THE BRIDES OF CHRIST.
VII.
ST. AGATHA.
“She hath no breasts—is cruelly maimed withal:
What shall we do for her, when spoken for,
Our little sister? Sheathe her, if a door,
In boards of cedar; if she be a wall,
Build up a house of silver,[[116]] and instal
Her worship”—so the monks. O bleeding core
Of maidenhood, thy Spouse and King shall pour
Balm in thy wounds, the lilies’ growth recall!
When Etna belched forth Phlegethon, and rolled
Its molten flanks upon Catania,
The saint’s veil they did reverently unfold
And wave it in the face of fire—Behold!
Piled black against the convent’s wall to-day,
That Red Sea curdled by Saint Agatha!
VIII.
ST. LUCIA.
“What’s this? Two human eyes upon a dish?
Wretch! what dost mean?” “Lucia sends thee these;
She greets thee: 'Be no longer ill at ease;
They are thine! When mine, a spirit devilish,
With them, with pink bloom and pale limbs, did fish
For men’s souls.’” Quick! to her—ere horror freeze.
Her wan lips smiled beneath the bandages:
“Thou hast languished for mine eyes—have, then, thy wish!”
She raised the fillet—the youth dropped as dead.
“Look up!” a sweet voice spake, “and praise the Lord!”
He obeyed trembling—O illumined head!
Low with an altered spirit he adored.
Thenceforth an angel’s eyes, her own instead,
Lighted her to her martyrdom’s reward.
IX.
ST. URSULA.
A bower of woven palms! In white arrayed,
Marshalled beneath that verdant canopy
By fair-haired Ursula of Brittany,
Eleven thousand martyrs, each a maid!
For England’s heir, Etherius, had obeyed
His bride’s will, honoring her virginity.
To Rome on pilgrimage, by river and sea,
They sailed, and prettily the bold mariner played.
Saint, dear to tender years! thou and thy doves
Fell pierced with many arrows, and the Rhine
With blood of innocents ran red as wine—
Still teach that to the pure Death’s kiss is Love’s!
Still teach it, though thy mortuary shrine
May moulder, while the stream to ocean moves!
THE UNKNOWN EROS.[[117]]
There seems a growing and lamentable tendency among English poets in these days to divide themselves up into schools. We have the Tennysonian, the Swinburnian, the Rossettian, as a little earlier we had the Lake school, the Byronic, and so on. In these schools of poetry, as in schools of painting, there are certain marked features peculiar to each and forming, as it were, the common property of that one. Certain tones and colors belong to this: subdued grays, royal purples, dim and far-away lights on meadow and mere. Another is a lustier flesh-and-blood school: its men and women are decidedly, though musically, improper. The choice expressions and tender care that the other lavishes on the beauties of nature this one devotes to a maiden’s hair, or her cheek, or her nose, the droop of her lashes, or the arch of her brow. A third affects the mystic in matter and form; the more incomprehensible it is, the finer the poetry. It is like the “vague school” in painting. One is sometimes puzzled to know whether the picture be a battle-piece, a landscape, a portrait, or a nightmare on canvas. And so they go on.
This follow-my-leader tendency is unquestionably a mark of feebleness. It would be so in any art; it is obviously so in an art that springs from inspiration, and is thus necessarily original. A poet is comprehensible; a school of poets is absurd. Imagine a school of Homers, of Virgils, of Dantes, of Shaksperes, of Miltons, of Byrons! Why, the world could not hold them.
Weak as our days may be in original poets, they are strong at least in numbers. Probably, unless in the days of good Queen Anne, never before did such a constant and voluminous stream of English verse roll through the press. Most of it falls still-born on the market; yet nothing seems to discourage the poets. From Tupper to Tennyson they publish and publish and publish all the time. Yet there is not a living English poet to-day—unless Aubrey de Vere, whose best work has been his latest—who did not establish whatever fame he has almost a quarter of a century ago, and whose poems since that period have not shown a marked and steady decline.
In the author of The Unknown Eros we find a man who has certainly something new to say; who follows no leader; who has thoughts, and a mode of expressing them, all his own; who cares less for how than for what; whose work compels attention, and who depends in nowise on the jingle of words, the tricks of adjective and rhyme—the ballet-dancing, so to say, of the English language—for his attraction. Indeed, in respect of form he is far behind the other poets of the time. He almost disregards it. Yet, as will be seen, the strange dress that he has chosen for his creation fits it admirably, and moulds itself at will to the strenuous freedom of the combative athlete, the scorn of a man of fine feelings and bright intelligence, the meditative mood of the student, or the softer movements of a lover. His instrument is now a clarion call to battle, now a lover’s lute, now a dirge. It has the strength and simplicity of the Gregorian chant, which in a few notes and changes expresses the heights of inspiration and exultation, the depths of dread, the saddest sorrow of the human heart.
