But how hunts Guido? Why, the fraudful trap—Late spurned to ruin by the indignant feetOf fellows in the chase who loved fair play—Here he picks up its fragments to the least,Lades him and hies to the old lurking-placeWhere haply he may patch again, refitThe mischief, file its blunted teeth anew,Make sure, next time, first snap shall break the bone.Craft, greed and violence complot revenge:Craft, for its quota, schemes to bring aboutAnd seize occasion and be safe withal:Greed craves its act may work both far and near,Crush the tree, branch and trunk and root beside,Whichever twig or leaf arrests a streakOf possible sunshine else would coin itself,And drop down one more gold piece in the path:Violence stipulates, "Advantage proved,And safety sure, be pain the overplus!Murder with jagged knife! Cut but tear too!Foiled oft, starved long, glut malice for amends!"And what, craft's scheme? scheme sorrowful and strangeAs though the elements, whom mercy cheeked,Had mustered hate for one eruption more,One final deluge to surprise the ArkCradled and sleeping on its mountain-top:Their outbreak-signal—what but the dove's coo,Back with the olive in her bill for newsSorrow was over? 'T is an infant's birth,Guido's first-born, his son and heir, that givesThe occasion: other men cut free their soulsFrom care in such a case, fly up in thanksTo God, reach, recognize his love for once:Guido cries, "Soul, at last the mire is thine!Lie there in likeness of a money-bag,My babe's birth so pins down past moving now,That I dare cut adrift the lives I lateScrupled to touch lest thou escape with them!These parents and their child my wife,—touch one,Lose all! Their rights determined on a headI could but hate, not harm, since from each hairDangled a hope for me: now—chance and change!No right was in their child but passes plainTo that child's child and through such child to me.I am a father now,—come what come will,I represent my child; he comes between—Cuts sudden off the sunshine of this lifeFrom those three: why, the gold is in his curls!Not with old Pietro's, Violante's head,Not his gray horror, her more hideous black—Go these, devoted to the knife!"'T is done:Wherefore should mind misgive, heart hesitate?He calls to counsel, fashions certain fourColorless natures counted clean till now,—Rustic simplicity, uncorrupted youth,Ignorant virtue! Here 's the gold o' the primeWhen Saturn ruled, shall shock our leaden day—The clown abash the courtier! Mark it, bards!The courtier tries his hand on clownship here,Speaks a word, names a crime, appoints a price,—Just breathes on what, suffused with all himself,Is red-hot henceforth past distinction nowI' the common glow of hell. And thus they breakAnd blaze on us at Rome, Christ's birthnight-eve!Oh angels that sang erst "On the earth, peace!To man, good will!"—such peace finds earth to-day!After the seventeen hundred years, so manWills good to man, so Guido makes completeHis murder! what is it I said?—cuts looseThree lives that hitherto he suffered cling,Simply because each served to nail secure,By a corner of the money-bag, his soul,—Therefore, lives sacred till the babe's first breathO'erweights them in the balance,—off they fly!So is the murder managed, sin conceivedTo the full: and why not crowned with triumph too?Why must the sin, conceived thus, bring forth death?I note how, within hair's-breadth of escape,Impunity and the thing supposed success,Guido is found when the check comes, the change,The monitory touch o' the tether—feltBy few, not marked by many, named by noneAt the moment, only recognized arightI' the fulness of the days, for God's, lest sinExceed the service, leap the line: such check—A secret which this life finds hard to keep,And, often guessed, is never quite revealed—Needs must trip Guido on a stumbling-blockToo vulgar, too absurdly plain i' the path!Study this single oversight of care,This hebetude that marred sagacity,Forgetfulness of all the man best knew,—How any stranger having need to fly,Needs but to ask and have the means of flight.Why, the first urchin tells you, to leave Rome,Get horses, you must show the warrant, justThe banal scrap, clerk's scribble, a fair word buys,Or foul one, if a ducat sweeten word,—And straight authority will back demand,Give you the pick o' the post-house!—how should he,Then, resident at Rome for thirty years,Guido, instruct a stranger! And himselfForgets just this poor paper scrap, wherewithArmed, every door he knocks at opens wideTo save him: horsed and manned, with such advanceO' the hunt behind, why, 't were the easy taskOf hours told on the fingers of one hand,To reach the Tuscan frontier, laugh at home,Light-hearted with his fellows of the place,—Prepared by that strange shameful judgment, thatSatire upon a sentence just pronouncedBy the Rota and confirmed by the Granduke,—Ready in a circle to receive their peer,Appreciate his good story how, when Rome,The Pope-King and the populace of priestsMade common cause with their confederateThe other priestling who seduced his wife,He, all unaided, wiped out the affrontWith decent bloodshed and could face his friends,Frolic it in the world's eye. Ay, such taleMissed such applause, and by such oversight!So, tired and footsore, those blood-flustered fiveWent reeling on the road through dark and cold,The few permissible miles, to sink at length,Wallow and sleep in the first wayside straw,As the other herd quenched, i' the wash o' the wave,—Each swine, the devil inside him: so slept they,And so were caught and caged—all through one trip.One touch of fool in Guido the astute!He curses the omission, I surmise,More than the murder. Why, thou fool and blind,It is the mercy-stroke that stops thy fate,Hamstrings and holds thee to thy hurt,—but how?On the edge o' the precipice! One minute more,Thou hadst gone farther and fared worse, my son,Fathoms down on the flint and fire beneath!Thy comrades each and all were of one mind,Thy murder done, to straightway murder theeIn turn, because of promised pay withheld.So, to the last, greed found itself at oddsWith craft in thee, and, proving conqueror,Had sent thee, the same night that crowned thy hope,Thither where, this same day, I see thee not,Nor, through God's mercy, need, to-morrow, see.Such I find Guido, midmost blotch of blackDiscernible in this group of clustered crimesHuddling together in the cave they callTheir palace, outraged day thus penetrates.Around him ranged, now close and now remote,Prominent or obscure to meet the needsO' the mage and master, I detect each shapeSubsidiary i' the scene nor loathed the less,All alike colored, all descried akinBy one and the same pitchy furnace stirredAt the centre: see, they lick the master's hand,—This fox-faced horrible priest, this brother-bruteThe Abate,—why, mere wolfishness looks well,Guido stands honest in the red o' the flame,Beside this yellow that would pass for white,Twice Guido, all craft but no violence,This copier of the mien and gait and garbOf Peter and Paul, that he may go disguised,Rob halt and lame, sick folk i' the temple-porch!Armed with religion, fortified by law,A man of peace, who trims the midnight lampAnd turns the classic page—and all for craft,All to work harm with, yet incur no scratch!While Guido brings the struggle to a close,Paul steps back the due distance, clear o' the trapHe builds and baits. Guido I catch and judge;Paul is past reach in this world and my time:That is a case reserved. Pass to the next,The boy of the brood, the young Girolamo,Priest, Canon, and what more? nor wolf nor fox.But hybrid, neither craft nor violenceWholly, part violence part craft: such crossTempts speculation—will both blend one day,And prove hell's better product? Or subsideAnd let the simple quality emerge,Go on with Satan's service the old way?Meanwhile, what promise,—what performance too!For there 's a new distinctive touch, I see,Lust—lacking in the two—hell's own blue tintThat gives a character and marks the manMore than a match for yellow and red. Once more,A case reserved: why should I doubt? Then comesThe gaunt gray nightmare in the furthest smoke,The hag that gave these three abortions birth,Unmotherly mother and unwomanlyWoman, that near turns motherhood to shame,Womanliness to loathing: no one word,No gesture to curb cruelty a whitMore than the she-pard thwarts her playsome whelpsTrying their milk-teeth on the soft o' the throatO' the first fawn, flung, with those beseeching eyes,Flat in the covert! How should she but couch,Lick the dry lips, unsheathe the blunted claw,Catch 'twixt her placid eyewinks at what chanceOld bloody half-forgotten dream may flit,Born when herself was novice to the taste,The while she lets youth take its pleasure. Last,These God-abandoned wretched lumps of life,These four companions,—country-folk this time,Not tainted by the unwholesome civic breath,Much less the curse o' the court! Mere striplings too,Fit to do human nature justice still!Surely when impudence in Guido's shapeShall propose crime and proffer money's-worthTo these stout tall rough bright-eyed black-haired boys,The blood shall bound in answer to each cheekBefore the indignant outcry break from lip!Are these i' the mood to murder, hardly loosedFrom healthy autumn-finish of ploughed glebe,Grapes in the barrel, work at happy end,And winter near with rest and Christmas play?How greet they Guido with his final task—(As if he but proposed "One vineyard moreTo dig, ere frost come, then relax indeed!")"Anywhere, anyhow and anywhy,Murder me some three people, old and young,Ye never heard the names of,—and be paidSo much!" And the whole four accede at once.Demur? Do cattle bidden march or halt?Is it some lingering habit, old fond faithI' the lord o' the land, instructs them,—birthright badgeOf feudal tenure claims its slaves again?Not so at all, thou noble human heart!All is done purely for the pay,—which, earned,And not forthcoming at the instant, makesReligion heresy, and the lord o' the landFit subject for a murder in his turn.The patron with cut throat and rifled purse,Deposited i' the roadside-ditch, his due,Naught hinders each good fellow trudging home,The heavier by a piece or two in poke,And so with new zest to the common life,Mattock and spade, plough-tail and wagon-shaft,Till some such other piece of luck betide,Who knows? Since this is a mere start in life,And none of them exceeds the twentieth year.Nay, more i' the background yet? Unnoticed formsClaim to be classed, subordinately vile?Complacent lookers-on that laugh,—perchanceShake head as their friend's horse-play grows too roughWith the mere child he manages amiss—But would not interfere and make bad worseFor twice the fractious tears and prayers: thou know'stCivility better, Marzi-Medici,Governor for thy kinsman the Granduke!Fit representative of law, man's lampI' the magistrate's grasp full-flare, no rushlight-endSputtering 'twixt thumb and finger of the priest!Whose answer to the couple's cry for helpIs a threat,—whose remedy of Pompilia's wrong,A shrug o' the shoulder, and facetious wordOr wink, traditional with Tuscan wits,To Guido in the doorway. Laud to law!The wife is pushed back to the husband, heWho knows how these home-squabblings persecutePeople who have the public good to mind,And work best with a silence in the court!Ah, but I save my word at least for thee,Archbishop, who art under, i' the Church,As I am under God,—thou, chosen by bothTo do the shepherd's office, feed the sheep—How of this lamb that panted at thy footWhile the wolf pressed on her within crook's reach?Wast thou the hireling that did turn and flee?With thee at least anon the little word!Such denizens o' the cave now cluster roundAnd heat the furnace sevenfold: time indeedA bolt from heaven should cleave roof and clear place,Transfix and show the world, suspiring flame,The main offender, scar and brand the restHurrying, each miscreant to his hole: then floodAnd purify the scene with outside day—Which yet, in the absolutest drench of dark,Ne'er wants a witness, some stray beauty-beamTo the despair of hell.First of the first,Such I pronounce Pompilia, then as nowPerfect in whiteness: stoop thou down, my child,Give one good moment to the poor old PopeHeart-sick at having all his world to blame—Let me look at thee in the flesh as erst,Let me enjoy the old clean linen garb,Not the new splendid vesture! Armed and crowned,Would Michael, yonder, be, nor crowned nor armed,The less pre-eminent angel? EverywhereI see in the world the intellect of man,That sword, the energy his subtle spear,The knowledge which defends him like a shield—Everywhere; but they make not up, I think,The marvel of a soul like thine, earth's flowerShe holds up to the softened gaze of God!It was not given Pompilia to know much,Speak much, to write a book, to move mankind,Be memorized by who records my time.Yet if in purity and patience, ifIn faith held fast despite the plucking fiend,Safe like the signet stone with the new nameThat saints are known by,—if in right returnedFor wrong, most pardon for worst injury,If there be any virtue, any praise,—Then will this woman-child have proved—who knows?—Just the one prize vouchsafed unworthy me,Seven years a gardener of the untoward groundI till,—this earth, my sweat and blood manureAll the long day that barrenly grows dusk:At least one blossom makes me proud at eveBorn 'mid the briers of my enclosure! Still(Oh, here as elsewhere, nothingness of man!)Those be the plants, imbedded yonder SouthTo mellow in the morning, those made fatBy the master's eye, that yield such timid leaf,Uncertain bud, as product of his pains!While—see how this mere chance-sown, cleft-nursed seed,That sprang up by the wayside 'neath the footOf the enemy, this breaks all into blaze,Spreads itself, one wide glory of desireTo incorporate the whole great sun it lovesFrom the inch-height whence it looks and longs! My flower,My rose, I gather for the breast of God,This I praise most in thee, where all I praise,That having been obedient to the endAccording to the light allotted, lawPrescribed thy life, still tried, still standing test,—Dutiful to the foolish parents first,Submissive next to the bad husband,—nay,Tolerant of those meaner miserableThat did his hests, eked out the dole of pain,—Thou, patient thus, couldst rise from law to law,The old to the new, promoted at one cryO' the trump of God to the new service, notTo longer bear, but henceforth fight, be foundSublime in new impatience with the foe!Endure man and obey God: plant firm footOn neck of man, tread man into the hellMeet for him, and obey God all the more!Oh child that didst despise thy life so muchWhen it seemed only thine to keep or lose,How the fine ear felt fall the first low word"Value life, and preserve life for My sake!"Thou didst ... how shall I say?... receive so longThe standing ordinance of God on earth,What wonder if the novel claim had clashedWith old requirement, seemed to supersedeToo much the customary law? But, brave,Thou at first prompting of what I call God,And fools call Nature, didst hear, comprehend,Accept the obligation laid on thee,Mother elect, to save the unborn child,As brute and bird do, reptile and the fly,Ay and, I nothing doubt, even tree, shrub, plantAnd flower o' the field, all in a common pactTo worthily defend the trust of trusts,Life from the Ever Living:—didst resist—Anticipate the office that is mine—And with his own sword stay the upraised arm,The endeavor of the wicked, and defendHim who—again in my default—was thereFor visible providence: one less true than thouTo touch, i' the past, less practised in the right,Approved less far in all docilityTo all instruction,—how had such an oneMade scruple "Is this motion a decree?"It was authentic to the experienced earO' the good and faithful servant. Go past meAnd get thy praise,—and be not far to seekPresently when I follow if I may!And surely not so very much apartNeed I place thee, my warrior-priest,—in whomWhat if I gain the other rose, the gold,We grave to imitate God's miracle,Greet monarchs with, good rose in its degree?Irregular noble scapegrace—son the same!Faulty—and peradventure ours the faultWho still misteach, mislead, throw hook and line,Thinking to land leviathan forsooth,Tame the scaled neck, play with him as a bird,And bind him for our maidens! Better bearThe King of Pride go wantoning awhile,Unplagued by cord in nose and thorn in jaw,Through deep to deep, followed by all that shine,Churning the blackness hoary: He who madeThe comely terror, He shall make the swordTo match that piece of netherstone his heart,Ay, nor miss praise thereby; who else shut fireI' the stone, to leap from mouth at sword's first stroke,In lamps of love and faith, the chivalryThat dares the right and disregards alikeThe yea and nay o' the world? Self-sacrifice,—What if an idol took it? Ask the ChurchWhy she was wont to turn each Venus here,—Poor Rome perversely lingered round, despiteInstruction, for the sake of purblind love,—Into Madonna's shape, and waste no whitOf aught so rare on earth as gratitude!All this sweet savor was not ours but thine,Nard of the rock, a natural wealth we nameIncense, and treasure up as food for saints,When flung to us—whose function was to giveNot find the costly perfume. Do I smile?Nay, Caponsacchi, much I find amiss,Blameworthy, punishable in this freakOf thine, this youth prolonged, though age was ripe,This masquerade in sober day, with changeOf motley too,—now hypocrite's disguise,Now fool's-costume: which lie was least like truth,Which the ungainlier, more discordant garb,With that symmetric soul inside my son,The churchman's or the worldling's,—let him judge,Our adversary who enjoys the task!I rather chronicle the healthy rage,—When the first moan broke from the martyr-maidAt that uncaging of the beasts,—made bareMy athlete on the instant, gave such goodGreat undisguised leap over post and paleRight into the mid-cirque, free fighting-place.There may have been rash stripping—every ragWent to the winds,—infringement manifoldOf laws prescribed pudicity, I fear,In this impulsive and prompt self-display!Ever such tax comes of the foolish youth;Men mulct the wiser manhood, and suspectNo veritable star swims out of cloud.Bear thou such imputation, undergoThe penalty I nowise dare relax,—Conventional chastisement and rebuke.But for the outcome, the brave starry birthConciliating earth with all that cloud,Thank heaven as I do! Ay, such championshipOf God at first blush, such prompt cheery thudOf glove on ground that answers ringinglyThe challenge of the false knight,—watch we long,And wait we vainly for its gallant likeFrom those appointed to the service, swornHis body-guard with pay and privilege—White-cinct, because in white walks sanctity,Red-socked, how else proclaim fine scorn of flesh,Unchariness of blood when blood faith begs!Where are the men-at-arms with cross on coat?Aloof, bewraying their attire: whilst thouIn mask and motley, pledged to dance not fight,Sprang'st forth the hero! In thought, word and deed,How throughout all thy warfare thou wast pure,I find it easy to believe: and ifAt any fateful moment of the strangeAdventure, the strong passion of that strait,Fear and surprise, may have revealed too much,—As when a thundrous midnight, with black airThat burns, raindrops that blister, breaks a spell,Draws out the excessive virtue of some sheathedShut unsuspected flower that hoards and hidesImmensity of sweetness,—so, perchance,Might the surprise and fear release too muchThe perfect beauty of the body and soulThou sayedst in thy passion for God's sake,He who is Pity. Was the trial sore?Temptation sharp? Thank God a second time!Why comes temptation but for man to meetAnd master and make crouch beneath his foot,And so be pedestalled in triumph? Pray"Lead us into no such temptations, Lord!"Yea, but, O Thou whose servants are the bold,Lead such temptations by the head and hair,Reluctant dragons, up to who dares fight,That so he may do battle and have praise!Do I not see the praise?