The most austere poet of our time, Coventry Patmore, conceived of art as
a sort of abstract ecstasy, whose source, limit and end are that supreme
wisdom which is the innermost essence of love. Thus the whole of his
work, those "bitter, sweet, few and veiled" songs, which are the fruit
of two out of his seventy years, is love-poetry; and it is love-poetry
of a quite unique kind. In the earlier of his two books, _The Angel in
the House_, we see him, in the midst of a scientific generation (in
which it was supposed that by adding prose to poetry you doubled the
value of poetry) unable to escape the influence of his time, desperately
set on doing the wrong thing by design, yet unable to keep himself from
often doing the right thing by accident. In his later book, _The Unknown
Eros_, he has achieved the proper recognition of himself, the full
consciousness of the means to his own end; and it is by _The Unknown
Eros_ that he will love, if it is enough claim to immortality to have
written the most devout, subtle and sublimated love-poetry of our
century.
Patmore tells us in _The Angel in the House_ that it was his intention
to write
That hymn for which the whole world longs,
A worthy hymn in woman's praise.
But at that time his only conception of woman was the conception of
woman as the lady. Now poetry has nothing whatever to do with woman as
the lady; it is in the novel, the comedy of manners, that we expect the
society of ladies. Prose, in the novel and the drama, is at liberty to
concern itself with those secondary emotions which come into play in our
familiar intercourse with one another; with those conventions which are
the "evening dress" by which our varying temperaments seek the disguise
of an outward uniformity; with those details of life which are also, in
a sense, details of costume, and thus of value to the teller of a tale,
the actor on a stage. But the poet who endeavors to bring all this
machinery of prose into the narrow and self-sufficing limits of verse is
as fatally doomed to failure as the painter who works after photographs,
instead of from the living model. At the time when _The Angel_ was
written, the heresy of the novel in verse was in the air. Were there
not, before and after it, the magnificent failure of _Aurora Leigh_, the
ineffectual, always interesting, endeavors of Clough, and certain more
careful, more sensitive, never quite satisfactory, experiments of
Tennyson? Patmore went his own way, to a more ingenious failure than
any. _The Angel in the House_ is written with exquisite neatness,
occasional splendor; it is the very flower of the poetry of convention;
and is always lifting the trivialities and the ingenuities to which, for
the most part, it restricts itself, miraculously near to that height
which, now and again, in such lines as _The Revelation_, it fully
attains. But it is not here, it is in _The Unknown Eros_ alone, that
Patmore has given immortality to what is immortal in perishable things.
How could it be otherwise, when the whole force of the experiment lies
in the endeavor to say essentially unpoetical things in a poetical
manner?
Give me the power of saying things
Too simple and too sweet for words,
was his wise, reasonable, and afterward answered prayer. Was it after
the offering of such a prayer that he wrote of
Briggs,
Factotum, Footman, Butler, Groom?
But it is not merely of such "vulgar errors" as this that we have to
complain, it is of the very success, the indisputable achievement, of
all but the most admirable parts of the poem. The subtlety, the fineness
of analysis, the simplified complexity, of such things as _The Changed
Allegiance_, can scarcely be overpraised as studies in "the dreadful
heart of woman," from the point of view of a shrewd, kindly, somewhat
condescending, absolutely clear-eyed observer, so dispassionate that he
has not even the privilege of an illusion, so impartial that you do not
even do his fervor the compliment of believing it possible that his
perfect Honoria had, after all, defects. But in all this, admirable as
it is, there is nothing which could not have been as well said in prose.
It is the point of view of the egoist, of the "marrying man," to whom
Each beauty blossomed in the sight
Of tender personal regard.
Woman is observed always in reference to the man who fancies she may
prove worthy to be his "predestined mate," and it seems to him his
highest boast that he is
proud
To take his passion into church.
At its best, this is the poetry of "being in love," not of love; of
affection, not passion. Passion is a thing of flame, rarely burning
pure, or without danger to him that holds that wind-blown torch in his
hand; while affection, such as this legalized affection of _The Angel in
the House_, is a gentle and comfortable warmth, as of a hearth-side. It
is that excellent, not quite essential, kind of love which need endure
neither pain nor revolt; for it has conquered the world on the world's
terms.
