s nature also;—and at once,
You cannot, from a suitor disallowed,
A hand thrown back as mine is, into yours
Receive a doit, a farthing, ... not for the world!
That’s etiquette with women, obviously
Exceeding claim of nature, law, and right,
Unanswerable to all. I grant, you see,
The case as you conceive it,—leave you room
[81]
To sweep your ample skirts of womanhood;
While, standing humbly squeezed against the wall,
I own myself excluded from being just,
Restrained from paying indubitable debts,
Because denied from giving you my soul—
That’s my misfortune!—I submit to it
As if, in some more reasonable age,
’Twould not be less inevitable. Enough.
You’ll trust me, cousin, as a gentleman,
To keep your honour, as you count it, pure,—
Your scruples (just as if I thought them wise)
Safe and inviolate from gifts of mine.’
I answered mild but earnest. ‘I believe
In no one’s honour which another keeps,
Nor man’s nor woman’s. As I keep, myself,
My truth and my religion, I depute
No father, though I had one this side death,
Nor brother, though I had twenty, much less you,
Though twice my cousin, and once Romney Leigh,
To keep my honour pure. You face, to-day,
A man who wants instruction, mark me, not
A woman who wants protection. As to a man,
Show manhood, speak out plainly, be precise
With facts and dates. My aunt inherited
This sum, you say—’
‘I said she died possessed
Of this, dear cousin.’
‘Not by heritage.
Thank you: we’re getting to the facts at last.
[82]
Perhaps she played at commerce with a ship
Which came in heavy with Australian gold?
Or touched a lottery with her finger-end,
Which tumbled on a sudden into her lap
Some old Rhine tower or principality?
Perhaps she had to do with a marine
Sub-transatlantic railroad, which pre-pays
As well as pre-supposes? or perhaps
Some stale ancestral debt was after-paid
By a hundred years, and took her by surprise?—
You shake your head my cousin; I guess ill.’
‘You need not guess, Aurora, nor deride,—
The truth is not afraid of hurting you.
You’ll find no cause, in all your scruples, why
Your aunt should cavil at a deed of gift
’Twixt her and me.’
‘I thought so—ah! a gift.’
‘You naturally thought so,’ he resumed.
‘A very natural gift.’
‘A gift, a gift!
Her individual life being stranded high
Above all want, approaching opulence,
Too haughty was she to accept a gift
Without some ultimate aim: ah, ah, I see,—
A gift intended plainly for her heirs,
And so accepted ... if accepted ... ah,
Indeed that might be; I am snared perhaps,
Just so. But, cousin, shall I pardon you,
[83]
If thus you have caught me with a cruel springe?’
He answered gently, ‘Need you tremble and pant
Like a netted lioness? is’t my fault, mine,
That you’re a grand wild creature of the woods,
And hate the stall built for you? Any way,
Though triply netted, need you glare at me?
I do not hold the cords of such a net;
You’re free from me, Aurora!’
‘Now may God
Deliver me from this strait! This gift of yours
Was tendered ... when? accepted ... when?’ I asked.
‘A month ... a fortnight since? Six weeks ago
It was not tendered. By a word she dropped,
I know it was not tendered nor received.
When was it? bring your dates.’
‘What matters when?
A half-hour ere she died, or a half-year,
Secured the gift, maintains the heritage
Inviolable with law. As easy pluck
The golden stars from heaven’s embroidered stole,
To pin them on the grey side of this earth,
As make you poor again, thank God.’
‘Not poor
Nor clean again from henceforth, you thank God?
Well, sir—I ask you ... I insist at need, ...
Vouchsafe the special date, the special date.’
‘The day before her death-day,’ he replied,
‘The gift was in her hands. We’ll find that deed,
[84]
And certify that date to you.’
As one
Who has climbed a mountain-height and carried up
His own heart climbing, panting in his throat
With the toil of the ascent, takes breath at last,
Looks back in triumph—so I stood and looked:
‘Dear cousin Romney, we have reached the top
Of this steep question, and may rest, I think.
But first,—I pray you pardon, that the shock
And surge of natural feeling and event
Had made me oblivious of acquainting you
That this, this letter ... unread, mark,—still sealed,
Was found enfolded in the poor dead hand:
That spirit of hers had gone beyond the address,
Which could not find her though you wrote it clear,—
I know your writing, Romney,—recognise
The open-hearted A, the liberal sweep
Of the G. Now listen,—let us understand;
You will not find that famous deed of gift,
Unless you find it in the letter here,
Which, not being mine, I give you back.—Refuse
To take the letter? well then—you and I,
As writer and as heiress, open it
Together, by your leave.—Exactly so:
The words in which the noble offering’s made,
Are nobler still, my cousin; and, I own,
The proudest and most delicate heart alive,
Distracted from the measure of the gift
By such a grace in giving, might accept
Your largesse without thinking any more
[85]
Of the burthen of it, than King Solomon
Considered, when he wore his holy ring
Charáctered over with the ineffable spell,
How many carats of fine gold made up
Its money-value. So, Leigh gives to Leigh—
Or rather, might have given, observe!—for that’s
The point we come to. Here’s a proof of gift,
But here’s no proof, sir, of acceptancy,
But rather, disproof. Death’s black dust, being blown,
Infiltrated through every secret fold
Of this sealed letter by a puff of fate,
Dried up for ever the fresh-written ink,
Annulled the gift, disutilised the grace,
And left these fragments.’
As I spoke, I tore
The paper up and down, and down and up
And crosswise, till it fluttered from my hands,
As forest-leaves, stripped suddenly and rapt
By a whirlwind on Valdarno, drop again,
Drop slow, and strew the melancholy ground
Before the amazèd hills ... why, so, indeed,
I’m writing like a poet, somewhat large
In the type of the image,—and exaggerate
A small thing with a great thing, topping it!—
But then I’m thinking how his eyes looked ... his,
With what despondent and surprised reproach!
I think the tears were in them, as he looked—
I think the manly mouth just trembled. Then
He broke the silence.
‘I may ask, perhaps,
[86]
Although no stranger ... only Romney Leigh,
Which means still less ... than Vincent Carrington ...
Your plans in going hence, and where you go.
This cannot be a secret.’
‘All my life
Is open to you, cousin. I go hence
To London, to the gathering-place of souls,
To live mine straight out, vocally, in books;
Harmoniously for others, if indeed
A woman’s soul, like man’s, be wide enough
To carry the whole octave (that’s to prove)
Or, if I fail, still, purely for myself.
Pray God be with me, Romney.’
‘Ah, poor child,
Who fight against the mother’s ‘tiring hand,
And choose the headsman’s! May God change his world
For your sake, sweet, and make it mild as heaven,
And juster than I have found you!’
But I paused.
‘And you, my cousin?’—
‘I,’ he said,—‘you ask?
You care to ask? Well, girls have curious minds,
And fain would know the end of everything,
Of cousins, therefore, with the rest. For me,
Aurora, I’ve my work; you know my work;
And, having missed this year some personal hope,
I must beware the rather that I miss
No reasonable duty. While you sing
Your happy pastorals of the meads and trees,
Bethink you that I go to impress and prove
[87]
On stifled brains and deafened ears, stunned deaf,
Crushed dull with grief, that nature sings itself,
And needs no mediate poet, lute or voice,
To make it vocal. While you ask of men
Your audience, I may get their leave perhaps
For hungry orphans to say audibly
‘We’re hungry, see,’—for beaten and bullied wives
To hold their unweaned babies up in sight,
Whom orphanage would better; and for all
To speak and claim their portion ... by no means
Of the soil, ... but of the sweat in tilling it,—
Since this is now-a-days turned privilege,
To have only God’s curse on us, and not man’s.
Such work I have for doing, elbow-deep
In social problems,—as you tie your rhymes,
To draw my uses to cohere with needs,
And bring the uneven world back to its round;
Or, failing so much, fill up, bridge at least
To smoother issues, some abysmal cracks
And feuds of earth, intestine heats have made
To keep men separate,—using sorry shifts
Of hospitals, almshouses, infant schools,
And other practical stuff of partial good,
You lovers of the beautiful and whole,
Despise by system.’
‘I despise? The scorn
Is yours, my cousin. Poets become such,
Through scorning nothing. You decry them for
The good of beauty, sung and taught by them,
While they respect your practical partial good
[88]
As being a part of beauty’s self. Adieu!
When God helps all the workers for his world,
The singers shall have help of Him, not last.’
He smiled as men smile when they will not speak
Because of something bitter in the thought;
And still I feel his melancholy eyes
Look judgment on me. It is seven years since:
I know not if ’twas pity or ’twas scorn
Has made them so far-reaching: judge it ye
Who have had to do with pity more than love.
And scorn than hatred. I am used, since then,
To other ways, from equal men. But so,
Even so, we let go hands, my cousin and I,
And, in between us, rushed the torrent-world
To blanch our faces like divided rocks,
And bar for ever mutual sight and touch
Except through swirl of spray and all that roar.
[89]
They met still sooner. ’Twas a year from thence
When Lucy Gresham, the sick sempstress girl,
Who sewed by Marian’s chair so still and quick,
And leant her head upon the back to cough
More freely when, the mistress turning round,
The others took occasion to laugh out,—
Gave up at last. Among the workers, spoke
A bold girl with black eyebrows and red lips,—
‘You know the news? Who’s dying, do you think?
Our Lucy Gresham. I expected it
As little as Nell Hart’s wedding. Blush not, Nell,
Thy curls be red enough without thy cheeks;
And, some day, there’ll be found a man to dote
On red curls.—Lucy Gresham swooned last night,
Dropped sudden in the street while going home;
And now the baker says, who took her up
And laid her by her grandmother in bed,
He’ll give her a week to die in. Pass the silk.
Let’s hope he gave her a loaf too, within reach,
For otherwise they’ll starve before they die,
[136]
That funny pair of bedfellows! Miss Bell,
I’ll thank you for the scissors. The old crone
Is paralytic—that’s the reason why
Our Lucy’s thread went faster than her breath,
Which went too quick, we all know. Marian Erle!
Why, Marian Erle, you’re not the fool to cry?
Your tears spoil Lady Waldemar’s new dress,
You piece of pity!’
Marian rose up straight,
And, breaking through the talk and through the work,
Went outward, in the face of their surprise,
To Lucy’s home, to nurse her back to life
Or down to death. She knew, by such an act,
All place and grace were forfeit in the house,
Whose mistress would supply the missing hand
With necessary, not inhuman haste,
And take no blame. But pity, too, had dues:
She could not leave a solitary soul
To founder in the dark, while she sate still
And lavished stitches on a lady’s hem
As if no other work were paramount.
‘Why, God,’ thought Marian, ‘has a missing hand
This moment; Lucy wants a drink, perhaps.
Let others miss me! never miss me, God!’
So Marian sate by Lucy’s bed, content
With duty, and was strong, for recompense,
To hold the lamp of human love arm-high
To catch the death-strained eyes and comfort them,
Until the angels, on the luminous side
[137]
Of death, had got theirs ready. And she said,
When Lucy thanked her sometimes, called her kind,
It touched her strangely. ‘Marian Erle, called kind!
What, Marian, beaten and sold, who could not die!
’Tis verily good fortune to be kind.
Ah, you,’ she said, ‘who are born to such a grace,
Be sorry for the unlicensed class, the poor,
Reduced to think the best good fortune means
That others, simply, should be kind to them.’
From sleep to sleep while Lucy slid away
So gently, like the light upon a hill,
Of which none names the moment that it goes,
Though all see when ’tis gone,—a man came in
And stood beside the bed. The old idiot wretch
Screamed feebly, like a baby overlain,
‘Sir, sir, you won’t mistake me for the corpse?
Don’t look at me, sir! never bury me!
Although I lie here, I’m alive as you,
Except my legs and arms,—I eat and drink,
And understand,—(that you’re the gentleman
Who fits the funerals up, Heaven speed you, sir,)
And certainly I should be livelier still
If Lucy here ... sir, Lucy is the corpse ...
Had worked more properly to buy me wine:
But Lucy, sir, was always slow at work,
I shan’t lose much by Lucy. Marian Erle,
Speak up and show the gentleman the corpse.’
And then a voice said, ‘Marian Erle.’ She rose;
[138]
It was the hour for angels—there, stood hers!
She scarcely marvelled to see Romney Leigh.
As light November snows to empty nests,
As grass to graves, as moss to mildewed stones,
As July suns to ruins, through the rents,
As ministering spirits to mourners, through a loss,
As Heaven itself to men, through pangs of death,
He came uncalled wherever grief had come.
‘And so,’ said Marian Erle, ‘we met anew,’
And added softly, ‘so, we shall not part.’
He was not angry that she had left the house
Wherein he placed her. Well—she had feared it might
Have vexed him. Also, when he found her set
On keeping, though the dead was out of sight,
That half-dead, half-live body left behind
With cankerous heart and flesh,—which took your best
And cursed you for the little good it did,
(Could any leave the bedrid wretch alone,
So joyless, she was thankless even to God,
Much less to you?) he did not say ’twas well,
Yet Marian thought he did not take it ill,—
Since day by day he came, and, every day,
She felt within his utterance and his eyes
A closer, tenderer presence of the soul,
Until at last he said, ‘We shall not part.’
On that same day, was Marian’s work complete:
She had smoothed the empty bed, and swept the floor
Of coffin sawdust, set the chairs anew
[139]
The dead had ended gossip in, and stood
In that poor room so cold and orderly,
The door-key in her hand, prepared to go
As they had, howbeit not their way. He spoke.
‘Dear Marian, of one clay God made us all,
And though men push and poke and paddle in’t
(As children play at fashioning dirt-pies)
And call their fancies by the name of facts,
Assuming difference, lordship, privilege,
When all’s plain dirt,—they come back to it at last;
The first grave-digger proves it with a spade,
And pats all even. Need we wait for this,
You, Marian, and I, Romney?’
She, at that,
Looked blindly in his face, as when one looks
Through driving autumn-rains to find the sky.
He went on speaking.
‘Marian, I being born
What men call noble, and you, issued from
The noble people,—though the tyrannous sword
Which pierced Christ’s heart, has cleft the world in twain
’Twixt class and class, opposing rich to poor,—
Shall we keep parted? Not so. Let us lean
And strain together rather, each to each,
Compress the red lips of this gaping wound,
As far as two souls can,—ay, lean and league,
I, from my superabundance,—from your want,
You,—joining in a protest ’gainst the wrong
On both sides!’—
[140]
All the rest, he held her hand
In speaking, which confused the sense of much;
Her heart, against his words, beat out so thick,
They might as well be written on the dust
Where some poor bird, escaping from hawk’s beak,
Has dropped, and beats its shuddering wings,—the lines
Are rubbed so,—yet ’twas something like to this,
—‘That they two, standing at the two extremes
Of social classes, had received one seal,
Been dedicate and drawn beyond themselves
To mercy and ministration,—he, indeed,
Through what he knew, and she, through what she felt,
He, by man’s conscience, she, by woman’s heart,
Relinquishing their several ’vantage posts
Of wealthy ease and honourable toil,
To work with God at love. And, since God willed
That, putting out his hand to touch this ark,
He found a woman’s hand there, he’d accept
The sign too, hold the tender fingers fast,
And say, ‘My fellow-worker, be my wife!’’
She told the tale with simple, rustic turns,—
Strong leaps of meaning in her sudden eyes
That took the gaps of any imperfect phrase
Of the unschooled speaker: I have rather writ
The thing I understood so, than the thing
I heard so. And I cannot render right
Her quick gesticulation, wild yet soft,
Self-startled from the habitual mood she used,
Half sad, half languid,—like dumb creatures (now
[141]
A rustling bird, and now a wandering deer,
Or squirrel against the oak-gloom flashing up
His sidelong burnished head, in just her way
Of savage spontaneity,) that stir
Abruptly the green silence of the woods,
And make it stranger, holier, more profound;
As Nature’s general heart confessed itself
Of life, and then fell backward on repose.
I kissed the lips that ended.—‘So indeed
He loves you, Marian?’
‘Loves me!’ She looked up
With a child’s wonder when you ask him first
Who made the sun—a puzzled blush, that grew,
Then broke off in a rapid radiant smile
Of sure solution. ‘Loves me! he loves all,—
And me, of course. He had not asked me else
To work with him for ever, and be his wife.’
Her words reproved me. This perhaps was love—
To have its hands too full of gifts to give,
For putting out a hand to take a gift;
To love so much, the perfect round of love
Includes, in strict conclusion, the being loved;
As Eden-dew went up and fell again,
Enough for watering Eden. Obviously
She had not thought about his love at all:
The cataracts of her soul had poured themselves,
And risen self-crowned in rainbow: would she ask
Who crowned her?—it sufficed that she was crowned.
[142]
With women of my class, ’tis otherwise:
We haggle for the small change of our gold,
And so much love, accord, for so much love,
Rialto-prices. Are we therefore wrong?
If marriage be a contract, look to it then,
Contracting parties should be equal, just;
But if, a simple fealty on one side,
A mere religion,—right to give, is all,
And certain brides of Europe duly ask
To mount the pile, as Indian widows do,
The spices of their tender youth heaped up,
The jewels of their gracious virtues worn,
More gems, more glory,—to consume entire
For a living husband! as the man’s alive,
Not dead,—the woman’s duty, by so much,
Advanced in England, beyond Hindostan.
I sate there, musing, till she touched my hand
With hers, as softly as a strange white bird
She feared to startle in touching. ‘You are kind.
But are you, peradventure, vexed at heart
Because your cousin takes me for a wife?
I know I am not worthy—nay, in truth,
I’m glad on’t, since, for that, he chooses me.
He likes the poor things of the world the best;
I would not therefore, if I could, be rich.
It pleasures him to stoop for buttercups;
I would not be a rose upon the wall
A queen might stop at, near the palace-door,
To say to a courtier, ‘Pluck that rose for me,
[143]
‘It’s prettier than the rest,’ O Romney Leigh!
I’d rather far be trodden by his foot,
Than lie in a great queen’s bosom.’
Out of breath
She paused.
‘Sweet Marian, do you disavow
The roses with that face?’
She dropt her head,
As if the wind had caught that flower of her,
And bent it in the garden,—then looked up
With grave assurance. ‘Well, you think me bold!
But so we all are, when we’re praying God.
And if I’m bold—yet, lady, credit me,
That, since I know myself for what I am,
Much fitter for his handmaid than his wife,
I’ll prove the handmaid and the wife at once,
Serve tenderly, and love obediently,
And be a worthier mate, perhaps, than some
Who are wooed in silk among their learned books;
While I shall set myself to read his eyes,
Till such grow plainer to me than the French
To wisest ladies. Do you think I’ll miss
A letter, in the spelling of his mind?
No more than they do, when they sit and write
Their flying words with flickering wild-fowl tails,
Nor ever pause to ask how many ts,
Should that be y or i—they know’t so well:
I’ve seen them writing, when I brought a dress
And waited,—floating out their soft white hands
On shining paper. But they’re hard sometimes,
[144]
For all those hands!—we’ve used out many nights,
And worn the yellow daylight into shreds
Which flapped and shivered down our aching eyes
Till night appeared more tolerable, just
That pretty ladies might look beautiful,
Who said at last ... ‘You’re lazy in that house!
‘You’re slow in sending home the work,—I count
I’ve waited near an hour for’t.’ Pardon me,—
I do not blame them, madam, nor misprize;
They are fair and gracious; ay, but not like you,
Since none but you has Mister Leigh’s own blood
Both noble and gentle,—and, without it ... well,
They are fair, I said; so fair, it scarce seems strange
That, flashing out in any looking-glass
The wonder of their glorious brows and breasts,
They are charmed so, they forget to look behind
And mark how pale we’ve grown, we pitiful
Remainders of the world. And so, perhaps,
If Mister Leigh had chosen a wife from these,
She might ... although he’s better than her best,
And dearly she would know it ... steal a thought
Which should be all his, an eye-glance from his face,
To plunge into the mirror opposite,
In search of her own beauty’s pearl: while I....
Ah, dearest lady, serge will outweigh silk
For winter-wear, when bodies feel a-cold,
And I’ll be a true wife to your cousin Leigh.’
Before I answered, he was there himself.
I think he had been standing in the room,
[145]
And listened probably to half her talk,
Arrested, turned to stone,—as white as stone.
Will tender sayings make men look so white?
He loves her then profoundly.
‘You are here,
Aurora? Here I meet you!’—We clasped hands.
‘Even so, dear Romney. Lady Waldemar
Has sent me in haste to find a cousin of mine
Who shall be.’
‘Lady Waldemar is good.’
‘Here’s one, at least, who is good,’ I sighed, and touched
Poor Marian’s happy head, as, doglike, she
Most passionately patient, waited on,
A-tremble for her turn of greeting words;
‘I’ve sate a full hour with your Marian Erle,
And learnt the thing by heart,—and, from my heart,
Am therefore competent to give you thanks
For such a cousin.’
‘You accept at last
A gift from me, Aurora, without scorn?
At last I please you?’—How his voice was changed!
‘You cannot please a woman against her will,
And once you vexed me. Shall we speak of that?
We’ll say, then, you were noble in it all,
And I not ignorant—let it pass. And now,
You please me, Romney, when you please yourself;
[146]
So, please you, be fanatical in love,
And I’m well pleased. Ah, cousin! at the old hall,
Among the gallery portraits of our Leighs,
We shall not find a sweeter signory
Than this pure forehead’s.’
Not a word he said.
How arrogant men are!—Even philanthropists,
Who try to take a wife up in the way
They put down a subscription-cheque,—if once
She turns and says, ‘I will not tax you so,
Most charitable sir,’—feel ill at ease,
As though she had wronged them somehow. I suppose
We women should remember what we are,
And not throw back an obolus inscribed
With Cæsar’s image, lightly. I resumed.
‘It strikes me, some of those sublime Vandykes
Were not too proud, to make good saints in heaven;
And, if so, then they’re not too proud to-day
To bow down (now the ruffs are off their necks)
And own this good, true, noble Marian, ... yours,
And mine, I’ll say!—For poets (bear the word)
Half-poets even, are still whole democrats,—
Oh, not that we’re disloyal to the high,
But loyal to the low, and cognisant
Of the less scrutable majesties. For me,
I comprehend your choice—I justify
Your right in choosing.’
‘No, no, no,’ he sighed,
With a sort of melancholy impatient scorn,
[147]
As some grown man, who never had a child,
Puts by some child who plays at being a man;
—‘You did not, do not, cannot comprehend
My choice, my ends, my motives, nor myself:
No matter now—we’ll let it pass, you say.
I thank you for your generous cousinship
Which helps this present; I accept for her
Your favourable thoughts. We’re fallen on days,
We two, who are not poets, when to wed
Requires less mutual love than common love,
For two together to bear out at once
Upon the loveless many. Work in pairs,
In galley-couplings or in marriage-rings,
The difference lies in the honour, not the work,—
And such we’re bound to, I and she. But love,
(You poets are benighted in this age;
The hour’s too late for catching even moths,
You’ve gnats instead,) love!—love’s fool-paradise
Is out of date, like Adam’s. Set a swan
To swim the Trenton, rather than true love
To float its fabulous plumage safely down
The cataracts of this loud transition-time,—
Whose roar, for ever, henceforth, in my ears,
Must keep me deaf to music.’
There, I turned
And kissed poor Marian, out of discontent.
The man had baffled, chafed me, till I flung
For refuge to the woman,—as, sometimes,
Impatient of some crowded room’s close smell,
You throw a window open, and lean out
[148]
To breathe a long breath in the dewy night,
And cool your angry forehead. She, at least,
Was not built up, as walls are, brick by brick;
Each fancy squared, each feeling ranged by line,
The very heat of burning youth applied
To indurate forms and systems! excellent bricks,
A well-built wall,—which stops you on the road,
And, into which, you cannot see an inch
Although you beat your head against it—pshaw!
‘Adieu,’ I said, ‘for this time, cousins both;
And, cousin Romney, pardon me the word,
Be happy!—oh, in some esoteric sense
Of course!—I mean no harm in wishing well.
Adieu, my Marian:—may she come to me,
Dear Romney, and be married from my house?
It is not part of your philosophy
To keep your bird upon the blackthorn?’
‘Ay,’
He answered, ‘but it is:—I take my wife
Directly from the people,—and she comes,
As Austria’s daughter to imperial France,
Betwixt her eagles, blinking not her race,
From Margaret’s Court at garret-height, to meet
And wed me at St. James’s, nor put off
Her gown of serge for that. The things we do,
We do: we’ll wear no mask, as if we blushed.’
‘Dear Romney, you’re the poet,’ I replied,—
But felt my smile too mournful for my word,
[149]
And turned and went. Ay, masks, I thought,—beware
Of tragic masks, we tie before the glass,
Uplifted on the cothurn half a yard
Above the natural stature! we would play
Heroic parts to ourselves,—and end, perhaps,
As impotently as Athenian wives
Who shrieked in fits at the Eumenides.
His foot pursued me down the stair. ‘At least,
You’ll suffer me to walk with you beyond
These hideous streets, these graves, where men alive,
Packed close with earthworms, burr unconsciously
About the plague that slew them; let me go.
The very women pelt their souls in mud
At any woman who walks here alone.
How came you here alone?—you are ignorant.’
We had a strange and melancholy walk:
The night came drizzling downward in dark rain;
And, as we walked, the colour of the time,
The act, the presence, my hand upon his arm,
His voice in my ear, and mine to my own sense,
Appeared unnatural. We talked modern books,
And daily papers; Spanish marriage-schemes,
And English climate—was’t so cold last year?
And will the wind change by to-morrow morn?
Can Guizot stand? is London full? is trade
Competitive? has Dickens turned his hinge
A-pinch upon the fingers of the great?
And are potatoes to grow mythical
[150]
Like moly? will the apple die out too?
Which way is the wind to-night? south-east? due east?
We talked on fast, while every common word
Seemed tangled with the thunder at one end,
And ready to pull down upon our heads
A terror out of sight. And yet to pause
Were surelier mortal: we tore greedily up
All silence, all the innocent breathing-points,
As if, like pale conspirators in haste,
We tore up papers where our signatures
Imperilled us to an ugly shame or death.
I cannot tell you why it was. ’Tis plain
We had not loved nor hated: wherefore dread
To spill gunpowder on ground safe from fire?
Perhaps we had lived too closely, to diverge
So absolutely: leave two clocks, they say,
Wound up to different hours, upon one shelf,
And slowly, through the interior wheels of each,
The blind mechanic motion sets itself
A-throb, to feel out for the mutual time.
It was not so with us, indeed. While he
Struck midnight, I kept striking six at dawn,
While he marked judgment, I, redemption-day;
And such exception to a general law,
Imperious upon inert matter even,
Might make us, each to either, insecure,
A beckoning mystery, or a troubling fear.
I mind me, when we parted at the door,
[151]
How strange his good-night sounded,—like good-night
Beside a deathbed, where the morrow’s sun
Is sure to come too late for more good-days:—
And all that night I thought.... ‘Good-night,’ said he.