—that while thy matesBound to deserve i' the matter, prove at needUnprofitable through the very painsWe gave to train them well and start them fair,—Are found too stiff, with standing ranked and ranged,For onset in good earnest, too obtuseOf ear, through iteration of command,For catching quick the sense of the real cry,—Thou, whose sword-hand was used to strike the lute,Whose sentry-station graced some wanton's gate,Thou didst push forward and show mettle, shameThe laggards, and retrieve the day. Well done!Be glad thou hast let light into the world,Through that irregular breach o' the boundary,—seeThe same upon thy path and march assured,Learning anew the use of soldiership,Self-abnegation, freedom from all fear,Loyalty to the life's end! Ruminate,Deserve the initiatory spasm,—once moreWork, be unhappy but bear life, my son!And troop you, somewhere 'twixt the best and worst,Where crowd the indifferent product, all too poorMakeshift, starved samples of humanity!Father and mother, huddle there and hide!A gracious eye may find you! Foul and fair,Sadly mixed natures: self-indulgent,—yetSelf-sacrificing too: how the love soars,How the craft, avarice, vanity and spiteSink again! So they keep the middle course,Slide into silly crime at unaware,Slip back upon the stupid virtue, stayNowhere enough for being classed, I hopeAnd fear. Accept the swift and rueful death,Taught, somewhat sternlier than is wont, what waitsThe ambiguous creature,—how the one black tuftSteadies the aim of the arrow just as wellAs the wide faultless white on the bird's breast!Nay, you were punished in the very partThat looked most pure of speck, 't was honest loveBetrayed you,—did love seem most worthy pains,Challenge such purging, since ordained surviveWhen all the rest of you was done with? Go!Never again elude the choice of tints!White shall not neutralize the black, nor goodCompensate bad in man, absolve him so:Life's business being just the terrible choice.So do I see, pronounce on all and someGrouped for my judgment now,—profess no doubtWhile I pronounce: dark, difficult enoughThe human sphere, yet eyes grow sharp by use,I find the truth, dispart the shine from shade,As a mere man may, with no special touchO' the lynx-gift in each ordinary orb:Nay, if the popular notion class me right,One of wellnigh decayed intelligence,—What of that? Through hard labor and good will,And habitude that gives a blind man sightAt the practised finger-ends of him, I doDiscern, and dare decree in consequence,Whatever prove the peril of mistake.Whence, then, this quite new quick cold thrill,—cloud-like,This keen dread creeping from a quarter scarceSuspected in the skies I nightly scan?What slacks the tense nerve, saps the wound-up springOf the act that should and shall be, sends the mountAnd mass o' the whole man's-strength,—conglobed so late—Shudderingly into dust, a moment's work?While I stand firm, go fearless, in this world,For this life recognize and arbitrate,Touch and let stay, or else remove a thing,Judge "This is right, this object out of place,"Candle in hand that helps me and to spare,—What if a voice deride me, "Perk and pry!Brighten each nook with thine intelligence!Play the good householder, ply man and maidWith tasks prolonged into the midnight, testTheir work and nowise stint of the due wageEach worthy worker: but with gyves and whipPay thou misprision of a single pointPlain to thy happy self who lift'st the light,Lament'st the darkling,—bold to all beneath!What if thyself adventure, now the placeIs purged so well? Leave pavement and mount roof,Look round thee for the light of the upper sky,The fire which lit thy fire which finds defaultIn Guido Franceschini to his cost!What if, above in the domain of light,Thou miss the accustomed signs, remark eclipse?Shalt thou still gaze on ground nor lift a lid,—Steady in thy superb prerogative,Thy inch of inkling,—nor once face the doubtI' the sphere above thee, darkness to be felt?"Yet my poor spark had for its source, the sun;Thither I sent the great looks which compelLight from its fount: all that I do and amComes from the truth, or seen or else surmised,Remembered or divined, as mere man may:I know just so, nor otherwise. As I know,I speak,—what should I know, then, and how speakWere there a wild mistake of eye or brainAs to recorded governance above?If my own breath, only, blew coal alightI styled celestial and the morning-star?I, who in this world act resolvedly,Dispose of men, their bodies and their souls,As they acknowledge or gainsay the lightI show them,—shall I too lack courage?—leaveI, too, the post of me, like those I blame?Refuse, with kindred inconsistency,To grapple danger whereby souls grow strong?I am near the end; but still not at the end;All to the very end is trial in life:At this stage is the trial of my soulDanger to face, or danger to refuse?Shall I dare try the doubt now, or not dare?O Thou,—as represented here to meIn such conception as my soul allows,—Under Thy measureless, my atom width!—Man's mind, what is it but a convex glassWherein are gathered all the scattered pointsPicked out of the immensity of sky,To reunite there, be our heaven for earth,Our known unknown, our God revealed to man?Existent somewhere, somehow, as a whole;Here, as a whole proportioned to our sense,—There, (which is nowhere, speech must babble thus!)In the absolute immensity, the wholeAppreciable solely by Thyself,—Here, by the little mind of man, reducedTo littleness that suits his faculty,In the degree appreciable too;Between Thee and ourselves—nay even, again,Below us, to the extreme of the minute,Appreciable by how many and what diverseModes of the life Thou madest be! (why liveExcept for love,—how love unless they know?)Each of them, only filling to the edge,Insect or angel, his just length and breadth,Due facet of reflection,—full, no less,Angel or insect, as Thou framedst things.I it is who have been appointed hereTo represent Thee, in my turn, on earth,Just as, if new philosophy know aught,This one earth, out of all the multitudeOf peopled worlds, as stars are now supposed,—Was chosen, and no sun-star of the swarm,For stage and scene of Thy transcendent actBeside which even the creation fadesInto a puny exercise of power.Choice of the world, choice of the thing I am,Both emanate alike from Thy dread playOf operation outside this our sphereWhere things are classed and counted small or great,—Incomprehensibly the choice is Thine!I therefore bow my head and take Thy place.There is, beside the works, a tale of TheeIn the world's mouth, which I find credible:I love it with my heart: unsatisfied,I try it with my reason, nor disceptFrom any point I probe and pronounce sound.Mind is not matter nor from matter, butAbove,—leave matter then, proceed with mind!Man's be the mind recognized at the height,—Leave the inferior minds and look at man!Is he the strong, intelligent and goodUp to his own conceivable height? Nowise.Enough o' the low,—soar the conceivable height,Find cause to match the effect in evidence,The work i' the world, not man's but God's; leave man!Conjecture of the worker by the work:Is there strength there?—enough: intelligence?Ample: but goodness in a like degree?Not to the human eye in the present state,An isoscele deficient in the base.What lacks, then, of perfection fit for GodBut just the instance which this tale suppliesOf love without a limit? So is strength,So is intelligence; let love be so,Unlimited in its self-sacrifice,Then is the tale true and God shows complete.Beyond the tale, I reach into the dark,Feel what I cannot see, and still faith stands:I can believe this dread machineryOf sin and sorrow, would confound me else,Devised—all pain, at most expenditureOf pain by Who devised pain—to evolve,By new machinery in counterpart,The moral qualities of man—how else?—To make him love in turn and be beloved,Creative and self-sacrificing too,And thus eventually God-like, (ay,"I have said ye are Gods,"—shall it be said for naught?)Enable man to wring, from out all pain,All pleasure for a common heritageTo all eternity: this may be surmised,The other is revealed,—whether a fact,Absolute, abstract, independent truth,Historic, not reduced to suit man's mind,—Or only truth reverberate, changed, made passA spectrum into mind, the narrow eye,—The same and not the same, else unconceived—Though quite conceivable to the next gradeAbove it in intelligence,—as truthEasy to man were blindness to the beastBy parity of procedure,—the same truthIn a new form, but changed in either case:What matter so intelligence be filled?To a child, the sea is angry, for it roars:Frost bites, else why the tooth-like fret on face?Man makes acoustics deal with the sea's wrath,Explains the choppy cheek by chymic law,—To man and child remains the same effectOn drum of ear and root of nose, change causeNever so thoroughly: so my heart be struck,What care I,—by God's gloved hand or the bare?Nor do I much perplex me with aught hard,Dubious in the transmitting of the tale,—No, nor with certain riddles set to solve.This life is training and a passage; pass,—Still, we march over some flat obstacleWe made give way before us; solid truthIn front of it, what motion for the world?The moral sense grows but by exercise.'T is even as man grew probativelyInitiated in Godship, set to makeA fairer moral world than this he finds,Guess now what shall be known hereafter. DealThus with the present problem: as we see,A faultless creature is destroyed, and sinHas had its way i' the world where God should rule.Ay, but for this irrelevant circumstanceOf inquisition after blood, we seePompilia lost and Guido saved: how long?For his whole life: how much is that whole life?We are not babes, but know the minute's worth,And feel that life is large and the world small,So, wait till life have passed from out the world.Neither does this astonish at the end,That whereas I can so receive and trust,Other men, made with hearts and souls the same,Reject and disbelieve,—subordinateThe future to the present,—sin, nor fear.This I refer still to the foremost fact,Life is probation and the earth no goalBut starting-point of man: compel him strive,Which means, in man, as good as reach the goal,—Why institute that race, his life, at all?But this does overwhelm me with surprise,Touch me to terror,—not that faith, the pearl,Should be let lie by fishers wanting food,—Nor, seen and handled by a certain fewCritical and contemptuous, straight consignedTo shore and shingle for the pebble it proves,—But that, when haply found and known and namedBy the residue made rich forevermore,These,—that these favored ones, should in a triceTurn, and with double zest go dredge for whelks,Mud-worms that make the savory soup! EnoughO' the disbelievers, see the faithful few!How do the Christians here deport them, keepTheir robes of white unspotted by the world?What is this Aretine Archbishop, thisMan under me as I am under God,This champion of the faith, I armed and decked,Pushed forward, put upon a pinnacle,To show the enemy his victor,—see!What 's the best fighting when the couple close?Pompilia cries, "Protect me from the wolf!"He—"No, thy Guido is rough, heady, strong,Dangerous to disquiet: let him bide!He needs some bone to mumble, help amuseThe darkness of his den with: so, the fawnWhich limps up bleeding to my foot and lies,—Come to me, daughter!—thus I throw him back!"Have we misjudged here, over-armed our knight,Given gold and silk where plain hard steel serves best,Enfeebled whom we sought to fortify,Made an archbishop and undone a saint?Well, then, descend these heights, this pride of life,Sit in the ashes with a barefoot monkWho long ago stamped out the worldly sparks,By fasting, watching, stone cell and wire scourge,—No such indulgence as unknits the strength—These breed the tight nerve and tough cuticle,And the world's praise or blame runs rillet-wiseOff the broad back and brawny breast, we know!He meets the first cold sprinkle of the world,And shudders to the marrow. "Save this child?Oh, my superiors, oh, the Archbishop's self!Who was it dared lay hand upon the arkHis betters saw fall nor put finger forth?Great ones could help yet help not: why should small?I break my promise: let her break her heart!"These are the Christians not the worldlings, notThe sceptics, who thus battle for the faith!If foolish virgins disobey and sleep,What wonder? But, this time, the wise that watch,Sell lamps and buy lutes, exchange oil for wine,The mystic Spouse betrays the Bridegroom here,To our last resource, then! Since all flesh is weak,Bind weaknesses together, we get strength:The individual weighed, found wanting, trySome institution, honest artificeWhereby the units grow compact and firm!Each props the other, and so stand is madeBy our embodied cowards that grow brave.The Monastery called of Convertites,Meant to help women because these helped Christ,—A thing existent only while it acts,Does as designed, else a nonentity,—For what is an idea unrealized?—Pompilia is consigned to these for help.They do help: they are prompt to testifyTo her pure life and saintly dying days.She dies, and lo, who seemed so poor, proves rich!What does the body that lives through helpfulnessTo women for Christ's sake? The kiss turns bite,The dove's note changes to the crow's cry: judge!"Seeing that this our Convent claims of rightWhat goods belong to those we succor, beThe same proved women of dishonest life,—And seeing that this Trial made appearPompilia was in such predicament,—The Convent hereupon pretends to saidSuccession of Pompilia, issues writ,And takes possession by the Fisc's advice."Such is their attestation to the causeOf Christ, who had one saint at least, they hoped:But, is a title-deed to filch, a corpseTo slander, and an infant-heir to cheat?Christ must give up his gains then! They unsayAll the fine speeches,—who was saint is whore.Why, scripture yields no parallel for this!The soldiers only threw dice for Christ's coat;We want another legend of the TwelveDisputing if it was Christ's coat at all,Claiming as prize the woof of price—for why?The Master was a thief, purloined the same,Or paid for it out of the common bag!Can it be this is end and outcome, allI take with me to show as stewardship's fruit,The best yield of the latest time, this yearThe seventeen-hundredth since God died for man?Is such, effect proportionate to cause?And still the terror keeps on the increaseWhen I perceive ... how can I blink the fact?That the fault, the obduracy to good,Lies not with the impracticable stuffWhence man is made, his very nature's fault,As if it were of ice the moon may gildNot melt, or stone 't was meant the sun should warmNot make bear flowers,—nor ice nor stone to blame:But it can melt, that ice, can bloom, that stone,Impassible to rule of day and night!This terrifies me, thus compelled perceive,Whatever love and faith we looked should springAt advent of the authoritative star,Which yet lie sluggish, curdled at the source,—These have leapt forth profusely in old time,These still respond with promptitude to-day,At challenge of—what unacknowledged powersO' the air, what uncommissioned meteors, warmthBy law, and light by rule should supersede?For see this priest, this Caponsacchi, stungAt the first summons,—"Help for honor's sake,Play the man, pity the oppressed!"—no pause,How does he lay about him in the midst,Strike any foe, right wrong at any risk,All blindness, bravery and obedience!—blind?Ay, as a man would be inside the sun,Delirious with the plenitude of lightShould interfuse him to the finger-ends—Let him rush straight, and how shall he go wrong?Where are the Christians in their panoply?The loins we girt about with truth, the breastsRighteousness plated round, the shield of faith,The helmet of salvation, and that swordO' the Spirit, even the word of God,—where these?Slunk into corners! Oh, I hear at onceHubbub of protestation! "What, we monks,We friars, of such an order, such a rule,Have not we fought, bled, left our martyr-markAt every point along the boundary-line'Twixt true and false, religion and the world,Where this or the other dogma of our ChurchCalled for defence?" And I, despite myself,How can I but speak loud what truth speaks low,"Or better than the best, or nothing serves!What boots deed, I can cap and cover straightWith such another doughtiness to match,Done at an instinct of the natural man?"Immolate body, sacrifice soul too,—Do not these publicans the same? Outstrip!Or else stop race you boast runs neck and neck,You with the wings, they with the feet,—for shame!Oh, I remark your diligence and zeal!Five years long, now, rounds faith into my ears,"Help thou, or Christendom is done to death!"Five years since, in the Province of To-kien,Which is in China as some people know,Maigrot, my Vicar Apostolic there,Having a great qualm, issues a decree.Alack, the converts use as God's name, notTien-chubut plainTienor else mereShang-ti,As Jesuits please to fancy politic,While, say Dominicans, it calls down fire,—ForTienmeans heaven, andShang-ti, supreme prince,WhileTien-chumeans the lord of heaven: all cry,"There is no business urgent for dispatchAs that thou send a legate, speciallyCardinal Tournon, straight to Pekin, thereTo settle and compose the difference!"So have I seen a potentate all fumeFor some infringement of his realm's just right.Some menace to a mud-built straw-thatched farmO' the frontier; while inside the mainland lie,Quite undisputed-for in solitude,Whole cities plague may waste or famine sap:What if the sun crumble, the sands encroach,While he looks on sublimely at his ease?How does their ruin touch the empire's bound?