Woman, as she is seen in _The Angel in the House_, is a delightful,
adorable, estimable, prettily capricious child; demonstrably finite,
capturable, a butterfly not yet Psyche. It is the severest judgment on
her poet that she is never a mystery to him. For all art is founded on
mystery, and to the poet, as to the child, the whole world is
mysterious. There are experts who tell me that this world, and life, and
the flowing of times past into times to come, are but a simple matter
after all: the jarring of this atom against that, a growth by explicable
degrees from a germ perhaps not altogether inexplicable. And there are
the experts in woman, who will explain to me the bright disarray of her
caprices, the strangeness of her moods, the unreason of her sway over
man; assuring me that she is mysterious only because she is not seen
through, and that she can never be seen through because into the depths
of emptiness one can see but a little distance. Not of such is the true
lover, the true poet. To him woman is as mysterious as the night of
stars, and all he learns of her is but to deepen the mystery which
surrounds her as with clouds. To him she is Fate, an unconscious part of
what is eternal in things; and, being the liveliest image of beauty, she
is to be reverenced for her beauty, as the saints are reverenced for
their virtue. What is it to me if you tell me that she is but the
creature of a day, prized for her briefness, as we prize flowers; loved
for her egoism, as we love infants; marveled at for the exquisite and
audacious completeness of her ignorance? Or what is it to me if you tell
me that she is all that a lady should be, infinitely perfect in
pettiness; and that her choice will reward the calculations of a
gentleman? If she is not a flame, devouring and illuminating, and if
your passion for her is not as another consuming and refining flame,
each rushing into either that both may be commingled in a brighter
ecstasy, you have not seen woman as it is the joy of the poet and the
lover to see her; and your fine distinctions, your disentangling of
sensations, your subtleties of interpretation, will be at the best but
of the subject of prose, revealing to me what is transitory in the
eternal rather than what is eternal in the transitory. The art of
Coventry Patmore, in _The Angel in the House_, is an art founded on this
scientific conception of woman. But the poet, who began by thinking of
woman as being at her best a perfect lady, ended by seeing her seated a
little higher than the angels, at the right hand of the Madonna, of whom
indeed she is a scarcely lower symbol. She who was a bright and
cherished toy in _The Angel in the House_ becomes in _The Unknown Eros_
pure spirit, the passionate sister of the pure idea. She is the mystical
rose of beauty, the female half of that harmony of opposites which is
God. She has other names, and is the Soul, the Church, the Madonna. To
be her servant is to be the servant of all right, the enemy of all
wrong; and therefore poems of fierce patriotism, and disdainful
condemnation of the foolish and vulgar who are the adversaries of God's
ordinances and man's, find their appropriate place among poems of tender
human pathos, of ecstatic human and divine love.
And she is now, at last, apprehended under her most essential aspect, as
the supreme mystery and her worship becomes an almost secret ritual, of
which none but the adepts can fathom the full significance.
Vision, in _The Unknown Eros_, is too swift, immediate and far-seeing to
be clouded by the delicate veils of dreams.
Give me the steady heat
Of thought wise, splendid, sweet,
Urged by the great, rejoicing wind that rings
With draught of unseen wings,
Making each phrase, for love and for delight,
Twinkle like Sirius on a frosty night:
that is his prayer, and it was not needful for him to
remain
Content to ask unlikely gifts in vain.
Out of this love-poetry all but the very essence of passion has been
consumed; and love is seen to be the supreme wisdom, even more than the
supreme delight. Apprehended on every side, and with the same
controlling ardor, those "frightful nuptials" of the Dove and Snake,
which are one of his allegories, lead upward, on the wings of an almost
aerial symbolism, to those all but inaccessible heights where mortal
love dies into that intense, self-abnegating, intellectual passion,
which we name the love of God.
At this height, at its very highest, his art becomes abstract ecstasy.
