Part 14

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, 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: 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, 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 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! 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! 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, 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.

SIXTH BOOK.

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, 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 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 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 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, 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; 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, 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; 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? 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_.’ 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!