"The best poetry is quite close to us." -- Novalis.
FOR all the chattering of the anthologist and the improved sale of recent verse, poetry is clearly not popular. It is no longer common property; there are no troubadours in our village streets and no drinking songs in our empty taverns. Democracy's persistent attitude towards poetry is that of refusal to look at the stars without a telescope; it has concluded that the bards are seeing things which do not exist, that they are loving the moon for a goddess when she is only a corpse. Free verse cannot be said to have helped matters much. The value of such experiments is not here denied, but their recent modishness was probably due to the fact that nobody except the illuminati mistook them for poetry. Democratic literary judgment may in this instance have been right, although its general attitude towards lyric expression has been hopelessly wrong. There is more than a difference in form between Shakespeare and Masters; there is a gulf between their ways of looking at the world. It is because the older poets were near enough to things to be neighbors that they wrote kindly, in rhythms that marched and sang. Their measure of earth, in so far as they used one, was genially variant; they judged by the homely but living standard of the soul's desire. A modern man measures things by what they are worth, and therefore by a rigidly conventional standard, the principles and limits of which have been fixed by society. It may be that the modern versifier is free because he, too, is mathematical; that he no longer obeys metrical law because he has adopted the metric system. Perhaps, unwilling to be bound by cadences whose origins are mysteriously prehistoric, he has sworn allegiance to lines.
All this is not facetious but symbolic; the new intellectual poet has learned too many statistics ever to be taken for a fool even by a king. He has called so many things illusions that he has forgotten even the spirit of the Ludus. It is not altogether his fault. The people who to-day scorn all mention of the poets are descended from a people who in past ages filled the streets with song; the people who scoff at poetry as "beyond" them are really beyond the poets. They have locked their heavy doors to the sun; with a sudden taste for exclusiveness, they have shut out the skylark and the sky. Poetry, the simplest, most natural of things, is the vision-heritage of the simple. A girl whispering to a doll is a poet because she has given reality to an image of the real; a boy whose wooden sword is the blade of Robert Lee has made, with a tremendous gesture, a drama of life and death. In later life this creative impulse weakens, as Wordsworth once took the trouble to suggest. An elderly gentleman cannot by any supreme magic transmute a fellow mortal into Robin Hood; the best he can do is to reverse the process. It is the opinion of every lover that an angel has deigned to be worshipped by him; and the aging Dante, on his part, made an angel of her whom he had adored. This means very simply that the grown poet, the master of words, must have rhyme and reason. But there will be in his work, if he is uncramped by an industrial education, some of the old natural movements of the human body: his song will march or leap, it will dance or stumble.
The bard achieved his towering renown in the past not because he was a freak of nature but because he was popular. He merely did the plain, necessary task of song a little better than other people. Then as now poets were born and their enemies were unmade, but there is a blight on our time. Now as ever the man who derides verse is an ungrateful child: he scorns his first parents in paradise because he is doomed to wear clothes; he ignores the moon because he is a slave to her image in his pocket. And the difference between what a man can put into his pocket and what he can put into his head is always the difference between beauty and material value; that is, between what will supply a merely external need and what, without ceasing its work in the world, will become part of the soul. For there exists an ancient and recently endorsed theory that man has a soul, that he is not merely the child of an ape, but verily the child of God. And the wildest hypothesis of the scientific intellect cannot conceive of God's being pleased with stocks and bonds or piles of metal that were the ashes of His morning fire; but the simplest mind will be content with thinking Him happy in the lovely faces of His sons.
