Chapter III: Part 3

Apart, however, from the Latinisms, which are not many, there is with Darley a certain delight in quaintness which makes of Teutonic words a disagreeable kind of slang. ‘Streamy vales’, for example, is not a welcome phrase. Like to this is the prank of writing ‘bittern ooze’. The ambiguity makes the words even grotesque; for the poet is writing of a marsh; is he then making the word ‘bitter’ more ‘quaint’, or is he taking the name of a bird for an adjective? Either way he is trifling. But as George Darley died a disappointed man, and as his poetry had light and space in it, and there was lacking the perception of these in his readers at the time, it is rather his beauties than his faults that shall be dealt with here. Life, light, and distance—in poetry—seem to leave on the mind’s eye the impression of red, yellow, and blue, radiant less or more according as the life is less or more impassioned, the light celestial, and the space remote; though no red, not even red veiled by the blond and tender colours of humanity, shines in Darley’s verse, there is assuredly no dimness in his gold nor dullness in his azure. At the first page of _Nepenthe_ the reader takes a larger and more liberal view of the world of the poet before him, reading this line on the daytime sun

High on his unpavilioned throne.

It is followed, unfortunately, by some commonplaces, but in itself it is fine. Less beautiful, but also a felicity for the visionary eye, is the phrase, ‘that huge-meadowed plain’. It is, at any rate, a word to sigh for in the narrow town and the narrow winter.

George Darley wrote of fairies—a dull subject, let us confess at last; and more than half of his drama of _Sylvia, the May-Queen_, is acted by fairies and fiends at war. But there are some happy fancies even in the prattle of fairy-queens to their courtiers, as where Morgana rallies her tender follower:

I’ve seen thee stand
Drowning amid the fields to save a daisy.

And again:

Thou once didst cherish
In thy fond breast a snowdrop dead with cold.

Darley was as resolute an Elizabethan as Beddoes, but while Beddoes darkened his skies for the drama of passions graced with trivial flowers blooming in an angry light, Darley addressed himself rather to the imitation of the humour and the prettiness. He copied the Shakespeare of the _Midsummer Night’s Dream_, and though the critics say that his rustics are tedious, it seems to me an unjust judgement. Granted the delight that Shakespeare finds in the derision of clowns as they blunder with words too long for their fortunes, and it is not fair to say that Darley is really a bore. His Andrea in the _May-Queen_ makes no bad sport of that kind. Darley has the situation and the quality of the laughter from Shakespeare, but the phrase is of his own exceeding ingenuity; and when the transformed serving-man meets that dapper elf Nephon, there is some very fair success in the frolicking. ‘Where is this mighty small-spoken gentleman?’ asks Andrea (unluckily Darley did not know that the penultimate of this Italian name is long). ‘Hillo, Signor Nobody; at what point of the compass must I look, to be mannerly?’ The most charming thing in the play is this exquisite beginning of the song of a fairy who has lost the mortal lady in her care:

Where can my young beauty be
That I have not found her?
Out alas! this is not she,
With a shroud around her?

This is beautiful and ancient versification and rhythm. But Darley had never got free from the habit of anapaestic vulgarities, out of date with all he wrote; and immediately after that delicate verse he begins again to caper:

For the pride of the valley, the flower of the glen, and so forth.

Among the phrases that give a flash to the verse is one, of graver value, that seems to recall something of Coventry Patmore’s ‘bright anger’. And Darley takes a flight about the world, in his happy mood and his foreboding, and there are rich lines in his landscape, such as these:

And mine ear rung with ocean’s roar,
And mine eye glistened with its blue.

With how much perception, how pliant a turn of thought, how instant a reflection, how delicate a sense of mood and habit Darley could play the seventeenth-century poet is proved by his famous lyric, _It is not beauty I demand_, with this among its stanzas:

Tell me not of your starry eyes,
Your lips that seem on roses fed,
Your breasts where Cupid tumbling lies,
Nor sleeps for kissing of his bed.

In the first edition of the _Golden Treasury_ this poem, of then unknown authorship, was placed, carefully timed, between Wotton and Carew. It seems to have been withdrawn altogether when its writer was found to be of the nineteenth century.

SYDNEY DOBELL

It would be better to be purely forgotten, and then rediscovered (or not, as may befall) than to be half remembered, or remembered by rumour, as Sydney Dobell seems to have been for many years, and compromised by the praises that send a straightforward reader shying and swerving to left or right—anywhere out of the way of their finger-posts. Oblivion is clean, but not so the encumbered remembrance, and not so the reputation taken into custody and care by the Introductory Memoir.

