The Conversion of Winckelmann and Other Poems :: :: University of Virginia Library

I

“Show me some other way, and I'll not do it!
“One sudden, solitary, sterile lie,
With no false brood to follow, haply born
Of feebleness, surprise, forbearing fear
Lest the hard fact should hurt, were base enough;—
Too base for me, who, ever since my tongue
Was fledged with language, straight unto the mark
Sent sharp words flying, careless whom they hit,
If friend or foe, and, least of all, myself.
And now!

“Nay, if it be the last time to be brave,
And slink a tortuous coward ever more,
Look this colossal lie full in the face!
It is not sudden, solitary, barren,
Feeble, surprised, a gift to tenderness,
But a deliberate, procreative lie,
Teeming with perjured progeny, swarm on swarm
Of profitable falsehood, each fresh fraud
Begetting a new litter: lie on lie,
With lies, and ever yet more lies to follow,
A labyrinth of lying! ... Winckelmann!
Stand you upon the solid earth, or float
Along some vague fantastic atmosphere,
Unbounded, unconditioned, where there rules
Nor truth, nor falsehood, only vaporous dreams
Submissive to the will and the desire?
No! Truth is truth, or here or otherwhere,

And at the Universe's furthest frontier
God still must post his sentinels to challenge
Apostasy of soul! Infinity
Hems in the conscience!

“Yet the alternative!

“Here to remain, and die! Day after day,
Week after week, year following upon year,
Hopeless of better or of worse, and doomed
With clowns and clods, triflers and dolts, to share
The same reiterated nothingness!
To live as dead, and manacled to the dead,
Who, since not coffined, deem themselves alive!
Oneself to be alive, and yet not live!
Be sensible of freedom, yet a slave!

When but one word, did I but utter it,
Would lift me from this darkness, and transport
To Italy and light!

“He waits within,
Ready to take profession of my Faith,
That I believe whatever Rome believes,
Say what Rome says, and do what Rome enjoins.
There's but that door 'twixt me and happiness.
Achinto, suave and smooth, with vowelled voice
Soft as his Southern tongue, all sì and smiles,
And stooping grace, befitting one whose height
Makes bending necessary, natural,
And condescension part of dignity;
From brow to buckle, just the Cardinal.
He waves aside one's scruples with a hand
As white as is a woman's, and a shrug

So definitely doubtful, one can scarce
Say if it pleads for faith or scepticism.
Haply for both, as though he fain would mean,
Without the hazard of the spoken word,
‘Why boggle at one mystery more or less?
Think long enough, and all is mystery,
Think longer still, and everything is doubt.
Why not the sage solution, “I believe,
Because it is impossible,” and thus
Profess your faith, and still retain your doubts?
Will disbelieving solve the mystery
More than believing, think you? Any way,
Believe, and here's your passport straight for Rome,
With ducats for the journey, and a home
In Passionei's Library, then all
The Gods of Greece and Art of Italy,

Your dream arrayed in daylight! Disbelieve,
And here you stagnate until life ebbs out,
The lettered lackey of unlettered lords,
Drudge for mere meat and drink. Rome holds the keys
Of both the Christian and the Pagan world.
Speak! She will open either.’

“League after league of undulating sand,
With nothing in its furrows, fallow still
Through season after season, save when brimmed
With the unsprouting snow, and in the mist
Some stunted growth huddling round brackish pools,
The landmarks of unloveliness that prop
A leaden sky, the sun's sarcophagus.
If but brute matter were thus blind and dumb!

But here men's souls are sterile as the soil,
Kindred to niggard Nature, stunted, starved,
Monotonous, forgotten of the Gods,
Disdained, and disinherited. And I,
Imprisoned in their narrowness, am paid
A scullion's wage for cataloguing books
Not worth the binding; fantasies of saints
Or genealogies of fools from fools,
A meaningless procession!

“And to think,
As I sit shivering here, body and soul,
And all around as dismal as my doubts,
Are silvery fountains flashing in the sun
Of Rome's blue spaciousness! tall crystal columns,
Self-buoyed and self-replenished, that upbear
Lightly a wind-webbed water-woven dome,

A fairy fretwork falling unimpaired
Into white marble basins, curved and cool
As the clear wave from chilly Samnite source
That brims and laves them! Thitherward there wend
Majestic matrons with columnar throats,
And brazen pitchers cushioned on the coils
Of ebon tresses; Caryatides
Throbbing and warm, Olympus in their gaze,
Born of the she-wolf and the Sabine rape,
With bosoms moulded by the mother milk,
Lips like the split pomegranate pulp, and teeth
White as the tusks of the Hernician boar
Snarling at huntsman's spear; round, sinewy limbs,
Supple as strong, and flexible alike
To love or hate, and passion-purpled blood
Quick to ferment, and then with thunderous brow

To flash the dagger from their hair and drive
Its point implacable into the heart
Of wayward lust! not like the haggard herds
I daily see around me, cringing, cowed,
With foolish flaxen hair and empty eyes,
Serfs suited to such masters!

