clever book on Browning to entitle me to judge of it as well as if
I had read the whole. He does not seem to me to be quite qualified,
as yet, for this kind of criticism. He does not seem to have
attained to the point of view from which all great critics have
judged poetry and art in general. He does not see that, in art, the
style in which a thing is said or done is of more importance than
the thing said or done. Indeed, he does not appear to know what
style means. Browning has an immense deal of mannerism--which in
art is always bad;--he has, in his few best passages, manner, which
as far as it goes is good; but of style--that indescribable
reposeful 'breath of a pure and unique individuality'--I recognise
no trace, though I find it distinctly enough in almost every other
English poet who has obtained so distinguished a place as Browning
has done in the estimation of the better class of readers. I do not
pretend to say absolutely that style does not exist in Browning's
work; but, if so, its 'still small voice' is utterly overwhelmed,
for me, by the din of the other elements. I think I can see, in
Browning's poetry, all that Mr. Symons sees, though not perhaps all
that he fancies he sees. But I also discern a want of which he
appears to feel nothing; and those defects of manner which he
acknowledges, but thinks little of, are to me most distressing, and
fatal to all enjoyment of the many brilliant qualities they are
mixed up with.--Yours very truly,
COVENTRY PATMORE.
Campbell, I suppose, protested in his vigorous fashion against the
criticism of Browning, and the answer to that letter, dated May 7, is
printed on p. 264 of the second volume of Mr. Basil Champneys' _Life of
Patmore_. It is a reiteration, with further explanations, such as that
When I said that manner was more important than matter in poetry, I
really meant that the true matter of poetry could only be expressed
by the manner. I find the brilliant thinking and the deep feeling
in Browning, but no true individuality--though of course his manner
is marked enough.
Another letter in the same year, to Campbell, after reading the proofs
of my first book of verse, _Days and Nights_, contained a criticism
which I thought, at the time, not less discouraging than the criticism
of my _Browning_. It seems to me now to contain the truth, the whole
truth, and nothing but the truth, about that particular book, and to
allow for whatever I may have done in verse since then. The first letter
addressed to me is a polite note, dated March 16, 1889, thanking me for
a copy of my book, and saying 'I send herewith a little volume of my
own, which I hope may please you in some of your idle moments.' The book
was a copy of _Florilegium Amantis_, a selection of his own poems,
edited by Dr. Garnett. Up to that time I had read nothing of Patmore
except fragments of _The Angel in the House_, which I had not had the
patience to read through. I dipped into these pages, and as I read for
the first time some of the odes of _The Unknown Eros_, I seemed to have
made a great discovery: here was a whole glittering and peaceful tract
of poetry which was like a new world to me. I wrote to him full of my
enthusiasm; and, though I heard nothing then in reply, I find among my
books a copy of _The Unknown Eros_ with this inscription: 'Arthur
Symons, from Coventry Patmore, July 23, 1890.'
The date is the date of his sixty-seventh birthday, and the book was
given to me after a birthday-dinner at his house at Hastings, when, I
remember, a wreath of laurel had been woven in honour of the occasion,
and he had laughingly, but with a quite naïve gratification, worn it for
a while at the end of dinner. He was one of the very few poets I have
seen who could wear a laurel wreath and not look ridiculous.
In the summer of that year I undertook to look after the _Academy_ for a
few weeks (a wholly new task to me) while Mr. Cotton, the editor, went
for a holiday. The death of Cardinal Newman occurred just then, and I
wrote to Patmore, asking him if he would do an obituary notice for me.
He replied, in a letter dated August 13, 1890:
I should have been very glad to have complied with your request,
had I felt myself at all able to do the work effectively; but my
acquaintance with Dr. Newman was very slight, and I have no sources
of knowledge about his life, but such as are open to all. I have
never taken much interest in contemporary Catholic history and
politics. There are a hundred people who could do what you want
better than I could, and I can never stir my lazy soul to take up
the pen, unless I fancy that I have something to say which makes it
a matter of conscience that I should say it.
Failing Patmore, I asked Dr. Greenhill, who was then living at Hastings,
and Patmore wrote on August 16:
Dr. Greenhill will do your work far better than I could have done
it. What an intellect we have lost in Newman--so delicately capable
of adjustment that it could crush a Hume or crack a Kingsley! And
what an example both in literature and in life. But that we have
not lost.
