'And minatory murmurs, answering, mar
The Night, both near and far.'

All his technical excellence, and larger excellence as well, will be found in 'Amelia,' one of the longest and tenderest of the odes. It is only a little less homely than 'The Angel in the House,' starting with the soberest of phrases, Whene'er mine eyes do my Amelia greet,' and yet it is one of the noblest of love poems since Spenser's. Style makes it great, though I hasten to add that it was conceived in a great mood and could not have been conceived greatly at all in another mood; and it is, ultimately, style, expressed in the complete harmony of the rational with the intuitive faculty, that makes Patmore a great English poet.

'I think the odes,' said one of his children, 'are very like Holy Scripture in being so simple that any one might imagine they understood all there is, and so profound that few will really do so. They are also like Scripture in the way Shakespeare is, viz., in being intensely human, and in not saying the words allowed to express the thing, but the thing itself.'

The author himself in a moment of unusual exhilaration cried, 'I have hit upon the finest metre that ever was invented, and on the finest mine of wholly unworked material that ever fell to the lot of an English poet!'

Yet he knew himself unregarded, and was proudly content. 'No plaint be mine of listeners none!' he muses, and at another time answers a reproach that he does unwisely in speaking plain truths, which should be cloaked in a dead language, Alas, and is not mine a language dead?' It is the line with which 'The Unknown Eros' concludes. He lived nearly twenty years after publishing the odes, but wrote no more verse; and if before his mortal voice was still he reflected again upon his dead language of verse, he may have smiled to remember that the dead languages have never died.

He forsook verse, but remained a poet in his prose. In one lost essay, the fruit of ten years' meditation, he pursued the familiar sex symbol, and Mr Gosse has told of the lamentable destruction of Sponsa Dei,' the entire manuscript being burned as the result of the author's

·

conversation with Father Gerard Hopkins; for Hopkins, himself a poet of incalculable because unintelligible genius, had said, 'That's telling secrets,' when he read the essay and saw how it developed Patmore's central theme. Ready as the author was to fulfil the highest office of a poet by telling secrets that were lawful, the peril of telling secrets that his Church might think it unlawful to tell was too great; and thus the most uncontrollable of men sacrificed at a word what might have been, for all we know now, a work as original in thought as, Mr Gosse assures us, it was rare in style.

Of Patmore's prose there are, however, abundant specimens available. The volumes of essays and sentences on literary and other matters are witnesses to his remarkable expressiveness, for the whole man, save that rarest part which verse alone could reveal, is here frankly discovered: wise and tender, proud and petulant, hard to please and lavishing praise; readier to repulse than to welcome, to offend than to satisfy; narrow and aspiring, a man of extremes. I cannot pretend that his character seems wholly amiable in its attraction, for his independence was shown in asperity, and his sense of right and wrong, both in spiritual and æsthetic matters, perceived no ambiguities. Cold yet flamelike, and suggesting to Mr Sargent a drawing of his head as Ezekiel (an odd tribute, perhaps), he reflects a white intense light from his own personality upon many of his subjects, while upon others he is merely freakish and perverse. Blake, in his view, drivelled, Herrick was a gilded insect, Emerson apparently a mill-wheel clacking in vacancy, Shelley a beautiful, effeminate, feeble-minded boy; the subordination of women to men was a privilege, for woman is the last and lowest of all spiritual creatures; and perhaps the only real use of natural science was to supply similes for poets. So might we pick out with indulgence or amusement the things we would not care to say even to ourselves. But the essays nevertheless gleam with wisdom, with those starry refractions which excite as well as bewilder us, and which it is hard to refrain from quoting here.

Yet a doubt emerges after reading many of them, I mean in particular the essays dealing with other than literary matters. These strictly irrational utterances

and remote speculations, the prompting, indeed, of aery monitors, are more proper for verse than prose, and in fact are already contained, explicit or implicit, in the odes. It is easy to accept the incomprehensible when the noblest rhythm of verse awakens and sustains the attention and gives thought the speed of wings; but the idea expressed as a sudden revelation in an ode may seem a mere paradox in the curt prose of 'Religio Poeta.' True the prose is brilliant and hard as a jewel, but it provokes dissent and resistance as the verse seldom does. But for these essays we should not have seen so clearly Patmore's limitations, we should not have known that in aspiring towards an unapprehended world, of which the highest of earthly things are but symbols, he was contracted more and more narrowly into himself until, in his last years, his thought was but a thin rod of light springing from the nether to the upper darkness.