“Thus, without
Within, in courtly corridors that lead
Onward to halls of pure white spaciousness,
On their pentelic pedestals the Gods,
Throned on imperishable marble, stand,
Abstract of power and passion purified
By dominance of beauty, their aloft
Unwrinkled foreheads rapt in starlike calm,
Rebuking man's perplexity! Pagan gods
Robed in majestic nakedness, adored

By Christian Pontiffs; 'mid remorseful Saints,
Radiant and unrepentant in their joy:
Gods, demigods, and heroes, pliant nymphs
In grasp of sinewy satyrs, goddesses,
Flowered from the brine, or fruited in the brain,
Winsome or wise, for pleasure or for power,
Teeming divinities! all there! there! there!
In universal Rome!

“There, yes! but reft
Of half their godhead by ungodlike man,
Careless, confusing, with disordered mind
Confounding Jove with Bacchus, Faun with Pan,
Antinoüs with Hermes, labelling
Sarcophagus a puteal, at loss,
From lack of proper study, to discern
A bust of days Republican from head

Done in the sunset of the Antonines,
Or Caryatid from Canephora.
Why, think but of that frieze they lately found
In musty wine-shop by the Latin Gate,
Discoloured by long drippings from the vat
It served for prop, and chipped by scullions' feet
Staggering about in search of withied flasks
Bellied with liquor to the very throat.
They say it is Capaneus scaling Thebes,
Full on the topmost ladder lightning-hit,
Shrivelling to fall. 'Tis Agamemnon, plain,
Adulterously murdered in his home,
War-lord in vain for an unworthy wife,
The wanton of Aegistheus. If it were
Capaneus, where the chlamys, helmet, spear,
And forward strain of battle on his face?
This man unarmed is that confiding thing,

A husband unaware. Were I but there,
I could convict them quick, would set aright
Their jumble of Olympus, single out
Original from copy, old from new,
Splendid from spurious,—I, and I alone!
Since, though from actual vision still shut out
Of those self-speaking images, I have
On text and indication bent and pored,
Until their inmost soul from outward garb
I know, as one a tree from bark or leaf,
And name them, never seen. Can one believe,
If I were by, that Cavaceppi should,
As now his wont is, chip a feature off,
Then clap it on again, to make-believe
The head's antique when but the body's so?
They're quick and subtle, these Italians,
But triflers somewhat.

“Yet, if that were all,
'Twere much, but little matched with more and worse:
Statues like Morning, slumbering undisturbed
In mud of Tiber, slime of centuries,
And offal of oblivion; toppled down
From Senate-house and Temple, from the seats
Of their serene supremacy dislodged;
Lowered from their dignity divine, since now
Saviours of Rome no more, and grossly hurled
On head of Vandal, Visigoth, and Hun,
A futile sacrilege! their deathless forms
Buried alive, with none to disinter,
In excrement of ages, breathing still
In subterranean refuges: Rapine, rage
Of multitudinous war, with wave on wave
Of tawny inundation, have entombed

Their monumental effigies, withal
Embalmed in still forgetfulness, and now
Quick to come forth, to slough their sleep, and dawn
Once more upon our sight! I know the spot,—
How often have I crept to it in my sleep!—
Midway the vineyard of the Convent propped
On southern shoulder of the Aventine,
Where, give me shovel and pick, and let me delve,
And I will such a Juno disenshroud,
As, seen, will straight repaganise mankind,
Bring the swoon premature of Pan to end,
Send Hamadryads wantoning through the wood,
And with the wand of her clear loveliness
Rejuvenate Olympus! Now She sleeps
In alabaster stillness, bedded deep
In loamy rubble, rambling olive roots
Knotted about the dimples of her knees.

The newly-feeling fibres of the vine
Fantastically filigree the curve
Of her creased neck, and, thence meandering down
Through the deep valley of her sloping breasts,
Veil the chaste portal of her matron womb.
The iron rust of many-wintered rain
And sodden soil hath brimmed with seeming gold
The fine-drawn furrows of her rippling hair,
And, mindful of her rights, with golden crown
Crested her brow.

Gods! let me go to her!
Achinto! I am coming!