The volume is a collection of odes, written at various and long intervals apparently, and in a style of metre resembling somewhat that of the minor poems of Milton. It has often the regular irregularity of the Greek chorus, with much of the latter’s elasticity, brightness, flexibility, and crystalline texture. In all this it is novel—markedly and successfully so. It is more novel, however, in subject-matter. It is refreshing to come across a man, a poet especially, who can drop out of the commonplace, and do it without affectation. So accustomed have we grown, however, to the commonplace that we follow him at first with difficulty. His “Eros” is indeed an unknown god to the run of readers. He is no Cupid rosy-red, with flowery bow and fire-tipped dart to smite and melt the hearts of sweet young lovers. He does not slumber in summer meads, or rove listlessly by laughing streamlets, or roguishly haunt the bosky dells, or float adown the slanting sunbeam to flame on the unwary and capture their hearts and kindle them into passion while they languish in the soft arms of Mother Nature. His God is not this pagan deity. He is remote, obscure, harsh-seeming. The poet’s song is no pleasing love-tune. It is martial, high, far away, up on crags remote and to be reached only by thorny paths with bleeding feet and straining eyes, and hearts that faint many times on the way. True love is banished from the earth, the poet seems to think; and in place of him, high, pure, serene, with his head lifted up and bathed in the clear light and refulgence of heaven, and his feet only touching the earth, men have set a toy, a plaything, a fair bestiality.
“What rumored heavens are these,” he asks,
“Which not a poet sings,
O, Unknown Eros? What this breeze
Of sudden wings
Speeding at far returns of time from interstellar space
To fan my very face,
And gone as fleet,
Through delicatest ether feathering soft their solitary beat,
With ne’er a light plume dropp’d, nor any trace
To speak of whence they came, or whither they depart?
O, Unknown Eros, sire of awful bliss,
What portent and what Delphic word,
Such as in form of snake forebodes the bird,
Is this?
In me life’s even flood
What eddies thus?
What in its ruddy orbit lifts the blood
Like a perturbed moon of Uranus
Reaching to some great world in ungauged darkness hid;
And whence
This rapture of the sense
Which, by thy whisper bid,
Reveres with obscure rite and sacramental sign
A bond I know not of nor dimly can divine;
This subject loyalty which longs
For chains and thongs
Woven of gossamer and adamant,
To bind me to my unguess’d want,
And so to lie,
Between those quivering plumes that thro’ fine ether pant,
For hopeless, sweet eternity?”
The hard questions here put the poet answers, to some degree at least, in other odes. In the “Legem Tuam Dilexi” (p. 43) he sings:
“The 'Infinite.’ Word horrible! at feud
With life, and the braced mood
Of power and joy and love;
Forbidden, by wise heathen ev’n, to be
Spoken of Deity,
Whose Name, on popular altars, was 'The Unknown,’
Because, or ere It was reveal’d as One
Confined in Three,
The people fear’d that it might prove
Infinity,
The blazon which the devils desired to gain;
And God, for their confusion, laugh’d consent;
Yet did so far relent,
That they might seek relief, and not in vain,
In dashing of themselves against the shores of pain.”
Was there ever a truer picture painted by man of the curse of lost souls and the hopeless relief they find “in dashing of themselves against the shores of pain”—that relief that the demented seek in beating their weary brains out or letting out the stream of the tired and useless life into the dark ocean of infinity, severing with maddened and sacrilegious hand the little knot that separates Time from Eternity? And what stronger picture of the prevalence of evil and the inherent tendency in the fallen world to rebel than this:
“Nor bides alone in hell
The bond-disdaining spirit boiling to rebel.
But for compulsion of strong grace,
The pebble in the road
Would straight explode,
And fill the ghastly boundlessness of space.
The furious power,
To soft growth twice constrain’d in leaf and flower,
Protests, and longs to flash its faint self far
Beyond the dimmest star.
The same
Seditious flame,
Beat backward with reduplicated might,
Struggles alive within its stricter term,
And is the worm.”
And here follows the response to the search after the “Unknown Eros”:
And the just Man does on himself affirm
God’s limits, and is conscious of delight,
Freedom and right,
And so His Semblance is, Who, every hour,
By day and night,
Buildeth new bulwarks ’gainst the Infinite.