Patmore's memory was retentive of good phrases which had once come up
under his pen, as that witty phrase about crushing and cracking had come
up in the course of a brief note scribbled on a half-sheet of paper.
The phrase reappears five years afterwards, elaborated into an
impressive sentence, in the preface to _The Rod, the Root, and the
Flower_, dated Lymington, May 1895:
The steam-hammer of that intellect which could be so delicately
adjusted to its task as to be capable of either crushing a Hume or
cracking a Kingsley is no longer at work, that tongue which had the
weight of a hatchet and the edge of a razor is silent; but its
mighty task of so representing truth as to make it credible to the
modern mind, when not interested in unbelief, has been done.
In the same preface will be found a phrase which Mr. Gosse quotes from a
letter of June 17, 1888, in which Patmore says that the reviewers of his
forthcoming book, _Principle in Art_, 'will say, or at least feel, "Ugh,
Ugh! the horrid thing! It's alive!" and think it their duty to set their
heels on it accordingly.' By 1895 the reviewers were replaced by
'readers, zealously Christian,' and the readers, instead of setting
their heels on it, merely 'put aside this little volume with a cry.'
I find no more letters, beyond mere notes and invitations, until the end
of 1893, but it was during these years that I saw Patmore most often,
generally when I was staying with Dykes Campbell at St. Leonards. When
one is five-and-twenty, and writing verse, among young men of one's own
age, also writing verse, the occasional companionship of an older poet,
who stands aside, in a dignified seclusion, acknowledged, respected, not
greatly loved or, in his best work at least, widely popular, can hardly
fail to be an incentive and an invigoration. It was with a full sense of
my privilege that I walked to and fro with Coventry Patmore on that high
terrace in his garden at Hastings, or sat in the house watching him
smoke cigarette after cigarette, or drove with him into the country, or
rowed with him round the moat of Bodiam Castle, with Dykes Campbell in
the stern of the boat; always attentive to his words, learning from him
all I could, as he talked of the things I most cared for, and of some
things for which I cared nothing. Yes, even when he talked of politics,
I listened with full enjoyment of his bitter humour, his ferocious
gaiety of onslaught; though I was glad when he changed from Gladstone to
St. Thomas Aquinas, and gladder still when he spoke of that other
religion, poetry. I think I never heard him speak long without some
reference to St. Thomas Aquinas, of whom he has written so often and
with so great an enthusiasm. It was he who first talked to me of St.
John of the Cross, and when, eight years later, at Seville, I came upon
a copy of the first edition of the _Obras Espirituales_ on a stall of
old books in the Sierpes, and began to read, and to try to render in
English, that extraordinary verse which remains, with that of S. Teresa,
the finest lyrical verse which Spain has produced, I understood how much
the mystic of the prose and the poet of _The Unknown Eros_ owed to the
_Noche Escura_ and the _Llama de Amor Viva_. He spoke of the Catholic
mystics like an explorer who has returned from the perils of far
countries, with a remembering delight which he can share with few.
If Mr. Gosse is anywhere in his book unjust to Patmore it is in speaking
of the later books of prose, the _Religio Poetae_ and _The Rod, the
Root, and the Flower_, some parts of which seem to him 'not very
important except as extending our knowledge of' Patmore's 'mind, and as
giving us a curious collection of the raw material of his poetry.' To
this I can only reply in some words which I used in writing of the
_Religio Poetae_, and affirm with an emphasis which I only wish to
strengthen, that, here and everywhere, and never more than in the
exquisite passage which Mr. Gosse only quotes to depreciate, the prose
of Patmore is the prose of a poet; not prose 'incompletely executed,'
and aspiring after the 'nobler order' of poetry, but adequate and
achieved prose, of a very rare kind. 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 sometimes remote contemplation is
always in one sense, as Pater has justly said of Wordsworth,
impassioned. Only in the finest of his poems has he surpassed these
pages of chill and ecstatic prose.
