MR. PATMORE'S AMELIA.*
15rE have recently had occasion to quote Mr. Grant Duff's ob- servation respecting our ebbing century, that "never was there a time when a wise adviser would more decidedly say to a young aspirant to public life, Be sure to take a great passport of poetry ;" and Sir Henry Taylor, a Nestor among officials, has lately reprinted his judgment that "the poetry of this country (a country pre-eminently poetical) is its chief storehouse of civil wisdom." So it seems well to examine a poet's work with the endeavour to comprehend its ultimate aims. It is not enough that we should please our taste by its mere melodies, and we shall be like the swine before which pearls are uselessly cast, if we rend with flippant dispraise, "because our natures are little," the provider of them. Low as too many of our minstrels have descended in their attempt to follow rather than guide the whims of the public, their critics have sunk yet lower, by the antithetic laudation of what is modish, and by echoing the dislikes of the "puzzled crowd, whose tired intent hunts like a pack without a scent."
Mr. Patmore's poem The Angel in the House is popular, but perhaps chiefly because of its perfect clearness and simplicity ; while it, at the same time, strikes chords of thought that most of his readers have not ears to hear, and will not attend to, because of the simple metre and easy language in which the most profound mystery of life is approached. Readers who are interested in the courtship of Honoria by Felix, and who dismiss them to "happiness ever after" of the three-volume sort, for the most part miss the noble interpretation of the law of sex that gives the poem its true value, and its author a claim to the possession of that "civil wisdom" which entitles him to a hearing from the "aspirant to public life." The present disintegration and reformation in many parts of the body politic call for a profounder social science, and a more earnest examina- tion of the bases and the true ends of life. Now that the old foundations of the family as the social unit are being under- mined, we are bound to reinforce our instinct of its value. We should not therefore be offended by one who endeavours to lift us to higher levels of thought and feeling, whence we may better perceive the meanings of the immortal legend of Adam and Eve, and of the eternal marriage of God and his Creation.
It is plain that Mr. Patmore was not satisfied with the super- ficial popularity of his first poems, and he has prefixed to the present edition of them an essay in which he justifies his choice of the new metre, as affording the best expression for the thought he has stored and sifted during years of comparative silence. The interest of his chief theme obliges us to pass by this introduction, and to confess that though his verse has peculiar suitableness to the thoughts expressed, it does not hold us entranced by honeyed sweetness, from the effort to grasp the unknown Eros of Mr. Patmore's heaven. Yet as he is bold to write of the theme of ultimate life and love, we must not find fault with the reticence which now and then obscures his work, and especially some of the poems published last year. He takes us towards the sun, and he smokes our glasses for us while he bids us feel the light and heat of the central power of our universe. Some, perhaps, even of those who sympathise with him may wish that he had yet more effectually veiled his Psyche, and had not drawn Eros, as be has done, in electric flashes from the obscuring clouds. Such a shyness among those who fear lest the evil of blasphemy out- weigh the good of insight is natural, but it will not trouble those who follow his thoughts to their heights. He does not err in the prevalent direction of attempted novelty. 'We live in a world somewhat dazed by physical discovery, but he sings the old songs, he is a priest of the old worship, he is, with all the phrases of our enlarged speech at his command, the prophet of the Eternal Love incarnate in the universe, and Whose voice is heard by those who will listen, in all the laws of being.
Many problems of life urgently demand solution : for instance, it is time that in the confused battle of sex which is threatening, a trained imagination, used by habit to contemplation, fed by the poetry of the past, and so lifted to a better outlook than that of those struggling in the dust of the arena, should tell us the wherefore of the Woman in the universe, of the intricate relations of sex, of the persistence of their symbolism in all
• Amelia, &e. By Coventry Patmore. London : George Bell and Sons. great religions, of the recognition of marriage as a sacrament by the Catholic Church in which, as in her other sacraments, she for ever declares the alliance of matter and spirit, and in which she specially proclaims the chief law of mortal life to be "very good." The weary souls who sigh year after year over the expression of increasing pessimism in music, painting, and the faces of the crowd, and who half believe that there is nothing left for us but to sigh in "a world whence love is fled, and truth is dying, because joy is dead," should heartily welcome a poet who, almost against his will, sings of joy, of sunshine, and of scientific optimism, as does Mr. Patmore. It is true that the apparition of Faith, Hope, and Love walking in the midst of our melancholy artists, our agnostics, and our eschatologians, who just now fly from their unknowable pre- sent to a scarcely more knowable future, may well startle by the terror and reproach of its beauty. Yet whatever the superficial gloom of the moment, mankind tends to the light. Poets, if true poets, but make the " selva selvaggia " of actual existence a porch to heaven, and do not loiter by Phlegethon and Styx, as do modern bards of the loathsome. True that the noblest poets "spice their fair banquets with the dust of death," but it is death, the lord and giver of fuller life ; death, the angel of fulfilled humanity they invoke, and not the sick despair of mere decaying flesh, of which we see and hear too much from those who live by flattering the temporary block in progress. Among the morbid minstrels of our decade, Mr. Patmore's overflowing joy is remarkable. It springs from certitude that the noblest dogmas held by man since we have record of his thoughts are truest. He cannot find words too vehement to assert the dignity of man. He uses those powers of the English lan- guage which were best developed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in passionate declarations of the omnipotent love. With strength borrowed from St. Thomas Aquinas, with fervour not unworthy of the author of the Imitation, he ventures to unveil partly the true light. It is too violent in its vibrations for many eyes, and of course there will be much criticism of Mr. Patmore's methods. He will offend some excellent judges of what is decorous by his mysticism, and he will possibly be too much opposed to the taste that revels in Queen Anne renaissance, to please even the more capable public.