For, ah, who can express
How full of bonds and simpleness
Is God,
How narrow is He,
And how the wide waste field of possibility
Is only trod
Straight to His homestead in the human heart,
And all His art
Is as the babe’s, that wins his mother to repeat
Her little song so sweet!
Man,
Darling of God. Whose thoughts but live and move
Round him; Who woos his will
To wedlock with His own, and does distil
To that drop’s span
The attar of all rose-fields of all love!
Therefore the soul select assumes the stress
Of bonds unbid, which God’s own style express
Better than well,
And aye hath borne,
To the Clown’s scorn,
The fetters of the three-fold golden chain....”
What “the three-fold golden chain” is that binds “the soul select” to God no Catholic needs to be told. Free and loyal self-sacrifice, in a world where self-sacrifice, whether we like it or not, is necessary and must be endured, brings us nearest and makes us likest to Him, the true Eros who “emptied himself for us.” These lines will help us to read the riddle of the “Unknown Eros,” “some note” of whose “renown and high behest” the poet thinks might thus “in enigma be express’d”:
“There lies the crown
Which all thy longing cures.
Refuse it, Mortal, that it may be yours!
It is a spirit though it seems red gold;
And such may no man, but by shunning, hold.
Refuse it, though refusing be despair;
And thou shalt feel the phantom in thy hair.”
This thought again is more fully wrought out in the conclusion of the same ode, “Legem Tuam Dilexi”:
“... For to have naught
Is to have all things without care or thought!
And lastly bartering life’s dear bliss for pain;
But evermore in vain;
For joy (rejoice ye Few that tasted have!)
Is Love’s obedience
Against the genial laws of natural sense,
Whose wide self-dissipating wave,
Prison’d in artful dikes,
Trembling returns and strikes
Thence to its source again,
In backward billows fleet,
Crest crossing crest ecstatic as they greet;
Thrilling each vein,
Exploring every chasm and cove
Of the full heart with floods of honeyed love,
And every principal street
And obscure alley and lane
Of the intricate brain
With brimming rivers of light and breezes sweet
Of the primordial heat;
Till, unto view of me and thee,
Lost the intense life be,
Or ludicrously display’d, by force
Of distance, as a soaring eagle, or a horse
On far-off hillside shown,
May seem a gust-driv’n rag or a dead stone.”
To those who read these lines carefully it will not be necessary to say that the author is a Catholic. His name, though modestly withheld from the present volume, is not unknown. It is many years ago since Coventry Patmore sang his sweet love-songs, The Betrothal and The Espousals.
They were received favorably enough by the critics—far more favorably, indeed, than have been many higher and greater poems on their first appearance: Keats’ Endymion, for instance. Then a strange silence struck the poet, and he was dumb.
If the present volume is the growth of all these silent years, Mr. Patmore has not suffered by his solitude. Between his earlier work and the present there is no comparison. Indeed, it takes a very careful reading of the first to detect therein the germ of the strong growth and most beautiful flower that compel admiration to-day. Those were nothing more than the story, told with all the fond minuteness of a gentle, ardent, intelligent, and chivalrous young lover, of his first true love; of the flowery paths and pleasant ways that led up to it; of the gracious nothings that make that time so sweet and ever memorable to the lovers; the lone communings, the tremulous doubts, the bitter-sweet emotions, the sun and shade, the laughing April showers that weave Love’s many-colored web and make a brief paradise for the new Adam and Eve, with no serpent lurking in the grass—all this is told delightfully and with delight. The verse is sweet and pleasant and flowing as the subject; but it is a song to while away a drowsy hour, not to cause us to halt and listen in the busy march and fierce strife of life. We glance over them with lazy pleasure as we watch the gambols of children in the sun.
These later poems are of a far different and more solemn nature. The poet has lived much, felt much, suffered much, joyed much, thought and meditated much in this long interval. He has been lifted to the heights of heaven; he has been dashed back to the gates of hell. He has been tossed on the waves of Doubt and felt the brotherhood of Despair. He has lost her who first taught him to sing; whose gentle glances thrilled the tender chords of his nature and moved them to utter sweet music. Here is her picture:
“But there danced she, who from the leaven
Of ill preserved my heart and wit
All unawares, for she was heaven,
Others at best but fit for it.
I mark’d her step, with peace elate,
Her brow more beautiful than morn,
Her sometime air of girlish state
Which sweetly waived its right to scorn;
The giddy crowd, she grave the while,
Although, as ’twere beyond her will,
About her mouth the baby smile
That she was born with linger’d still.
