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_ ACT IV - SCENE I
[Night. The church of a convent. Elizabeth, Conrad,
Gerard, Monks, an Abbess, Nuns, etc., in the distance.]
Conrad.
What's this new weakness? At your own request
We come to hear your self-imposed vows--
And now you shrink: where are the high-flown fancies
Which but last week, beside your husband's bier,
You vapoured forth? Will you become a jest?
You might have counted this tower's cost, before
You blazoned thus your plans abroad.
Eliz.
Oh! spare me!
Con.
Spare? Spare yourself; and spare big easy words,
Which prove your knowledge greater than your grace.
Eliz.
Is there no middle path? No way to keep
My love for them, and God, at once unstained?
Con.
If this were God's world, Madam, and not the devil's,
It might be done.
Eliz.
God's world, man! Why, God made it--
The faith asserts it God's.
Con.
Potentially--
As every christened rogue's a child of God,
Or those old hags, Christ's brides--Think of your horn-book--
The world, the flesh, and the devil--a goodly leash!
And yet God made all three. I know the fiend;
And you should know the world: be sure, be sure.
The flesh is not a stork among the cranes.
Our nature, even in Eden gross and vile,
And by miraculous grace alone upheld,
Is now itself, and foul, and damned, must die
Ere we can live; let halting worldlings, madam,
Maunder against earth's ties, yet clutch them still.
Eliz.
And yet God gave them to me--
Con. In the world;
Your babes are yours according to the flesh;
How can you hate the flesh, and love its fruit?
Eliz.
The Scripture bids me love them.
Con.
Truly so,
While you are forced to keep them; when God's mercy
Doth from the flesh and world deliverance offer,
Letting you bestow them elsewhere, then your love
May cease with its own usefulness, and the spirit
Range in free battle lists; I'll not waste reasons--
We'll leave you, Madam, to the Spirit's voice.
[Conrad and Gerard withdraw.]
Eliz. [alone].
Give up his children! Why, I'd not give up
A lock of hair, a glove his hand had hallowed:
And they are his gift; his pledge; his flesh and blood
Tossed off for my ambition! Ah! my husband!
His ghost's sad eyes upbraid me! Spare me, spare me!
I'd love thee still, if I dared; but I fear God.
And shall I never more see loving eyes
Look into mine, until my dying day?
That's this world's bondage: Christ would have me free,
And 'twere a pious deed to cut myself
The last, last strand, and fly: but whither? whither?
What if I cast away the bird i' the hand
And found none in the bush? 'Tis possible--
What right have I to arrogate Christ's bride-bed?
Crushed, widowed, sold to traitors? I, o'er whom
His billows and His storms are sweeping? God's not angry:
No, not so much as we with buzzing fly;
Or in the moment of His wrath's awakening
We should be--nothing. No--there's worse than that--
What if He but sat still, and let be be?
And these deep sorrows, which my vain conceit
Calls chastenings--meant for me--my ailments' cure--
Were lessons for some angels far away,
And I the corpus vile for the experiment?
The grinding of the sharp and pitiless wheels
Of some high Providence, which had its mainspring
Ages ago, and ages hence its end?
That were too horrible!--
To have torn up all the roses from my garden,
And planted thorns instead; to have forged my griefs,
And hugged the griefs I dared not forge; made earth
A hell, for hope of heaven; and after all,
These homeless moors of life toiled through, to wake,
And find blank nothing! Is that angel-world
A gaudy window, which we paint ourselves
To hide the dead void night beyond? The present?
Why here's the present--like this arched gloom,
It hems our blind souls in, and roofs them over
With adamantine vault, whose only voice
Is our own wild prayers' echo: and our future?--
It rambles out in endless aisles of mist,
The farther still the darker--O my Saviour!
My God! where art Thou? That's but a tale about Thee,
That crucifix above--it does but show Thee
As Thou wast once, but not as Thou art now--
Thy grief, but not Thy glory: where's that gone?
I see it not without me, and within me
Hell reigns, not Thou!
[Dashes herself down on the altar steps.]
[Monks in the distance chanting.]
'Kings' daughters were among thine honourable women'--
Eliz.
Kings' daughters! I am one!
Monks.
'Hearken, O daughter, and consider; incline thine ear:
Forget also thine own people, and thy father's house,
So shall the King have pleasure in thy beauty:
For He is thy Lord God, and worship thou Him.'
Eliz.
[springing up].
I will forget them!
They stand between my soul and its allegiance.
Thou art my God: what matter if Thou love me?
I am Thy bond-slave, purchased with Thy life-blood;
I will remember nothing, save that debt.
Do with me what Thou wilt. Alas, my babies!
He loves them--they'll not need me.
[Conrad advancing.]
Con.
How now, Madam!
Have these your prayers unto a nobler will
Won back that wandering heart?
Eliz.
God's will is spoken!