And so, a month passed. Let me set it down
At once,—I have been wrong, I have been wrong.
We are wrong always, when we think too much
Of what we think or are; albeit our thoughts
Be verily bitter as self-sacrifice,
We’re no less selfish. If we sleep on rocks
Or roses, sleeping past the hour of noon
We’re lazy. This I write against myself.
I had done a duty in the visit paid
To Marian, and was ready otherwise
To give the witness of my presence and name
Whenever she should marry.—Which, I thought,
Sufficed. I even had cast into the scale
An overweight of justice toward the match;
The Lady Waldemar had missed her tool,
Had broken it in the lock as being too straight
For a crooked purpose, while poor Marian Erle
Missed nothing in my accents or my acts:
I had not been ungenerous on the whole,
Nor yet untender; so, enough. I felt
Tired, overworked: this marriage somewhat jarred;
Or, if it did not, all the bridal noise ...
The pricking of the map of life with pins,
In schemes of ... ‘Here we’ll go,’ and ‘There we’ll stay,’
And ‘Everywhere we’ll prosper in our love,’
[152]
Was scarce my business. Let them order it;
Who else should care? I threw myself aside,
As one who had done her work and shuts her eyes
To rest the better.
I, who should have known,
Forereckoned mischief! Where we disavow
Being keeper to our brother, we’re his Cain.
I might have held that poor child to my heart
A little longer! ’twould have hurt me much
To have hastened by its beats the marriage-day,
And kept her safe meantime from tampering hands,
Or, peradventure, traps? What drew me back
From telling Romney plainly, the designs
Of Lady Waldemar, as spoken out
To me ... me? had I any right, ay, right,
With womanly compassion and reserve
To break the fall of woman’s impudence?—
To stand by calmly, knowing what I knew,
And hear him call her good?
Distrust that word.
‘There is none good save God,’ said Jesus Christ.
If He once, in the first creation-week,
Called creatures good,—for ever, afterward,
The Devil only has done it, and his heirs,
The knaves who win so, and the fools who lose;
The word’s grown dangerous. In the middle age,
I think they called malignant fays and imps
Good people. A good neighbour, even in this,
Is fatal sometimes,—cuts your morning up
[153]
To mince-meat of the very smallest talk,
Then helps to sugar her bohea at night
With your reputation. I have known good wives,
As chaste, or nearly so, as Potiphar’s;
And good, good mothers, who would use a child
To better an intrigue; good friends, beside,
(Very good) who hung succinctly round your neck
And sucked your breath, as cats are fabled to do
By sleeping infants. And we all have known
Good critics, who have stamped out poet’s hopes;
Good statesmen, who pulled ruin on the state;
Good patriots, who, for a theory, risked a cause;
Good kings, who disembowelled for a tax;
Good popes, who brought all good to jeopardy;
Good Christians, who sate still in easy chairs,
And damned the general world for standing up.—
Now, may the good God pardon all good men!
How bitterly I speak,—how certainly
The innocent white milk in us is turned,
By much persistent shining of the sun!—
Shake up the sweetest in us long enough
With men, it drops to foolish curd, too sour
To feed the most untender of Christ’s lambs.
I should have thought ... a woman of the world
Like her I’m meaning,—centre to herself,
Who has wheeled on her own pivot half a life
In isolated self-love and self-will,
As a windmill seen at distance radiating
[154]
Its delicate white vans against the sky,
So soft and soundless, simply beautiful,—
Seen nearer ... what a roar and tear it makes,
How it grinds and bruises!... if she loves at last,
Her love’s a re-adjustment of self-love,
No more; a need felt of another’s use
To her one advantage,—as the mill wants grain,
The fire wants fuel, the very wolf wants prey;
And none of these is more unscrupulous
Than such a charming woman when she loves.
She’ll not be thwarted by an obstacle
So trifling as ... her soul is, ... much less yours!—
Is God a consideration?—she loves you,
Not God; she will not flinch for Him indeed:
She did not for the Marchioness of Perth,
When wanting tickets for the birthnight-ball.
She loves you, sir, with passion, to lunacy;
She loves you like her diamonds ... almost.
Well,
A month passed so, and then the notice came;
On such a day the marriage at the church.
I was not backward.
Half St. Giles in frieze
Was bidden to meet St. James in cloth of gold,
And, after contract at the altar, pass
To eat a marriage-feast on Hampstead Heath.
Of course the people came in uncompelled,
Lame, blind, and worse—sick, sorrowful, and worse,
The humours of the peccant social wound
All pressed out, poured out upon Pimlico,
[155]
Exasperating the unaccustomed air
With hideous interfusion: you’d suppose
A finished generation, dead of plague,
Swept outward from their graves into the sun,
The moil of death upon them. What a sight!
A holiday of miserable men
Is sadder than a burial-day of kings.
They clogged the streets, they oozed into the church
In a dark slow stream, like blood. To see that sight,
The noble ladies stood up in their pews,
Some pale for fear, a few as red for hate,
Some simply curious, some just insolent,
And some in wondering scorn,—‘What next? what next?’
These crushed their delicate rose-lips from the smile
That misbecame them in a holy place,
With broidered hems of perfumed handkerchiefs;
Those passed the salts with confidence of eyes
And simultaneous shiver of moiré silk;
While all the aisles, alive and black with heads,
Crawled slowly toward the altar from the street,
As bruised snakes crawl and hiss out of a hole
With shuddering involutions, swaying slow
From right to left, and then from left to right,
In pants and pauses. What an ugly crest
Of faces, rose upon you everywhere,
From that crammed mass! you did not usually
See faces like them in the open day:
They hide in cellars, not to make you mad
As Romney Leigh is.—Faces!—O my God,
[156]
We call those, faces? men’s and women’s ... ay,
And children’s;—babies, hanging like a rag
Forgotten on their mother’s neck,—poor mouths,
Wiped clean of mother’s milk by mother’s blow,
Before they are taught her cursing. Faces!... phew,
We’ll call them vices festering to despairs,
Or sorrows petrifying to vices: not
A finger-touch of God left whole on them;
All ruined, lost—the countenance worn out
As the garments, the will dissolute as the acts,
The passions loose and draggling in the dirt
To trip the foot up at the first free step!—
Those, faces! ’twas as if you had stirred up hell
To heave its lowest dreg-fiends uppermost
In fiery swirls of slime,—such strangled fronts,
Such obdurate jaws were thrown up constantly,
To twit you with your race, corrupt your blood,
And grind to devilish colours all your dreams
Henceforth, ... though, haply, you should drop asleep
By clink of silver waters, in a muse
On Raffael’s mild Madonna of the Bird.
I’ve waked and slept through many nights and days
Since then,—but still that day will catch my breath
Like a nightmare. There are fatal days, indeed,
In which the fibrous years have taken root
So deeply, that they quiver to their tops
Whene’er you stir the dust of such a day.
My cousin met me with his eyes and hand,
[157]
And then, with just a word, ... that ‘Marian Erle
Was coming with her bridesmaids presently,’
Made haste to place me by the altar-stair,
Where he and other noble gentlemen
And high-born ladies, waited for the bride.
We waited. It was early: there was time
For greeting, and the morning’s compliment;
And gradually a ripple of women’s talk
Arose and fell, and tossed about a spray
Of English ss, soft as a silent hush,
And, notwithstanding, quite as audible
As louder phrases thrown out by the men.
—‘Yes, really, if we’ve need to wait in church,
We’ve need to talk there.’—‘She? ’Tis Lady Ayr,
In blue—not purple! that’s the dowager.’
—‘She looks as young.’—‘She flirts as young, you mean!
Why if you had seen her upon Thursday night,
You’d call Miss Norris modest.’—‘You again!
I waltzed with you three hours back. Up at six,
Up still at ten: scarce time to change one’s shoes.
I feel as white and sulky as a ghost,
So pray don’t speak to me, Lord Belcher.’—‘No,
I’ll look at you instead, and it’s enough
While you have that face.’ ‘In church, my lord! fie, fie!’
—‘Adair, you stayed for the Division?’—‘Lost
By one.’ ‘The devil it is! I’m sorry for’t.
And if I had not promised Mistress Grove’ ...
—‘You might have kept your word to Liverpool.’
‘Constituents must remember, after all,
[158]
We’re mortal.’—‘We remind them of it.’—‘Hark,
The bride comes! Here she comes, in a stream of milk!’
—‘There? Dear, you are asleep still; don’t you know
The five Miss Granvilles? always dressed in white
To show they’re ready to be married.’—‘Lower!
The aunt is at your elbow.’—‘Lady Maud,
Did Lady Waldemar tell you she had seen
This girl of Leigh’s?’ ‘No,—wait! ’twas Mrs. Brookes,
Who told me Lady Waldemar told her—
No, ’twasn’t Mrs. Brookes.’—‘She’s pretty?’—‘Who?
Mrs. Brookes? Lady Waldemar?’—‘How hot!
Pray is’t the law to-day we’re not to breathe?
You’re treading on my shawl—I thank you, sir.’
—‘They say the bride’s a mere child, who can’t read,
But knows the things she shouldn’t, with wide-awake
Great eyes. I’d go through fire to look at her.’
—‘You do, I think.’—‘And Lady Waldemar
(You see her; sitting close to Romney Leigh;
How beautiful she looks, a little flushed!)
Has taken up the girl, and organised
Leigh’s folly. Should I have come here, you suppose,
Except she’d asked me?’—‘She’d have served him more
By marrying him herself.’
‘Ah—there she comes,
The bride, at last!’
‘Indeed, no. Past eleven.
She puts off her patched petticoat to-day
And puts on May-fair manners, so begins
By setting us to wait.’—‘Yes, yes, this Leigh
Was always odd; it’s in the blood, I think;
[159]
His father’s uncle’s cousin’s second son
Was, was ... you understand me—and for him,
He’s stark!—has turned quite lunatic upon
This modern question of the poor—the poor:
An excellent subject when you’re moderate;
You’ve seen Prince Albert’s model lodging-house?
Does honour to his Royal Highness. Good!
But would he stop his carriage in Cheapside
To shake a common fellow by the fist
Whose name was ... Shakspeare? no. We draw a line,
And if we stand not by our order, we
In England, we fall headlong. Here’s a sight,—
A hideous sight, a most indecent sight!
My wife would come, sir, or I had kept her back.
By heaven, sir, when poor Damiens’ trunk and limbs
Were torn by horses, women of the court
Stood by and stared, exactly as to-day
On this dismembering of society,
With pretty troubled faces.’
‘Now, at last.
She comes now.’
‘Where? who sees? you push me, sir,
Beyond the point of what is mannerly.
You’re standing, madam, on my second flounce—
I do beseech you.’
‘No—it’s not the bride.
Half-past eleven. How late. The bridegroom, mark,
Gets anxious and goes out.’
‘And as I said ...
These Leighs! our best blood running in the rut!
[160]
It’s something awful. We had pardoned him
A simple misalliance, got up aside
For a pair of sky-blue eyes; our House of Lords
Has winked at such things, and we’ve all been young.
But here’s an inter-marriage reasoned out,
A contract (carried boldly to the light,
To challenge observation, pioneer
Good acts by a great example) ’twixt the extremes
Of martyrised society,—on the left,
The well-born,—on the right, the merest mob,
To treat as equals!—’tis anarchical!
It means more than it says—’tis damnable!
Why, sir, we can’t have even our coffee good,
Unless we strain it.’
‘Here, Miss Leigh!’
‘Lord Howe,
You’re Romney’s friend. What’s all this waiting for?’
‘I cannot tell. The bride has lost her head
(And way, perhaps!) to prove her sympathy
With the bridegroom.’
‘What,—you also, disapprove!’
‘Oh, I approve of nothing in the world,’
He answered; ‘not of you, still less of me,
Nor even of Romney—though he’s worth us both.
We’re all gone wrong. The tune in us is lost:
And whistling in back alleys to the moon,
Will never catch it.’
Let me draw Lord Howe;
[161]
A born aristocrat, bred radical,
And educated socialist, who still
Goes floating, on traditions of his kind,
Across the theoretic flood from France,—
Though, like a drenched Noah on a rotten deck,
Scarce safer for his place there. He, at least,
Will never land on Ararat, he knows,
To recommence the world on the old plan:
Indeed, he thinks, said world had better end;
He sympathises rather with the fish
Outside, than with the drowned paired beasts within
Who cannot couple again or multiply:
And that’s the sort of Noah he is, Lord Howe.
He never could be anything complete,
Except a loyal, upright gentleman,
A liberal landlord, graceful diner-out,
And entertainer more than hospitable,
Whom authors dine with and forget the port.
Whatever he believes, and it is much,
But no-wise certain ... now here and now there, ...
He still has sympathies beyond his creed,
Diverting him from action. In the House,
No party counts upon him, and all praise
All like his books too, (he has written books)
Which, good to lie beside a bishop’s chair,
So oft outreach themselves with jets of fire
At which the foremost of the progressists
May warm audacious hands in passing by.
—Of stature over-tall, lounging for ease;
Light hair, that seems to carry a wind in it,
[162]
And eyes that, when they look on you, will lean
Their whole weight half in indolence, and half
In wishing you unmitigated good,
Until you know not if to flinch from him
Or thank him.—’Tis Lord Howe.
‘We’re all gone wrong,’
Said he, ‘and Romney, that dear friend of ours,
Is no-wise right. There’s one true thing on earth;
That’s love! He takes it up, and dresses it,
And acts a play with it, as Hamlet did,
To show what cruel uncles we have been,
And how we should be uneasy in our minds,
While he, Prince Hamlet, weds a pretty maid
(Who keeps us too long waiting, we’ll confess)
By symbol, to instruct us formally
To fill the ditches up ’twixt class and class,
And live together in phalansteries.
What then?—he’s mad, our Hamlet! clap his play,
And bind him.’
‘Ah Lord Howe, this spectacle
Pulls stronger at us than the Dane’s. See there!
The crammed aisles heave and strain and steam with life—
Dear Heaven, what life!’
‘Why, yes,—a poet sees;
Which makes him different from a common man.
I, too, see somewhat, though I cannot sing;
I should have been a poet, only that
My mother took fright at the ugly world,
And bore me tongue-tied. If you’ll grant me now
That Romney gives us a fine actor-piece
[163]
To make us merry on his marriage-morn,
The fable’s worse than Hamlet’s, I’ll concede.
The terrible people, old and poor and blind,
Their eyes eat out with plague and poverty
From seeing beautiful and cheerful sights,
We’ll liken to a brutalised King Lear,
Led out,—by no means to clear scores with wrongs—
His wrongs are so far back, ... he has forgot;
All’s past like youth; but just to witness here
A simple contract,—he, upon his side,
And Regan with her sister Goneril
And all the dappled courtiers and court-fools,
On their side. Not that any of these would say
They’re sorry, neither. What is done, is done,
And violence is now turned privilege,
As cream turns cheese, if buried long enough.
What could such lovely ladies have to do
With the old man there, in those ill-odorous rags,
Except to keep the wind-side of him? Lear
Is flat and quiet, as a decent grave;
He does not curse his daughters in the least.
Be these his daughters? Lear is thinking of
His porridge chiefly ... is it getting cold
At Hampstead? will the ale be served in pots?
Poor Lear, poor daughters! Bravo, Romney’s play!’
A murmur and a movement drew around;
A naked whisper touched us. Something wrong!
What’s wrong? The black crowd, as an overstrained
Cord, quivered in vibrations, and I saw ...
[164]
Was that his face I saw?... his ... Romney Leigh’s ...
Which tossed a sudden horror like a sponge
Into all eyes,—while himself stood white upon
The topmost altar-stair, and tried to speak,
And failed, and lifted higher above his head
A letter, ... as a man who drowns and gasps.
‘My brothers, bear with me! I am very weak.
I meant but only good. Perhaps I meant
Too proudly,—and God snatched the circumstance
And changed it therefore. There’s no marriage—none.
She leaves me,—she departs,—she disappears,—
I lose her. Yet I never forced her ‘ay,’
To have her ‘no’ so cast into my teeth,
In manner of an accusation, thus.
My friends, you are all dismissed. Go, eat and drink
According to the programme,—and farewell!’
He ended. There was silence in the church;
We heard a baby sucking in its sleep
At the farthest end of the aisle. Then spoke a man,
‘Now, look to it, coves, that all the beef and drink
Be not filched from us like the other fun;
For beer’s spilt easier than a woman is!
This gentry is not honest with the poor;
They bring us up, to trick us.’—‘Go it, Jim,’
A woman screamed back,—‘I’m a tender soul;
I never banged a child at two years old
And drew blood from him, but I sobbed for it
Next moment,—and I’ve had a plague of seven.
[165]
I’m tender; I’ve no stomach even for beef,
Until I know about the girl that’s lost,
That’s killed, mayhap. I did misdoubt, at first,
The fine lord meant no good by her, or us.
He, maybe, got the upper hand of her
By holding up a wedding-ring, and then ...
A choking finger on her throat, last night,
And just a clever tale to keep us still,
As she is, poor lost innocent. ‘Disappear!’
Who ever disappears except a ghost?
And who believes a story of a ghost?
I ask you,—would a girl go off, instead
Of staying to be married? a fine tale!
A wicked man, I say, a wicked man!
For my part I would rather starve on gin
Than make my dinner on his beef and beer.’—
At which a cry rose up—‘We’ll have our rights.
We’ll have the girl, the girl! Your ladies there
Are married safely and smoothly every day,
And she shall not drop through into a trap
Because she’s poor and of the people: shame!
We’ll have no tricks played off by gentlefolks;
We’ll see her righted.’
Through the rage and roar
I heard the broken words which Romney flung
Among the turbulent masses, from the ground
He held still, with his masterful pale face—
As huntsmen throw the ration to the pack,
Who, falling on it headlong, dog on dog
In heaps of fury, rend it, swallow it up
[166]
With yelling hound-jaws,—his indignant words,
His piteous words, his most pathetic words,
Whereof I caught the meaning here and there
By his gesture ... torn in morsels, yelled across,
And so devoured. From end to end, the church
Rocked round us like the sea in storm, and then
Broke up like the earth in earthquake. Men cried out
‘Police’—and women stood and shrieked for God,
Or dropt and swooned; or, like a herd of deer,
(For whom the black woods suddenly grow alive,
Unleashing their wild shadows down the wind
To hunt the creatures into corners, back
And forward) madly fled, or blindly fell,
Trod screeching underneath the feet of those
Who fled and screeched.
The last sight left to me
Was Romney’s terrible calm face above
The tumult!—the last sound was ‘Pull him down!
Strike—kill him!’ Stretching my unreasoning arms,
As men in dreams, who vainly interpose
’Twixt gods and their undoing, with a cry
I struggled to precipitate myself
Head-foremost to the rescue of my soul
In that white face, ... till some one caught me back,
And so the world went out,—I felt no more.
What followed, was told after by Lord Howe,
Who bore me senseless from the strangling crowd
In church and street, and then returned alone
To see the tumult quelled. The men of law
[167]
Had fallen as thunder on a roaring fire,
And made all silent,—while the people’s smoke
Passed eddying slowly from the emptied aisles.
Here’s Marian’s letter, which a ragged child
Brought running, just as Romney at the porch
Looked out expectant of the bride. He sent
The letter to me by his friend Lord Howe
Some two hours after, folded in a sheet
On which his well-known hand had left a word.
Here’s Marian’s letter.
‘Noble friend, dear saint,
Be patient with me. Never think me vile,
Who might to-morrow morning be your wife
But that I loved you more than such a name.
Farewell, my Romney. Let me write it once,—
My Romney.
‘’Tis so pretty a coupled word,
I have no heart to pluck it with a blot.
We say ‘my God’ sometimes, upon our knees,
Who is not therefore vexed: so bear with it ...
And me. I know I’m foolish, weak, and vain;
Yet most of all I’m angry with myself
For losing your last footstep on the stair,
That last time of your coming,—yesterday!
The very first time I lost step of yours,
(Its sweetness comes the next to what you speak)
But yesterday sobs took me by the throat,
And cut me off from music.
‘Mister Leigh,
[168]
You’ll set me down as wrong in many things.
You’ve praised me, sir, for truth,—and now you’ll learn
I had not courage to be rightly true.
I once began to tell you how she came,
The woman ... and you stared upon the floor
In one of your fixed thoughts ... which put me out
For that day. After, some one spoke of me,
So wisely, and of you, so tenderly,
Persuading me to silence for your sake ...
Well, well! it seems this moment I was wrong
In keeping back from telling you the truth:
There might be truth betwixt us two, at least,
If nothing else. And yet ’twas dangerous.
Suppose a real angel came from heaven
To live with men and women! he’d go mad,
If no considerate hand should tie a blind
Across his piercing eyes. ’Tis thus with you:
You see us too much in your heavenly light;
I always thought so, angel,—and indeed
There’s danger that you beat yourself to death
Against the edges of this alien world,
In some divine and fluttering pity.
‘Yes,
It would be dreadful for a friend of yours,
To see all England thrust you out of doors
And mock you from the windows. You might say,
Or think (that’s worse), ‘There’s some one in the house
I miss and love still.’ Dreadful!
‘Very kind,
I pray you mark, was Lady Waldemar.
[169]
She came to see me nine times, rather ten—
So beautiful, she hurts me like the day
Let suddenly on sick eyes.
‘Most kind of all,
Your cousin!—ah, most like you! Ere you came
She kissed me mouth to mouth: I felt her soul
Dip through her serious lips in holy fire.
God help me, but it made me arrogant;
I almost told her that you would not lose
By taking me to wife: though, ever since,
I’ve pondered much a certain thing she asked ...
‘He loves you, Marian?’ ... in a sort of mild
Derisive sadness ... as a mother asks
Her babe, ‘You’ll touch that star, you think?’
‘Farewell!
I know I never touched it.
This is worst:
Babes grow, and lose the hope of things above;
A silver threepence sets them leaping high—
But no more stars! mark that.
I’ve writ all night,
And told you nothing. God, if I could die,
And let this letter break off innocent
Just here! But no—for your sake ...
Here’s the last:
I never could be happy as your wife,
I never could be harmless as your friend,
I never will look more into your face,
Till God says, ‘Look!’ I charge you, seek me not,
Nor vex yourself with lamentable thoughts
[170]
That peradventure I have come to grief;
Be sure I’m well, I’m merry, I’m at ease,
But such a long way, long way, long way off,
I think you’ll find me sooner in my grave,
And that’s my choice, observe. For what remains,
An over-generous friend will care for me,
And keep me happy ... happier....
There’s a blot!
This ink runs thick ... we light girls lightly weep ...
And keep me happier ... was the thing to say, ...
Than as your wife I could be!—O, my star,
My saint, my soul! for surely you’re my soul,
Through whom God touched me! I am not so lost
I cannot thank you for the good you did,
The tears you stopped, which fell down bitterly,
Like these—the times you made me weep for joy
At hoping I should learn to write your notes
And save the tiring of your eyes, at night;
And most for that sweet thrice you kissed my lips
And said ‘Dear Marian.’
’Twould be hard to read,
This letter, for a reader half as learn’d,
But you’ll be sure to master it, in spite
Of ups and downs. My hand shakes, I am blind,
I’m poor at writing, at the best,—and yet
I tried to make my gs the way you showed.
Farewell—Christ love you.—Say ‘poor Marian’ now.’
Poor Marian!—wanton Marian!—was it so,
Or so? For days, her touching, foolish lines
[171]
We mused on with conjectural fantasy,
As if some riddle of a summer-cloud
On which one tries unlike similitudes
Of now a spotted Hydra-skin cast off,
And now a screen of carven ivory
That shuts the heavens’ conventual secrets up
From mortals over-bold. We sought the sense:
She loved him so perhaps, (such words mean love,)
That, worked on by some shrewd perfidious tongue,
(And then I thought of Lady Waldemar)
She left him, not to hurt him; or perhaps
She loved one in her class,—or did not love,
But mused upon her wild bad tramping life,
Until the free blood fluttered at her heart,
And black bread eaten by the road-side hedge
Seemed sweeter than being put to Romney’s school
Of philanthropical self-sacrifice,
Irrevocably.—Girls are girls, beside,
Thought I, and like a wedding by one rule.
You seldom catch these birds, except with chaff:
They feel it almost an immoral thing
To go out and be married in broad day,
Unless some winning special flattery should
Excuse them to themselves for’t, ... ‘No one parts
Her hair with such a silver line as you,
One moonbeam from the forehead to the crown!’
Or else ... ‘You bite your lip in such a way,
It spoils me for the smiling of the rest’—
And so on. Then a worthless gaud or two,
To keep for love,—a ribbon for the neck,
[172]
Or some glass pin,—they have their weight with girls.
And Romney sought her many days and weeks:
He sifted all the refuse of the town,
Explored the trains, enquired among the ships,
And felt the country through from end to end;
No Marian!—Though I hinted what I knew,—
A friend of his had reasons of her own
For throwing back the match—he would not hear:
The lady had been ailing ever since,
The shock had harmed her. Something in his tone
Repressed me; something in me shamed my doubt
To a sigh, repressed too. He went on to say
That, putting questions where his Marian lodged,
He found she had received for visitors,
Besides himself and Lady Waldemar
And, that once, me—a dubious woman dressed
Beyond us both. The rings upon her hands
Had dazed the children when she threw them pence;
‘She wore her bonnet as the queen might hers,
To show the crown,’ they said,—‘a scarlet crown
Of roses that had never been in bud.’
When Romney told me that,—for now and then
He came to tell me how the search advanced,
His voice dropped: I bent forward for the rest:
The woman had been with her, it appeared,
At first from week to week, then day by day,
And last, ’twas sure ...
I looked upon the ground
[173]
To escape the anguish of his eyes, and asked
As low as when you speak to mourners new
Of those they cannot bear yet to call dead,
‘If Marian had as much as named to him
A certain Rose, an early friend of hers,
A ruined creature.’
‘Never,’—Starting up
He strode from side to side about the room,
Most like some prisoned lion sprung awake,
Who has felt the desert sting him through his dreams.
‘What was I to her, that she should tell me aught?
A friend! was I a friend? I see all clear.
Such devils would pull angels out of heaven,
Provided they could reach them; ’tis their pride;
And that’s the odds ’twixt soul and body-plague!
The veriest slave who drops in Cairo’s street,
Cries, ‘Stand off from me,’ to the passengers;
While these blotched souls are eager to infect,
And blow their bad breath in a sister’s face
As if they got some ease by it.’
I broke through.
‘Some natures catch no plagues. I’ve read of babes
Found whole and sleeping by the spotted breast
Of one a full day dead. I hold it true,
As I’m a woman and know womanhood,
That Marian Erle, however lured from place,
Deceived in way, keeps pure in aim and heart,
As snow that’s drifted from the garden-bank
To the open road.’
’Twas hard to hear him laugh.
[174]
‘The figure’s happy. Well—a dozen carts
And trampers will secure you presently
A fine white snow-drift. Leave it there, your snow!