Mr. Patmore, however, is certainly a poet who deserves sympathy and study, one who deals as a true poet should with urgent social difficulties, displaying an insight that is as startling as it is rare among us, who judge our apples of Sodom chiefly by their rind. Mr. Patmore's method is by idyll and fragmentary ode to express the truths he is in love with. In poems "writ to his mistress' eye- brow" he murmurs thoughts that are rooted in philosophy, though their blossoms blend with the rainbow. He leads us through Sussex pastures, and while we rejoice in gorse and sea-gleams, he raises suddenly the forma of long-forgotten metaphysics, and the landscape is bright with mystic light. Yet it is easy to miss the esoteric meaning of some of his odes, and therefore we excuse ourselves to the reader for these serious words of preface to their pleasant incidents and picturesque descriptions.
Nothing can be more real, more truly natural, than the sketches of womanly character and feeling in Amelia, at least when we read them with the echoes of last year's Unknown Erosin our ears. In all his poems Mr. Patmore blends subtlety with bluntness ; his very yearnings for "something afar from the sphere of our sorrow," his most mystic aspirations, are most human, and in the highest and widest sense natural. He sings the sublimation of material life rather than the chaos "without form and void," of those who think they know better than the Creator of material life. Mr. Patmore's persons are joyous men and women, living the poetic life in entirely joyous circumstances. His verse throbs with vital energy. He is so utterly content that he can carry joy over the edge and into the very shadow-land of pain, while his renunciations, his ascetic self-sacrifices, are but modes of keener delight. His "remorse of equity" finds good in Hell, and this would seem not the least noble vindication of the "eternal hope." He rises on strong wings above the gloom of the mitigated nihilism in fashion. When he most indignantly rails at the politics and tendencies of his nation, when he censures "Golden Tongue" and the "great Clever Party," he always preserves his faith in ultimate good.
The idyll "Amelia," which gives its name to the latest volume of Mr. Patmore's works, sings of love and of love's angel, Duty. The poet sets forth with much grace how the natural and pro- found passion of a betrothed couple can, while it is set in a frame of springtide brightness, be deepened by the present thought of death, a bidden guest at the banquet of their love, and a guest who gives it deeper meanings. We have not space for adequate extract, but the following lines offer an example of the lighting-up of the landscape with mystic brightness, to which we have alluded. They occur in a description of a visit by the betrothed pair to the grave of Millicent, a lost love of the once more happy lover :—
"And so we went alone,
By walls o'er which the lilac's numerous plume Shook down perfume ; Trim plots close blown With daisies, in conspicuous myriads seen, Engross'd each one With single ardour for her spouse, the Sun ; Garths in their glad array Of white and ruddy branch, auroral, gay, With azure chill the maiden-ftow'r between ; Meadows of fervid green, With sometime sudden prospect of untold
Cowslips, like chance-found gold ;
And broadcast buttercups at joyful gaze, Rending the air with praise, Like the six-hundred-thousand-voiced shout Of Jacob camped in Midian put to rout ; Then through the Park, Where Spring to livelier gloom Quickened the cedars dark, And, 'gainst the clear sky cold, Which shone afar, Crowded with sunny alps oracular, Great chestnuts raised themselves abroad, like cliffs of bloom.'
It is bold of any poet to entitle an ode " L'Allegro," yet a poet is bound to be bold, for faith in the "sudden singing thought on which unguessed increase to life perchance depends" must be his, or he is no poet at all. " L'Allegro " contains some fine pictures of pastoral life, but those pictures, such as that of the "whole bared harvest," are but background for the spiritual felicity, and her "kind twin-sister, certitude," which compel the singer to sing Felicity is, indeed, the inspirer of Mr. Patmore's verse. The mystery of Nature, which to most of us just now is a pain, to him "shapes to its living face the clinging shroud." He lifts a corner of the veil which conceals the true Isis, at whose feet we restlessly and de- spondently sigh, and he is not afraid to write of womanhood and woman's place in the universe, and to recognise the divine relations with it of which she is the type.
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