Her ball-dress seemed a breathing mist,
From the fair form exhaled and shed,
Raised in the dance with arm and wrist
All warmth and light, unbraceleted.
Her motion, feeling ’twas beloved,
The pensive soul of tune express’d,
And, oh, what perfume, as she moved,
Came from the flowers in her breast!”[[118]]
Here is she ten years later:
“Her sons pursue the butterflies,
Her baby daughter mocks the doves
With throbbing coo: in his fond eyes
She’s Venus with her little Loves;
Her step’s an honor to the earth,
Her form’s the native-land of grace,
And, lo, his coming lights with mirth
Beauty’s metropolis, her face!
Of such a lady proud’s the lord,
And that her happy bosom knows;
She takes his arm without a word,
In lanes of laurel and of rose.”[[119]]
And here at last is her “Departure,” as told in the latest volume:
“It was not like your great and gracious ways!
Do you, that have naught other to lament,
Never, my Love, repent
Of how, that July afternoon,
You went,
With sudden, unintelligible phrase,
And frighten’d eye,
Upon your journey of so many days,
Without a single kiss or a good-by?
I knew, indeed, that you were parting soon;
And so we sate, within the sun’s low rays,
You whispering to me, for your voice was weak,
Your harrowing praise.
Well, it was well, my Wife,
To hear you such things speak,
And see your love
Make of your eyes a growing gloom of life,
As a warm south wind sombres a March grove.
And it was like your great and gracious ways
To turn your talk on daily things, my Dear,
Lifting the luminous, pathetic lash
To let the laughter flash,
Whilst I drew near,
Because you spoke so low that I could scarcely hear.
But all at once to leave me at the last,
More at the wonder than the loss aghast,
With huddled, unintelligible phrase,
And frighten’d eye,
And go your journey of all days
With not one kiss or a good-by,
And the only loveless look the look with which you pass’d,
’Twas all unlike your great and gracious ways.”[[120]]
It goes without saying that such a loss must tell with incalculable force on a man of intense sensibility. Trials of this kind best prove a man. Some they crush; others they humiliate only to exalt. If we may judge by the silent testimony of the book before us, his great loss made this man greater. He felt, if not for the first time, more keenly than ever before, how uncertain and passing is all merely human happiness. The known Eros that had charmed his life suddenly passed away “with sudden, unintelligible phrase,” and in the darkness that fell upon his soul his humbled eyes were opened to the unknown Eros who was near him all the while.
But, beyond and beside this, between the publication of his earlier poems and the latest his conversion to the Catholic faith took place. So we judge, at least, from internal evidence in the books. Here was a new and most powerful agent introduced to act upon his nature. Moreover, the world had moved in the interval. Many and mighty changes had taken place in the world, and they did not pass unfelt or unobserved by the silent poet. But before we come to these we will give one more response to his questioning of the oracle before whom of all he burns his incense. In the “Deliciæ Sapientiæ de Amore” he sings joyously:
“Love, light for me
Thy ruddiest blazing torch,
That I, albeit a beggar by the Porch
Of the glad Palace of Virginity,
May gaze within, and sing the pomp I see....
Bring, Love, anear,
And bid be not afraid
Young Lover true, and love-foreboding Maid,
And wedded Spouse, if virginal of thought;
For I will sing of naught
Less sweet to hear
Than seems
A music in their half-remember’d dreams.
... The heavens themselves eternal are with fire
Of unapproach’d desire,
By the aching heart of Love, which cannot rest,
In blissfullest pathos so indeed possess’d.
O, spousals high;
O, doctrine blest,
Unutterable in even the happiest sigh;
This know ye all
Who can recall
With what a welling of indignant tears
Love’s simpleness first hears
The meaning of his mortal covenant,
And from what pride comes down
To wear the crown
Of which ’twas very heaven to feel the want.
Therefore gaze bold,
That so in you be joyful hope increas’d,
Thorough the Palace portals, and behold
The dainty and unsating Marriage-Feast.
O, hear
Them singing clear
'Cor meum et caro mea’ round the 'I am,’
The Husband of the Heavens, and the Lamb
Whom they for ever follow there that kept,
Or, losing, never slept
Till they reconquer’d had in mortal fight
The standard white.
Gaze and be not afraid,
Young Lover true and love-foreboding Maid.
The full noon of deific vision bright
Abashes nor abates
No spark minute of Nature’s keen delight.