The theme of this sketch, however, is not verse in general but Catholic verse in particular. Admittedly nobody could be more indifferent to poetry than the average English-speaking Catholic; but from what has been said it may reasonably be inferred that the Catholic poet has an advantage in being truly a child. He has behind him the ancestry of image-makers, and a radiant Mother whose care it has been to make of nature a divine plaything. She has fed the soul with Bread and Wine; she has made a mystic comedy of the bitter tragedy of the Cross. Having begun with seven sacraments, each of them a towering symbol, she ends with illuminating all things, living and dead, with grace. With a. great and abiding faith she has written the baffling difficulties of her creed into the simplest of flowers: the rose is mystical and the clover which grows by the wayside is a picture of One whom none can bear to see. If sometimes her images are fantastic, it is because her adventure, for high and unutterable stakes, is real enough to be infinitely more strange than fiction. Not satisfied with humanizing nature, she has mothered it. The poet who is a child of Christendom must first of all, then, be a child. He must make believe in the awful future; he must realize that he is still held in arms. Not always a hymn-writer, he knows that there is nothing on earth, even among things which had better be forgotten, whose image cannot be found in a cathedral. But he knows that Satan belongs in hell and not in a palace; he avows that the villain must not be defended with a sword. Remember, there is in his soul the bliss of obedience; you will find him in the "nurseries of heaven."
It was natural, then, that the revival of the Catholic spirit in England should have borne goodly fruit in verse, although the break in tradition could not easily be healed. Something has already been suggested concerning the writers who made occasional poems -- men like Newman and Faber for whom verse was only an aside, like a dream to a soldier. Now we shall greet those for whom poetry was the business of life. There are many, but at first there come three men whose art is not supreme, but who were none the less markedly children and children of the Church. Aubrey de Vere, constant and calm, found his reflective song in well-trimmed gardens; Gerard Hopkins, strangely solitary, was driven by fear to shut out the world from his eyes, but when he opened them he beheld earth shimmering with lucent rainbows; and Coventry Patmore, greatest among them, perhaps, went from the love that is a sacrament to the Love that is beyond vision. But in their separate ways they were brothers.
At first sight it would seem absurd to say that the simplicity of nature had any noteworthy relation to Coventry Patmore, for he was a quite amazing egoist. None of the other Victorians, not even Carlyle, was so frankly a cosmos unto himself. Still, when "The Angel in the House" appeared in 1858, the world greeted a poem which treated the most banal of subjects in the most commonplace of meters. That subject was domestic happiness, and that meter the rhymed octosyllabic quatrain. Anthony Trollope, or Archibald Marshall in our day, might have used the incidents in the story; a widower, with three goodly and pious daughters, beholds a young poet fall in love with all of them at first and finally with one; there is a pretty wedding and a subsequent serene family life. Patmore never completed the poem, but what was done sinks gently back into the languid posture of a decorous age. The immense popularity of the work, similar to that which attended Keble's "Christian Year," was, however, the result of the high and novel light with which the poet illuminated his theme.
Patmore had boldly made himself the poet of love. In his understanding of the influence exerted by a pure passion he is more powerful than Hugo; the subtlety with which he analyzes, step by step, the attraction which two young people come to have for each other is matched only in the ancient mediaeval romances. But in addition to these matters of psychology, he possessed the key to the religion of sex. In the consecration of virginity to its fellow and in the alternating assertion and surrender of each ego, he saw the liturgy of a sacrament. Virtue blending with virtue in a kind of ethereal sacrifice gains steadily in loftiness; and love which began in the garden achieves, by its mystical crucifixion, a resurrection unto the stars. Do the modern poets say of marriage that it is the ice into which passion finally freezes, the congealing of ecstasy into something which a humdrum bourgeois can keep in his kitchen? It is because they have made of love a convention, says Patmore, and conventions sit fast, but the high and constant purity of matrimony is vivified by the splendid variety of the soul. And thus the imagination of the poet, visioning the things that are hidden in the nature of man, defends the noblest and oldest of human institutions with ultimate originality.
This idea, which is Patmore's distinct contribution to literature, developed naturally with his character. Born in 1846 of an eccentric father, he took a youthful interest in science which he seems to have pursued for a while with the intensity of a boyish Edison. During this time he prided himself upon being an agnostic; but strong instincts, which in Patmore's case always overtopped the slower methods of reason, led him safely to religion and to love. In his mind the two were closely interwoven, and when he came to feel that he could write, poetry made the third among his trinity of guiding stars. His was an ardent, impetuous temperament, expressing itself only when the uniform glow with which it was suffused sought, spontaneously, a discharge in words. Landor, Tennyson, and Rossetti, who befriended his early years, saw Patmore's genius but were quite incapable of forming it. "The Angel in the House" was the criterion of its author's career: he would stand in the midst of men, but he would know how to be alone.
