The Poetical Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning Volume IV Part 9

The poet shall look grander in the face Than even of old (when he of Greece began To sing "that Achillean wrath which slew So many heroes")--seeing he shall treat The deeds of souls heroic toward the true, The oracles of life, previsions sweet And awful like divine swans gliding through White arms of Ledas, which will leave the heat Of their escaping G.o.ds.h.i.+p to endue The human medium with a heavenly flush.

Meanwhile, in this same Italy we want Not popular pa.s.sion, to arise and crush, But popular conscience, which may covenant For what it knows. Concede without a blush, To grant the "civic guard" is not to grant The civic spirit, living and awake: Those lappets on your shoulders, citizens, Your eyes strain after sideways till they ache (While still, in admirations and amens, The crowd comes up on festa-days to take The great sight in)--are not intelligence, Not courage even--alas, if not the sign Of something very n.o.ble, they are nought; For every day ye dress your sallow kine With fringes down their cheeks, though unbesought They loll their heavy heads and drag the wine And bear the wooden yoke as they were taught The first day. What ye want is light--indeed Not sunlight--(ye may well look up surprised To those unfathomable heavens that feed Your purple hills)--but G.o.d's light organized In some high soul, crowned capable to lead The conscious people, conscious and advised,-- For if we lift a people like mere clay, It falls the same. We want thee, O unfound And sovran teacher! if thy beard be grey Or black, we bid thee rise up from the ground And speak the word G.o.d giveth thee to say, Inspiring into all this people round, Instead of pa.s.sion, thought, which pioneers All generous pa.s.sion, purifies from sin, And strikes the hour for. Rise up, teacher! here's A crowd to make a nation!--best begin By making each a man, till all be peers Of earth's true patriots and pure martyrs in Knowing and daring. Best unbar the doors Which Peter's heirs keep locked so overclose They only let the mice across the floors, While every churchman dangles, as he goes, The great key at his girdle, and abhors In Christ's name, meekly. Open wide the house, Concede the entrance with Christ's liberal mind, And set the tables with His wine and bread.

What! "commune in both kinds?" In every kind-- Wine, wafer, love, hope, truth, unlimited, Nothing kept back. For when a man is blind To starlight, will he see the rose is red?

A bondsman s.h.i.+vering at a Jesuit's foot-- "Vae! mea culpa!"--is not like to stand A freedman at a despot's and dispute His t.i.tles by the balance in his hand, Weighing them "suo jure." Tend the root If careful of the branches, and expand The inner souls of men before you strive For civic heroes.

But the teacher, where?

From all these crowded faces, all alive, Eyes, of their own lids flas.h.i.+ng themselves bare, And brows that with a mobile life contrive A deeper shadow,--may we in no wise dare To put a finger out and touch a man, And cry "this is the leader"? What, all these!

Broad heads, black eyes,--yet not a soul that ran From G.o.d down with a message? All, to please The donna waving measures with her fan, And not the judgment-angel on his knees (The trumpet just an inch off from his lips), Who when he breathes next, will put out the sun?

Yet mankind's self were foundered in eclipse, If lacking doers, with great works to be done; And lo, the startled earth already dips Back into light; a better day's begun; And soon this leader, teacher, will stand plain, And build the golden pipes and synthesize This people-organ for a holy strain.

We hold this hope, and still in all these eyes Go sounding for the deep look which shall drain Suffused thought into channelled enterprise.

Where is the teacher? What now may he do, Who shall do greatly? Doth he gird his waist With a monk's rope, like Luther? or pursue The goat, like Tell? or dry his nets in haste, Like Masaniello when the sky was blue?

Keep house, like other peasants, with inlaced Bare brawny arms about a favourite child, And meditative looks beyond the door (But not to mark the kidling's teeth have filed The green shoots of his vine which last year bore Full twenty bunches), or, on triple-piled Throne-velvets sit at ease to bless the poor, Like other pontiffs, in the Poorest's name?

The old tiara keeps itself aslope Upon his steady brows which, all the same, Bend mildly to permit the people's hope?

