air. I answered gravely, ‘Poets needs must be Or men or women—more’s the pity.’ ‘Ah, But men, and still less women, happily, Scarce need be poets. Keep to the green wreath, Since even dreaming of the stone and bronze Brings headaches, pretty cousin, and defiles The clean white morning dresses.’ ‘So you judge! Because I love the beautiful, I must Love pleasure chiefly, and be overcharged For ease and whiteness! Well—you know the world, And only miss your cousin; ’tis not much!— But learn this: I would rather take my part With God’s Dead, who afford to walk in white Yet spread His glory, than keep quiet here, And gather up my feet from even a step, For fear to soil my gown in so much dust. I choose to walk at all risks.—Here, if heads That hold a rhythmic thought, must ache perforce, For my part, I choose headaches—and today’s My birthday.’ ‘Dear Aurora, choose instead To cure such. You have balsams.’ ‘I perceive!— The headache is too noble for my sex. You think the heartache would sound decenter, Since that’s the woman’s special, proper ache, And altogether tolerable, except To a woman.’ Saying which, I loosed my wreath, And, swinging it beside me as I walked, Half petulant, half playful, as we walked, I sent a sidelong look to find his thought— As falcon set on falconer’s finger may, With sidelong head, and startled, braving eye, Which means, ‘You’ll see—you’ll see! I’ll soon take flight— You shall not hinder.’ He, as shaking out His hand and answering ‘Fly then,’ did not speak, Except by such a gesture. Silently We paced, until, just coming into sight Of the house-windows, he abruptly caught At one end of the swinging wreath, and said ‘Aurora!’ There I stopped short, breath and all.
‘Aurora, let’s be serious, and throw by This game of head and heart. Life means, be sure, Both heart and head—both active, both complete, And both in earnest. Men and women make The world, as head and heart make human life. Work man, work woman, since there’s work to do In this beleaguered earth, for head and heart, And thought can never do the work of love! But work for ends, I mean for uses; not For such sleek fringes (do you call them ends? Still less God’s glory) as we sew ourselves Upon the velvet of those baldaquins Held ’twixt us and the sun. That book of yours, I have not read a page of; but I toss A rose up—it falls calyx down, you see! … The chances are that, being a woman, young, And pure, with such a pair of large, calm eyes, … You write as well … and ill … upon the whole, As other women. If as well, what then? If even a little better, … still, what then? We want the Best in art now, or no art. The time is done for facile settings up Of minnow gods, nymphs here, and tritons there; The polytheists have gone out in God, That unity of Bests. No best, no God!— And so with art, we say. Give art’s divine, Direct, indubitable, real as grief— Or leave us to the grief we grow ourselves Divine by overcoming with mere hope And most prosaic patience. You, you are young As Eve with nature’s daybreak on her face; But this same world you are come to, dearest coz, Has done with keeping birthdays, saves her wreaths To hang upon her ruins—and forgets To rhyme the cry with which she still beats back Those savage, hungry dogs that hunt her down To the empty grave of Christ. The world’s hard pressed; The sweat of labour in the early curse Has (turning acrid in six thousand years) Become the sweat of torture. Who has time, An hour’s time … think! … to sit upon a bank And hear the cymbal tinkle in white hands? When Egypt’s slain, I say, let Miriam sing!— Before … where’s Moses?’ ‘Ah—exactly that! Where’s Moses?—is a Moses to be found?— You’ll seek him vainly in the bulrushes, While I in vain touch cymbals. Yet, concede, Such sounding brass has done some actual good, (The application in a woman’s hand, If that were credible, being scarcely spoilt,) In colonising beehives.’ ‘There it is!— You play beside a death-bed like a child, Yet measure to yourself a prophet’s place To teach the living. None of all these things, Can women understand. You generalise Oh, nothing!—not even grief! Your quick-breathed hearts, So sympathetic to the personal pang, Close, on each separate knife-stroke, yielding up A whole life at each wound; incapable Of deepening, widening a large lap of life To hold the world-full woe. The human race To you means, such a child, or such a man, You saw one morning waiting in the cold, Beside that gate, perhaps. You gather up A few such cases, and, when strong, sometimes Will write of factories and of slaves, as if Your father were a negro, and your son A spinner in the mills. All’s yours and you— All, coloured with your blood, or otherwise Just nothing to you. Why, I call you hard To general suffering. Here’s the world half blind With intellectual light, half brutalised With civilisation, having caught the plague In silks from Tarsus, shrieking east and west Along a thousand railroads, mad with pain And sin too! … does one woman of you all, (You who weep easily) grow pale to see This tiger shake his cage?—does one of you Stand still from dancing, stop from stringing pearls, And pine and die, because of the great sum Of universal anguish?—Show me a tear Wet as Cordelia’s, in eyes bright as yours, Because the world is mad! You cannot count, That you should weep for this account, not you! You weep for what you know. A red-haired child Sick in a fever, if you touch him once, Though but so little as with a finger-tip, Will set you weeping; but a million sick … You could as soon weep for the rule of three, Or compound fractions. Therefore, this same world Uncomprehended by you, must remain Uninfluenced by you.—Women as you are, Mere women, personal and passionate, You give us doating mothers, and chaste wives, Sublime Madonnas, and enduring saints! We get no Christ from you—and verily We shall not get a poet, in my mind.’
