Commonplace 151 George & The Man Who Gave Us The Angel In The House PART TWO.
For a start, Patmore disliked science (as did George) because he thought the curiosity to explore the natural world is to rob it of its mystery. He was a religious man who thought his creator made things complex for a reason - so humans would remain perplexed about the wonder of the Cosmos. If we have learnt anything from television it is that science actually never disappoints our expectations and hopes for mystery and wonder. If Max Planck, Albert Einstein and Carl Sagan have taught us anything, it's that science is all about the mystery and wonder click. But Patmore would see it this way (page 206):
Without disrespect to Mr Huxley, Mr Herbert Spencer, and Professor Muller, we may affirm that the man who knew Plato, Homer and Aeschylus rightly, and knew little else, would know far more than he who knew all that these great scientists could teach, and knew nothing else.
Henry Huxley click was fundamental to the understanding of Natural Selection; Herbert Spencer click coined the phrase 'survival of the fittest'; I am assuming Muller is Hermann Muller click a pioneer of genetics. Or maybe Max Muller, the man who wrote about the so many things click. Only the average British public school system can produce this level of arrogant ignorance and want of intelligence in its alumni as Coventry Patmore displays.
Of course, Coventry Patmore was a Tory of the old school. He had George's contempt for Demos and Democracy. Our man would have understood and appreciated this passage (page 216) and possibly stole it to include in his novel, Demos:
The intercourse between the gentleman and his hind or labourer is free, cheerful and exhilarating, because there is commonly in it the only equality worth regarding, that of goodwill; whereas the commands of the sugar-boiler or the screw-maker to their brother are probably given with a frown and received with a scowl.
For an alternate view, have a look at this click.
Principles makes most of its author's insider knowledge of poetry, as Patmore considered himself an authority based on his own good-standing in that domain. Being a self-appointed elder statesman of culture, he allows himself to make some pretty sweeping and bonkers reflections. Take this one (p51), with regard to the difference between pity and pathos: ...perhaps the most intense touch of pathos in all history is that of Gordon murdered at Khartoum.
Where could we begin to deconstruct that tosh? And this from the man who loved the Ancient Greeks so much! Here are some of Patmore's thoughts on what are now considered to be towering legends of poetry.
Thomas Hardy (p54) he praises for his ability to be brief about describing moments of pathos in his novels. Pathos is good; it seems holy when described by Patmore. He decries Dickens and his handling of distressing scenes for their verbiage which dilutes the impact - and cites Little Nell's death as his example - of course. George could go off on one and overdo the words, but we forgive him his little creative foibles. Only his little ones, mind.
Patmore's view of Keats differs from George's, if we are to believe our man meant it when he said this: To like Keats is a test of fitness for understanding poetry, just as to like Shakespeare is a test of general mental capacity. Patmore regards Keats as over-rated and facile at times, with the vast bulk of his work mostly worthless. He defends this by saying Keats would agree with him. He makes reference to what he regards as femininity in Keats and apparent in his verse, obvious to the expert because the poems are constructed with too much of a love of beauty, and beauty, to Patmore, should be accidental, and not consciously intended, and is the quintessential female trait. He ends the chapter with this:
It is a fact that the observation of which is as old as the mythology which attributed the parentage of heroes in whom the intellectual powers prevailed in the union of gods with women, while those who distinguished themselves by more external and showy faculties were said to have been born of the commerce of goddesses with men. As I said, you find yourself saying to yourself: 'That Coventry Patmore was a ****'.
He goes on to dismiss Shelley more or less for being too passionate. He mentions Shelley's rustication for writing controversial views - well, his promotion of Atheism. Patmore quotes Shelley's biographer, Professor Dowden: ...good feeling would not have punished so severely what was more an offence of the intellect than of the heart and will. If only George's fall from grace at Owens College had been framed thus! Patmore ends his piece on Shelley by conceding that he does have a not unimportant place in English literature.
As for Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Patmore dismisses Rossetti's want of English as a first language as the reason for him not being a supreme English poet. Rossetti was 3/4 Italian by heritage, his mother was half Italian and half English. As Rossetti's maternal grandmother was English, then Patmore is wrong; it's not called 'mother tongue' for nothing. She will have taught Rossetti's mother to speak, and his mother would have carried it to him. But, Patmore thinks Rossetti is tainted with too flash a way of concentrating on emotions, and he disapproves of the painter's eye for detail. As Rossetti was one of the founders of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, whose works were big on the minutiae of Nature and the visible world's reality, for him to not make use of this in his poetry would have been a sin.