It was one of his contentions, in that beautiful book of prose, _Religio
Poetae_, in which thought is sustained throughout at almost the lyrical
pitch, that the highest art is not emotional, and that "the music of
Handel, the poetry of Aeschylus, and the architecture of the Parthenon
are appeals to a sublime good sense which takes scarcely any account of
'the emotions.'" Not the highest art only, but all art, if it is so much
as to come into existence, must be emotional; for it is only emotion
which puts life into the death-like slumber of words, of stones, of the
figures on a clef. But emotion may take any shape, may inform the least
likely of substances. Is not all music a kind of divine mathematics, and
is not mathematics itself a rapture to the true adept? To Patmore
abstract things were an emotion, became indeed the highest emotion of
which he was capable; and that joy, which he notes as the mark of fine
art, that peace, which to him was the sign of great art, themselves, the
most final of the emotions, interpenetrated for him the whole substance
of thought, aspiration, even argument. Never were arguments at once so
metaphysical and so mystical, so precise, analytic and passionate as
those "high arguments" which fill these pages with so thrilling a life.
The particular subtlety of Patmore's mysticism finds perhaps its
counterpart in the writings of certain of the Catholic mystics: it has
at once the clear-eyed dialectic of the Schoolmen and the august heat of
Saint Theresa. Here is passion which analyzes itself, and yet with so
passionate a complexity that it remains passion. Read, for instance,
that eulogy of "Pain," which is at once a lyric rapture, and betrays an
almost unholy depth of acquaintance with the hidden, tortuous and
delightful way of sensation. Read that song of songs, _Deliciae
Sapientiae de Amore_, which seems to speak, with the tongue of angels,
all the secrets of all those "to whom generous Love, by any name, is
dear." Read that other, interrupted song,
Building new bulwarks 'gainst the infinite,
"_Legem tuam dilexi._" Read those perhaps less quintessential dialogues
in which a personified Psyche seeks wisdom of Eros and the Pythoness.
And then, if you would realize how subtle an argument in verse may be,
how elegantly and happily expressed, and yet not approach, at its
highest climb, the point from which these other arguments in verse take
flight, turn to _The Angel in the House_ and read "The Changed
Allegiance." The difference is the difference between wisdom and worldly
wisdom: wisdom being the purified and most ardent emotion of the
intellect, and thus of the very essence of poetry; while worldly wisdom
is but the dispassionate ingenuity of the intelligence, and thus of not
so much as the highest substance of prose.
The word "glittering," which Patmore so frequently uses, and always with
words which soften its sharpness, may be applied, not unsuitably, to
much of his writing in this book: a "glittering peace" does indeed seem
to illuminate it. The writing throughout is classical, in a sense in
which perhaps no other writing of our time is classical. When he says of
the Virgin:
Therefore, holding a little thy soft breath,
Thou underwent'st the ceremony of death;
or, of the eternal paradox of love:
Tis but in such captivity
The unbounded Heavens know what they be;
when he cries:
O Love, that, like a rose,
Deckest my breast with beautiful repose;
or speaks of "this fond indignity, delight;" he is, though with an
entirely personal accent, writing in the purest classical tradition. He
was accustomed always, in his counsels to young writers, to reiterate
that saying of Aristotle, that in the language of poetry there should be
"a continual slight novelty;" and I remember that he would point to his
own work, with that legitimate pride in himself which was one of the
fierce satisfactions of his somewhat lonely and unacknowledged old age.
There is in every line of _The Unknown Eros_ that continual slight
novelty which makes classical poetry, certainly, classical. Learned in
every meter, Patmore never wrote but in one, the iambic: and there was a
similar restraint, a similar refusal of what was good, but not (as he
conceived) the highest good, all strangeness of beauty, all trouble,
curiosity, the splendor of excess, in the words and substance of his
writing. I find no exception even in that fiercely aristocratic
political verse, which is the very rapture of indignation and wrath
against such things as seemed to him worthy to be hated of God.
Like Landor, with whom he had other points of resemblance, Coventry
Patmore was a good hater. May one not say, like all great lovers? He
hated the mob, because he saw in it the "amorous and vehement drift of
Man's herd to hell." He hated Protestantism, because he saw in it a
weakening of the bonds of spiritual order. He hated the Protestantism of
modern art, its revolt against the tradition of the "true Church," the
many heresies of its many wanderings after a strange, perhaps forbidden,
beauty. Art was to him religion, as religion was to him the supreme art.