Gradually his insight deepened. Just as he had gone swiftly from science to faith, so now he advanced to the science of faith. During many years his mystical sympathy with Catholic doctrine had drawn him towards the Church, but the quiet creed of his first wife held him in restraint. Some time after her death Pat-more journeyed to Rome and engaged in meditative study of religious life. For a while he found it impossible to make a submission, but suddenly, in the middle of the night, certainty flooded his soul, and with characteristic impetuosity he hastened at once to a Jesuit house and craved admission to the Church. From that day on, not the slightest shadow of religious doubt fell across his mind. The engrossing subject of the identity of love and religion was taken up with even greater conviction as he found that Catholic mystics had long proclaimed his doctrine. In the end he became the seer, beholding the mystery of God's nature and His love in the analogy of human marriage and in the never-ending interlacing of force and matter which constitutes the world. Treading these high realms of vision, he was serenely conscious of the value of his mission, and though he was buried in the habit of St. Francis, he cannot conceivably be imagined to have welcomed "Brother Ass."
Indeed, the stalwart egoism with which Patmore proclaimed his intuitions was the natural complement of his thought. Thoroughly honest in his enraptured idealism, he viewed with some disgust the lowlier philosophies about him; when aroused he attacked with bitter anger and his paradoxes were staggering. There is in his statement of opinion a great deal of emotional exaggeration which developed from his extreme love of liberty. In politics, to which he devoted much prose and even several odes, Patmore was a violent opponent of popular government in all its works and pomps; very particularly obnoxious to him were such mandates as prohibition, with which democracy threatened to bind the individual. Nevertheless, the man who could thus work himself almost literally into a towering rage was otherwise the most tender of men. Life with his first wife, Emily Andrews, was beautiful in its perfect concord; and the second woman of his choice, Marianne Byles, was the object of an affection scarcely less deep. There lay in his soul the tenderness of tears, and his most enduring work is that in which this very human and very ordinary quality dares to enter the sanctuary of vision. No one in his age quite resembled him, for modern society is complex and he was utterly simple, with the strong moods and strange ecstasies of a hermit during the broken ages of Rome.
Unless one bears the character of Patmore constantly in mind, no study of his achievements as a Catholic poet will prove satisfactory. The great work of his later years is that now generally grouped under the title, "The Unknown Eros." In these odes he sang of the august analogy between Divine and human love, adapting the Pindaric form to the requirements of his straightforward emotion and stripping it almost bare of poetic language. God, "The Husband of the Heavens," is the deathless Lover of the Soul, and reverently the poet feels
"This subject loyalty which longs
For chains and thongs
Woven of gossamer and adamant,
To bind me to my unguessed want,
And so to lie Between those quivering plumes that thro' fine ether pant
For hopeless, sweet eternity."
Its direct analogy is human love, composed of two well-suited parts:
"Your might, Love, makes me weak,
Your might it is that makes my weakness sweet."
The surrounding mysteries, those of pain and defeat and unrequited longing, are the subjects of Patmore's most appealing poems, "A Farewell," "Tristitia," and the exquisite "Departure." Love holds the universe firmly to its heart:
"But for compulsion of strong grace,
The pebble in the road
Would straight explode
And fill the ghastly boundlessness of space."
And love will in the end make certain that hunger is appeased and the heartbreak healed. Browning was right when he glorified the fighter for, as Patmore saw,
"The man who, though his fights be all defeats,
Still fights,
Enters at last
The heavenly Jerusalem's rejoicing streets
With glory more, and more triumphant rites
Than always-conquering Joshua's when his blast
The frighted walls of Jericho down cast."
