Part 5

'Seek to have less rather than more.' It is a counsel of perfection in _The Imitation of Christ_. And here, undoubtedly, is the secret of all that is virile and classic in the art of man, and of all in nature that is most harmonious with that art. Moreover, this is the secret of Italy. How little do the tourists and the poets grasp this latter truth, by the way--and the artists! The legend of Italy is to be gorgeous, and they have her legend by rote. But Italy is slim and all articulate; her most characteristic trees are those that are distinct and distinguished, with lines that suggest the etching-point rather than a brush loaded with paint. Cypresses shaped like flames, tall pines with the abrupt flatness of their tops, thin canes in the brakes, sharp aloes by the road-side, and olives with the delicate acuteness of the leaf--these make keen lines of slender vegetation. And they own the seasons by a gentle confession. Rather than be overpowered by the clamorous proclamation of summer in the English woods, we would follow June to this subtler South: even to the Campagna, where the cycle of the seasons passes within such narrow limitations that insensitive eyes scarcely recognise it. In early spring there is a fresher touch of green on all the spaces of grass, the distance grows less mellow and more radiant; by the coming of May the green has been imperceptibly dimmed again; it blushes with the mingled colours of minute and numberless flowers--a dust of flowers, in lines longer than those of ocean billows. This is the desert blossoming like a rose: not the obvious rose of gardens, but the multitudinous and various flower that gathers once in the year in every hand's-breadth of the wilderness. When June comes the sun has burnt all to leagues of harmonious seed, coloured with a hint of the colour of harvest, which is gradually changed to the lighter harmonies of winter. All this fine chromatic scale passes within such modest boundaries that it is accused as a monotony. But those who find its modesty delightful may have a still more delicate pleasure in the blooming and blossoming of the sea. The passing from the winter blue to the summer blue, from the cold colour to the colour that has in it the fire of the sun, the kindling of the sapphire of the Mediterranean--the significance of these sea-seasons, so far from the pasture and the harvest, is imperceptible to ordinary senses, as appears from the fact that so few stay to see it all fulfilled. And if the tourist stayed, he would no doubt violate all that is lovely and moderate by the insistence of his descriptions. He would find adjectives for the blue sea, but probably he would refuse to search for words for the white. A white Mediterranean is not in the legend. Nevertheless it blooms, now and then, pale as an opal; the white sea is the flower of the breathless midsummer. And in its clear, silent waters, a few days, in the culmination of the heat, bring forth translucent living creatures, many-shaped jelly-fish, coloured like mother-of-pearl.

But without going so far from the landscape of daily life, it is in agricultural Italy that the _little less_ makes so undesignedly, and as it were so inevitably, for beauty. The country that is formed for use and purpose only is immeasurably the loveliest. What a lesson in literature! How feelingly it persuades us that all except a very little of the ornament of letters and of life makes the dulness of the world. The tenderness of colour, the beauty of series and perspective, and the variety of surface, produced by the small culture of vegetables, are among the charms that come unsought, and that are not to be found by seeking--are never to be achieved if they are sought for their own sake. And another of the delights of the useful laborious land is its vitality. The soil may be thin and dry, but man's life is added to its own. He has embanked the hill to make little platforms for the growth of wheat in the light shadows of olive leaves. Thanks to the metayer land-tenure, man's heart, as well as his strength, is given to the ground, with his hope and his honour. Louis Blanc's 'point of honour of industry' is a conscious impulse--it is not too much to say--with most of the Tuscan contadini; but as each effort they make for their master they make also for the bread of their children, it is no wonder that the land they cultivate has a look of life. But in all colour, in all luxury, and in all that gives material for picturesque English, this lovely scenery for food and wine and raiment has that _little less_ to which we desire to recall a rhetorical world.

MR. COVENTRY PATMORE'S ODES

To most of the great poets no greater praise can be given than praise of their imagery. Imagery is the natural language of their poetry. Without a parable she hardly speaks. But undoubtedly there is now and then a poet who touches the thing, not its likeness, too vitally, too sensitively, for even such a pause as the verse makes for love of the beautiful image. Those rare moments are simple, and their simplicity makes one of the reader's keenest experiences. Other simplicities may be achieved by lesser art, but this is transcendent simplicity. There is nothing in the world more costly. It vouches for the beauty which it transcends; it answer for the riches it forbears; it implies the art which it fulfils. All abundance ministers to it, though it is so single. And here we get the sacrificial quality which is the well-kept secret of art at this perfection. All the faculties of the poet are used for preparing this naked greatness--are used and fruitfully spent and shed. The loveliness that stands and waits on the simplicity of certain of Mr. Coventry Patmore's Odes, the fervours and splendours that are there, only to be put to silence--to silence of a kind that would be impossible were they less glorious--are testimonies to the difference between sacrifice and waste.