’Tis there your Hymen waits!
There where in courts afar all unconfused they crowd,
As fumes the starlight soft
In gulfs of cloud,
And each to the other, well-content,
Sighs oft,
'’Twas this we meant!'
Gaze without blame,
Ye in whom living Love yet blushes for dead shame.
There of pure Virgins none
Is fairer seen,
Save One,
Than Mary Magdalene.
Love makes the life to be
A fount perpetual of virginity;
For, lo, the Elect
Of generous Love, how named soe’er, affect
Nothing but God,
Or mediate or direct,
Nothing but God,
The Husband of the Heavens:
And who Him love, in potence great or small,
Are, one and all,
Heirs of the Palace glad
And only clad
With the bridal robes of ardor virginal.”
The Love that our poet has been seeking, has found, and here hymns in strains that at times are truly little short of seraphic, will now be known to the reader; and we leave this high, ethereal Court of Love that is human indeed, yet more than human, to glance at other and more ordinary, though still lofty, subjects which the poet has touched.
In a sense it is really refreshing to find that he is not always in the skies; that he is very human and made of flesh and blood like ourselves. Indeed, so human is he that he openly confesses, in a poem of matchless beauty and delicacy, to having found a substitute for his dead wife. Ordinary men, who are not poets, yet who nevertheless have hearts, will give a rough reading to the exquisite ode, “Tired Memory” (p. 93), wherein the poet, lamenting his wife, and confessing truthfully, albeit sadly, that
“In our mortal air
None thrives for long upon the happiest dream,”
and seeking round “for some extreme of unconceived, interior sacrifice, whereof the smoke might rise to God,” cries in agony:
“My Lord, if thy strange will be this,
That I should crucify my heart,
Because my love has also been my pride,
I do submit, if I saw how, to bliss,
Wherein She has no part.”
“And I was heard,” he adds, let us hope untruthfully; for the “crucifixion of his heart” took the shape apparently of a second wife, thus:
“My heart was dead,
Dead of devotion and tired memory,
When a strange grace of thee
In a fair stranger, as I take it, bred
To her some tender heed,
Most innocent
Of purpose therewith blent,
And pure of faith, I think, to thee; yet such
That the pale reflex of an alien love,
So vaguely, sadly shown,
Did her heart touch
Above
All that, till then, had woo’d her for its own.
And so the fear, which is love’s chilly dawn,
Flush’d faintly upon lids that droop’d like thine,
And made me weak,
By thy delusive likeness doubly drawn,
And Nature’s long-suspended breath of flame,
Persuading soft, and whispering Duty’s name,
Awhile to smile and speak
With this thy Sister sweet, and therefore mine...”
But this is not so much the humanity to which we referred. We think that three characteristics will strike the readers of these odes: 1, the high spiritual nature of many; 2, the deep pathos and human love of others; 3, the lofty scorn and fierce sarcasm displayed, mistakenly sometimes, in certain of the odes.
The poet is an Englishman of Englishmen, and, only for his Catholic faith, it seems to us that he would be one among the prophets of despair, whose name is legion and whose day is the present.
“O, season strange for song!”
he cries in the Proem;
“Is’t England’s parting soul that nerves my tongue
As other kingdoms, nearing their eclipse,
Have, in their latest bards, uplifted strong
The voice that was their voice in earlier days?
Is it her sudden, loud and piercing cry,
The note which those that seem too weak to sigh
Will sometimes utter just before they die?”
To speak frankly, we do not think it is. We do not think England’s soul is parting yet. We think there is much good left in this world for England to do; at the very least there is much atonement to be made for the many and great evils and national crimes—among others that greatest of all, apostasy—for which that soul has to answer. She can do much, she has done something, toward making this atonement; and the time of grace was never nearer to her than at present. Nevertheless, it is impossible to deny the intense pathos and exquisite beauty of the following sad lines:
“Lo, weary of the greatness of her ways,
There lies my Land, with hasty pulse and hard,
Her ancient beauty marr’d,
And, in her cold and aimless roving sight,
Horror of light....”
In the sixth ode, entitled “Peace,” he returns to this theme:
“O England, how hast thou forgot,
In dullard care for undisturbed increase
Of gold, which profits not,
The gain which once thou knew’st was for thy peace!
Honor is peace, the peace which does accord
Alone with God’s glad word:
'My peace I send you, and I send a sword.’
