12 OCTOBER 1889, Page 17

MR. PATMORE'S ESSAYS.*

IN a small volume of about two hundred pages, Mr. Patmore has condensed the result of much thought upon subjects con- nected more or less closely with the art of which he is a master. Art, in the largest sense of the word, comprehends all the forms in which men of genius utter what is in them ; and Mr. Patmore is no more straying from his special business as a poet by writing upon architecture, than Michael Angelo when he laid aside the chisel and the brush in order to write- sonnets. It is possible for a critic to grasp a principle- in Art without much technical knowledge; but the poet, when he has his singing robes on, does not think of principles ; his work then is to create. Wordsworth, although prepossessed by a theory which, combined with his lack of humour, often led him astray, forgot it altogether when, in the full flush of inspiration, he produced his noblest verse ; Principle in Art, te. By Coeentry Patmore. London : Bell and Bona.

and Coleridge's marvellous critical sagacity was not, we may be very certain, brought into play when he wrote" Christabel " and "The Ancient Mariner." A poet cannot say why his verse flows from him one day in a fall and rapid stream, and why upon the next his hard-bound brains are dry as the dust of summer. The poet's hour is not the hour of the critic. At the same time, a few of the most famous singers have raised the critical art to the highest level ; and when a poet writes about poetry, the reader who loves literature will always listen with interest to what he has to tell him.

Mr. Patmore understands well the limitations of criticism,

and says truly that in dealing with such a work as The Tempest, "its noblest function is to declare its own helpless- ness by directing attention to beauty beyond beauty which

defies analysis." In noticing more recent works, admiration, unfortunately, is not the critic's chief function. Mr. Patmore can be severe in his estimate of brother-poets, but he is, we think, nearly always just. Nothing can be more vigorous and, in our judgment, more truthful than his estimate of Shelley both as a man and a poet. Of no modern poet has more

frantic nonsense been written, and Mr. Patmore's comments -will be intolerable to the worshippers who, like Mr. William Rossetti, regard Shelley as "among the most perfect, the

most unspeakable of artists," towards whom "the very soul rushes out as an unapproached poet, and embraces him as a dearest friend :"—

" If to do," Mr. Patmore says, "what is right in one's own eyes is the whole of virtue, and to suffer for so doing is to be a martyr, then Shelley was the saint and martyr which a large number of— chiefly young—persons consider him to have been as a man; and if to have the faculty of saying everything in the most brilliant language and imagery, without having anything particular to say beyond sublime commonplaces and ethereal fallacies about love and liberty, is to be a supreme' poet, then Shelley undoubtedly was such. But as a man, Shelley was almost wholly devoid of the instincts of the 'political animal,' which Aristotle defines a man to be. If he could not see the reasons for any social institution or custom, he could not feel any ; and forthwith set himself to con- vince the world that they were the invention of priests and tyrants. He was equally deficient in what is commonly understood by natural affection. The ties of relationship were no ties to him; for he could only see them as accidents. 'I, like the God of the Jews,' writes Shelley, 'set up myself as no respecter of persons ; and relationship is regarded by me as bearing that relation to reason which a band of straw does to fire.' As these deficiencies were the cause of all the abnormal phenomena of his life, so they are at the root of, or rather are, the imperfections of his poetry, which is all splendour and sentiment and sensitiveness, and little or no true wisdom or true love. The very texture of his verse suffers from these causes. In his best poems it is firm, fluent, various, and melodious ; but the more serious and subtle music of life, which he had not in his heart he could not put into his rhythms; which no one who knows what rhythm is will venture to compare with the best of Tennyson's or Wordsworth's, far less with the best of our really 'supreme' poets."

Lord Tennyson, as a contemporary poet, is perhaps too near and dear to us to allow of a strictly impartial estimate of his poetry ; but Wordsworth can be judged of with the calmness bestowed upon a classic, and, to our thinking, he stands so

incontestably at the head of the reflective poets as to rank with the three or four English poets who can be called "supreme."