Whatever hand shall grasp this oriflamme, Whatever man (last peasant or first pope Seeking to free his country) shall appear, Teach, lead, strike fire into the ma.s.ses, fill These empty bladders with fine air, insphere These wills into a unity of will, And make of Italy a nation--dear And blessed be that man! the Heavens shall kill No leaf the earth lets grow for him, and Death Shall cast him back upon the lap of Life To live more surely, in a clarion-breath Of hero-music. Brutus with the knife, Rienzi with the fasces, throb beneath Rome's stones,--and more who threw away joy's fife Like Pallas, that the beauty of their souls Might ever s.h.i.+ne untroubled and entire: But if it can be true that he who rolls The Church's thunders will reserve her fire For only light,--from eucharistic bowls Will pour new life for nations that expire, And rend the scarlet of his papal vest To gird the weak loins of his countrymen,-- I hold that he surpa.s.ses all the rest Of Romans, heroes, patriots; and that when He sat down on the throne, he dispossessed The first graves of some glory. See again, This country-saving is a glorious thing: And if a common man achieved it? well.

Say, a rich man did? excellent. A king?

That grows sublime. A priest? improbable.

A pope? Ah, there we stop, and cannot bring Our faith up to the leap, with history's bell So heavy round the neck of it--albeit We fain would grant the possibility For _thy_ sake, Pio Nono!

Stretch thy feet In that case--I will kiss them reverently As any pilgrim to the papal seat: And, such proved possible, thy throne to me Shall seem as holy a place as Pellico's Venetian dungeon, or as Spielberg's grate At which the Lombard woman hung the rose Of her sweet soul by its own dewy weight, To feel the dungeon round her suns.h.i.+ne close, And pining so, died early, yet too late For what she suffered. Yea, I will not choose Betwixt thy throne, Pope Pius, and the spot Marked red for ever, spite of rains and dews, Where Two fell riddled by the Austrian's shot, The brothers Bandiera, who accuse, With one same mother-voice and face (that what They speak may be invincible) the sins Of earth's tormentors before G.o.d the just, Until the unconscious thunderbolt begins To loosen in His grasp.

And yet we must Beware, and mark the natural kiths and kins Of circ.u.mstance and office, and distrust The rich man reasoning in a poor man's hut, The poet who neglects pure truth to prove Statistic fact, the child who leaves a rut For a smoother road, the priest who vows his glove Exhales no grace, the prince who walks afoot, The woman who has sworn she will not love, And this Ninth Pius in Seventh Gregory's chair, With Andrea Doria's forehead!

Count what goes To making up a pope, before he wear That triple crown. We pa.s.s the world-wide throes Which went to make the popedom,--the despair Of free men, good men, wise men; the dread shows Of women's faces, by the f.a.ggot's flash Tossed out, to the minutest stir and throb O' the white lips, the least tremble of a lash, To glut the red stare of a licensed mob; The short mad cries down oubliettes, and plash So horribly far off; priests, trained to rob, And kings that, like encouraged nightmares, sat On nations' hearts most heavily distressed With monstrous sights and apophthegms of fate-- We pa.s.s these things,--because "the times" are prest With necessary charges of the weight Of all this sin, and "Calvin, for the rest, Made bold to burn Servetus. Ah, men err!"-- And so do _churches_! which is all we mean To bring to proof in any register Of theological fat kine and lean: So drive them back into the pens! refer Old sins (with pourpoint, "quotha" and "I ween") Entirely to the old times, the old times; Nor ever ask why this preponderant Infallible pure Church could set her chimes Most loudly then, just then,--most jubilant, Precisely then, when mankind stood in crimes Full heart-deep, and Heaven's judgments were not scant.

Inquire still less, what signifies a church Of perfect inspiration and pure laws Who burns the first man with a brimstone-torch, And grinds the second, bone by bone, because The times, forsooth, are used to rack and scorch!

What _is_ a holy Church unless she awes The times down from their sins? Did Christ select Such amiable times to come and teach Love to, and mercy? The whole world were wrecked If every mere great man, who lives to reach A little leaf of popular respect, Attained not simply by some special breach In the age's customs, by some precedence In thought and act, which, having proved him higher Than those he lived with, proved his competence In helping them to wonder and aspire.

My words are guiltless of the bigot's sense; My soul has fire to mingle with the fire Of all these souls, within or out of doors Of Rome's church or another. I believe In one Priest, and one temple with its floors Of s.h.i.+ning jasper gloom'd at morn and eve By countless knees of earnest auditors, And crystal walls too lucid to perceive, That none may take the measure of the place And say "So far the porphyry, then, the flint-- To this mark mercy goes, and there ends grace,"

Though still the permeable crystals hint At some white starry distance, bathed in s.p.a.ce.