Beneath the heroic sun
Is there then none
Whose sinewy wings by choice do fly
In the fine mountain-air of public obloquy,
To tell the sleepy mongers of false ease
That war’s the ordained way of all alive,
And therein with good-will to dare and thrive
Is profit and heart’s peace?
Remnant of Honor, brooding in the dark
Over your bitter cark,
Staring, as Rispah stared, astonied seven days,
Upon the corpses of so many sons,
Who loved her once,
Dead in the dim and lion-haunted ways,
Who could have dreamt
That times should come like these!”
We do not altogether go with Mr. Patmore in this invective, however much we may admire its form. England has certainly acted meanly in many important European questions of late years. She will probably so act in many more in the future, if she finds it advisable or profitable. And it is a poor excuse to ask what other European nation has not acted or would not act, had it the chance, equally meanly with England. We may be very wrathful about the matter; we may have some very hard things to say against England for not drawing the sword in certain cases; yet between the nation that is too ready to fight and the nation that guards severely what are strictly its own primary interests without fighting, we certainly prefer the latter. The bloody road is a sad road to glory, and its end is never seen. While, then, we may for the moment side with the passionate poet who sits down in his studio and hurls his wrath in words of flame against the ministry for not leading the country into war and reviving ancient glories, as they are called, on second thoughts, while still, perhaps, thoroughly disgusted with the ministry and the meanness of their ways, we become gradually reconciled to the situation, and thank Heaven, though of course not the ministers, that we can sleep quietly in our beds. It may be an ignoble sense—doubtless it is; yet if it prevailed a little more generally throughout the world just now, the world would not, in the long run, be the sufferer from it.
There is another peace against which Mr. Patmore declaims in no measured terms in “The Standards.” This was written soon after the launching of Mr. Gladstone’s first pamphlet, not so much against “the English Catholics,” as the author states in a note—he would do well to remember that the world is a little larger than England—but against Catholics: against the Catholic Church and its chief.
“... That last,
Blown from our Zion of the Seven Hills,
Was no uncertain blast!
Listen: the warning all the champaign fills,
And minatory murmurs, answering, mar
The Night, both near and far,
Perplexing many a drowsy citadel
Beneath whose ill-watch’d walls the Powers of Hell,
With armed jar
And angry threat, surcease
Their long-kept compact of contemptuous peace!
Lo, yonder, where our little English band,
With peace in heart and wrath in hand,
Have dimly ta’en their stand,
Sweetly the light
Shines from the solitary peak at Edgbaston,
Whence, o’er the dawning Land,
Gleam the gold blazonries of Love irate
’Gainst the black flag of Hate.”
This call is most spirited and trenchant and bold. We can only find space for the strong end:
“The sanction of the world’s undying hate
Means more than flaunted flags in windy air.
Be ye of gathering fate
Now gladly ware.
Now from the matrix, by God’s grinding wrought,
The brilliant shall be brought;
The white stone mystic set between the eyes
Of them that get the prize,
Yea, part and parcel of that mighty Stone
Which shall be thrown
Into the Sea, and Sea shall be no more.”
“1867” is a poem strongly written and of marked character, but with which we cannot agree. It was called out apparently by the passage of the bill extending the suffrage by the conservative ministry under the leadership of Mr. Disraeli. It is—so we read it, and we see no possibility of reading it otherwise—a direct and bitter attack on a rational extension of the popular liberties, which we take to be radically wrong in conception:
“In the year of the great crime,
When the false English Nobles and their Jew,
By God demented, slew
The Trust they stood twice pledged to keep from wrong,
One said, Take up thy Song,
That breathes the mild and almost mythic time
Of England’s prime!
But I, Ah, me,
The freedom of the few
That, in our free Land, were indeed the free,
Can song renew?”
Let us here say that if a man cannot attack Mr. Disraeli, or the Earl of Beaconsfield, on higher and fairer ground than on that of his being “a Jew,” he may as well let that statesman alone. A man who adopts this very small, very cheap, and very common mode of attack is not worthy the hearing of sensible men. Addressing the “outlawed Best”—by the bye, the poet is very arbitrary and perplexing in his use of capitals—England’s nobles, presumably, Mr. Patmore says:
“Know, ’twas the force of function high,
In corporate exercise, and public awe
Of Nature’s, Heaven’s, and England’s Law,
That Best, though mix’d with Bad, should reign,
Which kept you in your sky!”
Does he mean that the “Best” are restricted to the English nobility? If he does mean this, he is quite wrong; if he does not mean it, then the lines immediately following are meaningless:
“But, when the sordid Trader caught
The loose-held sceptre from your hands distraught,
And soon, to the Mechanic vain,
Sold the proud toy for naught,
Your charm was broke, your task was sped,
Your beauty, with your honor, dead.”