’Twill pass for soot ere sunset. Pure in aim?
She’s pure in aim, I grant you,—like myself,
Who thought to take the world upon my back
To carry it o’er a chasm of social ill,
And end by letting slip through impotence
A single soul, a child’s weight in a soul,
Straight down the pit of hell! yes, I and she
Have reason to be proud of our pure aims.’
Then softly, as the last repenting drops
Of a thunder-shower, he added, ‘The poor child;
Poor Marian! ’twas a luckless day for her,
When first she chanced on my philanthropy.’
He drew a chair beside me, and sate down;
And I, instinctively, as women use
Before a sweet friend’s grief,—when, in his ear,
They hum the tune of comfort, though themselves
Most ignorant of the special words of such,
And quiet so and fortify his brain
And give it time and strength for feeling out
To reach the availing sense beyond that sound,—
Went murmuring to him, what, if written here,
Would seem not much, yet fetched him better help
Than, peradventure, if it had been more.
I’ve known the pregnant thinkers of this time,
And stood by breathless, hanging on their lips,
[175]
When some chromatic sequence of fine thought
In learned modulation phrased itself
To an unconjectured harmony of truth.
And yet I’ve been more moved, more raised, I say,
By a simple word ... a broken easy thing,
A three-years infant might say after you,—
A look, a sigh, a touch upon the palm,
Which meant less than ‘I love you’ ... than by all
The full-voiced rhetoric of those master-mouths.
‘Ah dear Aurora,’ he began at last,
His pale lips fumbling for a sort of smile,
‘Your printer’s devils have not spoilt your heart:
That’s well. And who knows but, long years ago,
When you and I talked, you were somewhat right
In being so peevish with me? You, at least,
Have ruined no one through your dreams! Instead,
You’ve helped the facile youth to live youth’s day
With innocent distraction, still perhaps
Suggestive of things better than your rhymes.
The little shepherd-maiden, eight years old,
I’ve seen upon the mountains of Vaucluse,
Asleep i’ the sun, her head upon her knees,
The flocks all scattered,—is more laudable
Than any sheep-dog trained imperfectly,
Who bites the kids through too much zeal.’
‘I look
As if I had slept, then?’
He was touched at once
By something in my face. Indeed ’twas sure
[176]
That he and I,—despite a year or two
Of younger life on my side, and on his,
The heaping of the years’ work on the days,—
The three-hour speeches from the member’s seat,
The hot committees, in and out the House,
The pamphlets, ‘Arguments,’ ‘Collective Views,’
Tossed out as straw before sick houses, just
To show one’s sick and so be trod to dirt,
And no more use,—through this world’s underground
The burrowing, groping effort, whence the arm
And heart come bleeding,—sure, that he and I
Were, after all, unequally fatigued!
That he, in his developed manhood, stood
A little sunburnt by the glare of life;
While I ... it seemed no sun had shone on me,
So many seasons I had forgot my Springs;
My cheeks had pined and perished from their orbs,
And all the youth-blood in them had grown white
As dew on autumn cyclamens: alone
My eyes and forehead answered for my face.
He said ... ‘Aurora, you are changed—are ill!’
‘Not so, my cousin,—only not asleep!’
I answered, smiling gently. ‘Let it be.
You scarcely found the poet of Vaucluse
As drowsy as the shepherds. What is art,
But life upon the larger scale, the higher,
When, graduating up in a spiral line
Of still expanding and ascending gyres,
[177]
It pushes toward the intense significance
Of all things, hungry for the Infinite?
Art’s life,—and where we live, we suffer and toil.’
He seemed to sift me with his painful eyes.
‘Alas! you take it gravely; you refuse
Your dreamland, right of common, and green rest.
You break the mythic turf where danced the nymphs,
With crooked ploughs of actual life,—let in
The axes to the legendary woods,
To pay the head-tax. You are fallen indeed
On evil days, you poets, if yourselves
Can praise that art of yours no otherwise;
And, if you cannot, ... better take a trade
And be of use! ’twere cheaper for your youth.’
‘Of use!’ I softly echoed, ‘there’s the point
We sweep about for ever in argument;
Like swallows, which the exasperate, dying year
Sets spinning in black circles, round and round,
Preparing for far flights o’er unknown seas.
And we ... where tend we?’
‘Where?’ he said, and sighed.
‘The whole creation, from the hour we are born,
Perplexes us with questions. Not a stone
But cries behind us, every weary step,
‘Where, where?’ I leave stones to reply to stones.
Enough for me and for my fleshly heart
To harken the invocations of my kind,
When men catch hold upon my shuddering nerves
[178]
And shriek, ‘What help? what hope? what bread i’ the house,
What fire i’ the frost?’ There must be some response,
Though mine fail utterly. This social Sphinx,
Who sits between the sepulchres and stews,
Makes mock and mow against the crystal heavens,
And bullies God,—exacts a word at least
From each man standing on the side of God,
However paying a sphinx-price for it.
We pay it also if we hold our peace,
In pangs and pity. Let me speak and die.
Alas! you’ll say, I speak and kill, instead.’
I pressed in there; ‘The best men, doing their best,
Know peradventure least of what they do:
Men usefullest i’ the world, are simply used;
The nail that holds the wood, must pierce it first,
And He alone who wields the hammer, sees
The work advanced by the earliest blow. Take heart.’
‘Ah, if I could have taken yours!’ he said,
‘But that’s past now,’ Then rising ... ‘I will take
At least your kindness and encouragement.
I thank you. Dear, be happy. Sing your songs,
If that’s your way! but sometimes slumber too,
Nor tire too much with following, out of breath,
The rhymes upon your mountains of Delight.
Reflect, if Art be, in truth, the higher life,
You need the lower life to stand upon,
In order to reach up unto that higher;
And none can stand a-tiptoe in the place
[179]
He cannot stand in with two stable feet.
Remember then!—for Art’s sake, hold your life.’
We parted so. I held him in respect.
I comprehended what he was in heart
And sacrificial greatness. Ay, but he
Supposed me a thing too small to deign to know:
He blew me, plainly, from the crucible,
As some intruding, interrupting fly
Not worth the pains of his analysis
Absorbed on nobler subjects. Hurt a fly!
He would not for the world: he’s pitiful
To flies even. ‘Sing,’ says he, ‘and teaze me still,
If that’s your way, poor insect.’ That's your way!
[180]
Aurora Leigh, be humble. Shall I hope
To speak my poems in mysterious tune
With man and nature,—with the lava-lymph
That trickles from successive galaxies
Still drop by drop adown the finger of God,
In still new worlds?—with summer-days in this,
That scarce dare breathe, they are so beautiful?—
With spring’s delicious trouble in the ground
Tormented by the quickened blood of roots,
And softly pricked by golden crocus-sheaves
In token of the harvest-time of flowers?—
With winters and with autumns,—and beyond,
With the human heart’s large seasons,—when it hopes
And fears, joys, grieves, and loves?—with all that strain
Of sexual passion, which devours the flesh
In a sacrament of souls? with mother’s breasts,
Which, round the new-made creatures hanging there,
Throb luminous and harmonious like pure spheres?—
With multitudinous life, and finally
With the great out-goings of ecstatic souls,
[182]
Who, in a rush of too long prisoned flame,
Their radiant faces upward, burn away
This dark of the body, issuing on a world
Beyond our mortal?—can I speak my verse
So plainly in tune to these things and the rest,
That men shall feel it catch them on the quick,
As having the same warrant over them
To hold and move them, if they will or no,
Alike imperious as the primal rhythm
Of that theurgic nature? I must fail,
Who fail at the beginning to hold and move
One man,—and he my cousin, and he my friend,
And he born tender, made intelligent,
Inclined to ponder the precipitous sides
Of difficult questions; yet, obtuse to me,—
Of me, incurious! likes me very well,
And wishes me a paradise of good,
Good looks, good means, and good digestion!—ay,
But otherwise evades me, puts me off
With kindness, with a tolerant gentleness,—
Too light a book for a grave man’s reading! Go,
Aurora Leigh: be humble.
There it is;
We women are too apt to look to one,
Which proves a certain impotence in art.
We strain our natures at doing something great,
Far less because it’s something great to do,
Than, haply, that we, so, commend ourselves
As being not small, and more appreciable
To some one friend. We must have mediators
[183]
Betwixt our highest conscience and the judge;
Some sweet saint’s blood must quicken in our palms,
Or all the life in heaven seems slow and cold:
Good only, being perceived as the end of good,
And God alone pleased,—that’s too poor, we think,
And not enough for us, by any means.
Ay—Romney, I remember, told me once
We miss the abstract, when we comprehend!
We miss it most when we aspire, ... and fail.
Yet, so, I will not.—This vile woman’s way
Of trailing garments, shall not trip me up.
I’ll have no traffic with the personal thought
In art’s pure temple. Must I work in vain,
Without the approbation of a man?
It cannot be; it shall not. Fame itself,
That approbation of the general race,
Presents a poor end, (though the arrow speed,
Shot straight with vigorous finger to the white,)
And the highest fame was never reached except
By what was aimed above it. Art for art,
And good for God Himself, the essential Good!
We’ll keep our aims sublime, our eyes erect,
Although our woman-hands should shake and fail;
And if we fail.... But must we?—
Shall I fail?
The Greeks said grandly in their tragic phrase,
‘Let no one be called happy till his death.’
To which I add,—Let no one till his death
Be called unhappy. Measure not the work
[184]
Until the day’s out and the labour done;
Then bring your gauges. If the day’s work’s scant,
Why, call it scant; affect no compromise;
And, in that we have nobly striven at least,
Deal with us nobly, women though we be,
And honour us with truth, if not with praise.
My ballads prospered; but the ballad’s race
Is rapid for a poet who bears weights
Of thought and golden image. He can stand
Like Atlas, in the sonnet,—and support
His own heavens pregnant with dynastic stars;
But then he must stand still, nor take a step.
In that descriptive poem called ‘The Hills,’
The prospects were too far and indistinct.
’Tis true my critics said, ‘A fine view, that!’
The public scarcely cared to climb the book
For even the finest; and the public’s right,
A tree’s mere firewood, unless humanised;
Which well the Greeks knew, when they stirred the bark
With close-pressed bosoms of subsiding nymphs,
And made the forest-rivers garrulous
With babble of gods. For us, we are called to mark
A still more intimate humanity
In this inferior nature,—or, ourselves,
Must fall like dead leaves trodden underfoot
By veritabler artists. Earth, shut up
By Adam, like a fakir in a box
Left too long buried, remained stiff and dry,
[185]
A mere dumb corpse, till Christ the Lord came down,
Unlocked the doors, forced open the blank eyes,
And used his kingly chrisms to straighten out
The leathery tongue turned back into the throat:
Since when, she lives, remembers, palpitates
In every limb, aspires in every breath,
Embraces infinite relations. Now,
We want no half-gods, Panomphæan Joves,
Fauns, Naiads, Tritons, Oreads and the rest,
To take possession of a senseless world
To unnatural vampire-uses. See the earth,
The body of our body, the green earth,
Indubitably human, like this flesh
And these articulated veins through which
Our heart drives blood! there’s not a flower of spring,
That dies ere June, but vaunts itself allied
By issue and symbol, by significance
And correspondence, to that spirit-world
Outside the limits of our space and time,
Whereto we are bound. Let poets give it voice
With human meanings; else they miss the thought,
And henceforth step down lower, stand confessed
Instructed poorly for interpreters,—
Thrown out by an easy cowslip in the text.
Even so my pastoral failed: it was a book
Of surface-pictures—pretty, cold, and false
With literal transcript,—the worse done, I think,
For being not ill-done. Let me set my mark
Against such doings, and do otherwise.
[186]
This strikes me.—If the public whom we know,
Could catch me at such admissions, I should pass
For being right modest. Yet how proud we are,
In daring to look down upon ourselves!
The critics say that epics have died out
With Agamemnon and the goat-nursed gods—
I’ll not believe it. I could never dream
As Payne Knight did, (the mythic mountaineer
Who travelled higher than he was born to live,
And showed sometimes the goitre in his throat
Discoursing of an image seen through fog,)
That Homer’s heroes measured twelve feet high.
They were but men!—his Helen’s hair turned grey
Like any plain Miss Smith’s, who wears a front;
And Hector’s infant blubbered at a plume
As yours last Friday at a turkey-cock.
All men are possible heroes: every age,
Heroic in proportions, double-faced,
Looks backward and before, expects a morn
And claims an epos.
Ay, but every age
Appears to souls who live in it, (ask Carlyle)
Most unheroic. Ours, for instance, ours!
The thinkers scout it, and the poets abound
Who scorn to touch it with a finger-tip:
A pewter age,—mixed metal, silver-washed;
An age of scum, spooned off the richer past;
An age of patches for old gaberdines;
An age of mere transition, meaning nought,
[187]
Except that what succeeds must shame it quite,
If God please. That’s wrong thinking, to my mind,
And wrong thoughts make poor poems.
Every age,
Through being beheld too close, is ill-discerned
By those who have not lived past it. We’ll suppose
Mount Athos carved, as Persian Xerxes schemed,
To some colossal statue of a man:
The peasants, gathering brushwood in his ear,
Had guessed as little of any human form
Up there, as would a flock of browsing goats.
They’d have, in fact, to travel ten miles off
Or ere the giant image broke on them,
Full human profile, nose and chin distinct,
Mouth, muttering rhythms of silence up the sky,
And fed at evening with the blood of suns;
Grand torso,—hand, that flung perpetually
The largesse of a silver river down
To all the country pastures. ’Tis even thus
With times we live in,—evermore too great
To be apprehended near.
But poets should
Exert a double vision; should have eyes
To see near things as comprehensively
As if afar they took their point of sight,
And distant things, as intimately deep,
As if they touched them. Let us strive for this.
I do distrust the poet who discerns
No character or glory in his times,
And trundles back his soul five hundred years,
[188]
Past moat and drawbridge, into a castle-court,
Oh not to sing of lizards or of toads
Alive i’ the ditch there!—’twere excusable;
But of some black chief, half knight, half sheep-lifter,
Some beauteous dame, half chattel and half queen,
As dead as must be, for the greater part,
The poems made on their chivalric bones.
And that’s no wonder: death inherits death.
Nay, if there’s room for poets in the world
A little overgrown, (I think there is)
Their sole work is to represent the age,
Their age, not Charlemagne’s,—this live, throbbing age,
That brawls, cheats, maddens, calculates, aspires,
And spends more passion, more heroic heat,
Betwixt the mirrors of its drawing-rooms,
Than Roland with his knights, at Roncesvalles.
To flinch from modern varnish, coat or flounce,
Cry out for togas and the picturesque,
Is fatal,—foolish too. King Arthur’s self
Was commonplace to Lady Guenever;
And Camelot to minstrels seemed as flat,
As Regent Street to poets.
Never flinch,
But still, unscrupulously epic, catch
Upon the burning lava of a song,
The full-veined, heaving, double-breasted Age:
That, when the next shall come, the men of that
May touch the impress with reverent hand, and say
‘Behold,—behold the paps we all have sucked!
[189]
That bosom seems to beat still, or at least
It sets ours beating. This is living art,
Which thus presents, and thus records true life.’
What form is best for poems? Let me think
Of forms less, and the external. Trust the spirit,
As sovran nature does, to make the form;
For otherwise we only imprison spirit,
And not embody. Inward evermore
To outward,—so in life, and so in art,
Which still is life.
Five acts to make a play.
And why not fifteen? why not ten? or seven?
What matter for the number of the leaves,
Supposing the tree lives and grows? exact
The literal unities of time and place,
When ’tis the essence of passion to ignore
Both time and place? Absurd. Keep up the fire,
And leave the generous flames to shape themselves.
’Tis true the stage requires obsequiousness
To this or that convention; ‘exit’ here
And ‘enter’ there; the points for clapping, fixed,
Like Jacob’s white-peeled rods before the rams;
And all the close-curled imagery clipped
In manner of their fleece at shearing-time.
Forget to prick the galleries to the heart
Precisely at the fourth act,—culminate
Our five pyramidal acts with one act more,—
We’re lost so! Shakspeare’s ghost could scarcely plead
[190]
Against our just damnation. Stand aside;
We’ll muse for comfort that, last century,
On this same tragic stage on which we have failed,
A wigless Hamlet would have failed the same.
And whosoever writes good poetry,
Looks just to art. He does not write for you
Or me,—for London or for Edinburgh;
He will not suffer the best critic known
To step into his sunshine of free thought
And self-absorbed conception, and exact
An inch-long swerving of the holy lines.
If virtue done for popularity
Defiles like vice, can art for praise or hire
Still keep its splendor, and remain pure art?
Eschew such serfdom. What the poet writes,
He writes: mankind accepts it, if it suits,
And that’s success: if not, the poem’s passed
From hand to hand, and yet from hand to hand,
Until the unborn snatch it, crying out
In pity on their fathers’ being so dull,
And that’s success too.
I will write no plays.
Because the drama, less sublime in this,
Makes lower appeals, defends more menially,
Adopts the standard of the public taste
To chalk its height on, wears a dog-chain round
Its regal neck, and learns to carry and fetch
The fashions of the day to please the day;
Fawns close on pit and boxes, who clap hands,
[191]
Commending chiefly its docility
And humour in stage-tricks; or else indeed
Gets hissed at, howled at, stamped at like a dog,
Or worse, we’ll say. For dogs, unjustly kicked,
Yell, bite at need; but if your dramatist
(Being wronged by some five hundred nobodies
Because their grosser brains most naturally
Misjudge the fineness of his subtle wit)
Shows teeth an almond’s breadth, protests the length
Of a modest phrase,—‘My gentle countrymen,
There’s something in it, haply, of your fault,’—
Why then, besides five hundred nobodies,
He’ll have five thousand, and five thousand more,
Against him,—the whole public,—all the hoofs
Of King Saul’s father’s asses, in full drove,—
And obviously deserve it. He appealed
To these,—and why say more if they condemn,
Than if they praised him?—Weep, my Æschylus,
But low and far, upon Sicilian shores!
For since ’twas Athens (so I read the myth)
Who gave commission to that fatal weight,
The tortoise, cold and hard, to drop on thee
And crush thee,—better cover thy bald head;
She’ll hear the softest hum of Hyblan bee
Before thy loud’st protesting.—For the rest,
The risk’s still worse upon the modern stage:
I could not, in so little, accept success,
Nor would I risk so much, in ease and calm,
For manifester gains; let those who prize,
Pursue them: I stand off.
[192]
And yet, forbid,
That any irreverent fancy or conceit
Should litter in the Drama’s throne-room, where
The rulers of our art, in whose full veins
Dynastic glories mingle, sit in strength
And do their kingly work,—conceive, command,
And, from the imagination’s crucial heat,
Catch up their men and women all a-flame
For action, all alive, and forced to prove
Their life by living out heart, brain, and nerve,
Until mankind makes witness, ‘These be men
As we are,’ and vouchsafes the kiss that’s due
To Imogen and Juliet—sweetest kin
On art’s side.
’Tis that, honouring to its worth
The drama, I would fear to keep it down
To the level of the footlights. Dies no more
The sacrificial goat, for Bacchus slain,—
His filmed eyes fluttered by the whirling white
Of choral vestures,—troubled in his blood,
While tragic voices that clanged keen as swords,
Leapt high together with the altar-flame,
And made the blue air wink. The waxen mask,
Which set the grand still front of Themis’ son
Upon the puckered visage of a player;—
The buskin, which he rose upon and moved,
As some tall ship, first conscious of the wind,
Sweeps slowly past the piers;—the mouthpiece, where
The mere man’s voice with all its breaths and breaks
Went sheathed in brass, and clashed on even heights
[193]
Its phrasèd thunders;—these things are no more,
Which once were. And concluding, which is clear,
The growing drama has outgrown such toys
Of simulated stature, face, and speech,
It also, peradventure, may outgrow
The simulation of the painted scene,
Boards, actors, prompters, gaslight, and costume;
And take for a worthier stage the soul itself,
Its shifting fancies and celestial lights,
With all its grand orchestral silences
To keep the pauses of the rhythmic sounds.
Alas, I still see something to be done,
And what I do falls short of what I see
Though I waste myself on doing. Long green days,
Worn bare of grass and sunshine,—long calm nights,
From which the silken sleeps were fretted out,—
Be witness for me, with no amateur’s
Irreverent haste and busy idleness
I’ve set myself to art! What then? what’s done?
What’s done, at last?
Behold, at last, a book.
If life-blood’s necessary,—which it is,
(By that blue vein athrob on Mahomet’s brow,
Each prophet-poet’s book must show man’s blood!)
If life-blood’s fertilising, I wrung mine
On every leaf of this,—unless the drops
Slid heavily on one side and left it dry.
That chances often: many a fervid man
Writes books as cold and flat as grave-yard stones
[194]
From which the lichen’s scraped; and if St. Preux
Had written his own letters, as he might,
We had never wept to think of the little mole
’Neath Julie’s drooping eyelid. Passion is
But something suffered, after all.
While Art
Sets action on the top of suffering:
The artist’s part is both to be and do,
Transfixing with a special, central power
The flat experience of the common man,
And turning outward, with a sudden wrench,
Half agony, half ecstasy, the thing
He feels the inmost: never felt the less
Because he sings it. Does a torch less burn
For burning next reflectors of blue steel,
That he should be the colder for his place
’Twixt two incessant fires,—his personal life’s,
And that intense refraction which burns back
Perpetually against him from the round
Of crystal conscience he was born into
If artist-born? O sorrowful great gift
Conferred on poets, of a twofold life,
When one life has been found enough for pain!
We, staggering ’neath our burden as mere men,
Being called to stand up straight as demi-gods,
Support the intolerable strain and stress
Of the universal, and send clearly up
With voices broken by the human sob,
Our poems to find rhymes among the stars!
[195]
But soft!—a ‘poet’ is a word soon said;
A book’s a thing soon written. Nay, indeed,
The more the poet shall be questionable,
The more unquestionably comes his book!
And this of mine—well, granting to myself
Some passion in it, furrowing up the flats,
Mere passion will not prove a volume worth
Its gall and rags even. Bubbles round a keel
Mean nought, excepting that the vessel moves.
There’s more than passion goes to make a man,
Or book, which is a man too.
I am sad.
I wonder if Pygmalion had these doubts,
And, feeling the hard marble first relent,
Grow supple to the straining of his arms,
And tingle through its cold to his burning lip,
Supposed his senses mocked, and that the toil
Of stretching past the known and seen, to reach
The archetypal Beauty out of sight,
Had made his heart beat fast enough for two,
And with his own life dazed and blinded him!
Not so; Pygmalion loved,—and whoso loves
Believes the impossible.
And I am sad:
I cannot thoroughly love a work of mine,
Since none seems worthy of my thought and hope
More highly mated. He has shot them down,
My Phœbus Apollo, soul within my soul,
Who judges, by the attempted, what’s attained,
And with the silver arrow from his height,
[196]
Has struck down all my works before my face,
While I said nothing. Is there aught to say?
I called the artist but a greatened man;
He may be childless also, like a man.
I laboured on alone. The wind and dust
And sun of the world beat blistering in my face;
And hope, now for me, now against me, dragged
My spirits onward,—as some fallen balloon,
Which, whether caught by blossoming tree or bare,
Is torn alike. I sometimes touched my aim,
Or seemed,—and generous souls cried out, ‘Be strong,
Take courage; now you’re on our level,—now!
The next step saves you!’ I was flushed with praise,
But, pausing just a moment to draw breath,
I could not choose but murmur to myself
‘Is this all? all that’s done? and all that’s gained?
If this then be success, ’tis dismaller
Than any failure.’
O my God, my God,
O supreme Artist, who as sole return
For all the cosmic wonder of Thy work,
Demandest of us just a word ... a name,
‘My Father!’—thou hast knowledge, only thou,
How dreary ’tis for women to sit still
On winter nights by solitary fires,
And hear the nations praising them far off,
Too far! ay, praising our quick sense of love,
Our very heart of passionate womanhood,
Which could not beat so in the verse without
[197]
Being present also in the unkissed lips,
And eyes undried because there’s none to ask
The reason they grew moist.
To sit alone,
And think, for comfort, how, that very night,
Affianced lovers, leaning face to face
With sweet half-listenings for each other’s breath,
Are reading haply from some page of ours,
To pause with a thrill, as if their cheeks had touched,
When such a stanza, level to their mood,
Seems floating their own thought out—‘So I feel
For thee,’—‘And I, for thee: this poet knows
What everlasting love is!’—how, that night,
A father, issuing from the misty roads
Upon the luminous round of lamp and hearth
And happy children, having caught up first
The youngest there until it shrunk and shrieked
To feel the cold chin prick its dimples through
With winter from the hills, may throw i’ the lap
Of the eldest, (who has learnt to drop her lids
To hide some sweetness newer than last year’s)
Our book and cry, ... ‘Ah you, you care for rhymes;
So here be rhymes to pore on under trees,
When April comes to let you! I’ve been told
They are not idle as so many are,
But set hearts beating pure as well as fast:
It’s yours, the book; I’ll write your name in it,—
That so you may not lose, however lost
In poet’s lore and charming reverie,
The thought of how your father thought of you
[198]
In riding from the town.’
To have our books
Appraised by love, associated with love,
While we sit loveless! is it hard, you think?
At least ’tis mournful. Fame, indeed, ’twas said,
Means simply love. It was a man said that.
And then, there’s love and love: the love of all
(To risk, in turn, a woman’s paradox,)
Is but a small thing to the love of one.
You bid a hungry child be satisfied
With a heritage of many corn-fields: nay,
He says he’s hungry,—he would rather have
That little barley-cake you keep from him
While reckoning up his harvests. So with us;
(Here, Romney, too, we fail to generalise!)
We’re hungry.
Hungry! but it’s pitiful
To wail like unweaned babes and suck our thumbs
Because we’re hungry. Who, in all this world,
(Wherein we are haply set to pray and fast,
And learn what good is by its opposite)
Has never hungered? Woe to him who has found
The meal enough! if Ugolino’s full,
His teeth have crunched some foul unnatural thing:
For here satiety proves penury
More utterly irremediable. And since
We needs must hunger,—better, for man’s love,
Than God’s truth! better, for companions sweet,
Than great convictions! let us bear our weights,
Preferring dreary hearths to desert souls.
[199]
Well, well! they say we’re envious, we who rhyme;
But I, because I am a woman perhaps,
And so rhyme ill, am ill at envying.
I never envied Graham his breadth of style,
Which gives you, with a random smutch or two,
(Near-sighted critics analyse to smutch)
Such delicate perspectives of full life;
Nor Belmore, for the unity of aim
To which he cuts his cedarn poems, fine
As sketchers do their pencils; nor Mark Gage,
For that caressing colour and trancing tone
Whereby you’re swept away and melted in
The sensual element, which, with a back wave,
Restores you to the level of pure souls
And leaves you with Plotinus. None of these,
For native gifts or popular applause,
I’ve envied; but for this,—that when, by chance,
Says some one,—‘There goes Belmore, a great man!
