Katherine Brégy

“ Men shall not miss the stars, nor mourn the sea.
There has been a general acceptation of Johnson as a poet of the Irish revival which is both true and false. The heart has its own fatherland; and, while as fundamentally English in many ways as Newman himself, Johnson did throw in his lot unhesitatingly with the fortunes of the Celt. It was at first, no doubt, a poetical and devotional attraction (albeit blood, too, called, on the paternal side) ; the response of a keenly imaginative nature to the half-revealed magic of Celtic lore—that magic of fire and of tears. ”

“ For God and for His Spouse;
and human love becomes a ladder leading up to mystic visions of Christ as the Love, the Bride-groom of the soul. Pre-eminently in the old exquisite myth of Eros and Psyche, but scarcely less in the experience of every loving and suffering life, Patmore found this all-but-unspeakable truth prefigured, and he played upon the motif in ode after ode of marvellous beauty and tenderness. ”

“ One more dogma was thus revealed to Coventry Patmore; not merely as a convenient "form of sound words" but as a fact with vital bearing upon the rest of life. Mary of Nazareth became to him thenceforth the essential womanhood—the symbol and prototype of humanity, nature, the body. In her littleness and sweetness was found the perfect complement to God's infinitude: she was Regina Mundi as well as Regina Cœli, foreshadowing the triumph of every faithful soul. A great epic upon the Marriage of the Virgin was to have celebrated
this theme, but it never saw completion. ”

“ Patmore could scarcely have escaped the snares which yawn before every poet conscious of a message. In point of fact, he was never more supremely the poet than when he was most radically the seer. Never, save possibly in one or two political arraignments, does the personal note derogate from the permanence of his poetry; never once, for all his vehemence of belief, does he descend into didacticism. Nor does his symbolic analysis of human emotion even for a moment lessen the intense reality of pain and of love throughout his song. ”

“ The world mourned the poet. The world began to read his thrice-precious legacy. And so the world grew rich. Then came that memorable, that almost spectacular, posthumous essay on Shelley, as rich and as radiant as a handful of jewels; and even the general reader capitulated. So that to-day one may quite declare Thompson's immortality to have been speedily achieved; for only the dead are immortal.
When a certain slender volume of Poems, by one Francis Thompson, was issued in the November of 1893, critical London opened wide eyes of attention and even astonishment. ”

“ As a whole, however, the verdict was one of rather dazed appreciation; and, if personal details of a more or less romantic nature began to mingle with current criticism, they merely, and for a time, added to the poet's little vogue.
But who was the poet? In one sense a young man—some thirty-four years—as ages go: but bowed already, bent, well-nigh broken by the age-old sorrow of the world. Not unmeet was it that Thompson's birth should have been in Lancashire, historic home of the flame-red, blood-red rose. His father and mother were converts to the Faith. ”

“ Death has done much for Francis Thompson; still he is not yet under danger of becoming a "popular poet." In more than a score of passages he has imprisoned emotions still palpitating with life; he has found words for those flashes of consciousness which, almost to our own souls, remain inarticulate. But they are not surface emotions, and in mode of expression the poet was supremely heedless of the wide appeal. Moreover, being far from obvious, his poems demand somewhat of the reader's co-operation, with the inevitable result of minimising the circle of these readers. ”

“ Out of this grew Lionel's passion for Ireland; albeit the glamour of her romance and her mystery, her thirst for freedom and her unnumbered woes, eventually won from him the allegiance of a very son. That fine and masterly poem which forms the title of his second volume is probably the richest fruit of this self-dedication. From the elemental pathos of "Ireland's" opening stanzas, through the bitter story of wrong and martyrdom, and the cold, terrible arraignment of the land's oppressors, the music sweeps with the majesty at once of death and of victory ”

“ There is something deliciously daring in her shy comments upon the Angel: "It is a shame for you to have been initiated into a thing or two quite solely feminine," she writes to Coventry; and yet again she refers to the "Wedding Sermon" as "not so high in some parts as Thomas à Kempis, than whom nobody ought to be lower, to my thinking." It sounds just a little bit formidable! Yet that uncompromising elevation of soul, and the vestal reserve of manner which few friends were able to pierce, were in reality the best possible foil for Patmore's passionately sensuous yet mystical nature. ”

