Page:Aurora Leigh a Poem.djvu/69

60 Were twice as wretched as you represent, Most serious work, most necessary work, As any of the economists’. Reform, Make trade a Christian possibility, And individual right no general wrong; Wipe out earth’s furrows of the Thine and Mine, And leave one green, for men to play at bowls; With innings for them all! . . what then, indeed, If mortals were not greater by the head Than any of their prosperities? what then, Unless the artist keep up open roads Betwixt the seen and unseen,—bursting through The best of your conventions with his best The unspeakable, imaginable best God bids him speak, to prove what lies beyond Both speech and imagination? A starved man Exceeds a fat beast: we’ll not barter, sir, The beautiful for barley.—And, even so, I hold you will not compass your poor ends Of barley-feeding and material ease, Without a poet’s individualism To work your universal. It takes a soul, To move a body: it takes a high-souled man, To move the masses. . even to a cleaner stye: It takes the ideal, to blow a hair’s breadth off The dust of the actual.—Ah, your Fouriers failed, Because not poets enough to understand That life develops from within.—For me, Perhaps I am not worthy, as you say, Of work like this! . . perhaps a woman’s soul