There is a small accessible volume of selections from Sydney Dobell’s poems, of which the biographical and critical introduction is more than usually disheartening. It is apparently by several hands, and one of them has the most uncertain hold upon grammatical collocation, while others seem to express in the thick English of a certain period the portly zeal of the writers for a poet who had associations with their own youth. It is, of course, easy not to read an introductory memoir; and this one should not be read by those who might charge the poet with the insignificant sincerity (equal in literature to insincerity) of the honest critics who admired him. There must have been better things written in his praise than these. We know, for instance, Rossetti’s admiration (carelessly and thinly alluded to in his rather vacant letters to Allingham) for _Keith of Ravelston_; and the poets who were Dobell’s contemporaries must surely have had something better to offer him than the dull enthusiasm of biographical introductions. He was a lyrical poets’ lyrical poet, in this sense: the thought, the motive, the thing for which his best lyric lives, is not only a poetic thought, it is also a brief one. It closes, it is finished in shape, it holds well within the verse. There are, needless to say, long thoughts and short thoughts, which are fit for poetry, reconciled from the beginning with the poetic intellect, and justified by themselves. It is the brief thought that is so essentially lyrical. Take, as an example, the conception of which was born the poem called _Isabel_. She who is dead was, in love, in piety, in grief, too shy for life, more spiritual, more wild, and more warm than the world, losing her in her own light, and not so much as knowing her for a secret creature, had ever seen her to be. Therefore her poet chooses no time but the dark summer dawn and the summer sunrise for his songs and for his memories. Her path had missed men’s footsteps, and he travels into the hours that also are aloof, to think of her with the thoughts of the imagination. I have thus reluctantly disarrayed the phrases of the poem in order that the reader may have the short thought at a glance.

All fine sonnets and other poems in brief final forms have in like manner brief thoughts—large, great, but short. A short thought which is poetic is the highest inspiration of the lyric poet, even though there may be many and many a splendid lyric that has it not, but is as unclosed as the passage of a bird in flight. So are the greater number of the poems of Sydney Dobell; he has not the perfect inspiration of the short thought always, or even often. That inspiration distinguishes _Isabel_ greatly. Of that poetic poem let me give a stanza or two—

That early hour I meet
The daily vigil of my life to keep,
Because there are no other lights so sweet,
Or shades so long and deep,
Isabel.

And best I think of thee
Beside the duskest shade and brightest sun,
Whose mystic lot in life it was to be
Outshone, outwept by none,
Isabel.

This poem has assuredly rare sweetness and much rarer passion in its solitary tones; it has in a small measure the emotion of the hours of sleep, as the waking heart still owns it in face of the breaking of a summer dawn. The short thought is the matter and form again of those two sonnets whereby chiefly Dobell’s name is now remembered—_The Army Surgeon_ and _Home in War Time_. When a poetic short thought is transfigured in a single beautiful image, then the sonnet is satisfied, the sonnet is fulfilled. It remained for the English poets so to conceive the sonnet, not re-arraying but creating it. Of these two sonnets it is _The Army Surgeon_ that has this fundamental completeness; the other has not imagery, though it has, with extraordinary finality, the short thought. In both imagination is intellectual and visual, and the tide of impassioned feeling is a high tide, that has lifted all the poet’s blood. These are not, perhaps, in the full sense, great poems; they have not the peace which seems, beyond all our understanding, to make an eternal quality of poetry of the tumult of Lear. They are poems of emotional unrest, but among poems of emotional unrest they are singularly fine and true, and something at least of the fusing work of passion is done upon their beautiful diction.

All in all, the whole series of war-poems have a strange success. They were written during the Crimean war, and they have all the best quality of their time, which may be called good faith. Sydney Dobell takes his types as all the Romance poets and their posterity knew them, and he does not lie in wait for the accidents and incidents of fragmentary life. He has a milkmaid in all her symmetry, a Lady Constance in hers, a French chasseur, a wounded officer, a market wife; they are all conventional. But if the poet found his persons ready for him in a not all unwise legend, he did no small thing in filling them full of warm traditionary life. It may well be that the more modern author achieves somewhat less—or perhaps it would be better to say that he achieves his work at a less expense of life—when he makes his human creature (his unit with all the natural lack of unity) to live and to be seen by its natural singleness; when he so marks the gnarls and knots of the life, surprised in a separate man, as to give proof of a man by his very accidents. It may well be easier work to do thus than to do as Sydney Dobell does with his expected Romance, breathing so fully. The one poet shall not justly charge the other with any unhandsome or slovenly dealing.

There is, however, one poem in the war series which has another kind of life than that of the milkmaid’s song. This is one of the finest—_Tommy’s Dead_. Who shall say that this poem of actual knowledge, and of a life lived, is not better than the rest? More full of the poet’s authentic life it may not be, but the thing is better worth doing. Tommy’s father is a single and separate creature, and every line of his song is a strong surprise, though it is but of the thinness, the dullness, and the last old age in a day of bad news at the farm.

On the other hand, _The Little Girl’s Song_ is only in part the cry of a child; and yet even in the least childish lines, there is the excuse that the poet, in the urgency of his feeling, has broken through the limitations of the childish speech because he could not restrain the haste of his own pity-driven word. The little girl’s father is at the war, and she wonders whether indeed she sees her mother wasting with grief, or whether that face was always so pale. The trivial word of the child—‘Papa’—seems to make the line more forlorn:

Do not mind my crying, Papa, I am not crying for pain;
Do not mind my shaking, Papa, I am not shaking with fear;
Though the wild wind is hideous to hear,
And I see the snow and the rain.
When will you come back again,
Papa, Papa?

The beautiful _Keith of Ravelston_ is in the series of Crimean poems; and some who know its undefined sweetness and its mystery may not be aware with how admirable an art Sydney Dobell introduces its vague outlines. It is a song sung by one who is happy in the year of sorrow—

She sings the sorrow of the air,
Whereof her voice is made.

