Part 12

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, 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, 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! 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 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, 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. 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 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 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! 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, 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 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_ 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 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, 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’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; 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.