* * * * *
However, having bought Volume V to read, I tried to keep on with it.
I read what it said about Browning's father being a banker. Poor old
man, I felt sorry for him. Imagine the long years when he and his son
faced each other, the old father telling himself hopefully, "Ah, well,
he's a child, he'll get over these queer poetical ways,"--and then his
_not_ getting over them, but proposing to give his life to poetry! Make
a career of it!
[Illustration: MURDER!--All's right with the world.--Pippa passes.]
If there are any kind of men who want sons like themselves, it's our
bankers: they have their banks to hand on, and they long to have nice
banker babies. But it seems they are constantly begetting impossible
infants. Cardinal Newman for instance: his bewildered father too was a
banker. Fate takes a special pleasure in tripping these worthy men up.
Imagine Browning senior reading "Pippa Passes," with pursed lips, at his
desk. What mental pictures of his son's heroine did the old gentleman
form, as he followed her on her now famous walk through that
disreputable neighborhood?
I hope he enjoyed more "How They Brought the Good News from Ghent." For
example, where the man says, while galloping fast down the road:
"I turned in my saddle and made the girths tight,
Then shortened each stirrup, and set the pique right,
Rebuckled the check-strap, chained slacker the bit--"
[Illustration: He made the girths tight]
The banker must have been pleased that Robert could harness a horse in
rhyme anyhow. I dare say he knew as we all do that it was poor enough
poetry, but at least it was practical. It was something he could tell
his friends at the club.
* * * * *
Putting Browning aside with poor Stroom, I next tried Matthew Arnold.
The Arnolds: a great family, afflicted with an unfortunate strain.
Unusually good qualities,--but they feel conscientious about them.
If Matthew Arnold had only been born into some other family! If he had
only been the son of C. S. Calverley or Charles II, for instance.
He had a fine mind, and he and it matured early. Both were Arnold
characteristics. But so was his conscientiously setting himself to
enrich his fine mind "by the persistent study of 'the best that is known
and thought in the world.'" This was deadening. Gentlemen who teach
themselves just how and what to appreciate, take half the vitality out
of their appreciation thereafter. They go out and collect all "the best"
and bring it carefully home, and faithfully pour it down their
throats--and get drunk on it? No! It loses its lift and intoxication,
taken like that.
An aspiring concern with good art is supposed to be meritorious. People
"ought" to go to museums and concerts, and they "ought" to read poetry.
It is a mark of superiority to have a full supply of the most correct
judgments.
This doctrine is supposed to be beyond discussion, Leo Stein says. "I
do not think it is beyond discussion," he adds. "It is more nearly
beneath it.... To teach or formally to encourage the appreciation of art
does more harm than good.... It tries to make people see things that
they do not feel.... People are stuffed with appreciation in our art
galleries, instead of looking at pictures for the fun of it."
Those who take in art for the fun of it, and don't fake their
sensations, acquire an appetite that it is a great treat to satisfy. And
by and by, art becomes as necessary to them as breathing fresh air.
To the rest of us, art is only a luxury: a dessert, not a food.
* * * * *
Some poets have to struggle with a harsh world for leave to be poets,
like unlucky peaches trying to ripen north of Latitude 50. Coventry
Patmore by contrast was bred in a hot-house. He was the son of a man
named Peter G. Patmore, who, unlike most fathers, was willing to have a
poet in the family. In fact he was eager. He was also, unfortunately,
helpful, and did all he could to develop in his son "an ardor for
poetry." But ardor is born, not cooked. A watched pot never boils. Nor
did Patmore. He had many of the other good qualities that all poets
need, but the quality Peter G. planned to develop in the boy never
grew. Young Patmore studied the best Parnassian systems, he obeyed the
best rules, he practiced the right spiritual calisthenics, took his
dumb-bells out daily: but he merely proved that poetry is not the
automatic result of going through even the properest motions correctly.
Still he kept on, year by year, and the results were impressive. Many
respected them highly. Including their author.
He grew old in this remarkable harness. Perhaps he also grew tired. At
any rate, at sixty-three he "solemnly recorded" the fact that he had
finally finished "his task as a poet." He lived for about ten years
more, but the remainder was silence. "He had been a practicing poet for
forty-seven years," Edmund Gosse says. Odd way for Gosse to talk: as
though he were describing a dentist.
One of this worthy Mr. Patmore's most worthy ideas was that the actual
writing of verse was but a part of his job. Not even professional poets,
he felt, should make it their chief occupation. No; one ought to spend
months, maybe years, meditating on everything, in order to supply his
soul with plenty of suitable thoughts--like a tailor importing fine
woolens to accumulate stock. And even with the shelves full, one ought
not to work till just the right hour.
His theories called for a conscientious inspection of each inspiration.
They also obliged this good gentleman to exercise self-control. Many a
time when he wanted to work he held back. Although "the intention to
write was never out of his mind" (Mr. Gosse says), Mr. Patmore had "the
power of will to refuse himself the satisfaction of writing, except on
those rare occasions when he felt capable of doing his best."
There once was a man I knew, who wooed his fiancee on those terms. He
used to sit thinking away in his library, evenings, debating whether he
had better go see her, and whether he was at his best. And after
fiddling about in a worried way between yes and no, he would sometimes
go around only to find that she would not see _him_. I think that she
loved the man, too, or was ready to love him. "His honesty has a
horrible fascination for me," I remember her saying, "but when he has an
impulse to kiss me--and I see him stop--and look as though he were
taking his temperature with a thermometer first, trying to see if his
blood is up--I want to hit him and scream!"