Then follows the strain of Romance in an immemorial cadence:

The murmur of the mourning ghost
That keeps the shadowy kine;
‘Oh, Keith of Ravelston,
The sorrows of thy line!’

I must own that _Balder_ and _The Roman_ have not yet persuaded me to read them through; but the lyrics, if so chosen that a certain vein of weakness may not appear anywhere, are surely a perdurable part of our incomparable literature.

COVENTRY PATMORE

To prophesy that the odes of Coventry Patmore shall be confessed, a hundred years hence, high classic poetry, is assuredly to promise the critics of a hundred years hence high classic quality in their judgement. It is to look for a definite intelligence and for an explicit code of literary law, inasmuch as a mind trained in the less obvious measures and restraints both of thought and of verse is needed to recognize the law of _The Unknown Eros_. It is to look, not only for such precision, but for its rare companions—liberty, flight, height, courage, a sense of space and a sense of closeness, readiness for spiritual experience, and all the gravity, all the resolution, of the lonely reader of a lonely poet. Whatever criticism may learn in time to come, _The Unknown Eros_ will hardly then have many readers, and will no doubt still keep the accidental loneliness that surrounds it now by reason of the indifference of the majority; but its essential loneliness is its own quality, conferred by no world’s neglect; not an effect of conspicuousness or difference; not a mere contrast, for it is relative to nothing.

The reader undertakes at least to know and to watch that solitude. It was assuredly a sense of the gravity of this enterprise that inspired the phrase, ‘lonely watcher of the skies’; a star is lonely, and its student, whatever his conditions, lonely as he watches. Pausing upon that significant phrase, we ask for a moment whose it is. Not Keats’s, evidently; and it proves at last to be a word of Patmore’s own; and the lonely watcher is his rapt and vigilant reader. In a now cancelled passage of Coventry Patmore’s ode, _Tired Memory_, occurs the ‘lonely’ astronomer. Who can complain that there are not many prepared for such a vigil? Moreover, _The Unknown Eros_, although we may attempt images of sidereal distance to express its profound flight, has the more dreadful solitude of an experience, and goes far in an inverse flight, through the essentially single human heart—intimately into time and space, remotely into the heart of hearts.

Of many words of praise, the word ‘classic’ is chosen here because it suggests no exclusions of schools or kinds, nor even any preferences for poetry of one kind of perfection, to the slighting of poetry of another. None the less is it the most sharp and severe of all words of criticism, or it shall here have that character, if the reader will agree to understand as ‘classic’ all poetry that is _one_—thought and word. The fusion of thought and word is unmistakable, whether the fire of an impassioned thought bring it to pass, or the close coldness of fancy made perfect; for since we hear that metals pass into one another, _in vacuo_, by pressure in the cold, this latter image is possible; but even if, with Thomas à Kempis, we contemplate the metal that is one with fire and is changed into fire, it is less by the fusion of fire that a greatly classic poem is to be figured, than by a more vital union; mind and body, where tidal thought and feeling are quick with the blood and various with the breath of life, give a juster, as well as a simpler and a human, image of a vital poem. Besides, the fire of life is made sensible to us by warmth and not by flame, and there are in literature a far greater number of humanly warm poems that are classic and vital, than of poems that are classic and vital with apparent and uncovered flame. Some of these last, indeed, there are, but few. The image of warm life is the general measure of poetry. Then is poetry proved classic and alive when a reader, struck to the heart, moved and shaken like Leontes looking on the figure of Hermione, having seen her colour, her height, her light, her age, knows her indeed, and confesses her at last by another sign: ‘Oh, she’s warm!’

In _The Unknown Eros_ the poet’s intention, single, separate, strikes unique strokes against which the reader’s human heart is all unarmed by custom. It is mastery, and not violence, that so comes home, dividing soul and spirit. There is not a violence in the world that does not seem a dissipation and an essential weakness when reproached by such a majestic energy, able to curb its hand.

Not without profoundly conscious art did Coventry Patmore achieve the ultimate, the mortal, pathos of such an ode as _Eurydice_. He was ready to tell the secret which no others could use as he used it, however it might be guessed; and the secret of _Eurydice_ was: ‘After exceeding ill, a little good.’ The slenderness of the good and the poignancy of the ill are mingled, in this ode on dreams, with such closeness of fear as no other poet has ever endured. _Eurydice_ is the dream of the mourner, who night by night follows some dreary clue through labyrinths without hope, to find the dear dead living the thin, remote, neglected life that the dead do live in these intolerable dreams. But Coventry Patmore does not always capture terror for such purposes of eternal sadness; he is able to marry terror to joy in the magnificent ode of reunion, _The Day after To-morrow_:

O, heaving sea,
That heav’st as if for bliss of her and me,
And separatest not dear heart from heart,
Though each ’gainst other beats too far apart

O, weary Love, O, folded to her breast,
Love in each moment years and years of rest.

· · · · ·

O Life, too liberal, when to take her hand
Is more of hope than heart can understand.

· · · · ·

One day’s controlled hope, and one again,
And then the third, and ye shall have the rein,
O Life, Death, Terror, Love!

