On this page
-
Text (2)
-
1098 THE IE1BEB. [No. 347, SAmn,^
-
A STORY OF HARMED LOVE AND ITS TROUBLES....
Note: This text has been automatically extracted via Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software. The text has not been manually corrected and should not be relied on to be an accurate representation of the item.
-
-
Transcript
-
Note: This text has been automatically extracted via Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software. The text has not been manually corrected and should not be relied on to be an accurate representation of the item.
Additionally, when viewing full transcripts, extracted text may not be in the same order as the original document.
The Espousals. The Angel In The House. B...
snip , when the latter are simply contemplated as the be-all and the end-all of the poet ' s songs of love . The total poem , therefore , is a love lyric , commencing at the very beginning of the passion , and ending when ten years of married existence have passed , and when husband and wife are also father and mother . The conception is not entirely new to literature ; but it is a noble one , which had been singularly neglected , and which certainly waited development in the form of a poem worthy of the theme . A finer theme or one appealing more largely to the universal human soul , it would be impossible to find ; and Mr . Patmore has brought to its elucidation the brain . andheart of a true poet , profound reverence for his subject , and , manifestly , a'large amount of patient labour in thought , phraseology , and construction . Oh some points , however , we have a few objections to offer , which it may be ' : as well to explain at once .
Out readers are aware of the consistency with which we have opposed the spasmodic style , and will understand the earnestness of our wish to see the poetry of this nineteenth century wisely rescued from the influence of such parching and withering gusts . VVe must , therefore , needs feel some disappointment at finding a writer , with ; tbe desire and the genius to aid in that areform , rather compromising tban advancing it by the common error of casting himself into the opposite extreme . Because gaudiness is bad , we are not to adopt Quakerism ; yet something like drab and slate-colour forms the complexion of Mr . Patmore ' s poem . Because it is the fashion to introduce too taany descriptions of natural scenery into our current poetry , and
because those descriptions are often inappropriate and overwrought , that is no reason why Mr . Patmore should almost exclude them from his pages , < especially when it is evident from the one or two he has given that he can peneil them with ¦& . singularly delicate and airy touch . Because some of our living poets overstrain themselves by pompous phraseology and ideas too "vague and far-stretched for any reasonable expression , we are not the better ^ disposed to receive the common-places of every-day conversation , the most familiar topics of ordinary intercourse , ingeniously wrought up into verse j andrliyme , very easy , very natural , very clever after a certain manner , but more-fitted for a novel of fashionable life than fora poem . As , for instance , this : — ¦ ¦ - . : ¦" . - ¦ ¦ ¦ . ¦ " ¦'¦ . . ¦¦ ¦' .. . /; " . ' .,. ' J . . ;¦ ' . "¦ ¦ ¦¦ ' ' . ¦¦ ¦ ¦¦ : Good Mrs . Fife , To my " The Dean , is lie at home ?" Said , " ITo , sir ; but Miss Honor is 5 " And straight , not asking if I'd come , : Announced me , * 'JJIr . Felix , Miss , " ¦ ¦* " To Mildred , in the study . There : We talk'd , she working . " We agreed Tie day was fine ; the fancy-fair Successful ; " Did I ever read DeGenlis ? " "No . " " I must . Shehad heard I was engaged . " " To-whom ? " " Miss Fry . Was it the fact ? " "No ! " >' On rny word ?" " What scandal people talk'd ! " " Would I Hold out-this skein of silk . " So pass'd 1 I know not how much time away * . > How were her sisters ? " - ^ WelL ! At laat I sxumnon'd heart enough , to say , " I hoped to have seen Miss Churchill too . " " Mias—who ? " laugh'd Mildred j " what is this ? I said , and so indeed it ' s true , Last night you quarroll'd ? Here she is !" Ifo doubt Mr . Patmore would say that he has a meaning in all this , and that , if we don ' t find it out , the fault is in ourselves ; but the same thing , we take it , is said of his own production by every author , and it hardly