Part I Canto III Verse II

1860 Edition as published by Chapman & Hall and Ticknor & Fields

 

Lucile de Nevers (if her riddle I read)

Was a woman of genius: whose genius, indeed,

In the abstract, nor yet in the abstract mere woman:

But THE WOMAN OF GENIUS, essentially human,

Yet for ever at war with her own human nature.

The genius, now fused in the woman gave stature

And strength to her sex; now the woman, at war

Wiith the genius, impeded its flight to the star.

As it is with all genius, the essence and soul

Of her nature was truth. When she sought to control,

Or to stifle, or palter in aught with that truth,

“Twas when life seem’d to grant it no issues.

                                                         Her youth

One occasion had known, when, if fused in another,

That tumult of soul, which she now sought to smother,

Finding scope within man’s larger life, and conroll’d

By man’s clearer judgment perchance might have roll’d

Into channels enriching the troubled existence

Which it now only vex’d with an inward resistance.

But that chance fell too soon, when the crude sense of power

Which had been to her nature so fatal a dower,

Was too fierce and unfashion’d to fuse itself yet

In the life of another, and served but to fret

And to startle the man it yet haunted and thrall’d;

And that moment, once lost, had never been recall’d.

But it left her heart sore; and to shelter her heart

From approach, she then sought, in that delicate art

Of concealment, those thousand adroit strategies

Of feminine wit, which repel while they please,

A weapon, at once, and a shield, to conceal

And defend all that woman can earnestly feel.

Thus, striving her instincts to hide and repress,

She felt frighten'd at times by her very success:

She pined for the hill-tops, the clouds, and the stars:

Golden wires may annoy us as much as steel bars

If they keep us behind prison-windows: impassion'd

Her heart rose and burst the light cage she had fashion'd

Out of glittering trifles around it.

Wings of desolate flight, and soar’d up from the world.

In this dual identity possibly lay

The secret and charm of her singular sway

Over men of the world. ‘Twas the genius, all warm

With the woman, that gave to the woman a charm

Indescribably strange; there appear’d in her life

A puzzle, a mystery – something at strife

With such men, which yet thrall’d and enchain’d them in part,

And, perplexing the fancy, still haunted the heart.

That intensity, earnestness, depth, or veracity,

Which starward impell’d her with such pertinacity

As turns to the loadstar the needle, reflected

Itself upon others: she therefore affected

Unconsciously, those amongst whom she was thrown,

As the magnet the metals it neighbors.

                                                      Unknown

To herself, all her instincts, without hesitation,

Embraced the idea of self-immolation.

Unlike man’s stern intellect, which, while it stands

Aloof from the minds that it sways and commands

By a power wrench’d from labor, sublimely compels

All around and beneath the high sphere where it dwells

To its fix’d and imperial purpose; in her

The soft spirit of woman that seeks to confer

Its sweet self on the loved, had her life but been blended

With some man’s whose heart had her own comprehended,

All its wealth at his feet would have lavishly thrown.

For him she had then been ambitious alone:

For him had aspired; in him had transfused

All the gladness and grace of her nature; and used

For him only the spells of its delicate power:

Like the ministering fairy that brings from her bower

To some mage all the treasures, whose use the fond elf,

More enrich’d by her love, disregards for herself.

But standing apart, as she ever had done,

And her genius, which needed a vent, finding none

In the broad fields of action thrown wide to man’s power,

She unconsciously made it her bulwark and tower,

And built in it her refuge, whence lightly she hurl’d

Her contempt at the fashions and forms of the world.

And indeed, her chief fault was this unconscious scorn

Of the world, to whose usages woman is born,

Not the WORLD, where that word implies all human nature,

The creator’s great gift to the needs of the creature:

That large heart, with its sorrow to solace, its care

To assuage, and its grant aspirations to share:

But the world, with encroachments that chafe and perplex,

With its men against man, and its sex against sex.

“Ah, what will the world say?” with her was a query

Never uttered, or uttered alone with a dreary

Rejection in thought of the answer before

It was heard: hence the thing which she sought to ignore

And escape from in thought, she encounter’d in act

By the blindness with which she opposed it.

                                                                  In fact,

Had Lucile found in life that communion which links

All that woman but dreams, feels, conceives of, and thinks,

With what man acts and is,-- concentrating the strength

Of her genius within her affections, at length

Finding woman’s full use through man’s life, by man’s skill

Readapted to forms fix’d for life, the strong will

And high heart which the world’s creeds now recklessly braved,

From the world’s crimes the man of the world would have saved;

Reconciled, as it were, the divine with the human,

And, exalting the man, have completed the woman.