_Ultima dolcezza_ was once exquisitely said of the skylark; _ultima amarezza_ should be the words for the lines:

Thou whom ev’n more than Heaven lov’d I have,
And yet have not been true, even to thee;

and the extremity of grief without bitterness, the grief that kisses and says a conscious ‘farewell, farewell’, is in _Departure_, and in this passage of too significant allusion, with years of tears lightly implied by a negative:

When the one darling of our widowhead,
The nurseling Grief, is dead,
And no dews blur our eyes
To see the peach-bloom come in evening skies.

Nor does a public sorrow utter less life and death. The ode entitled _Proem_ foretells with a singular peace of grief the day when England, ‘a dim heroic nation, long since dead’, shall be benignly remembered no otherwise than by ‘the bird-voice and the blast of her omniloquent tongue’—by the poets of her then dead language.

As to the ‘natural description’ for which the reader is apt to look—it might not unfairly be said that Patmore never described. He claimed the truths of science, to which in youth he had devoted his attention, to serve his poem with images; and thus he used them in his speech, as when the perception he gained of Divine truths by the act of contemplation and the holding his spirit still, ready, and free, was likened by him to the photographic picture of stars invisible even to the camera but made visible by a long accumulation of continuous imperceptible impressions. And nature, evasive to the mere describer, yielded imagery to him with an indescribable freshness. There is an instance in the ode, _Wind and Wave_, with its final flash of sea and sea-margins, and waves that

Traverse wildly, like delighted hands,
The fair and fleckless sands

· · · · ·

And burst in wind-kissed splendours on the deafening beach.

The smile of Psyche is

Like sunny eve in some forgotten place;

love shows in the dark eyes of the dying woman,

As when a south wind sombres a March grove.

In _Amelia_ we receive the candid, simple shock of the line in which every meeting with her beauty is likened to a first beholding of the ocean. In this ode, also, stands the ‘little bright, surf-breathing town’, and the westering sun fills with shade ‘the dimples of our homeward hills’. Whenever Coventry Patmore touches nature it is with a sudden sight, often it is also with a sudden insight. The blackbird at dawn, a lonely thrush at evening, singing notes few and fine, and ‘sad with promise of a different sun’, brought him in full the message of the wild suggestion that never left poet’s heart at rest. When he wrote the _Odes_, and used thus a free metre because he knew himself to be set at liberty by his very knowledge and love of law, that heart beat in the sensitive line, and he caught rapturous breath, or sighed, as a spirit blowing whither it will.

The quality of poetry is not strained. It has not to abide our repeated question. It tests and is not tested. Every true lover of poetry knows that when he cites great lines it is not the poetry but the hearer that is to be judged. This true lover may well have outlived the desire to give to others a convincing or converting reason for his own certainties as to the most poetic things in poetry, but he still desires to know whose mind’s ear is fine, and how many have the ear, as time goes on. To the treasure of these most beautiful things, to which the dramatic and the epic poets have given passages or phrases, the lyric poets stanzas or lines, it is a wonder to find how much Coventry Patmore has added. The slender volume of his odes furnishes them out of all measure. Even those readers who will not hold the author of that small volume to have answered all the conditions on which a poet is acknowledged great, will confess this extraordinary disproportion. The mental apprehension of poetry can be put to the proof by Patmore’s odes—and indeed by not a few passages of the contemned _Angel in the House_—much oftener than by honoured classical poems from which we gather those testing lines by precious threes and twos. _The Unknown Eros_ yields them to us in overwhelming beauty and in strong numbers. Some have that poetry of imagery—so enkindling, so exalting that we say of imagery that it is poetry itself, until we find the poetry of the yonder side, for some again are of the simplicity, the further simplicity, that is beyond imagery. One of the testing lines of our literature has this latter character—Chaucer’s, chosen by Matthew Arnold, on the lot of man:

Now with his love, now in the coldë grave.

From Coventry Patmore’s odes we gather them with both hands, exalted, subdued, and greatly moved by our riches.

Why _The Unknown Eros_ should have found so few readers it might be hard to say. We should have expected something different from the literary liberty and literary variety of England. Ignorance of Patmore’s odes might have been looked for, that is, from readers fairly of one mind in the admiration of Byron and Scott, but it is not easily to be explained in readers of various minds admiring Byron, Scott, Wordsworth, Crashaw, Campion, Blake, Milton, and Shakespeare the lyrist. Probably a doubt as to the whole meaning of many among the odes has discouraged even Patmore’s willing readers. The beauty was there, but it was to them an uncertain magnificence, a glow from a doubtful fire, a pealing call of an uncertain word, remote as thunder, the heart-piercing utterance of an obscure grief—obscure as waters are obscure because they are profound, not because they are turbid. Some of our esteemed poets have left us meanings troubled by the lowest of difficulties—the grammatical. Their waters have matter in mechanical suspension rather than in chemical solution. It is often impossible to decide to what nouns some of the pronouns in _Sordello_ refer. But Patmore’s pure diction, uttered in the composure that gives high dignity to his most poignant poems, permits no such baffling of inquiry. Nevertheless some of the odes of _The Unknown Eros_ are difficult. Some, we say, and are again puzzled at finding them so few. _The Day after To-morrow_ is not readily understood to refer to reunion after death; the Psyche odes sing of a spiritual experience alien to the history, to the aspirations, and even the desires, of the greater number of deeply spiritual men; the matter of the mystical ode called _The Unknown Eros_ itself is all but hidden; _Deliciae Sapientiae de Amore_ darkly sings the triumph of virginity and its sacrifice at once; few or no readers will guess the _Arbor Vitae_ of a very fine ode to be the Catholic Church, and the ‘nests of the hoarse bird, who talks and understands not his own word’ to be (a most unjust image) the clusters of her clergy; and a few other necessities for explanation there may be. But, on the other hand, there can be no doubt, to all initiate in the world of poetry, as to the full significance—the furthest significance, to every inner alley and retreat of meaning, to every ultimate pang of sensitiveness—expressed in that terrible record of a mourner’s dreams, _Eurydice_; in _Departure_; in _If I were dead_; in _Saint Valentine’s Day_; or in the ode on the decline of England, already named, which contains the memorable description of her literature. Why, of these all-intelligible poems, is only one generally known, even with the relative generalness possible among the little minority that cares for poetry? That one is, needless to say, _The Toys_, a very beautiful and tender poem, but one containing less essential poetry than any other page of the odes.