He leaves clean work behind him, and requires
No sweeper up of the chips,’ ... a girl I know,
Who answers nothing, save with her brown eyes,
Smiles unaware, as if a guardian saint
Smiled in her:—for this, too,—that Gage comes home
And lays his last book’s prodigal review
Upon his mother’s knees, where, years ago,
He had laid his childish spelling-book and learned
To chirp and peck the letters from her mouth,
As young birds must. ‘Well done,’ she murmured then,
She will not say it now more wonderingly;
And yet the last ‘Well done’ will touch him more,
[200]
As catching up to-day and yesterday
In a perfect chord of love; and so, Mark Gage.
I envy you your mother!—and you, Graham,
Because you have a wife who loves you so,
She half forgets, at moments, to be proud
Of being Graham’s wife, until a friend observes,
‘The boy here, has his father’s massive brow,
Done small in wax ... if we push back the curls.’
Who loves me? Dearest father,—mother sweet,—
I speak the names out sometimes by myself,
And make the silence shiver: they sound strange,
As Hindostanee to an Ind-born man
Accustomed many years to English speech;
Or lovely poet-words grown obsolete,
Which will not leave off singing. Up in heaven
I have my father,—with my mother’s face
Beside him in a blotch of heavenly light;
No more for earth’s familiar, household use,
No more! The best verse written by this hand,
Can never reach them where they sit, to seem
Well-done to them. Death quite unfellows us,
Sets dreadful odds betwixt the live and dead,
And makes us part as those at Babel did,
Through sudden ignorance of a common tongue.
A living Cæsar would not dare to play
At bowls, with such as my dead father is.
And yet, this may be less so than appears,
This change and separation. Sparrows five
[201]
For just two farthings, and God cares for each.
If God is not too great for little cares,
Is any creature, because gone to God?
I’ve seen some men, veracious, nowise mad,
Who have thought or dreamed, declared and testified,
They’ve heard the Dead a-ticking like a clock
Which strikes the hours of the eternities,
Beside them, with their natural ears,—and known
That human spirits feel the human way,
And hate the unreasoning awe which waves them off
From possible communion. It may be.
At least, earth separates as well as heaven.
For instance, I have not seen Romney Leigh
Full eighteen months ... add six, you get two years.
They say he’s very busy with good works,—
Has parted Leigh Hall into almshouses.
He made an almshouse of his heart one day,
Which ever since is loose upon the latch
For those who pull the string.—I never did.
It always makes me sad to go abroad;
And now I’m sadder that I went to-night
Among the lights and talkers at Lord Howe’s.
His wife is gracious, with her glossy braids,
And even voice, and gorgeous eyeballs, calm
As her other jewels. If she’s somewhat cold,
Who wonders, when her blood has stood so long
In the ducal reservoir she calls her line
By no means arrogantly? she’s not proud;
[202]
Not prouder than the swan is of the lake
He has always swum in;—’tis her element,
And so she takes it with a natural grace,
Ignoring tadpoles. She just knows, perhaps,
There are men, move on without outriders,
Which isn’t her fault. Ah, to watch her face,
When good Lord Howe expounds his theories
Of social justice and equality—
’Tis curious, what a tender, tolerant bend
Her neck takes: for she loves him, likes his talk,
‘Such clever talk—that dear, odd Algernon!’
She listens on, exactly as if he talked
Some Scandinavian myth of Lemures,
Too pretty to dispute, and too absurd.
She’s gracious to me as her husband’s friend,
And would be gracious, were I not a Leigh,
Being used to smile just so, without her eyes,
On Joseph Strangways, the Leeds mesmerist,
And Delia Dobbs, the lecturer from ‘the States’
Upon the ‘Woman’s question.’ Then, for him,
I like him ... he’s my friend. And all the rooms
Were full of crinkling silks that swept about
The fine dust of most subtle courtesies.
What then?—why then, we come home to be sad.
How lovely One I love not, looked to-night!
She’s very pretty, Lady Waldemar.
Her maid must use both hands to twist that coil
Of tresses, then be careful lest the rich
[203]
Bronze rounds should slip:—she missed, though, a grey hair,
A single one,—I saw it; otherwise
The woman looked immortal. How they told,
Those alabaster shoulders and bare breasts,
On which the pearls, drowned out of sight in milk,
Were lost, excepting for the ruby-clasp!
They split the amaranth velvet-boddice down
To the waist, or nearly, with the audacious press
Of full-breathed beauty. If the heart within
Were half as white!—but, if it were, perhaps
The breast were closer covered, and the sight
Less aspectable, by half, too.
I heard
The young man with the German student’s look—
A sharp face, like a knife in a cleft stick,
Which shot up straight against the parting line
So equally dividing the long hair,—
Say softly to his neighbour, (thirty-five
And mediæval) ‘Look that way, Sir Blaise.
She’s Lady Waldemar—to the left,—in red—
Whom Romney Leigh, our ablest man just now,
Is soon about to marry.’
Then replied
Sir Blaise Delorme, with quiet, priestlike voice,
Too used to syllable damnations round
To make a natural emphasis worth while:
‘Is Leigh your ablest man? the same, I think,
Once jilted by a recreant pretty maid
Adopted from the people? Now, in change,
[204]
He seems to have plucked a flower from the other side
Of the social hedge,’
‘A flower, a flower,’ exclaimed
My German student,—his own eyes full-blown
Bent on her. He was twenty, certainly.
Sir Blaise resumed with gentle arrogance,
As if he had dropped his alms into a hat,
And had the right to counsel,—‘My young friend,
I doubt your ablest man’s ability
To get the least good or help meet for him,
For pagan phalanstery or Christian home,
From such a flowery creature,’
‘Beautiful!’
My student murmured, rapt,—‘Mark how she stirs!
Just waves her head, as if a flower indeed,
Touched far off by the vain breath of our talk.’
At which that bilious Grimwald, (he who writes
For the Renovator) who had seemed absorbed
Upon the table-book of autographs,
(I dare say mentally he crunched the bones
Of all those writers, wishing them alive
To feel his tooth in earnest) turned short round
With low carnivorous laugh,—‘A flower, of course!
She neither sews nor spins,—and takes no thought
Of her garments ... falling off.’
The student flinched,
Sir Blaise, the same; then both, drawing back their chairs
As if they spied black-beetles on the floor,
[205]
Pursued their talk, without a word being thrown
To the critic.
Good Sir Blaise’s brow is high
And noticeably narrow: a strong wind,
You fancy, might unroof him suddenly,
And blow that great top attic off his head
So piled with feudal relics. You admire
His nose in profile, though you miss his chin;
But, though you miss his chin, you seldom miss
His golden cross worn innermostly, (carved
For penance, by a saintly Styrian monk
Whose flesh was too much with him,) slipping through
Some unaware unbuttoned casualty
Of the under-waistcoat. With an absent air
Sir Blaise sate fingering it and speaking low,
While I, upon the sofa, heard it all.
‘My dear young friend, if we could bear our eyes
Like blessedest St. Lucy, on a plate,
They would not trick us into choosing wives,
As doublets, by the colour. Otherwise
Our fathers chose,—and therefore, when they had hung
Their household keys about a lady’s waist,
The sense of duty gave her dignity:
She kept her bosom holy to her babes;
And, if a moralist reproved her dress,
’Twas, ‘Too much starch!’—and not, ‘Too little lawn!’'
‘Now, pshaw!’ returned the other in a heat,
A little fretted by being called ‘young friend,’
[206]
Or so I took it,—‘for St. Lucy’s sake,
If she’s the saint to curse by, let us leave
Our fathers,—plagued enough about our sons!’
(He stroked his beardless chin) ‘yes, plagued, sir, plagued:
The future generations lie on us
As heavy as the nightmare of a seer;
Our meat and drink grow painful prophecy:
I ask you,—have we leisure, if we liked,
To hollow out our weary hands to keep
Your intermittent rushlight of the past
From draughts in lobbies? Prejudice of sex,
And marriage-laws ... the socket drops them through
While we two speak,—however may protest
Some over-delicate nostrils, like your own,
’Gainst odours thence arising.’
‘You are young,’
Sir Blaise objected.
‘If I am,’ he said
With fire,—‘though somewhat less so than I seem,
The young run on before, and see the thing
That’s coming. Reverence for the young, I cry.
In that new church for which the world’s near ripe,
You’ll have the younger in the Elder’s chair,
Presiding with his ivory front of hope
O’er foreheads clawed by cruel carrion-birds
Of life’s experience.’
‘Pray your blessing, sir,’
Sir Blaise replied good-humouredly,—‘I plucked
A silver hair this morning from my beard,
Which left me your inferior. Would I were
[207]
Eighteen, and worthy to admonish you!
If young men of your order run before
To see such sights as sexual prejudice
And marriage-law dissolved,—in plainer words,
A general concubinage expressed
In a universal pruriency,—the thing
Is scarce worth running fast for, and you’d gain
By loitering with your elders.’
‘Ah,’ he said,
‘Who, getting to the top of Pisgah-hill,
Can talk with one at bottom of the view,
To make it comprehensible? Why, Leigh
Himself, although our ablest man, I said,
Is scarce advanced to see as far as this,
Which some are: he takes up imperfectly
The social question—by one handle—leaves
The rest to trail. A Christian socialist,
Is Romney Leigh, you understand.’
‘Not I.
I disbelieve in Christian-pagans, much
As you in women-fishes. If we mix
Two colours, we lose both, and make a third
Distinct from either. Mark you! to mistake
A colour is the sign of a sick brain,
And mine, I thank the saints, is clear and cool:
A neutral tint is here impossible.
The church,—and by the church, I mean, of course,
The catholic, apostolic, mother-church,—
Draws lines as plain and straight as her own wall;
Inside of which, are Christians, obviously,
[208]
And outside ... dogs.’
‘We thank you. Well I know
The ancient mother-church would fain still bite,
For all her toothless gums,—as Leigh himself
Would fain be a Christian still, for all his wit;
Pass that; you two may settle it, for me.
You’re slow in England. In a month I learnt
At Göttingen, enough philosophy
To stock your English schools for fifty years;
Pass that, too. Here, alone, I stop you short,
—Supposing a true man like Leigh could stand
Unequal in the stature of his life
To the height of his opinions. Choose a wife
Because of a smooth skin?—not he, not he!
He’d rail at Venus’ self for creaking shoes,
Unless she walked his way of righteousness:
And if he takes a Venus Meretrix,
(No imputation on the lady there)
Be sure that, by some sleight of Christian art,
He has metamorphosed and converted her
To a Blessed Virgin.’
‘Soft!’ Sir Blaise drew breath
As if it hurt him,—‘Soft! no blasphemy,
I pray you!’
‘The first Christians did the thing;
Why not the last?’ asked he of Göttingen,
With just that shade of sneering on the lip,
Compensates for the lagging of the beard,—
‘And so the case is. If that fairest fair
Is talked of as the future wife of Leigh,
[209]
She’s talked of, too, at least as certainly,
As Leigh’s disciple. You may find her name
On all his missions and commissions, schools,
Asylums, hospitals,—he has had her down,
With other ladies whom her starry lead
Persuaded from their spheres, to his country-place
In Shropshire, to the famed phalanstery
At Leigh Hall, christianised from Fourier’s own,
(In which he has planted out his sapling stocks
Of knowledge into social nurseries)
And there, they say, she has tarried half a week,
And milked the cows, and churned, and pressed the curd,
And said ‘my sister’ to the lowest drab
Of all the assembled castaways; such girls!
Ay, sided with them at the washing-tub—
Conceive, Sir Blaise, those naked perfect arms,
Round glittering arms, plunged elbow-deep in suds,
Like wild swans hid in lilies all a-shake.’
Lord Howe came up. ‘What, talking poetry
So near the image of the unfavouring Muse?
That’s you, Miss Leigh: I’ve watched you half an hour,
Precisely as I watched the statue called
A Pallas in the Vatican;—you mind
The face, Sir Blaise?—intensely calm and sad,
As wisdom cut it off from fellowship,—
But that spoke louder. Not a word from you!
And these two gentlemen were bold, I marked,
And unabashed by even your silence.’
‘Ah,’
[210]
Said I, ‘my dear Lord Howe, you shall not speak
To a printing woman who has lost her place,
(The sweet safe corner of the household fire
Behind the heads of children) compliments,
As if she were a woman. We who have clipt
The curls before our eyes, may see at least
As plain as men do: speak out, man to man;
No compliments, beseech you.’
‘Friend to friend,
Let that be. We are sad to-night, I saw,
(—Good night, Sir Blaise! Ah, Smith—he has slipped away)
I saw you across the room, and stayed, Miss Leigh,
To keep a crowd of lion-hunters off,
With faces toward your jungle. There were three;
A spacious lady, five feet ten and fat,
Who has the devil in her (and there’s room)
For walking to and fro upon the earth,
From Chipewa to China; she requires
Your autograph upon a tinted leaf
’Twixt Queen Pomare’s and Emperor Soulouque’s;
Pray give it; she has energies, though fat:
For me, I’d rather see a rick on fire
Than such a woman angry. Then a youth
Fresh from the backwoods, green as the underboughs,
Asks modestly, Miss Leigh, to kiss your shoe,
And adds, he has an epic, in twelve parts,
Which when you’ve read, you’ll do it for his boot,—
All which I saved you, and absorb next week
Both manuscript and man,—because a lord
[211]
Is still more potent than a poetess,
With any extreme republican. Ah, ah,
You smile at last, then.’
‘Thank you.’
‘Leave the smile,
I’ll lose the thanks for ’t,—ay, and throw you in
My transatlantic girl, with golden eyes,
That draw you to her splendid whiteness, as
The pistil of a water-lily draws,
Adust with gold. Those girls across the sea
Are tyrannously pretty,—and I swore
(She seemed to me an innocent, frank girl)
To bring her to you for a woman’s kiss,
Not now, but on some other day or week:
—We’ll call it perjury; I give her up.’
‘No, bring her.’
‘Now,’ said he, ‘you make it hard
To touch such goodness with a grimy palm.
I thought to tease you well, and fret you cross,
And steel myself, when rightly vexed with you,
For telling you a thing to tease you more.’
‘Of Romney?’
‘No, no; nothing worse,’ he cried,
‘Of Romney Leigh, than what is buzzed about,—
That he is taken in an eye-trap too,
Like many half as wise. The thing I mean
Refers to you, not him.’
‘Refers to me.’
[212]
He echoed,—‘Me! You sound it like a stone
Dropped down a dry well very listlessly,
By one who never thinks about the toad
Alive at the bottom. Presently perhaps
You’ll sound your ‘me’ more proudly—till I shrink.’
‘Lord Howe’s the toad, then, in this question?’
‘Brief,
We’ll take it graver. Give me sofa-room,
And quiet hearing. You know Eglinton,
John Eglinton, of Eglinton in Kent?’
‘Is he the toad?—he’s rather like the snail;
Known chiefly for the house upon his back:
Divide the man and house—you kill the man;
That’s Eglinton of Eglinton, Lord Howe.’
He answered grave. ‘A reputable man,
An excellent landlord of the olden stamp,
If somewhat slack in new philanthropies;
Who keeps his birthdays with a tenants’ dance,
Is hard upon them when they miss the church
Or keep their children back from catechism,
But not ungentle when the aged poor
Pick sticks at hedge-sides; nay, I’ve heard him say,
‘The old dame has a twinge because she stoops:
‘That’s punishment enough for felony.’’
‘O tender-hearted landlord! May I take
My long lease with him, when the time arrives
[213]
For gathering winter-faggots!’
‘He likes art,
Buys books and pictures ... of a certain kind;
Neglects no patent duty; a good son’....
‘To a most obedient mother. Born to wear
His father’s shoes, he wears her husband’s too:
Indeed, I’ve heard it’s touching. Dear Lord Howe,
You shall not praise me so against your heart,
When I’m at worst for praise and faggots.’
‘Be
Less bitter with me, for ... in short,’ he said,
‘I have a letter, which he urged me so
To bring you ... I could scarcely choose but yield;
Insisting that a new love passing through
The hand of an old friendship, caught from it
Some reconciling perfume.’
‘Love, you say?
My lord, I cannot love. I only find
The rhymes for love,—and that’s not love, my lord.
Take back your letter.’
‘Pause: you’ll read it first?’
‘I will not read it: it is stereotyped;
The same he wrote to,—anybody’s name,—
Anne Blythe, the actress, when she had died so true,
A duchess fainted in a private box:
Pauline, the dancer, after the great pas,
In which her little feet winked overhead
Like other fire-flies, and amazed the pit:
[214]
Or Baldinacci, when her F in alt
Had touched the silver tops of heaven itself
With such a pungent soul-dart, even the Queen
Laid softly, each to each, her white-gloved palms,
And sighed for joy: or else (I thank your friend)
Aurora Leigh,—when some indifferent rhymes,
Like those the boys sang round the holy ox
On Memphis-road, have chanced, perhaps, to set
Our Apis-public lowing. Oh, he wants,
Instead of any worthy wife at home,
A star upon his stage of Eglinton!
Advise him that he is not overshrewd
In being so little modest: a dropped star
Makes bitter waters, says a Book I’ve read,—
And there’s his unread letter.’
‘My dear friend,’
Lord Howe began....
In haste I tore the phrase.
‘You mean your friend of Eglinton, or me?’
‘I mean you, you,’ he answered with some fire.
‘A happy life means prudent compromise;
The tare runs through the farmer’s garnered sheaves;
But though the gleaner’s apron holds pure wheat,
We count her poorer. Tare with wheat, we cry,
And good with drawbacks. You, you love your art,
And, certain of vocation, set your soul
On utterance. Only, ... in this world we have made,
(They say God made it first, but, if He did,
[215]
’Twas so long since, ... and, since, we have spoiled it so,
He scarce would know it, if He looked this way,
From hells we preach of, with the flames blown out,)
In this bad, twisted, topsy-turvy world,
Where all the heaviest wrongs get uppermost,—
In this uneven, unfostering England here,
Where ledger-strokes and sword-strokes count indeed,
But soul-strokes merely tell upon the flesh
They strike from,—it is hard to stand for art,
Unless some golden tripod from the sea
Be fished up, by Apollo’s divine chance,
To throne such feet as yours, my prophetess,
At Delphi. Think,—the god comes down as fierce
As twenty bloodhounds! shakes you, strangles you,
Until the oracular shriek shall ooze in froth!
At best it’s not all ease,—at worst too hard:
A place to stand on is a ’vantage gained,
And here’s your tripod. To be plain, dear friend,
You’re poor, except in what you richly give;
You labour for your own bread painfully,
Or ere you pour our wine. For art’s sake, pause.’
I answered slow,—as some wayfaring man,
Who feels himself at night too far from home,
Makes stedfast face against the bitter wind.
‘Is art so less a thing than virtue is,
That artists first must cater for their ease
Or ever they make issue past themselves
To generous use? alas, and is it so,
That we, who would be somewhat clean, must sweep
[216]
Our ways as well as walk them, and no friend
Confirm us nobly,—‘Leave results to God,
But you, be clean?’ What! ‘prudent compromise
Makes acceptable life,’ you say instead,
You, you, Lord Howe?—in things indifferent, well.
For instance, compromise the wheaten bread
For rye, the meat for lentils, silk for serge,
And sleep on down, if needs, for sleep on straw;
But there, end compromise. I will not bate
One artist-dream, on straw or down, my lord,
Nor pinch my liberal soul, though I be poor,
Nor cease to love high, though I live thus low.’
So speaking, with less anger in my voice
Than sorrow, I rose quickly to depart;
While he, thrown back upon the noble shame
Of such high-stumbling natures, murmured words,
The right words after wrong ones. Ah, the man
Is worthy, but so given to entertain
Impossible plans of superhuman life,—
He sets his virtues on so raised a shelf,
To keep them at the grand millennial height,
He has to mount a stool to get at them;
And, meantime, lives on quite the common way,
With everybody’s morals.
As we passed,
Lord Howe insisting that his friendly arm
Should oar me across the sparkling brawling stream
Which swept from room to room,—we fell at once
On Lady Waldemar. ‘Miss Leigh,’ she said,
[217]
And gave me such a smile, so cold and bright,
As if she tried it in a ‘tiring glass
And liked it; ‘all to-night I’ve strained at you,
As babes at baubles held up out of reach
By spiteful nurses, (‘Never snatch,’ they say,)
And there you sate, most perfectly shut in
By good Sir Blaise and clever Mister Smith,
And then our dear Lord Howe! at last, indeed,
I almost snatched. I have a world to speak
About your cousin’s place in Shropshire, where
I’ve been to see his work ... our work,—you heard
I went?... and of a letter, yesterday,
In which, if I should read a page or two,
You might feel interest, though you’re locked of course
In literary toil.—You’ll like to hear
Your last book lies at the phalanstery,
As judged innocuous for the elder girls
And younger women who still care for books.
We all must read, you see, before we live:
But slowly the ineffable light comes up,
And, as it deepens, drowns the written word,—
So said your cousin, while we stood and felt
A sunset from his favourite beech-tree seat:
He might have been a poet if he would,
But then he saw the higher thing at once,
And climbed to it. I think he looks well now,
Has quite got over that unfortunate ...
Ah, ah ... I know it moved you. Tender-heart!
You took a liking to the wretched girl.
Perhaps you thought the marriage suitable,
[218]
Who knows? a poet hankers for romance,
And so on. As for Romney Leigh, ’tis sure
He never loved her,—never. By the way,
You have not heard of her ...? quite out of sight,
And out of saving? lost in every sense?’
She might have gone on talking half-an-hour,
And I stood still, and cold, and pale, I think,
As a garden-statue a child pelts with snow
For pretty pastime. Every now and then
I put in ‘yes’ or ‘no,’ I scarce knew why;
The blind man walks wherever the dog pulls,
And so I answered. Till Lord Howe broke in;
‘What penance takes the wretch who interrupts
The talk of charming women? I, at last,
Must brave it. Pardon, Lady Waldemar!
The lady on my arm is tired, unwell,
And loyally I’ve promised she shall say
No harder word this evening, than ... goodnight;
The rest her face speaks for her.’—Then we went.
And I breathe large at home. I drop my cloak,
Unclasp my girdle, loose the band that ties
My hair ... now could I but unloose my soul!
We are sepulchred alive in this close world,
And want more room.
The charming woman there—
This reckoning up and writing down her talk
Affects me singularly. How she talked
To pain me! woman’s spite!—You wear steel-mail;
[219]
A woman takes a housewife from her breast,
And plucks the delicatest needle out
As ’twere a rose, and pricks you carefully
’Neath nails, ’neath eyelids, in your nostrils,—say,
A beast would roar so tortured,—but a man,
A human creature, must not, shall not flinch,
No, not for shame.
What vexes, after all,
Is just that such as she, with such as I,
Knows how to vex. Sweet heaven, she takes me up
As if she had fingered me and dog-eared me
And spelled me by the fireside, half a life!
She knows my turns, my feeble points.—What then?
The knowledge of a thing implies the thing;
Of course, she found that in me, she saw that,
Her pencil underscored this for a fault,
And I, still ignorant. Shut the book up! close!
And crush that beetle in the leaves.
O heart,
At last we shall grow hard too, like the rest,
And call it self-defence because we are soft.
And after all, now, ... why should I be pained,
That Romney Leigh, my cousin, should espouse
This Lady Waldemar? And, say, she held
Her newly-blossomed gladness in my face, ...
’Twas natural surely, if not generous,
Considering how, when winter held her fast,
I helped the frost with mine, and pained her more
Than she pains me. Pains me!—but wherefore pained?
[220]
’Tis clear my cousin Romney wants a wife,—
So, good!—The man’s need of the woman, here,
Is greater than the woman’s of the man,
And easier served; for where the man discerns
A sex, (ah, ah, the man can generalise,
Said he) we see but one, ideally
And really: where we yearn to lose ourselves
And melt like white pearls in another’s wine,
He seeks to double himself by what he loves,
And make his drink more costly by our pearls.
At board, at bed, at work, and holiday,
It is not good for man to be alone,—
And that’s his way of thinking, first and last;
And thus my cousin Romney wants a wife.
But then my cousin sets his dignity
On personal virtue. If he understands
By love, like others, self-aggrandisement,
It is that he may verily be great
By doing rightly and kindly. Once he thought,
For charitable ends set duly forth
In Heaven’s white judgment-book, to marry ... ah,
We’ll call her name Aurora Leigh, although
She’s changed since then!—and once, for social ends,
Poor Marian Erle, my sister Marian Erle,
My woodland sister, sweet maid Marian,
Whose memory moans on in me like the wind
Through ill-shut casements, making me more sad
Than ever I find reasons for. Alas,
Poor pretty plaintive face, embodied ghost,
[221]
He finds it easy, then, to clap thee off
From pulling at his sleeve and book and pen,—
He locks thee out at night into the cold,
Away from butting with thy horny eyes
Against his crystal dreams,—that, now, he’s strong
To love anew? that Lady Waldemar
Succeeds my Marian?
After all, why not?
He loved not Marian, more than once he loved
Aurora. If he loves, at last, that Third,
Albeit she prove as slippery as spilt oil
On marble floors, I will not augur him
Ill luck for that. Good love, howe’er ill-placed,
Is better for a man’s soul in the end,
Than if he loved ill what deserves love well.
A pagan, kissing, for a step of Pan,
The wild-goat’s hoof-print on the loamy down,
Exceeds our modern thinker who turns back
The strata ... granite, limestone, coal, and clay,
Concluding coldly with, ‘Here’s law! Where’s God?’
And then at worse,—if Romney loves her not,—
At worst,—if he’s incapable of love,
Which may be—then indeed, for such a man
Incapable of love, she’s good enough;
For she, at worst too, is a woman still
And loves him ... as the sort of woman can.
My loose long hair began to burn and creep,
Alive to the very ends, about my knees:
[222]
I swept it backward as the wind sweeps flame,
With the passion of my hands. Ah, Romney laughed
One day ... (how full the memories come up!)
‘—Your Florence fire-flies live on in your hair,’
He said, ‘it gleams so.’ Well, I wrung them out,
My fire-flies; made a knot as hard as life,
Of those loose, soft, impracticable curls,
And then sat down and thought.... ‘She shall not think
Her thought of me,’—and drew my desk and wrote.
‘Dear Lady Waldemar, I could not speak
With people round me, nor can sleep to-night
And not speak, after the great news I heard
Of you and of my cousin. May you be
Most happy; and the good he meant the world,
Replenish his own life. Say what I say,
And let my word be sweeter for your mouth,
As you are you ... I only Aurora Leigh.’