The flesh is weak; the spirit's fixed, and dares,--
Stay! confess, sir,
Did not yourself set on your brothers here
To sing me to your purpose?
Con.
As I live
I meant it not; yet had I bribed them to it,
Those words were no less God's.
Eliz.
I know it, I know it;
And I'll obey them: come, the victim's ready.
[Lays her hand on the altar. Gerard, Abbess,
and Monks descend and advance.]
All worldly goods and wealth, which once I loved,
I do now count but dross: and my beloved,
The children of my womb, I now regard
As if they were another's. God is witness
My pride is to despise myself; my joy
All insults, sneers, and slanders of mankind;
No creature now I love, but God alone.
Oh, to be clear, clear, clear, of all but Him!
Lo, here I strip me of all earthly helps--
[Tearing off her clothes.]
Naked and barefoot through the world to follow
My naked Lord--And for my filthy pelf--
Con.
Stop, Madam--
Eliz.
Why so, sir?
Con.
Upon thine oath!
Thy wealth is God's, not thine--How darest renounce
The trust He lays on thee? I do command thee,
Being, as Aaron, in God's stead, to keep it
Inviolate, for the Church and thine own needs.
Eliz.
Be it so--I have no part nor lot in't--
There--I have spoken.
Abbess.
O noble soul! which neither gold, nor love,
Nor scorn can bend!
Gerard.
And think what pure devotions,
What holy prayers must they have been, whose guerdon
Is such a flood of grace!
Nuns.
What love again!
What flame of charity, which thus prevails
In virtue's guest!
Eliz.
Is self-contempt learnt thus?
I'll home.
Abbess.
And yet how blest, in these cool shades
To rest with us, as in a land-locked pool,
Touched last and lightest by the ruffling breeze.
Eliz.
No! no! no! no! I will not die in the dark:
I'll breathe the free fresh air until the last,
Were it but a month--I have such things to do--
Great schemes--brave schemes--and such a little time!
Though now I am harnessed light as any foot-page.
Come, come, my ladies. [Exeunt Elizabeth, etc.]
Ger.
Alas, poor lady!
Con.
Why alas, my son?
She longs to die a saint, and here's the way to it.
Ger.
Yet why so harsh? why with remorseless knife
Home to the stem prune back each bough and bud?
I thought the task of education was
To strengthen, not to crush; to train and feed
Each subject toward fulfilment of its nature,
According to the mind of God, revealed
In laws, congenital with every kind
And character of man.
Con.
A heathen dream!
Young souls but see the gay and warm outside,
And work but in the shallow upper soil.
Mine deeper, and the sour and barren rock
Will stop you soon enough. Who trains God's Saints,
He must transform, not pet--Nature's corrupt throughout--
A gaudy snake, which must be crushed, not tamed,
A cage of unclean birds, deceitful ever;
Born in the likeness of the fiend, which Adam
Did at the Fall, the Scripture saith, put on.
Canst thou draw out Leviathan with a hook,
To make him sport for thy maidens? Scripture saith
Who is the prince of this world--so forget not.
Ger.
Forgive, if my more weak and carnal judgment
Be startled by your doctrines, and doubt trembling
The path whereon you force yourself and her.
Con.
Startled? Belike--belike--let doctrines be;
Thou shalt be judged by thy works; so see to them,
And let divines split hairs: dare all thou canst;
Be all thou darest;--that will keep thy brains full.
Have thy tools ready, God will find thee work--
Then up, and play the man. Fix well thy purpose--
Let one idea, like an orbed sun,
Rise radiant in thine heaven; and then round it
All doctrines, forms, and disciplines will range
As dim parhelia, or as needful clouds,
Needful, but mist-begotten, to be dashed
Aside, when fresh shall serve thy purpose better.
Ger.
How? dashed aside?
Con.
Yea, dashed aside--why not?
The truths, my son, are safe in God's abysses--
While we patch up the doctrines to look like them.
The best are tarnished mirrors--clumsy bridges,
Whereon, as on firm soil, the mob may walk
Across the gulf of doubt, and know no danger.
We, who see heaven, may see the hell which girds it.
Blind trust for them. When I came here from Rome,
Among the Alps, all through one frost-bound dawn,
Waiting with sealed lips the noisy day,
I walked upon a marble mead of snow--
An angel's spotless plume, laid there for me:
Then from the hillside, in the melting noon,
Looked down the gorge, and lo! no bridge, no snow--
But seas of writhing glacier, gashed and scored
With splintered gulfs, and fathomless crevasses,
Blue lips of hell, which sucked down roaring rivers
The fiends who fled the sun. The path of Saints
Is such; so shall she look from heaven, and see
The road which led her thither. Now we'll go,
And find some lonely cottage for her lodging;
Her shelter now is but a crumbling ruin
Roofed in with pine boughs--discipline more healthy
For soul, than body: She's not ripe for death.
[Exeunt.] _
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