settles Abe abstract question . At any rate , a writer does not do himself justice by adopting axtything which has even the semblance of unnecessary singularity . - Another fault we conceive to be a morbid excess of intellectual analysis . If other living poets err by appealing too much to the senses , JMr . Patmore we think , errs by a too incessant action of the brain . Judging from a large proportion of his style , we should say he has studied much in the school of Donne , Cowley , Crashaw , Quarles , Herbert , and other poets of the first half of the seventeenth century ; and he has often emulated them in the singular subtlety of his ' conceits 1 and the wonderful ingenuity of his paradoxes . There is no doubt that modern poetry -would be the richer and the
stronger for an infusion of this element ; but Mr . Patmore persecutes us with riddles . He lays his mind , so to speak , on a metaphysical dissectingtable , and anatomizes it with painful minuteness . The result is a lecture on disease , when we want the healthy perceptions of vitality ; the introduction of a mass of doctrine , to which the reader may or may not assent , and winch , therefore , offers a ground for disputation , instead of the universal sympathies of , poetry . There is a perpetual intrusion of individual opinion . * ' I think thus ; all wise and good men think the same : if you think differently , it is because you are neither wise nor good ; " some such conception as this is constantly apparent . The large regard of Nature is thus narrowed into something sectional ; while a faint mist of Evangelical phraseology substitutes a suggestion of particular creeds for the poet ' s divine Catholicity . We do not mean to accuse Mr . Patmore of the fiercer or more repulsive forms of bigotry ; his volume , indeed , contains many beautiful
instances of sweetness , charity , and human love ; neither do we object to any association of earth and heaven which the poet draws out of the natural longings of the human soul , and which he implies in the form of feeling or 'emotion ; but we do doubt the advisability of allying poetry with sharply flefined doctrine . Tet , after all , here is a fine—in many respects a noble—poem . It ia not out of any want of respect , either for the author ' s genius or for the nature of'iiia theme , that we urge those objections ; and , if every one of them be granted , there will still ba left a large demand upon our admiration and -sympathy . . 'A poem -which makes life nobler by fixing what idle conceit regards ' as volatile and evanescent— "Which vindicates the essential holiness of our human affe ction s , and beholds only one stop from the earthly to the divine— -must poBBeaB'the highest elements of moral beauty ; and it is impossible to read Mr . Patmore ' s volume without acknowledging that the author a intellect is of a rare order . There is subtlety enough in these pagos
to make twenty volumes of ordinary calibre ; indeed , the subtlety is T kind and a degree quite unknown to tuese days , though at one th ™ „ ? a common . Observe the following comparison : — one tune not im-Immeasurable bliss Gains nothing by becoming more ! Millions have meaning ; after this , Cyphers forget the integer . This is almost equal in subtlety , if not in beauty , to Donne ' s im drawn from a pair of compasses , in tlie lines : — "aage If ¦ we be two , we are two so : ¦ As stiff twin compasses are two : ¦ 'Thy soul , the fix'd foot , makes no show To move , but doth if tli' other do ; And , though it in tlie centre sit ,
Yet , when the other far doth roam , It leans and hearkens after it , And grows erect as that comes home . And this ( to return to Mr . Patmore ) has something of the manner nf Cowley : — . . 0 I Till Eve was brought to Adam , he A solitary desert trod , Though ia the great society Of Nature , Angels , and of G oil . The following , spoken of the woman ' s consent , is very beautiful and original : — - Tbatfatal "I am thine " Comes with alternate gush and check And joltings of the heart , as wine
Pourdjrom ajlask of narrow neck . Occasionally we find a simile of great delicacy and brightness in itself taken apart from the thing symbolized ; as this ;¦— ' Pure as the permeating fires ¦' ¦ ¦ ¦ Tlut smoulder in the opal ' s veins . Or this : — : . : ;¦ : . ¦ :. ' - ;¦ ; • . . ¦ ¦• ' . ' _ . . . ¦ . ¦;¦ ¦ . . . . ¦ : ¦ : ; ' . But dread , she trusts , will turn to joy , Like sombre smoke to sudden Jlavie . The following is noble , both in conception and expression . The husband is -vindicating married love as compared with , the first passion of youth—« " Dear wife , " said he , " a fresh-lit fire Sends forth to heaven great shows of fume , . And watchers far away admire ;