But if Patmore spoke, as he wrote, of these difficult things as a
traveller speaks of the countries from which he has returned, when he
spoke of poetry it was like one who speaks of his native country. At
first I found it a little difficult to accustom myself to his permanent
mental attitude there, with his own implied or stated pre-eminence
(Tennyson and Barnes on the lower slopes, Browning vaguely in sight, the
rest of his contemporaries nowhere), but, after all, there was an
undisguised simplicity in it, which was better, because franker, than
the more customary 'pride that apes humility,' or the still baser
affectation of indifference. A man of genius, whose genius, like
Patmore's, is of an intense and narrow kind, cannot possibly do justice
to the work which has every merit but his own. Nor can he, when he is
conscious of its equality in technical skill, be expected to
discriminate between what is more or less valuable in his own work;
between, that is, his own greater or less degree of inspiration. And
here I may quote a letter which Patmore wrote to me, dated Lymington,
December 31, 1893, about a review of mine in which I had greeted him as
'a poet, one of the most essential poets of our time,' but had ventured
to say, perhaps petulantly, what I felt about a certain part of his
work.
I thank you for the copy of the _Athenæum_, containing your
generous and well-written notice of 'Religio Poetae.' There is much
in it that must needs be gratifying to me, and nothing that I feel
disposed to complain of but your allusion to the 'dinner-table
domesticities of the "Angel in the House."' I think that you have
been a little misled--as almost everybody has been--by the
differing characters of the metres of the 'Angel' and 'Eros.' The
meats and wines of the two are, in very great part, almost
identical in character; but, in one case, they are served on the
deal table of the octo-syllabic quatrain, and, in the other, they
are spread on the fine, irregular rock of the free tetrameter.
In his own work he could see no flaw; he knew, better than any one, how
nearly it answered almost everywhere to his own intention; and of his
own intentions he could be no critic. It was from this standpoint of
absolute satisfaction with what he had himself done that he viewed other
men's work; necessarily, in the case of one so certain of himself, with
a measure of dissatisfaction. He has said in print fundamentally foolish
things about writers living and dead; and yet remains, if not a great
critic, at least a great thinker on the first principles of art. And, in
those days when I used to listen to him while he talked to me of the
basis of poetry, and of metres and cadences, and of poetical methods,
what meant more to me than anything he said, though not a word was
without its value, was the profound religious gravity with which he
treated the art of poetry, the sense he conveyed to one of his own
reasoned conception of its immense importance, its divinity.
It was partly, no doubt, from this reverence for his art that Patmore
wrote so rarely, and only under an impulse which could not be withstood.
Even his prose was written with the same ardour and reluctance, and a
letter which he wrote to me from Lymington, dated August 7, 1894, in
answer to a suggestion that he should join some other writers in a
contemplated memorial to Walter Pater, is literally exact in its
statement of his own way of work, not only during his later life:
I should have liked to make one of the honourable company of
commentators upon Pater, were it not that the faculty of writing,
or, what amounts to the same thing, interest in writing, has quite
deserted me. Some accidental motive wind comes over me, once in a
year or so, and I find myself able to write half a dozen pages in
an hour or two: but all the rest of my time is hopelessly sterile.
To what was this curious difficulty or timidity in composition due? In
the case of the poetry, Mr. Gosse attributes it largely to the fact of a
poet of lyrical genius attempting to write only philosophical or
narrative poetry; and there is much truth in the suggestion. Nothing in
Patmore, except his genius, is so conspicuous as his limitations.
Herrick, we may remember from his essay on Mrs. Meynell, seemed to him
but 'a splendid insect'; Keats, we learn from Mr. Champneys' life,
seemed to him 'to be greatly deficient in first-rate imaginative power';
Shelley 'is all unsubstantial splendour, like the transformation scene
of a pantomime, or the silvered globes hung up in a gin-palace'; Blake
is 'nearly all utter rubbish, with here and there not so much a gleam as
a trick of genius.' All this, when he said it, had a queer kind of
delightfulness, and, to those able to understand him, never seemed, as
it might have seemed in any one else, mere arrogant bad taste, but a
necessary part of a very narrow and very intense nature. Although
Patmore was quite ready to give his opinion on any subject, whether on
'Wagner, the musical impostor,' or on 'the grinning woman, in every
canvas of Leonardo,' he was singularly lacking in the critical faculty,
even in regard to his own art; and this was because, in his own art, he
was a poet of one idea and of one metre. He did marvellous things with
that one idea and that one metre, but he saw nothing beyond them; all
thought must be brought into relation with nuptial love, or it was of no
interest to him, and the iambic metre must do everything that poetry
need concern itself about doing.
