Principle in Art, Etc.

by Coventry Patmore

But if the realities of love were not in themselves dark to the understanding, it would be necessary to darken them—not only lest they should be profaned, but also because, as St. Bernard says, “The more the realities of heaven are clothed with obscurity, the more they delight and attract, and nothing so much heightens longing as such tender refusal.” “Night,” says the inspirer of St. Bernard, “is the light of my pleasures.”

Love is rooted deeper in the earth than any other passion; and for that cause its head, like that of the Tree Igdrasil, soars higher into heaven. The heights demand and justify the depths, as giving them substance and credibility. “That He hath ascended—what is it but because He first also descended into the lower parts of the earth?” Love “reconciles the highest with the lowest, ordering all things strongly and sweetly from end to end.” St. Bernard says that “divine love” (religion) “has its first root in the most secret of the human affections.” This affection is the only key to the inner sanctuaries of that faith which declares, “Thy Maker is thy Husband;” the only clue by which searchers of the “secret of the King,” in the otherwise inscrutable writings of prophet and apostle, discover, as Keble writes, “the loving hint that meets the longing guess,” which looks to the future for the satisfying and abiding reality, the passage of whose momentary shadow forms the supreme glory of our mortality.

The whole of after-life depends very much upon how life’s transient transfiguration in youth by love is subsequently regarded; and the greatest of all the functions of the poet is to aid in his readers the fulfilment of the cry, which is that of nature as well as religion, “Let not my heart forget the things mine eyes have seen.” The greatest perversion of the poet’s function is to falsify the memory of that transfiguration of the senses, and to make light of its sacramental character. This character is instantly recognised by the unvitiated heart and apprehension of every youth and maiden; but it is very easily forgotten and profaned by most, unless its sanctity is upheld by priests and poets. Poets are naturally its prophets—all the more powerful because, like the prophets of old, they are wholly independent of the priests, and are often the first to discover and rebuke the lifelessness into which that order is always tending to fall. If society is to survive its apparently impending dangers, it must be mainly by guarding and increasing the purity of the sources in which society begins. The world is finding out, as it has often done before, and more or less forgotten, that it cannot do without religion. Love is the first thing to wither under its loss. What love does in transfiguring life, that religion does in transfiguring love: as any one may see who compares one state or time with another. Love is sure to be something less than human if it is not something more; and the so-called extravagances of the youthful heart, which always claims a character for divinity in its emotions, fall necessarily into sordid, if not shameful, reaction, if those claims are not justified to the understanding by the faith which declares man and woman to be priest and priestess to each other of relations inherent in Divinity itself, and proclaimed in the words “Let us make man in our own image” and “male and female created he them.” Nothing can reconcile the intimacies of love to the higher feelings, unless the parties to them are conscious—and true lovers always are—that, for the season at least, they justify the words “I have said, Ye are gods.” Nuptial love bears the clearest marks of being nothing other than the rehearsal of a communion of a higher nature. Its felicity consists in a perpetual conversion of phase from desire to sacrifice, and from sacrifice to desire, accompanied by unchangeable complaisance in the delight shining in the beauty of the beloved; and it is agitated in all its changes by fear, without which love cannot long exist as emotion. Such a state, in proportion to its fervour, delicacy, and perfection, is ridiculous unless it is regarded as a “great sacrament.” It is the inculcation of this significance which has made love between man and woman what it is now—at least to the idea and aspirations of all good minds. It is time that the sweet doctrine should be enforced more clearly. Love being much more respected and religion much less than of old, the danger of profanation is not so great as it was when religion was revered and love despised. The most characteristic virtue of woman, or at least the most alluring of her weaknesses—her not caring for masculine truth and worth unless they woo her with a smile or a touch or some such flattery of her senses—is the prevailing vice of most men, especially in these times. This general effeminacy is the poet’s great opportunity. It is his pontifical privilege to feel the truth; and his function is to bridge the gulf between severe verity and its natural enemy, feminine sentiment, by speech which, without any sacrifice of the former, is “simple, sensuous, and passionate.” He insinuates in nerve-convincing music the truths which the mass of mankind must feel before they believe. He leads them by their affections to things above their affections, making Urania acceptable to them by her prænomen Venus. He is the apostle of the Gentiles, and conveys to them, without any flavour of cant or exclusiveness, the graces which the chosen people have too often denied or disgraced in their eyes.

XIII
KEATS

Mr. Sidney Colvin’s book upon Keats is, in the main, a welcome exception to what has become, of late, the rule in this class of work. It is remarkably just, and every good reader will feel it to be the more warmly appreciative because it is scarcely ever extravagantly so. The bulk of Keats’s poetry, including “Endymion,” is estimated at its true worth, which, as Keats—the severest judge of his own work—knew and confessed, was not much; and the little volume (justly styled by Mr. Colvin “immortal”) which was published in 1820, and which does not consist of more than about 3000 lines, is declared to contain nearly the whole of the poet’s effective writing. And even in this little volume—which includes “Lamia,” “Isabella,” “The Eve of St. Agnes,” the five “Odes,” and “Hyperion”—Mr. Colvin acutely detects and boldly points out many serious defects. From the comparatively worthless waste of the rest of Keats’s writing, Mr. Colvin picks out with accurate discernment the few pieces and passages of real excellence; and he does criticism good service in directing attention to the especial value of the fragment called “The Eve of St. Mark,” and of that which is probably the very finest lyric in the English language, “La Belle Dame sans Merci.”

