A HUNDRED YEARS AGO

An old book called The Mirror of the Months, published anonymously in 1826, seemed, at a glance, to a random reader, to contain little thin springs of thoughts that walked the world in volume and dignity fifty years later. There was nothing else to hint that the book was the work of the father of a poet, but the father of one among all poets was manifestly the author. Soon after, the same reader found it attributed, in a bookseller’s catalogue, to P. G. Patmore.

The earliest or the directest spring is called the source of a river; but we know not how far apart and on what scattered watersheds rose the tributary waters, early and late, that filled a splendid summoning and gathering stream, and charged it with rains of the four courts of heaven. It need not dismay us to find the one discoverable source to be something so slight as—for example—a passage on the month of February in The Mirror of the Months (it is hardly worth quoting) whereof the ode on ‘St. Valentine’s Day’ of Coventry Patmore was the ultimate fulfilment. Yet a reader may be reluctant to find a small thought, lying cold in a minor mind, to be the certain beginning of a great thought in an illustrious mind; the perfectly recognizable yet insignificant origin of what we love is more surprising 69than would be a stranger beginning. Perhaps we feel this unwelcome surprise because we had been too ready to believe that what is original is strong, and what is original is warm. It was easier to think of a first impulse tiring or becoming more composed, of a passion gradually losing light and flame, than of this increase, kindling, and quickening. It is because the small source of ‘St. Valentine’s Day’ is really authentic that its inadequacy does little less than startle us. At any rate the incident is one that may instruct us in the history of that second step which is momentous in intellectual things.

Furthermore, the ambiguous questions of heredity seem thereby to gain in mystery; and some things must needs gain in mystery before we can at all undertake to think upon them. Without mystery they are all obscure. Who can think, for instance, of the infinity of space without adding inconceivable things to his meditation? And, in like manner, the bond of fathers and sons seems to become somewhat more intelligible if we add to the comparatively easy thought of the responsibility of a father for the mind of a child some confession of the retrospective answer to be exacted from the child, inasmuch as in the child is the fulfilment of what was but prophesied in the father, whom the son at last justifies.

In 1826 Leigh Hunt must have dominated unduly. The Mirror of the Months would evidently have been 70graver, fresher, and more frank, in thought and in English alike, but for the example of the excessive amiability that makes Leigh Hunt’s poem of Rimini, among others, ridiculous. It was a mere fashion, apparently, and it is not difficult to imagine that even Leigh Hunt could talk with a better simplicity than the simplicity of the universal literary smile he practised in his books. There is something that does but ape the humane, the liberal, the gracious. It is an early nineteenth-century attempt at the favour and prettiness of the Elizabethans, with an absolute rejection of the Elizabethan ‘horrors’.

Yet without ‘horrors’, without a real murder among the dances, without royal madness embowered, and noble distraction wearing flowers, without the wild convention, without the noble spirit, wilder than nature—a barbaric artifice outfacing nature—what were the Elizabethan favour and prettiness worth? Nay, they would never have been there but to adorn frightful deeds. The men of a hundred years ago took one part and left the other, and were delighted in the civilized choice they had the grace—as they held it—to make, in a tolerant rebuke, in a liberal approval, of the great past. And see the fruit of that choice. Not being fond of Leigh Hunt, I had not read Rimini until a year or two ago, and now already the most conspicuous memory I have of the story of that poem is the memory of an incidental picnic.

71It is possible, of course, that my angry fancy may have exaggerated the cause of its own derision—and that the event sung in the canto in question may have been some modification of a picnic; as it were a mitigated picnic; I have not the poem for reference. Nevertheless, there stands a picnic of some sort—a contribution of the English man of letters to the story of the Adriatic cities and of the antecedents of Dante’s Hell.

A picnic, I maintain it, a drive, a cloth under the trees, are there. I am quite certain, at any rate, that the place chosen therefor is called by Leigh Hunt, in so many words, ‘a rural spot’.

A far greater man than Leigh Hunt—nay, there is no common measure of comparison—has, by some ill luck, at nearly the same moment of our literary history, also made the same Francesca da Rimini the subject of some entirely nineteenth-century feeling. I speak of Walter Savage Landor, and of the exquisite passage of the Imaginary Conversations (the Pentameron). What he does he does, unlike Leigh Hunt, with genius; but—one must have the courage to say so—in error as complete as the little writer’s. The reader may be reminded of that tender page about Francesca: ‘She stops: she would avert the eyes of Dante from her: he looks for the sequel: she thinks he looks severely: she says, “Galeotto is the name of the book,” fancying by this timorous little flight she has drawn him far enough from the nest 72of her young loves. No, the eagle beak of Dante and his piercing eyes are yet over her. “Galeotto is the name of the book.” “What matters that?” “And of the writer.” “Or that either?” At last she disarms him; but how? “That day we read no more.” Such a depth of intuitive judgement, such a delicacy of perception, exists not in any other work of human genius.’ And this judgement, for greater misfortune, he puts into the mouth of Boccaccio, because he loved him, and intended that he should speak from Landor’s heart; and so, indeed, he does. But the day of Boccaccio was not ours, and there is no possible exchange of hearts. Are we candid if we persuade ourselves to find these pauses in the speech of Francesca? I protest that I read the line in one cold breath of almost indifferent anger. ‘The name of the book’, as Landor has it, is not in Dante at all. ‘A pander was that book, and the writer thereof,’ is simply what the Francesca of Dante says.^[2]

To come back to The Mirror of the Months. This is a volume so full of charm that it is something less 73than just to reproach it so hastily with Leigh Hunt’s universal literary smile. Something of that it has, indeed, but it has also the smile of spirit and that of sweetness. Of two wits of yesterday two phrases, for example, are familiar in admiring quotation: ‘The age of indiscretion’, and ‘Yes, nature is creeping up’, or, in another form, ‘Not like his portrait? He will be like it.’ Every one recognizes the phrases so well that there is perhaps not a reader in England who needs to be more than reminded of them. Now ‘the age of indiscretion’ is in The Mirror of the Months, where it got no fame, or little; and ‘Nature is creeping up’ is fairly anticipated in the passage: ‘Cattle wade into the shallow pools of warm water, and stand half the day there stock still, in exact imitation of Cuyp’s pictures.’ Take this description of the parent birds’ business of bringing out their young broods and dismissing them, ‘while they (the parents) proceed in their periodical duty of providing new flocks of the same kind of “fugitive pieces”, as regularly as the editors of a magazine.’ And this for a mere laugh: ‘The only specific reason why I object to March is that she drives hares mad; which is a great fault.’

Moreover, the procession and recession of the year is here noted in the garden and in the open field of England by senses full of spirit. The separate and atmospheric effect of an oat-field among all other grain is well expressed in the phrase where the oats are said to hang ‘like raindrops in the air’. And 74the author has eyes for the scarcely perceptible and most slender growth that in July pricks through the short and level turf and makes the grassy downs live in the winds, as poplars make the woods. ‘April’, says this forgotten writer, ‘is worth two Mays, because it tells of May’—a subtlety somewhat like that of his son’s minor fancies.

And finally another small spring of the poetry to come in the following generation is in the mere phrase ‘The pomp of health and the lustre of loveliness’. Coventry Patmore, with the poet’s finer verbal art, had afterwards

So much simplicity of mind

In such a pomp of loveliness.

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