This is, of course, the poetry of the prophet, even if of a very human one. Truths were made known to him by meditation achieving insight, and their effectiveness depends upon a recognition of their honesty. His are moods to which not everyone will obediently succumb; but Patmore would have been the last to maintain that all should scale the mountain peaks to which he had ascended. The "Odes" fail, then, to attain to that universality of appeal which the great Catholic lyrics, Dies Irae and Te Deum, so securely possess; they fail again in being too predominately intellectual and violating thereby the inspired mandate of charity. There will, however, always be some to whom Patmore's odes will speak the very words of Beauty, for whom his sublime idealization of love will be the key to life. In thus carrying the ideal of "The Angel in the House" aloft with his vision, the poet lost somewhat of his subtle ability to interpret the lowliest of human experiences in words of light. In "Amelia," however, he developed a commonplace theme -- the feelings of a girl who is about to take the place of a dead wife -- with a deftness, a splendid and perfect sympathy, and a grace of fine poetry that are scarcely matched even by the masters. The delicate restraint with which the nature of a beautiful woman is presented with all its virginal purity and power of passion, preserves the morning tint of poetry; it is a memory of Paradise.
The poet's unsteady strength and increasing attraction to direct speech left many things to be said in prose. There are keen readers who prefer the slender epigrammatic volumes -- "Religio Poetae"; "Principle in Art"; "Rod, Root, and Flower" -- to any of Patmore's verse. It may be granted that his mystical philosophy is very succinctly set forth in these brilliant essays; the oracle speaks plainly, if violently, in them. No one can ever boil down Patmore's utterances, for he gave only the bare quintessence of his thought. In general his essays deal with the same themes as those which underlie the poems, but undraped as they are of poetic symbolism they will strike the average reader as outrageous. The humble Christian, staring incredulously at unfathomable paradoxes, is likely to mark his copy of "Rod, Root, and Flower" with irate question marks. Such cryptic utterances as "Heaven becomes very intelligible and attractive when it is discerned to be -- Woman," need setting forth in the raiment which the poet alone can supply. In prose Coventry Patmore the seer becomes a figure as alien from these matter-of-fact days as his beloved St. John of the Cross.
His death in 1896 was preceded like that of another master of hard sayings, Huysmans, by much physical suffering borne with sublime fortitude. In numerous other ways the two men, so different in their attitude toward the native question of sex, were alike. Both saw in Woman the central figure, but one beheld her as the fount of evil, while for the other she was the image of all Good. Together they testify to the power of the Church to quench the thirst of intensely original minds, to grant that intellectual freedom without which the egoist, product of our age, must die. Patmore's memory will rest secure on his individuality. It would be easy to show that Huysmans' influence on modern literature has been very vast, and later on we shall attempt to make clear that the doctrine for which Patmore lived has also been fruitful in disciples. For all his hardness of speech and his limitations as a poet, he has proved himself, as Mrs. Meynell says, "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."{1}
II
Of Gerard Manley Hopkins, poetically tongue-tied and chosen for suffering, the world has heard but little and that is strangely perverse. The one poet friend who appreciated him sufficiently to edit his work failed utterly to understand his religious life; and so Robert Bridges' memoir has left the impression of a man hopelessly entangled in fatal asceticism, guilty of an absurd devotion to Mary, and altogether quite despondent. From the most famous anecdote concerning him one learns that he advised Coventry Patmore to burn the manuscript of "Sponsa Dei," thus depriving literature of a remarkable essay and Patmore of a crown. Recently this story, grossly annotated with theological "learning," has been repeated in the reminiscences of an educator-person whose sole titles to fame are a second-rate decoration from the French government (which has made other mistakes) and Patmore's occasional unwariness in selecting acquaintances. It ought not to be necessary to state that Father Hopkins' sole remark was, "That's telling secrets," probably a mere reenforcement of the author's own conclusion. But these matters are curious examples of what life meant for Gerard Hopkins -- a lovable individual whose only possible love was silently religious; a poet who could only lisp in numbers, and a child whom nobody could understand.
The man is too elusive ever to be caught in a portrait. A delicate, brooding youth, alive as few men are to the seductive glow of the world, came to Oxford and fell in love with Greece. This was his natural habitat, coloured with those fiery, unreal skies which enraptured Keats and later Rupert Brooke. Hopkins' religious intuition, however, shrank quickly from the temptress, and following his prayer he was received into the Church by Newman. Even so he felt unsafe against the teasing stars and made the poet's final renunciation by joining the Jesuits. There is nothing to show that he was misunderstood, but the reward of his election was an unremitting pursuit by the demon of ugliness. Never was a man more delicately sensitive, more keenly responsive to the subtle nuances of form; and upon this instrument the world smote with the hand of the Cyclops. He went from preaching to the classroom at Stonyhurst; thence to the slums of Liverpool, and finally to Ireland where, as an examiner in the Catholic University, he withered in an atmosphere which was, for him, deadly. Father Gerard Hopkins made his religious sacrifice with the stolidity of a soldier; but it was torture as real as the martyrdom of Lallement. This brief record of pain is all that can be given for a life that began at Stratford, near London, in 1844, and ended on June 8, 1889. His poetry, like his character, is cryptic. Could anything be more nobly simple than this youthful song of renunciation, come so straight from the heart:
"Shape nothing, lips; be lovely dumb.