As long as Mr. Colvin limits himself to the positive beauties and defects of Keats’s poetry he is nearly always right; it is only in his summing up and in his estimate of the comparative worth of his subject that a less enthusiastic critic must part company with him. “I think it probable that by power, as well as by temperament and aim, he was the most Shakespearian spirit that has lived since Shakespeare.” Is not the truth rather that, among real poets, Keats was the most un-Shakespearian poet that ever lived? True poets may be divided into two distinct classes, though there is a border-line at which they occasionally become confused. In the first class, which contains all the greatest poets, with Shakespeare at their head, intellect predominates; governing and thereby strengthening passion, and evolving beauty and sweetness as accidents—though inevitable accidents—of its operation. The vision of such poets may almost be described in the words of St. Thomas Aquinas, in speaking of the Beatific Vision. “The vision,” he writes, “is a virtue, the beatitude an accident.” Such poets are truly spoken of as masculine. In the other class—in which Keats stands as high as any other, if not higher—the “beatitude,” the beauty and sweetness, is the essential, the truth and power of intellect and passion the accident. These poets are, without any figure of speech, justly described as feminine (not necessarily effeminate); and they are separated from the first class by a distance as great as that which separates a truly manly man from a truly womanly woman. The trite saying that the spirit of the great poet has always a feminine element is perfectly true notwithstanding. “The man is not without the woman;” though “the man is not for the woman, but the woman for the man.” The difference lies in that which has the lead and mastery. In Keats the man had not the mastery. For him a thing of beauty was not only a joy for ever, but was the supreme and only good he knew or cared to know; and the consequence is that his best poems are things of exquisite and most sensitively felt beauty, and nothing else. But it is a fact of primary significance, both in morals and in art (a fact which is sadly lost sight of just now), that the highest beauty and joy are not attainable when they occupy the first place as motives, but only when they are more or less the accidents of the exercise of the manly virtue of the vision of truth. There is at fitting seasons a serene splendour and a sunny sweetness about that which is truly masculine, whether in character or in art, which women and womanly artists never attain—an inner radiance of original loveliness and joy which comes, and can only come, of the purity of motive which regards external beauty and delight as accidental.

In his individual criticisms of Keats’s poems Mr. Colvin fully recognises their defect of masculine character. In speaking of “Isabella” he says: “Its personages appeal to us, not so much humanly and in themselves, as by the circumstances, scenery, and atmosphere amidst which we see them move. Herein lies the strength, and also the weakness, of modern romance: its strength, inasmuch as the charm of the mediæval colour and mystery is unfailing for those who feel it at all; its weakness, inasmuch as under the influence of that charm both writer and reader are too apt to forget the need for human and moral truth; and without these no great literature can exist.” Again: “In Keats’s conceptions of his youthful heroes there is at all times a touch, not the wholesomest, of effeminacy and physical softness, and the influence of passion he is apt to make fever and unman them quite; as, indeed, a helpless and enslaved submission of all the faculties to love proved, when it came to the trial, to be the weakness of his own nature.” And again: “In matters of poetic feeling and fancy Keats and Hunt had not a little in common. Both alike were given to ‘luxuriating’ somewhat effusively and fondly over the ‘deliciousness’ of whatever they liked in art, books, and nature.” In these and other equally just and unquestionable criticisms of Keats’s character and works, surely Mr. Colvin sufficiently refutes his own assertion that this writer was “by temperament” “the most Shakespearian” of poets since Shakespeare. And whether he was also such (as Mr. Colvin further asserts him to have been) “by power,” let the poet’s work declare. In his own lovely line—which he faithfully kept to in “Lamia,” “Isabella,” “The Eve of St. Agnes,” and the “Odes”—he is unsurpassed and perhaps unequalled. When he is true to that line we do not feel the want of anything better, though we may know that there is something better: as, in the presence of a beautiful woman, we do not sigh because she is not a General Gordon or a Sir Thomas More. But let Keats try to assume the man—as he does in his latest work, his attempts at dramatic composition or at satirical humour, in the “Cap and Bells”—and all his life and power seem to shrivel and die, like the beauty of Lamia in the presence of Apollonius. Some of his readers may object the semblance of Miltonic strength in certain passages of the fragment “Hyperion”; but Keats himself knew and admitted that it was only a semblance and an echo, and therefore wisely abandoned the attempt, having satisfied himself with having shown the world that there was no object of merely external nature, from “roses amorous of the moon” to

The solid roar
Of thunderous waterfalls and torrents hoarse,
Pouring a constant bulk, uncertain where,

which he had not nerves to feel and words so to utter that others should feel as he did.

In making this distinction between poetry of a masculine and that of a feminine order, it must be understood that no sort of disrespect is intended to the latter in saying a good word for that “once important sex” of poetry which the bewitching allurements of Keats and Shelley and their followers have caused, for a season, to be comparatively despised. The femininity of such poets as these is a glorious and immortal gift, such as no mortal lady has ever attained or ever will attain. It has been proved to us how well a mortal lady may become able to read the classics; but, humbled as some of us may feel by her having headed the Tripos, it is still some compensation for those of our sex to remember that we alone can write “classics,” even of the feminine order. Nor let it be thought that we have been insisting upon a modern and fanciful distinction in thus dividing great men into two classes, in one of which the masculine and in the other the feminine predominates. It is a fact the observation of which is as old as the mythology which attributed the parentage of heroes in whom the intellectual powers prevailed to the union of gods with women, while those who distinguished themselves by more external and showy faculties were said to have been born of the commerce of goddesses with men.