‘With which conclusion you conclude’. … ‘But this— That you, Aurora, with the large live brow And steady eyelids, cannot condescend To play at art, as children play at swords, To show a pretty spirit, chiefly admired Because true action is impossible. You never can be satisfied with praise Which men give women when they judge a book Not as mere work, but as mere woman’s work, Expressing the comparative respect Which means the absolute scorn. ‘Oh, excellent! What grace! what facile turns! what fluent sweeps! What delicate discernment … almost thought! The book does honour to the sex, we hold. Among our female authors we make room For this fair writer, and congratulate The country that produces in these times Such women, competent to … spell.’ ‘Stop there!’ I answered—burning through his thread of talk With a quick flame of emotion—‘You have read My soul, if not my book, and argue well I would not condescend … we will not say To such a kind of praise, (a worthless end Is praise of all kinds) but to such a use Of holy art and golden life. I am young, And peradventure weak—you tell me so— Through being a woman. And, for all the rest, Take thanks for justice. I would rather dance At fairs on tight-rope, till the babies dropped Their gingerbread for joy—than shift the types For tolerable verse, intolerable To men who act and suffer. Better far, Pursue a frivolous trade by serious means, Than a sublime art frivolously.’ ‘You, Choose nobler work than either, O moist eyes, And hurrying lips, and heaving heart! We are young Aurora, you and I. The world … look round … The world, we’re come to late, is swollen hard With perished generations and their sins: The civiliser’s spade grinds horribly On dead men’s bones, and cannot turn up soil That’s otherwise than fetid. All success Proves partial failure; all advance implies What’s left behind; all triumph, something crushed At the chariot-wheels; all government, some wrong: And rich men make the poor, who curse the rich, Who agonise together, rich and poor, Under and over, in the social spasm And crisis of the ages. Here’s an age, That makes its own vocation! here, we have stepped Across the bounds of time! here’s nought to see, But just the rich man and just Lazarus, And both in torments; with a mediate gulph, Though not a hint of Abraham’s bosom. Who, Being man and human, can stand calmly by And view these things, and never tease his soul For some great cure? No physic for this grief, In all the earth and heavens too?’ ‘You believe In God, for your part?—ay? that He who makes, Can make good things from ill things, best from worst, As men plant tulips upon dunghills when They wish them finest?’ ‘True. A death-heat is The same as life-heat, to be accurate; And in all nature is no death at all, As men account of death, as long as God Stands witnessing for life perpetually, By being just God. That’s abstract truth, I know, Philosophy, or sympathy with God: But I, I sympathise with man, not God, I think I was a man for chiefly this; And when I stand beside a dying bed, It’s death to me. Observe—it had not much Consoled the race of mastodons to know Before they went to fossil, that anon Their place should quicken with the elephant; They were not elephants but mastodons: And I, a man, as men are now, and not As men may be hereafter, feel with men In the agonising present.’ ‘Is it so,’ I said, ‘my cousin? is the world so bad, While I hear