But how hunts Guido? Why, the fraudful trap—Late spurned to ruin by the indignant feetOf fellows in the chase who loved fair play—Here he picks up its fragments to the least,Lades him and hies to the old lurking-placeWhere haply he may patch again, refitThe mischief, file its blunted teeth anew,Make sure, next time, first snap shall break the bone.Craft, greed and violence complot revenge:Craft, for its quota, schemes to bring aboutAnd seize occasion and be safe withal:Greed craves its act may work both far and near,Crush the tree, branch and trunk and root beside,Whichever twig or leaf arrests a streakOf possible sunshine else would coin itself,And drop down one more gold piece in the path:Violence stipulates, "Advantage proved,And safety sure, be pain the overplus!Murder with jagged knife! Cut but tear too!Foiled oft, starved long, glut malice for amends!"And what, craft's scheme? scheme sorrowful and strangeAs though the elements, whom mercy cheeked,Had mustered hate for one eruption more,One final deluge to surprise the ArkCradled and sleeping on its mountain-top:Their outbreak-signal—what but the dove's coo,Back with the olive in her bill for newsSorrow was over? 'T is an infant's birth,Guido's first-born, his son and heir, that givesThe occasion: other men cut free their soulsFrom care in such a case, fly up in thanksTo God, reach, recognize his love for once:Guido cries, "Soul, at last the mire is thine!Lie there in likeness of a money-bag,My babe's birth so pins down past moving now,That I dare cut adrift the lives I lateScrupled to touch lest thou escape with them!These parents and their child my wife,—touch one,Lose all! Their rights determined on a headI could but hate, not harm, since from each hairDangled a hope for me: now—chance and change!No right was in their child but passes plainTo that child's child and through such child to me.I am a father now,—come what come will,I represent my child; he comes between—Cuts sudden off the sunshine of this lifeFrom those three: why, the gold is in his curls!Not with old Pietro's, Violante's head,Not his gray horror, her more hideous black—Go these, devoted to the knife!"'T is done:Wherefore should mind misgive, heart hesitate?He calls to counsel, fashions certain fourColorless natures counted clean till now,—Rustic simplicity, uncorrupted youth,Ignorant virtue! Here 's the gold o' the primeWhen Saturn ruled, shall shock our leaden day—The clown abash the courtier! Mark it, bards!The courtier tries his hand on clownship here,Speaks a word, names a crime, appoints a price,—Just breathes on what, suffused with all himself,Is red-hot henceforth past distinction nowI' the common glow of hell. And thus they breakAnd blaze on us at Rome, Christ's birthnight-eve!Oh angels that sang erst "On the earth, peace!To man, good will!"—such peace finds earth to-day!After the seventeen hundred years, so manWills good to man, so Guido makes completeHis murder! what is it I said?—cuts looseThree lives that hitherto he suffered cling,Simply because each served to nail secure,By a corner of the money-bag, his soul,—Therefore, lives sacred till the babe's first breathO'erweights them in the balance,—off they fly!So is the murder managed, sin conceivedTo the full: and why not crowned with triumph too?Why must the sin, conceived thus, bring forth death?I note how, within hair's-breadth of escape,Impunity and the thing supposed success,Guido is found when the check comes, the change,The monitory touch o' the tether—feltBy few, not marked by many, named by noneAt the moment, only recognized arightI' the fulness of the days, for God's, lest sinExceed the service, leap the line: such check—A secret which this life finds hard to keep,And, often guessed, is never quite revealed—Needs must trip Guido on a stumbling-blockToo vulgar, too absurdly plain i' the path!Study this single oversight of care,This hebetude that marred sagacity,Forgetfulness of all the man best knew,—How any stranger having need to fly,Needs but to ask and have the means of flight.Why, the first urchin tells you, to leave Rome,Get horses, you must show the warrant, justThe banal scrap, clerk's scribble, a fair word buys,Or foul one, if a ducat sweeten word,—And straight authority will back demand,Give you the pick o' the post-house!—how should he,Then, resident at Rome for thirty years,Guido, instruct a stranger! And himselfForgets just this poor paper scrap, wherewithArmed, every door he knocks at opens wideTo save him: horsed and manned, with such advanceO' the hunt behind, why, 't were the easy taskOf hours told on the fingers of one hand,To reach the Tuscan frontier, laugh at home,Light-hearted with his fellows of the place,—Prepared by that strange shameful judgment, thatSatire upon a sentence just pronouncedBy the Rota and confirmed by the Granduke,—Ready in a circle to receive their peer,Appreciate his good story how, when Rome,The Pope-King and the populace of priestsMade common cause with their confederateThe other priestling who seduced his wife,He, all unaided, wiped out the affrontWith decent bloodshed and could face his friends,Frolic it in the world's eye. Ay, such taleMissed such applause, and by such oversight!So, tired and footsore, those blood-flustered fiveWent reeling on the road through dark and cold,The few permissible miles, to sink at length,Wallow and sleep in the first wayside straw,As the other herd quenched, i' the wash o' the wave,—Each swine, the devil inside him: so slept they,And so were caught and caged—all through one trip.One touch of fool in Guido the astute!He curses the omission, I surmise,More than the murder. Why, thou fool and blind,It is the mercy-stroke that stops thy fate,Hamstrings and holds thee to thy hurt,—but how?On the edge o' the precipice! One minute more,Thou hadst gone farther and fared worse, my son,Fathoms down on the flint and fire beneath!Thy comrades each and all were of one mind,Thy murder done, to straightway murder theeIn turn, because of promised pay withheld.So, to the last, greed found itself at oddsWith craft in thee, and, proving conqueror,Had sent thee, the same night that crowned thy hope,Thither where, this same day, I see thee not,Nor, through God's mercy, need, to-morrow, see.Such I find Guido, midmost blotch of blackDiscernible in this group of clustered crimesHuddling together in the cave they callTheir palace, outraged day thus penetrates.Around him ranged, now close and now remote,Prominent or obscure to meet the needsO' the mage and master, I detect each shapeSubsidiary i' the scene nor loathed the less,All alike colored, all descried akinBy one and the same pitchy furnace stirredAt the centre: see, they lick the master's hand,—This fox-faced horrible priest, this brother-bruteThe Abate,—why, mere wolfishness looks well,Guido stands honest in the red o' the flame,Beside this yellow that would pass for white,Twice Guido, all craft but no violence,This copier of the mien and gait and garbOf Peter and Paul, that he may go disguised,Rob halt and lame, sick folk i' the temple-porch!Armed with religion, fortified by law,A man of peace, who trims the midnight lampAnd turns the classic page—and all for craft,All to work harm with, yet incur no scratch!While Guido brings the struggle to a close,Paul steps back the due distance, clear o' the trapHe builds and baits. Guido I catch and judge;Paul is past reach in this world and my time:That is a case reserved. Pass to the next,The boy of the brood, the young Girolamo,Priest, Canon, and what more? nor wolf nor fox.But hybrid, neither craft nor violenceWholly, part violence part craft: such crossTempts speculation—will both blend one day,And prove hell's better product? Or subsideAnd let the simple quality emerge,Go on with Satan's service the old way?Meanwhile, what promise,—what performance too!For there 's a new distinctive touch, I see,Lust—lacking in the two—hell's own blue tintThat gives a character and marks the manMore than a match for yellow and red. Once more,A case reserved: why should I doubt? Then comesThe gaunt gray nightmare in the furthest smoke,The hag that gave these three abortions birth,Unmotherly mother and unwomanlyWoman, that near turns motherhood to shame,Womanliness to loathing: no one word,No gesture to curb cruelty a whitMore than the she-pard thwarts her playsome whelpsTrying their milk-teeth on the soft o' the throatO' the first fawn, flung, with those beseeching eyes,Flat in the covert! How should she but couch,Lick the dry lips, unsheathe the blunted claw,Catch 'twixt her placid eyewinks at what chanceOld bloody half-forgotten dream may flit,Born when herself was novice to the taste,The while she lets youth take its pleasure. Last,These God-abandoned wretched lumps of life,These four companions,—country-folk this time,Not tainted by the unwholesome civic breath,Much less the curse o' the court! Mere striplings too,Fit to do human nature justice still!Surely when impudence in Guido's shapeShall propose crime and proffer money's-worthTo these stout tall rough bright-eyed black-haired boys,The blood shall bound in answer to each cheekBefore the indignant outcry break from lip!Are these i' the mood to murder, hardly loosedFrom healthy autumn-finish of ploughed glebe,Grapes in the barrel, work at happy end,And winter near with rest and Christmas play?How greet they Guido with his final task—(As if he but proposed "One vineyard moreTo dig, ere frost come, then relax indeed!")"Anywhere, anyhow and anywhy,Murder me some three people, old and young,Ye never heard the names of,—and be paidSo much!" And the whole four accede at once.Demur? Do cattle bidden march or halt?Is it some lingering habit, old fond faithI' the lord o' the land, instructs them,—birthright badgeOf feudal tenure claims its slaves again?Not so at all, thou noble human heart!All is done purely for the pay,—which, earned,And not forthcoming at the instant, makesReligion heresy, and the lord o' the landFit subject for a murder in his turn.The patron with cut throat and rifled purse,Deposited i' the roadside-ditch, his due,Naught hinders each good fellow trudging home,The heavier by a piece or two in poke,And so with new zest to the common life,Mattock and spade, plough-tail and wagon-shaft,Till some such other piece of luck betide,Who knows? Since this is a mere start in life,And none of them exceeds the twentieth year.Nay, more i' the background yet? Unnoticed formsClaim to be classed, subordinately vile?Complacent lookers-on that laugh,—perchanceShake head as their friend's horse-play grows too roughWith the mere child he manages amiss—But would not interfere and make bad worseFor twice the fractious tears and prayers: thou know'stCivility better, Marzi-Medici,Governor for thy kinsman the Granduke!Fit representative of law, man's lampI' the magistrate's grasp full-flare, no rushlight-endSputtering 'twixt thumb and finger of the priest!Whose answer to the couple's cry for helpIs a threat,—whose remedy of Pompilia's wrong,A shrug o' the shoulder, and facetious wordOr wink, traditional with Tuscan wits,To Guido in the doorway. Laud to law!The wife is pushed back to the husband, heWho knows how these home-squabblings persecutePeople who have the public good to mind,And work best with a silence in the court!Ah, but I save my word at least for thee,Archbishop, who art under, i' the Church,As I am under God,—thou, chosen by bothTo do the shepherd's office, feed the sheep—How of this lamb that panted at thy footWhile the wolf pressed on her within crook's reach?Wast thou the hireling that did turn and flee?With thee at least anon the little word!Such denizens o' the cave now cluster roundAnd heat the furnace sevenfold: time indeedA bolt from heaven should cleave roof and clear place,Transfix and show the world, suspiring flame,The main offender, scar and brand the restHurrying, each miscreant to his hole: then floodAnd purify the scene with outside day—Which yet, in the absolutest drench of dark,Ne'er wants a witness, some stray beauty-beamTo the despair of hell.First of the first,Such I pronounce Pompilia, then as nowPerfect in whiteness: stoop thou down, my child,Give one good moment to the poor old PopeHeart-sick at having all his world to blame—Let me look at thee in the flesh as erst,Let me enjoy the old clean linen garb,Not the new splendid vesture! Armed and crowned,Would Michael, yonder, be, nor crowned nor armed,The less pre-eminent angel? EverywhereI see in the world the intellect of man,That sword, the energy his subtle spear,The knowledge which defends him like a shield—Everywhere; but they make not up, I think,The marvel of a soul like thine, earth's flowerShe holds up to the softened gaze of God!It was not given Pompilia to know much,Speak much, to write a book, to move mankind,Be memorized by who records my time.Yet if in purity and patience, ifIn faith held fast despite the plucking fiend,Safe like the signet stone with the new nameThat saints are known by,—if in right returnedFor wrong, most pardon for worst injury,If there be any virtue, any praise,—Then will this woman-child have proved—who knows?—Just the one prize vouchsafed unworthy me,Seven years a gardener of the untoward groundI till,—this earth, my sweat and blood manureAll the long day that barrenly grows dusk:At least one blossom makes me proud at eveBorn 'mid the briers of my enclosure! Still(Oh, here as elsewhere, nothingness of man!)Those be the plants, imbedded yonder SouthTo mellow in the morning, those made fatBy the master's eye, that yield such timid leaf,Uncertain bud, as product of his pains!While—see how this mere chance-sown, cleft-nursed seed,That sprang up by the wayside 'neath the footOf the enemy, this breaks all into blaze,Spreads itself, one wide glory of desireTo incorporate the whole great sun it lovesFrom the inch-height whence it looks and longs! My flower,My rose, I gather for the breast of God,This I praise most in thee, where all I praise,That having been obedient to the endAccording to the light allotted, lawPrescribed thy life, still tried, still standing test,—Dutiful to the foolish parents first,Submissive next to the bad husband,—nay,Tolerant of those meaner miserableThat did his hests, eked out the dole of pain,—Thou, patient thus, couldst rise from law to law,The old to the new, promoted at one cryO' the trump of God to the new service, notTo longer bear, but henceforth fight, be foundSublime in new impatience with the foe!Endure man and obey God: plant firm footOn neck of man, tread man into the hellMeet for him, and obey God all the more!Oh child that didst despise thy life so muchWhen it seemed only thine to keep or lose,How the fine ear felt fall the first low word"Value life, and preserve life for My sake!"Thou didst ... how shall I say?... receive so longThe standing ordinance of God on earth,What wonder if the novel claim had clashedWith old requirement, seemed to supersedeToo much the customary law? But, brave,Thou at first prompting of what I call God,And fools call Nature, didst hear, comprehend,Accept the obligation laid on thee,Mother elect, to save the unborn child,As brute and bird do, reptile and the fly,Ay and, I nothing doubt, even tree, shrub, plantAnd flower o' the field, all in a common pactTo worthily defend the trust of trusts,Life from the Ever Living:—didst resist—Anticipate the office that is mine—And with his own sword stay the upraised arm,The endeavor of the wicked, and defendHim who—again in my default—was thereFor visible providence: one less true than thouTo touch, i' the past, less practised in the right,Approved less far in all docilityTo all instruction,—how had such an oneMade scruple "Is this motion a decree?"It was authentic to the experienced earO' the good and faithful servant. Go past meAnd get thy praise,—and be not far to seekPresently when I follow if I may!And surely not so very much apartNeed I place thee, my warrior-priest,—in whomWhat if I gain the other rose, the gold,We grave to imitate God's miracle,Greet monarchs with, good rose in its degree?Irregular noble scapegrace—son the same!Faulty—and peradventure ours the faultWho still misteach, mislead, throw hook and line,Thinking to land leviathan forsooth,Tame the scaled neck, play with him as a bird,And bind him for our maidens! Better bearThe King of Pride go wantoning awhile,Unplagued by cord in nose and thorn in jaw,Through deep to deep, followed by all that shine,Churning the blackness hoary: He who madeThe comely terror, He shall make the swordTo match that piece of netherstone his heart,Ay, nor miss praise thereby; who else shut fireI' the stone, to leap from mouth at sword's first stroke,In lamps of love and faith, the chivalryThat dares the right and disregards alikeThe yea and nay o' the world? Self-sacrifice,—What if an idol took it? Ask the ChurchWhy she was wont to turn each Venus here,—Poor Rome perversely lingered round, despiteInstruction, for the sake of purblind love,—Into Madonna's shape, and waste no whitOf aught so rare on earth as gratitude!All this sweet savor was not ours but thine,Nard of the rock, a natural wealth we nameIncense, and treasure up as food for saints,When flung to us—whose function was to giveNot find the costly perfume. Do I smile?Nay, Caponsacchi, much I find amiss,Blameworthy, punishable in this freakOf thine, this youth prolonged, though age was ripe,This masquerade in sober day, with changeOf motley too,—now hypocrite's disguise,Now fool's-costume: which lie was least like truth,Which the ungainlier, more discordant garb,With that symmetric soul inside my son,The churchman's or the worldling's,—let him judge,Our adversary who enjoys the task!I rather chronicle the healthy rage,—When the first moan broke from the martyr-maidAt that uncaging of the beasts,—made bareMy athlete on the instant, gave such goodGreat undisguised leap over post and paleRight into the mid-cirque, free fighting-place.There may have been rash stripping—every ragWent to the winds,—infringement manifoldOf laws prescribed pudicity, I fear,In this impulsive and prompt self-display!Ever such tax comes of the foolish youth;Men mulct the wiser manhood, and suspectNo veritable star swims out of cloud.Bear thou such imputation, undergoThe penalty I nowise dare relax,—Conventional chastisement and rebuke.But for the outcome, the brave starry birthConciliating earth with all that cloud,Thank heaven as I do! Ay, such championshipOf God at first blush, such prompt cheery thudOf glove on ground that answers ringinglyThe challenge of the false knight,—watch we long,And wait we vainly for its gallant likeFrom those appointed to the service, swornHis body-guard with pay and privilege—White-cinct, because in white walks sanctity,Red-socked, how else proclaim fine scorn of flesh,Unchariness of blood when blood faith begs!Where are the men-at-arms with cross on coat?Aloof, bewraying their attire: whilst thouIn mask and motley, pledged to dance not fight,Sprang'st forth the hero! In thought, word and deed,How throughout all thy warfare thou wast pure,I find it easy to believe: and ifAt any fateful moment of the strangeAdventure, the strong passion of that strait,Fear and surprise, may have revealed too much,—As when a thundrous midnight, with black airThat burns, raindrops that blister, breaks a spell,Draws out the excessive virtue of some sheathedShut unsuspected flower that hoards and hidesImmensity of sweetness,—so, perchance,Might the surprise and fear release too muchThe perfect beauty of the body and soulThou sayedst in thy passion for God's sake,He who is Pity. Was the trial sore?Temptation sharp? Thank God a second time!Why comes temptation but for man to meetAnd master and make crouch beneath his foot,And so be pedestalled in triumph? Pray"Lead us into no such temptations, Lord!"Yea, but, O Thou whose servants are the bold,Lead such temptations by the head and hair,Reluctant dragons, up to who dares fight,That so he may do battle and have praise!Do I not see the praise?