But does it seem less than reasonable to begin a review of a poet's work with praise of an infrequent mood? Infrequent such a mood must needs be, yet it is in a profound sense characteristic. To have attained it once or twice is to have proved such gift and grace as a true history of literature would show to be above price, even gauged by the rude measure of rarity. Transcendent simplicity could not possibly be habitual. Man lives within garments and veils, and art is chiefly concerned with making mysteries of these for the loveliness of his life; when they are rent asunder it is impossible not to be aware that an overwhelming human emotion has been in action. Thus _Departure_, _If I were Dead_, _A Farewell_, _Eurydice_, _The Toys_, _St. Valentine's Day_--though here there is in the exquisite imaginative play a mitigation of the bare vitality of feeling--group themselves apart as the innermost of the poet's achievements.

Second to these come the Odes that have splendid thought in great images, and display--rather than, as do the poems first glanced at, betray--the beauties of poetic art. Emotion is here, too, and in shocks and throes, never frantic when almost intolerable. It is mortal pathos. If any other poet has filled a cup with a draught so unalloyed, we do not know it. Love and sorrow are pure in _The Unknown Eros_; and its author has not refused even the cup of terror. Against love often, against sorrow nearly always, against fear always, men of sensibility instantaneously guard the quick of their hearts. It is only the approach of the pang that they will endure; from the pang itself, dividing soul and spirit, a man who is conscious of a profound capacity for passion defends himself in the twinkling of an eye. But through nearly the whole of Coventry Patmore's poetry there is an endurance of the mortal touch. Nay, more, he has the endurance of the immortal touch. That is, his capacity for all the things that men elude for their greatness is more than the capacity of other men. He endures therefore what they could but will not endure and, besides this, degrees that they cannot apprehend. Thus, to have studied _The Unknown Eros_ is to have had a certain experience--at least the impassioned experience of a compassion; but it is also to have recognised a soul beyond our compassion.

What some of the Odes have to sing of, their author does not insist upon our knowing. He leaves more liberty for a well-intentioned reader's error than makes for peace and recollection of mind in reading. That the general purpose of the poems is obscure is inevitable. It has the obscurity of profound clear waters. What the poet chiefly secures to us is the understanding that love and its bonds, its bestowal and reception, does but rehearse the action of the union of God with humanity--that there is no essential man save Christ, and no essential woman except the soul of mankind. When the singer of a Song of Songs seems to borrow the phrase of human love, it is rather that human love had first borrowed the truths of the love of God. The thought grows gay in the three _Psyche_ odes, or attempts a gaiety--the reader at least being somewhat reluctant. How is it? Mr. Coventry Patmore's play more often than not wins you to but a slow participation. Perhaps because some thrust of his has left you still tremulous.

But the inequality of equal lovers, sung in these Odes with a Divine allusion, is a most familiar truth. Love that is passionate has much of the impulse of gravitation--gravitation that is not falling, as there is no downfall in the precipitation of the sidereal skies. The love of the great for the small is the passionate love; the upward love hesitates and is fugitive. St. Francis Xavier asked that the day of his ecstasy might be shortened; Imogen, the wife of all poetry, 'prays forbearance;' the child is 'fretted with sallies of his mothers kisses.' It might be drawing an image too insistently to call this a centrifugal impulse.

The art that utters an intellectual action so courageous, an emotion so authentic, as that of Mr. Coventry Patmore's poetry, cannot be otherwise than consummate. Often the word has a fulness of significance that gives the reader a shock of appreciation. This is always so in those simplest odes which we have taken as the heart of the author's work. Without such wonderful rightness, simplicity of course is impossible. Nor is that beautiful precision less in passages of description, such as the landscape lines in _Amelia_ and elsewhere. The words are used to the uttermost yet with composure. And a certain justness of utterance increases the provocation of what we take leave to call unjust thought in the few poems that proclaim an intemperate scorn--political, social, literary. The poems are but two or three; they are to be known by their subjects--we might as well do something to justify their scorn by using the most modern of adjectives--and call them topical. Here assuredly there is no composure. Never before did superiority bear itself with so little of its proper, signal, and peculiar grace--reluctance.

