The Devout Amorist
N° philosophy of love could be more unpopular to-day than that which inspired the whole of Coventry Patmore's work. Like most of the great introspective poets, he was directed by a single idea, upon which his mind worked and adventured, delighting in highway vagaries, but never losing sight of the road. His was a simple mind, powerfully unified ; and without that quality no real flexibility or variety can be found. For to know one's own mind and its purpose is to be free to experiment 'without fear of becoming entangled and baffled.
This, however, is not an acceptable belief to-day. We pride ourselves rather on our complexities and confusions, and the idea of having a single purpose is looked upon either as priggishness or as neurotic self-delusion. The mere mechanism, the drive, of Patmore's character is therefore likely to make him unreadable to-day. So we find two factors which fight against his popularity. First, he has a striking singleness of aim ; so much so, indeed, that the whole of his work might be called a theme with variations. Secondly, the nature of that aim is wholly inimical to modern taste.
His aim was, to expound the Pauline doctrine that woman should approach God only through man. It is paradoxical that one so exquisitely the servant of woman's charms should spend his life expounding the teaching of the world's greatest misogynist. In that paradox, however, lies the key to our present distaste for him. We ask ourselves if there was not in him a deep-seated insincerity, with its corollary of sentimentalism in his aesthetic practice. It must be remembered that our taste to-day is coloured by the feminism which is having such a marked effect upon every phase of our civilization. Woman, in insisting on her independence, has determinedly shifted her position in the worlds of art and religion. She will no longer allow her beauty to serve merely as an inspiration for man. It must also exist in and for herself. Neither will she submit to a vicarious relationship to God through man, as preached by Paul in his elaborate scheme of cosmic symbolism, no small part of which he borrowed from Platonic thought.
It is not surprising, therefore, that Patmore is so uncongenial. He is everything to woman except that which she now demands of man. He worships and sanctifies her ; he calls her Lilith, the subtle one ; he treats her as a flower ; but he never makes her his equal. Tennyson did the same : but Tennyson does not annoy usPseause he did it naturally and unthinkingly. Patmore, however, was deliberate, coldly evolving a sort of mysticism in which woman, ah ! woman, the ineffable symbol, takes her exquisite but inferior place in a male and female universe. It seems a little monstrous to us, as unpleasant as his three marriages. There is a story that Alice Meynell called at the house on the day of his death, and in her eloquent grief appealed to his third wife, " Is it not dreadful, the loss to us all, and to literature ? " The third wife looked at her quizzically, and then replied, in quiet tones, " Come in and have a cup of tea." Was that rather obscure third wife, educated by intimacy with the old poet, a forerunner of the woman of to-day ? Was she perhaps still smarting with indignation against the effrontery of the man who could write of her efforts at emancipation :- " This aping man is crafty Love's devising
To make the woman's difference more surprising ; And, as for feeling wrath at such rebelling, Who'd scold the child for now and then repelling Lures with, I won't ! ' or for a moment's straying In its sure growth towards more full obeying " ?
So much for the doctrinaire side of Patmore, in which a keen and incisive intelligence is warped by prejudice and no small amount of pure reactionary priggishness.
If there were nothing more in him, however, he would not be worth reconsideration now. The greatest of mortals, the Goethes, Whitmans, Rousseaus, have that unbearable streak of rigid opinions. As the reader, with a large patience perhaps, penetrates into Patmore's work, he begins to feel a sense of structure. And that realization acts upon the detail of the work, illuminating it from within, so that the poet's phraseology takes on a personal beauty, like a friend lived With and respected. What seemed bare and even trite is enriched with an allusiveness which has an immediate value and also an ulterior attractiveness of position in the whole. This quality is definitely a sign that here one is in the company of a major poet. It informs Wordsworth's Prelude, and all of Milton's work. One is conscious that the poet, by spiritual concentration, devotion, and singleness. of passion, is moving always in a high country, so that even the dullest scene he has to show us is enriched by mountain air, and the startling light of the hills. This power belongs to Patmore. But, with it, he has his own personal intuitions, those sudden surprises and idiosyn- crasies which are the flowers of that larger and sustained effort. In the midst of his Victorian story, with its croquet lawns, bustles, and red-plush upholstery, he will suddenly flash out into such passages as this :- " Tho death of nuptial joy is sloth To keep your mistress in your wife, Keep to the very height your oath, And honour her with arduous life. Lastly, no personal reverence. doff. Life's all externals unto those Who pluck the blushing petals off. To find tho secret of the rose."
Again and again he breaks through his proprieties, showing-
" Pure passion's high prerogative To make, not follow, precedent."
There is throughout his work that strain of sensuous and even purely physical vitality which is so often the sheath of the mystic, a sort of animal magnetism out of' which springs the illuminating force. All of Patmore's revelations are clothed- " With rhapsodies of perfect words Ruled by returning kiss of rhymes."
Of his technique a book could be written. In fact, he has written it himself, for in a long treatise on prosody he expounds his theory of the art of poetry. The gist of that theory is that prosody has a quantitative or time basis as does music, and that in the construction of verse the measure, of each poem should be set, a short line being compensated by so many bars' rest, as in music. On this theory his odes, like those of his gaudy disciple Francis Thompson, are built up with such perfect proportion and balance of sound and silence. They are noble things, achieving a technical excellenee such as is found only in Milton's Samson Agonistes, that sun- smitten iceberg of prosodic beauty. It was a rare and original character that could win this perfection, and we are glad to be given a fitting description of the man by Sir Edmund Gosse - " He was exceedingly unlike other people, but his face possessed quite as much beauty as strangeness. Three things were particularly noticeable in the head of Coventry Patmore : the vast convex brows, arched with vision ; the bright, shrewd, bluish-grey eyes, and the wilful sensuous mouth. These three seemed ever at war amongst themselves ; they spoke three different languages ; they proclaimed a man of dreams, a canny man of business, a man of vehement physical determination."
In the best of the odes, however, those warring qualities are fused into a whole so perfect that at first we see nothing. Then gradually the art of them begins to assail us with a quietness louder than persuasion, so that our indifference and sometime aversion is conquered, and (to quote a lovely example)— " Perchance we may,
Where now this night is day, And even through faith of still averted feet, Making full circle of our banishment, Amazed meet : The bitter journey to the bourne so sweet Seasoning the termless feast of our content With tears of recognition never dry."
RICHARD CHURCH.
Previous page
