Demeter and other poems/Romney's Remorse
ROMNEY'S REMORSE.
'I read Hayley's Life of Romney the other day—Romney wanted but education and reading to make him a very fine painter; but his ideal was not high nor fixed. How touching is the close of his life! He married at nineteen, and because Sir Joshua and others had said that "marriage spoilt an artist" almost immediately left his wife in the North and scarce saw her till the end of his life; when old, nearly mad and quite desolate, he went back to her and she received him and nursed him till he died. This quiet act of hers is worth all Romney's pictures! even as a matter of Art, I am sure,' (Letters and Literary Remains of Edward Fitzgerald, vol. i.)
'Beat, little heart—I give you this and this' Who are you? What! the Lady Hamilton? Good, I am never weary painting you.To sit once more? Cassandra, Hebe, Joan,Or spinning at your wheel beside the vine—Bacchante, what you will; and if I failTo conjure and concentrate into formAnd colour all you are, the fault is lessIn me than Art. What Artist ever yetCould make pure light live on the canvas? Art!Why should I so disrelish that short word? Where am I? snow on all the hills! so hot,So fever'd! never colt would more delightTo roll himself in meadow grass than ITo wallow in that winter of the hills. Nurse, were you hired? or came of your own willTo wait on one so broken, so forlorn?Have I not met you somewhere long ago?I am all but sure I haye—in Kendal church— O yes! I hired you for a season thereAnd then we parted; but you look so kindThat you will not deny my sultry throatOne draught of icy water. There—you spillThe drops upon my forehead. Your hand shakes.I am ashamed. I am a trouble to you,Could kneel for your forgiveness. Are they tears?For me—they do me too much grace—for me?O Mary, Mary!Vexing you with words!Words only, born of fever, or the fumesOf that dark opiate dose you gave me,—words,Wild babble. I have stumbled back againInto the common day, the sounder self.God stay me there, if only for your sake,The truest, kindliest, noblest-hearted wifeThat ever wore a Christian marriage-ring. My curse upon the Master’s apothegm,That wife and children drag an Artist down!This seem’d my lodestar in the Heaven of Art,And lured me from the household fire on earth.To you my days have been a life-long lie,Grafted on half a truth, and tho’ you say‘Take comfort, you have won the Painter’s fame;The best in me that sees the worst in me,And groans to see it, finds no comfort there. What fame? I am not Raphaël, Titian—noNor even a Sir Joshua, some will cry.Wrong there! The painter’s fame? but mine, that grewBlown into glittering by the popular breath,May float awhile beneath the sun, may rollThe rainbow hues of heaven about it—There! The colour’d bubble bursts above the abyssOf Darkness, utter Lethe.
Is it so?Her sad eyes plead for my own fame with meTo make it dearer.
Look, the sun has risenTo flame along another dreary day.Your hand. How bright you keep your marriage-ring!Raise me. I thank you.
Has your opiate thenBred this black mood? or am I conscious, moreThan other Masters, of the chasm betweenWork and Ideal? Or does the gloom of AgeAnd suffering cloud the height I stand upon Even from myself? stand? stood . . . no more.And yetThe world would lose, if such a wife as youShould vanish unrecorded. Might I craveOne favour? I am bankrupt of all claimOn your obedience, and my strongest wishFalls flat before your least unwillingness.Still would you—if it please you—sit to me? I dream’d last night of that clear summer noon,When seated on a rock, and foot to footWith your own shadow in the placid lake,You claspt our infant daughter, heart to heart.I had been among the hills, and brought you downA length of staghorn-moss, and this you twinedAbout her cap. I see the picture yet,Mother and child. A sound from far away,No louder than a bee among the flowers, A fall of water lull’d the noon asleep.You still’d it for the moment with a songWhich often echo’d in me, while I stoodBefore the great Madonna-masterpiecesOf ancient Art in Paris, or in Rome. Mary, my crayons! if I can, I will.You should have been—I might have made you once,Had I but known you as I know you now—The true Alcestis of the time. Your song—Sit, listen! I remember it, a proofThat I—even I—at times remember’d you.
‘Beat upon mine, little heart! beat, beat! Beat upon mine! you are mine, my sweet! All mine from your pretty blue eyes to your feet,My sweet.’Less profile! turn to me—three-quarter face.
‘Sleep, little blossom, my honey, my bliss! For I give you this, and I give you this! And I blind your pretty blue eyes with a kiss!Sleep!'
Too early blinded by the kiss of death— ‘Father and Mother will watch you grow’—You watch’d, not I, she did not grow, she died.
‘Father and Mother will watch you grow, And gather the roses whenever they blow, And find the white heather wherever you go,My sweet.’
Ah, my white heather only grows in heavenWith Milton’s amaranth. There, there, there! a childHad shamed me at it—Down, you idle tools,Stampt into dust—tremulous, all awry, Blurr’d like a landskip in a ruffled pool,—Not one stroke firm. This Art, that harlot-likeSeduced me from you, leaves me harlot-like,Who love her still, and whimper, impotentTo win her back before I die—and then—Then, in the loud world’s bastard judgment-day,One truth will damn me with the mindless mob,Who feel no touch of my temptation, moreThan[errata 1] all the myriad lies, that blacken roundThe corpse of every man that gains a name;‘This model husband, this fine Artist’! Fool,What matters? Six foot deep of burial mouldWill dull their comments! Ay, but when the shoutOf His descending peals from Heaven, and throbsThro’ earth, and all her graves, if He should ask‘Why left you wife and children? for my sake,According to my word?’ and I replied ‘Nay, Lord, for Art,' why, that would sound so meanThat all the dead, who wait the doom of HellFor bolder sins than mine, adulteries,Wife-murders,—nay, the ruthless MussulmanWho flings his bowstrung Harem in the sea,Would turn, and glare at me, and point and jeer,And gibber at the worm, who, living, madeThe wife of wives a widow-bride, and lostSalvation for a sketch.I am wild again!The coals of fire you heap upon my headHave crazed me. Someone knocking there without?No! Will my Indian brother come? to findMe or my coffin? Should I know the man?This worn-out Reason dying in her house May leave the windows blinded, and if so,Bid him farewell for me, and tell him—Hope!I hear a death-bed Angel whisper ‘Hope.’“The miserable have 6 medicineBut only Hope!” He said it . . . in the play.His crime was of the senses; of the mindMine; worse, cold, calculated.Tell my son—O let me lean my head upon your breast.‘Beat little heart’ on this fool brain of mine.I once had friends—and many—none like you.I love you more than when we married. Hope!O yes, I hope, or fancy that, perhaps,Human forgiveness touches heaven, and thence—For you forgive me, you are sure of that—Reflected, sends a light on the forgiven.
Errata