Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844

The only incident which we ever heard of, at all rivaling this story in an abortive ending, is one which we once heard related at a party, where the conversation turned on the singular manner in which valuable articles thrown into the sea had been sometimes recovered, and restored to their owners—the ring of Polycrates, which was found in the maw of a fish after having been sunk in deep waters, being, as the reader knows, the first and most remarkable instance of such recoveries. After the rest of the company had exhausted their marvellous relations, the following tale was told as the climax of all such wonderful narratives; and it was admitted on all hands that the force of surprise could no further go. We shall endeavour to versify it, à la Patmore, conceiving that its issue is very similar to that of his story of “The River.”

The Ring and the FishA lady and her lover onceWere walking on a rocky beach:Soft at first, and gentle, wasThe music of their mutual speech,And the looks were gentle, too,With which each regarded each.At length some casual word occurr’dWhich somewhat moved the lady’s bile;From less to more her anger wax’d—How sheepish look’d her swain the while!—And now upon their faces twainThere is not seen a single smile.A ring was on the lady’s hand,The gift of that dumb-founder’d lover—In scorn she pluck’d it from her hand,And flung it far the waters over—Far beyond the power of anyDuck or drag-net to recover.Remorse then smote the lady’s heartWhen she had thrown her ring away;She paceth o’er the rocky beach,And resteth neither night nor day;But still the burthen of her songIs, “Oh, my ring! my ring!” alway.Her lover now essays to sootheThe dark compunctious visitings,That assail the lady’s breastWith a thousand thousand stings,For that she had thrown awayThis, the paragon of rings.But all in vain; at length one dayA fisher chanced to draw his netAcross the sullen spot that heldThe gem that made the lady fret,And caught about the finest codThat ever he had captured yet.He had a basket on his back,And he placed his booty in it;The lady’s lover bought the fish,And, when the cook began to skin it,She found—incredible surprise!—She found the ring—was not within it.

The next tale, called “The Woodman’s Daughter,” is a story of seduction, madness, and child-murder. These are powerful materials to work with; yet it is not every man’s hand that they will suit. In the hands of common-place, they are simply revolting. In the hands of folly and affectation, their repulsiveness is aggravated by the simpering conceits which usurp the place of the strongest passions of our nature. He only is privileged to unveil these gloomy depths of erring humanity, who can subdue their repulsiveness by touches of ethereal feeling; and whose imagination, buoyant above the waves of passion, bears the heart of the reader into havens of calm beauty, even when following the most deplorable aberrations of a child of sin. Such a man is not Mr Patmore. He has no imagination at all—or, what is the same thing, an imagination which welters in impotence, far below the level of the emotions which it ought to overrule. The pitfalls of his tale of misery are covered over with thin sprinklings of asterisks—the poorest subterfuge of an impoverished imagination; and besotted indeed is the senselessness with which he disports himself around their margin. Maud, the victim, is the daughter of Gerald, the woodman; and Merton, the seducer, is the son of a rich squire in the neighbourhood. Maud used to accompany her father to his employment in the woods.

“She merely went to think she help’d;And whilst he hack’d and saw’d,The rich squire’s son, a young boy then,For whole days, as if aw’d,Stood by, and gazed alternatelyAt Gerald and at Maud.“He sometimes, in a sullen tone,Would offer fruits, and sheAlways received his gifts with an air,So unreserved and free,That half-feign’d distance soon becameFamiliarity.“Therefore in time, when Gerald shookThe woods at his employ,The young heir and the cottage-girlWould steal out to enjoyThe music of each other’s talk—A simple girl and boy.“They pass’d their time, both girl and boy,Uncheck’d, unquestion’d; yetThey always hid their wanderingsBy wood and rivulet,Because they could not give themselvesA reason why they met.—It may have been in the ancient time,Before Love’s earliest ban,Psychëan curiosityHad broken Nature’s plan;When all that was not youth was age,And men knew less of Man;—“Or when the works of time shall reachThe goal to which they tend,And knowledge, being perfect, shallAt last in wisdom end—That wisdom to end knowledge—orSome change comes, yet unkenn’d;“It perhaps may be again, that men,Like orange plants, will bear,At once, the many fine effectsTo which God made them heir—Large souls, large forms, and love like thatBetween this childish pair.“Two summers pass’d away, and then—Though yet young Merton’s eyes,Wide with their language, spake of youth’sHabitual surprise—He felt that pleasures such as theseNo longer could suffice.”

