An old book called _The Mirror of the Months_, published anonymously in
1826, seemed, at a glance, to a random reader, to contain little thin
springs of thoughts that walked the world in volume and dignity fifty
years later. There was nothing else to hint that the book was the work
of the father of a poet, but the father of one among all poets was
manifestly the author. Soon after, the same reader found it attributed,
in a bookseller’s catalogue, to P. G. Patmore.
The earliest or the directest spring is called the source of a river;
but we know not how far apart and on what scattered watersheds rose the
tributary waters, early and late, that filled a splendid summoning and
gathering stream, and charged it with rains of the four courts of
heaven. It need not dismay us to find the one discoverable source to be
something so slight as—for example—a passage on the month of February in
_The Mirror of the Months_ (it is hardly worth quoting) whereof the ode
on ‘St. Valentine’s Day’ of Coventry Patmore was the ultimate
fulfilment. Yet a reader may be reluctant to find a small thought, lying
cold in a minor mind, to be the certain beginning of a great thought in
an illustrious mind; the perfectly recognizable yet insignificant origin
of what we love is more surprising than would be a stranger beginning.
Perhaps we feel this unwelcome surprise because we had been too ready to
believe that what is original is strong, and what is original is warm.
It was easier to think of a first impulse tiring or becoming more
composed, of a passion gradually losing light and flame, than of this
increase, kindling, and quickening. It is because the small source of
‘St. Valentine’s Day’ is really authentic that its inadequacy does
little less than startle us. At any rate the incident is one that may
instruct us in the history of that second step which is momentous in
intellectual things.
Furthermore, the ambiguous questions of heredity seem thereby to gain in
mystery; and some things must needs gain in mystery before we can at all
undertake to think upon them. Without mystery they are all obscure. Who
can think, for instance, of the infinity of space without adding
inconceivable things to his meditation? And, in like manner, the bond of
fathers and sons seems to become somewhat more intelligible if we add to
the comparatively easy thought of the responsibility of a father for the
mind of a child some confession of the retrospective answer to be
exacted from the child, inasmuch as in the child is the fulfilment of
what was but prophesied in the father, whom the son at last justifies.
In 1826 Leigh Hunt must have dominated unduly. _The Mirror of the
Months_ would evidently have been graver, fresher, and more frank, in
thought and in English alike, but for the example of the excessive
amiability that makes Leigh Hunt’s poem of _Rimini_, among others,
ridiculous. It was a mere fashion, apparently, and it is not difficult
to imagine that even Leigh Hunt could talk with a better simplicity than
the simplicity of the universal literary smile he practised in his
books. There is something that does but ape the humane, the liberal, the
gracious. It is an early nineteenth-century attempt at the favour and
prettiness of the Elizabethans, with an absolute rejection of the
Elizabethan ‘horrors’.
Yet without ‘horrors’, without a real murder among the dances, without
royal madness embowered, and noble distraction wearing flowers, without
the wild convention, without the noble spirit, wilder than nature—a
barbaric artifice outfacing nature—what were the Elizabethan favour and
prettiness worth? Nay, they would never have been there but to adorn
frightful deeds. The men of a hundred years ago took one part and left
the other, and were delighted in the civilized choice they had the
grace—as they held it—to make, in a tolerant rebuke, in a liberal
approval, of the great past. And see the fruit of that choice. Not being
fond of Leigh Hunt, I had not read _Rimini_ until a year or two ago, and
now already the most conspicuous memory I have of the story of that poem
is the memory of an incidental picnic.
It is possible, of course, that my angry fancy may have exaggerated the
cause of its own derision—and that the event sung in the canto in
question may have been some modification of a picnic; as it were a
mitigated picnic; I have not the poem for reference. Nevertheless, there
stands a picnic of some sort—a contribution of the English man of
letters to the story of the Adriatic cities and of the antecedents of
Dante’s Hell.
A picnic, I maintain it, a drive, a cloth under the trees, are there. I
am quite certain, at any rate, that the place chosen therefor is called
by Leigh Hunt, in so many words, ‘a rural spot’.