One of Patmore's most egregious lapses of judgement and taste is served up in his musings on the poetic work of William Blake. The chapter on Blake (p97) opens:
Blake's poetry, with the exception of four or five lovely lyrics and here and there in other pieces a startling gleam of unquestionable genius, is mere drivel.
He makes the claim that Blake's visual Art is over-rated and will not last the course because it is already out of fashion. Patmore has viewed a bit of a Blake retrospective and says he is unimpressed by a great many works shown together. In Commonplace 149, we saw how Peckham loomed large in the Blake legend by delivering him of a vision of Angels - not the sort you find cluttering up your house looking zoned out on legal highs. Blake has always been in fashion with intellectuals and Artists - you don't have to understand the titles to appreciate the pictures. Much of modern Art has words attached (as titles or as motifs, as part of the piece) that make no rational sense, so the argument Patmore puts forward that the impetus for the pictures is meaningless religious mania, is sterile.
Patmore makes the mistake of thinking Blake is mad and therefore, out of control in his mind all of the time - which he likens to a sort of random imbecility that is devoid of intentional action. He never explains why he thinks the thoughts of the mad are worthless. (Ironic, considering his religious views are, to me, a sign on incipient dementia haha.) He points out that the public (whoever they are, he doesn't identify) mistake madness for genius because both are aberrations; but genius, for Patmore, is not a stream of consciousness touched by revelation moved by the moment event; it is controlled, managed - cold. It is Patmore whose days are numbered - William Blake went on to influence every generation that came after him.
How wrong Patmore was to think posterity would not embrace William Blake as one of the pre-eminent Artists of his or any other day! Who in the UK reads Coventry Patmore these days (though there might be a Commonplace blogger reflecting on him somewhere - yikes!!)? And whose heart hasn't soared to the strains of Sir Hubert Parry's rendering of Blake's Jerusalem (for some of us, THE British national anthem click). When we think of Coventry, we think of the cathedral, the Luftwaffe, the birthplace of Philip Larkin, not Mr Patmore. Coventry who??
In the previous Commonplace we took a look at Coventry Patmore's poem The Angel in The House, where the poet gives us his roadmap for creating a woman fit for purpose to the average middle class man.
There is something of Patmore in George, with George sometimes being a junior version of the older man. Coventry Patmore was a critic as well as a poet. This is not an easy cv to maintain; if you are a middle-of-the-road poet, you need incredible chutzpah to pull off the role of critiquing other poets' work. Or a massive lack of insight into your own mindset. George was in a similar position when he undertook the work of revising Forster's Life of Dickens - but on George's side was devotion (not of the blind variety, for he saw flaws in Dickens' work) to the man whose stories made such an impression on all the Gissings when George was a child. Patmore, did not have the benefit of foresight as to which poets would become legends, and who would fall by the wayside, so to read him now is to constantly think 'That Coventry Patmore's a ****' under your breath. As we shall see.
Patmore, bless him, had not much connection with the poets on whom he passed judgement. This was partly because of the arrogance of the older man reviewing the younger. And, because he didn't 'get' the poets, he tended to think they were second-rate. We know this because of Patmore's collection of essays, Principle in Art, first published in 1879. You can read the 1889 edition here for free click
Principles does not confine itself to Art alone, but introduces a range of political and social musings to back up the curious notion George shared, that only 'aristocratic' males truly appreciate Art. Patmore takes it further and says it's only those in this special club who can appreciate anything, even human interaction, history or cheese. (Maybe he didn't mention cheese - I made that bit up). As he's so soften so wrong, Principles can be viewed more as a curiosity than a road map for appreciating Victorian poetry and culture. It is evidence for a mindset that would never willingly relinquish the reins of taste to new blood.
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| Hestia, Goddess of the Hearth - the prototype Angel In The House. Egyptian tapestry C6th. click |
Without disrespect to Mr Huxley, Mr Herbert Spencer, and Professor Muller, we may affirm that the man who knew Plato, Homer and Aeschylus rightly, and knew little else, would know far more than he who knew all that these great scientists could teach, and knew nothing else.
 |
| Did Homer predict the Higgs Boson? To find out more click. Doh! |
Of course, Coventry Patmore was a Tory of the old school. He had George's contempt for Demos and Democracy. Our man would have understood and appreciated this passage (page 216) and possibly stole it to include in his novel, Demos:
The intercourse between the gentleman and his hind or labourer is free, cheerful and exhilarating, because there is commonly in it the only equality worth regarding, that of goodwill; whereas the commands of the sugar-boiler or the screw-maker to their brother are probably given with a frown and received with a scowl.