That’s quiet, guarded! though she hold it up
Against the light, she’ll not see through it more
Than lies there to be seen. So much for pride;
And now for peace, a little! Let me stop
All writing back.... ‘Sweet thanks, my sweetest friend,
‘You’ve made more joyful my great joy itself,’
—No, that’s too simple! she would twist it thus,
‘My joy would still be as sweet as thyme in drawers,
However shut up in the dark and dry;
But violets, aired and dewed by love like yours,
Out-smell all thyme! we keep that in our clothes,
[223]
But drop the other down our bosoms, till
They smell like’ ... ah, I see her writing back
Just so. She’ll make a nosegay of her words,
And tie it with blue ribbons at the end
To suit a poet;—pshaw!
And then we’ll have
The call to church; the broken, sad, bad dream
Dreamed out at last; the marriage-vow complete
With the marriage-breakfast; praying in white gloves,
Drawn off in haste for drinking pagan toasts
In somewhat stronger wine than any sipped
By gods, since Bacchus had his way with grapes.
A postscript stops all that, and rescues me.
‘You need not write. I have been overworked,
And think of leaving London, England even,
And hastening to get nearer to the sun,
Where men sleep better. So, adieu.’—I fold
And seal,—— and now I’m out of all the coil;
I breathe now; I spring upward like a branch,
A ten-years school-boy with a crooked stick
May pull down to his level, in search of nuts,
But cannot hold a moment. How we twang
Back on the blue sky, and assert our height,
While he stares after! Now, the wonder seems
That I could wrong myself by such a doubt.
We poets always have uneasy hearts;
Because our hearts, large-rounded as the globe,
Can turn but one side to the sun at once.
We are used to dip our artist-hands in gall
[224]
And potash, trying potentialities
Of alternated colour, till at last
We get confused, and wonder for our skin
How nature tinged it first. Well—here’s the true
Good flesh-colour; I recognise my hand,—
Which Romney Leigh may clasp as just a friend’s,
And keep his clean.
And now, my Italy.
Alas, if we could ride with naked souls
And make no noise and pay no price at all,
I would have seen thee sooner, Italy,—For
still I have heard thee crying through my life,
Thou piercing silence of extatic graves,
Men call that name!
But even a witch, to-day,
Must melt down golden pieces in the nard
Wherewith to anoint her broomstick ere she rides;
And poets evermore are scant of gold,
And, if they find a piece behind the door,
It turns by sunset to a withered leaf.
The Devil himself scarce trusts his patented
Gold-making art to any who make rhymes,
But culls his Faustus from philosophers
And not from poets. ‘Leave my Job,’ said God;
And so, the Devil leaves him without pence,
And poverty proves, plainly, special grace.
In these new, just, administrative times
Men clamour for an order of merit. Why?
Here’s black bread on the table, and no wine!
[225]
At least I am a poet in being poor;
Thank God. I wonder if the manuscript
Of my long poem, if ’twere sold outright,
Would fetch enough to buy me shoes, to go
A-foot, (thrown in, the necessary patch
For the other side the Alps)? it cannot be:
I fear that I must sell this residue
Of my father’s books; although the Elzevirs
Have fly-leaves over-written by his hand,
In faded notes as thick and fine and brown
As cobwebs on a tawny monument
Of the old Greeks—conferenda hæc cum his—
Corruptè citat—lege potiùs,
And so on, in the scholar’s regal way
Of giving judgment on the parts of speech,
As if he sate on all twelve thrones up-piled,
Arraigning Israel. Ay, but books and notes
Must go together. And this Proclus too,
In quaintly dear contracted Grecian types,
Fantastically crumpled, like his thoughts
Which would not seem too plain; you go round twice
For one step forward, then you take it back,
Because you’re somewhat giddy! there’s the rule
For Proclus. Ah, I stained this middle leaf
With pressing in’t my Florence iris-bell,
Long stalk and all: my father chided me
For that stain of blue blood,—I recollect
The peevish turn his voice took,—‘Silly girls,
Who plant their flowers in our philosophy
To make it fine, and only spoil the book!
[226]
No more of it, Aurora.’ Yes—no more!
Ah, blame of love, that’s sweeter than all praise
Of those who love not! ’tis so lost to me,
I cannot, in such beggared life, afford
To lose my Proclus. Not for Florence, even.
The kissing Judas, Wolff, shall go instead,
Who builds us such a royal book as this
To honour a chief-poet, folio-built,
And writes above, ‘The house of Nobody:’
Who floats in cream, as rich as any sucked
From Juno’s breasts, the broad Homeric lines,
And, while with their spondaic prodigious mouths
They lap the lucent margins as babe-gods,
Proclaims them bastards. Wolff’s an atheist;
And if the Iliad fell out, as he says,
By mere fortuitous concourse of old songs,
We’ll guess as much, too, for the universe.
That Wolff, those Platos: sweep the upper shelves
As clean as this, and so I am almost rich,
Which means, not forced to think of being poor
In sight of ends. To-morrow: no delay.
I’ll wait in Paris till good Carrington
Dispose of such, and, having chaffered for
My book’s price with the publisher, direct
All proceeds to me. Just a line to ask
His help.
And now I come, my Italy,
My own hills! Are you ’ware of me, my hills,
[227]
How I burn toward you? do you feel to-night
The urgency and yearning of my soul,
As sleeping mothers feel the sucking babe
And smile?—Nay, not so much as when, in heat,
Vain lightnings catch at your inviolate tops,
And tremble while ye are stedfast. Still, ye go
Your own determined, calm, indifferent way
Toward sunrise, shade by shade, and light by light;
Of all the grand progression nought left out;
As if God verily made you for yourselves,
And would not interrupt your life with ours.
[228]
The English have a scornful insular way
Of calling the French light. The levity
Is in the judgment only, which yet stands;
For say a foolish thing but oft enough,
(And here’s the secret of a hundred creeds,—
Men get opinions as boys learn to spell,
By re-iteration chiefly) the same thing
Shall pass at last for absolutely wise,
And not with fools exclusively. And so,
We say the French are light, as if we said
The cat mews, or the milch-cow gives us milk:
Say rather, cats are milked, and milch-cows mew;
For what is lightness but inconsequence,
Vague fluctuation ’twixt effect and cause,
Compelled by neither? Is a bullet light,
That dashes from the gun-mouth, while the eye
Winks, and the heart beats one, to flatten itself
To a wafer on the white speck on a wall
A hundred paces off? Even so direct,
So sternly undivertible of aim,
[230]
Is this French people.
All, idealists
Too absolute and earnest, with them all
The idea of a knife cuts real flesh;
And still, devouring the safe interval
Which Nature placed between the thought and act,
With those too fiery and impatient souls,
They threaten conflagration to the world
And rush with most unscrupulous logic on
Impossible practice. Set your orators
To blow upon them with loud windy mouths
Through watchword phrases, jest or sentiment,
Which drive our burley brutal English mobs
Like so much chaff, whichever way they blow,—
This light French people will not thus be driven.
They turn indeed; but then they turn upon
Some central pivot of their thought and choice,
And veer out by the force of holding fast.
—That’s hard to understand, for Englishmen
Unused to abstract questions, and untrained
To trace the involutions, valve by valve,
In each orbed bulb-root of a general truth,
And mark what subtly fine integument
Divides opposed compartments. Freedom’s self
Comes concrete to us, to be understood,
Fixed in a feudal form incarnately
To suit our ways of thought and reverence,
The special form, with us, being still the thing.
With us, I say, though I’m of Italy
By mother’s birth and grave, by father’s grave
[231]
And memory; let it be,—a poet’s heart
Can swell to a pair of nationalities,
However ill-lodged in a woman’s breast.
And so I am strong to love this noble France,
This poet of the nations, who dreams on
And wails on (while the household goes to wreck)
For ever, after some ideal good,—
Some equal poise of sex, some unvowed love
Inviolate, some spontaneous brotherhood,
Some wealth, that leaves none poor and finds none tired,
Some freedom of the many, that respects
The wisdom of the few. Heroic dreams!
Sublime, to dream so; natural, to wake:
And sad, to use such lofty scaffoldings,
Erected for the building of a church,
To build instead, a brothel ... or a prison—
May God save France!
However she have sighed
Her great soul up into a great man’s face,
To flush his temples out so gloriously
That few dare carp at Cæsar for being bald,
What then?—this Cæsar represents, not reigns,
And is no despot, though twice absolute;
This Head has all the people for a heart;
This purple’s lined with the democracy,—
Now let him see to it! for a rent within
Must leave irreparable rags without.
A serious riddle: find such anywhere
[232]
Except in France; and when it’s found in France,
Be sure to read it rightly. So, I mused
Up and down, up and down, the terraced streets,
The glittering boulevards, the white colonnades
Of fair fantastic Paris who wears boughs
Like plumes, as if man made them,—tossing up
Her fountains in the sunshine from the squares,
As dice i’ the game of beauty, sure to win;
Or as she blew the down-balls of her dreams,
And only waited for their falling back,
To breathe up more, and count her festive hours.
The city swims in verdure, beautiful
As Venice on the waters, the sea-swan.
What bosky gardens, dropped in close-walled courts,
As plums in ladies’ laps, who start and laugh:
What miles of streets that run on after trees,
Still carrying the necessary shops,
Those open caskets, with the jewels seen!
And trade is art, and art’s philosophy,
In Paris. There’s a silk, for instance, there,
As worth an artist’s study for the folds,
As that bronze opposite! nay, the bronze has faults;
Art’s here too artful,—conscious as a maid,
Who leans to mark her shadow on the wall
Until she lose a ’vantage in her step.
Yet Art walks forward, and knows where to walk:
The artists also, are idealists,
Too absolute for nature, logical
To austerity in the application of
[233]
The special theory: not a soul content
To paint a crooked pollard and an ass,
As the English will, because they find it so,
And like it somehow.—Ah, the old Tuileries
Is pulling its high cap down on its eyes,
Confounded, conscience-stricken, and amazed
By the apparition of a new fair face
In those devouring mirrors. Through the grate,
Within the gardens, what a heap of babes,
Swept up like leaves beneath the chestnut-trees,
From every street and alley of the town,
By the ghosts perhaps, that blow too bleak this way
A-looking for their heads! Dear pretty babes;
I’ll wish them luck to have their ball-play out
Before the next change comes.—And, farther on,
What statues, poised upon their columns fine,
As if to stand a moment were a feat,
Against that blue! What squares! what breathing-room
For a nation that runs fast,—ay, runs against
The dentist’s teeth at the corner, in pale rows,
Which grin at progress in an epigram.
I walked the day out, listening to the chink
Of the first Napoleon’s dry bones, as they lay
In his second grave beneath the golden dome
That caps all Paris like a bubble. ‘Shall
These dry bones live,’ thought Louis Philippe once,
And lived to know. Herein is argument
For kings and politicians, but still more
For poets, who bear buckets to the well,
[234]
Of ampler draught.
These crowds are very good
For meditation, (when we are very strong)
Though love of beauty makes us timorous,
And draws us backward from the coarse town-sights
To count the daisies upon dappled fields,
And hear the streams bleat on among the hills
In innocent and indolent repose;
While still with silken elegiac thoughts
We wind out from us the distracting world,
And die into the chrysalis of a man,
And leave the best that may, to come of us,
In some brown moth. Be, rather, bold, and bear
To look into the swarthiest face of things,
For God’s sake who has made them.
Seven days’ work;
The last day shutting ’twixt its dawn and eve,
The whole work bettered, of the previous six!
Since God collected and resumed in man
The firmaments, the strata, and the lights,
Fish, fowl, and beast, and insect,—all their trains
Of various life caught back upon His arm,
Reorganised, and constituted MAN,
The microcosm, the adding up of works;
Within whose fluttering nostrils, then, at last,
Consummating Himself, the Maker sighed,
As some strong winner at the foot-race sighs
Touching the goal.
Humanity is great;
[235]
And, if I would not rather pore upon
An ounce of common, ugly, human dust,
An artisan’s palm, or a peasant’s brow,
Unsmooth, ignoble, save to me and God,
Than track old Nilus to his silver roots,
And wait on all the changes of the moon
Among the mountain-peaks of Thessaly,
(Until her magic crystal round itself
For many a witch to see in)—set it down
As weakness,—strength by no means. How is this,
That men of science, osteologists
And surgeons, beat some poets, in respect
For nature,—count nought common or unclean,
Spend raptures upon perfect specimens
Of indurated veins, distorted joints,
Or beautiful new cases of curved spine;
While we, we are shocked at nature’s falling off,
We dare to shrink back from her warts and blains,
We will not, when she sneezes, look at her,
Not even to say ‘God bless her’? That’s our wrong;
For that, she will not trust us often with
Her larger sense of beauty and desire,
But tethers us to a lily or a rose
And bids us diet on the dew inside,—
Left ignorant that the hungry beggar-boy
(Who stares unseen against our absent eyes,
And wonders at the gods that we must be,
To pass so careless for the oranges!)
Bears yet a breastful of a fellow-world
To this world, undisparaged, undespoiled,
[236]
And (while we scorn him for a flower or two,
As being, Heaven help us, less poetical)
Contains, himself, both flowers and firmaments
And surging seas and aspectable stars,
And all that we would push him out of sight
In order to see nearer. Let us pray
God’s grace to keep God’s image in repute;
That so, the poet and philanthropist,
(Even I and Romney) may stand side by side,
Because we both stand face to face with men
Contemplating the people in the rough,—
Yet each so follow a vocation,—his
And mine.
I walked on, musing with myself
On life and art, and whether, after all,
A larger metaphysics might not help
Our physics, a completer poetry
Adjust our daily life and vulgar wants,
More fully than the special outside plans,
Phalansteries, material institutes,
The civil conscriptions and lay monasteries
Preferred by modern thinkers, as they thought
The bread of man indeed made all his life,
And washing seven times in the ‘People’s Baths’
Were sovereign for a people’s leprosy,—
Still leaving out the essential prophet’s word
That comes in power. On which, we thunder down,
We prophets, poets,—Virtue’s in the word!
The maker burnt the darkness up with His,
To inaugurate the use of vocal life;
[237]
And, plant a poet’s word even, deep enough
In any man’s breast, looking presently
For offshoots, you have done more for the man,
Than if you dressed him in a broad-cloth coat
And warmed his Sunday potage at your fire.
Yet Romney leaves me....
God! what face is that?
O Romney, O Marian!
Walking on the quays
And pulling thoughts to pieces leisurely,
As if I caught at grasses in a field,
And bit them slow between my absent lips,
And shred them with my hands....
What face is that?
What a face, what a look, what a likeness! Full on mine
The sudden blow of it came down, till all
My blood swam, my eyes dazzled. Then I sprang—
It was as if a meditative man
Were dreaming out a summer afternoon
And watching gnats a-prick upon a pond,
When something floats up suddenly, out there,
Turns over ... a dead face, known once alive—
So old, so new! It would be dreadful now
To lose the sight and keep the doubt of this.
He plunges—ha! he has lost it in the splash.
I plunged—I tore the crowd up, either side,
And rushed on,—forward, forward ... after her.
Her? whom?
[238]
A woman sauntered slow, in front,
Munching an apple,—she left off amazed
As if I had snatched it: that’s not she, at least.
A man walked arm-linked with a lady veiled,
Both heads dropped closer than the need of talk:
They started; he forgot her with his face,
And she, herself,—and clung to him as if
My look were fatal. Such a stream of folk,
And all with cares and business of their own!
I ran the whole quay down against their eyes;
No Marian; nowhere Marian. Almost, now,
I could call Marian, Marian, with the shriek
Of desperate creatures calling for the Dead.
Where is she, was she? was she anywhere?
I stood still, breathless, gazing, straining out
In every uncertain distance, till, at last,
A gentleman abstracted as myself
Came full against me, then resolved the clash
In voluble excuses,—obviously
Some learned member of the Institute
Upon his way there, walking, for his health,
While meditating on the last ‘Discourse;’
Pinching the empty air ’twixt finger and thumb,
From which the snuff being ousted by that shock,
Defiled his snow-white waistcoat, duly pricked
At the button-hole with honourable red;
‘Madame, your pardon,’—there, he swerved from me
A metre, as confounded as he had heard
That Dumas would be chosen to fill up
The next chair vacant, by his ‘men in us.’
[239]
Since when was genius found respectable?
It passes in its place, indeed,—which means
The seventh floor back, or else the hospital:
Revolving pistols are ingenious things,
But prudent men (Academicians are)
Scarce keep them in the cupboard, next the prunes.
And so, abandoned to a bitter mirth,
I loitered to my inn. O world, O world,
O jurists, rhymers, dreamers, what you please,
We play a weary game of hide-and-seek!
We shape a figure of our fantasy,
Call nothing something, and run after it
And lose it, lose ourselves too in the search;
Till, clash against us, comes a somebody
Who also has lost something and is lost,
Philosopher against philanthropist,
Academician against poet, man
Against woman, against the living, the dead,—
Then home, with a bad headache and worse jest!
To change the water for my heliotropes
And yellow roses. Paris has such flowers.
But England, also. ’Twas a yellow rose,
By that south window of the little house,
My cousin Romney gathered with his hand
On all my birthdays for me, save the last;
And then I shook the tree too rough, too rough,
For roses to stay after.
Now, my maps.
[240]
I must not linger here from Italy
Till the last nightingale is tired of song,
And the last fire-fly dies off in the maize.
My soul’s in haste to leap into the sun
And scorch and seethe itself to a finer mood,
Which here, in this chill north, is apt to stand
Too stiffly in former moulds.
That-face persists.
It floats up, it turns over in my mind,
As like to Marian, as one dead is like
The same alive. In very deed a face
And not a fancy, though it vanished so;
The small fair face between the darks of hair,
I used to liken, when I saw her first,
To a point of moonlit, water down a well:
The low brow, the frank space between the eyes,
Which always had the brown pathetic look
Of a dumb creature who had been beaten once,
And never since was easy with the world.
Ah, ah—now I remember perfectly
Those eyes, to-day,—how overlarge they seemed,
As if some patient passionate despair
(Like a coal dropt and forgot on tapestry,
Which slowly burns a widening circle out)
Had burnt them larger, larger. And those eyes
To-day, I do remember, saw me too,
As I saw them, with conscious lids astrain
In recognition. Now, a fantasy,
A simple shade or image of the brain,
Is merely passive, does not retro-act,
[241]
Is seen, but sees not.
’Twas a real face,
Perhaps a real Marian.
Which being so,
I ought to write to Romney, ‘Marian’s here.
Be comforted for Marian.’
My pen fell,
My hands struck sharp together, as hands do
Which hold at nothing. Can I write to him
A half truth? can I keep my own soul blind
To the other half, ... the worse? What are our souls,
If still, to run on straight a sober pace
Nor start at every pebble or dead leaf,
They must wear blinkers, ignore facts, suppress
Six tenths of the road? Confront the truth, my soul!
And oh, as truly as that was Marian’s face,
The arms of that same Marian clasped a thing
... Not hid so well beneath the scanty shawl,
I cannot name it now for what it was.
A child. Small business has a cast-away
Like Marian, with that crown of prosperous wives,
At which the gentlest she grows arrogant
And says, ‘my child.’ Who’ll find an emerald ring
On a beggar’s middle finger, and require
More testimony to convict a thief?
A child’s too costly for so mere a wretch;
She filched it somewhere; and it means, with her,
Instead of honour, blessing, ... merely shame.
[242]
I cannot write to Romney, ‘Here she is,
Here’s Marian found! I’ll set you on her track:
I saw her here, in Paris, ... and her child.
She put away your love two years ago,
But, plainly, not to starve. You suffered then;
And, now that you’ve forgot her utterly
As any last year’s annual, in whose place
You’ve planted a thick flowering evergreen,
I choose, being kind, to write and tell you this
To make you wholly easy—she’s not dead,
But only ... damned.’
Stop there: I go too fast;
I’m cruel like the rest,—in haste to take
The first stir in the arras for a rat,
And set my barking, biting thoughts upon’t.
—A child! what then? Suppose a neighbour’s sick
And asked her, ‘Marian, carry out my child
In this Spring air,’—I punish her for that?
Or say, the child should hold her round the neck
For good child-reasons, that he liked it so
And would not leave her—she had winning ways—
I brand her therefore, that she took the child?
Not so.
I will not write to Romney Leigh.
For now he’s happy,—and she may indeed
Be guilty,—and the knowledge of her fault
Would draggle his smooth time. But I, whose days
Are not so fine they cannot bear the rain,
And who, moreover, having seen her face,
Must see it again, ... will see it, by my hopes
[243]
Of one day seeing heaven too. The police
Shall track her, hound her, ferret their own soil;
We’ll dig this Paris to its catacombs
But certainly we’ll find her, have her out,
And save her, if she will or will not—child
Or no child,—if a child, then one to save!
The long weeks passed on without consequence.
As easy find a footstep on the sand
The morning after spring-tide, as the trace
Of Marian’s feet between the incessant surfs
Of this live flood. She may have moved this way,—
But so the star-fish does, and crosses out
The dent of her small shoe. The foiled police
Renounced me; ‘Could they find a girl and child,
No other signalment but girl and child?
No data shown, but noticeable eyes
And hair in masses, low upon the brow,
As if it were an iron crown and pressed?
Friends heighten, and suppose they specify:
Why, girls with hair and eyes, are everywhere
In Paris; they had turned me up in vain
No Marian Erle indeed, but certainly
Mathildes, Justines, Victoires, ... or, if I sought
The English, Betsies, Saras, by the score.
They might as well go out into the fields
To find a speckled bean, that’s somehow specked,
And somewhere in the pod.’—They left me so.
Shall I leave Marian? have I dreamed a dream?
[244]
—I thank God I have found her! I must say
‘Thank God,’ for finding her, although ’tis true
I find the world more sad and wicked for’t.
But she—
I’ll write about her, presently;
My hand’s a-tremble as I had just caught up
My heart to write with, in the place of it.
At least you’d take these letters to be writ
At sea, in storm!—wait now....
A simple chance
Did all. I could not sleep last night, and, tired
Of turning on my pillow and harder thoughts,
Went out at early morning, when the air
Is delicate with some last starry touch,
To wander through the Market-place of Flowers
(The prettiest haunt in Paris), and make sure
At worst, that there were roses in the world.
So, wandering, musing, with the artist’s eye,
That keeps the shade-side of the thing it loves,
Half-absent, whole-observing, while the crowd
Of young vivacious and black-braided heads
Dipped, quick as finches in a blossomed tree,
Among the nosegays, cheapening this and that
In such a cheerful twitter of rapid speech,—
My heart leapt in me, startled by a voice
That slowly, faintly, with long breaths that marked
The interval between the wish and word,
Inquired in stranger’s French, ‘Would that be much,
That branch of flowering mountain-gorse?’—‘So much?
Too much for me, then!’ turning the face round
[245]
So close upon me, that I felt the sigh
It turned with.
‘Marian, Marian!’—face to face—
‘Marian! I find you. Shall I let you go?’
I held her two slight wrists with both my hands;
‘Ah Marian, Marian, can I let you go?’
—She fluttered from me like a cyclamen,
As white, which, taken in a sudden wind,
Beats on against the palisade.—‘Let pass,’
She said at last. ‘I will not,’ I replied;
‘I lost my sister Marian many days,
And sought her ever in my walks and prayers,
And, now I find her ... do we throw away
The bread we worked and prayed for,—crumble it
And drop it, ... to do even so by thee
Whom still I’ve hungered after more than bread,
My sister Marian?—can I hurt thee, dear?
Then why distrust me? Never tremble so.
Come with me rather, where we’ll talk and live,
And none shall vex us. I’ve a home for you
And me and no one else’....
She shook her head.
‘A home for you and me and no one else
Ill-suits one of us: I prefer to such,
A roof of grass on which a flower might spring,
Less costly to me than the cheapest here;
And yet I could not, at this hour, afford
A like home, even. That you offer yours,
I thank you. You are good as heaven itself—
As good as one I knew before.... Farewell.’
[246]
I loosed her hands.—‘In his name, no farewell!’
(She stood as if I held her.) ‘For his sake,
For his sake, Romney’s! by the good he meant,
Ay, always! by the love he pressed for once,—
And by the grief, reproach, abandonment,
He took in change’....
‘He, Romney! who grieved him?
Who had the heart for’t? what reproach touched him?
Be merciful,—speak quickly.’
‘Therefore come,’
I answered with authority,—‘I think
We dare to speak such things, and name such names,
In the open squares of Paris!’
Not a word
She said, but, in a gentle humbled way,
(As one who had forgot herself in grief)
Turned round and followed closely where I went,
As if I led her by a narrow plank,
Across devouring waters, step by step,—
And so in silence we walked on a mile.
And then she stopped: her face was white as wax.
‘We go much farther?’
‘You are ill,’ I asked,
‘Or tired?’
She looked the whiter for her smile.
‘There’s one at home,’ she said, ‘has need of me
By this time,—and I must not let him wait.’
‘Not even,’ I asked, ‘to hear of Romney Leigh?’
[247]
‘Not even,’ she said, ‘to hear of Mister Leigh.’
‘In that case,’ I resumed, ‘I go with you,
And we can talk the same thing there as here.
None waits for me: I have my day to spend.’
Her lips moved in a spasm without a sound,—
But then she spoke. ‘It shall be as you please;
And better so—’tis shorter seen than told.
And though you will not find me worth your pains,
That even, may be worth some pains to know,
For one as good as you are.’
Then she led
The way, and I, as by a narrow plank
Across devouring waters, followed her,
Stepping by her footsteps, breathing by her breath,
And holding her with eyes that would not slip;
And so, without a word, we walked a mile,
And so, another mile, without a word.
Until the peopled streets being all dismissed,
House-rows and groups all scattered like a flock,
The market-gardens thickened, and the long
White walls beyond, like spiders’ outside threads,
Stretched, feeling blindly toward the country-fields
Through half-built habitations and half-dug
Foundations,—intervals of trenchant chalk,
That bite betwixt the grassy uneven turfs
Where goats (vine-tendrils trailing from their mouths)
Stood perched on edges of the cellarage
[248]
Which should be, staring as about to leap
To find their coming Bacchus. All the place
Seemed less a cultivation than a waste:
Men work here, only,—scarce begin to live:
All’s sad, the country struggling with the town,
Like an untamed hawk upon a strong man’s fist,
That beats its wings and tries to get away,
And cannot choose be satisfied so soon
To hop through court-yards with its right foot tied,
The vintage plains and pastoral hills in sight!
We stopped beside a house too high and slim
To stand there by itself, but waiting till
Five others, two on this side, three on that,
Should grow up from the sullen second floor
They pause at now, to build it to a row.
The upper windows partly were unglazed
Meantime,—a meagre, unripe house: a line
Of rigid poplars elbowed it behind,
And, just in front, beyond the lime and bricks
That wronged the grass between it and the road,
A great acacia, with its slender trunk
And overpoise of multitudinous leaves,
(In which a hundred fields might spill their dew
And intense verdure, yet find room enough)
Stood, reconciling all the place with green.
I followed up the stair upon her step.
She hurried upward, shot across a face,
A woman’s on the landing,—‘How now, now!
[249]
Is no one to have holidays but you?
You said an hour, and stay three hours, I think,
And Julie waiting for your betters here?