It must be owned that some of the accessory persons and conditions of the story of _The Angel in the House_ are unwelcome to poetry as we have learnt to hold it. But this is an avowal that we are either content, or very weakly, very ineffectually, ill content, to live in a social world that we confess to be unworthy of poetry. Coventry Patmore, as we understand his attitude, refused to be content with such a world, and refused, moreover, to be impotently discontent. If the world was unfit for his poem, he would reject the world—and he at least knew how to reject and did not play at rejection. He did not believe that there was such unfitness, because love and immortality were there, as elsewhere, with humanity. The modern age chose to be ashamed of the manner in which it chose to live, to be associated, to prosper, to order its affairs; no other age had condescended to that kind of shame. But Coventry Patmore was not modern in this matter. He thought the daily civilized ways of a Cathedral town, granted that they were delicate and gay, and not dull, no more unfit for ‘realistic’ art than other contemporary ways, neither delicate nor gay, have been held to be before, and notably since, the writing of _The Angel in the House_. Coventry Patmore wrote of conventions in the manner of a realist, and he had for this precedents older than his critics stopped to remember. If so much of explanation is to be offered in answer to still current criticisms, how does it befall that any reader should pause upon the mere intervals in poetry so profound and penetrating as, in a hundred passages, shakes the metre with a hand of control?

Among such passages are these records of beauty:

Her eyes incredulously bright,
And all her happy beauty blown
Beneath the beams of my delight.

So much simplicity of mind
In such a pomp of loveliness!
Eyes that softly lodge the light.

And elsewhere are words that touch the heart so close as these:

His only Love, and she is wed!
His fondness comes about his heart
As milk comes when the babe is dead.

And again:

Alone, alone with sky and sea
And her, the third simplicity.

Here is a quatrain winged, not weighted, with meaning:

Far round each blade of harvest bare
Its little load of bread;
Each furlong of that journey fair
With separate sweetness sped.

Again:

Blest in her place, blissful is she;
And I, departing, seem to be
Like the strange waif that comes to run
A few days flaming near the sun,
And carries back, through boundless night,
Its lessening memory of light.

It is possible that this early poem is contemned because the reader takes the ‘Angel’ to be the woman, and an angel obviously feminine is a kind of sentimentality. But I prefer to take the ‘Angel’ to be Love. Patmore’s masculine mind probably referred the name rather to such an angel as he who in the Old Testament took up a prophet by the hair of his head and carried him across country. Together with Love, Patmore’s subject was the Child in the House, before ever Pater had so varied Patmore’s title. Together with the revelation of youthful love he has coupled all the sweet revelations made to a child:

This and the Child’s unheeded Dream
Was all the light of all his day.

We find that there are two master-emotions in modern poetry—in that Romance literature which has been the complementary life of Europe now for many centuries; one dates from Dante’s day, and one chiefly from the day of Henry Vaughan (Wordsworth’s virtually immediate precursor). Love, and the love of Nature, mystically passionate, are what they are with us, not because all men, but because two boys, conceived them. It needs the childish dream to raise these emotions into the regions of mystery, sweetness, tenderness, and terror which they have gained because Dante was a child in love with a girl, and Vaughan a child in love with Nature. Other lovers have loved in childhood, or else they have profited by Dante’s childhood; other poets have conceived the passion for Nature in their childhood, or have profited by the childhood of Wordsworth, of Vaughan, and of Traherne. The wilder and the more real, the more delirious and the more innocent these remote experiences, the more has the lover’s love the quality of Romance, and the poet’s imaginative verse the quality of the poetry of Nature. Men could never have done for mankind what these boys have done; literature owes her two ideal adult passions to the dreams of childhood.

Coventry Patmore’s ardour and mystery acknowledged that dear and ignorant origin. He did more than remember that incomparable antiquity; with him childhood hardly needed remembering, for it remained, the companion of his complete intellect, the rapture of his profoundly experienced heart, the strange and delicate witness of manly sorrows.

