Justice to Patmore

New Zealand Listener, Volume 37, Issue 936, 19 July 1957, Page 12

Justice to Patmore

THE MIND AND ART OF COVENTR PATMORE, by J. C. Reid; Routledge pote Kegan Paul, English price 35/-.

(Reviewed by

lan A.

Gordon

NE by one, the "lesser" Victorians are being made the subject of considerable studies. Partly, I suppose, the reason is the continuous need for PhD. topics. Partly, however, these studies are a genuine attempt, erising from real curiosity, to reassess @ period that has now become as much "historical" as that of the Tudors or the Stuarts. Patmore in his own day was never regarded as a major. His bestknown poem, the long The Angel in the House, was regarded as charming Gf you liked uxorious love-poetry) or sentimental (if, like Swinburne, who parodied the poem, you preferred something more exciting), His imagery varied from the pure Tennysonian of : A -water-lily, ail alone within a lonely castle-moat to passages (universally regarded in Patmore’s day as pure bathos), like And words were growing vain, when Briggs, Factotum, Footman, Butler, Groom, Who press’d the cyder, fed the pigs, Preserv’d the rabbits, drove the brougham. ‘Today one goes back to Patmore with the perspective of hindsight. If you look at him (via Tennyson) you see a sentimental poet who spoils his lines by too much colloquialism. If, however, you approach him with a backward glance (your mind full of echoes of Auden), it is the Victorianisms that mar the pieces. The colloquial ease, the accept-

ance of an unromantic normality, and the language of ordinary living, form real pointers to the poetry of cur uwu day. If you move to his later (and better, though less well known) long poem, The Victories of Love, you find insight and strength, and (within an apparently simple colloquial couplet movement) an astonishing variety of nuances both of character and expression: The whole poem is done with sensitivity and firmness; never a trace of the sentimental Patmore of popular esteem.

Mr Reid is to be congratulated on a really solid job. The many readers who know him as a breezy broadcaster will find him here very different. Perhaps a bit overawed at the magnitude of his task-the book is of some 350 large pages-he writes soberly and for serious readers. The first part of the book is a massive survey of the poet’s reading (from Plato to Aquinas) and the philosophy that emerged from it. The latter sections form a careful consideration of the poetry. Indeed, Mr Reid’s range is so wide (as was his subject’s) that it is difficult for a predominantly literary reviewer to do him full justice. But Mr Reid has certainly done justice to Patmore. His book will stand beside Frederick Page’s study and the Oxford definitive edition as essential for any close student of the complex movements of the intellectual climate that we still rather too easily label by the simple epithet "Victorian."