I feel how nature's ice-crusts keep the dint Of undersprings of silent Deity.

I hold the articulated gospels which Show Christ among us crucified on tree.

I love all who love truth, if poor or rich In what they have won of truth possessively.

No altars and no hands defiled with pitch Shall scare me off, but I will pray and eat With all these--taking leave to choose my ewers-- And say at last "Your visible churches cheat Their inward types; and, if a church a.s.sures Of standing without failure and defeat, The same both fails and lies."

To leave which lures Of wider subject through past years,--behold, We come back from the popedom to the pope, To ponder what he _must_ be, ere we are bold For what he _may_ be, with our heavy hope To trust upon his soul. So, fold by fold, Explore this mummy in the priestly cope, Transmitted through the darks of time, to catch The man within the wrappage, and discern How he, an honest man, upon the watch Full fifty years for what a man may learn, Contrived to get just there; with what a s.n.a.t.c.h Of old-world oboli he had to earn The pa.s.sage through; with what a drowsy sop, To drench the busy barkings of his brain; What ghosts of pale tradition, wreathed with hop 'Gainst wakeful thought, he had to entertain For heavenly visions; and consent to stop The clock at noon, and let the hour remain (Without vain windings-up) inviolate Against all chimings from the belfry. Lo, From every given pope you must abate, Albeit you love him, some things--good, you know-- Which every given heretic you hate, a.s.sumes for his, as being plainly so.

A pope must hold by popes a little,--yes, By councils, from Nicaea up to Trent,-- By hierocratic empire, more or less Irresponsible to men,--he must resent Each man's particular conscience, and repress Inquiry, meditation, argument, As tyrants faction. Also, he must not Love truth too dangerously, but prefer "The interests of the Church" (because a blot Is better than a rent, in miniver)-- Submit to see the people swallow hot Husk-porridge, which his chartered churchmen stir Quoting the only true G.o.d's epigraph, "Feed my lambs, Peter!"--must consent to sit Attesting with his pastoral ring and staff To such a picture of our Lady, hit Off well by artist-angels (though not half As fair as Giotto would have painted it)-- To such a vial, where a dead man's blood Runs yearly warm beneath a churchman's finger,-- To such a holy house of stone and wood, Whereof a cloud of angels was the bringer From Bethlehem to Loreto. Were it good For any pope on earth to be a flinger Of stones against these high-niched counterfeits?

Apostates only are iconoclasts.

He dares not say, while this false thing abets That true thing, "This is false." He keeps his fasts And prayers, as prayer and fast were silver frets To change a note upon a string that lasts, And make a lie a virtue. Now, if he Did more than this, higher hoped, and braver dared, I think he were a pope in jeopardy, Or no pope rather, for his truth had barred The vaulting of his life,--and certainly, If he do only this, mankind's regard Moves on from him at once, to seek some new Teacher and leader. He is good and great According to the deeds a pope can do; Most liberal, save those bonds; affectionate, As princes may be, and, as priests are, true; But only the Ninth Pius after eight, When all's praised most. At best and hopefullest, He's pope--we want a man! his heart beats warm, But, like the prince enchanted to the waist, He sits in stone and hardens by a charm Into the marble of his throne high-placed.

Mild benediction waves his saintly arm-- So, good! but what we want's a perfect man, Complete and all alive: half travertine Half suits our need, and ill subserves our plan.

Feet, knees, nerves, sinews, energies divine Were never yet too much for men who ran In such hard ways as must be this of thine, Deliverer whom we seek, whoe'er thou art, Pope, prince, or peasant! If, indeed, the first, The n.o.blest, therefore! since the heroic heart Within thee must be great enough to burst Those trammels buckling to the baser part Thy saintly peers in Rome, who crossed and cursed With the same finger.

Come, appear, be found, If pope or peasant, come! we hear the c.o.c.k, The courtier of the mountains when first crowned With golden dawn; and orient glories flock To meet the sun upon the highest ground.