The most beautiful of all gardens is assuredly not that which is rather forest or field than garden, the ‘landscape garden’ of a false taste; nor, on the other hand, the shaven and trimmed and weeded parterre with an unstarred lawn; but rather the garden long ago strictly planned, rigidly ordered, architecturally piled, smooth and definite, but later set free, given over to time and the sun; not a wilderness, but having an enclosed wildness, a directed liberty, a designed magnificence and excess. Comparable to such a garden is Coventry Patmore’s mind, obedient to an ancient law, but wildly natural under an inspiration of visiting winds and a splendid sun of genius.

No poet ever had a greater value for poetry or attributed to it a greater dignity than the value and the dignity that consecrated it in Patmore’s heart. As he very literally and actually held the members of the body to be divine, so may it be said that he saw in poetry also the incarnate word; the metre, the diction, the pause, the rhyme, the phrase were not accidental but essential. Hence his extraordinary mastery of style. And as to his sense of the greatness of poetry as a power and domination we have but to compare it with the sense of one who spared no words in praise of poetry, and who speculated boldly as to its work and mission—Matthew Arnold.[3] Failing the religious sanction, failing the fundamental law with its code, poetry, Arnold thought, might take its place, whether as temporary regent or regent without a term. It would, he said, console and soothe mankind. As though a race in need of the spur and the curb, the example, the threat, and the canon, were sufficiently to be served by those unmanly ministrations! As though to be soothed in an ill-temper and comforted in an ill-humour were the chief necessities of men, a race worthy of the dignities of chastisement! In raising poetry to what he thought this eminence, assuredly Matthew Arnold did it no honour. Never was poetry more conscious than Patmore’s. Nor, perhaps, if we seek among the homages of the poets to their art shall we find graver or profounder veneration than Patmore’s, hardly even excepting Wordsworth’s, explicit and implicit.

Footnote 3:

He thought the value of the religions to be their ‘unconscious
poetry’. ‘It is part of the man’s unconscious poetry,’ says Harold
Skimpole—he is alluding to the family butcher (unpaid)—‘that he always
calls it “his little bill”.’

He valued his country chiefly for her poets. So must we learn to do, and to value her for him.

POETRY AND CHILDHOOD

Which is the language of poetry? For each, perhaps, the language that first named for him a flock of sheep, a hill, a mountain river, or whatever thing touched a child’s mind with a remote and yet familiar love. The poets who have for him a lifelong advantage over all others are the poets who write that tongue. No other word than theirs will be to him the very name of what he finds so fresh. Thus, for my own part, reading again the _Chants du Crépuscule_, the _Feuilles d’Automne_, _Contemplations_, and _Voix Intérieures_, I own the power of the poet who knows the true name of an orchard, and so calls it ‘le verger’. ‘Le verger’ is purely yonder steep field of fruit-trees round and soft above their separate shadows. In another tongue the name is translated, and therefore removed by one step; it has no longer the shape and figure and spirit which the name first known has for the child learning the thing and the word in one.

Besides, Victor Hugo falls in with the mood of one who has profound childish memories connected with his common words, by writing so closely of infantine things as though to secure the charm for all a reader’s lifetime to come, and to establish the authority of his French precisely upon those names of childish import that are most subject to such an early spell.

A reader who, when he had learnt that there are birds, had learnt their English name, and had, moreover, received his father, his mother, his bed, his sleep, his nurse’s song, his little breakfast, in English, has not, I think, an equal poet to rehearse for him those words, those things rather, in his later years. For there seems to be no poet in our master-poetry to do for him that singular office, and to sing the language of his first nurse to a great and authentic lyre. He may learn all nature with our poets, and he hears the Gospel first in an incomparable tongue; and his first sense of Greece doubtless comes with an adequate word. But he has no august poet to resume his ancient lullabies, heard once in ancient regions between sleeping and waking, the immemorial night-light, the homely language of antiquity and old romance as children have the sense of them in their little words at play upon the floor, at play upon the moss. He has not had Victor Hugo’s French.

Furthermore still, an English reader whose childish life was uttered in French has half forgotten, amid later English, some of the daily words of that time, unused by grown men and women. These Victor Hugo sings to him. They return to him out of the past and out of his poetic page at once. They had but dropped to sleep in imperishable memory; they wake again, and they are more fresh to his heart than swallows, and than torrents from the Alps.

Here, then, is the tongue of poetry for him. The child and the poet know it together. They meet, they understand, they have the way of it together. And if they meet again across age and change and disuse, how close, how light, how natural is this encounter, how sudden and how old the intimacy! Poet and child have their traffic, no doubt, in every life; but what incomparable traffic is this of Victor Hugo and an English reader who had a French childhood! How ingenious is fortune to bring their communion to pass! Many are the things, small and all-important, known fully, and more than known—recognized, known after estrangement—between these two only of all the pairs of poet and child, in the world. Where else can there be just such a commerce? In the first place that poet is unique. He, too, breathes the breath of the moss closely; he has not only the child’s sense of it, but also the child’s inexpert and invaluable word. And the reader, on his part, has, as I have said, a peculiar experience both of memory and of oblivion. For him, then, the French language has that grace of election which makes it wholly, invincibly successful—the grace of each man’s first tongue; and in overplus it has the powers of the tongue in which Victor Hugo was wont to write of children, and, again, the powers of the tongue of a great romance. Of a word in that language, therefore, it may be said, as of the elect lady in a violent world—

Her gentle step to go or come
Gains her more merit than a martyrdom.