In a memorandum for prayer made in 1861, we read this petition:
That I may be enabled to write my poetry from immediate perception
of the truth and delight of love at once divine and human, and that
all events may so happen as shall best advance this my chief work
and probable means of working out my own salvation.
In his earlier work, it is with human love only that he deals; in his
later, and inconceivably finer work, it is not with human love only, but
with 'the relation of the soul to Christ as his betrothed wife': 'the
burning heart of the universe,' as he realises it. This conception of
love, which we see developing from so tamely domestic a level to so
incalculable a height of mystic rapture, possessed the whole man,
throughout the whole of his life, shutting him into a 'solitude for two'
which has never perhaps been apprehended with so complete a
satisfaction. He was a married monk, whose monastery was the world; he
came and went in the world, imagining he saw it more clearly than any
one else; and, indeed, he saw things about him clearly enough, when they
were remote enough from his household prejudices. But all he really ever
did was to cultivate a little corner of a garden, where he brought to
perfection a rare kind of flower, which some thought too pretty to be
fine, and some too colourless to be beautiful, but in which he saw the
seven celestial colours, faultlessly mingled, and which he took to be
the image of the flower most loved by the Virgin in heaven.
Patmore was a poet profoundly learned in the technique of his art, and
the _Prefatory Study on English Metrical Law_, which fills the first
eighty-five pages of the _Amelia_ volume of 1878, is among the subtlest
and most valuable of such studies which we have in English. In this
essay he praises the simplest metres for various just reasons, but yet
is careful to define the 'rhyme royal,' or stanza of seven ten-syllable
lines, as the most heroic of measures; and to admit that blank verse,
which he never used, 'is, of all recognised English metres, the most
difficult to write well in.' But, in his expressed aversion for trochaic
and dactylic measures, is he not merely recording his own inability to
handle them? and, in setting more and more rigorous limits to himself in
his own dealing with iambic measures, is he not accepting, and making
the best of, a lack of metrical flexibility? It is nothing less than
extraordinary to note that, until the publication of the nine _Odes_ in
1868, not merely was he wholly tied to the iambic measure, but even
within those limits he was rarely quite so good in the four-line stanza
of eights and sixes as in the four-line stanza of eights; that he was
usually less good in the six-line than in the four-line stanza of eights
and sixes; and that he was invariably least good in the stanza of three
long lines which, to most practical intents and purposes, corresponds
with this six-line stanza. The extremely slight licence which this
rearrangement into longer lines affords was sufficient to disturb the
balance of his cadences, and nowhere else was he capable of writing
quite such lines as:
One friend was left, a falcon, famed for beauty, skill and size,
Kept from his fortune's ruin, for the sake of its great eyes.
All sense, not merely of the delicacy, but of the correctness of rhythm,
seems to have left him suddenly, without warning.
And then, the straightening and tightening of the bonds of metre having
had its due effect, an unprecedented thing occurred. In the _Odes_ of
1868, absorbed finally into _The Unknown Eros_ of 1877, the iambic metre
is still used; but with what a new freedom, and at the summons of how
liberating an inspiration! At the same time Patmore's substance is
purged and his speech loosened, and, in throwing off that burden of
prose stuff which had tied down the very wings of his imagination, he
finds himself rising on a different movement. Never was a development
in metre so spiritually significant.
In spite of Patmore's insistence to the contrary, as in the letter which
I have already quoted, there is no doubt that the difference between
_The Angel in the House_ and _The Unknown Eros_ is the difference
between what is sometimes poetry in spite of itself, and what is poetry
alike in accident and essence. In all his work before the _Odes_ of
1868, Patmore had been writing down to his conception of what poetry
ought to be; when, through I know not what suffering, or contemplation,
or actual inner illumination, his whole soul had been possessed by this
new conception of what poetry could be, he began to write as finely, and
not only as neatly, as he was able. The poetry which came, came fully
clothed, in a form of irregular but not lawless verse, which Mr. Gosse
states was introduced into English by the _Pindarique Odes_ of Cowley,
but which may be more justly derived, as Patmore himself, in one of his
prefaces, intimates, from an older and more genuine poet, Drummond of
Hawthornden.