Take voice and work! we wait to hear thee knock At some one of our Florentine nine gates, On each of which was imaged a sublime Face of a Tuscan genius, which, for hate's And love's sake, both, our Florence in her prime Turned boldly on all comers to her states, As heroes turned their s.h.i.+elds in antique time Emblazoned with honourable acts. And though The gates are blank now of such images, And Petrarch looks no more from Nicolo Toward dear Arezzo, 'twixt the acacia-trees, Nor Dante, from gate Gallo--still we know, Despite the razing of the blazonries, Remains the consecration of the s.h.i.+eld: The dead heroic faces will start out On all these gates, if foes should take the field, And blend sublimely, at the earliest shout, With living heroes who will scorn to yield A hair's-breadth even, when, gazing round about, They find in what a glorious company They fight the foes of Florence. Who will grudge His one poor life, when that great man we see Has given five hundred years, the world being judge, To help the glory of his Italy?

Who, born the fair side of the Alps, will budge, When Dante stays, when Ariosto stays, When Petrarch stays for ever? Ye bring swords, My Tuscans? Ay, if wanted in this haze, Bring swords: but first bring souls!--bring thoughts and words, Unrusted by a tear of yesterday's, Yet awful by its wrong,--and cut these cords, And mow this green lush falseness to the roots, And shut the mouth of h.e.l.l below the swathe!

And, if ye can bring songs too, let the lute's Recoverable music softly bathe Some poet's hand, that, through all bursts and bruits Of popular pa.s.sion, all unripe and rathe Convictions of the popular intellect, Ye may not lack a finger up the air, Annunciative, reproving, pure, erect, To show which way your first Ideal bare The whiteness of its wings when (sorely pecked By falcons on your wrists) it unaware Arose up overhead and out of sight.

Meanwhile, let all the far ends of the world Breathe back the deep breath of their old delight, To swell the Italian banner just unfurled.

Help, lands of Europe! for, if Austria fight, The drums will bar your slumber. Had ye curled The laurel for your thousand artists' brows, If these Italian hands had planted none?

Can any sit down idle in the house Nor hear appeals from Buonarroti's stone And Raffael's canvas, rousing and to rouse?

Where's Poussin's master? Gallic Avignon Bred Laura, and Vaucluse's fount has stirred The heart of France too strongly, as it lets Its little stream out (like a wizard's bird Which bounds upon its emerald wing and wets The rocks on each side), that she should not gird Her loins with Charlemagne's sword when foes beset The country of her Petrarch. Spain may well Be minded how from Italy she caught, To mingle with her tinkling Moorish bell, A fuller cadence and a subtler thought.

And even the New World, the receptacle Of freemen, may send glad men, as it ought, To greet Vespucci Amerigo's door.

While England claims, by trump of poetry, Verona, Venice, the Ravenna-sh.o.r.e, And dearer holds John Milton's Fiesole Than Langland's Malvern with the stars in flower.

And Vallombrosa, we two went to see Last June, beloved companion,--where sublime The mountains live in holy families, And the slow pinewoods ever climb and climb Half up their b.r.e.a.s.t.s, just stagger as they seize Some grey crag, drop back with it many a time, And straggle blindly down the precipice.

The Vallombrosan brooks were strewn as thick That June-day, knee-deep with dead beechen leaves, As Milton saw them ere his heart grew sick And his eyes blind. I think the monks and beeves Are all the same too: scarce have they changed the wick On good Saint Gualbert's altar which receives The convent's pilgrims; and the pool in front (Wherein the hill-stream trout are cast, to wait The beatific vision and the grunt Used at refectory) keeps its weedy state, To baffle saintly abbots who would count The fish across their breviary nor 'bate The measure of their steps. O waterfalls And forests! sound and silence! mountains bare That leap up peak by peak and catch the palls Of purple and silver mist to rend and share With one another, at electric calls Of life in the sunbeams,--till we cannot dare Fix your shapes, count your number! we must think Your beauty and your glory helped to fill The cup of Milton's soul so to the brink, He never more was thirsty when G.o.d's will Had shattered to his sense the last chain-link By which he had drawn from Nature's visible The fresh well-water. Satisfied by this, He sang of Adam's paradise and smiled, Remembering Vallombrosa. Therefore is The place divine to English man and child, And pilgrims leave their souls here in a kiss.

For Italy's the whole earth's treasury, piled With reveries of gentle ladies, flung Aside, like ravelled silk, from life's worn stuff; With coins of scholars' fancy, which, being rung On work-day counter, still sound silver-proof; In short, with all the dreams of dreamers young, Before their heads have time for slipping off Hope's pillow to the ground. How oft, indeed, We've sent our souls out from the rigid north, On bare white feet which would not print nor bleed, To climb the Alpine pa.s.ses and look forth, Where booming low the Lombard rivers lead To gardens, vineyards, all a dream is worth,-- Sights, thou and I, Love, have seen afterward From Tuscan Bellosguardo, wide awake,[11]

When, standing on the actual blessed sward Where Galileo stood at nights to take The vision of the stars, we have found it hard, Gazing upon the earth and heaven, to make A choice of beauty.