. - . . ' . But , when the flames their power assume , Tile more they burn the less they show ; The clouds no longer smirch the sty ; And then the flames intensest glow When far-off watchers think they die . " Extracts , however , can give only a very incomplete notion of a poem ¦ which , as we have remarked , does not seek to startle by individual passages ; for , as the author himself says : — —— -Likeness and proportion both Hence fail , as if a child in glee , Catching the flakes of the salt froth , Cried , Look , my mother , here ' s the sea . "
We must , therefore , be content to refer all poetical readers ( but no others , and not even the indolent and frivolous among those ) to the complete poem , confident that , if attunes they differ from the author , they will more often be impressed with the beauty of his subject , the subtlety of his intellect , and the sincerity of his devotion to his art .
1098 The Ie1beb. [No. 347, Samn,^
1098 THE IE 1 BEB . [ No . 347 , SAmn , ^
A Story Of Harmed Love And Its Troubles....
A STORY OF HARMED LOVE AND ITS TROUBLES . Deverell : a Novel . 3 Vols . % Chapman and Hall Deverell is by the hand of a woman who lias known suffering , and has fceen acquainted with the chamber of sickness . These facts lire apparent on the face of the book ; they contribute to stamp its particular character , and even account for tlie defects in the execution of the work . There are oversights , such as slight inconsistencies , or errors in the use of names , which might have been corrected if the work had been revised by the authoress herself . It is a novel in the form of an autobiography , in which tlie writer , with a , conscientious truthfulness , tells nothing that did not actually come
within her own knowledge . But , although it is a story of the iceliugs , rather than of events , the uarration is graceful and really interesting . The autobiogTapher is well endowed by nature , but is oppressed by a timidity of character which restrains her from asserting- her true position , and leads her into errors . The consequences of those errors form part of the drama of the book . Aline begins with her school friendships , the most conspicuous of which interweaves her life witli that of St . George Deverell , the : heroine , a girl of great beauty , vehement feelings , intense love of power , andjro * ordinate ambition . Brought up by a mother who constitutes herself a chronic sacrifice to her child , Dcverellsoon learns to have her own way , soon sees how to make others steppins-stones to her purpose . The character is
drawn with much power , and the manner in which the young givl gradually develops her schemes , —which have their small beginning in the indulgence of a school-girl love , and end with the enslavement of a nobleman high « the state , —is at once natural and striking . Aline has likewise yielded to tnc indulgence of a school love ; rathci ' , however , from softness of olmnictev than vehemence of feelings ; she luis contracted an early and imprudent marriage ; she conceals it from her friends , from the husband whom sne marries after she becomes a widow ; the concealment begets suspicion , an suspicion estrangement . The scheming Deverell , who has a distinct p « rposc constantly in view , is able to set the foibles of one person against , nnotner , until all , even those who are fur superior to herself , become p ' ) ' '' ^! . her hands , and instruments for coercing and tormenting ouch other , strength comes out more towards the end ; the earlier portion might , pc » 'l > P ^ have been more compressed with advantage to the ultimate cil'ect . ¦ >» c P posely abstain , however , from spoiling the interest of the story by smy LlXP nation of the plot . . Q ^ Moral courage is , perhaps , tlie quality which of all others is the commonly wanting , and it is in tho want of this courage that rose
-
-
Citation
-
Leader (1850-1860), Nov. 15, 1856, page 18, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse2.kdl.kcl.ac.uk/periodicals/l/issues/cld_15111856/page/18/
-