Nevertheless, he was a whole and consistent being. He is rightly called a mystic, and is in no sense a merely intellectual writer of mystical sympathies. He is no more an English Maeterlinck than Maeterlinck is a Belgian Shakespeare, and it would be preposterous to confuse him with writers who are willing to give mysticism a trial, as if it were a secondhand coat that could be cut down to fit, or stretched to disguise the gross protuberance of age. Mr Burdett attributes to him a system of thought, but the intellectual coherence which that implies was not within Patmore's reach. His constancy was emotional and founded in character, and he was incapable of rationalising the impulses of his heart.

It is not easy to forbear a question as to his position as an English poet, now that a hundred years have passed since his birth and nearly thirty since his death. In 1886 he wrote:

'I have written little, but it is all my best; I have never spoken when I had nothing to say, nor spared time or labour to make my words true. I have respected posterity; and, should there be a posterity which cares for letters, I dare to hope that it will respect me.'

In the case of certain of his great contemporaries, Tennyson, Browning, and Swinburne, much of their prolific work

can be disregarded, and enough will yet remain to compare with Patmore's entire production. They dealt with varied subjects, their sympathies were diffused over the colonies and outliers of the intellectual empire; but Patmore's virtue is shown in concentration. He is the peer of the greatest of them in his utterance of ecstasy and the nobility of his style. He alone is a metaphysical poet and is not properly comparable with them at all, but with Meredith. Being metaphysicals, Patmore and Meredith perceived the world, both intellectually and spiritually, as other than it seemed; to the one it was less real, to the other more real than its appearance. Patmore saw man in the visible world as the beloved of God, his soul as the bride of God; Meredith saw him as a brave or fretful being, 'come out of brutishness' indeed but still subject to the sacred reality '—inscrutable Earth. Each poet at length was absorbed in his theme, but while Patmore's music became aerial and fine and so died away, Meredith's became perplexed until its obscurity matched perfectly the obscurity of his faith. But all these comparisons are foolish, for genius is unique and therefore incomparable, and the final impression of Coventry Patmore's poetry is an impression of pure genius. It fulfils Swinburne's strict test by eluding all tests and outsoaring criticism.

JOHN FREEMAN.

Art. 9.-STATE PATERNALISM IN THE ANTIPODES.

POLITICAL philosophers, both ancient and modern, have frequently emphasised the remarkable points of resemblance between absolute democracies and monarchies. In his famous Reflections' (Burke quoted Aristotle's opinion to the effect that, under both forms of government, citizens of the better class are equally oppressed, and few thinkers challenge the Greek sage's statement to the effect that the courtier and the demagogue are political twin-brothers.) The former prostrates himself before Cæsar, the latter before Demos; that is the sole difference. Certainly, as the instrument of oppression, the tax-collector has superseded the executioner; while the courtier of the mob, less attractive so far as external graces go than that of the monarch, bawls uncouth flatteries to his exacting masters in our parks and public halls. Hypocrisy and servility do not always appear in court dress. One may find among the innumerable appeals of the French revolutionary orators to the sovereign people more than a century ago, and among the utterances of the Bolshevik leaders in Russia to-day, expressions of adulation as ridiculous as any recorded in Persian or Byzantine annals. 'Les extrêmes se touchent.' And in policy also the parallel holds good. The preachers of extreme democracy in their proposed levies on capital and other confiscatory designs show the inclination ascribed by De Tocqueville to absolute monarchs to follow the example of the savage who cuts down the tree in order to obtain its fruit. The demagogue in power is an even more energetic, if less highly skilled, axeman than the despot. It is noticeable, too, that State paternalism attains its highest degree of development in communities under ultra-democratic and those under despotic rule. Motives of self-preservation urge the monarch to feed and clothe to the best of his ability the masses whose contentment is the foundation of his throne. Those of ambition and selfinterest impel the demagogue, invested with precarious authority, to lavish material comforts on the poorer class of electors to whose capricious favour he owes his elevation. Political necessity in each case compels the