Therefore let us all Refreshed in England or in other land, By visions, with their fountain-rise and fall, Of this earth's darling,--we, who understand A little how the Tuscan musical Vowels do round themselves as if they planned Eternities of separate sweetness,--we, Who loved Sorrento vines in picture-book, Or ere in wine-cup we pledged faith or glee,-- Who loved Rome's wolf with demi-G.o.ds at suck, Or ere we loved truth's own divinity,-- Who loved, in brief, the cla.s.sic hill and brook, And Ovid's dreaming tales and Petrarch's song, Or ere we loved Love's self even,--let us give The blessing of our souls (and wish them strong To bear it to the height where prayers arrive, When faithful spirits pray against a wrong,) To this great cause of southern men who strive In G.o.d's name for man's rights, and shall not fail.

Behold, they shall not fail. The shouts ascend Above the shrieks, in Naples, and prevail.

Rows of shot corpses, waiting for the end Of burial, seem to smile up straight and pale Into the azure air and apprehend That final gun-flash from Palermo's coast Which lightens their apocalypse of death.

So let them die! The world shows nothing lost; Therefore, not blood. Above or underneath, What matter, brothers, if ye keep your post On duty's side? As sword returns to sheath, So dust to grave, but souls find place in Heaven.

Heroic daring is the true success, The eucharistic bread requires no leaven; And though your ends were hopeless, we should bless Your cause as holy. Strive--and, having striven, Take, for G.o.d's recompense, that righteousness!

FOOTNOTES:

[2] They show at Verona, as the tomb of Juliet, an empty trough of stone.

[3] These famous statues recline in the Sagrestia Nuova, on the tombs of Giuliano de' Medici, third son of Lorenzo the Magnificent, and Lorenzo of Urbino, his grandson. Strozzi's epigram on the Night, with Michel Angelo's rejoinder, is well known.

[4] This mocking task was set by Pietro, the unworthy successor of Lorenzo the Magnificent.

[5] Savonarola was burnt for his testimony against papal corruptions as early as March, 1498: and, as late as our own day, it has been a custom in Florence to strew with violets the pavement where he suffered, in grateful recognition of the anniversary.

[6] See his description of the plague in Florence.

[7] Charles of Anjou, in his pa.s.sage through Florence, was permitted to see this picture while yet in Cimabue's "bottega." The populace followed the royal visitor, and, from the universal delight and admiration, the quarter of the city in which the artist lived was called "Borgo Allegri." The picture was carried in triumph to the church, and deposited there.

[8] How Cimabue found Giotto, the shepherd-boy, sketching a ram of his flock upon a stone, is prettily told by Vasari,--who also relates that the elder artist Margheritone died "infastidito"

of the successes of the new school.

[9] The Florentines, to whom the Ravennese refused the body of Dante (demanded of them "in a late remorse of love"), have given a cenotaph in this church to their divine poet. Something less than a grave!

[10] In allusion to Mr. Kirkup's discovery of Giotto's fresco portrait of Dante.

[11] Galileo's villa, close to Florence, is built on an eminence called Bellosguardo.

PART II.

I wrote a meditation and a dream, Hearing a little child sing in the street: I leant upon his music as a theme, Till it gave way beneath my heart's full beat Which tried at an exultant prophecy But dropped before the measure was complete-- Alas, for songs and hearts! O Tuscany, O Dante's Florence, is the type too plain?

Didst thou, too, only sing of liberty As little children take up a high strain With unintentioned voices, and break off To sleep upon their mothers' knees again?

Couldst thou not watch one hour? then, sleep enough-- That sleep may hasten manhood and sustain The faint pale spirit with some muscular stuff.

But we, who cannot slumber as thou dost, We thinkers, who have thought for thee and failed, We hopers, who have hoped for thee and lost, We poets, wandered round by dreams,[12] who hailed From this Atrides' roof (with lintel-post Which still drips blood,--the worse part hath prevailed) The fire-voice of the beacons to declare Troy taken, sorrow ended,--cozened through A crimson sunset in a misty air, What now remains for such as we, to do?