And so the ode goes on to hope that
“Prayer perchance may win
A term to God’s indignant mood
And the orgies of the multitude,
Which now begin....”
We cannot help thinking, if God’s name must be introduced in the matter, that he is not especially indignant with Mr. Disraeli and the English nobles and people at the extension of the suffrage, and that for this reason to stigmatize 1867 as “the year of the great Crime” is nonsense. As for “the sordid Trader,” there has always been a considerable admixture of the “Trader” in the composition of the English government, noble or ignoble. The first Napoleon’s estimate of the English as “a nation of shopkeepers” was not an ill-judged one; and never was that government, at least since Reformation times, so pure and its members so honest as to-day, when “the sordid Trader” has a large hand in the administration. We do all honor to the spirit of chivalry; we do not object to class distinctions in countries where such distinctions are historic and hereditary; but we recognize manhood wherever we find it, and set it above all accidents of time or clime or artificial restrictions. At the end of the ode, however, the poet rises above his smaller self to a strain that is noble and true:
'And now, because the dark comes on apace
When none can work for fear,
And Liberty in every Land lies slain,
And the two Tyrannies unchallenged reign,
And heavy prophecies, suspended long
At supplication of the righteous few
And so discredited, to fulfilment throng,
Restrain’d no more by faithful prayer or tear,
And the dread baptism of blood seems near
That brings to the humbled Earth the Time of Grace,
Hush’d be all song,
And let Christ’s own look through
The darkness, suddenly increased,
To the gray secret lingering in the East.”
We could linger with delight over many passages in these odes, and dwell with pleasure on the peculiar depth, conciseness, and expressiveness of the phrases used, the mere words often which the poet chooses. His power of condensation and deep philosophic comprehension and observation constantly strikes one. The concealed art of the whole is marvellous. But this, we have no doubt, will, from the copious extracts we have given, strike the reader as it has struck us. And we hasten on to quote a few more passages and take leave of the book.
We have called attention to the poet’s scorn. It is very bitter, and is at its best when it attacks not so much persons or matters which are at least open to question as when it deals with obvious shams and pretentious littleness. What could be better than this placid treatment of the modern scientific school which can see nothing more than its telescope and its instruments disclose to it?
“Not greatly moved with awe am I
To learn that we may spy
Five thousand firmaments beyond our own.
The best that’s known
Of the heavenly bodies does them credit small.
View’d close, the Moon’s fair ball
Is of ill objects worst.
A corpse in Night’s highway, naked, fire-scarr’d, accurst;
And now they tell
That the Sun is plainly seen to boil and burst
Too horribly for hell.
So, judging from these two,
As we must do,
The Universe, outside our living Earth,
Was all conceiv’d in the Creator’s mirth,
Forecasting at the time Man’s spirit deep,
To make dirt cheap.
Put by the Telescope!
Better without it man may see,
Stretch’d awful in the hush’d midnight,
The ghost of his eternity.
Give me the nobler glass that swells to the eye
The things which near us lie,
Till Science rapturously hails,
In the minutest water-drop,
A torment of innumerable tails.
These at least do live.
But rather give
A mind not much to pry
Beyond our royal-fair estate
Betwixt these deserts blank of small and great.
Wonder and beauty our own courtiers are,
Pressing to catch our gaze,
And out of obvious ways
Ne’er wandering far.”
At other times his strong humanity seems to die in him, the struggle of life seems small and profitless, and the many ends that move us weak and purposeless as children’s plans. “Here, in this little Bay,” he says:
“Full of tumultuous life and great repose,
Where, twice a day,
The purposeless, glad ocean comes and goes,
Under high cliffs, and far from the huge town,
I sit me down.
For want of me the world’s course will not fail;
When all its work is done, the lie shall rot;
The truth is great, and shall prevail,
When none cares whether it prevail or not.”
Of course we need not remind the poet that it is just the duty of honest men to see that the truth prevails and the lie rots, for his poems are a very pæan of Truth and its high offices; but in this as in others of the odes he gives complete expression to the weariness that at times creeps over all who are struggling for the right. It is like the song of the tired mariners in Tennyson’s Lotos-Eaters.
Again he sings:
“Join, then, if thee it please, the bitter jest
Of mankind’s progress; all its spectral race
Mere impotence of rest,
The heaving vain of life which cannot cease from self,
Crest altering still to gulf
And gulf to crest
In endless chase
That leaves the tossing water anchor’d in its place!