For an alternate view, have a look at this click.
Principles makes most of its author's insider knowledge of poetry, as Patmore considered himself an authority based on his own good-standing in that domain. Being a self-appointed elder statesman of culture, he allows himself to make some pretty sweeping and bonkers reflections. Take this one (p51), with regard to the difference between pity and pathos: ...perhaps the most intense touch of pathos in all history is that of Gordon murdered at Khartoum.
Where could we begin to deconstruct that tosh? And this from the man who loved the Ancient Greeks so much! Here are some of Patmore's thoughts on what are now considered to be towering legends of poetry.
Thomas Hardy (p54) he praises for his ability to be brief about describing moments of pathos in his novels. Pathos is good; it seems holy when described by Patmore. He decries Dickens and his handling of distressing scenes for their verbiage which dilutes the impact - and cites Little Nell's death as his example - of course. George could go off on one and overdo the words, but we forgive him his little creative foibles. Only his little ones, mind.
Patmore's view of Keats differs from George's, if we are to believe our man meant it when he said this: To like Keats is a test of fitness for understanding poetry, just as to like Shakespeare is a test of general mental capacity. Patmore regards Keats as over-rated and facile at times, with the vast bulk of his work mostly worthless. He defends this by saying Keats would agree with him. He makes reference to what he regards as femininity in Keats and apparent in his verse, obvious to the expert because the poems are constructed with too much of a love of beauty, and beauty, to Patmore, should be accidental, and not consciously intended, and is the quintessential female trait. He ends the chapter with this:
It is a fact that the observation of which is as old as the mythology which attributed the parentage of heroes in whom the intellectual powers prevailed in the union of gods with women, while those who distinguished themselves by more external and showy faculties were said to have been born of the commerce of goddesses with men. As I said, you find yourself saying to yourself: 'That Coventry Patmore was a ****'.
 |
| The Angel In The House by Julia Margaret Cameron 1879 |
As for Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Patmore dismisses Rossetti's want of English as a first language as the reason for him not being a supreme English poet. Rossetti was 3/4 Italian by heritage, his mother was half Italian and half English. As Rossetti's maternal grandmother was English, then Patmore is wrong; it's not called 'mother tongue' for nothing. She will have taught Rossetti's mother to speak, and his mother would have carried it to him. But, Patmore thinks Rossetti is tainted with too flash a way of concentrating on emotions, and he disapproves of the painter's eye for detail. As Rossetti was one of the founders of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, whose works were big on the minutiae of Nature and the visible world's reality, for him to not make use of this in his poetry would have been a sin.
One of Patmore's most egregious lapses of judgement and taste is served up in his musings on the poetic work of William Blake. The chapter on Blake (p97) opens:
Blake's poetry, with the exception of four or five lovely lyrics and here and there in other pieces a startling gleam of unquestionable genius, is mere drivel.
He makes the claim that Blake's visual Art is over-rated and will not last the course because it is already out of fashion. Patmore has viewed a bit of a Blake retrospective and says he is unimpressed by a great many works shown together. In Commonplace 149, we saw how Peckham loomed large in the Blake legend by delivering him of a vision of Angels - not the sort you find cluttering up your house looking zoned out on legal highs. Blake has always been in fashion with intellectuals and Artists - you don't have to understand the titles to appreciate the pictures. Much of modern Art has words attached (as titles or as motifs, as part of the piece) that make no rational sense, so the argument Patmore puts forward that the impetus for the pictures is meaningless religious mania, is sterile.
 |
| The River of Life by William Blake c 1805 |
How wrong Patmore was to think posterity would not embrace William Blake as one of the pre-eminent Artists of his or any other day! Who in the UK reads Coventry Patmore these days (though there might be a Commonplace blogger reflecting on him somewhere - yikes!!)? And whose heart hasn't soared to the strains of Sir Hubert Parry's rendering of Blake's Jerusalem (for some of us, THE British national anthem click). When we think of Coventry, we think of the cathedral, the Luftwaffe, the birthplace of Philip Larkin, not Mr Patmore. Coventry who??
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