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Elizabeth Barrett Browning - Aurora Leigh: Book Fifth
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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 escapings of ecstatic souls,
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
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
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 my 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 its 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 veritable artists. Earth (shut up
By Adam, like a fakir in a box
Left too long buried) remained stiff and dry,
A mere dumb corpse, till Christ the Lord came down,
Unlocked the doors, forced open the blank eyes,
And used His kingly chrism 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.
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 deem,
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 whimpered at a plume
As yours last Friday at a turkey-cock.
All actual heroes are essential men,
And all men 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`t (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
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 Alexander schemed,
To some colossal statue of a man.
The peasants, gathering brushwood in his ear,
Had guessed as little as the browsing goats
Of form or feature of humanity
Up there,—in fact, had travelled five 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,
Past moat and drawbridge, into a castle-court,
To sing—oh, not of lizard or of toad
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 this 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 Fleet Street to our 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!
This 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: Shakespeare`s ghost could scarcely plead
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 splendour 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, submits 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
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 praise 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 loudest protestation!


                                   Then
The risk`s still worse upon the modern stage.
I could not, for 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. 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 greeting 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
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 its 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 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 graveyard stones
From which the lichen`s scraped; and if Saint 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 demigods,
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!
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, supposed 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.


                          But 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 Phoebus Apollo, soul within my soul,
Who judges, by the attempted, what`s attained,
And with the silver arrow from his height
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
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 a 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,
Some 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 shrink and shriek
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.
`Tis 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 
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.
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 knee, where, years ago,
He 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,
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
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 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 one day an almshouse of his heart,
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;
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 who travel 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
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-bodice 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,
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 gained 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,
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 ebon 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 sat 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 Saint 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,"
Or so I took it,—"for Saint Lucy`s sake,
If she`s the saint to swear 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-law . . . 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
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 walls,
Inside of which are Christians, obviously.
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,
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 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,"
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
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."

Source
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