Ah, well does he who does but stand aside,
Sans hope or fear,
And marks the crest and gulf in station sink and rear,
And prophesies ’gainst trust in such a tide:
For he sometimes is prophet, heavenly taught,
Whose message is that he sees only naught!
Nathless, discern’d may be,
By listeners at the doors of destiny,
The fly-wheel swift and still
Of God’s incessant will,
Mighty to keep in bound, tho’ powerless to quell,
The amorous and vehement drift of man’s herd to hell.”
We can quote no further at any length, though we find something to attract us in every ode; and the more we read the odes the more we find in them, the more we admire them, and the clearer they become. Though independent of each other, a secret string of purpose, of aim and aspiration, of a yearning after something that the poet has not yet quite caught or cannot as yet fully express, becomes apparent. To this is due much of the obscurity and dimness that at first offend the eye. Closer study, however, reveals a throbbing passion, a high ideal, gleams of light from heaven, the flashes of a bright intelligence warmed by a pure heart and looking from and through all things earthly heavenwards. We have seen no man of late who can lash the follies and lay bare the falsehoods of the time so thoroughly. A man of intense and rooted convictions, he may make mistakes sometimes, but at least he makes them nobly. He is very human, as we have already said. Indeed, there are touches here and there in some of the odes that are strongly sensuous, and the two last poems, “The Rosy Bosom’d Hours” and “The After-Glow,” were better omitted from the volume. Their littleness offends and breaks with a discordant jar on the high and serene atmosphere through which we have been passing. It is almost like what the introduction of one of Offenbach’s airs would be into a solemn Mass. From the poet whose “Proem” is pitched in so high a key as this:
“Therefore no 'plaint be mine
Of listeners none,
No hope of render’d use or proud reward,
In hasty times and hard;
But chants as of a lonely thrush’s throat
At latest eve,
That does in each calm note
Both joy and grieve;
Notes few and strong and fine,
Gilt with sweet day’s decline,
And sad with promise of a different sun,”
we certainly expected no such stuff as the following, addressed to his bride:
“At Dawlish, 'mid the pools of brine,
You stept from rock to rock,
One hand quick tightening upon mine,
One holding up your frock.
I thought, indeed, by magic chance,
A third [day] from Heaven to win,
But as, at dusk, we reach’d Penzance,
A drizzling rain set in.”
There is so much that is high and noble and full of great promise in this new writer—for such he really is—and we have been so honest in our admiration of it, that we feel all the more at liberty to point out some of the blemishes that mar a work of rare excellence and strange beauty. Here and there throughout the volume are lines and couplets that linger lovingly in the memory; as, for instance:
“Pierce, then, with thought’s steel probe the trodden ground
Till passion’s buried floods be found....”
And again:
“Till inmost absolution start
The welling in the grateful eyes,
The heaving in the heart.”
What could be more tenderly and naturally expressive than those two last lines? Or than this:
“Winnow with sighs, and wash away
With tears the dust and stain of clay.”
Often have we heard aspirations of the following kind, but never sweeter than this:
“Ye Clouds that on your endless journey go,
Ye Winds that westward flow,
Thou heaving Sea
That heav’st ’twixt her and me,
Tell her I come....”
The poet yokes all Nature to the wings of his fancy, and makes it the loving slave of his Love.
How simple, yet how subtly told, is this great truth:
“Who does not know
That good and ill
Are done in secret still,
And that which shows is verily but show!”
And this deep reflection contains a volume:
“How high of heart is one, and one how sweet of mood:
But not all height is holiness,
Nor every sweetness good.”
Here is a proverb, only too often verified:
“One fool, with lusty lungs,
Does what a hundred wise, who hate and hold their tongues,
Shall ne’er undo.”
In “Victory in Defeat” he says—how truly!—
“Life is not life at all without delight,
Nor has it any might;
And better than the insentient heart and brain
Is sharpest pain;
And better for the moment seems it to rebel,
If the great Master, from his lifted seat,
Ne’er whispers to the wearied servant, 'Well!’”
We hope to hear again and soon from Mr. Patmore. If he can avoid a certain obscurity that will repel many who would be sincere and honest admirers of so noble a writer, it will be better for himself and those whom he addresses. Even as his work now stands we are happy to say of it, in closing our review, what a true poet whose name often adorns these pages has said: “Many parts of the book seem to me both to ascend higher and descend deeper than almost anything we have had for a long time.”