This book does not offer a selection in the usual sense. The poetry of a
master is selected before it is written, and before it is conceived; and
the mind that conceives it is selected. Mr. Coventry Patmore’s art and
labour do but second that original distinction. Therefore it is hardly
necessary to say that my intention has not been to make a collection of
“best passages.” What has been intended is to collect passages in which
the poet has dealt with two things—delight and sorrow, those human and
intelligible passions to which all real poetry has access, but which
this poetry touches so close as to be mingled with them and changed into
them.
So to offer great poetry to the natural human sensibility, should be to
gain for the poet’s whole work new readers. I confess that is my motive.
Because of their youth, which has not allowed them to read very much, or
because of accident, there may be many readers still to gain. Among them
may be the fittest—not the less fit because they have been for a time
under the influence of a fashion for inordinate haste, or for inordinate
leisure, of appreciation. Mr. Patmore’s greatest work is neither so new
as to gratify the eagerness of one fashion, nor so old as to flatter the
reluctance of the other. It is a work of the beginning of the last
quarter of our century. It is dated later than Mr. Swinburne’s best, for
instance, but it had its place in literature before the present young
love of poetry had taken life. Again, many poets are heard because a
chorus of contemporaries sings with them and like them. Mr. Coventry
Patmore’s voice is single in his day, and single in our literature. It
makes part of no choir loud by numbers, and so it needs an attentive
ear. To that attentive ear it sounds alone, as the divinest voice of our
time.
There is a dignity in Mr. Patmore’s reputation (attendant on the
exceeding dignity of his art) that might be offended—though it could not
be injured—by officious praises. But it is not inopportune to say thus
much: Readers of this book and of the entire poems may be promised a
perfect respite from the tedious controversy as to matter and manner,
thought and expression. They shall not be invited to attend to
discussions as to the relative importance of two things that in truth
have no high importance if they can be divided so as to be merely
related. The dispute is an inconsiderable one; it is perfectly opportune
in the criticism of all poetry below a certain perfectly definite
standard of art, and there only. Above that standard, thought and form
are not opposed, nor merely related; they are one. It is not difficult
to make a definition of classical poetry, if classical poetry may
rightly be defined as all poetry—be its thought what it may, and its
form what it may—in which thought and form are one. Classical poetry of
every age—and every age has had a little—is that in which there is no
antithesis, in which there is more than a bond—union and fusion. The
classical poem may be a mere “To Althea from Prison,” or even a mere “To
Blossoms.” In the small classic the word is fused with its fancy, and in
the great it is fused with its passion; and the greater the passion the
greater the splendour of the fire of that fusion—the “integrity of
fire.”
The more essential passages of Mr. Coventry Patmore’s much earlier
work—_The Angel in the House_—are classic, and very high in that noble
rank. He plays with this power of his art in the brief metre, the
symmetrical stanza, and the colloquial phrase. He has here accepted the
dailiest things and made them spirit and fire. There has been something
said against these colloquialisms; and indeed they would not be
tolerable in hands less austere and sweet. The newest Philistine, who is
afraid of the reproach of Philistinism, who denies Philistinism in the
name of a Philistine, and ultimately receives a Philistine’s reward, has
been known to make light of some of Mr. Patmore’s couplets, which he
finds too “domestic.” But such “domestic” couplets as those in
“Olympus,” for instance, are a smiling defiance of Philistinism. So are
the brilliant stanzas, made of life, sense, and spirit, in which the
very accessories,—the spoilt accessories—of a modern English wedding are
rendered grave and blithe, and the bridegroom is restored to the dignity
of the sun. Mr. Patmore makes the Wedding Sermon (at the close of _The
Angel in the House_) the improbable opportunity for the finest wit and
thought, tenderness, mystery, and celestial knowledge. One of the things
that have baffled the trivial in these early poems is probably what they
have taken for triviality or artlessness in the metre as well as in the
word. Locks and bars and bolts are less secure for the locking away of a
poet’s privacy, than is his unintelligible candour. In his solemnity the
world recognises a mystery; but by his frank play and simplicity it is
sometimes baffled and misled into disregard.
The _Odes_ are greater than the earlier poems, because they have greater
capacity for the quality that is in all Mr. Patmore’s work. As for their
metre, it is their very poetry. They move with indescribable dignity,
and with the freedom of the spirit. The wind bloweth where it listeth.
With absolute art the poet sighs, or pauses, or recovers breath, in the
“irregular” line, with an effect of infinite liberty and pathos. “Thou
hearest the sound thereof.” One of Mr. Patmore’s worthiest
contemporaries has said that the Odes are almost too mournful to be
read, because they are so close to the thought: “the verse attending on
the thought, and having no independent life of its own.” This
appreciation is insufficient, for there is union rather than
“attendance;” but it expresses hastily the effect of this most sensitive
and vital line—precisely the effect, which, in another art, results from
the phrases of a _Parsifal_. Take the regular stanza as answering to a
symmetrical melody; you will perceive that neither stanza nor tune can
be so immediately sensitive as are those sentences of music, and those
lines of the ode in the hands of a master. No other metrical form could
be so free and so living a communication.
What is here to be communicated is vital and mortal pathos and felicity.
Even as far as the reader has capacity to perceive that passion, he is
aware that it is greater than his experience, and he confesses that it
was uttered out of a greater capacity than his. Compassion with that
greater passion is a high and worthy manner of admiration. It may be the
“terror” that Aristotle joined to “pity.” Compassion in the highest
degree is the divinest form of religion. The compassion of the slighter
acquaintance with sorrow for the greater, and of the smaller capacity
for the vaster, is a remorse of tenderness, lowliness, and respect, the
paradox of worship.
Dexterity—the lower technique—may become habitual, and the more
brilliant kinds of habit are often mistaken for the actual intention of
great art; but great art is never habitual. Art has a perpetually living
intention. All the lines and passages here gathered together are proofs
of this instancy of art. And they are chosen as instant communications
of the two passions of happiness and pain, because these are the most
simple. It would have been easy to represent Mr. Patmore by an anthology
proving him the poet of wit, or the poet of beauty, or the poet of
indignation. But the most classic subject of classic poetry is the most
intelligible in kind, however enormous in degree—felicity and
infelicity. Of melancholy—the black humour—none of Mr. Patmore’s work
has a sign.