But the permanent cause why she now miss'd and fail'd

That firm hold upon life she so keenly assail'd,

Was, in all those diurnal occasions that place

The world and the woman opposed face to face,

Where the woman must yield, she, refusing to stir,

Offended the world, which in turn wounded her. 

For the world is a nettle; disturb it, it stings:

Grasp it firmly, it stings not. On one of two things,

If you would not be stung, it behoves you to settle:

Avoid it, or crush it. She crush'd not the nettle;

For she could not; nor would she avoid it: she tried

With the weak hand of woman to thrust it aside,

And it stung her. A woman is too slight a thing

To trample the world without feeling its sting. 

 

 

Part II Canto IV Verse I

1860 Edition

Sole fountain of song, and the sole source of such lays

As Time cannot quench in the dust of his days,

Muse or Spirit, that inspirest, since Nature began

The great epic of Life, the deep drama of Man!

What matter though skilless the lay be, and rude,

Or melodiously moving the pure Doric mood,

If one ray from thy presence, informing his song,

Should descend on the singer, and lift him along?

From the prattle of pedants, the babble of fools,

From the falsehoods and forms of conventional schools,

First and last unappealable arbitress, thou!

Whose throne is no more on the crest-cloven brow

Of Parnassus, where first out of Phocis was roll’d,

From the Heliconiades singing nine-fold,

The song which the blind son of Moeon set free,

But deep in the heart of mankind, unto thee,

Mother Nature, that badest me sing what I fee,

And canst feel what I sing, unto thee I appeal!

For the Poets pour wine; and, when 'tis new, all decry it;

But, once let it be old, every trifler must try it.

And Polonius, who praises no wine that's not Massic,

Complains of my verse, that my verse is not classic:

And the erudite ladies who take, now and then,

Tea and toast, with aesthetics, precisely at Ten,

Have avouch'd that my song is not earnest because

Model schools, lodging-houses for paupers, poor laws,

The progress of woman, the great working classes,

All the age is concern’d in, unnoticed it passes.

And Miss Tilburina, who sings, and not badly

My earlier verses, sighs “Commonplace sadly!"

Tell them, tell them, my song is as old as 'tis new,

And aver that 'tis earnest because it is true.

Strip from Fashion the garment she wears: what remains

But the old human heart, with its joys and its pains?

The progress of woman, the great working classes,

All the age is concern'd in, unnoticed it passes.

And Miss Tilburina, who sings, and not badly,

My earlier verses, sighs ‘Commonplace sadly!'

Tell them, tell them, my song is as old as 'tis new,

And aver that 'tis earnest because it is true.

Strip from Fashion the garment she wears: what remains

But the old human heart, with its joys and its pains?

The same drama that drew to its hopes and its fears

From the eyes of our fathers both laughter and tears.

'Twas conceived in the heart of the first man on earth,

By the rivers of Eden when, lone from his birth,

Through the bowers of Paradise wandering forlorn,

He pined for the face of an Eve yet unborn:

It was acted in Egypt, when Pharaoh was king;

It was spoken in Attic, and sung to the string

Of the cithern in Greece; and in Rome, word for word,

It was utter'd by Horace in accents long heard.

Love and grief, strength and weakness, regret and desire,

These have breath'd in all ages from every lyre,

The chant of man's heart, with its ceaseless endeavour;

As old as the song which the sea sings for ever.

Other men, other manners! anon from the North,

With the Hun and the Vandal, unchanged it roll'd forth.

New in language alone, it was hymn'd to the harp

Harold bore by the Baltic; its music fell sharp

With the sword of the Guiscard; it made Ruldel's weeping

Melodious for Melisanth; still is it keeping

In play the perpetual pulses of passion

In the heart of mankind; and whatever the fashion

Of the garments we wear, 'tis the same life they cover.

When the Greek actor, acting Electra, wept over

'The urn of Orestes, the theatre rose

And wept with him. What was there in such fictive woes.

To thrill a whole theatre? Ah, 'tis his son

That lies dead in the urn he is weeping upon!

‘Tis no fabled Electra that hangs o'er that urn,

‘Tis a father that weeps his own child.

                                                         Men discern

The man through the mask; the heart moved by the heart.

Owns the pathos of life in the pathos of art.

And the heart is the sole grand republic, in which

All that's human is equal, the poor and the rich:

The sole indestructible state, time can touch

With no change: before Rome, before Carthage, 'twas such

As it will be when London and Paris are gone.