Why if he had waked, he might have waked, for me.’
—Just murmuring an excusing word she passed
And shut the rest out with the chamber-door,
Myself shut in beside her.
’Twas a room
Scarce larger than a grave, and near as bare;
Two stools, a pallet-bed; I saw the room:
A mouse could find no sort of shelter in’t,
Much less a greater secret; curtainless,—
The window fixed you with its torturing eye,
Defying you to take a step apart,
If peradventure you would hide a thing.
I saw the whole room, I and Marian there
Alone.
Alone? She threw her bonnet off,
Then sighing as ’twere sighing the last time,
Approached the bed, and drew a shawl away:
You could not peel a fruit you fear to bruise
More calmly and more carefully than so,—
Nor would you find within, a rosier flushed
Pomegranate—
There he lay, upon his back,
The yearling creature, warm and moist with life
To the bottom of his dimples,—to the ends
Of the lovely tumbled curls about his face;
For since he had been covered over-much
To keep him from the light-glare, both his cheeks
[250]
Were hot and scarlet as the first live rose
The shepherd’s heart-blood ebbed away into,
The faster for his love. And love was here
As instant! in the pretty baby-mouth,
Shut close as if for dreaming that it sucked;
The little naked feet drawn up the way
Of nestled birdlings; everything so soft
And tender,—to the little holdfast hands,
Which, closing on a finger into sleep,
Had kept the mould of’t.
While we stood there dumb,—
For oh, that it should take such innocence
To prove just guilt, I thought, and stood there dumb;
The light upon his eyelids pricked them wide,
And, staring out at us with all their blue,
As half perplexed between the angelhood
He had been away to visit in his sleep,
And our most mortal presence,—gradually
He saw his mother’s face, accepting it
In change for heaven itself, with such a smile
As might have well been learnt there,—never moved,
But smiled on, in a drowse of ecstasy,
So happy (half with her and half with heaven)
He could not have the trouble to be stirred,
But smiled and lay there. Like a rose, I said:
As red and still indeed as any rose,
That blows in all the silence of its leaves,
Content, in blowing, to fulfil its life.
She leaned above him (drinking him as wine)
[251]
In that extremity of love, ’twill pass
For agony or rapture, seeing that love
Includes the whole of nature, rounding it
To love ... no more,—since more can never be
Than just love. Self-forgot, cast out of self,
And drowning in the transport of the sight,
Her whole pale passionate face, mouth, forehead, eyes,
One gaze, she stood! then, slowly as he smiled,
She smiled too, slowly, smiling unaware,
And drawing from his countenance to hers
A fainter red, as if she watched a flame
And stood in it a-glow. ‘How beautiful,’
Said she.
I answered, trying to be cold.
(Must sin have compensations, was my thought,
As if it were a holy thing like grief?
And is a woman to be fooled aside
From putting vice down, with that woman’s toy,
A baby?)—— ‘Ay! the child is well enough,’
I answered. ‘If his mother’s palms are clean,
They need be glad, of course, in clasping such:
But if not,—I would rather lay my hand,
Were I she,—on God’s brazen altar-bars
Red-hot with burning sacrificial lambs,
Than touch the sacred curls of such a child.’
She plunged her fingers in his clustering locks,
As one who would not be afraid of fire;
And then, with indrawn steady utterance, said,—
‘My lamb, my lamb! although, through such as thou,
[252]
The most unclean got courage and approach
To God, once,—now they cannot, even with men,
Find grace enough for pity and gentle words.’
‘My Marian,’ I made answer, grave and sad,
‘The priest who stole a lamb to offer him,
Was still a thief. And if a woman steals
(Through God’s own barrier-hedges of true love,
Which fence out licence in securing love)
A child like this, that smiles so in her face,
She is no mother, but a kidnapper,
And he’s a dismal orphan ... not a son;
Whom all her kisses cannot feed so full
He will not miss hereafter a pure home
To live in, a pure heart to lean against,
A pure good mother’s name and memory
To hope by, when the world grows thick and bad,
And he feels out for virtue.’
‘Oh,’ she smiled
With bitter patience, ‘the child takes his chance,—
Not much worse off in being fatherless
Than I was, fathered. He will say, belike,
His mother was the saddest creature born;
He’ll say his mother lived so contrary
To joy, that even the kindest, seeing her,
Grew sometimes almost cruel: he’ll not say
She flew contrarious in the face of God
With bat-wings of her vices. Stole my child,—
My flower of earth, my only flower on earth,
My sweet, ray beauty!’ ... Up she snatched the child,
[253]
And, breaking on him in a storm of tears,
Drew out her long sobs from their shivering roots,
Until he took it for a game, and stretched
His feet, and flapped his eager arms like wings,
And crowed and gurgled through his infant laugh:
‘Mine, mine,’ she said; ‘I have as sure a right
As any glad proud mother in the world,
Who sets her darling down to cut his teeth
Upon her church-ring. If she talks of law,
I talk of law! I claim my mother-dues
By law,—the law which now is paramount;
The common law, by which the poor and weak
Are trodden underfoot by vicious men,
And loathed for ever after by the good.
Let pass! I did not filch ... I found the child.’
‘You found him, Marian?’
‘Ay, I found him where
I found my curse,—in the gutter, with my shame!
What have you, any of you, to say to that,
Who all are happy, and sit safe and high,
And never spoke before to arraign my right
To grief itself? What, what, ... being beaten down
By hoofs of maddened oxen into a ditch,
Half-dead, whole mangled ... when a girl, at last,
Breathes, sees ... and finds there, bedded in her flesh,
Because of the overcoming shock perhaps,
Some coin of price!... and when a good man comes
(That’s God! the best men are not quite as good)
And says, ‘I dropped the coin there: take it, you,
[254]
And keep it,—it shall pay you for the loss,’—
You all put up your finger—‘See the thief!
Observe that precious thing she has come to filch!
How bad those girls are!’ Oh, my flower, my pet,
I dare forget I have you in my arms,
And fly off to be angry with the world,
And fright you, hurt you with my tempers, till
You double up your lip? Ah, that indeed
Is bad: a naughty mother!’
‘You mistake,’
I interrupted; ‘if I loved you not,
I should not, Marian, certainly be here.’
‘Alas,’ she said, ‘you are so very good;
And yet I wish, indeed, you had never come
To make me sob until I vex the child.
It is not wholesome for these pleasure-plats
To be so early watered by our brine.
And then, who knows? he may not like me now
As well, perhaps, as ere he saw me fret,—
One’s ugly fretting! he has eyes the same
As angels, but he cannot see as deep,
And so I’ve kept for ever in his sight
A sort of smile to please him,—as you place
A green thing from the garden in a cup,
To make believe it grows there. Look, my sweet,
My cowslip-ball! we’ve done with that cross face,
And here’s the face come back you used to like.
Ah, ah! he laughs! he likes me. Ah, Miss Leigh,
You’re great and pure; but were you purer still,—
[255]
As if you had walked, we’ll say, no otherwhere
Than up and down the new Jerusalem,
And held your trailing lutestring up yourself
From brushing the twelve stones, for fear of some
Small speck as little as a needle-prick,
White stitched on white,—the child would keep to me,
Would choose his poor lost Marian, like me best,
And, though you stretched your arms, cry back and cling,
As we do, when God says it’s time to die
And bids us go up higher. Leave us, then;
We two are happy. Does he push me off?
He’s satisfied with me, as I with him.’
‘So soft to one, so hard to others! Nay,’
I cried, more angry that she melted me,
‘We make henceforth a cushion of our faults
To sit and practise easy virtues on?
I thought a child was given to sanctify
A woman,—set her in the sight of all
The clear-eyed Heavens, a chosen minister
To do their business and lead spirits up
The difficult blue heights. A woman lives,
Not bettered, quickened toward the truth and good
Through being a mother?... then she’s none! although
She damps her baby’s cheeks by kissing them,
As we kill roses.’
‘Kill! O Christ,’ she said,
And turned her wild sad face from side to side
With most despairing wonder in it—‘What,
What have you in your souls against me then,
[256]
All of you? am I wicked, do you think?
God knows me, trusts me with the child! but you,
You think me really wicked?’
‘Complaisant,’
I answered softly, ‘to a wrong you’ve done,
Because of certain profits,—which is wrong
Beyond the first wrong, Marian. When you left
The pure place and the noble heart, to take
The hand of a seducer’....
‘Whom? whose hand?
I took the hand of’....
Springing up erect,
And lifting up the child at full arm’s length,
As if to bear him like an oriflamme
Unconquerable to armies of reproach,—
‘By him’ she said, ‘my child’s head and its curls,
By those blue eyes no woman born could dare
A perjury on, I make my mother’s oath,
That if I left that Heart, to lighten it,
The blood of mine was still, except for grief!
No cleaner maid than I was, took a step
To a sadder end,—no matron-mother now
Looks backward to her early maidenhood
Through chaster pulses. I speak steadily:
And if I lie so, ... if, being fouled in will
And paltered with in soul by devil’s lust,
I dared to bid this angel take my part, ...
Would God sit quiet, let us think, in heaven,
Nor strike me dumb with thunder? Yet I speak:
He clears me therefore. What, ‘seduced’’s your word?
[257]
Do wolves seduce a wandering fawn in France?
Do eagles, who have pinched a lamb with claws,
Seduce it into carrion? So with me.
I was not ever, as you say, seduced,
But simply, murdered.’
There she paused, and sighed,
With such a sigh as drops from agony
To exhaustion,—sighing while she let the babe
Slide down upon her bosom from her arms,
And all her face’s light fell after him,
Like a torch quenched in falling. Down she sank,
And sate upon the bedside with the child.
But I, convicted, broken utterly,
With woman’s passion clung about her waist,
And kissed her hair and eyes,—‘I have been wrong,
Sweet Marian’ ... (weeping in a tender rage)
‘Sweet holy Marian! And now, Marian, now,
I’ll use your oath although my lips are hard,
And by the child, my Marian, by the child,
I’ll swear his mother shall be innocent
Before my conscience, as in the open Book
Of Him who reads for judgement. Innocent,
My sister! let the night be ne’er so dark,
The moon is surely somewhere in the sky;
So surely is your whiteness to be found
Through all dark facts. But pardon, pardon me,
And smile a little, Marian,—for the child,
If not for me, my sister.’
The poor lip
[258]
Just motioned for the smile and let it go:
And then, with scarce a stirring of the mouth,
As if a statue spoke that could not breathe,
But spoke on calm between its marble lips,—
‘I’m glad, I’m very glad you clear me so.
I should be sorry that you set me down
With harlots, or with even a better name
Which misbecomes his mother. For the rest,
I am not on a level with your love,
Nor ever was, you know,—but now am worse,
Because that world of yours has dealt with me
As when the hard sea bites and chews a stone
And changes the first form of it. I’ve marked
A shore of pebbles bitten to one shape
From all the various life of madrepores;
And so, that little stone, called Marian Erle,
Picked up and dropped by you and another friend,
Was ground and tortured by the incessant sea
And bruised from what she was,—changed! death’s a change,
And she, I said, was murdered; Marian’s dead.
What can you do with people when they are dead,
But, if you are pious, sing a hymn and go,
Or, if you are tender, heave a sigh and go,
But go by all means,—and permit the grass
To keep its green feud up ’twixt them and you?
Then leave me,—let me rest. I’m dead, I say.
And if, to save the child from death as well,
The mother in me has survived the rest,
Why, that’s God’s miracle you must not tax,—
[259]
I’m not less dead for that: I’m nothing more
But just a mother. Only for the child,
I’m warm, and cold, and hungry, and afraid,
And smell the flowers a little, and see the sun,
And speak still, and am silent,—just for him!
I pray you therefore to mistake me not,
And treat me, haply, as I were alive;
For though you ran a pin into my soul,
I think it would not hurt nor trouble me.
Here’s proof, dear lady,—in the market-place
But now, you promised me to say a word
About ... a friend, who once, long years ago,
Took God’s place toward me, when He draws and loves
And does not thunder, ... whom at last I left,
As all of us leave God. You thought perhaps,
I seemed to care for hearing of that friend?
Now, judge me! we have sate here half-an-hour
And talked together of the child and me,
And I not asked as much as, ‘What’s the thing
You had to tell me of the friend ... the friend?’
He’s sad, I think you said,—he’s sick perhaps?
It’s nought to Marian if he’s sad or sick.
Another would have crawled beside your foot
And prayed your words out. Why, a beast, a dog,
A starved cat, if he had fed it once with milk,
Would show less hardness. But I’m dead, you see,
And that explains it.’
Poor, poor thing, she spoke
And shook her head, as white and calm as frost
On days too cold for raining any more,
[260]
But still with such a face, so much alive,
I could not choose but take it on my arm
And stroke the placid patience of its cheeks,—
Then told my story out, of Romney Leigh,
How, having lost her, sought her, missed her still,
He, broken-hearted for himself and her,
Had drawn the curtains of the world awhile
As if he had done with morning. There I stopped,
For when she gasped, and pressed me with her eyes,
‘And now ... how is it with him? tell me now,’—
I felt the shame of compensated grief,
And chose my words with scruple—slowly stepped
Upon the slippery stones set here and there
Across the sliding water. ‘Certainly,
As evening empties morning into night,
Another morning takes the evening up
With healthful, providential interchange;
And, though he thought still of her,’—
‘Yes, she knew,
She understood: she had supposed, indeed,
That, as one stops a hole upon a flute,
At which a new note comes and shapes the tune,
Excluding her would bring a worthier in,
And, long ere this, that Lady Waldemar
He loved so’ ...
‘Loved,’ I started,—‘loved her so!
Now tell me’ ...
‘I will tell you,’ she replied:
‘But since we’re taking oaths, you’ll promise first
That he, in England, he, shall never learn
[261]
In what a dreadful trap his creature here,
Round whose unworthy neck he had meant to tie
The honourable ribbon of his name,
Fell unaware, and came to butchery:
Because,—I know him,—as he takes to heart
The grief of every stranger, he’s not like
To banish mine as far as I should choose
In wishing him most happy. Now he leaves
To think of me, perverse, who went my way,
Unkind, and left him,—but if once he knew ...
Ah, then, the sharp nail of my cruel wrong
Would fasten me for ever in his sight,
Like some poor curious bird, through each spread wing
Nailed high up over a fierce hunter’s fire,
To spoil the dinner of all tenderer folk
Come in by chance. Nay, since your Marian’s dead,
You shall not hang her up, but dig a hole
And bury her in silence! ring no bells.’
I answered gaily, though my whole voice wept;
‘We’ll ring the joy-bells, not the funeral-bells,
Because we have her back, dead or alive.’
She never answered that, but shook her head;
Then low and calm, as one who, safe in heaven,
Shall tell a story of his lower life,
Unmoved by shame or anger,—so she spoke.
She told me she had loved upon her knees,
As others pray, more perfectly absorbed
In the act and aspiration. She felt his,
[262]
For just his uses, not her own at all,
His stool, to sit on, or put up his foot,
His cup, to fill with wine or vinegar,
Whichever drink might please him at the chance,
For that should please her always: let him write
His name upon her ... it seemed natural;
It was most precious, standing on his shelf,
To wait until he chose to lift his hand.
Well, well,—I saw her then, and must have seen
How bright her life went, floating on her love,
Like wicks the housewives send afloat on oil,
Which feeds them to a flame that lasts the night.
To do good seemed so much his business,
That, having done it, she was fain to think,
Must fill up his capacity for joy.
At first she never mooted with herself
If he was happy, since he made her so,
Or if he loved her, being so much beloved:
Who thinks of asking if the sun is light,
Observing that it lightens? who’s so bold,
To question God of His felicity?
Still less. And thus she took for granted first,
What first of all she should have put to proof,
And sinned against him so, but only so.
‘What could you hope,’ she said, ‘of such as she?
You take a kid you like, and turn it out
In some fair garden; though the creature’s fond
And gentle, it will leap upon the beds
And break your tulips, bite your tender trees:
[263]
The wonder would be if such innocence
Spoiled less. A garden is no place for kids.’
And, by degrees, when he who had chosen her,
Brought in his courteous and benignant friends
To spend their goodness on her, which she took
So very gladly, as a part of his,—
By slow degrees, it broke on her slow sense,
That she, too, in that Eden of delight
Was out of place, and, like the silly kid,
Still did most mischief where she meant most love.
A thought enough to make a woman mad,
(No beast in this, but she may well go mad)
That, saying ‘I am thine to love and use,’
May blow the plague in her protesting breath
To the very man for whom she claims to die,—
That, clinging round his neck, she pulls him down
And drowns him,—and that, lavishing her soul,
She hales perdition on him. ‘So, being mad,’
Said Marian ...
‘Ah—who stirred such thoughts, you ask?
Whose fault it was, that she should have such thoughts?
None’s fault, none’s fault. The light comes, and we see:
But if it were not truly for our eyes,
There would be nothing seen, for all the light;
And so with Marian. If she saw at last,
The sense was in her,—Lady Waldemar
Had spoken all in vain else.’
‘O my heart,
O prophet in my heart,’ I cried aloud,
[264]
‘Then Lady Waldemar spoke!’
‘Did she speak,’
Mused Marian softly—‘or did she only sign?
Or did she put a word into her face
And look, and so impress you with the word?
Or leave it in the foldings of her gown,
Like rosemary smells, a movement will shake out
When no one’s conscious? who shall say, or guess?
One thing alone was certain,—from the day
The gracious lady paid a visit first,
She, Marian, saw things different,—felt distrust
Of all that sheltering roof of circumstance
Her hopes were building into with clay nests:
Her heart was restless, pacing up and down
And fluttering, like dumb creatures before storms,
Not knowing wherefore she was ill at ease.’
‘And still the lady came,’ said Marian Erle,
‘Much oftener than he knew it, Mister Leigh.
She bade me never tell him that she had come,
She liked to love me better than he knew,
So very kind was Lady Waldemar:
And every time she brought with her more light,
And every light made sorrow clearer ... Well,
Ah, well! we cannot give her blame for that;
’Twould be the same thing if an angel came,
Whose right should prove our wrong. And every time
The lady came, she looked more beautiful,
And spoke more like a flute among green trees,
Until at last, as one, whose heart being sad
[265]
On hearing lovely music, suddenly
Dissolves in weeping, I brake out in tears
Before her ... asked her counsel ... ‘had I erred
In being too happy? would she set me straight?
For she, being wise and good and born above
The flats I had never climbed from, could perceive
If such as I, might grow upon the hills;
And whether such poor herb sufficed to grow,
For Romney Leigh to break his fast upon ’t,—
Or would he pine on such, or haply starve?’
She wrapt me in her generous arms at once,
And let me dream a moment how it feels
To have a real mother, like some girls:
But when I looked, her face was younger ... ay,
Youth’s too bright not to be a little hard,
And beauty keeps itself still uppermost,
That’s true!—Though Lady Waldemar was kind,
She hurt me, hurt, as if the morning-sun
Should smite us on the eyelids when we sleep,
And wake us up with headache. Ay, and soon
Was light enough to make my heart ache too:
She told me truths I asked for ... ’twas my fault ...
‘That Romney could not love me, if he would,
As men call loving; there are bloods that flow
Together, like some rivers, and not mix,
Through contraries of nature. He indeed
Was set to wed me, to espouse my class,
Act out a rash opinion,—and, once wed,
So just a man and gentle, could not choose
But make my life as smooth as marriage-ring,
[266]
Bespeak me mildly, keep me a cheerful house,
With servants, broaches, all the flowers I liked,
And pretty dresses, silk the whole year round’ ...
At which I stopped her,—‘This for me. And now
‘For him.’—She murmured,—truth grew difficult;
She owned, ‘’Twas plain a man like Romney Leigh
Required a wife more level to himself.
If day by day he had to bend his height
To pick up sympathies, opinions, thoughts,
And interchange the common talk of life
Which helps a man to live as well as talk,
His days were heavily taxed. Who buys a staff
To fit the hand, that reaches but the knee?
He’d feel it bitter to be forced to miss
The perfect joy of married suited pairs,
Who, bursting through the separating hedge
Of personal dues with that sweet eglantine
Of equal love, keep saying, ‘So we think,
It strikes us,—that’s our fancy.’‘—When I asked
If earnest will, devoted love, employed
In youth like mine, would fail to raise me up,—
As two strong arms will always raise a child
To a fruit hung overhead? she sighed and sighed ...
‘That could not be,’ she feared. ‘You take a pink,
You dig about its roots and water it,
And so improve it to a garden-pink,
But will not change it to a heliotrope,
The kind remains. And then, the harder truth—
This Romney Leigh, so rash to leap a pale,
So bold for conscience, quick for martyrdom,
[267]
Would suffer steadily and never flinch,
But suffer surely and keenly, when his class
Turned shoulder on him for a shameful match,
And set him up as nine-pin in their talk,
To bowl him down with jestings.’—There, she paused;
And when I used the pause in doubting that
We wronged him after all in what we feared—
‘Suppose such things should never touch him, more
In his high conscience, (if the things should be,)
Than, when the queen sits in an upper room,
The horses in the street can spatter her!’—
A moment, hope came,—but the lady closed
That door and nicked the lock, and shut it out,
Observing wisely that, ‘the tender heart
Which made him over-soft to a lower class,
Could scarcely fail to make him sensitive
‘To a higher,—how they thought, and what they felt.’
‘Alas, alas,’ said Marian, rocking slow
The pretty baby who was near asleep,
The eyelids creeping over the blue balls,—
‘She made it clear, too clear—I saw the whole!
And yet who knows if I had seen my way
Straight out of it, by looking, though ’twas clear,
Unless the generous lady, ’ware of this,
Had set her own house all a-fire for me,
To light me forwards? Leaning on my face
Her heavy agate eyes which crushed my will,
She told me tenderly, (as when men come
To a bedside to tell people they must die)
[268]
‘She knew of knowledge,—ay, of knowledge, knew,
That Romney Leigh had loved her formerly;
And she loved him, she might say, now the chance
Was past ... but that, of course, he never guessed,—
For something came between them ... something thin
As a cobweb ... catching every fly of doubt
To hold it buzzing at the window-pane
And help to dim the daylight. Ah, man’s pride
Or woman’s—which is greatest? most averse
To brushing cobwebs? Well, but she and he
Remained fast friends; it seemed not more than so,
Because he had bound his hands and could not stir:
An honourable man, if somewhat rash;
And she, not even for Romney, would she spill
A blot ... as little even as a tear ...
Upon his marriage-contract,—not to gain
A better joy for two than came by that!
For, though I stood between her heart and heaven,
She loved me wholly.’
Did I laugh or curse?
I think I sate there silent, hearing all,
Ay, hearing double,—Marian’s tale, at once,
And Romney’s marriage-vow, ‘I’ll keep to thee,’
Which means that woman-serpent. Is it time
For church now?
‘Lady Waldemar spoke more,’
Continued Marian, ‘but, as when a soul
Will pass out through the sweetness of a song
Beyond it, voyaging the uphill road,—
Even so, mine wandered from the things I heard,
[269]
To those I suffered. It was afterward
I shaped the resolution to the act.
For many hours we talked. What need to talk?
The fate was clear and close; it touched my eyes;
But still the generous lady tried to keep
The case afloat, and would not let it go,
And argued, struggled upon Marian’s side,
Which was not Romney’s! though she little knew
What ugly monster would take up the end,—
What griping death within the drowning death
Was ready to complete my sum of death.’
I thought,—Perhaps he’s sliding now the ring
Upon that woman’s finger....
She went on:
‘The lady, failing to prevail her way,
Upgathered my torn wishes from the ground,
And pieced them with her strong benevolence;
And, as I thought I could breathe freer air
Away from England, going without pause,
Without farewell,—just breaking with a jerk
The blossomed offshoot from my thorny life,—
She promised kindly to provide the means,
With instant passage to the colonies
And full protection,—‘would commit me straight
‘To one who once had been her waiting-maid
And had the customs of the world, intent
On changing England for Australia
Herself, to carry out her fortune so.’
For which I thanked the Lady Waldemar,
[270]
As men upon their death-beds thank last friends
Who lay the pillow straight: it is not much,
And yet ’tis all of which they are capable,
This lying smoothly in a bed to die.
And so, ’twas fixed;—and so, from day to day,
The woman named, came in to visit me.’
Just then, the girl stopped speaking,—sate erect,
And stared at me as if I had been a ghost,
(Perhaps I looked as white as any ghost)
With large-eyed horror. ‘Does God make,’ she said,
‘All sorts of creatures, really, do you think?
Or is it that the Devil slavers them
So excellently, that we come to doubt
Who’s strongest, He who makes, or he who mars?
I never liked the woman’s face, or voice,
Or ways: it made me blush to look at her;
It made me tremble if she touched my hand;
And when she spoke a fondling word, I shrank,
As if one hated me, who had power to hurt;
And, every time she came, my veins ran cold,
As somebody were walking on my grave.
At last I spoke to Lady Waldemar:
‘Could such an one be good to trust?’ I asked.
Whereat the lady stroked my cheek and laughed
Her silver-laugh—(one must be born to laugh,
To put such music in it) ‘Foolish girl,
‘Your scattered wits are gathering wool beyond
The sheep-walk reaches!—leave the thing to me.’
And therefore, half in trust, and half in scorn
[271]
That I had heart still for another fear
In such a safe despair, I left the thing.
‘The rest is short. I was obedient:
I wrote my letter which delivered him
From Marian, to his own prosperities,
And followed that bad guide. The lady?—hush,—
I never blame the lady. Ladies who
Sit high, however willing to look down,
Will scarce see lower than their dainty feet:
And Lady Waldemar saw less than I,
With what a Devil’s daughter I went forth
The swine’s road, headlong over a precipice,
In such a curl of hell-foam caught and choked,
No shriek of soul in anguish could pierce through
To fetch some help. They say there’s help in heaven
For all such cries. But if one cries from hell ...
What then?—the heavens are deaf upon that side.
‘A woman ... hear me,—let me make it plain,—
A woman ... not a monster ... both her breasts
Made right to suckle babes ... she took me off,
A woman also, young and ignorant,
And heavy with my grief, my two poor eyes
Near washed away with weeping, till the trees,
The blessed unaccustomed trees and fields,
Ran either side the train, like stranger dogs
Unworthy of any notice,—took me off,
So dull, so blind, and only half alive,
Not seeing by what road, nor by what ship,
[272]
Nor toward what place, nor to what end of all.—
Men carry a corpse thus,—past the doorway, past
The garden-gate, the children’s playground, up
The green lane,—then they leave it in the pit,
To sleep and find corruption, cheek to cheek
With him who stinks since Friday.
‘But suppose;
To go down with one’s soul into the grave,—
To go down half dead, half alive, I say,
And wake up with corruption, ... cheek to cheek
With him who stinks since Friday! There it is,
And that’s the horror of ’t, Miss Leigh.
‘You feel?
You understand?—no, do not look at me,
But understand. The blank, blind, weary way
Which led ... where’er it led ... away, at least;
The shifted ship ... to Sydney or to France ...