Mr. Patmore, however, was very firm about this being necessary. He had
many a severe inner struggle because of his creed. He would repulse the
most enticing inspiration, if his thermometer wasn't at just the right
figure. Neither he nor his inspirations were robust, but they were
evenly matched, and they must have wrestled obstinately and often in the
course of his life, and pushed each other about and exchanged slaps and
tense bloodless pinches. But whenever Mr. Patmore felt it his duty to
wrestle, he won.
[Illustration: He took his temperature first]
Consequently, looking backward he felt able to say when he was old: "I
have written little, but it is all my best; I have never spoken when I
had nothing to say, nor spared time nor labor to make my words true. I
have respected posterity, and should there be a posterity which cares
for letters, I dare to hope that it will respect me."
That last phrase has a manly ring. Imagine him, alone late at night,
trying to sum up his life, and placing before us what bits he had
managed to do before dying. We may live through some evening of that
sort ourselves, by and by. We may turn to look back at the new faces of
the young men and women who will some day be inheriting our world as we
go out its gate. Will they laugh at us and think us pompous, as some of
us regard Mr. Patmore? He doesn't seem very hopeful, by the way, about
our caring for letters, but he does seem to think, if we do, that we
will not make fun of him.
I don't think he ought to mind that, though, if we are friendly about
it. We certainly respect him compared with many men of his time--the
shifty politicians, the vicious or weak leaders of thought, who went
through life as softies, without rigid standards of conduct. He shines
out by contrast, this incorruptible, solemn old Roman.
Only--he was so solemn! "From childhood to the grave" he thought he had
"a mission to perform," with his poems. And what was this mission that
he was so determined to fill? "He believed himself to be called upon to
celebrate Nuptial Love."
Again it is his solemnity one smiles at, but not his idea. Nuptial Love?
Very good. The possibilities of episodic love have been hotly explored,
its rights have been defended, its spiritual joys have been sung. But
Nuptial Love, our queer breed of humans, inconstant at heart, believes
to be a tame thing by contrast: nearly all anti-climax. There are
delights at the beginning, and a gentle glow (perhaps) at the end: for
the rest it is a long dusty journey of which the less said the better.
Exceptional couples who do somewhat better than this, and not only get
along without storms but live contentedly too, are apt to congratulate
themselves and call their lives a success. Contentedly! Pah! Content
with mere absence of friction! No conception, apparently, of the depths
beyond depths two should find, who devote themselves deeply to each
other for all of their lives. I don't say this often is possible: I
think people try: but one or the other comes up against a hard place and
stops. Only, sometimes it's not that which prevents going further; it's
a waywardness that will not stick to any one mine to get gold. A man
slips away and runs about, picking up stray outcroppings, but loses the
rich veins of metal, far down in the earth.
Why is it that so few of us contentedly stick to one mate, and say to
ourselves, "Here is my treasure; I will seek all in her."
Well, this is a subject on which I should enjoy speculating--but Nuptial
Love happens to be a field in which I have had no experience, and
furthermore it is not my theme anyhow, but my friend Mr. Patmore's,
whose spirit has been standing indignantly by, as I wrote, as though it
were ordering me away, with a No Trespassing look. I will therefore
withdraw, merely adding that he himself didn't do any too well with it.
However, no poet can avoid an occasional slump. For all Mr. Patmore's
efforts, he needs to be edited as much as the rest of them. Some of his
little chance sayings were taking and odd:
"How strange a thing a lover seems
To animals that do not love."
But he always fell back into being humdrum and jog-trot. Take this
stanza, from his poetical flight entitled Tamerton Church Tower:
"I mounted, now, my patient nag,
And scaled the easy steep;
And soon beheld the quiet flag
On Lanson's solemn Keep.
But he was writing jokes for Punch;
So I, who knew him well,
Deciding not to stay for lunch,
Returned to my hotel."
May I ask why such verses should be enshrined in a standard collection
of poetry? The last four lines are good, they have a touch of humor or
lightness, perhaps; but what can be said for the first four? And they,
only, are Patmore's. The last four I added myself, in an effort to help.
"A man may mix poetry with prose as much as he pleases, and it will only
elevate and enliven," as Landor observed; "but the moment he mixes a
particle of prose with his poetry, it precipitates the whole."
* * * * *
All but the vulgar like poetry. This is using vulgarity in the sense in
which Iva Jewel Geary defines it, as being "in its essence the
acceptance of life as low comedy, and the willingness to be entertained
by it always, as such. Whereas poetry," she says, "is the interpretation
of life as serious drama: a play, in the main dignified and beautiful,
or tragic."
Some readers take to poetry as to music, because it enraptures the ear.
Others of us feel a need for its wisdom and insight--and wings. It
deepens our everyday moods. It reminds us of Wonder. Here we are, with
our great hearts and brains, descended from blind bits of slime,
erecting a busy civilization on a beautiful earth; and that earth is
whirling through space, amid great golden worlds: and yet, being
grandsons of slime, we forget to look around us.
As Patmore expressed it:
"An idle poet, here and there,
Looks round him; but, for all the rest,
The world, unfathomably fair,
Is duller than a witling's jest.
Love wakes men, once a lifetime each;
They lift their heavy lids, and look;
And, lo, what one sweet page can teach,
They read with joy, then shut the book."