—that while thy matesBound to deserve i' the matter, prove at needUnprofitable through the very painsWe gave to train them well and start them fair,—Are found too stiff, with standing ranked and ranged,For onset in good earnest, too obtuseOf ear, through iteration of command,For catching quick the sense of the real cry,—Thou, whose sword-hand was used to strike the lute,Whose sentry-station graced some wanton's gate,Thou didst push forward and show mettle, shameThe laggards, and retrieve the day. Well done!Be glad thou hast let light into the world,Through that irregular breach o' the boundary,—seeThe same upon thy path and march assured,Learning anew the use of soldiership,Self-abnegation, freedom from all fear,Loyalty to the life's end! Ruminate,Deserve the initiatory spasm,—once moreWork, be unhappy but bear life, my son!And troop you, somewhere 'twixt the best and worst,Where crowd the indifferent product, all too poorMakeshift, starved samples of humanity!Father and mother, huddle there and hide!A gracious eye may find you! Foul and fair,Sadly mixed natures: self-indulgent,—yetSelf-sacrificing too: how the love soars,How the craft, avarice, vanity and spiteSink again! So they keep the middle course,Slide into silly crime at unaware,Slip back upon the stupid virtue, stayNowhere enough for being classed, I hopeAnd fear. Accept the swift and rueful death,Taught, somewhat sternlier than is wont, what waitsThe ambiguous creature,—how the one black tuftSteadies the aim of the arrow just as wellAs the wide faultless white on the bird's breast!Nay, you were punished in the very partThat looked most pure of speck, 't was honest loveBetrayed you,—did love seem most worthy pains,Challenge such purging, since ordained surviveWhen all the rest of you was done with? Go!Never again elude the choice of tints!White shall not neutralize the black, nor goodCompensate bad in man, absolve him so:Life's business being just the terrible choice.So do I see, pronounce on all and someGrouped for my judgment now,—profess no doubtWhile I pronounce: dark, difficult enoughThe human sphere, yet eyes grow sharp by use,I find the truth, dispart the shine from shade,As a mere man may, with no special touchO' the lynx-gift in each ordinary orb:Nay, if the popular notion class me right,One of wellnigh decayed intelligence,—What of that? Through hard labor and good will,And habitude that gives a blind man sightAt the practised finger-ends of him, I doDiscern, and dare decree in consequence,Whatever prove the peril of mistake.Whence, then, this quite new quick cold thrill,—cloud-like,This keen dread creeping from a quarter scarceSuspected in the skies I nightly scan?What slacks the tense nerve, saps the wound-up springOf the act that should and shall be, sends the mountAnd mass o' the whole man's-strength,—conglobed so late—Shudderingly into dust, a moment's work?While I stand firm, go fearless, in this world,For this life recognize and arbitrate,Touch and let stay, or else remove a thing,Judge "This is right, this object out of place,"Candle in hand that helps me and to spare,—What if a voice deride me, "Perk and pry!Brighten each nook with thine intelligence!Play the good householder, ply man and maidWith tasks prolonged into the midnight, testTheir work and nowise stint of the due wageEach worthy worker: but with gyves and whipPay thou misprision of a single pointPlain to thy happy self who lift'st the light,Lament'st the darkling,—bold to all beneath!What if thyself adventure, now the placeIs purged so well? Leave pavement and mount roof,Look round thee for the light of the upper sky,The fire which lit thy fire which finds defaultIn Guido Franceschini to his cost!What if, above in the domain of light,Thou miss the accustomed signs, remark eclipse?Shalt thou still gaze on ground nor lift a lid,—Steady in thy superb prerogative,Thy inch of inkling,—nor once face the doubtI' the sphere above thee, darkness to be felt?"Yet my poor spark had for its source, the sun;Thither I sent the great looks which compelLight from its fount: all that I do and amComes from the truth, or seen or else surmised,Remembered or divined, as mere man may:I know just so, nor otherwise. As I know,I speak,—what should I know, then, and how speakWere there a wild mistake of eye or brainAs to recorded governance above?If my own breath, only, blew coal alightI styled celestial and the morning-star?I, who in this world act resolvedly,Dispose of men, their bodies and their souls,As they acknowledge or gainsay the lightI show them,—shall I too lack courage?—leaveI, too, the post of me, like those I blame?Refuse, with kindred inconsistency,To grapple danger whereby souls grow strong?I am near the end; but still not at the end;All to the very end is trial in life:At this stage is the trial of my soulDanger to face, or danger to refuse?Shall I dare try the doubt now, or not dare?O Thou,—as represented here to meIn such conception as my soul allows,—Under Thy measureless, my atom width!—Man's mind, what is it but a convex glassWherein are gathered all the scattered pointsPicked out of the immensity of sky,To reunite there, be our heaven for earth,Our known unknown, our God revealed to man?Existent somewhere, somehow, as a whole;Here, as a whole proportioned to our sense,—There, (which is nowhere, speech must babble thus!)In the absolute immensity, the wholeAppreciable solely by Thyself,—Here, by the little mind of man, reducedTo littleness that suits his faculty,In the degree appreciable too;Between Thee and ourselves—nay even, again,Below us, to the extreme of the minute,Appreciable by how many and what diverseModes of the life Thou madest be! (why liveExcept for love,—how love unless they know?)Each of them, only filling to the edge,Insect or angel, his just length and breadth,Due facet of reflection,—full, no less,Angel or insect, as Thou framedst things.I it is who have been appointed hereTo represent Thee, in my turn, on earth,Just as, if new philosophy know aught,This one earth, out of all the multitudeOf peopled worlds, as stars are now supposed,—Was chosen, and no sun-star of the swarm,For stage and scene of Thy transcendent actBeside which even the creation fadesInto a puny exercise of power.Choice of the world, choice of the thing I am,Both emanate alike from Thy dread playOf operation outside this our sphereWhere things are classed and counted small or great,—Incomprehensibly the choice is Thine!I therefore bow my head and take Thy place.There is, beside the works, a tale of TheeIn the world's mouth, which I find credible:I love it with my heart: unsatisfied,I try it with my reason, nor disceptFrom any point I probe and pronounce sound.Mind is not matter nor from matter, butAbove,—leave matter then, proceed with mind!Man's be the mind recognized at the height,—Leave the inferior minds and look at man!Is he the strong, intelligent and goodUp to his own conceivable height? Nowise.Enough o' the low,—soar the conceivable height,Find cause to match the effect in evidence,The work i' the world, not man's but God's; leave man!Conjecture of the worker by the work:Is there strength there?—enough: intelligence?Ample: but goodness in a like degree?Not to the human eye in the present state,An isoscele deficient in the base.What lacks, then, of perfection fit for GodBut just the instance which this tale suppliesOf love without a limit? So is strength,So is intelligence; let love be so,Unlimited in its self-sacrifice,Then is the tale true and God shows complete.Beyond the tale, I reach into the dark,Feel what I cannot see, and still faith stands:I can believe this dread machineryOf sin and sorrow, would confound me else,Devised—all pain, at most expenditureOf pain by Who devised pain—to evolve,By new machinery in counterpart,The moral qualities of man—how else?—To make him love in turn and be beloved,Creative and self-sacrificing too,And thus eventually God-like, (ay,"I have said ye are Gods,"—shall it be said for naught?)Enable man to wring, from out all pain,All pleasure for a common heritageTo all eternity: this may be surmised,The other is revealed,—whether a fact,Absolute, abstract, independent truth,Historic, not reduced to suit man's mind,—Or only truth reverberate, changed, made passA spectrum into mind, the narrow eye,—The same and not the same, else unconceived—Though quite conceivable to the next gradeAbove it in intelligence,—as truthEasy to man were blindness to the beastBy parity of procedure,—the same truthIn a new form, but changed in either case:What matter so intelligence be filled?To a child, the sea is angry, for it roars:Frost bites, else why the tooth-like fret on face?Man makes acoustics deal with the sea's wrath,Explains the choppy cheek by chymic law,—To man and child remains the same effectOn drum of ear and root of nose, change causeNever so thoroughly: so my heart be struck,What care I,—by God's gloved hand or the bare?Nor do I much perplex me with aught hard,Dubious in the transmitting of the tale,—No, nor with certain riddles set to solve.This life is training and a passage; pass,—Still, we march over some flat obstacleWe made give way before us; solid truthIn front of it, what motion for the world?The moral sense grows but by exercise.'T is even as man grew probativelyInitiated in Godship, set to makeA fairer moral world than this he finds,Guess now what shall be known hereafter. DealThus with the present problem: as we see,A faultless creature is destroyed, and sinHas had its way i' the world where God should rule.Ay, but for this irrelevant circumstanceOf inquisition after blood, we seePompilia lost and Guido saved: how long?For his whole life: how much is that whole life?We are not babes, but know the minute's worth,And feel that life is large and the world small,So, wait till life have passed from out the world.Neither does this astonish at the end,That whereas I can so receive and trust,Other men, made with hearts and souls the same,Reject and disbelieve,—subordinateThe future to the present,—sin, nor fear.This I refer still to the foremost fact,Life is probation and the earth no goalBut starting-point of man: compel him strive,Which means, in man, as good as reach the goal,—Why institute that race, his life, at all?But this does overwhelm me with surprise,Touch me to terror,—not that faith, the pearl,Should be let lie by fishers wanting food,—Nor, seen and handled by a certain fewCritical and contemptuous, straight consignedTo shore and shingle for the pebble it proves,—But that, when haply found and known and namedBy the residue made rich forevermore,These,—that these favored ones, should in a triceTurn, and with double zest go dredge for whelks,Mud-worms that make the savory soup! EnoughO' the disbelievers, see the faithful few!How do the Christians here deport them, keepTheir robes of white unspotted by the world?What is this Aretine Archbishop, thisMan under me as I am under God,This champion of the faith, I armed and decked,Pushed forward, put upon a pinnacle,To show the enemy his victor,—see!What 's the best fighting when the couple close?Pompilia cries, "Protect me from the wolf!"He—"No, thy Guido is rough, heady, strong,Dangerous to disquiet: let him bide!He needs some bone to mumble, help amuseThe darkness of his den with: so, the fawnWhich limps up bleeding to my foot and lies,—Come to me, daughter!—thus I throw him back!"Have we misjudged here, over-armed our knight,Given gold and silk where plain hard steel serves best,Enfeebled whom we sought to fortify,Made an archbishop and undone a saint?Well, then, descend these heights, this pride of life,Sit in the ashes with a barefoot monkWho long ago stamped out the worldly sparks,By fasting, watching, stone cell and wire scourge,—No such indulgence as unknits the strength—These breed the tight nerve and tough cuticle,And the world's praise or blame runs rillet-wiseOff the broad back and brawny breast, we know!He meets the first cold sprinkle of the world,And shudders to the marrow. "Save this child?Oh, my superiors, oh, the Archbishop's self!Who was it dared lay hand upon the arkHis betters saw fall nor put finger forth?Great ones could help yet help not: why should small?I break my promise: let her break her heart!"These are the Christians not the worldlings, notThe sceptics, who thus battle for the faith!If foolish virgins disobey and sleep,What wonder? But, this time, the wise that watch,Sell lamps and buy lutes, exchange oil for wine,The mystic Spouse betrays the Bridegroom here,To our last resource, then! Since all flesh is weak,Bind weaknesses together, we get strength:The individual weighed, found wanting, trySome institution, honest artificeWhereby the units grow compact and firm!Each props the other, and so stand is madeBy our embodied cowards that grow brave.The Monastery called of Convertites,Meant to help women because these helped Christ,—A thing existent only while it acts,Does as designed, else a nonentity,—For what is an idea unrealized?—Pompilia is consigned to these for help.They do help: they are prompt to testifyTo her pure life and saintly dying days.She dies, and lo, who seemed so poor, proves rich!What does the body that lives through helpfulnessTo women for Christ's sake? The kiss turns bite,The dove's note changes to the crow's cry: judge!"Seeing that this our Convent claims of rightWhat goods belong to those we succor, beThe same proved women of dishonest life,—And seeing that this Trial made appearPompilia was in such predicament,—The Convent hereupon pretends to saidSuccession of Pompilia, issues writ,And takes possession by the Fisc's advice."Such is their attestation to the causeOf Christ, who had one saint at least, they hoped:But, is a title-deed to filch, a corpseTo slander, and an infant-heir to cheat?Christ must give up his gains then! They unsayAll the fine speeches,—who was saint is whore.Why, scripture yields no parallel for this!The soldiers only threw dice for Christ's coat;We want another legend of the TwelveDisputing if it was Christ's coat at all,Claiming as prize the woof of price—for why?The Master was a thief, purloined the same,Or paid for it out of the common bag!Can it be this is end and outcome, allI take with me to show as stewardship's fruit,The best yield of the latest time, this yearThe seventeen-hundredth since God died for man?Is such, effect proportionate to cause?And still the terror keeps on the increaseWhen I perceive ... how can I blink the fact?That the fault, the obduracy to good,Lies not with the impracticable stuffWhence man is made, his very nature's fault,As if it were of ice the moon may gildNot melt, or stone 't was meant the sun should warmNot make bear flowers,—nor ice nor stone to blame:But it can melt, that ice, can bloom, that stone,Impassible to rule of day and night!This terrifies me, thus compelled perceive,Whatever love and faith we looked should springAt advent of the authoritative star,Which yet lie sluggish, curdled at the source,—These have leapt forth profusely in old time,These still respond with promptitude to-day,At challenge of—what unacknowledged powersO' the air, what uncommissioned meteors, warmthBy law, and light by rule should supersede?For see this priest, this Caponsacchi, stungAt the first summons,—"Help for honor's sake,Play the man, pity the oppressed!"—no pause,How does he lay about him in the midst,Strike any foe, right wrong at any risk,All blindness, bravery and obedience!—blind?Ay, as a man would be inside the sun,Delirious with the plenitude of lightShould interfuse him to the finger-ends—Let him rush straight, and how shall he go wrong?Where are the Christians in their panoply?The loins we girt about with truth, the breastsRighteousness plated round, the shield of faith,The helmet of salvation, and that swordO' the Spirit, even the word of God,—where these?Slunk into corners! Oh, I hear at onceHubbub of protestation! "What, we monks,We friars, of such an order, such a rule,Have not we fought, bled, left our martyr-markAt every point along the boundary-line'Twixt true and false, religion and the world,Where this or the other dogma of our ChurchCalled for defence?" And I, despite myself,How can I but speak loud what truth speaks low,"Or better than the best, or nothing serves!What boots deed, I can cap and cover straightWith such another doughtiness to match,Done at an instinct of the natural man?"Immolate body, sacrifice soul too,—Do not these publicans the same? Outstrip!Or else stop race you boast runs neck and neck,You with the wings, they with the feet,—for shame!Oh, I remark your diligence and zeal!Five years long, now, rounds faith into my ears,"Help thou, or Christendom is done to death!"Five years since, in the Province of To-kien,Which is in China as some people know,Maigrot, my Vicar Apostolic there,Having a great qualm, issues a decree.Alack, the converts use as God's name, notTien-chubut plainTienor else mereShang-ti,As Jesuits please to fancy politic,While, say Dominicans, it calls down fire,—ForTienmeans heaven, andShang-ti, supreme prince,WhileTien-chumeans the lord of heaven: all cry,"There is no business urgent for dispatchAs that thou send a legate, speciallyCardinal Tournon, straight to Pekin, thereTo settle and compose the difference!"So have I seen a potentate all fumeFor some infringement of his realm's just right.Some menace to a mud-built straw-thatched farmO' the frontier; while inside the mainland lie,Quite undisputed-for in solitude,Whole cities plague may waste or famine sap:What if the sun crumble, the sands encroach,While he looks on sublimely at his ease?How does their ruin touch the empire's bound?