It is the shut, the curfew sent
From there where all surrenders come
Which only makes you eloquent."Be shelled, eyes, with double dark
And find the uncreated light:
This ruck and reel which you rema
rk Coils, keeps, and teases simple sight."
But that repression in the end precluded expression; having bound himself hand and foot against nature, he threw his body amid the thorns of Greek prosody. When his penance had been done, he could not extricate his art from the coils of a theory which is interesting but impossible. In the midst of dicta about running rhythm, sprung rhythm, rocking rhythm, and counterpoint, he stood, a futurist poet before the shrine of Mary. Eschewing all the familiar grammatical transitions, his verse became a sort of verbal pantomime, gesture on gesture, ecstatic and arresting very frequently, but seldom graceful. This method was associated with even further oddities such as perplexing dialect words and strange AEschylian combinations, and a radical departure from the rhythm to which the English ear has been attuned.
Of course there is power in it, as of flashes. Such a line as, "Kiss my hand to the dappled-with-damson west" brings with it a glimpse of the true evening sky, and one knows not what image of the wild seacoast. Motion -- which was one of Father Hopkins' fascinations -- is most vividly reproduced in such lines as these:
"Into the snows she sweeps,
Hurling the haven behind."
But all these advantages gained from a nearly scientific exactness in registering impressions are offset by utter failures, when the picture is lost in the formula and nothing remains but an array of abstruse symbols. He is most truly poetic when the emotions which control his life govern for a time his response to the display of the world. The poem, "The Blessed Virgin Compared to the Air We Breathe," is one of those truly powerful and fervent Marian hymns in which modern literature rivals the old. The sonnets of his last days, too, are most poignant outcries of a soul shrouded in mystic darkness, bowed and bloody under the lash. There are not many more moving lines than this: "I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day." The greater portion of his slender volume is, however, intellectual verse which is sometimes gifted with power but generally lies beyond the boundaries of song. The sonnet to "Dun Scotus' Oxford" is probably the best among this group, but even it is for the very patient reader. It was natural, also, that Father Hopkins, whose life was a crucifixion and at whom kindly human things generally looked from behind strangers' windows, should have aspired to be the poet of pain. In "The Loss of the Eurydice" and "The Wreck of the Deutsch-land" he came very near the sublimity of his favorite Greek tragedian, and sang of God the Controller of men's wills as no other English poet has done. It is interesting to note that his manner here is very much like that of a modern German Catholic poet, Annette von Droste-Hülsdorff.
Immediate reaction to the verve of nature and the resolution to set that down in words, regardless of environment and continuity, are the characteristics of Father Hopkins' verse. He was a child enchanted with a sunbeam and oblivious of the light which floods the world; he was a master of the phrase but a mere tinker at composition. Now these same qualities are so strongly manifest in his prose that one cannot refrain from setting down an entry from his diary:
"Sept. 24. First saw the Northern Lights. My eye was caught with the beams of light and dark very like the crown of horny rays the sun makes behind a cloud. At first I thought of silvery cloud until I saw these were more luminous and did not dim the clearness of the stars in the Bear. They rose slightly radiating thrown out from the line of the earth. Then I saw soft pulses of light; one after another rose and passed upwards arched in shape, but waveringly and with the arch broken. They seemed to float, not following the warp of the sphere as falling stars look to do, but free and concentrical with it. This busy working of nature wholly independent of the earth and seeming to go in a strain of time not reckoned by our reckoning of days and years, but simply as if correcting the preoccupation of the world by being preoccupied with and appealing to and being dated to the Day of Judgment, was like a new witness to God and filled with delightful fear." (Dublin Review.)