Mr. Gosse is cruel enough to say that Patmore had 'considerable
affinities' with Cowley, and that 'when Patmore is languid and Cowley is
unusually felicitous, it is difficult to see much difference in the form
of their odes.' But Patmore, in his essay on metre, has said,
If there is not sufficient motive power of passionate thought, no
typographical aids will make anything of this sort of verse but
metrical nonsense--which it nearly always is--even in Cowley, whose
brilliant wit and ingenuity are strangely out of harmony with most
of his measures;
and it seems to me that he is wholly right in saying so. The difference
between the two is an essential one. In Patmore the cadence follows the
contours of the thought or emotion, like a transparent garment; in
Cowley the form is a misshapen burden, carried unsteadily. It need not
surprise us that to the ears of Cowley (it is he who tells us) the verse
of Pindar should have sounded 'little better than prose.' The fault of
his own 'Pindarique' verse is that it is so much worse than prose. The
pauses in Patmore, left as they are to be a kind of breathing, or pause
for breath, may not seem to be everywhere faultless to all ears; but
they _are_ the pauses in breathing, while in Cowley the structure of his
verse, when it is irregular, remains as external, as mechanical, as the
couplets of the _Davideis_.
Whether Patmore ever acknowledged it or no, or indeed whether [says
Mr. Gosse] the fact has ever been observed, I know not, but the
true analogy of the _Odes_ is with the Italian lyric of the early
Renaissance. It is in the writings of Petrarch and Dante, and
especially in the _Canzoniere_ of the former, that we must look for
examples of the source of Patmore's later poetic form.
Here again, while there may be a closer 'analogy,' at least in spirit,
there is another, and even clearer difference in form. The canzoni of
Petrarch are composed in stanzas of varying, but in each case uniform,
length, and every stanza corresponds precisely in metrical arrangement
with every other stanza in the same canzone. In English the
_Epithalamion_ and the _Prothalamion_ of Spenser (except for their
refrain) do exactly what Petrarch had done in Italian; and whatever
further analogy there may be between the spirit of Patmore's writing and
that of Spenser in these two poems, the form is essentially different.
The resemblance with _Lycidas_ is closer, and closer still with the
poems of Leopardi, though Patmore has not followed the Italian habit of
mingling rhymed and non-rhymed verse, nor did he ever experiment, like
Goethe, Heine, Matthew Arnold, and Henley, in wholly unrhymed irregular
lyrical verse.
Patmore's endeavour, in _The Unknown Eros_, is certainly towards a form
of _vers libre_, but it is directed only towards the variation of the
normal pause in the normal English metre, the iambic 'common time,' and
is therefore as strictly tied by law as a metre can possibly be when it
ceases to be wholly regular. Verse literally 'free,' as it is being
attempted in the present day in France, every measure being mingled, and
the disentangling of them left wholly to the ear of the reader, has
indeed been attempted by great metrists in many ages, but for the most
part only very rarely and with extreme caution. The warning, so far, of
all these failures, or momentary half-successes, is to be seen in the
most monstrous and magnificent failure of the nineteenth century, the
_Leaves of Grass_ of Walt Whitman. Patmore realised that without law
there can be no order, and thus no life; for life is the result of a
harmony between opposites. For him, cramped as he had been by a
voluntary respect for far more than the letter of the law, the discovery
of a freer mode of speech was of incalculable advantage. It removed from
him all temptation to that 'cleverness' which Mr. Gosse rightly finds in
the handling of 'the accidents of civilised life,' the unfortunate part
of his subject-matter in _The Angel in the House_; it allowed him to
abandon himself to the poetic ecstasy, which in him was almost of the
same nature as philosophy, without translating it downward into the
terms of popular apprehension; it gave him a choice, formal, yet
flexible means of expression for his uninterrupted contemplation of
divine things.
1906.
SAROJINI NAIDU