But how hunts Guido? Why, the fraudful trap—Late spurned to ruin by the indignant feetOf fellows in the chase who loved fair play—Here he picks up its fragments to the least,Lades him and hies to the old lurking-placeWhere haply he may patch again, refitThe mischief, file its blunted teeth anew,Make sure, next time, first snap shall break the bone.Craft, greed and violence complot revenge:Craft, for its quota, schemes to bring aboutAnd seize occasion and be safe withal:Greed craves its act may work both far and near,Crush the tree, branch and trunk and root beside,Whichever twig or leaf arrests a streakOf possible sunshine else would coin itself,And drop down one more gold piece in the path:Violence stipulates, "Advantage proved,And safety sure, be pain the overplus!Murder with jagged knife! Cut but tear too!Foiled oft, starved long, glut malice for amends!"And what, craft's scheme? scheme sorrowful and strangeAs though the elements, whom mercy cheeked,Had mustered hate for one eruption more,One final deluge to surprise the ArkCradled and sleeping on its mountain-top:Their outbreak-signal—what but the dove's coo,Back with the olive in her bill for newsSorrow was over? 'T is an infant's birth,Guido's first-born, his son and heir, that givesThe occasion: other men cut free their soulsFrom care in such a case, fly up in thanksTo God, reach, recognize his love for once:Guido cries, "Soul, at last the mire is thine!Lie there in likeness of a money-bag,My babe's birth so pins down past moving now,That I dare cut adrift the lives I lateScrupled to touch lest thou escape with them!These parents and their child my wife,—touch one,Lose all! Their rights determined on a headI could but hate, not harm, since from each hairDangled a hope for me: now—chance and change!No right was in their child but passes plainTo that child's child and through such child to me.I am a father now,—come what come will,I represent my child; he comes between—Cuts sudden off the sunshine of this lifeFrom those three: why, the gold is in his curls!Not with old Pietro's, Violante's head,Not his gray horror, her more hideous black—Go these, devoted to the knife!"
But how hunts Guido? Why, the fraudful trap—
Late spurned to ruin by the indignant feet
Of fellows in the chase who loved fair play—
Here he picks up its fragments to the least,
Lades him and hies to the old lurking-place
Where haply he may patch again, refit
The mischief, file its blunted teeth anew,
Make sure, next time, first snap shall break the bone.
Craft, greed and violence complot revenge:
Craft, for its quota, schemes to bring about
And seize occasion and be safe withal:
Greed craves its act may work both far and near,
Crush the tree, branch and trunk and root beside,
Whichever twig or leaf arrests a streak
Of possible sunshine else would coin itself,
And drop down one more gold piece in the path:
Violence stipulates, "Advantage proved,
And safety sure, be pain the overplus!
Murder with jagged knife! Cut but tear too!
Foiled oft, starved long, glut malice for amends!"
And what, craft's scheme? scheme sorrowful and strange
As though the elements, whom mercy cheeked,
Had mustered hate for one eruption more,
One final deluge to surprise the Ark
Cradled and sleeping on its mountain-top:
Their outbreak-signal—what but the dove's coo,
Back with the olive in her bill for news
Sorrow was over? 'T is an infant's birth,
Guido's first-born, his son and heir, that gives
The occasion: other men cut free their souls
From care in such a case, fly up in thanks
To God, reach, recognize his love for once:
Guido cries, "Soul, at last the mire is thine!
Lie there in likeness of a money-bag,
My babe's birth so pins down past moving now,
That I dare cut adrift the lives I late
Scrupled to touch lest thou escape with them!
These parents and their child my wife,—touch one,
Lose all! Their rights determined on a head
I could but hate, not harm, since from each hair
Dangled a hope for me: now—chance and change!
No right was in their child but passes plain
To that child's child and through such child to me.
I am a father now,—come what come will,
I represent my child; he comes between—
Cuts sudden off the sunshine of this life
From those three: why, the gold is in his curls!
Not with old Pietro's, Violante's head,
Not his gray horror, her more hideous black—
Go these, devoted to the knife!"
'T is done:Wherefore should mind misgive, heart hesitate?He calls to counsel, fashions certain fourColorless natures counted clean till now,—Rustic simplicity, uncorrupted youth,Ignorant virtue! Here 's the gold o' the primeWhen Saturn ruled, shall shock our leaden day—The clown abash the courtier! Mark it, bards!The courtier tries his hand on clownship here,Speaks a word, names a crime, appoints a price,—Just breathes on what, suffused with all himself,Is red-hot henceforth past distinction nowI' the common glow of hell. And thus they breakAnd blaze on us at Rome, Christ's birthnight-eve!Oh angels that sang erst "On the earth, peace!To man, good will!"—such peace finds earth to-day!After the seventeen hundred years, so manWills good to man, so Guido makes completeHis murder! what is it I said?—cuts looseThree lives that hitherto he suffered cling,Simply because each served to nail secure,By a corner of the money-bag, his soul,—Therefore, lives sacred till the babe's first breathO'erweights them in the balance,—off they fly!
'T is done:
Wherefore should mind misgive, heart hesitate?
He calls to counsel, fashions certain four
Colorless natures counted clean till now,
—Rustic simplicity, uncorrupted youth,
Ignorant virtue! Here 's the gold o' the prime
When Saturn ruled, shall shock our leaden day—
The clown abash the courtier! Mark it, bards!
The courtier tries his hand on clownship here,
Speaks a word, names a crime, appoints a price,—
Just breathes on what, suffused with all himself,
Is red-hot henceforth past distinction now
I' the common glow of hell. And thus they break
And blaze on us at Rome, Christ's birthnight-eve!
Oh angels that sang erst "On the earth, peace!
To man, good will!"—such peace finds earth to-day!
After the seventeen hundred years, so man
Wills good to man, so Guido makes complete
His murder! what is it I said?—cuts loose
Three lives that hitherto he suffered cling,
Simply because each served to nail secure,
By a corner of the money-bag, his soul,—
Therefore, lives sacred till the babe's first breath
O'erweights them in the balance,—off they fly!
So is the murder managed, sin conceivedTo the full: and why not crowned with triumph too?Why must the sin, conceived thus, bring forth death?I note how, within hair's-breadth of escape,Impunity and the thing supposed success,Guido is found when the check comes, the change,The monitory touch o' the tether—feltBy few, not marked by many, named by noneAt the moment, only recognized arightI' the fulness of the days, for God's, lest sinExceed the service, leap the line: such check—A secret which this life finds hard to keep,And, often guessed, is never quite revealed—Needs must trip Guido on a stumbling-blockToo vulgar, too absurdly plain i' the path!Study this single oversight of care,This hebetude that marred sagacity,Forgetfulness of all the man best knew,—How any stranger having need to fly,Needs but to ask and have the means of flight.Why, the first urchin tells you, to leave Rome,Get horses, you must show the warrant, justThe banal scrap, clerk's scribble, a fair word buys,Or foul one, if a ducat sweeten word,—And straight authority will back demand,Give you the pick o' the post-house!—how should he,Then, resident at Rome for thirty years,Guido, instruct a stranger! And himselfForgets just this poor paper scrap, wherewithArmed, every door he knocks at opens wideTo save him: horsed and manned, with such advanceO' the hunt behind, why, 't were the easy taskOf hours told on the fingers of one hand,To reach the Tuscan frontier, laugh at home,Light-hearted with his fellows of the place,—Prepared by that strange shameful judgment, thatSatire upon a sentence just pronouncedBy the Rota and confirmed by the Granduke,—Ready in a circle to receive their peer,Appreciate his good story how, when Rome,The Pope-King and the populace of priestsMade common cause with their confederateThe other priestling who seduced his wife,He, all unaided, wiped out the affrontWith decent bloodshed and could face his friends,Frolic it in the world's eye. Ay, such taleMissed such applause, and by such oversight!So, tired and footsore, those blood-flustered fiveWent reeling on the road through dark and cold,The few permissible miles, to sink at length,Wallow and sleep in the first wayside straw,As the other herd quenched, i' the wash o' the wave,—Each swine, the devil inside him: so slept they,And so were caught and caged—all through one trip.One touch of fool in Guido the astute!He curses the omission, I surmise,More than the murder. Why, thou fool and blind,It is the mercy-stroke that stops thy fate,Hamstrings and holds thee to thy hurt,—but how?On the edge o' the precipice! One minute more,Thou hadst gone farther and fared worse, my son,Fathoms down on the flint and fire beneath!Thy comrades each and all were of one mind,Thy murder done, to straightway murder theeIn turn, because of promised pay withheld.So, to the last, greed found itself at oddsWith craft in thee, and, proving conqueror,Had sent thee, the same night that crowned thy hope,Thither where, this same day, I see thee not,Nor, through God's mercy, need, to-morrow, see.Such I find Guido, midmost blotch of blackDiscernible in this group of clustered crimesHuddling together in the cave they callTheir palace, outraged day thus penetrates.Around him ranged, now close and now remote,Prominent or obscure to meet the needsO' the mage and master, I detect each shapeSubsidiary i' the scene nor loathed the less,All alike colored, all descried akinBy one and the same pitchy furnace stirredAt the centre: see, they lick the master's hand,—This fox-faced horrible priest, this brother-bruteThe Abate,—why, mere wolfishness looks well,Guido stands honest in the red o' the flame,Beside this yellow that would pass for white,Twice Guido, all craft but no violence,This copier of the mien and gait and garbOf Peter and Paul, that he may go disguised,Rob halt and lame, sick folk i' the temple-porch!Armed with religion, fortified by law,A man of peace, who trims the midnight lampAnd turns the classic page—and all for craft,All to work harm with, yet incur no scratch!While Guido brings the struggle to a close,Paul steps back the due distance, clear o' the trapHe builds and baits. Guido I catch and judge;Paul is past reach in this world and my time:That is a case reserved. Pass to the next,The boy of the brood, the young Girolamo,Priest, Canon, and what more? nor wolf nor fox.But hybrid, neither craft nor violenceWholly, part violence part craft: such crossTempts speculation—will both blend one day,And prove hell's better product? Or subsideAnd let the simple quality emerge,Go on with Satan's service the old way?Meanwhile, what promise,—what performance too!For there 's a new distinctive touch, I see,Lust—lacking in the two—hell's own blue tintThat gives a character and marks the manMore than a match for yellow and red. Once more,A case reserved: why should I doubt? Then comesThe gaunt gray nightmare in the furthest smoke,The hag that gave these three abortions birth,Unmotherly mother and unwomanlyWoman, that near turns motherhood to shame,Womanliness to loathing: no one word,No gesture to curb cruelty a whitMore than the she-pard thwarts her playsome whelpsTrying their milk-teeth on the soft o' the throatO' the first fawn, flung, with those beseeching eyes,Flat in the covert! How should she but couch,Lick the dry lips, unsheathe the blunted claw,Catch 'twixt her placid eyewinks at what chanceOld bloody half-forgotten dream may flit,Born when herself was novice to the taste,The while she lets youth take its pleasure. Last,These God-abandoned wretched lumps of life,These four companions,—country-folk this time,Not tainted by the unwholesome civic breath,Much less the curse o' the court! Mere striplings too,Fit to do human nature justice still!Surely when impudence in Guido's shapeShall propose crime and proffer money's-worthTo these stout tall rough bright-eyed black-haired boys,The blood shall bound in answer to each cheekBefore the indignant outcry break from lip!Are these i' the mood to murder, hardly loosedFrom healthy autumn-finish of ploughed glebe,Grapes in the barrel, work at happy end,And winter near with rest and Christmas play?How greet they Guido with his final task—(As if he but proposed "One vineyard moreTo dig, ere frost come, then relax indeed!")"Anywhere, anyhow and anywhy,Murder me some three people, old and young,Ye never heard the names of,—and be paidSo much!" And the whole four accede at once.Demur? Do cattle bidden march or halt?Is it some lingering habit, old fond faithI' the lord o' the land, instructs them,—birthright badgeOf feudal tenure claims its slaves again?Not so at all, thou noble human heart!All is done purely for the pay,—which, earned,And not forthcoming at the instant, makesReligion heresy, and the lord o' the landFit subject for a murder in his turn.The patron with cut throat and rifled purse,Deposited i' the roadside-ditch, his due,Naught hinders each good fellow trudging home,The heavier by a piece or two in poke,And so with new zest to the common life,Mattock and spade, plough-tail and wagon-shaft,Till some such other piece of luck betide,Who knows? Since this is a mere start in life,And none of them exceeds the twentieth year.Nay, more i' the background yet? Unnoticed formsClaim to be classed, subordinately vile?Complacent lookers-on that laugh,—perchanceShake head as their friend's horse-play grows too roughWith the mere child he manages amiss—But would not interfere and make bad worseFor twice the fractious tears and prayers: thou know'stCivility better, Marzi-Medici,Governor for thy kinsman the Granduke!Fit representative of law, man's lampI' the magistrate's grasp full-flare, no rushlight-endSputtering 'twixt thumb and finger of the priest!Whose answer to the couple's cry for helpIs a threat,—whose remedy of Pompilia's wrong,A shrug o' the shoulder, and facetious wordOr wink, traditional with Tuscan wits,To Guido in the doorway. Laud to law!The wife is pushed back to the husband, heWho knows how these home-squabblings persecutePeople who have the public good to mind,And work best with a silence in the court!
So is the murder managed, sin conceived
To the full: and why not crowned with triumph too?
Why must the sin, conceived thus, bring forth death?
I note how, within hair's-breadth of escape,
Impunity and the thing supposed success,
Guido is found when the check comes, the change,
The monitory touch o' the tether—felt
By few, not marked by many, named by none
At the moment, only recognized aright
I' the fulness of the days, for God's, lest sin
Exceed the service, leap the line: such check—
A secret which this life finds hard to keep,
And, often guessed, is never quite revealed—
Needs must trip Guido on a stumbling-block
Too vulgar, too absurdly plain i' the path!
Study this single oversight of care,
This hebetude that marred sagacity,
Forgetfulness of all the man best knew,—
How any stranger having need to fly,
Needs but to ask and have the means of flight.
Why, the first urchin tells you, to leave Rome,
Get horses, you must show the warrant, just
The banal scrap, clerk's scribble, a fair word buys,
Or foul one, if a ducat sweeten word,—
And straight authority will back demand,
Give you the pick o' the post-house!—how should he,
Then, resident at Rome for thirty years,
Guido, instruct a stranger! And himself
Forgets just this poor paper scrap, wherewith
Armed, every door he knocks at opens wide
To save him: horsed and manned, with such advance
O' the hunt behind, why, 't were the easy task
Of hours told on the fingers of one hand,
To reach the Tuscan frontier, laugh at home,
Light-hearted with his fellows of the place,—
Prepared by that strange shameful judgment, that
Satire upon a sentence just pronounced
By the Rota and confirmed by the Granduke,—
Ready in a circle to receive their peer,
Appreciate his good story how, when Rome,
The Pope-King and the populace of priests
Made common cause with their confederate
The other priestling who seduced his wife,
He, all unaided, wiped out the affront
With decent bloodshed and could face his friends,
Frolic it in the world's eye. Ay, such tale
Missed such applause, and by such oversight!
So, tired and footsore, those blood-flustered five
Went reeling on the road through dark and cold,
The few permissible miles, to sink at length,
Wallow and sleep in the first wayside straw,
As the other herd quenched, i' the wash o' the wave,
—Each swine, the devil inside him: so slept they,
And so were caught and caged—all through one trip.
One touch of fool in Guido the astute!
He curses the omission, I surmise,
More than the murder. Why, thou fool and blind,
It is the mercy-stroke that stops thy fate,
Hamstrings and holds thee to thy hurt,—but how?
On the edge o' the precipice! One minute more,
Thou hadst gone farther and fared worse, my son,
Fathoms down on the flint and fire beneath!
Thy comrades each and all were of one mind,
Thy murder done, to straightway murder thee
In turn, because of promised pay withheld.
So, to the last, greed found itself at odds
With craft in thee, and, proving conqueror,
Had sent thee, the same night that crowned thy hope,
Thither where, this same day, I see thee not,
Nor, through God's mercy, need, to-morrow, see.
Such I find Guido, midmost blotch of black
Discernible in this group of clustered crimes
Huddling together in the cave they call
Their palace, outraged day thus penetrates.
Around him ranged, now close and now remote,
Prominent or obscure to meet the needs
O' the mage and master, I detect each shape
Subsidiary i' the scene nor loathed the less,
All alike colored, all descried akin
By one and the same pitchy furnace stirred
At the centre: see, they lick the master's hand,—
This fox-faced horrible priest, this brother-brute
The Abate,—why, mere wolfishness looks well,
Guido stands honest in the red o' the flame,
Beside this yellow that would pass for white,
Twice Guido, all craft but no violence,
This copier of the mien and gait and garb
Of Peter and Paul, that he may go disguised,
Rob halt and lame, sick folk i' the temple-porch!
Armed with religion, fortified by law,
A man of peace, who trims the midnight lamp
And turns the classic page—and all for craft,
All to work harm with, yet incur no scratch!
While Guido brings the struggle to a close,
Paul steps back the due distance, clear o' the trap
He builds and baits. Guido I catch and judge;
Paul is past reach in this world and my time:
That is a case reserved. Pass to the next,
The boy of the brood, the young Girolamo,
Priest, Canon, and what more? nor wolf nor fox.
But hybrid, neither craft nor violence
Wholly, part violence part craft: such cross
Tempts speculation—will both blend one day,
And prove hell's better product? Or subside
And let the simple quality emerge,
Go on with Satan's service the old way?
Meanwhile, what promise,—what performance too!