That is prose which almost seizes the intangible by itself becoming intangible. It is a break, perhaps not altogether happy, from the conventions of the literary craft; for a counterpart one must visit the strabismic art displays of modern painters.
Are there many who care, or will learn to care, for the poetry of Gerard Hopkins? Probably not. It seems impossible that poetry should ever follow the direction of his teaching, no matter how different its form may come to be. He was the elf-child playing with the fringe of the sober modern sea, and such children are rare and even unpopular. Certainly he can have no place except as the priest-artist who, resolute in his search for "Uncreated Light," paused for an occasional song before the shrine of the Virgin. As a Marian poet, seeking refuge in the arms of the Mother from the torment of life, he makes a distinct appeal, although the delicate odour of his incense will be lost on the crowd of worshippers. As a man he shall go down with the mystics and victims of song, with Campion and Blake, into the keeping of those who love the memory of the luckless dead. He had much to say that was left unspoken, but which comes eloquently, none the less, from the sad eyes of the priest who loved the soul above all else in the world -- his own and his neighbour's equally. And what he had lived for was surely not in vain.
III
In contrast with the bold vision and tense mystical language of Gerard Hopkins and Coventry Patmore, the school of poetry established by Wordsworth read nature tranquilly, gravely, in search of "the breath and finer spirit of knowledge." Reason, living simply beside the stream that washed the roots of aged trees, could observe the spiritual background of nature as Plato had envisaged it. Poetry was content to walk meditatively under the stars and to be transported occasionally by the distant horn of Triton. Chief among the Wordsworthians was Aubrey de Vere, a writer of exquisite mental poise and word-control. He tempered the landscape of England with Christian moods as no other poet except Keble has tempered it; but it was the ordered landscape of rural England, charming in the twilight of memory but safe from the storms that raged on England's sea. If he saw anything else it was Ireland, but he could not have formed an idea of an independent Celtic nation.
This staid Victorianism would have made of Aubrey de Vere a mediocre poet had it not been for the one important break which he did venture -- his conversion to the Church. Profoundly moved by the thought of Newman, he went with the help of Coleridge and Manning to Rome and discovered the divine continuity of Christendom. De Vere was now able to invest his garden with the religious aura of the past; he read back into the life of the society which had borne so much that was beautiful in saint and virgin. In short, though he did not equal Wordsworth in wresting from nature the sublime intuition of immortality or the vigorous protest against industrialism which are inherent in her, he did surpass him in the sanctification of the common shrine. He gave to earth not only personality but also personages; and perhaps it would be well to turn aside for a moment to De Vere's own individuality. Born in Ireland, January 10, 1814, he was educated at Trinity College and at Oxford; in youth he became a disciple of Wordsworth and remained faithful to the last by making an annual pilgrimage to the master's grave. A gentleman of the rarest personal charm, De Vere held the friendship of notable men like Gladstone, was the center of a brilliant society, and the idolized poet of people like Kegan Paul. His religious fervour had the sweetness as well as the rigour of sincerity, and his influence on other souls was remarkable. A long and hard-working literary career came to a close with his death in 1902.
Being a poet whose literary power lay rather in tranquil thought than in any kind of emotion, De Vere was not bound to a particular verse form, but used them all at will with dignified success. In the epic he was least successful, in the sonnet perhaps most genuinely at home. If his dramas are largely forgotten now, the "Mary Tudor" has suffered an unkind fate; its sheer historical veracity should appeal to the lover of the past, and the skill with which the characters are made to take life upon the tapestry of the story is not so usual in modern poetry. There is power in it, even if that power is sternly reposeful, and a simple grandeur of diction that one must match with something earlier than modern romanticism. The classic art, sure of itself and guided by philosophic restraint, speaks in many fine passages; to such calm poise of feeling the modern mind is not addicted, but literature may come back to it from erotic exhaustion.