Save, indeed, that its citizens (time flowing on)

'Thro' the errors and follies of ages improve

The final dominion of absolute love.

If this world be, indeed, as 'twas said, but a stage,

The dress only is changed 'twixt the acts of an age.

From the dark tiring-chamber behind straight reissue

With new masks the old mummers; the very same tissue

Of passionate antics that move through the play,

With new parts to fulfil and new phrases to say.

The plot grows more complex, more actors appear,

And the moral perchance glimpses out, there and here,

More clearly, approaching the ultimate fall

Of the curtain that yet hangs unseen. That is all.

As for you, O Polonius, you vex me but slightly;

But you, Tilburina, your eyes beam so brightly

In despite of their languishing looks, on my word,

That to see you look cross I can scarcely afford.

­Yes! the silliest woman that smiles on a bard

Better far than Longinus himself can reward

The appeal to her feelings of which she approves;

And the critics I most care to please are the Loves.

Live the gentle romance! live the page torn asunder

By a light rosy finger with innocent wonder!

Live the tale which Neaera turns over and over

In the rose-colour'd room where she dreams of a lover!

Live the old melodrama of murder and love

Which Jane sobs to see from the box up above!

Hang it! women, I know, are vain, frivolous, false.

I know they care more for a riband, a waltz,

A box at the opera, a new moire antique,

Than for science, philosophy, ethics, or Greek.

I know they admire, too, a thousand times more

Gardoni, or Mario, or even that bore

Colonel * * *, whom the deuce only knows what they say to,

Than Shakespeare, or Goethe, or Newton, or Plato.

I know they are silly, deceitful, and worse:

Inconceivably spiteful, self-will'd, and perverse;

I know they have weak hearts and obstinate wills;

I know that their logic is not Mr. Mill's;

I know that their conscience, thank Heaven, is not mine:

That they cant about genius, but cannot divine

Its existence, till all the world points with the hand;

That they wear their creed (even the best), second-hand;

That their love's but a plague which in them doth infuse

Its contagion from clothes or coin -- no matter whose.

And I know that the thing they most care for. . . but no!

I'll not say it out loud. Never mind what I know.

But despite of all this, and despite of much more,

I know I would rather, a hundred times o'er,

O Neaera, you exquisite infant, whose duty

Is but to be fair, and whose soul is your beauty,

Have one smile from your eyes, or one kiss from your lips,

One pressure vouchsafed from your fair finger­tips,

Than to wear all the laurels that ever with praise

Impaled human brows - even Dante's brown bays!

Alas, friend! what boots it, a stone at his head

And a brass on his breast, - when a man is once dead?

Ay! were fame the sole guerdon, poor guerdon were then

Theirs who, stripping life bare, stand forth models for men.

The reformer's? -- a creed by posterity learnt

A century after its author is burnt!

The poet's -- a laurel that hides the bald brow

It hath blighted! The painter's? -- ask Raphael now

Which Madonna's authentic! The statesman's? ­a name

For parties to blacken, or boys to declaim!

The soldier's? -- three lines on the cold Abbey pavement!

Were this all the life of the wise and the brave meant,

All it ends in, thrice better, Neaera, it were

Unregarded to sport with thine odorous hair,

Untroubled to lie at thy feet in the shade

And be loved, while the roses yet bloom overhead,

Than to sit by the lone hearth, and think the long thought,

A severe, sad, blind schoolmaster, envied for nought

Save the name of John Milton! For all men, indeed,

Who in some choice edition may graciously read,

With fair illustration, and erudite note,

The song which the poet in bitterness wrote,

Beat the poet, and notably beat him, in this –

The joy of the genius is theirs, whilst they miss

The grief of the man: Tasso's song -- not his madness!

Dante's dreams -- not his waking to exile and sadness!

Milton's music -- but not Milton's blindness! . . .

                                                                    Yet rise,

My Milton, and answer, with those noble eyes

Which the glory of heaven hath blinded to earth!

Say -- the life, in the living it, savours of worth:

That the deed, in the doing it, reaches its aim:

That the fact has a value apart from the fame:

That a deeper delight, in the mere labour, pays

Scorn of lesser delights, and laborious days:

And Shakespeare, though all Shakespeare's wrltings were lost,

And his genius, though never a trace of it cross'd

Posterity's path, not the less would have dwelt

In the isle with Miranda, with Hamlet have felt

All that Hamlet hath utter'd, and haply where, pure

On its death-bed, wrong'd Love lay, have moan'd with the Moor!