“ Yet, although the personal equation inclined thus to the "serene classics," the critic's attitude toward a living genius was one of wistful appreciation. His every sense was keen in the search for beauty, and he welcomed it in whatever guise: Lucretius and Fielding, Pope and Wordsworth, Renan and Hawthorne—all of these shared his sympathy and his comprehension.
The discerning had great hopes of Johnson, with his Celtic dreams, his scholarly and exquisite methods, his unwavering faith in spiritual realities. ”

“ And then, his was that fusing imagination (the crowning gift of genius!) which transmutes reason and emotion with equal facility into one "agile bead of boiling gold."
But it is not merely with Patmore's poetry—nor, for that matter, with his prose—that the critical world must one day reckon. It is pre-eminently with his poetic philosophy. Teaching in his verse only by suggestions of rare beauty, but throughout the essays with increasing definition and completeness, he formulated a very consistent
rationale of life, love, and God. ”

“ Not man with man, but man with death
Wrestled: thine hoariest minstrel saith
⁠No greater deed, Llanarmon!
The power of such poetry is undeniable: but is one not conscious of the long vista of time and art through which our bard looks back upon his subject? The Celtic inspiration was in truth a precious and powerful factor in Lionel Johnson's poetry; one is not so certain that it was an inevitable or an inalienable one.
On the other hand, any divorce between the poet and his religious lyrics would be quite inconceivable. ”

“ Upon this symbol, conjugal love, Patmore indeed based the body of his work: yet he cannot justly be accused (as it would seem that Swedenborg, in his much-discussed work, must needs be) of sacrificing to it the eternal reality—love divine. Chastity our poet recognised as the final and perfect flowering of this fair bud, and it was the "Bride of Christ" alone who fully attained here below to that double sex which shall distinguish the regenerate in heaven. One of his most perfect odes, "Deliciæ Sapientiæ de Amore," stands for ever as a defence and vindication. ”

“ Wisdom which will neither be withstood nor denied by its chosen vessel? For in casting about for this possible solution of a difficult world, our poet first came into definite contact with the Christian idea. The conception of the God-Man, the Word made Flesh, took immediate root in an intellect and heart peculiarly open, peculiarly sensitive to beauty and to truth. Almost half a century later, Coventry Patmore declared that this thought of God incarnate in Jesus Christ had from that moment remained to him "the only reality worth seriously caring for." ”

“ Manifestly, Thompson's viewpoint (the viewpoint of verses such as "Daisy" and "The Poppy") is very far from being a childlike one. But his are the musings of one who, having known the full measure of manhood—having known life and love and the grave—has still a heart meet for "the nurseries of Heaven."
We have already suggested the inevitable thing: and now, perforce, we remember that one of the first—yea, and one of the last—titles laid by appreciative critics at our poet's feet was, "the greater Crashaw." It is as deceptive as such generalisations have, in the main, proved
selves to be. ”

“ There is no more representative expression of this very Christian and very poetic attitude than in the lovely Paschal ode, "From the Night of Forebeing," with its inspiring burden:
Look up, O mortals, and the portent heed:
In very deed
Washed with new fire to their irradiant birth
Reintegrated are the heavens and earth!
From sky to sod,
The world's unfolded blossom smells of God. ”

“ There we catch the voice of our own Lionel Johnson, the poet of austere ideals, bruised and forespent by the battle; the poet of faith through an age incredulous. Bravely he faced the conflict, but no longer joyously: the maladie du siècle had touched him.
In approaching his more personal poems, we shall have to face the most serious charge ever brought against Johnson's poetry—the charge that it is lacking in true emotional quality. We are told that his lyrics spring from and express a thought rather than a feeling ”

“ The year 1880 brought sorrow back into Patmore's life in the sudden death of his wife Mary. Her loss proved the first of a bitter trilogy. Scarcely two years later, his well-loved daughter Emily (Sister Mary Christina, as she had become, of the Society of the Holy Child Jesus) died in her near-by convent. The passing of this rare and understanding spirit, from childhood so deeply in sympathy with his own—a poet herself, and one of the best critics of her father's work—can
scarcely have been less than a sundering of the poet's very life. ”