The various books of lyrics and ballads do not sound the peculiar present-day song note. They contain verse of much charm, carefully groomed and exact as Horace, and of a rare sweetness of religious feeling which critics like Professor Saintsbury can only call "pretty." Nevertheless they are actually in touch with Nature and her soul, for De Vere boldly attempted a vision of the two in harmonious union. "Minds repelled by the thought of a God who stands afar off," he said, "and created the universe but to abandon it to general laws, fling themselves at the feet of a God made man." And though he may have been too weak to bring the world to its knees, there can be no doubt that Aubrey de Vere himself was kneeling in adoration. He felt certain that
"Some presence veiled, in fields and groves
That mingles rapture with remorse;
Some buried joy beside us moves,
And thrills the soul with such discourse
As they, perchance, that wondering pair
Who to Emmaus bent their way
Hearing, heard not. Like them our prayer
We make: 'The night is near us. . . . Stay!' "
Platitudes often have the advantage of being sensible: it must still be proved that great art is usually insane. But his reflective description of natural scenery is not always devoid of ecstacy, for there are occasional flashes of gold and red, and the tranquil vista may shimmer with "lucidities of sun-pierced limes." De Vere's historical poetry lacks all the fire of an apostolate, is merely reminiscent, Thackerayesque. He found that the saints were beautiful in the legendary twilight, and drew from them a consolation not hinted at in the gorgeous pageantry of Hugo and Scott. As one of the first to put the Celtic sagas into English verse, De Vere may he regarded, also, as one of the forerunners of a most important literary movement, even though he succeeded no better than had Pope with Homer.
In "St. Peter's Chains" he wrote what may be termed a sequence of historical sonnets. Of this verse form he was truly a master, but the sonnets referred to are vastly inferior to the group included in the "Search after Proserpine." Here, as in all other good sequences, the poet's philosophy of life is presented in a series of carefully wrought miniatures. Of course, they are not Shakesperian nor does their art match the chiseled perfection of Heredia; but they are gentle vesper lamps, lighted with splendid sympathy for all things and thoughts, touched with spiritual refinement. "Sorrow," the best perhaps, is only a little inferior to "Our Human Life," and the rest are strikingly even. Aubrey de Vere was not a master of vision and it may be wrong to say that he possessed a single one of what are called "great" ideas, with which the modern egoist is so bountifully supplied. But he felt sincerely and courted honourably, "Great thoughts, grave thoughts, thoughts lasting to the end." "In everything that he has written," says Coventry Patmore, "his aim has been grave and high. He has never been sectarian even when Catholic."
Yet Catholic he was in a fine way that did his brethren honour. Throughout life he haunted the shrines where God had manifested Himself, and studied reverently the images of His majesty. He had none of the abnormally sensitive responsiveness of Father Hopkins, and Patmore's robust and paradoxical statement of the highest truth was alien to him. May it not be said, however, that in many ways he was (and is) a better everyday companion, more constant in his fervour and less rigorously disdainful of the humble things? For all his thorough culture, De Vere was the most charitable of men, one of the most self-sacrificing of the poets. Those petty jealousies which so often disrupt the Muses' coterie touched him not at all; free and firm to the end, he came to earn the title of chevalier of song. Whether his poetry is ever to be more popular, whether we shall learn to overlook the absence of elan which flattens it so much, are questions no one can answer; but of the man it may be said, simply, that he was nearly a saint.
BOOK NOTE
The complete works of Patmore and De Vere include poems and essays. The only edition of Gerard Hopkins' verse is that issued with a memoir by Robert Bridges. Note the following biographies: of Patmore, by Basil Champneys and Edmund Gosse; of De Vere, by Wilfrid Ward. The manifest incompleteness of Bridges' estimate of Hopkins is corrected to some extent by a series of short essays in the Dublin Review, 1920. The Diary is in the possession of Father Keating, S.J. See also, "Idea of Coventry Patmore," by Osbert Burdett; "Essays," by Alice Meynell; "Collected Works," vol. 3, by Joyce Kilmer; "The Poet's Chantry," by Katherine Brégy. Paul Claudel's French translation of Patmore is interesting. For an enthusiastic estimate of De Vere's poetry see "Memories," by Kegan Paul, and the Quarterly Review for 1896. Magazine articles on Patmore and De Vere are, of course, numerous.
{1} "Rhythm of Life," p. 96.