What the meaning of the three stanzas beginning with—

“It may have been in the ancient time,”

may be, we are utterly at a loss to conjecture. We seek in vain to invest them with a shadow of sense. Perhaps they are thrown in to redeem, by their profound unintelligibility, the shallow trifling of the rest of the poem. But it was not enough for young Merton that the girl accepted the fruits which he offered to her in a sullen tone. He had now reached the age so naturally and lucidly described as the period of life when the “eyes, wide with their language, speak of youth’s habitual surprise,” and he began to seek “new joys from books,” communicating the results of his studies to Maud, whose turn it now was to be surprised.

“So when to-morrow came, while MaudStood listening with surprise,He told the tale learnt over night,And, if he met her eyes,Perhaps said how far the stars were, andTalk’d on about the skies.”

The effect of these lucid revelations upon the mind of Maud was very overpowering.

“She wept for joy if the cushat sangIts low song in the fir;The cat, perhaps, broke the quiet withIts regular slow purr;’Twas music now, and her wheel gave forthA rhythm in its whirr.“She once had read, When lovers die,And go where angels are,Each pair of lover’s souls, perhaps,Will make a double star;So stars grew dearer, and she thoughtThey did not look so far.“But being ignorant, and stillSo young as to be proneTo think all very great delightsPeculiarly her own,She guess’d not what to her made sweetBooks writ on lovers’ moan.”

And so the poem babbles on through several very sickly pages, in which the following descriptive stanza occurs:—

“The flat white river lapsed along,Now a broad broken glare,Now winding through the bosom’d lands,Till lost in distance, whereThe tall hills, sunning their chisell’d peaks,Made emptier the empty air.”

During one of their ramblings, Maud becomes visibly embarrassed.

“But Merton’s thoughts were less confused:‘What, I wrong ought so good?Besides, the danger that is seenIs easily withstood:’Then loud, ‘The sun is very warm’—And they walk’d into the wood.”

The wood consisting of a forest of as shady asterisks as the most fastidious lovers could desire.

“Months pass’d away, and every dayThe lovers still were wontTo meet together, and their shameAt meeting had grown blunt;For they were of an age when sinIs only seen in front.”

The father, however, who was also of an age to see sin in front, suspects that his daughter is with child, and taxes her with it. Maud confesses her shame; upon which, as we are led to conjecture, old Gerald dies broken-hearted—while the girl is safely delivered under a cloud of asterisks. She is deterred from disclosing her situation to Merton, the father of the child—and why? for this very natural reason, forsooth, that

“He, if that were done,Could hardly fail to knowThe ruin he had caused, he mightBe brought to share her woe,Making it doubly sharp.”

So, rather than occasion the slightest distress or inconvenience to her seducer, she magnanimously resolves to murder her baby; and accordingly the usual machinery of the poem is brought into play—the asterisks—which on former occasions answered the purpose of a forest and a cloud, being now converted into a very convenient pool, in which she quietly immerses the offspring of her illicit passion. And the deed being done, its appalling consequences   on her conscience are thus powerfully and naturally depicted—

“Lo! in her eyes stands the great surpriseThat comes with the first crime.“She throws a glance of terror round—There’s not a creature nigh;But behold the sun that looketh throughThe frowning western sky,Is lifting up one broad beam, likeA lash of God’s own eye.”

Were we not right in saying that there is nothing in the writings of any former poetaster to equal the silly and conceited jargon of the present versifier? Having favoured us with the emphatic lines in italics, to depict the physical concomitants of Maud’s guilt, he again has recourse to asterisks, to veil the mental throes by which her mind is tortured into madness by remorse: and very wisely—for they lead us to suppose that the writer could have powerfully delineated these inner agitations, if he had chosen; but that he has abstained from doing so out of mercy to the feelings of his readers. We must, therefore, content ourselves with the following feebleness, with which the poem concludes:

“Maud, with her books, comes, day by day,Fantastically clad,To read them near the poor; and allWho meet her, look so sad—That even to herself it isQuite plain that she is mad.”