For there 's a new distinctive touch, I see,
Lust—lacking in the two—hell's own blue tint
That gives a character and marks the man
More than a match for yellow and red. Once more,
A case reserved: why should I doubt? Then comes
The gaunt gray nightmare in the furthest smoke,
The hag that gave these three abortions birth,
Unmotherly mother and unwomanly
Woman, that near turns motherhood to shame,
Womanliness to loathing: no one word,
No gesture to curb cruelty a whit
More than the she-pard thwarts her playsome whelps
Trying their milk-teeth on the soft o' the throat
O' the first fawn, flung, with those beseeching eyes,
Flat in the covert! How should she but couch,
Lick the dry lips, unsheathe the blunted claw,
Catch 'twixt her placid eyewinks at what chance
Old bloody half-forgotten dream may flit,
Born when herself was novice to the taste,
The while she lets youth take its pleasure. Last,
These God-abandoned wretched lumps of life,
These four companions,—country-folk this time,
Not tainted by the unwholesome civic breath,
Much less the curse o' the court! Mere striplings too,
Fit to do human nature justice still!
Surely when impudence in Guido's shape
Shall propose crime and proffer money's-worth
To these stout tall rough bright-eyed black-haired boys,
The blood shall bound in answer to each cheek
Before the indignant outcry break from lip!
Are these i' the mood to murder, hardly loosed
From healthy autumn-finish of ploughed glebe,
Grapes in the barrel, work at happy end,
And winter near with rest and Christmas play?
How greet they Guido with his final task—
(As if he but proposed "One vineyard more
To dig, ere frost come, then relax indeed!")
"Anywhere, anyhow and anywhy,
Murder me some three people, old and young,
Ye never heard the names of,—and be paid
So much!" And the whole four accede at once.
Demur? Do cattle bidden march or halt?
Is it some lingering habit, old fond faith
I' the lord o' the land, instructs them,—birthright badge
Of feudal tenure claims its slaves again?
Not so at all, thou noble human heart!
All is done purely for the pay,—which, earned,
And not forthcoming at the instant, makes
Religion heresy, and the lord o' the land
Fit subject for a murder in his turn.
The patron with cut throat and rifled purse,
Deposited i' the roadside-ditch, his due,
Naught hinders each good fellow trudging home,
The heavier by a piece or two in poke,
And so with new zest to the common life,
Mattock and spade, plough-tail and wagon-shaft,
Till some such other piece of luck betide,
Who knows? Since this is a mere start in life,
And none of them exceeds the twentieth year.
Nay, more i' the background yet? Unnoticed forms
Claim to be classed, subordinately vile?
Complacent lookers-on that laugh,—perchance
Shake head as their friend's horse-play grows too rough
With the mere child he manages amiss—
But would not interfere and make bad worse
For twice the fractious tears and prayers: thou know'st
Civility better, Marzi-Medici,
Governor for thy kinsman the Granduke!
Fit representative of law, man's lamp
I' the magistrate's grasp full-flare, no rushlight-end
Sputtering 'twixt thumb and finger of the priest!
Whose answer to the couple's cry for help
Is a threat,—whose remedy of Pompilia's wrong,
A shrug o' the shoulder, and facetious word
Or wink, traditional with Tuscan wits,
To Guido in the doorway. Laud to law!
The wife is pushed back to the husband, he
Who knows how these home-squabblings persecute
People who have the public good to mind,
And work best with a silence in the court!
Ah, but I save my word at least for thee,Archbishop, who art under, i' the Church,As I am under God,—thou, chosen by bothTo do the shepherd's office, feed the sheep—How of this lamb that panted at thy footWhile the wolf pressed on her within crook's reach?Wast thou the hireling that did turn and flee?With thee at least anon the little word!
Ah, but I save my word at least for thee,
Archbishop, who art under, i' the Church,
As I am under God,—thou, chosen by both
To do the shepherd's office, feed the sheep—
How of this lamb that panted at thy foot
While the wolf pressed on her within crook's reach?
Wast thou the hireling that did turn and flee?
With thee at least anon the little word!
Such denizens o' the cave now cluster roundAnd heat the furnace sevenfold: time indeedA bolt from heaven should cleave roof and clear place,Transfix and show the world, suspiring flame,The main offender, scar and brand the restHurrying, each miscreant to his hole: then floodAnd purify the scene with outside day—Which yet, in the absolutest drench of dark,Ne'er wants a witness, some stray beauty-beamTo the despair of hell.
Such denizens o' the cave now cluster round
And heat the furnace sevenfold: time indeed
A bolt from heaven should cleave roof and clear place,
Transfix and show the world, suspiring flame,
The main offender, scar and brand the rest
Hurrying, each miscreant to his hole: then flood
And purify the scene with outside day—
Which yet, in the absolutest drench of dark,
Ne'er wants a witness, some stray beauty-beam
To the despair of hell.
First of the first,Such I pronounce Pompilia, then as nowPerfect in whiteness: stoop thou down, my child,Give one good moment to the poor old PopeHeart-sick at having all his world to blame—Let me look at thee in the flesh as erst,Let me enjoy the old clean linen garb,Not the new splendid vesture! Armed and crowned,Would Michael, yonder, be, nor crowned nor armed,The less pre-eminent angel? EverywhereI see in the world the intellect of man,That sword, the energy his subtle spear,The knowledge which defends him like a shield—Everywhere; but they make not up, I think,The marvel of a soul like thine, earth's flowerShe holds up to the softened gaze of God!It was not given Pompilia to know much,Speak much, to write a book, to move mankind,Be memorized by who records my time.Yet if in purity and patience, ifIn faith held fast despite the plucking fiend,Safe like the signet stone with the new nameThat saints are known by,—if in right returnedFor wrong, most pardon for worst injury,If there be any virtue, any praise,—Then will this woman-child have proved—who knows?—Just the one prize vouchsafed unworthy me,Seven years a gardener of the untoward groundI till,—this earth, my sweat and blood manureAll the long day that barrenly grows dusk:At least one blossom makes me proud at eveBorn 'mid the briers of my enclosure! Still(Oh, here as elsewhere, nothingness of man!)Those be the plants, imbedded yonder SouthTo mellow in the morning, those made fatBy the master's eye, that yield such timid leaf,Uncertain bud, as product of his pains!While—see how this mere chance-sown, cleft-nursed seed,That sprang up by the wayside 'neath the footOf the enemy, this breaks all into blaze,Spreads itself, one wide glory of desireTo incorporate the whole great sun it lovesFrom the inch-height whence it looks and longs! My flower,My rose, I gather for the breast of God,This I praise most in thee, where all I praise,That having been obedient to the endAccording to the light allotted, lawPrescribed thy life, still tried, still standing test,—Dutiful to the foolish parents first,Submissive next to the bad husband,—nay,Tolerant of those meaner miserableThat did his hests, eked out the dole of pain,—Thou, patient thus, couldst rise from law to law,The old to the new, promoted at one cryO' the trump of God to the new service, notTo longer bear, but henceforth fight, be foundSublime in new impatience with the foe!Endure man and obey God: plant firm footOn neck of man, tread man into the hellMeet for him, and obey God all the more!Oh child that didst despise thy life so muchWhen it seemed only thine to keep or lose,How the fine ear felt fall the first low word"Value life, and preserve life for My sake!"Thou didst ... how shall I say?... receive so longThe standing ordinance of God on earth,What wonder if the novel claim had clashedWith old requirement, seemed to supersedeToo much the customary law? But, brave,Thou at first prompting of what I call God,And fools call Nature, didst hear, comprehend,Accept the obligation laid on thee,Mother elect, to save the unborn child,As brute and bird do, reptile and the fly,Ay and, I nothing doubt, even tree, shrub, plantAnd flower o' the field, all in a common pactTo worthily defend the trust of trusts,Life from the Ever Living:—didst resist—Anticipate the office that is mine—And with his own sword stay the upraised arm,The endeavor of the wicked, and defendHim who—again in my default—was thereFor visible providence: one less true than thouTo touch, i' the past, less practised in the right,Approved less far in all docilityTo all instruction,—how had such an oneMade scruple "Is this motion a decree?"It was authentic to the experienced earO' the good and faithful servant. Go past meAnd get thy praise,—and be not far to seekPresently when I follow if I may!
First of the first,
Such I pronounce Pompilia, then as now
Perfect in whiteness: stoop thou down, my child,
Give one good moment to the poor old Pope
Heart-sick at having all his world to blame—
Let me look at thee in the flesh as erst,
Let me enjoy the old clean linen garb,
Not the new splendid vesture! Armed and crowned,
Would Michael, yonder, be, nor crowned nor armed,
The less pre-eminent angel? Everywhere
I see in the world the intellect of man,
That sword, the energy his subtle spear,
The knowledge which defends him like a shield—
Everywhere; but they make not up, I think,
The marvel of a soul like thine, earth's flower
She holds up to the softened gaze of God!
It was not given Pompilia to know much,
Speak much, to write a book, to move mankind,
Be memorized by who records my time.
Yet if in purity and patience, if
In faith held fast despite the plucking fiend,
Safe like the signet stone with the new name
That saints are known by,—if in right returned
For wrong, most pardon for worst injury,
If there be any virtue, any praise,—
Then will this woman-child have proved—who knows?—
Just the one prize vouchsafed unworthy me,
Seven years a gardener of the untoward ground
I till,—this earth, my sweat and blood manure
All the long day that barrenly grows dusk:
At least one blossom makes me proud at eve
Born 'mid the briers of my enclosure! Still
(Oh, here as elsewhere, nothingness of man!)
Those be the plants, imbedded yonder South
To mellow in the morning, those made fat
By the master's eye, that yield such timid leaf,
Uncertain bud, as product of his pains!
While—see how this mere chance-sown, cleft-nursed seed,
That sprang up by the wayside 'neath the foot
Of the enemy, this breaks all into blaze,
Spreads itself, one wide glory of desire
To incorporate the whole great sun it loves
From the inch-height whence it looks and longs! My flower,
My rose, I gather for the breast of God,
This I praise most in thee, where all I praise,
That having been obedient to the end
According to the light allotted, law
Prescribed thy life, still tried, still standing test,—
Dutiful to the foolish parents first,
Submissive next to the bad husband,—nay,
Tolerant of those meaner miserable
That did his hests, eked out the dole of pain,—
Thou, patient thus, couldst rise from law to law,
The old to the new, promoted at one cry
O' the trump of God to the new service, not
To longer bear, but henceforth fight, be found
Sublime in new impatience with the foe!
Endure man and obey God: plant firm foot
On neck of man, tread man into the hell
Meet for him, and obey God all the more!
Oh child that didst despise thy life so much
When it seemed only thine to keep or lose,
How the fine ear felt fall the first low word
"Value life, and preserve life for My sake!"
Thou didst ... how shall I say?... receive so long
The standing ordinance of God on earth,
What wonder if the novel claim had clashed
With old requirement, seemed to supersede
Too much the customary law? But, brave,
Thou at first prompting of what I call God,
And fools call Nature, didst hear, comprehend,
Accept the obligation laid on thee,
Mother elect, to save the unborn child,
As brute and bird do, reptile and the fly,
Ay and, I nothing doubt, even tree, shrub, plant
And flower o' the field, all in a common pact
To worthily defend the trust of trusts,
Life from the Ever Living:—didst resist—
Anticipate the office that is mine—
And with his own sword stay the upraised arm,
The endeavor of the wicked, and defend
Him who—again in my default—was there
For visible providence: one less true than thou
To touch, i' the past, less practised in the right,
Approved less far in all docility
To all instruction,—how had such an one
Made scruple "Is this motion a decree?"
It was authentic to the experienced ear
O' the good and faithful servant. Go past me
And get thy praise,—and be not far to seek
Presently when I follow if I may!
And surely not so very much apartNeed I place thee, my warrior-priest,—in whomWhat if I gain the other rose, the gold,We grave to imitate God's miracle,Greet monarchs with, good rose in its degree?Irregular noble scapegrace—son the same!Faulty—and peradventure ours the faultWho still misteach, mislead, throw hook and line,Thinking to land leviathan forsooth,Tame the scaled neck, play with him as a bird,And bind him for our maidens! Better bearThe King of Pride go wantoning awhile,Unplagued by cord in nose and thorn in jaw,Through deep to deep, followed by all that shine,Churning the blackness hoary: He who madeThe comely terror, He shall make the swordTo match that piece of netherstone his heart,Ay, nor miss praise thereby; who else shut fireI' the stone, to leap from mouth at sword's first stroke,In lamps of love and faith, the chivalryThat dares the right and disregards alikeThe yea and nay o' the world? Self-sacrifice,—What if an idol took it? Ask the ChurchWhy she was wont to turn each Venus here,—Poor Rome perversely lingered round, despiteInstruction, for the sake of purblind love,—Into Madonna's shape, and waste no whitOf aught so rare on earth as gratitude!All this sweet savor was not ours but thine,Nard of the rock, a natural wealth we nameIncense, and treasure up as food for saints,When flung to us—whose function was to giveNot find the costly perfume. Do I smile?Nay, Caponsacchi, much I find amiss,Blameworthy, punishable in this freakOf thine, this youth prolonged, though age was ripe,This masquerade in sober day, with changeOf motley too,—now hypocrite's disguise,Now fool's-costume: which lie was least like truth,Which the ungainlier, more discordant garb,With that symmetric soul inside my son,The churchman's or the worldling's,—let him judge,Our adversary who enjoys the task!I rather chronicle the healthy rage,—When the first moan broke from the martyr-maidAt that uncaging of the beasts,—made bareMy athlete on the instant, gave such goodGreat undisguised leap over post and paleRight into the mid-cirque, free fighting-place.There may have been rash stripping—every ragWent to the winds,—infringement manifoldOf laws prescribed pudicity, I fear,In this impulsive and prompt self-display!Ever such tax comes of the foolish youth;Men mulct the wiser manhood, and suspectNo veritable star swims out of cloud.Bear thou such imputation, undergoThe penalty I nowise dare relax,—Conventional chastisement and rebuke.But for the outcome, the brave starry birthConciliating earth with all that cloud,Thank heaven as I do! Ay, such championshipOf God at first blush, such prompt cheery thudOf glove on ground that answers ringinglyThe challenge of the false knight,—watch we long,And wait we vainly for its gallant likeFrom those appointed to the service, swornHis body-guard with pay and privilege—White-cinct, because in white walks sanctity,Red-socked, how else proclaim fine scorn of flesh,Unchariness of blood when blood faith begs!Where are the men-at-arms with cross on coat?Aloof, bewraying their attire: whilst thouIn mask and motley, pledged to dance not fight,Sprang'st forth the hero! In thought, word and deed,How throughout all thy warfare thou wast pure,I find it easy to believe: and ifAt any fateful moment of the strangeAdventure, the strong passion of that strait,Fear and surprise, may have revealed too much,—As when a thundrous midnight, with black airThat burns, raindrops that blister, breaks a spell,Draws out the excessive virtue of some sheathedShut unsuspected flower that hoards and hidesImmensity of sweetness,—so, perchance,Might the surprise and fear release too muchThe perfect beauty of the body and soulThou sayedst in thy passion for God's sake,He who is Pity. Was the trial sore?Temptation sharp? Thank God a second time!Why comes temptation but for man to meetAnd master and make crouch beneath his foot,And so be pedestalled in triumph? Pray"Lead us into no such temptations, Lord!"Yea, but, O Thou whose servants are the bold,Lead such temptations by the head and hair,Reluctant dragons, up to who dares fight,That so he may do battle and have praise!Do I not see the praise?—that while thy matesBound to deserve i' the matter, prove at needUnprofitable through the very painsWe gave to train them well and start them fair,—Are found too stiff, with standing ranked and ranged,For onset in good earnest, too obtuseOf ear, through iteration of command,For catching quick the sense of the real cry,—Thou, whose sword-hand was used to strike the lute,Whose sentry-station graced some wanton's gate,Thou didst push forward and show mettle, shameThe laggards, and retrieve the day. Well done!Be glad thou hast let light into the world,Through that irregular breach o' the boundary,—seeThe same upon thy path and march assured,Learning anew the use of soldiership,Self-abnegation, freedom from all fear,Loyalty to the life's end! Ruminate,Deserve the initiatory spasm,—once moreWork, be unhappy but bear life, my son!
And surely not so very much apart
Need I place thee, my warrior-priest,—in whom
What if I gain the other rose, the gold,
We grave to imitate God's miracle,
Greet monarchs with, good rose in its degree?
Irregular noble scapegrace—son the same!
Faulty—and peradventure ours the fault
Who still misteach, mislead, throw hook and line,
Thinking to land leviathan forsooth,
Tame the scaled neck, play with him as a bird,
And bind him for our maidens! Better bear
The King of Pride go wantoning awhile,
Unplagued by cord in nose and thorn in jaw,
Through deep to deep, followed by all that shine,
Churning the blackness hoary: He who made
The comely terror, He shall make the sword
To match that piece of netherstone his heart,
Ay, nor miss praise thereby; who else shut fire
I' the stone, to leap from mouth at sword's first stroke,
In lamps of love and faith, the chivalry
That dares the right and disregards alike
The yea and nay o' the world? Self-sacrifice,—
What if an idol took it? Ask the Church
Why she was wont to turn each Venus here,—
Poor Rome perversely lingered round, despite
Instruction, for the sake of purblind love,—
Into Madonna's shape, and waste no whit
Of aught so rare on earth as gratitude!