He was a mystic who found in Catholicism the sufficing symbols of those
beliefs which were the deepest emotions of his spirit. It was a
necessity to him to be dogmatic, and he gave to even his petulances the
irresistible sanction of the Church.
_Religio Poetae_ contains twenty-three short essays--many of them rather
sermons than essays--on such topics as "Peace in Life and Art, Ancient
and Modern Ideas of Purity, Emotional Art, Conscience, Distinction."
There is nothing which marks it as of the present but an occasional
personality, which we could wish absent, and a persistent habit of
self-quotation. There is absolutely no popular appeal, no extraneous
interest in the timeliness of subject, or the peculiarities of
treatment; nothing, in fact, to draw the notice of the average reader or
to engage his attention. To the average reader the book must be nothing
but the vainest speculation and the dullest theory. Yet, in many ways,
it is one of the most beautiful and notable works in prose that have
appeared in recent years. It is a book, argumentative as it is, which
one is not called on so much to agree with or dissent from as to ponder
over, and to accept, in a certain sense, for its own sake. Patmore is
one of the few surviving defenders of the faith, and that alone gives
him an interesting position among contemporary men of letters. He is a
Christian and a Catholic, that is to say the furthest logical
development of the dogmatic Christian; but he is also a mystic; and his
spiritual apprehensions are so vivid that he is never betrayed into
dogmatic narrowness without the absolution of an evident vision and
conviction. And, above all, he is a poet; one of the most essential
poets of our time, not on account of the dinner-table domesticities of
_The Angel in the House_, but by reason of the sublimated love-poetry of
_The Unknown Eros_, with its extraordinary subtlety of thought and
emotion, rendered with the faultless simplicity of an elaborate and
conscious art. His prose is everywhere the prose of a poet. Thought, in
him, is of the very substance of poetry, and is sustained throughout at
almost the lyrical pitch. There is, in these essays, a rarefied air as
of the mountain-tops of meditation; and the spirit of their pondering
over things, their sometimes remote contemplation, is always, in one
sense, as Pater has justly said of Wordsworth, impassioned. Each essay
in itself may at once be said to be curiously incomplete or fragmentary,
and yet singularly well related as a part to a whole, the effect of
continuity coming from the fact that these are the occasional
considerations of a mind which, beyond that of most men, is consistent
and individual. Not less individual than the subject-matter is the
style, which in its gravity and sweetness, its fine, unforbidding
austerity, its smooth harmony--a harmony produced by the use of simple
words subtly--is unlike that of any contemporary writer, though much
akin to Patmore's own poetic style.
The subjects with which these essays deal may be grouped under three
heads: religion, art and woman. In all Patmore's attitude is intensely
conservative and aristocratic--fiercely contemptuous of popular idols
and ideals, whenever he condescends to notice them. The very daring and
very logical essay on "Christianity and Progress" is the clearest and
most cogent statement of Christianity as an aristocracy, in opposition
to the current modern view of it as a democracy, that has been made
since the democratic spirit made its way into the pulpit. "Let not such
as these," says Patmore,
exalt themselves against the great Masters of the experimental science
of Life, one of whom--St. Theresa, if I remember rightly--declares that
more good is done by one minute of reciprocal communion of love with God
than by the founding of fifty hospitals or of fifty churches.
It is from this point of view that Patmore writes:
Many people doubt whether Christianity has done much, or even anything,
for the "progress" of the human race as a race; and there is more to be
said in defence of such doubt than most good people suppose. Indeed, the
expression of this doubt is very widely considered as shocking and
irreligious; and as condemnatory of Christianity altogether. It is
considered to be equivalent to an assertion that Christianity has
hitherto proved a "failure." But some who do not consider that
Christianity has proved a failure, do, nevertheless, hold that it is
open to question whether the race, as a race, has been much affected by
it, and whether the external and visible evil and good which have come
of it do not pretty nearly balance one another.
It is with the same view of things, from the same standpoint, that Mr.