If Mr. Patmore really intends that his Odes shall be read with minim, or crochet, or quaver rests, to fill up a measure of beaten time, we are free to hold that he rather arbitrarily applies to liberal verse the laws of verse set for use--cradle verse and march-marking verse (we are, of course, not considering verse set to music, and thus compelled into the musical time). Liberal verse, dramatic, narrative, meditative, can surely be bound by no time measures--if for no other reason, for this: that to prescribe pauses is also to forbid any pauses unprescribed. Granting, however, his principle of catalexis, we still doubt whether the irregular metre of _The Unknown Eros_ is happily used except for the large sweep of the flight of the Ode more properly so called. _Lycidas_, the _Mrs. Anne Killigrew_, the _Intimations_, and Emerson's _Threnody_, considered merely for their versification, fulfil their laws so perfectly that they certainly move without checks as without haste. So with the graver Odes--much in the majority--of Mr. Coventry Patmore's series. A more lovely dignity of extension and restriction, a more touching sweetness of simple and frequent rhyme, a truer impetus of pulse and impulse, English verse could hardly yield than are to be found in his versification. And what movement of words has ever expressed flight, distance, mystery, and wonderful approach, as they are expressed in a celestial line--the eighth in the ode _To the Unknown Eros_? When we are sensible of a metrical cheek it is in this way: To the English ear the heroic line is the unit of metre, and when two lines of various length undesignedly add together to form a heroic line, they have to be separated with something of a jerk. And this adding--as, for instance, of a line of four syllables preceding or following one of six--occurs now and then, and even in such a masterly measure of music as _A Farewell_. It is as when a sail suddenly flaps windless in the fetching about of a boat. In _The Angel in the House_, and other earlier poems, Mr. Coventry Patmore used the octosyllabic stanza perfectly, inasmuch as he never left it either heavily or thinly packed. Moreover those first poems had a composure which was the prelude to the peace of the Odes. And even in his slightest work he proves himself the master--that is, the owner--of words that, owned by him, are unprofaned, are as though they had never been profaned; the capturer of an art so quick and close that it is the voice less of a poet than of the very Muse.

INNOCENCE AND EXPERIENCE

I shall not ask the commentators whether Blake used these two words in union or in antithesis. They assuredly have an inseverable union in the art of literature. The songs of Innocence and Experience are for each poet the songs of his own separate heart and life; but to take the cumulative experiences of other men, and to use these in place of the virginal fruit of thought--whereas one would hardly consent to take them for ordering even the most habitual of daily affairs--is to forego Innocence and Experience at once and together. Obviously, Experience can be nothing except personal and separate; and Innocence of a singularly solitary quality is his who does not dip his hands into other men's histories, and does not give to his own word the common sanction of other men's summaries and conclusions. Therefore I bind Innocence and Experience in one, and take them as a sign of the necessary and noble isolation of man from man--of his uniqueness. But if I had a mind to forego that manner of personal separateness, and to use the things of others, I think I would rather appropriate their future than their past. Let me put on their hopes, and the colours of their confidence, if I must borrow. Not that I would burden my prophetic soul with unjustified ambitions; but even this would be more tolerable than to load my memory with an unjustifiable history.

And yet how differently do the writers of a certain kind of love-poetry consider this matter. These are the love-poets who have no reluctance in adopting the past of a multitude of people to whom they have not even been introduced. Their verse is full of ready-made memories, various, numerous, and cruel. No single life--supposing it to be a liberal life concerned with something besides sex--could quite suffice for so much experience, so much disillusion, so much _deception_. To achieve that tone in its fulness it is necessary to take for one's own the _praeterita_ (say) of Alfred de Musset and of the men who helped him--not to live but--to have lived; it is necessary to have lived much more than any man lives, and to make a common hoard of erotic remembrances with all kinds of poets.

As the Franciscans wear each other's old habits, and one Friar goes about darned because of another's rending, so the poet of a certain order grows cynical for the sake of many poets' old loves. Not otherwise will the resultant verse succeed in implying so much--or rather so many, in the feminine plural. The man of very sensitive individuality might hesitate at the adoption. The Franciscan is understood to have a fastidiousness and to overcome it. But these poets so triumph over their repugnance that it does not appear. And yet, if choice were, one might wish rather to make use of one's fellowmen's old shoes than put their old secrets to use, and dress one's art in a motley of past passions. Moreover, to utilise the mental experience of many is inevitably to use their verse and phrase. For the rest, all the traits of this love-poetry are familiar enough. One of them is the absence of the word of promise and pledge, the loss of the earliest and simplest of the impulses of love: which is the vow. 'Till death!' 'For ever!' are cries too simple and too natural to be commonplace, and in their denial there is the least tolerable of banalities--that of other men's disillusions.

Perfect personal distinctness of Experience would be in literature a delicate Innocence. Not a passage of cheapness, of greed, of assumption, of sloth, or of any such sins in the work of him whose love-poetry were thus true, and whose _pudeur_ of personality thus simple and inviolate. This is the private man, in other words the gentleman, who will neither love nor remember in public.