“If He knew,
My austere Sire! How plain I see him now!
His hand and eye intent upon his task,
His heart with God: but Luther's God, not Rome's!

Too straight and simple to do aught but deem
His humble handicraft the highest Art,
If finished faithfully. To cobble shoes,
And be an honest man, or lie, and live
A dainty dilettante, which is best,
Which noblest, worthiest? My dear Mother, too!
What would she say? my Mother with a gaze
Ever as though she just had come from prayer,
Though housewife never blither; and she deemed
That Rome is Antichrist. O, how they drudged,
Day in day out, and far into the night,
That I might be a scholar. Yes—but whose?
Not Jove's, but—‘Mother! anything but that!
I am not fit to preach the word of God.’
So they forbore, and I have laboured on,
Mellowing my mind, but still, still harvestless,
Till now, now, now! when Rome exclaims ‘'Tis ripe,’

And puts the fruitful sickle in my hand.
Both long are dead and resting in their graves,
In dreary Stendhal with its grass-grown ways,
Where everything's forgotten, and the wind
Wails over sand and unremembered bones.
They will not know.

“But if they should! and if
There be, as they believed, a second life,
A world where cobblers are as wise as kings,
And haply higher seated, whence they scan
Our nether doings with unclouded eyes:
A Heaven, as they conceived it, denizened
Not by lascivious Ganymedes, but thronged
With saints and martyrs? Martyrs!—that's the point.
I was not made for martyrdom; and yet,

I think that I could bear the tight stiff stake,
The sudden blaze, the suffocating smoke,
The fiendish fire, one's entrails all a hell,
And every nerve a demon, but at most
Just for one maddening minute, then no more,
Rather than palter with the truth; but not
This long, slow, sullen, endless martyrdom
Of a whole life, the martyrdom of mind,
Which with the torture grows more sensitive,
Nor perishes of the pain. I cannot bear it!
Meek souls, how should they know? 'Twas kind of Nature
With feignings of the Future thus to lull
The living ache, and cozen them till death
Reveals not the deception! But that I
Should of a doubtful promise be the dupe,
Bide in a prison with an open door!

Out on the thought! One life, if only one,
Thus willed, thus wasted, when no fabled Heaven,
But Rome,—Olympus, Paradise, in one,—
In this clear world awaits me!

“But the price?
I had forgot the price. The Greek sage said,
‘The Gods to men sell all things at a price,’
And the divinities of Papal Rome
Drive a hard bargain. They demand my soul,
Or what they call such, better named my Self,
My conscience, honour, fealty to truth,
The very mark and manhood of my mind.
What an exchange! Will nothing less suffice them?
I must believe the unbelievable,
Or piously asseverate I do.

They, with dissimulation not content,
Claim simulation also.

“Never to be an honest man again!
To creep to Lauds and Vespers at the heel
Of punctual Monsignori, portly, sleek,
Too princely to be sceptical, then kneel
And keep a sidelong glance lest any watch
To see one does one's praying properly;
To make pretence to pray, to patter psalms,
With face convinced; to swell my throat and join
In canticles by eunuch voices shrilled,
The unmanlier I! to clasp my breviary,
And wend with suitable and solemn gait
To Mass, ‘Impostor!’ hissing in my ears:
Dip finger in the holy-water stoup,
Then cross myself on forehead, breast, and lips,

To show I know the trick; to genuflect
Just at the proper moment, proper place,
And do it very noticeably lest
Any should guess I burn to stand erect;
Make daily mock of the Great Sacrifice,
And feign to deem it re-enacted there;
To bow my head to—nothing! when a bell
Tinkles, and, husht in incense, every sound
A moment is suspended!—Could I do it?
To sleep, wake, walk, sit, kneel, rise, live, a liar!
Kissing cold relics, mumbling litanies
With sacristans and shavelings,—honest, they,
A perjurer, I! Then, the Confessional!
With nothing to confess,—for truly I
Am not adulterer, murderer, backbiter,
And any day as lief eat fish as flesh,—
And so, 'tis plain, with nothing to confess

Save the one sin I never could confess,
The sin of sins that overtops the rest,
And dwarfs them into virtues! Comedy,
With still the mask on! Peter's self could not
Absolve for such transgression.

[An attendant enters, addresses Wincklemann, and retires.]

“What did he say?
‘His Eminence grows impatient.’ So do I.
Honour, dishonour, true, false, bitter, base,
Grow to a maddening medley in my brain.
Tell him I'm coming. Nuncio! Confessor!
And you, attendant troop of acolytes,
Now hear me make profession of my Faith!
There's nothing under Heaven I won't believe.
I'd sooner be a priest of Cybele,
Than bide imbruted here!