“ Eros, Patmore leads his reader into a realm of palpitating beauty, truth and love. The sensuous nature, by no means annihilated in this new life of the spirit, is glorified and inconceivably satisfied. The capacity of the soul for good (which our poet always contended was "in proportion to the strength of its passions") is infinite, because these passions are marshalled into the orderly service of God. ”

“ Perhaps his own interior struggle served to obviate a natural tendency toward exclusiveness, and to unite the poet with his great labouring and suffering brotherhood. It is never easy for a temperament like Johnson's to overcome its intolerance for many aspects of human nature. It is never easy to recognise that the spirit is willing and the flesh
weak, without despising the flesh. But if there be one line of development perceptible throughout our poet's work, it is an increasing tendency toward the human and concrete. ”

“ The blending of abstract and concrete throughout these poems is peculiarly interesting: Lionel Johnson's ideal beauty is not invariably wrapped in cloud or dazzling in the splendour of sunrise—it is both sought and found beneath some actual, earthly symbol. Hence this poet was increasingly given to the painting of word pictures, little vignettes of an almost Cowper-like nicety, which crystallise some momentary aspect of Nature with the soulful simplicity of Wordsworth himself. ”

“ Because of the universal potency of external beauty, it may be that Johnson's widest appeal will be made through his Nature poems. "Sancta Silvarum," written as early as 1886, expresses in lines of powerful cadence the youth's passionate sympathy with the Nature world, his quick response to the
⁠music of the mystery, that embraces
All forest-depths, and footless, far-off places,
his awed recognition of one mighty Will that shapes the course of star and blossom, of wind and sea. ”

“ He left behind him a number of unpublished poems, alike early and late, to be gathered by his literary executor in the collected edition of his work.
Well—one may see Thompson's achievement as a whole now, and through a perspective of time which, naturally, changes some details of the outlook. What does not change or anywise diminish is the conviction of his high place as poet. His work is passionately personal; for all the debt to Patmorean philosophy, its form and its thought are overwhelmingly his own. ”

“ Coventry declared with his usual ardour, "and this beauty seemed to be the pure effulgence of Catholic sanctity." The world was soon to know her as Mary Patmore, the poet's second wife.
"Tired Memory," an ode of great beauty, interprets that delicate and difficult experience by which the new love was reconciled to that other—infinitely mourned, infinitely cherished, scarcely yet resigned to the "stony rock of death's insensibility." In the pathos and intimacy of its self-revelation, the poem is not unworthy of comparison with the Vita Nuova. ”

“ Yet there is an increasing tendency, notably throughout the Preludes, toward a mystical interpretation of sexual love. The "pathos of eternity" has blown across the face of passion: and in the Victories of Love (as the latter part of the work was called) there is even more of this divine pathos than there is of nuptial joy.
Although the Angel was never completed according to Patmore's original design, few of us will feel that it could desirably be longer. The last word is spoken in that extraordinary "Wedding Sermon," which brings the poem to a close. ”

“ Up to London came the young exile, unfriended, with a body never robust, a heart of aching sensitiveness, and a mind absorbed in dreams of ideal beauty. Nothing was ever so inconsolably easy as his steep, his swift descent. Those days upon the cruel London streets; those nights when he lay outcast, suffering the "abashless inquisition of each star"; the wonderful, tentative efforts; the ceaseless literary discouragements; the want, the shame, the impotence of it all, bore their speedy fruit. ”

“ In point of fact, what the poet actually needed, each day more imperiously, was simply the gift of resolute faith. And so, pilgrim-like, with unerring instinct, he travelled back that old, old road which leads to Rome.
Once in the Papal city, Aubrey de Vere introduced him into a Catholic circle of notable grace and distinction; and here, with "deliberate speed, majestic instancy," he continued his search after truth. It was not an easy struggle. We have the whole story in his little "Autobiography" of the spirit ”