Chapter VI: Part 6

‘Now, pshaw!’ returned the other in a heat,
A little fretted by being called ‘young friend,’
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
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,
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 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,’
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.’

‘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.’
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
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:
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,
’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
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,
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,
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;
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?
’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,
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!

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.
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,
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.
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
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?
—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
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.’
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?’
‘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
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.