PENULTIMATE CARICATURE

There has been no denunciation, and perhaps even no recognition, of a certain social immorality in the caricature of the mid-century and earlier. Literary and pictorial alike, it had for its notice the vulgarising of the married woman. No one now would read Douglas Jerrold for pleasure, but it is worth while to turn up that humourist's serial, _Mrs. Caudle's Curtain Lectures_, which were presumably considered good comic reading in the _Punch_ of that time, and to make acquaintance with a certain ideal of the grotesque. Obviously to make a serious comment on anything which others consider or have considered humorous is to put one's-self at a disadvantage. He who sees the joke holds himself somewhat the superior of the man who would see it, such as it is, if he thought it worth his eyesight. The last-named has to bear the least tolerable of modern reproaches; but he need not always care. Now to turn over Douglas Jerrold's monologues is to find that people in the mid-century took their mirth principally from the life of the _arriere boutique_. On that shabby stage was enacted the comedy of literature. Therefore we must take something of the vulgarity of Jerrold as a circumstance of the social ranks wherein he delighted. But the essential vulgarity is that of the woman. There is in some old _Punch_ volume a drawing by Leech--whom one is weary of hearing named the gentle, the refined--where the work of the artist has vied with the spirit of the letter-press. Douglas Jerrold treats of the woman's jealousy, Leech of her stays. They lie on a chair by the bed, beyond description gross. And page by page the woman is derided, with an unfailing enjoyment of her foolish ugliness of person, of manners, and of language. In that time there was, moreover, one great humourist; he bore his part willingly in vulgarising the woman; and the part that fell to him was the vulgarising of the act of maternity. Woman spiteful, woman suing man at the law for evading her fatuous companionship, woman incoherent, woman abandoned without restraint to violence and temper, woman feigning sensibility--in none of these ignominies is woman so common, foul, and foolish for Dickens as she is in child-bearing.

I named Leech but now. He was, in all things essential, Dickens's contemporary. And accordingly the married woman and her child are humiliated by his pencil; not grossly, but commonly. For him she is moderately and dully ridiculous. What delights him as humorous is that her husband--himself wearisome enough to die of--is weary of her, finds the time long, and tries to escape her. It amuses him that she should furtively spend money over her own dowdiness, to the annoyance of her husband, and that her husband should have no desire to adorn her, and that her mother should be intolerable. It pleases him that her baby, with enormous cheeks and a hideous rosette in its hat--a burlesque baby--should be a grotesque object of her love, for that too makes subtly for her abasement. Charles Keene, again--another contemporary, though he lived into a later and different time. He saw little else than common forms of human ignominy--indignities of civic physique, of stupid prosperity, of dress, of bearing. He transmits these things in greater proportion than he found them--whether for love of the humour of them, or by a kind of inverted disgust that is as eager as delight--one is not sure which is the impulse. The grossness of the vulgarities is rendered with a completeness that goes far to convince us of a certain sensitiveness of apprehension in the designer; and then again we get convinced that real apprehension--real apprehensiveness--would not have insisted upon such things, could not have lived with them through almost a whole career. There is one drawing in the _Punch_ of years ago, in which Charles Keene achieved the nastiest thing possible to even the invention of that day. A drunken citizen, in the usual broadcloth, has gone to bed, fully dressed, with his boots on and his umbrella open, and the joke lies in the surprise awaiting, when she awakes, the wife asleep at his side in a nightcap. Every one who knows Keene's work can imagine how the huge well-fed figure was drawn, and how the coat wrinkled across the back, and how the bourgeois whiskers were indicated. This obscene drawing is matched by many equally odious. Abject domesticity, ignominies of married life, of middle-age, of money-making; the old common jape against the mother-in-law; ill-dressed men with whisky--ill- dressed women with tempers; everything that is underbred and decivilised; abominable weddings: in one drawing a bridegroom with shambling sidelong legs asks his bride if she is nervous; she is a widow, and she answers, 'No, never was.' In all these things there is very little humour. Where Keene achieved fun was in the figures of his schoolboys. The hint of tenderness which in really fine work could never be absent from a man's thought of a child or from his touch of one, however frolic or rowdy the subject in hand, is absolutely lacking in Keene's designs; nevertheless, we acknowledge that here is humour. It is also in some of his clerical figures when they are not caricatures, and certainly in 'Robert,' the City waiter of _Punch_. But so irresistible is the derision of the woman that all Charles Keene's persistent sense of vulgarity is intent centrally upon her. Never for any grace gone astray is she bantered, never for the social extravagances, for prattle, or for beloved dress; but always for her jealousy, and for the repulsive person of the man upon whom she spies and in whom she vindicates her ignoble rights. If this is the shopkeeper the possession of whom is her boast, what then is she?