All this sweet savor was not ours but thine,
Nard of the rock, a natural wealth we name
Incense, and treasure up as food for saints,
When flung to us—whose function was to give
Not find the costly perfume. Do I smile?
Nay, Caponsacchi, much I find amiss,
Blameworthy, punishable in this freak
Of thine, this youth prolonged, though age was ripe,
This masquerade in sober day, with change
Of motley too,—now hypocrite's disguise,
Now fool's-costume: which lie was least like truth,
Which the ungainlier, more discordant garb,
With that symmetric soul inside my son,
The churchman's or the worldling's,—let him judge,
Our adversary who enjoys the task!
I rather chronicle the healthy rage,—
When the first moan broke from the martyr-maid
At that uncaging of the beasts,—made bare
My athlete on the instant, gave such good
Great undisguised leap over post and pale
Right into the mid-cirque, free fighting-place.
There may have been rash stripping—every rag
Went to the winds,—infringement manifold
Of laws prescribed pudicity, I fear,
In this impulsive and prompt self-display!
Ever such tax comes of the foolish youth;
Men mulct the wiser manhood, and suspect
No veritable star swims out of cloud.
Bear thou such imputation, undergo
The penalty I nowise dare relax,—
Conventional chastisement and rebuke.
But for the outcome, the brave starry birth
Conciliating earth with all that cloud,
Thank heaven as I do! Ay, such championship
Of God at first blush, such prompt cheery thud
Of glove on ground that answers ringingly
The challenge of the false knight,—watch we long,
And wait we vainly for its gallant like
From those appointed to the service, sworn
His body-guard with pay and privilege—
White-cinct, because in white walks sanctity,
Red-socked, how else proclaim fine scorn of flesh,
Unchariness of blood when blood faith begs!
Where are the men-at-arms with cross on coat?
Aloof, bewraying their attire: whilst thou
In mask and motley, pledged to dance not fight,
Sprang'st forth the hero! In thought, word and deed,
How throughout all thy warfare thou wast pure,
I find it easy to believe: and if
At any fateful moment of the strange
Adventure, the strong passion of that strait,
Fear and surprise, may have revealed too much,—
As when a thundrous midnight, with black air
That burns, raindrops that blister, breaks a spell,
Draws out the excessive virtue of some sheathed
Shut unsuspected flower that hoards and hides
Immensity of sweetness,—so, perchance,
Might the surprise and fear release too much
The perfect beauty of the body and soul
Thou sayedst in thy passion for God's sake,
He who is Pity. Was the trial sore?
Temptation sharp? Thank God a second time!
Why comes temptation but for man to meet
And master and make crouch beneath his foot,
And so be pedestalled in triumph? Pray
"Lead us into no such temptations, Lord!"
Yea, but, O Thou whose servants are the bold,
Lead such temptations by the head and hair,
Reluctant dragons, up to who dares fight,
That so he may do battle and have praise!
Do I not see the praise?—that while thy mates
Bound to deserve i' the matter, prove at need
Unprofitable through the very pains
We gave to train them well and start them fair,—
Are found too stiff, with standing ranked and ranged,
For onset in good earnest, too obtuse
Of ear, through iteration of command,
For catching quick the sense of the real cry,—
Thou, whose sword-hand was used to strike the lute,
Whose sentry-station graced some wanton's gate,
Thou didst push forward and show mettle, shame
The laggards, and retrieve the day. Well done!
Be glad thou hast let light into the world,
Through that irregular breach o' the boundary,—see
The same upon thy path and march assured,
Learning anew the use of soldiership,
Self-abnegation, freedom from all fear,
Loyalty to the life's end! Ruminate,
Deserve the initiatory spasm,—once more
Work, be unhappy but bear life, my son!
And troop you, somewhere 'twixt the best and worst,Where crowd the indifferent product, all too poorMakeshift, starved samples of humanity!Father and mother, huddle there and hide!A gracious eye may find you! Foul and fair,Sadly mixed natures: self-indulgent,—yetSelf-sacrificing too: how the love soars,How the craft, avarice, vanity and spiteSink again! So they keep the middle course,Slide into silly crime at unaware,Slip back upon the stupid virtue, stayNowhere enough for being classed, I hopeAnd fear. Accept the swift and rueful death,Taught, somewhat sternlier than is wont, what waitsThe ambiguous creature,—how the one black tuftSteadies the aim of the arrow just as wellAs the wide faultless white on the bird's breast!Nay, you were punished in the very partThat looked most pure of speck, 't was honest loveBetrayed you,—did love seem most worthy pains,Challenge such purging, since ordained surviveWhen all the rest of you was done with? Go!Never again elude the choice of tints!White shall not neutralize the black, nor goodCompensate bad in man, absolve him so:Life's business being just the terrible choice.
And troop you, somewhere 'twixt the best and worst,
Where crowd the indifferent product, all too poor
Makeshift, starved samples of humanity!
Father and mother, huddle there and hide!
A gracious eye may find you! Foul and fair,
Sadly mixed natures: self-indulgent,—yet
Self-sacrificing too: how the love soars,
How the craft, avarice, vanity and spite
Sink again! So they keep the middle course,
Slide into silly crime at unaware,
Slip back upon the stupid virtue, stay
Nowhere enough for being classed, I hope
And fear. Accept the swift and rueful death,
Taught, somewhat sternlier than is wont, what waits
The ambiguous creature,—how the one black tuft
Steadies the aim of the arrow just as well
As the wide faultless white on the bird's breast!
Nay, you were punished in the very part
That looked most pure of speck, 't was honest love
Betrayed you,—did love seem most worthy pains,
Challenge such purging, since ordained survive
When all the rest of you was done with? Go!
Never again elude the choice of tints!
White shall not neutralize the black, nor good
Compensate bad in man, absolve him so:
Life's business being just the terrible choice.
So do I see, pronounce on all and someGrouped for my judgment now,—profess no doubtWhile I pronounce: dark, difficult enoughThe human sphere, yet eyes grow sharp by use,I find the truth, dispart the shine from shade,As a mere man may, with no special touchO' the lynx-gift in each ordinary orb:Nay, if the popular notion class me right,One of wellnigh decayed intelligence,—What of that? Through hard labor and good will,And habitude that gives a blind man sightAt the practised finger-ends of him, I doDiscern, and dare decree in consequence,Whatever prove the peril of mistake.Whence, then, this quite new quick cold thrill,—cloud-like,This keen dread creeping from a quarter scarceSuspected in the skies I nightly scan?What slacks the tense nerve, saps the wound-up springOf the act that should and shall be, sends the mountAnd mass o' the whole man's-strength,—conglobed so late—Shudderingly into dust, a moment's work?While I stand firm, go fearless, in this world,For this life recognize and arbitrate,Touch and let stay, or else remove a thing,Judge "This is right, this object out of place,"Candle in hand that helps me and to spare,—What if a voice deride me, "Perk and pry!Brighten each nook with thine intelligence!Play the good householder, ply man and maidWith tasks prolonged into the midnight, testTheir work and nowise stint of the due wageEach worthy worker: but with gyves and whipPay thou misprision of a single pointPlain to thy happy self who lift'st the light,Lament'st the darkling,—bold to all beneath!What if thyself adventure, now the placeIs purged so well? Leave pavement and mount roof,Look round thee for the light of the upper sky,The fire which lit thy fire which finds defaultIn Guido Franceschini to his cost!What if, above in the domain of light,Thou miss the accustomed signs, remark eclipse?Shalt thou still gaze on ground nor lift a lid,—Steady in thy superb prerogative,Thy inch of inkling,—nor once face the doubtI' the sphere above thee, darkness to be felt?"
So do I see, pronounce on all and some
Grouped for my judgment now,—profess no doubt
While I pronounce: dark, difficult enough
The human sphere, yet eyes grow sharp by use,
I find the truth, dispart the shine from shade,
As a mere man may, with no special touch
O' the lynx-gift in each ordinary orb:
Nay, if the popular notion class me right,
One of wellnigh decayed intelligence,—
What of that? Through hard labor and good will,
And habitude that gives a blind man sight
At the practised finger-ends of him, I do
Discern, and dare decree in consequence,
Whatever prove the peril of mistake.
Whence, then, this quite new quick cold thrill,—cloud-like,
This keen dread creeping from a quarter scarce
Suspected in the skies I nightly scan?
What slacks the tense nerve, saps the wound-up spring
Of the act that should and shall be, sends the mount
And mass o' the whole man's-strength,—conglobed so late—
Shudderingly into dust, a moment's work?
While I stand firm, go fearless, in this world,
For this life recognize and arbitrate,
Touch and let stay, or else remove a thing,
Judge "This is right, this object out of place,"
Candle in hand that helps me and to spare,—
What if a voice deride me, "Perk and pry!
Brighten each nook with thine intelligence!
Play the good householder, ply man and maid
With tasks prolonged into the midnight, test
Their work and nowise stint of the due wage
Each worthy worker: but with gyves and whip
Pay thou misprision of a single point
Plain to thy happy self who lift'st the light,
Lament'st the darkling,—bold to all beneath!
What if thyself adventure, now the place
Is purged so well? Leave pavement and mount roof,
Look round thee for the light of the upper sky,
The fire which lit thy fire which finds default
In Guido Franceschini to his cost!
What if, above in the domain of light,
Thou miss the accustomed signs, remark eclipse?
Shalt thou still gaze on ground nor lift a lid,—
Steady in thy superb prerogative,
Thy inch of inkling,—nor once face the doubt
I' the sphere above thee, darkness to be felt?"
Yet my poor spark had for its source, the sun;Thither I sent the great looks which compelLight from its fount: all that I do and amComes from the truth, or seen or else surmised,Remembered or divined, as mere man may:I know just so, nor otherwise. As I know,I speak,—what should I know, then, and how speakWere there a wild mistake of eye or brainAs to recorded governance above?If my own breath, only, blew coal alightI styled celestial and the morning-star?I, who in this world act resolvedly,Dispose of men, their bodies and their souls,As they acknowledge or gainsay the lightI show them,—shall I too lack courage?—leaveI, too, the post of me, like those I blame?Refuse, with kindred inconsistency,To grapple danger whereby souls grow strong?I am near the end; but still not at the end;All to the very end is trial in life:At this stage is the trial of my soulDanger to face, or danger to refuse?Shall I dare try the doubt now, or not dare?
Yet my poor spark had for its source, the sun;
Thither I sent the great looks which compel
Light from its fount: all that I do and am
Comes from the truth, or seen or else surmised,
Remembered or divined, as mere man may:
I know just so, nor otherwise. As I know,
I speak,—what should I know, then, and how speak
Were there a wild mistake of eye or brain
As to recorded governance above?
If my own breath, only, blew coal alight
I styled celestial and the morning-star?
I, who in this world act resolvedly,
Dispose of men, their bodies and their souls,
As they acknowledge or gainsay the light
I show them,—shall I too lack courage?—leave
I, too, the post of me, like those I blame?
Refuse, with kindred inconsistency,
To grapple danger whereby souls grow strong?
I am near the end; but still not at the end;
All to the very end is trial in life:
At this stage is the trial of my soul
Danger to face, or danger to refuse?
Shall I dare try the doubt now, or not dare?
O Thou,—as represented here to meIn such conception as my soul allows,—Under Thy measureless, my atom width!—Man's mind, what is it but a convex glassWherein are gathered all the scattered pointsPicked out of the immensity of sky,To reunite there, be our heaven for earth,Our known unknown, our God revealed to man?Existent somewhere, somehow, as a whole;Here, as a whole proportioned to our sense,—There, (which is nowhere, speech must babble thus!)In the absolute immensity, the wholeAppreciable solely by Thyself,—Here, by the little mind of man, reducedTo littleness that suits his faculty,In the degree appreciable too;Between Thee and ourselves—nay even, again,Below us, to the extreme of the minute,Appreciable by how many and what diverseModes of the life Thou madest be! (why liveExcept for love,—how love unless they know?)Each of them, only filling to the edge,Insect or angel, his just length and breadth,Due facet of reflection,—full, no less,Angel or insect, as Thou framedst things.I it is who have been appointed hereTo represent Thee, in my turn, on earth,Just as, if new philosophy know aught,This one earth, out of all the multitudeOf peopled worlds, as stars are now supposed,—Was chosen, and no sun-star of the swarm,For stage and scene of Thy transcendent actBeside which even the creation fadesInto a puny exercise of power.Choice of the world, choice of the thing I am,Both emanate alike from Thy dread playOf operation outside this our sphereWhere things are classed and counted small or great,—Incomprehensibly the choice is Thine!I therefore bow my head and take Thy place.There is, beside the works, a tale of TheeIn the world's mouth, which I find credible:I love it with my heart: unsatisfied,I try it with my reason, nor disceptFrom any point I probe and pronounce sound.Mind is not matter nor from matter, butAbove,—leave matter then, proceed with mind!Man's be the mind recognized at the height,—Leave the inferior minds and look at man!Is he the strong, intelligent and goodUp to his own conceivable height? Nowise.Enough o' the low,—soar the conceivable height,Find cause to match the effect in evidence,The work i' the world, not man's but God's; leave man!Conjecture of the worker by the work:Is there strength there?—enough: intelligence?Ample: but goodness in a like degree?Not to the human eye in the present state,An isoscele deficient in the base.What lacks, then, of perfection fit for GodBut just the instance which this tale suppliesOf love without a limit? So is strength,So is intelligence; let love be so,Unlimited in its self-sacrifice,Then is the tale true and God shows complete.Beyond the tale, I reach into the dark,Feel what I cannot see, and still faith stands:I can believe this dread machineryOf sin and sorrow, would confound me else,Devised—all pain, at most expenditureOf pain by Who devised pain—to evolve,By new machinery in counterpart,The moral qualities of man—how else?—To make him love in turn and be beloved,Creative and self-sacrificing too,And thus eventually God-like, (ay,"I have said ye are Gods,"—shall it be said for naught?)Enable man to wring, from out all pain,All pleasure for a common heritageTo all eternity: this may be surmised,The other is revealed,—whether a fact,Absolute, abstract, independent truth,Historic, not reduced to suit man's mind,—Or only truth reverberate, changed, made passA spectrum into mind, the narrow eye,—The same and not the same, else unconceived—Though quite conceivable to the next gradeAbove it in intelligence,—as truthEasy to man were blindness to the beastBy parity of procedure,—the same truthIn a new form, but changed in either case:What matter so intelligence be filled?To a child, the sea is angry, for it roars:Frost bites, else why the tooth-like fret on face?Man makes acoustics deal with the sea's wrath,Explains the choppy cheek by chymic law,—To man and child remains the same effectOn drum of ear and root of nose, change causeNever so thoroughly: so my heart be struck,What care I,—by God's gloved hand or the bare?Nor do I much perplex me with aught hard,Dubious in the transmitting of the tale,—No, nor with certain riddles set to solve.This life is training and a passage; pass,—Still, we march over some flat obstacleWe made give way before us; solid truthIn front of it, what motion for the world?The moral sense grows but by exercise.'T is even as man grew probativelyInitiated in Godship, set to makeA fairer moral world than this he finds,Guess now what shall be known hereafter. DealThus with the present problem: as we see,A faultless creature is destroyed, and sinHas had its way i' the world where God should rule.Ay, but for this irrelevant circumstanceOf inquisition after blood, we seePompilia lost and Guido saved: how long?For his whole life: how much is that whole life?We are not babes, but know the minute's worth,And feel that life is large and the world small,So, wait till life have passed from out the world.Neither does this astonish at the end,That whereas I can so receive and trust,Other men, made with hearts and souls the same,Reject and disbelieve,—subordinateThe future to the present,—sin, nor fear.This I refer still to the foremost fact,Life is probation and the earth no goalBut starting-point of man: compel him strive,Which means, in man, as good as reach the goal,—Why institute that race, his life, at all?But this does overwhelm me with surprise,Touch me to terror,—not that faith, the pearl,Should be let lie by fishers wanting food,—Nor, seen and handled by a certain fewCritical and contemptuous, straight consignedTo shore and shingle for the pebble it proves,—But that, when haply found and known and namedBy the residue made rich forevermore,These,—that these favored ones, should in a triceTurn, and with double zest go dredge for whelks,Mud-worms that make the savory soup! EnoughO' the disbelievers, see the faithful few!How do the Christians here deport them, keepTheir robes of white unspotted by the world?What is this Aretine Archbishop, thisMan under me as I am under God,This champion of the faith, I armed and decked,Pushed forward, put upon a pinnacle,To show the enemy his victor,—see!What 's the best fighting when the couple close?Pompilia cries, "Protect me from the wolf!"He—"No, thy Guido is rough, heady, strong,Dangerous to disquiet: let him bide!He needs some bone to mumble, help amuseThe darkness of his den with: so, the fawnWhich limps up bleeding to my foot and lies,—Come to me, daughter!