Patmore states his ideal of the poetic art, and condemns what he
considers the current misconception of the subject. "I may go further,"
he declares, in his vivacious attack on "Emotional Art,"
and say that no art can appeal "to the emotions only" with the faintest
hope of even the base success it aspires to. The pathos of such art (and
pathos is its greatest point) is wholly due to a more or less vivid
expression of a vague remorse at its divorce from truth and order. The
Dame aux Camelias sighs in all Chopin's music over her lost virtue,
which, however, she shows no anxiety to recover, and the characteristic
expression of the most recent and popular school of poetry and painting
is a ray of the same sickly and in the most part hypocritical homage to
virtue. Without some such homage even the dying and super-sensitive body
of "emotional art" loses its very faintest pretensions to the name of
art, and becomes the confessed carion of Offenbach's operas and the
music-hall. Atheism in art, as well as in life, has only to be pressed
to its last consequences in order to become ridiculous, no less than
disastrous; and the "ideal," in the absence of an idea or intellectual
reality, becomes the "realism" of the brothel and the shambles.
What, then, is the ideal, the proper substance and manner of poetry? It
is thus defined in another essay, which contends that "Bad Morality is
Bad Art:"
The poet, as a rule, should avoid religion altogether as a direct
subject. Law, the rectitude of humanity, should be his only subject, as,
from time immemorial, it has been the subject of true art, though many a
true artist has done the Muse's will and knew it not. As all the music
of verse arises, not from infraction, but inflection of the law of the
set metre, so the greatest poets have been those the modulus of whose
verse has been most variously and delicately inflected, in
correspondence with feelings and passions which are the inflections of
moral law in their theme. Masculine law is always, however obscurely,
the theme of the true poet; the feeling and its correspondent rhythm,
its feminine inflection, without which the law has no sensitive or
poetic life. Art is thus constituted because it is the constitution of
life, all the grace and sweetness of which arise from inflection of law,
not from infraction of it, as bad men and bad poets fancy.
Again from the same standpoint, again with the same absolute and
aristocratic outlook on the world, does Patmore "sing of the nature of
woman"--the subject of his constant preoccupation as an artist, the one
sufficing subject to which he has devoted all his art. The modern woman,
one may suppose, is not likely to appreciate the precise manner in which
Patmore exalts her sex. It is far too logical, too reasonable, too
scrupulously according to nature; thus, for example, in a passage of
characteristically delicate wit:
It is "of faith" that the woman's claim to the honour of man lies in the
fact of her being the "weaker vessel." It would be of no use to prove
what every Christian man and woman is bound to believe, and what is,
indeed, obvious to the senses of any sane man or woman whatever. But a
few words of random comment on the text may, by adding to faith
knowledge, make man and woman--woman especially--more thankful than
before for those conditions which constitute the chief felicity of her
life and his, and which it is one of the chief triumphs of progress to
render ever more and more manifest. The happiest result of the "higher
education" of woman cannot fail to consist in the rendering of her
weakness more and more daintily conspicuous. How much sweeter to dry the
tears that flow because one cannot accede to some demonstrable fallacy
in her theory of variable stars, than to kiss her into conformity to the
dinner-hour or the fitness or unfitness of such-or-such a person to be
asked to a picnic! How much more dulcet the _dulcis Amaryllidis ira_
when Amaryllis knows Sophocles and Hegel by heart, than when her
accomplishments extend only to a moderate proficiency in French and the
pianoforte! It is a great consolation to reflect that, among all the
bewildering changes to which the world is subject, the character of
woman cannot be altered; and that, so long as she abstains from absolute
outrages against nature--such as divided skirts, freethinking,
tricycles, and Radicalism--neither Greek, nor conic sections, nor
political economy, nor cigarettes, nor athletics, can ever really do
other than enhance the charm of that sweet unreasonableness which
humbles the gods to the dust, and compels them to adore the lace below
the last hem of her brocade!
Such, then, and so consistent, is Patmore's attitude in matters of
religion, of art, and of the relation of man and woman. We are concerned
neither to defend nor to contend against it, admitting only that,
granted the premises (which, no doubt, can be taken on certain grave and
ancient warrants), the deductions from those premises are strictly
logical, and at the present day, as novel as they are logical. Patmore
is inclined to be petulant, and he occasionally rides a hobby-horse so
recklessly as to commit himself to incredible fallacies. But a book
which attains perfection has never yet been produced, and Patmore's is
close, very close indeed.