The word of poetry in after-life is sublime and tragic by will, by force and conquest; the word, in the French of Hugo, has for me but to be uttered. ‘Le verger’ possesses not only a young child’s sight of trees under the sun and moon, a young child’s touch of the grass, but also the genius of the South of France, of ancient agriculture and of early song.

Assuredly those to whom the word first learnt was ‘the orchard’ must be content with something less than this.

A reading of later French persuades one easily that Victor Hugo was alone, and is alone, the speaker of what has become so mysterious and so intelligible, so surcharged and so buoyant a language:

Oh, ’tis not Spanish, but ’tis Heaven she speaks!

cries Crashaw. Victor Hugo speaks not so much French as childhood, and a peculiar childhood; Romance, and a unique Romance; nature, too, as no eyes of Latin race had seen it until then, with insight as well as with perception—in Emerson’s phrase, ‘a little wildly, or with the flower of the mind’.

Apart from all this which makes the lyrics of this great poet so dear, for exclusive and accidental reasons, to one reader among many, I have no praise for the French poetic tongue. It is true that the word ‘souffle’ is for my ear all a summer wind at night—it has more merit than a martyrdom of description; that is by chance. It is by genius, however, that Victor Hugo makes this word so fresh and dark.

What I have to suggest is that the poets, since he ceased to write (ceased as a lyrist, not as a rhetorician), have done little more for the enlargement of their language than he did in the distant days when his work was a very revolution; and this in spite of their metrical liberty, which seems to have no bounds. The freedom he claimed from the bonds of the preceding century or so was precisely no more than his art needed. Nothing was done for the sake of liberty, for the sake of others, for the sake of pioneership, or for any other of the causes that mediocrity is fond of. All was purely for his own poetry, and because, being Victor Hugo, he could not write within the laws that held Boileau content. Where he found no need of change he obeyed Boileau or another, or La Harpe or another, with a cheerful docility that has left his verse to-day far behind the reforms of modern French prosody, ‘reforms’ that seem to have been inspired by the revolt of a Walt Whitman, and make easy havoc of the whole order, the whole law. Even in the enlarged liberty made for French poetry by Victor Hugo’s advance, the wave of verse met salutary bars and measures as strong as rocks. But his successors have spilt their art thinly over all boundaries, and the flat country is already under shallow water.

I have under my hand the volume of a little recent symbolist, side by side with _Les Voix Intérieures_, and the comparison persuades me that not all this new licence is able to make the French language a really liberal instrument. What has been written here must be the proof that if I have a prejudice it is for French, and that for me magic and the caprice of destiny are on that side. But there are disabilities; and it is not metrical liberty, or the chance medley of masculine and feminine endings, or the ignoring of the e mute, or rhymes that are but the suggestion of a jingle, or any other of these later liberties that can make this language sufficient. It lacks the second part, the other side, the splendour of alternative. It has the strangest blanks. It cannot so much as call an author shallow, nor a teacup, nor a sea.

As it has no alternative of derivation, French has none of time; no place apart for poems and prayers, but the whole language is at the disposal of the daily grocer and the trade-circular. The French of commerce, merely exaggerated, has tempted poets to make that ready eloquence resound, when the lyric could do no more, for lack of strings.

A word as to syllables—those great units of verse—and their motions. The Italian syllables dance, springing from their double consonants and long vowels; the English walk, with all variety of gait, and fly with all variety of wing; the French trot. ‘Égalisez les syllabes.’ The Frenchman who speaks right Parisian equalizes the syllables not only of his own language but of every other. Hear him speak Italian thus; hear him, as a good pastor in England, read the English Testament.

GEORGE MEREDITH

If the novel has been raised to the highest place in literature in our time, this was mainly by the power of one hand. Victor Hugo had not the intellect, nor Flaubert the purpose, nor George Eliot the drama, nor Thackeray the tolerance, that in union could achieve such an exaltation of an art that was once pastime. Fiction was made by Meredith for his generation the companion of poetry, and thus the second great imaginative art of letters. The picaresque novel, the novel of irony, the novel of invention, the novel of morals, the novel of emotion—the work of Le Sage, Cervantes, Balzac, Charlotte Brontë—works of genius as they are, take an intermediate, arbitrary, and partial place; they are on the way to the work of intellect and philosophy in fiction, the novel that watches life, perceives, detects, indeed, but has also the spiritual insight, wisdom as well as knowledge, and not only temperament but passion; that not only states the problem, but accounts for it.

George Meredith did not pause upon his knowledge of the human heart as though knowledge in itself were a good, he used his science; nor did he stop upon his emotion over the pain of life, he used his sympathy. He worked much beyond and far above the regions in which the wrangle about art with a purpose or art without a purpose goes forward. No critic will ever impugn Meredith’s transcendent purpose. It is not possible to imagine his prose or poetry without it.