Still bound, wherever else, to another land;
The swooning sickness on the dismal sea,
The foreign shore, the shameful house, the night,
The feeble blood, the heavy-headed grief, ...
No need to bring their damnable drugged cup,
And yet they brought it! Hell’s so prodigal
Of devil’s gifts ... hunts liberally in packs,
Will kill no poor small creature of the wilds
But fifty red wide throats must smoke at it,—
As HIS at me ... when waking up at last ...
I told you that I waked up in the grave.
‘Enough so!—it is plain enough so. True,
[273]
We wretches cannot tell out all our wrong,
Without offence to decent happy folk.
I know that we must scrupulously hint
With half-words, delicate reserves, the thing
Which no one scrupled we should feel in full.
Let pass the rest, then; only leave my oath
Upon this sleeping child,—man’s violence,
Not man’s seduction, made me what I am,
As lost as ... I told him I should be lost;
When mothers fail us, can we help ourselves?
That’s fatal!—And you call it being lost,
That down came next day’s noon and caught me there
Half gibbering and half raving on the floor,
And wondering what had happened up in heaven,
That suns should dare to shine when God himself
Was certainly abolished.
‘I was mad,—
How many weeks, I know not,—many weeks.
I think they let me go, when I was mad,
They feared my eyes and loosed me, as boys might
A mad dog which they had tortured. Up and down
I went by road and village, over tracts
Of open foreign country, large and strange,
Crossed everywhere by long thin poplar-lines
Like fingers of some ghastly skeleton Hand
Through sunlight and through moonlight evermore
Pushed out from hell itself to pluck me back,
And resolute to get me, slow and sure;
While every roadside Christ upon his cross
Hung reddening through his gory wounds at me,
[274]
And shook his nails in anger, and came down
To follow a mile after, wading up
The low vines and green wheat, crying ‘Take the girl!
‘She’s none of mine from henceforth,’ Then, I knew,
(But this is somewhat dimmer than the rest)
The charitable peasants gave me bread
And leave to sleep in straw: and twice they tied,
At parting, Mary’s image round my neck—
How heavy it seemed! as heavy as a stone;
A woman has been strangled with less weight:
I threw it in a ditch to keep it clean
And ease my breath a little, when none looked;
I did not need such safeguards:—brutal men
Stopped short, Miss Leigh, in insult, when they had seen
My face,—I must have had an awful look.
And so I lived: the weeks passed on,—I lived.
’Twas living my old tramp-life o’er again,
But, this time, in a dream, and hunted round
By some prodigious Dream-fear at my back
Which ended, yet: my brain cleared presently,
And there I sate, one evening, by the road,
I, Marian Erle, myself, alone, undone,
Facing a sunset low upon the flats,
As if it were the finish of all time,—
The great red stone upon my sepulchre,
Which angels were too weak to roll away.
[275]
One eve it happened, when I sate alone,
Alone, upon the terrace of my tower,
A book upon my knees, to counterfeit
The reading that I never read at all,
While Marian, in the garden down below,
Knelt by the fountain (I could just hear thrill
The drowsy silence of the exhausted day)
And peeled a new fig from that purple heap
In the grass beside her,—turning out the red
To feed her eager child, who sucked at it
With vehement lips across a gap of air
As he stood opposite, face and curls a-flame
With that last sun-ray, crying, ‘give me, give,’
And stamping with imperious baby-feet,
(We’re all born princes)—something startled me,—
The laugh of sad and innocent souls, that breaks
Abruptly, as if frightened at itself;
’Twas Marian laughed. I saw her glance above
In sudden shame that I should hear her laugh,
And straightway dropped my eyes upon my book,
[324]
And knew, the first time, ’twas Boccaccio’s tales,
The Falcon’s,—of the lover who for love
Destroyed the best that loved him. Some of us
Do it still, and then we sit and laugh no more.
Laugh you, sweet Marian! you’ve the right to laugh,
Since God himself is for you, and a child!
For me there’s somewhat less,—and so, I sigh.
The heavens were making room to hold the night,
The sevenfold heavens unfolding all their gates
To let the stars out slowly (prophesied
In close-approaching advent, not discerned),
While still the cue-owls from the cypresses
Of the Poggio called and counted every pulse
Of the skyey palpitation. Gradually
The purple and transparent shadows slow
Had filled up the whole valley to the brim,
And flooded all the city, which you saw
As some drowned city in some enchanted sea,
Cut off from nature,—drawing you who gaze,
With passionate desire, to leap and plunge,
And find a sea-king with a voice of waves,
And treacherous soft eyes, and slippery locks
You cannot kiss but you shall bring away
Their salt upon your lips. The duomo-bell
Strikes ten, as if it struck ten fathoms down,
So deep; and fifty churches answer it
The same, with fifty various instances.
Some gaslights tremble along squares and streets;
The Pitti’s palace-front is drawn in fire;
[325]
And, past the quays, Maria Novella’s Place,
In which the mystic obelisks stand up
Triangular, pyramidal, each based
On a single trine of brazen tortoises,
To guard that fair church, Buonarroti’s Bride,
That stares out from her large blind dial-eyes,
Her quadrant and armillary dials, black
With rhythms of many suns and moons, in vain
Enquiry for so rich a soul as his,—
Methinks I have plunged, I see it all so clear....
And, oh my heart, ... the sea-king!
In my ears
The sound of waters. There he stood, my king!
I felt him, rather than beheld him. Up
I rose, as if he were my king indeed,
And then sate down, in trouble at myself,
And struggling for my woman’s empery.
’Tis pitiful; but women are so made:
We’ll die for you, perhaps,—’tis probable;
But we’ll not spare you an inch of our full height:
We’ll have our whole just stature,—five feet four,
Though laid out in our coffins: pitiful!
—‘You, Romney!—— Lady Waldemar is here?’
He answered in a voice which was not his.
‘I have her letter; you shall read it soon:
But first, I must be heard a little, I,
Who have waited long and travelled far for that,
[326]
Although you thought to have shut a tedious book
And farewell. Ah, you dog-eared such a page,
And here you find me.’
Did he touch my hand,
Or but my sleeve? I trembled, hand and foot,—
He must have touched me.—‘Will you sit?’ I asked,
And motioned to a chair; but down he sate,
A little slowly, as a man in doubt,
Upon the couch beside me,—couch and chair
Being wheeled upon the terrace.
‘You are come,
My cousin Romney?—this is wonderful.
But all is wonder on such summer-nights;
And nothing should surprise us any more,
Who see that miracle of stars. Behold.’
I signed above, where all the stars were out,
As if an urgent heat had started there
A secret writing from a sombre page,
A blank last moment, crowded suddenly
With hurrying splendours.
‘Then you do not know’—
He murmured.
‘Yes, I know,’ I said, ‘I know.
I had the news from Vincent Carrington.
And yet I did not think you’d leave the work
In England, for so much even,—though, of course,
You’ll make a work-day of your holiday,
And turn it to our Tuscan people’s use,—
Who much need helping since the Austrian boar
[327]
(So bold to cross the Alp by Lombardy
And dash his brute front unabashed against
The steep snow-bosses of that shield of God
Who soon shall rise in wrath and shake it clear,)
Came hither also,—raking up our vines
And olive-gardens with his tyrannous tusks,
And rolling on our maize with all his swine,’
‘You had the news from Vincent Carrington,’
He echoed,—picking up the phrase beyond,
As if he knew the rest was merely talk
To fill a gap and keep out a strong wind,—
‘You had, then, Vincent’s personal news?’
‘His own,’
I answered. ‘All that ruined world of yours
Seems crumbling into marriage. Carrington
Has chosen wisely.’
‘Do you take it so?’
He cried, ‘and is it possible at last’ ...
He paused there,—and then, inward to himself,
‘Too much at last, too late!—yet certainly’ ...
(And there his voice swayed as an Alpine plank
That feels a passionate torrent underneath)
‘The knowledge, if I had known it, first or last,
Had never changed the actual case for me.
And best, for her, at this time.’
Nay, I thought,
He loves Kate Ward, it seems, now, like a man,
Because he has married Lady Waldemar.
Ah, Vincent’s letter said how Leigh was moved
[328]
To hear that Vincent was betrothed to Kate.
With what cracked pitchers go we to deep wells
In this world! Then I spoke,—‘I did not think,
My cousin, you had ever known Kate Ward.’
‘In fact I never knew her. ’Tis enough
That Vincent did, before he chose his wife
For other reasons than those topaz eyes
I’ve heard of. Not to undervalue them,
For all that. One takes up the world with eyes.’
—Including Romney Leigh, I thought again,
Albeit he knows them only by repute.
How vile must all men be, since he’s a man.
His deep pathetic voice, as if he guessed
I did not surely love him, took the word;
‘You never got a letter from Lord Howe
A month back, dear Aurora?’
‘None,’ I said.
‘I felt it was so,’ he replied: ‘Yet, strange!
Sir Blaise Delorme has passed through Florence?’
‘Ay,
By chance I saw him in Our Lady’s church,
(I saw him, mark you, but he saw not me)
Clean-washed in holy water from the count
Of things terrestrial,—letters and the rest;
He had crossed us out together with his sins.
[329]
Ay, strange; but only strange that good Lord Howe
Preferred him to the post because of pauls.
For me I’m sworn to never trust a man—
At least with letters.’
‘There were facts to tell,—
To smooth with eye and accent. Howe supposed ...
Well, well, no matter! there was dubious need;
You heard the news from Vincent Carrington.
And yet perhaps you had been startled less
To see me, dear Aurora, if you had read
That letter.’
—Now he sets me down as vexed.
I think I’ve draped myself in woman’s pride
To a perfect purpose. Oh, I’m vexed, it seems!
My friend Lord Howe deputes his friend Sir Blaise,
To break as softly as a sparrow’s egg
That lets a bird out tenderly, the news
Of Romney’s marriage to a certain saint;
To smooth with eye and accent,—indicate
His possible presence. Excellently well
You’ve played your part, my Lady Waldemar,—
As I’ve played mine.
‘Dear Romney,’ I began,
‘You did not use, of old, to be so like
A Greek king coming from a taken Troy,
’Twas needful that precursors spread your path
With three-piled carpets, to receive your foot
And dull the sound of’t. For myself, be sure,
Although it frankly ground the gravel here,
[330]
I still could bear it. Yet I’m sorry, too,
To lose this famous letter, which Sir Blaise
Has twisted to a lighter absently
To fire some holy taper with: Lord Howe
Writes letters good for all things but to lose;
And many a flower of London gossipry
Has dropt wherever such a stem broke off,—
Of course I know that, lonely among my vines,
Where nothing’s talked of, save the blight again,
And no more Chianti! Still the letter’s use
As preparation ... Did I start indeed?
Last night I started at a cockchafer,
And shook a half-hour after. Have you learnt
No more of women, ’spite of privilege,
Than still to take account too seriously
Of such weak flutterings? Why, we like it, sir,—
We get our powers and our effects that way.
The trees stand stiff and still at time of frost,
If no wind tears them; but, let summer come,
When trees are happy,—and a breath avails
To set them trembling through a million leaves
In luxury of emotion. Something less
It takes to move a woman: let her start
And shake at pleasure,—nor conclude at yours,
The winter’s bitter,—but the summer’s green.’
He answered, ‘Be the summer ever green
With you, Aurora!—though you sweep your sex
With somewhat bitter gusts from where you live
Above them,—whirling downward from your heights
[331]
Your very own pine-cones, in a grand disdain
Of the lowland burrs with which you scatter them.
So high and cold to others and yourself,
A little less to Romney, were unjust,
And thus, I would not have you. Let it pass:
I feel content, so. You can bear indeed
My sudden step beside you: but for me,
’Twould move me sore to hear your softened voice,—
Aurora’s voice,—if softened unaware
In pity of what I am.’
Ah friend, I thought,
As husband of the Lady Waldemar
You’re granted very sorely pitiable!
And yet Aurora Leigh must guard her voice
From softening in the pity of your case,
As if from lie or licence. Certainly
We’ll soak up all the slush and soil of life
With softened voices, ere we come to you.
At which I interrupted my own thought
And spoke out calmly. ‘Let us ponder, friend,
Whate’er our state, we must have made it first;
And though the thing displease us, ay, perhaps
Displease us warrantably, never doubt
That other states, thought possible once, and then
Rejected by the instinct of our lives,—
If then adopted, had displeased us more
Than this, in which the choice, the will, the love,
Has stamped the honour of a patent act
From henceforth. What we choose, may not be good;
[332]
But, that we choose it, proves it good for us
Potentially, fantastically, now
Or last year, rather than a thing we saw,
And saw no need for choosing. Moths will burn
Their wings,—which proves that light is good for moths,
Or else they had flown not, where they agonise,’
‘Ay, light is good,’ he echoed, and there paused.
And then abruptly, ... ‘Marian. Marian’s well?’
I bowed my head, but found no word. ’Twas hard
To speak of her to Lady Waldemar’s
New husband. How much did he know, at last?
How much? how little?—— He would take no sign,
But straight repeated,—‘Marian. Is she well?’
‘She’s well,’ I answered.
She was there in sight
An hour back, but the night had drawn her home;
Where still I heard her in an upper room,
Her low voice singing to the child in bed,
Who restless with the summer-heat and play
And slumber snatched at noon, was long sometimes
At falling off, and took a score of songs
And mother-hushes, ere she saw him sound.
‘She’s well,’ I answered.
‘Here?’ he asked.
[333]
‘Yes, here.’
He stopped and sighed. ‘That shall be presently,
But now this must be. I have words to say,
And would be alone to say them, I with you,
And no third troubling.’
‘Speak then,’ I returned,
‘She will not vex you.’
At which, suddenly
He turned his face upon me with its smile,
As if to crush me. ‘I have read your book,
Aurora.’
‘You have read it,’ I replied,
‘And I have writ it,—we have done with it.
And now the rest?’
‘The rest is like the first,’
He answered,—‘for the book is in my heart,
Lives in me, wakes in me, and dreams in me:
My daily bread tastes of it,—and my wine
Which has no smack of it, I pour it out;
It seems unnatural drinking.’
Bitterly
I took the word up; ‘Never waste your wine.
The book lived in me ere it lived in you;
I know it closer than another does,
And that it’s foolish, feeble, and afraid,
And all unworthy so much compliment.
Beseech you, keep your wine,—and, when you drink,
[334]
Still wish some happier fortune to your friend,
Than even to have written a far better book.’
He answered gently, ‘That is consequent:
The poet looks beyond the book he has made,
Or else he had not made it. If a man
Could make a man, he’d henceforth be a god
In feeling what a little thing is man:
It is not my case. And this special book,
I did not make it, to make light of it:
It stands above my knowledge, draws me up;
’Tis high to me. It may be that the book
Is not so high, but I so low, instead;
Still high to me. I mean no compliment:
I will not say there are not, young or old,
Male writers, ay, or female,—let it pass,
Who’ll write us richer and completer books.
A man may love a woman perfectly,
And yet by no means ignorantly maintain
A thousand women have not larger eyes:
Enough that she alone has looked at him
With eyes that, large or small, have won his soul.
And so, this book, Aurora,—so, your book.’
‘Alas,’ I answered, ‘is it so, indeed?’
And then was silent.
‘Is it so, indeed,’
He echoed, ‘that alas is all your word?’
[335]
I said,—‘I’m thinking of a far-off June,
When you and I, upon my birthday once,
Discoursed of life and art, with both untried.
I’m thinking, Romney, how ’twas morning then,
And now ’tis night.’
‘And now,’ he said, ‘’tis night.’
‘I’m thinking,’ I resumed, ‘’tis somewhat sad
That if I had known, that morning in the dew,
My cousin Romney would have said such words
On such a night, at close of many years,
In speaking of a future book of mine,
It would have pleased me better as a hope,
Than as an actual grace it can at all.
That’s sad, I’m thinking.’
‘Ay,’ he said, ‘’tis night.’
‘And there,’ I added lightly, ‘are the stars!
And here, we’ll talk of stars, and not of books.’
‘You have the stars,’ he murmured,—‘it is well:
Be like them! shine, Aurora, on my dark,
Though high and cold and only like a star,
And for this short night only,—you, who keep
The same Aurora of the bright June day
That withered up the flowers before my face,
And turned me from the garden evermore
Because I was not worthy. Oh, deserved,
Deserved! That I, who verily had not learnt
[336]
God’s lesson half, attaining as a dunce
To obliterate good words with fractious thumbs
And cheat myself of the context,—I should push
Aside, with male ferocious impudence,
The world’s Aurora who had conned her part
On the other side the leaf! ignore her so,
Because she was a woman and a queen,
And had no beard to bristle through her song,—
My teacher, who has taught me with a book,
My Miriam, whose sweet mouth, when nearly drowned
I still heard singing on the shore! Deserved,
That here I should look up unto the stars
And miss the glory’ ...
‘Can I understand?’
I broke in. ‘You speak wildly, Romney Leigh,
Or I hear wildly. In that morning-time
We recollect, the roses were too red,
The trees too green, reproach too natural
If one should see not what the other saw:
And now, it’s night, remember; we have shades
In place of colours; we are now grown cold,
And old, my cousin Romney. Pardon me,—
I’m very happy that you like my book,
And very sorry that I quoted back
A ten years’ birthday; ’twas so mad a thing
In any woman, I scarce marvel much
You took it for a venturous piece of spite,
Provoking such excuses, as indeed
I cannot call you slack in.’
‘Understand,’
[337]
He answered sadly, ‘something, if but so.
This night is softer than an English day,
And men may well come hither when they’re sick,
To draw in easier breath from larger air.
’Tis thus with me; I’ve come to you,—to you,
My Italy of women, just to breathe
My soul out once before you, ere I go,
As humble as God makes me at the last,
(I thank Him) quite out of the way of men,
And yours, Aurora,—like a punished child,
His cheeks all blurred with tears and naughtiness,
To silence in a corner. I am come
To speak, beloved’....
‘Wisely, cousin Leigh,
And worthily of us both!’
‘Yes, worthily;
For this time I must speak out and confess
That I, so truculent in assumption once,
So absolute in dogma, proud in aim,
And fierce in expectation,—I, who felt
The whole world tugging at my skirts for help,
As if no other man than I, could pull,
Nor woman, but I led her by the hand,
Nor cloth hold, but I had it in my coat,—
Do know myself to-night for what I was
On that June-day, Aurora. Poor bright day,
Which meant the best ... a woman and a rose, ...
And which I smote upon the cheek with words,
Until it turned and rent me! Young you were,
That birthday, poet, but you talked the right:
[338]
While I, ... I built up follies like a wall
To intercept the sunshine and your face.
Your face! that’s worse.’
‘Speak wisely, cousin Leigh.’
‘Yes, wisely, dear Aurora, though too late:
But then, not wisely. I was heavy then,
And stupid, and distracted with the cries
Of tortured prisoners in the polished brass
Of that Phalarian bull, society,—
Which seems to bellow bravely like ten bulls,
But, if you listen, moans and cries instead
Despairingly, like victims tossed and gored
And trampled by their hoofs. I heard the cries
Too close: I could not hear the angels lift
A fold of rustling air, nor what they said
To help my pity. I beheld the world
As one great famishing carnivorous mouth,—
A huge, deserted, callow, black, bird Thing,
With piteous open beak that hurt my heart,
Till down upon the filthy ground I dropped,
And tore the violets up to get the worms.
Worms, worms, was all my cry: an open mouth,
A gross want, bread to fill it to the lips,
No more! That poor men narrowed their demands
To such an end, was virtue, I supposed,
Adjudicating that to see it so
Was reason. Oh, I did not push the case
Up higher, and ponder how it answers, when
The rich take up the same cry for themselves,
[339]
Professing equally,—‘an open mouth
A gross want, food to fill us, and no more!’
Why that’s so far from virtue, only vice
Finds reason for it! That makes libertines:
That slurs our cruel streets from end to end
With eighty thousand women in one smile,
Who only smile at night beneath the gas:
The body’s satisfaction and no more,
Being used for argument against the soul’s,
Here too! the want, here too, implying the right.
—How dark I stood that morning in the sun,
My best Aurora, though I saw your eyes,—
When first you told me ... oh, I recollect
The words ... and how you lifted your white hand,
And how your white dress and your burnished curls
Went greatening round you in the still blue air,
As if an inspiration from within
Had blown them all out when you spoke the same,
Even these,—‘You will not compass your poor ends
Of barley-feeding and material ease,
Without the poet’s individualism
To work your universal. It takes a soul,
To move a body,—it takes a high-souled man,
To move the masses ... even to a cleaner stye:
It takes the ideal, to blow an inch inside
The dust of the actual: and your Fouriers failed,
Because not poets enough to understand
That life develops from within.’ I say
Your words,—I could say other words of yours;
For none of all your words has been more lost
[340]
Than sweet verbena, which, being brushed against,
Will hold you three hours after by the smell,
In spite of long walks on the windy hills.
But these words dealt in sharper perfume,—these
Were ever on me, stinging through my dreams,
And saying themselves for ever o’er my acts
Like some unhappy verdict. That I failed,
Is certain. Stye or no stye, to contrive
The swine’s propulsion toward the precipice,
Proved easy and plain. I subtly organised
And ordered, built the cards up high and higher,
Till, some one breathing, all fell flat again;
In setting right society’s wide wrong,
Mere life’s so fatal! So I failed indeed
Once, twice, and oftener,—hearing through the rents
Of obstinate purpose, still those words of yours,
‘You will not compass your poor ends, not you!’
But harder than you said them; every time
Still farther from your voice, until they came
To overcrow me with triumphant scorn
Which vexed me to resistance. Set down this
For condemnation,—I was guilty here:
I stood upon my deed and fought my doubt,
As men will,—for I doubted,—till at last
My deed gave way beneath me suddenly,
And left me what I am. The curtain dropped,
My part quite ended, all the footlights quenched,
My own soul hissing at me through the dark,
I, ready for confession,—I was wrong,
I’ve sorely failed; I’ve slipped the ends of life,
[341]
I yield; you have conquered.’
‘Stay,’ I answered him;
‘I’ve something for your hearing, also. I
Have failed too.’
‘You!’ he said, ‘you’re very great;
The sadness of your greatness fits you well:
As if the plume upon a hero’s casque
Should nod a shadow upon his victor face.’
I took him up austerely,—‘You have read
My book, but not my heart; for recollect,
’Tis writ in Sanscrit, which you bungle at.
I’ve surely failed, I know; if failure means
To look back sadly on work gladly done,—
To wander on my mountains of Delight,
So called, (I can remember a friend’s words
As well as you, sir,) weary and in want
Of even a sheep-path, thinking bitterly....
Well, well! no matter. I but say so much,
To keep you, Romney Leigh, from saying more,
And let you feel I am not so high indeed,
That I can bear to have you at my foot,—
Or safe, that I can help you. That June-day,
Too deeply sunk in craterous sunsets now
For you or me to dig it up alive;
To pluck it out all bleeding with spent flame
At the roots, before those moralising stars
We have got instead,—that poor lost day, you said
Some words as truthful as the thing of mine
You care to keep in memory: and I hold
[342]
If I, that day, and, being the girl I was,
Had shown a gentler spirit, less arrogance,
It had not hurt me. Ah, you’ll not mistake
The point here. I but only think, you see,
More justly, that’s more humbly, of myself,
Than when I tried a crown on and supposed....
Nay, laugh, sir,—I’ll laugh with you!—pray you, laugh.
I’ve had so many birthdays since that day,
I’ve learnt to prize mirth’s opportunities,
Which come too seldom. Was it you who said
I was not changed? the same Aurora? Ah,
We could laugh there, too! Why, Ulysses’ dog
Knew him, and wagged his tail and died: but if
I had owned a dog, I too, before my Troy,
And, if you brought him here, ... I warrant you
He’d look into my face, bark lustily,
And live on stoutly, as the creatures will
Whose spirits are not troubled by long loves.
A dog would never know me, I’m so changed;
Much less a friend ... except that you’re misled
By the colour of the hair, the trick of the voice,
Like that Aurora Leigh’s.’
‘Sweet trick of voice!
I would be a dog for this, to know it at last,
And die upon the falls of it. O love,
O best Aurora! are you then so sad,
You scarcely had been sadder as my wife?’
‘Your wife, sir! I must certainly be changed,
If I, Aurora, can have said a thing
[343]
So light, it catches at the knightly spurs
Of a noble gentleman like Romney Leigh,
And trips him from his honourable sense
Of what befits’ ...
‘You wholly misconceive,’
He answered.
I returned,—‘I’m glad of it;
But keep from misconception, too, yourself:
I am not humbled to so low a point,
Nor so far saddened. If I am sad at all,
Ten layers of birthdays on a woman’s head,
Are apt to fossilise her girlish mirth,
Though ne’er so merry: I’m perforce more wise,
And that, in truth, means sadder. For the rest,
Look here, sir: I was right upon the whole,
That birthday morning. ’Tis impossible
To get at men excepting through their souls,
However open their carnivorous jaws;
And poets get directlier at the soul,
Than any of your œconomists:—for which,
You must not overlook the poet’s work
When scheming for the world’s necessities.
The soul’s the way. Not even Christ Himself
Can save man else than as He holds man’s soul;
And therefore did He come into our flesh,
As some wise hunter creeping on his knees
With a torch, into the blackness of some cave,
To face and quell the beast there,—take the soul,
And so possess the whole man, body and soul.
I said, so far, right, yes; not farther, though:
[344]
We both were wrong that June-day,—both as wrong
As an east wind had been. I who talked of art,
And you who grieved for all men’s griefs ... what then?
We surely made too small a part for God
In these things. What we are, imports us more
Than what we eat; and life, you’ve granted me,
Develops from within. But innermost
Of the inmost, most interior of the interne,
God claims his own, Divine humanity
Renewing nature,—or the piercingest verse,
Prest in by subtlest poet, still must keep
As much upon the outside of a man,
As the very bowl, in which he dips his beard.
—And then, ... the rest. I cannot surely speak.
Perhaps I doubt more than you doubted then,
If I, the poet’s veritable charge,
Have borne upon my forehead. If I have,
It might feel somewhat liker to a crown,
The foolish green one even.—Ah, I think,
And chiefly when the sun shines, that I’ve failed.
But what then, Romney? Though we fail indeed,
You ... I ... a score of such weak workers, ... He
Fails never. If He cannot work by us,
He will work over us. Does He want a man,
Much less a woman, think you? Every time
The star winks there, so many souls are born,
Who all shall work too. Let our own be calm:
We should be ashamed to sit beneath those stars,
Impatient that we’re nothing.’
‘Could we sit
[345]
Just so for ever, sweetest friend,’ he said,
‘My failure would seem better than success.
And yet, indeed, your book has dealt with me
More gently, cousin, than you ever will!