A far greater man than Leigh Hunt—nay, there is no common measure of
comparison—has, by some ill luck, at nearly the same moment of our
literary history, also made the same Francesca da Rimini the subject of
some entirely nineteenth-century feeling. I speak of Walter Savage
Landor, and of the exquisite passage of the _Imaginary Conversations_
(the _Pentameron_). What he does he does, unlike Leigh Hunt, with
genius; but—one must have the courage to say so—in error as complete as
the little writer’s. The reader may be reminded of that tender page
about Francesca: ‘She stops: she would avert the eyes of Dante from her:
he looks for the sequel: she thinks he looks severely: she says,
“Galeotto is the name of the book,” fancying by this timorous little
flight she has drawn him far enough from the nest of her young loves.
No, the eagle beak of Dante and his piercing eyes are yet over her.
“Galeotto is the name of the book.” “What matters that?” “And of the
writer.” “Or that either?” At last she disarms him; but how? “_That_ day
we read no more.” Such a depth of intuitive judgement, such a delicacy
of perception, exists not in any other work of human genius.’ And this
judgement, for greater misfortune, he puts into the mouth of Boccaccio,
because he loved him, and intended that he should speak from Landor’s
heart; and so, indeed, he does. But the day of Boccaccio was not ours,
and there is no possible exchange of hearts. Are we candid if we
persuade ourselves to find these pauses in the speech of Francesca? I
protest that I read the line in one cold breath of almost indifferent
anger. ‘The name of the book’, as Landor has it, is not in Dante at all.
‘A pander was that book, and the writer thereof,’ is simply what the
Francesca of Dante says.[2]
Footnote 2:
Francesca calls the book a Galeotto and him who wrote it a Galeotto,
because ‘Galeotto’ was then the synonym for ‘pander’. Galeotto
(Gallehault) was he who brought Lancilotto and Ginevra to their first
sin, according to the _Tavola Rotonda_, a romance popular in
Francesca’s time. Dante had none of the pretty and complex meanings
imputed to him by Landor. Dante, the insistent moralist, simply
intended a simple warning against dangerous reading; he was in this
obedient to a Bull (in 1313) whereby the Pope condemned _La Tavola
Rotonda_—one of the earliest books to be thus banned.
To come back to _The Mirror of the Months_. This is a volume so full of
charm that it is something less than just to reproach it so hastily with
Leigh Hunt’s universal literary smile. Something of that it has, indeed,
but it has also the smile of spirit and that of sweetness. Of two wits
of yesterday two phrases, for example, are familiar in admiring
quotation: ‘The age of indiscretion’, and ‘Yes, nature is creeping up’,
or, in another form, ‘Not like his portrait? He _will_ be like it.’
Every one recognizes the phrases so well that there is perhaps not a
reader in England who needs to be more than reminded of them. Now ‘the
age of indiscretion’ is in _The Mirror of the Months_, where it got no
fame, or little; and ‘Nature is creeping up’ is fairly anticipated in
the passage: ‘Cattle wade into the shallow pools of warm water, and
stand half the day there stock still, in exact imitation of Cuyp’s
pictures.’ Take this description of the parent birds’ business of
bringing out their young broods and dismissing them, ‘while they (the
parents) proceed in their periodical duty of providing new flocks of the
same kind of “fugitive pieces”, as regularly as the editors of a
magazine.’ And this for a mere laugh: ‘The only specific reason why I
object to March is that she drives hares mad; which is a great fault.’
Moreover, the procession and recession of the year is here noted in the
garden and in the open field of England by senses full of spirit. The
separate and atmospheric effect of an oat-field among all other grain is
well expressed in the phrase where the oats are said to hang ‘like
raindrops in the air’. And the author has eyes for the scarcely
perceptible and most slender growth that in July pricks through the
short and level turf and makes the grassy downs live in the winds, as
poplars make the woods. ‘April’, says this forgotten writer, ‘is worth
two Mays, because it tells of May’—a subtlety somewhat like that of his
son’s minor fancies.
And finally another small spring of the poetry to come in the following
generation is in the mere phrase ‘The pomp of health and the lustre of
loveliness’. Coventry Patmore, with the poet’s finer verbal art, had
afterwards
So much simplicity of mind
In such a pomp of loveliness.