The greatness of Meredith stands unquestionable even in the eyes of those who think it incomplete. Great he was—in thought, in passion, in the art of letters, a student of mankind who sought to help, without consoling, the race he watched, suffering and hoping with that which he studied, as a physician pressing a finger upon a brother’s wrist, caring much for the pulse, for the blood, and for the man’s life, caring also much for his own science. The incompleteness which so many readers charged against his work is perhaps that it lacks the great and high repose of art which is unconscious of appearances. A great author should be anxious for effect, or the result of his phrase upon the educated ear, but he should be lifted above anxiety for appearances or the result of his phrase upon the untaught. Meredith’s prose has not this loftiness, and therefore misses the classic simplicity. He must be afraid of nothing who writes at the greatest heights, and Meredith feared commonplace. Strange fear for so distinguished a mind! But the fear is unmistakable. It appears most plainly in narrative. He will not consent to employ the usual forthright order of words in telling what happened. Even in recounting the order of dialogue, he can hardly bear to use the customary ‘he said’—he prefers ‘she heard’. This perpetual kind of device mars the manner of his work only in so far as a fine style can be marred by a little manner, and that is not very far. Generally when we find such a weakness of fear and human respect in literature, it is the companion of a weakness of the whole man—or at any rate of the whole author. But when a great man suffers from this frailty, we gladly recognize the truth that style is a profound thing that cannot gravely suffer from surface habits. Meredith’s style is at the foundation of his literature. It has often been said of some author that he has little intellect or power but a good style of writing. Of Meredith we might almost say that he has a magnificent style, yet writes but ill, wild as the paradox may sound. Everything worthy to be called style is his, but the phrase is often tormented, racked, and bent. No other man’s writing could keep its strength, its gravity, and its beauty under such a strain. In poetry, where inversion of one kind or another is, by a long convention, in its right home, Meredith’s fault of manner is the use of words so strange as to be unknown, but this occurs in none but the later poems. Difficulty in attaining to the full meaning is too great in both the earlier and the later poems, and in the slighter pieces the fancy is too perversely fanciful. A great imagination is Meredith’s, but a quibbling fancy.

When Matthew Arnold called poetry a criticism of life, the phrase was taken away from the novel, to which it should belong. Philosophic novelists (there have not been many in the history of English letters) are the chief critics of human life—social life, civilized life, the life of the race and of races, and that of a man and a woman; even a great novelist who is not a philosopher—Thackeray, for example—is a critic of life in its ethics, its emotions, and its shows; the novelist who is a humorist does his admirable part of criticism. But Meredith in his day took the whole social man into his grasp and his vision. A mere user of his arresting hand and of his searching eyes Meredith was not; he bent all the powers of a vigilant mind and of a human heart upon the study of character. The study was also the creation. Meredith formed the most possible, the most complex, the most complete and least explicable of women and men, now and then varying these vitally-mingled persons by presenting a man who, having one quality only, such as the Egoism of the Egoist, is yet alive with a most indubitable life. George Meredith seldom tells a story of these people—he tells nothing less than their history. What he tells us is so much their history that the error, the sin, or the blunder that draws their fate about them is detected in their youth, traced in their maturity, and finished, early or late, in their doom. No other important student of life, except perhaps George Eliot, has found such visible revenges. He saw them, and he was resolved to show them. His doctrine of consequences seems to stand between that of the Buddhist with his inevitable body of results, and that of the Christian with his directed and decreed retribution. Meredith’s Avenger is an offended Nature or wronged Reason, working by the force of some undecreed law; nevertheless of a law. Undecreed; and yet Meredith, by figure of language at any rate, attributes to the visiting and avenging Power now something of formidable indignation and now something of formidable indifference; and even indifference has to be felt! Even blindness implies an eye capable of sight! Meredith had a philosophy of Nature which taught him not—as other students of brute life might suppose—a simple and irresponsible egoism, but self-denial, self-conquest, and unflinching endurance. He would have the individual man to learn the almost unlearnable lesson that his own fate is of no importance. Of no importance to the race others have perceived and pronounced it; Meredith would have the unit to accept and make his own that interior resignation—if resignation is not too half-hearted a word. All the graver poems too bear this as their principal teaching, and their many lessons rest on this alone. To the apostolate of this doctrine he dedicated his practice of comedy, as well as his heart of tragedy, and the Comic Spirit has no surer mission than to attack the outworks of that self-love within which lurks the condemned desire for personal happiness. Austere doctrine, compared with which the courage of the Stoic is but shallow in its penetration of the soul, is but sparing in its wounding of the heart.

PESSIMISM IN FICTION

The told story was not at first used for the purposes of pity, terror, and purification, but mainly for fun. Shall we make a great exception of the Book of Job, the inspired novel all occupied with its subject, the history of a single valuable soul? A family swept out of life are of no moment to that novelist, save as their fate causes the affliction of Job. By and by he shall be comforted with other sons and daughters. These, like the dead ones, are negligible except as sons and daughters to one not negligible man. Never was art truer to a single intention. The earlier family have no names named, but the later receive names because they are to go on living for the final joy of a momentous man.

If we may be permitted (or may be permitted as time goes on) to read Genesis, too, as a divine and all-significant novel, here is an even earlier example of the novel written with the gravest intention, and with simple and economic art. Here the ‘stars also’ are swept into being as the sons of Job are swept out of it, in a phrase that does not pause upon the universe that was to live, as the phrase did not pause upon the beautiful young men who were to die. The earth is central for that purpose, and Job for this.