INDIAN LOVE SONG BY LEW SARETT Cold sky and frozen star That look upon me from afar Hollow night and black butte Homeless wind and waterfall Shivering wolf and lonely loon WET SILVER BY JOSEPH AUSLANDER The Gothic girders of Spider Castle Are fretted with pulver of rain, harassed with rain-dust glitter; The Gothic girders of Spider Castle Sag silver; the fog drips beauty into the sparrow's twitter; Lustrously dank is the snail's horn, his armour glistens; Now the hush, soaked silver: and still my heart listens and listens. COVENTRY PATMORE BY JOHN FREEMAN COVENTRY KERSEY DIGHTON PATMORE was born at Woodford, Essex (now a mere suburb of London), on July 23, 1823. The calendar alone is faithful in its mute reminder that a hundred years have passed, for men's affections are not occupied with Patmore's work and it would be foolish to speak of his name in connection with a centenary "celebration". He is celebrated but as a lonely hill in a quiet land, shown on the map but visited only by those to whom the hill air, and its solitude, are a stimulation and a delight. The greatness that his admirers have never ceased to claim for him may have been silently acknowledged, but has never been widely felt; and for most readers he remains a name in a catalogue, an illustration, a cipher, a shade. Great poets are creatures of their age, even if they show greatness equally in expressing and transcending it. Patmore and Tennyson were both Victorian poets and in the truest sense the voices of their time; and they each, but in different degree, transcended their time. Tennyson was a dominating figure, standing firm amid his generation and only distinguished by his loftiness of thought and grave attitude of a spiritual legislator; but Patmore was isolated alike by his genius and the intense arrogance of his regard of a world surging turbulently beneath him. He expressed his time in The Angel in the House, he transcended it in The Unknown Eros, standing scornfully or sorrowfully remote in many odes in the latter, consciously and even proudly alien in certain prose essays. Exceptions to these general statements may be noted, but the statements represent the broad facts. It is not altogether fanciful to read his character in his face. The portraits, especially that by Mr. Sargent by which he is best known, show a mind alert, bold and perverse, a spirit impetuous and unconciliating. The eyes are gemlike but the light in them is not cold, and it is that quick light that redeems the countenance from hardness. Nor is it fanciful, perhaps, to read his history into his face. The son of Peter G. Patmore who was concerned as second in John Scott's duel with Lockhart's friend, Christie; educated at home and in Paris and thus escaping, I cannot say whether unfortunately, the influence of Oxford and Cambridge in the 'forties; entering the Civil Service (through the British Museum), that great nursery of men of letters; marrying once, twice, thrice, and each time gaining in temporalities and inward happiness; joining the Roman Catholic church at the point of his second marriage; publishing the first part of The Angel in the House when he was but thirty-one and tasting briefly the sweets of popularity; staying silent from 1863 to 1877 and finding then scarce any audience; reconciling himself to obscurity, yet a little disdainful of what was denied him; saddening as he looked out upon his time but serene in obedience to silent admonitions; contented meanwhile to publish his wilful, epigrammatic essays of a beautiful prose texture, and at length slipping almost unperceived and almost unhonoured out of life at the age of seventy-three that all this should be traceable in the portraits is impossible, but there is still a strong harmony of the painter's counterfeit and the image called up by the reader's inward eye. Patmore was the least impersonal of writers, and so his work somewhat easily yields us an image of deep shadows and high lights, to set beside the likeness made in the most personal of mediums -the painter's. As I have said, he was a very young man when he published The Angel in the House, and added his still, domestic voice to the larger utterance of other singers. Tennyson, the Brownings and Arnold were already famous, the eloquence of Ruskin and Carlyle was already familiar, philosophy already knew Mill, and science was shortly to give birth to The Origin of Species. Patmore, in fact, rose amid the rich chaos of Victorian literature at its central point. The angel of his title has been commonly held to refer to the lady of the poem, but more reasonably to the remoter Amor of the odes. The poem still provokes the amusement of those who indolently fail to relate it to the rest of Patmore's work and, because it seems so easy to understand, do not think it worth understanding. The same hasty indolence prevents their reading the later odes, which are not at all easy to understand; and hence the author has been dismissed, even by intelligent people, as too simple altogether, and by others as too obscure altogether. Certain professors of literature, including Mr. Saintsbury himself, have treated him as a minor-minor poet, a chicken clucking between Tennyson's feet, a mote dancing in Ruskin's ray. The courtship of a dean's daughter, the marriage, the honeymoon journey, the unadventurous adventure of merely faithful wedlock-who will not smile at the tameness of a domestic epic? Habitual readers of verse are fondest of lyrical and dramatic poetry; the social recitals of Cowper and Crabbe no longer delight and are the mild pleasure of lax moods only. And again, the common attitude to marriage being no longer quite inflexible, the Oriental view of woman being equally immoral and outworn, it is no wonder if the central idea of the narrative is itself a count against this poem. Patmore wrote it while he was still a Protestant, but the inward rigidity which it discloses, and which I cannot deny nor diminish, suggests that he was already prepared for the conversion that followed it. It is by a miracle, then, that the poem remains not only readable but even delightful, tinctured but faintly with dogma but quite blessedly with humour. It sailed, somewhat slowly, into popular favour, but with the rise of Swinburne and the passionate lyricism of Poems and Ballads Patmore's note was contemned or merely unheard. His song was like a robin or, in his own phrase, a heavenly-minded thrush; and the exuberant clamour of a new and earthly music, the audacity of that heady, intemperate beauty, drew away the attention of critical readers until, at length, popularity too waned and neglect followed. Forty years ago his very name, says Mr. Gosse, was ridiculed; the wonderful odes had been published only a few years before, but they shared in the neglect or the contumely cast upon the earlier poems. The Angel in the House is the simplest of things, and its depths are as lucid as the mental atmosphere in which it was conceived. Patmore's temper was vehement, his temper so strongly marked and, in later years, so independent of opinion that it seems hardly |