—thus I throw him back!"Have we misjudged here, over-armed our knight,Given gold and silk where plain hard steel serves best,Enfeebled whom we sought to fortify,Made an archbishop and undone a saint?Well, then, descend these heights, this pride of life,Sit in the ashes with a barefoot monkWho long ago stamped out the worldly sparks,By fasting, watching, stone cell and wire scourge,—No such indulgence as unknits the strength—These breed the tight nerve and tough cuticle,And the world's praise or blame runs rillet-wiseOff the broad back and brawny breast, we know!He meets the first cold sprinkle of the world,And shudders to the marrow. "Save this child?Oh, my superiors, oh, the Archbishop's self!Who was it dared lay hand upon the arkHis betters saw fall nor put finger forth?Great ones could help yet help not: why should small?I break my promise: let her break her heart!"These are the Christians not the worldlings, notThe sceptics, who thus battle for the faith!If foolish virgins disobey and sleep,What wonder? But, this time, the wise that watch,Sell lamps and buy lutes, exchange oil for wine,The mystic Spouse betrays the Bridegroom here,To our last resource, then! Since all flesh is weak,Bind weaknesses together, we get strength:The individual weighed, found wanting, trySome institution, honest artificeWhereby the units grow compact and firm!Each props the other, and so stand is madeBy our embodied cowards that grow brave.The Monastery called of Convertites,Meant to help women because these helped Christ,—A thing existent only while it acts,Does as designed, else a nonentity,—For what is an idea unrealized?—Pompilia is consigned to these for help.They do help: they are prompt to testifyTo her pure life and saintly dying days.She dies, and lo, who seemed so poor, proves rich!What does the body that lives through helpfulnessTo women for Christ's sake? The kiss turns bite,The dove's note changes to the crow's cry: judge!"Seeing that this our Convent claims of rightWhat goods belong to those we succor, beThe same proved women of dishonest life,—And seeing that this Trial made appearPompilia was in such predicament,—The Convent hereupon pretends to saidSuccession of Pompilia, issues writ,And takes possession by the Fisc's advice."Such is their attestation to the causeOf Christ, who had one saint at least, they hoped:But, is a title-deed to filch, a corpseTo slander, and an infant-heir to cheat?Christ must give up his gains then! They unsayAll the fine speeches,—who was saint is whore.Why, scripture yields no parallel for this!The soldiers only threw dice for Christ's coat;We want another legend of the TwelveDisputing if it was Christ's coat at all,Claiming as prize the woof of price—for why?The Master was a thief, purloined the same,Or paid for it out of the common bag!Can it be this is end and outcome, allI take with me to show as stewardship's fruit,The best yield of the latest time, this yearThe seventeen-hundredth since God died for man?Is such, effect proportionate to cause?And still the terror keeps on the increaseWhen I perceive ... how can I blink the fact?That the fault, the obduracy to good,Lies not with the impracticable stuffWhence man is made, his very nature's fault,As if it were of ice the moon may gildNot melt, or stone 't was meant the sun should warmNot make bear flowers,—nor ice nor stone to blame:But it can melt, that ice, can bloom, that stone,Impassible to rule of day and night!This terrifies me, thus compelled perceive,Whatever love and faith we looked should springAt advent of the authoritative star,Which yet lie sluggish, curdled at the source,—These have leapt forth profusely in old time,These still respond with promptitude to-day,At challenge of—what unacknowledged powersO' the air, what uncommissioned meteors, warmthBy law, and light by rule should supersede?For see this priest, this Caponsacchi, stungAt the first summons,—"Help for honor's sake,Play the man, pity the oppressed!"—no pause,How does he lay about him in the midst,Strike any foe, right wrong at any risk,All blindness, bravery and obedience!—blind?Ay, as a man would be inside the sun,Delirious with the plenitude of lightShould interfuse him to the finger-ends—Let him rush straight, and how shall he go wrong?Where are the Christians in their panoply?The loins we girt about with truth, the breastsRighteousness plated round, the shield of faith,The helmet of salvation, and that swordO' the Spirit, even the word of God,—where these?Slunk into corners! Oh, I hear at onceHubbub of protestation! "What, we monks,We friars, of such an order, such a rule,Have not we fought, bled, left our martyr-markAt every point along the boundary-line'Twixt true and false, religion and the world,Where this or the other dogma of our ChurchCalled for defence?" And I, despite myself,How can I but speak loud what truth speaks low,"Or better than the best, or nothing serves!What boots deed, I can cap and cover straightWith such another doughtiness to match,Done at an instinct of the natural man?"Immolate body, sacrifice soul too,—Do not these publicans the same? Outstrip!Or else stop race you boast runs neck and neck,You with the wings, they with the feet,—for shame!Oh, I remark your diligence and zeal!Five years long, now, rounds faith into my ears,"Help thou, or Christendom is done to death!"Five years since, in the Province of To-kien,Which is in China as some people know,Maigrot, my Vicar Apostolic there,Having a great qualm, issues a decree.Alack, the converts use as God's name, notTien-chubut plainTienor else mereShang-ti,As Jesuits please to fancy politic,While, say Dominicans, it calls down fire,—ForTienmeans heaven, andShang-ti, supreme prince,WhileTien-chumeans the lord of heaven: all cry,"There is no business urgent for dispatchAs that thou send a legate, speciallyCardinal Tournon, straight to Pekin, thereTo settle and compose the difference!"So have I seen a potentate all fumeFor some infringement of his realm's just right.Some menace to a mud-built straw-thatched farmO' the frontier; while inside the mainland lie,Quite undisputed-for in solitude,Whole cities plague may waste or famine sap:What if the sun crumble, the sands encroach,While he looks on sublimely at his ease?How does their ruin touch the empire's bound?
O Thou,—as represented here to me
In such conception as my soul allows,—
Under Thy measureless, my atom width!—
Man's mind, what is it but a convex glass
Wherein are gathered all the scattered points
Picked out of the immensity of sky,
To reunite there, be our heaven for earth,
Our known unknown, our God revealed to man?
Existent somewhere, somehow, as a whole;
Here, as a whole proportioned to our sense,—
There, (which is nowhere, speech must babble thus!)
In the absolute immensity, the whole
Appreciable solely by Thyself,—
Here, by the little mind of man, reduced
To littleness that suits his faculty,
In the degree appreciable too;
Between Thee and ourselves—nay even, again,
Below us, to the extreme of the minute,
Appreciable by how many and what diverse
Modes of the life Thou madest be! (why live
Except for love,—how love unless they know?)
Each of them, only filling to the edge,
Insect or angel, his just length and breadth,
Due facet of reflection,—full, no less,
Angel or insect, as Thou framedst things.
I it is who have been appointed here
To represent Thee, in my turn, on earth,
Just as, if new philosophy know aught,
This one earth, out of all the multitude
Of peopled worlds, as stars are now supposed,—
Was chosen, and no sun-star of the swarm,
For stage and scene of Thy transcendent act
Beside which even the creation fades
Into a puny exercise of power.
Choice of the world, choice of the thing I am,
Both emanate alike from Thy dread play
Of operation outside this our sphere
Where things are classed and counted small or great,—
Incomprehensibly the choice is Thine!
I therefore bow my head and take Thy place.
There is, beside the works, a tale of Thee
In the world's mouth, which I find credible:
I love it with my heart: unsatisfied,
I try it with my reason, nor discept
From any point I probe and pronounce sound.
Mind is not matter nor from matter, but
Above,—leave matter then, proceed with mind!
Man's be the mind recognized at the height,—
Leave the inferior minds and look at man!
Is he the strong, intelligent and good
Up to his own conceivable height? Nowise.
Enough o' the low,—soar the conceivable height,
Find cause to match the effect in evidence,
The work i' the world, not man's but God's; leave man!
Conjecture of the worker by the work:
Is there strength there?—enough: intelligence?
Ample: but goodness in a like degree?
Not to the human eye in the present state,
An isoscele deficient in the base.
What lacks, then, of perfection fit for God
But just the instance which this tale supplies
Of love without a limit? So is strength,
So is intelligence; let love be so,
Unlimited in its self-sacrifice,
Then is the tale true and God shows complete.
Beyond the tale, I reach into the dark,
Feel what I cannot see, and still faith stands:
I can believe this dread machinery
Of sin and sorrow, would confound me else,
Devised—all pain, at most expenditure
Of pain by Who devised pain—to evolve,
By new machinery in counterpart,
The moral qualities of man—how else?—
To make him love in turn and be beloved,
Creative and self-sacrificing too,
And thus eventually God-like, (ay,
"I have said ye are Gods,"—shall it be said for naught?)
Enable man to wring, from out all pain,
All pleasure for a common heritage
To all eternity: this may be surmised,
The other is revealed,—whether a fact,
Absolute, abstract, independent truth,
Historic, not reduced to suit man's mind,—
Or only truth reverberate, changed, made pass
A spectrum into mind, the narrow eye,—
The same and not the same, else unconceived—
Though quite conceivable to the next grade
Above it in intelligence,—as truth
Easy to man were blindness to the beast
By parity of procedure,—the same truth
In a new form, but changed in either case:
What matter so intelligence be filled?
To a child, the sea is angry, for it roars:
Frost bites, else why the tooth-like fret on face?
Man makes acoustics deal with the sea's wrath,
Explains the choppy cheek by chymic law,—
To man and child remains the same effect
On drum of ear and root of nose, change cause
Never so thoroughly: so my heart be struck,
What care I,—by God's gloved hand or the bare?
Nor do I much perplex me with aught hard,
Dubious in the transmitting of the tale,—
No, nor with certain riddles set to solve.
This life is training and a passage; pass,—
Still, we march over some flat obstacle
We made give way before us; solid truth
In front of it, what motion for the world?
The moral sense grows but by exercise.
'T is even as man grew probatively
Initiated in Godship, set to make
A fairer moral world than this he finds,
Guess now what shall be known hereafter. Deal
Thus with the present problem: as we see,
A faultless creature is destroyed, and sin
Has had its way i' the world where God should rule.
Ay, but for this irrelevant circumstance
Of inquisition after blood, we see
Pompilia lost and Guido saved: how long?
For his whole life: how much is that whole life?
We are not babes, but know the minute's worth,
And feel that life is large and the world small,
So, wait till life have passed from out the world.
Neither does this astonish at the end,
That whereas I can so receive and trust,
Other men, made with hearts and souls the same,
Reject and disbelieve,—subordinate
The future to the present,—sin, nor fear.
This I refer still to the foremost fact,
Life is probation and the earth no goal
But starting-point of man: compel him strive,
Which means, in man, as good as reach the goal,—
Why institute that race, his life, at all?
But this does overwhelm me with surprise,
Touch me to terror,—not that faith, the pearl,
Should be let lie by fishers wanting food,—
Nor, seen and handled by a certain few
Critical and contemptuous, straight consigned
To shore and shingle for the pebble it proves,—
But that, when haply found and known and named
By the residue made rich forevermore,
These,—that these favored ones, should in a trice
Turn, and with double zest go dredge for whelks,
Mud-worms that make the savory soup! Enough
O' the disbelievers, see the faithful few!
How do the Christians here deport them, keep
Their robes of white unspotted by the world?
What is this Aretine Archbishop, this
Man under me as I am under God,
This champion of the faith, I armed and decked,
Pushed forward, put upon a pinnacle,
To show the enemy his victor,—see!
What 's the best fighting when the couple close?
Pompilia cries, "Protect me from the wolf!"
He—"No, thy Guido is rough, heady, strong,
Dangerous to disquiet: let him bide!
He needs some bone to mumble, help amuse
The darkness of his den with: so, the fawn
Which limps up bleeding to my foot and lies,
—Come to me, daughter!—thus I throw him back!"
Have we misjudged here, over-armed our knight,
Given gold and silk where plain hard steel serves best,
Enfeebled whom we sought to fortify,
Made an archbishop and undone a saint?
Well, then, descend these heights, this pride of life,
Sit in the ashes with a barefoot monk
Who long ago stamped out the worldly sparks,
By fasting, watching, stone cell and wire scourge,
—No such indulgence as unknits the strength—
These breed the tight nerve and tough cuticle,
And the world's praise or blame runs rillet-wise
Off the broad back and brawny breast, we know!
He meets the first cold sprinkle of the world,
And shudders to the marrow. "Save this child?
Oh, my superiors, oh, the Archbishop's self!
Who was it dared lay hand upon the ark
His betters saw fall nor put finger forth?
Great ones could help yet help not: why should small?
I break my promise: let her break her heart!"
These are the Christians not the worldlings, not
The sceptics, who thus battle for the faith!
If foolish virgins disobey and sleep,
What wonder? But, this time, the wise that watch,
Sell lamps and buy lutes, exchange oil for wine,
The mystic Spouse betrays the Bridegroom here,
To our last resource, then! Since all flesh is weak,
Bind weaknesses together, we get strength:
The individual weighed, found wanting, try
Some institution, honest artifice
Whereby the units grow compact and firm!
Each props the other, and so stand is made
By our embodied cowards that grow brave.
The Monastery called of Convertites,
Meant to help women because these helped Christ,—
A thing existent only while it acts,
Does as designed, else a nonentity,—
For what is an idea unrealized?—
Pompilia is consigned to these for help.
They do help: they are prompt to testify
To her pure life and saintly dying days.
She dies, and lo, who seemed so poor, proves rich!
What does the body that lives through helpfulness
To women for Christ's sake? The kiss turns bite,
The dove's note changes to the crow's cry: judge!
"Seeing that this our Convent claims of right
What goods belong to those we succor, be
The same proved women of dishonest life,—
And seeing that this Trial made appear
Pompilia was in such predicament,—
The Convent hereupon pretends to said
Succession of Pompilia, issues writ,
And takes possession by the Fisc's advice."
Such is their attestation to the cause
Of Christ, who had one saint at least, they hoped:
But, is a title-deed to filch, a corpse
To slander, and an infant-heir to cheat?
Christ must give up his gains then! They unsay
All the fine speeches,—who was saint is whore.
Why, scripture yields no parallel for this!
The soldiers only threw dice for Christ's coat;
We want another legend of the Twelve
Disputing if it was Christ's coat at all,
Claiming as prize the woof of price—for why?
The Master was a thief, purloined the same,
Or paid for it out of the common bag!
Can it be this is end and outcome, all
I take with me to show as stewardship's fruit,
The best yield of the latest time, this year
The seventeen-hundredth since God died for man?
Is such, effect proportionate to cause?
And still the terror keeps on the increase
When I perceive ... how can I blink the fact?
That the fault, the obduracy to good,
Lies not with the impracticable stuff
Whence man is made, his very nature's fault,
As if it were of ice the moon may gild
Not melt, or stone 't was meant the sun should warm
Not make bear flowers,—nor ice nor stone to blame:
But it can melt, that ice, can bloom, that stone,
Impassible to rule of day and night!
This terrifies me, thus compelled perceive,
Whatever love and faith we looked should spring
At advent of the authoritative star,
Which yet lie sluggish, curdled at the source,—
These have leapt forth profusely in old time,
These still respond with promptitude to-day,
At challenge of—what unacknowledged powers
O' the air, what uncommissioned meteors, warmth
By law, and light by rule should supersede?
For see this priest, this Caponsacchi, stung
At the first summons,—"Help for honor's sake,
Play the man, pity the oppressed!"—no pause,
How does he lay about him in the midst,
Strike any foe, right wrong at any risk,
All blindness, bravery and obedience!—blind?
Ay, as a man would be inside the sun,
Delirious with the plenitude of light
Should interfuse him to the finger-ends—
Let him rush straight, and how shall he go wrong?
Where are the Christians in their panoply?
The loins we girt about with truth, the breasts
Righteousness plated round, the shield of faith,
The helmet of salvation, and that sword
O' the Spirit, even the word of God,—where these?
Slunk into corners! Oh, I hear at once
Hubbub of protestation! "What, we monks,
We friars, of such an order, such a rule,
Have not we fought, bled, left our martyr-mark
At every point along the boundary-line
'Twixt true and false, religion and the world,
Where this or the other dogma of our Church
Called for defence?" And I, despite myself,
How can I but speak loud what truth speaks low,
"Or better than the best, or nothing serves!
What boots deed, I can cap and cover straight
With such another doughtiness to match,
Done at an instinct of the natural man?"
Immolate body, sacrifice soul too,—
Do not these publicans the same? Outstrip!
Or else stop race you boast runs neck and neck,
You with the wings, they with the feet,—for shame!
Oh, I remark your diligence and zeal!
Five years long, now, rounds faith into my ears,
"Help thou, or Christendom is done to death!"
Five years since, in the Province of To-kien,
Which is in China as some people know,
Maigrot, my Vicar Apostolic there,
Having a great qualm, issues a decree.
Alack, the converts use as God's name, not
Tien-chubut plainTienor else mereShang-ti,
As Jesuits please to fancy politic,
While, say Dominicans, it calls down fire,—
ForTienmeans heaven, andShang-ti, supreme prince,
WhileTien-chumeans the lord of heaven: all cry,
"There is no business urgent for dispatch
As that thou send a legate, specially
Cardinal Tournon, straight to Pekin, there
To settle and compose the difference!"
So have I seen a potentate all fume
For some infringement of his realm's just right.
Some menace to a mud-built straw-thatched farm
O' the frontier; while inside the mainland lie,
Quite undisputed-for in solitude,
Whole cities plague may waste or famine sap:
What if the sun crumble, the sands encroach,
While he looks on sublimely at his ease?
How does their ruin touch the empire's bound?