The book brought down entire the bright June-day,
And set me wandering in the garden-walks,
And let me watch the garland in a place,
You blushed so ... nay, forgive me; do not stir:
I only thank the book for what it taught,
And what, permitted. Poet, doubt yourself;
But never doubt that you’re a poet to me
From henceforth. Ah, you’ve written poems, sweet,
Which moved me in secret, as the sap is moved
In still March-branches, signless as a stone:
But this last book o’ercame me like soft rain
Which falls at midnight, when the tightened bark
Breaks out into unhesitating buds,
And sudden protestations of the spring.
In all your other books, I saw but you:
A man may see the moon so, in a pond,
And not be nearer therefore to the moon,
Nor use the sight ... except to drown himself:
And so I forced my heart back from the sight;
For what had I, I thought, to do with her,—
Aurora ... Romney? But, in this last book,
You showed me something separate from yourself,
Beyond you; and I bore to take it in,
And let it draw me. You have shown me truths,
O June-day friend, that help me now at night,
When June is over! truths not yours, indeed,
[346]
But set within my reach by means of you:
Presented by your voice and verse the way
To take them clearest. Verily I was wrong;
And verily, many thinkers of this age,
Ay, many Christian teachers, half in heaven,
Are wrong in just my sense, who understood
Our natural world too insularly, as if
No spiritual counterpart completed it
Consummating its meaning, rounding all
To justice and perfection, line by line,
Form by form, nothing single, nor alone,—
The great below clenched by the great above;
Shade here authenticating substance there;
The body proving spirit, as the effect
The cause: we, meantime, being too grossly apt
To hold the natural, as dogs a bone,
(Though reason and nature beat us in the face);
So obstinately, that we’ll break our teeth
Or ever we let go. For everywhere
We’re too materialistic,—eating clay,
(Like men of the west) instead of Adam’s corn
And Noah’s wine; clay by handfuls, clay by lumps,
Until we’re filled up to the throat with clay,
And grow the grimy colour of the ground
On which we are feeding. Ay, materialist
The age’s name is. God himself, with some,
Is apprehended as the bare result
Of what his hand materially has made,
Expressed in such an algebraic sign,
Called God;—that is, to put it otherwise,
[347]
They add up nature to a naught of God
And cross the quotient. There are many, even,
Whose names are written in the Christian church
To no dishonour,—diet still on mud,
And splash the altars with it. You might think
The clay, Christ laid upon their eyelids when,
Still blind, he called them to the use of sight,
Remained there to retard its exercise
With clogging incrustations. Close to heaven,
They see, for mysteries, through the open doors,
Vague puffs of smoke from pots of earthenware;
And fain would enter, when their time shall come,
With quite a different body than St. Paul
Has promised,—husk and chaff, the whole barley-corn,
Or where’s the resurrection?’
‘Thus it is,’
I sighed. And he resumed with mournful face.
‘Beginning so, and filling up with clay
The wards of this great key, the natural world,
And fumbling vainly therefore at the lock
Of the spiritual,—we feel ourselves shut in
With all the wild-beast roar of struggling life,
The terrors and compunctions of our souls,
As saints with lions,—we who are not saints,
And have no heavenly lordship in our stare
To awe them backward! Ay, we are forced, so pent,
To judge the whole too partially, ... confound
Conclusions. Is there any common phrase
Significant, when the adverb’s heard alone,
The verb being absent, and the pronoun out?
[348]
But we, distracted in the roar of life,
Still insolently at God’s adverb snatch,
And bruit against Him that his thought is void,
His meaning hopeless;—cry, that everywhere
The government is slipping from his hand,
Unless some other Christ ... say Romney Leigh ...
Come up, and toil and moil, and change the world,
For which the First has proved inadequate,
However we talk bigly of His work
And piously of His person. We blaspheme
At last, to finish that doxology,
Despairing on the earth for which He died.’
‘So now,’ I asked, ‘you have more hope of men?’
‘I hope,’ he answered: ‘I am come to think
That God will have his work done, as you said,
And that we need not be disturbed too much
For Romney Leigh or others having failed
With this or that quack nostrum,—recipes
For keeping summits by annulling depths,
For learning wrestling with long lounging sleeves,
And perfect heroism without a scratch.
We fail,—what, then? Aurora, if I smiled
To see you, in your lovely morning-pride,
Try on the poet’s wreath which suits the noon,—
(Sweet cousin, walls must get the weather-stain
Before they grow the ivy!) certainly
I stood myself there worthier of contempt,
Self-rated, in disastrous arrogance,
[349]
As competent to sorrow for mankind
And even their odds. A man may well despair,
Who counts himself so needful to success.
I failed. I throw the remedy back on God,
And sit down here beside you, in good hope.’
‘And yet, take heed,’ I answered, ‘lest we lean
Too dangerously on the other side,
And so fail twice. Be sure, no earnest work
Of any honest creature, howbeit weak,
Imperfect, ill-adapted, fails so much,
It is not gathered as a grain of sand
To enlarge the sum of human action used
For carrying out God’s end. No creature works
So ill, observe, that therefore he’s cashiered.
The honest earnest man must stand and work;
The woman also; otherwise she drops
At once below the dignity of man,
Accepting serfdom. Free men freely work:
Whoever fears God, fears to sit at ease.’
He cried, ‘True. After Adam, work was curse;
The natural creature labours, sweats and frets.
But, after Christ, work turns to privilege;
And henceforth one with our humanity,
The Six-day Worker, working still in us,
Has called us freely to work on with Him
In high companionship. So, happiest!
I count that Heaven itself is only work
To a surer issue. Let us work, indeed,—
[350]
But, no more, work as Adam ... nor as Leigh
Erewhile, as if the only man on earth,
Responsible for all the thistles blown
And tigers couchant,—struggling in amaze
Against disease and winter,—snarling on
For ever, that the world’s not paradise.
Oh cousin, let us be content, in work,
To do the thing we can, and not presume
To fret because it’s little. ’Twill employ
Seven men, they say, to make a perfect pin:
Who makes the head, content to miss the point,—
Who makes the point, agreed to leave the join:
And if a man should cry, ‘I want a pin,
And I must make it straightway, head and point,’—
His wisdom is not worth the pin he wants.
Seven men to a pin,—and not a man too much!
Seven generations, haply, to this world,
To right it visibly, a finger’s breadth,
And mend its rents a little. Oh, to storm
And say,—‘This world here is intolerable;
I will not eat this corn, nor drink this wine,
Nor love this woman, flinging her my soul
Without a bond for’t, as a lover should,
Nor use the generous leave of happiness
As not too good for using generously’—
(Since virtue kindles at the touch of joy,
Like a man’s cheek laid on a woman’s hand;
And God, who knows it, looks for quick returns
From joys)!—to stand and claim to have a life
Beyond the bounds of the individual man,
[351]
And raze all personal cloisters of the soul
To build up public stores and magazines,
As if God’s creatures otherwise were lost,
The builder surely saved by any means!
To think,—I have a pattern on my nail,
And I will carve the world new after it,
And solve so, these hard social questions,—nay,
Impossible social questions,—since their roots
Strike deep in Evil’s own existence here,
Which God permits because the question’s hard
To abolish evil nor attaint free-will.
Ay, hard to God, but not to Romney Leigh!
For Romney has a pattern on his nail,
(Whatever may be lacking on the Mount)
And not being overnice to separate
What’s element from what’s convention, hastes
By line on line, to draw you out a world,
Without your help indeed, unless you take
His yoke upon you and will learn of him,—
So much he has to teach! so good a world!
The same, the whole creation’s groaning for!
No rich nor poor, no gain nor loss nor stint,
No potage in it able to exclude
A brother’s birthright, and no right of birth,
The potage,—both secured to every man;
And perfect virtue dealt out like the rest,
Gratuitously, with the soup at six,
To whoso does not seek it.’
‘Softly, sir,’
I interrupted,—‘I had a cousin once
[352]
I held in reverence. If he strained too wide,
It was not to take honour, but give help;
The gesture was heroic. If his hand
Accomplished nothing ... (well, it is not proved)
That empty hand thrown impotently out
Were sooner caught, I think, by One in heaven,
Than many a hand that reaped a harvest in
And keeps the scythe’s glow on it. Pray you, then,
For my sake merely, use less bitterness
In speaking of my cousin.’
‘Ah,’ he said,
‘Aurora! when the prophet beats the ass,
The angel intercedes.’ He shook his head—
‘And yet to mean so well, and fail so foul,
Expresses ne’er another beast than man;
The antithesis is human. Harken, dear;
There’s too much abstract willing, purposing,
In this poor world. We talk by aggregates,
And think by systems; and, being used to face
Our evils in statistics, are inclined
To cap them with unreal remedies
Drawn out in haste on the other side the slate.’
‘That’s true,’ I answered, fain to throw up thought,
And make a game of’t; ‘Oh, we generalise
Enough to please you. If we pray at all,
We pray no longer for our daily bread,
But next centenary’s harvests. If we give,
Our cup of water is not tendered till
We lay down pipes and found a Company
[353]
With Branches. Ass or angel, ’tis the same:
A woman cannot do the thing she ought,
Which means whatever perfect thing she can,
In life, in art, in science, but she fears
To let the perfect action take her part
And rest there: she must prove what she can do
Before she does it,—prate of woman’s rights,
Of woman’s mission, woman’s function, till
The men (who are prating, too, on their side) cry,
‘A woman’s function plainly is ... to talk.’
Poor souls, they are very reasonably vexed!
They cannot hear each other speak.’
‘And you,
An artist, judge so?’
‘I, an artist,—yes,
Because, precisely, I’m an artist, sir,
And woman,—if another sate in sight,
I’d whisper,—Soft, my sister! not a word!
By speaking we prove only we can speak;
Which he, the man here, never doubted. What
He doubts, is whether we can do the thing
With decent grace, we’ve not yet done at all:
Now, do it; bring your statue,—you have room!
He’ll see it even by the starlight here;
And if ’tis e’er so little like the god
Who looks out from the marble silently
Along the track of his own shining dart
Through the dusk of ages,—there’s no need to speak;
The universe shall henceforth speak for you,
And witness, ‘She who did this thing, was born
[354]
To do it,—claims her license in her work.’
—And so with more works. Whoso cures the plague,
Though twice a woman, shall be called a leech:
Who rights a land’s finances, is excused
For touching coppers, though her hands be white,—
But we, we talk!’
‘It is the age’s mood,’
He said; ‘we boast, and do not. We put up
Hostelry signs where’er we lodge a day,—
Some red colossal cow, with mighty paps
A Cyclops’ fingers could not strain to milk;
Then bring out presently our saucer-full
Of curds. We want more quiet in our works,
More knowledge of the bounds in which we work;
More knowledge that each individual man
Remains an Adam to the general race,
Constrained to see, like Adam, that he keep
His personal state’s condition honestly,
Or vain all thoughts of his to help the world,
Which still must be developed from its one,
If bettered in its many. We, indeed,
Who think to lay it out new like a park,
We take a work on us which is not man’s;
For God alone sits far enough above,
To speculate so largely. None of us
(Not Romney Leigh) is mad enough to say,
We’ll have a grove of oaks upon that slope
And sink the need of acorns. Government,
If veritable and lawful, is not given
By imposition of the foreign hand,—
[355]
Nor chosen from a pretty pattern-book
Of some domestic idealogue, who sits
And coldly chooses empire, where as well
He might republic. Genuine government
Is but the expression of a nation, good
Or less good,—even as all society,
Howe’er unequal, monstrous, crazed, and cursed,
Is but the expression of men’s single lives,
The loud sum of the silent units. What,
We’d change the aggregate and yet retain
Each separate figure? Whom do we cheat by that?
Now, not even Romney.’
‘Cousin, you are sad.
Did all your social labour at Leigh Hall
And elsewhere, come to nought then?’
‘It was nought,’
He answered mildly. ‘There is room indeed,
For statues still, in this large world of God’s,
But not for vacuums,—so I am not sad:
Not sadder than is good for what I am.
My vain phalanstery dissolved itself;
My men and women of disordered lives,
I brought in orderly to dine and sleep,
Broke up those waxen masks I made them wear,
With fierce contortions of the natural face;
And cursed me for my tyrannous constraint
In forcing crooked creatures to live straight;
And set the country hounds upon my back
To bite and tear me for my wicked deed
Of trying to do good without the church
[356]
Or even the squires, Aurora. Do you mind
Your ancient neighbours? The great book-club teems
With ‘sketches,’ ‘summaries,’ and ‘last tracts’ but twelve,
On socialistic troublers of close bonds
Betwixt the generous rich and grateful poor.
The vicar preached from ‘Revelations,’ (till
The doctor woke) and found me with ‘the frogs’
On three successive Sundays; ay, and stopped
To weep a little (for he’s getting old)
That such perdition should o’ertake a man
Of such fair acres,—in the parish, too!
He printed his discourses ‘by request;’
And if your book shall sell as his did, then
Your verses are less good than I suppose.
The women of the neighbourhood subscribed,
And sent me a copy bound in scarlet silk,
Tooled edges, blazoned with the arms of Leigh:
I own that touched me.’
‘What, the pretty ones?
Poor Romney!’
‘Otherwise the effect was small.
I had my windows broken once or twice
By liberal peasants, naturally incensed
At such a vexer of Arcadian peace,
Who would not let men call their wives their own
To kick like Britons,—and made obstacles
When things went smoothly as a baby drugged,
Toward freedom and starvation; bringing down
The wicked London tavern-thieves and drabs,
To affront the blessed hillside drabs and thieves
[357]
With mended morals, quotha,—fine new lives!—
My windows paid for’t. I was shot at, once,
By an active poacher who had hit a hare
From the other barrel, tired of springeing game
So long upon my acres, undisturbed,
And restless for the country’s virtue, (yet
He missed me)—ay, and pelted very oft
In riding through the village. ‘There he goes,
Who’d drive away our Christian gentlefolks,
To catch us undefended in the trap
He baits with poisonous cheese, and lock us up
In that pernicious prison of Leigh Hall
With all his murderers! Give another name,
And say Leigh Hell, and burn it up with fire.’
And so they did, at last, Aurora.’
‘Did?’
‘You never heard it, cousin? Vincent’s news
Came stinted, then.’
‘They did? they burnt Leigh Hall?’
‘You’re sorry, dear Aurora? Yes indeed,
They did it perfectly: a thorough work,
And not a failure, this time. Let us grant
’Tis somewhat easier, though, to burn a house
Than build a system:—yet that’s easy, too,
In a dream. Books, pictures,—ay, the pictures! what,
You think your dear Vandykes would give them pause?
Our proud ancestral Leighs with those peaked beards,
Or bosoms white as foam thrown up on rocks
[358]
From the old-spent wave. Such calm defiant looks
They flared up with! now, nevermore they’ll twit
The bones in the family-vault with ugly death.
Not one was rescued, save the Lady Maud,
Who threw you down, that morning you were born,
The undeniable lineal mouth and chin,
To wear for ever for her gracious sake;
For which good deed I saved her: the rest went:
And you, you’re sorry, cousin. Well, for me,
With all my phalansterians safely out,
(Poor hearts, they helped the burners, it was said,
And certainly a few clapped hands and yelled)
The ruin did not hurt me as it might,—
As when for instance I was hurt one day,
A certain letter being destroyed. In fact,
To see the great house flare so ... oaken floors,
Our fathers made so fine with rushes once,
Before our mothers furbished them with trains,—
Carved wainscoats, panelled walls, the favourite slide
For draining off a martyr, (or a rogue)
The echoing galleries, half a half-mile long,
And all the various stairs that took you up
And took you down, and took you round about
Upon their slippery darkness, recollect,
All helping to keep up one blazing jest;
The flames through all the casements pushing forth,
Like red-hot devils crinkled into snakes,
All signifying,—‘Look you, Romney Leigh,
We save the people from your saving, here,
Yet so as by fire! we make a pretty show
[359]
Besides,—and that’s the best you’ve ever done.’—
—To see this, almost moved myself to clap!
The ‘vale et plaude’ came, too, with effect,
When, in the roof fell, and the fire, that paused,
Stunned momently beneath the stroke of slates
And tumbling rafters, rose at once and roared,
And wrapping the whole house, (which disappeared
In a mounting whirlwind of dilated flame,)
Blew upward, straight, its drift of fiery chaff
In the face of Heaven, ... which blenched, and ran up higher.’
‘Poor Romney!’
‘Sometimes when I dream,’ he said,
‘I hear the silence after; ’twas so still.
For all those wild beasts, yelling, cursing round,
Were suddenly silent, while you counted five!
So silent, that you heard a young bird fall
From the top-nest in the neighbouring rookery
Through edging over-rashly toward the light.
The old rooks had already fled too far,
To hear the screech they fled with, though you saw
Some flying on still, like scatterings of dead leaves
In autumn-gusts, seen dark against the sky:
All flying,—ousted, like the House of Leigh.’
‘Dear Romney!’
‘Evidently ’twould have been
A fine sight for a poet, sweet, like you,
To make the verse blaze after. I myself,
Even I, felt something in the grand old trees,
[360]
Which stood that moment like brute Druid gods
Amazed upon the rim of ruin, where,
As into a blackened socket, the great fire
Had dropped,—still throwing up splinters now and then,
To show them grey with all their centuries,
Left there to witness that on such a day
The house went out.’
‘Ah!’
‘While you counted five
I seemed to feel a little like a Leigh,—
But then it passed, Aurora. A child cried;
And I had enough to think of what to do
With all those houseless wretches in the dark,
And ponder where they’d dance the next time, they
Who had burnt the viol.’
‘Did you think of that?
Who burns his viol will not dance, I know,
To cymbals, Romney.’
‘O my sweet sad voice,’
He cried,—‘O voice that speaks and overcomes!
The sun is silent, but Aurora speaks.’
‘Alas,’ I said; ‘I speak I know not what:
I’m back in childhood, thinking as a child,
A foolish fancy—will it make you smile?
I shall not from the window of my room
Catch sight of those old chimneys any more.’
‘No more,’ he answered. ‘If you pushed one day
Through all the green hills to our fathers’ house,
[361]
You’d come upon a great charred circle where
The patient earth was singed an acre round;
With one stone-stair, symbolic of my life,
Ascending, winding, leading up to nought!
’Tis worth a poet’s seeing. Will you go?’
I made no answer. Had I any right
To weep with this man, that I dared to speak?
A woman stood between his soul and mine,
And waved us off from touching evermore
With those unclean white hands of hers. Enough.
We had burnt our viols and were silent.
So,
The silence lengthened till it pressed. I spoke,
To breathe: ‘I think you were ill afterward.’
‘More ill,’ he answered, ‘had been scarcely ill.
I hoped this feeble fumbling at life’s knot
Might end concisely,—but I failed to die,
As formerly I failed to live,—and thus
Grew willing, having tried all other ways,
To try just God’s. Humility’s so good,
When pride’s impossible. Mark us, how we make
Our virtues, cousin, from our worn-out sins,
Which smack of them from henceforth. Is it right,
For instance, to wed here, while you love there?
And yet because a man sins once, the sin
Cleaves to him, in necessity to sin;
That if he sin not so, to damn himself,
He sins so, to damn others with himself:
[362]
And thus, to wed here, loving there, becomes
A duty. Virtue buds a dubious leaf
Round mortal brows; your ivy’s better, dear.
—Yet she, ’tis certain, is my very wife;
The very lamb left mangled by the wolves
Through my own bad shepherding: and could I choose
But take her on my shoulder past this stretch
Of rough, uneasy wilderness, poor lamb,
Poor child, poor child?—Aurora, my belov’d,
I will not vex you any more to-night;
But, having spoken what I came to say,
The rest shall please you. What she can, in me,—
Protection, tender liking, freedom, ease,
She shall have surely, liberally, for her
And hers, Aurora. Small amends they’ll make
For hideous evils (which she had not known
Except by me) and for this imminent loss,
This forfeit presence of a gracious friend,
Which also she must forfeit for my sake,
Since, ... drop your hand in mine a moment, sweet,
We’re parting!—— Ah, my snowdrop, what a touch,
As if the wind had swept it off! you grudge
Your gelid sweetness on my palm but so,
A moment? angry, that I could not bear
You ... speaking, breathing, living, side by side
With some one called my wife ... and live, myself?
Nay, be not cruel—you must understand!
Your lightest footfall on a floor of mine
Would shake the house, my lintel being uncrossed
’Gainst angels: henceforth it is night with me,
[363]
And so, henceforth, I put the shutters up;
Auroras must not come to spoil my dark.’
He smiled so feebly, with an empty hand
Stretched sideway from me,—as indeed he looked
To any one but me to give him help,—
And, while the moon came suddenly out full,
The double-rose of our Italian moons,
Sufficient, plainly, for the heaven and earth,
(The stars, struck dumb and washed away in dews
Of golden glory, and the mountains steeped
In divine languor) he, the man, appeared
So pale and patient, like the marble man
A sculptor puts his personal sadness in
To join his grandeur of ideal thought,—
As if his mallet struck me from my height
Of passionate indignation, I who had risen
Pale,—doubting, paused, ... Was Romney mad indeed?
Had all this wrong of heart made sick the brain?
Then quiet, with a sort of tremulous pride,
‘Go, cousin,’ I said coldly. ‘A farewell
Was sooner spoken ’twixt a pair of friends
In those old days, than seems to suit you now:
And if, since then, I’ve writ a book or two,
I’m somewhat dull still in the manly art
Of phrase and metaphrase. Why, any man
Can carve a score of white Loves out of snow,
As Buonarroti down in Florence there,
And set them on the wall in some safe shade,
[364]
As safe, sir, as your marriage! very good;
Though if a woman took one from the ledge
To put it on the table by her flowers,
And let it mind her of a certain friend,
’Twould drop at once, (so better,) would not bear
Her nail-mark even, where she took it up
A little tenderly; so best, I say:
For me, I would not touch so light a thing,
And risk to spoil it half an hour before
The sun shall shine to melt it: leave it there.
I’m plain at speech, direct in purpose: when
I speak, you’ll take the meaning as it is,
And not allow for puckerings in the silks
By clever stitches. I’m a woman, sir,
And use the woman’s figures naturally,
As you, the male license. So, I wish you well.
I’m simply sorry for the griefs you’ve had—
And not for your sake only, but mankind’s.
This race is never grateful: from the first,
One fills their cup at supper with pure wine,
Which back they give at cross-time on a sponge,
In bitter vinegar.’
‘If gratefuller,’
He murmured,—‘by so much less pitiable!
God’s self would never have come down to die,
Could man have thanked him for it.’
‘Happily
’Tis patent that, whatever,’ I resumed,
‘You suffered from this thanklessness of men,
You sink no more than Moses’ bulrush-boat,
[365]
When once relieved of Moses; for you’re light,
You’re light, my cousin! which is well for you,
And manly. For myself,—now mark me, sir,
They burnt Leigh Hall; but if, consummated
To devils, heightened beyond Lucifers,
They had burnt instead a star or two, of those
We saw above there just a moment back,
Before the moon abolished them,—destroyed
And riddled them in ashes through a sieve
On the head of the foundering universe,—what then?
If you and I remained still you and I,
It would not shift our places as mere friends,
Nor render decent you should toss a phrase
Beyond the point of actual feeling!—nay,
You shall not interrupt me: as you said,
We’re parting. Certainly, not once or twice,
To-night you’ve mocked me somewhat, or yourself;
And I, at least, have not deserved it so
That I should meet it unsurprised. But now,
Enough: we’re parting ... parting. Cousin Leigh,
I wish you well through all the acts of life
And life’s relations, wedlock, not the least;
And it shall ‘please me,’ in your words, to know
You yield your wife, protection, freedom, ease,
And very tender liking. May you live
So happy with her, Romney, that your friends
May praise her for it. Meantime, some of us
Are wholly dull in keeping ignorant
Of what she has suffered by you, and what debt
Of sorrow your rich love sits down to pay:
[366]
But if ’tis sweet for love to pay its debt,
’Tis sweeter still for love to give its gift;
And you, be liberal in the sweeter way,—
You can, I think. At least, as touches me,
You owe her, cousin Romney, no amends;
She is not used to hold my gown so fast,
You need entreat her now to let it go:
The lady never was a friend of mine,
Nor capable,—I thought you knew as much,—
Of losing for your sake so poor a prize
As such a worthless friendship. Be content,
Good cousin, therefore, both for her and you!
I’ll never spoil your dark, nor dull your noon,
Nor vex you when you’re merry, nor when you rest:
You shall not need to put a shutter up
To keep out this Aurora. Ah, your north
Can make Auroras which vex nobody,
Scarce known from evenings! also, let me say,
My larks fly higher than some windows. Right;
You’ve read your Leighs. Indeed ’twould shake a house,
If such as I came in with outstretched hand,
Still warm and thrilling from the clasp of one ...
Of one we know, ... to acknowledge, palm to palm,
As mistress there ... the Lady Waldemar.’
‘Now God be with us’ ... with a sudden clash
Of voice he interrupted—‘what name’s that?
You spoke a name, Aurora.’
‘Pardon me;
I would that, Romney, I could name your wife
[367]
Nor wound you, yet be worthy.’
‘Are we mad?’
He echoed—‘wife! mine! Lady Waldemar!
I think you said my wife.’ He sprang to his feet,
And threw his noble head back toward the moon
As one who swims against a stormy sea,
And laughed with such a helpless, hopeless scorn,
I stood and trembled.
‘May God judge me so,’
He said at last,—‘I came convicted here,
And humbled sorely if not enough. I came,
Because this woman from her crystal soul
Had shown me something which a man calls light:
Because too, formerly, I sinned by her
As, then and ever since, I have, by God,
Through arrogance of nature,—though I loved ...
Whom best, I need not say, ... since that is writ
Too plainly in the book of my misdeeds;
And thus I came here to abase myself,
And fasten, kneeling, on her regent brows
A garland which I startled thence one day
Of her beautiful June-youth. But here again
I’m baffled!—fail in my abasement as
My aggrandisement: there’s no room left for me,
At any woman’s foot, who misconceives
My nature, purpose, possible actions. What!
Are you the Aurora who made large my dreams
To frame your greatness? you conceive so small?
You stand so less than woman, through being more,
And lose your natural instinct, like a beast,
[368]
Through intellectual culture? since indeed
I do not think that any common she
Would dare adopt such fancy-forgeries
For the legible life-signature of such
As I, with all my blots: with all my blots!
At last then, peerless cousin, we are peers—
At last we’re even. Ah, you’ve left your height;
And here upon my level we take hands,
And here I reach you to forgive you, sweet,
And that’s a fall, Aurora. Long ago
You seldom understood me,—but, before,
I could not blame you. Then, you only seemed
So high above, you could not see below;
But now I breathe,—but now I pardon!—nay,
We’re parting. Dearest, men have burnt my house,
Maligned my motives,—but not one, I swear,
Has wronged my soul as this Aurora has,
Who called the Lady Waldemar my wife.’
‘Not married to her! yet you said’ ...
‘Again?
Nay, read the lines’ (he held a letter out)
‘She sent you through me.’
By the moonlight there,
I tore the meaning out with passionate haste
Much rather than I read it. Thus it ran.
[369]
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