A short paper upon " Crabbe and Shelley" suggests one or two points for comment. The utter contrast between them does not necessarily prove, as certain Shelley-worshippers affirm, that Crabbe is no poet—a judgment lately uttered by Mr. Saintsbury—but that the domain of poetry is wider than some critics are disposed to admit. That Mr. Patmore is unwilling to grant a place in it, however lowly, to Crabbe, can be gathered from the tone of his criticism. What he says may be true in the main, but it is, we think, inadequate. He sees

what is painful and repulsive in a poet who surpasses Words- worth in his capacity for creeping "on all-fours ;" but he does not see, or does not appreciate, the poetic force, insight, and pathos which made his verse so dear to Walter Scott, and has led Dr. Newman to call Cmbbe a classic. Again, in this brief paper we read that "Coleridge in his great way, and Burns in his comparatively small way, have done a certain moderate amount of work so thoroughly and- manifestly well that no sane critic has ever called it into question, or ever will." So, indeed, we might have thought; but Sir Henry Taylor, whose sanity is perhaps his chief gift as a critic, has declared 99 per cent, of what Burns wrote to be worthless, and that nothing which he wrote was of such excellence as to found a poet's fame. The vagaries of criticism are innumerable, and Mr. Patmore cites one of them in his remarks on Mr. Colvin's

Seats, in English Men of Letters. "I think it probable," Keats's biographer writes, "that by power as well as by temperament and aim, he was the most Shakespearian spirit that has lived since Shakespeare," which leads Mr. Pat more to ask whether it is not -the truth rather that, among real poets, Keats was the most tin-Shakespearian

poet that ever lived? The author is not satisfied with giving this opinion, but states the ground on which he holds it ; and

his paper on this delightful poet, less than seven pages in length, is rich in suggestive matter. But why, after making the just distinction between poetry of a masculine and feminine order, as exemplified on the one side by Shakespeare, on the other by Shelley and Keats, does he add :—" The femininity of such poets as these is a glorious and immortal gift, such as no mortal lady has ever attained or ever will attain. It has been proved to us how well a mortal lady may become able to read the classics ; but, humbled as some of us may feel by her having headed the Tripes, it is still some compensation for those of our sex to remember that we alone can write 'classics' even of the feminine order." Again, is it true, as Mr. Patmore affirms in another essay, that "the most characteristic virtue of woman, or at least the most alluring of her weaknesses," is "her not caring for masculine truth

and worth, unless they woo her with a smile, or a touch, or some such flattery of her senses " P Does not such a state- ment imply that the smile and the touch and the flattery are

not only dear to a woman, as they well may be, but dearer than truth and worth No poet of our time has written so charmingly about woman as Mr. Patmore. All that is pure and gentle and lovely in her character, all that is sweet and bewitching in her ways, her power to rule when she least thinks of riling, her self-forgetfulness, her innocent arts, her captivating foibles, her modest taste in dress dis- playing "more loveliness than she eonceals,"—these are the sweet feminine arts and virtues which Mr. Patmore glorifies in his verse as only a poet can. In one sense, he lifts woman to the highest pinnacle on the wings of poetry ; in another, he seems to lower her, since, as in the passages we have quoted, he questions her claim to mental and moral equality with man. In the beautiful lines entitled " Olympus," Amelia can only cry, "For shame !" but has no argument to urge against the wild talk brought back by her husband from "a careless parliament of gods olympic," and he, good man, while allowing that if he had answered thus, " 'twould not have pass'd for very wise," Since he has not "her voice and eyes," is glad to leave the gods for home :—

"Yea, very glad at heart to come, And lay a happy head to rest

• On her unreasonable breast."

The little poem is a charming picture; but would it be less so if this sweet wife, in addition to being right by instinct, as true women generally are upon moral questions, had been able to give a reason for her faith ? We agree with Mr. Patmore that, as yet, no woman (with one or two exceptions in the domain of fiction) has written classics; but it is a bold thing to say she never will. One must admit, however, that it is difficult to conceive of a female Shakespeare or Hooker, although, if Mr. Swinburne will forgive us for saying so, we can imagine the existence of a female Hugo.

Of Rossetti as a poet, Mr. Patmore writes with a temperate appreciation that will carry more weight than the extravagant praise lavished on this remarkable man by some of his friends and followers. He says truly, that while his power is chiefly

shown in his long ballads, it is impossible not to feel that they are more or less anachronisms both in spirit and in form. But

how fine is the remark that in ranch of Rossetti's work "there is a rich and obscure glow of insight into depths too profound and too sacred for clear speech, even if they could be spoken; a sort of insight not at all uncommon in the great art of past times, but exceedingly rare in the art of our own."

And here is a passage from an affectionately appreciative paper on Clough, evidently written by one who knew and loved the man :—

"Those who recognise in the Both's' Ciongh's almost solitary claim to literary eminence, must somewhat wonder at the consider- Able figure he stands for in the estimation of the present genera- tion. The fact is, that Clough, like James Spedding, was personally far more impressive than his -works ; and the singularly strong effect produced among his friends by the extreme simplicity and shy kindliness of his life and manners, and the at once repelleat and alluring severity of his truthfulness, gave his character a con- sequence beyond that of his writings with all who kaew him though

ever so slightly ; and the halo of this sanctity hangs, through the report of his friends, about all that he has done, and renders cold criticism of it almost impossible. No one who knew Clough can so separate his personality from his writings as to be able to criticise them fairly as literature ; no one who has not known him can understand their value as the outcome of character."

These remarks, while true of Clough, may be also applied generally in relation to the contemporary estimate of men who appear to be intellectually what Saul was physically, higher than any of the people. We cannot judge with critical im- partiality of authors who express the thoughts of the age, or of statesmen who carry out its wishes. In the present day, every man who does his duty well and is well paid for doing it, is almost certain of a testimonial, and possibly, when his work is done, of a biography. "In this age," said Southey—and the remark is truer to-day than when he made it—"when a person of any notoriety dies, they lose as little time in making a book of him as they used to do in making a mummy." And the

evil does not stay here, for the poor victim runs the risk also of being represented in bronze or marble. If the nine years

during which a poet is advised to keep his verse, were the space required after the death of a public man before his Life should be written or a monument raised to his memory, what a boon would it be to the public! In "Shall Smith have a Statue P" Mr. Patmore writes with keen satire on the modern fashion of recognising too hastily the claims of men dis- tinguished by the public. The enthusiasm of the moment, he suggests, may result in making ourselves ridiculous in the eyes of our children, and by raising statues too quickly "we may be placing an awful and easy vengeance in the hands of posterity, which might choose, not to pull down such monuments, but to let them stand."

In the short but weighty essay that gives a title to this volume, Mr. Patmore observes that it would be well for the professed critic to remember that "criticism is not the expres- sion, however picturesque and glowing, of the faith that is in him, but the rendering of sound and intelligible reasons for that faith." Doubtless, as a general rule, it is true that the critic of Art or Literature must have a reason for his faith, just as he will have a reason for his faith as a Christian ; but he cannot always make that faith intelligible by argument. There are passages, for instance, in the great poets that may hold him captive in a, way quite inexplicable to criticism ; all he knows is that the stamp of inspiration is upon them ; and so, too—Christianity being an inward life, and how can life be explained P—some of the strongest reasons a man has for his religious belief may be those he is the least capable of making intelligible to an unbeliever.

We may observe, in conclusion, that these essays, reprinted from the St. James's Gazette, strike us in several instances as too full of thought to be fitted for the hasty readers of an evening paper. No one, however, who did read them in that journal could fail to be surprised at their elevation of thought and lucidity of expression. There is no rhetorical effort in such papers as "Imagination," "Pathos," "Love and Poetry," or "Cheerful- ness in Life and Art;" but the words are so fitted to the

thoughts, that while the mind of the reader is quickened, his ear is satisfied. In these essays there is a pithy wisdom that reminds us of Bacon ; and there is, too, in large measure, a gift whioh Bacon lacked,—spiritual insight.