“Lilian” is the next tale in the volume. This poem is an echo, both in sentiment and in versification of Mr Tennyson’s “Locksley Hall;” and a baser and more servile echo was never bleated forth from the throat of any of the imitative flock. There are many other indications in the volume which show that Mr Tennyson is the model which Mr Patmore has set up for his imitation; but “Lilian,” more particularly, is a complete counterpart in coarsest fustian of the silken splendours of Mr Tennyson’s poem. It is “Locksley Hall” stripped of all its beauty, and debased by a thousand vulgarities, both of sentiment and style. The burden of both poems consists of bitter denunciations poured forth by disappointed and deserted love; with this difference, that the passion which Mr Tennyson gives utterance to, Mr Patmore reverberates in rant. A small poet, indeed, could not have worked after a more unsafe model. For while he might hope to mimic the agitated passions of “Locksley Hall,” in vain could he expect to be visited by the serene imagination which, in that poem, steeps their violence in an atmosphere of beauty. Even with regard to Mr Tennyson’s poem, it is rather for the sake of its picturesque descriptions, than on account of its burning emotions, that we recur to it with pleasure. We rejoice to follow him to regions where

“Never comes the trader, never floats an European flag,Slides the bird o’er lustrous woodland, droops the trailer from the crag.”

It is rather, we say, on account of such lines as these (no picture of tropical loveliness ever surpassed, in our opinion, the description printed in italics) that we admire “Locksley Hall,” than on account of the troubled passions which it embodies; knowing as we do, that poetry has nobler offices to perform than to fulmine forth fierce and sarcastic invectives against the head of a jilt; and if, as Mr Tennyson says, “love is love for evermore,” we would ask even him why he did not make the lover in “Locksley Hall” betray, even in spite of himself, a more pitiful tenderness for the devoted heroine of the tale? How different the strain of the manly Schiller under similar circumstances! His bitterness cannot be restrained from breaking down at last in a flood of tenderness over the lost mistress of his affections.

“Oh! what scorn for thy desolate yearsShall I feel! God forbid it should be!How bitter will then be the tearsShed, Minna, oh Minna, for thee!”

But if it be true that “Locksley Hall” is somewhat deficient in the ethereal tenderness which would overcome a true heart, even when blighted in its best affections, it was not to be expected that its imitator should have been visited with deeper glimpses of the divine. The indignant passions of his unrequited lover are, indeed, passions of the most ignoble clay—not one touch of elevated feeling lifts   him for a moment out of the mire. The whole train of circumstances which engender his emotions, prove the lover, in this case, to have been the silliest of mortal men, and his mistress, from the very beginning of his intercourse with her, to have been one of the most abandoned of her sex. “Lilian” is a burlesque on disappointed love, and a travestie of the passions which such a disappointment entails. We know not which are the more odious and revolting in their expression—the emotions of the jilted lover, or the incidents which call them into play.

The poem is designed to illustrate the bad effects produced on the female mind by the reading of French novels. We have nothing to say in their defence. But the incongruity lies here—that Lilian, who was seduced by means of these noxious publications, was evidently a lady of the frailest virtue from the very first; and her lover might have seen this with half an eye. Her materials were obviously of the most inflammable order; and it evidently did not require the application of such a spark as the seducer Winton, with his formidable artillery of imported literature, to set her tinder in a blaze—any other small contingency would have answered equally well. All that she wanted was an opportunity to fall; and that she would soon have found, under any circumstances whatsoever. The lover, however, sees nothing of all this, but relates the story of his unfortunate love-affair with as much simplicity as if he had been mourning the fall of the mother of mankind from paradise.

The lover relates his tale to his friend, the author. He begins by entreating him to

“Bear with me, in caseTears come. I feel them coming by the smarting in my face.”

And then he proceeds to introduce us to this Lilian, the immaculate mistress of his soul—

“She could see me coming to her with the vision of the hawk;Always hasten’d on to meet me, heavy passion in her walk;Low tones to me grew lower, sweetening so her honey talk,“That it fill’d up all my hearing, drown’d the voices of the birds,The voices of the breezes, and the voices of the herds—For to me the lowest ever were the loudest of her words.”

“Heavy passion in her walk!”—what a delicate and delectable young lady she must have been! Then, as to the fact so harmoniously expressed, of her accents drowning “the voices of the birds, the voices of the breezes, and the voices of the herds,” we may remark, that the first and second never require to be drowned at all, being nearly inaudible at any rate, even during the most indifferent conversation—so that there was nothing very remarkable in their being extinguished by the plaintiveness of the lady’s tones; while, with regard to the voices of the herds, if she succeeded in drowning these—the cattle being near at hand, and lowing lustily—she must indeed have roared to her lover “like any nightingale.”

The description of her is thus continued—

“On her face, then and for ever, was the seriousness within.Her sweetest smiles (and sweeter did a lover never win)Ere half-done grew so absent, that they made her fair cheek thin.“On her face, then and for ever, thoughts unworded used to live;So that when she whisper’d to me, ‘Better joy earth cannot give’—Her lips, though shut, continued, ‘But earth’s joy is fugitive.’“For there a nameless something, though suppress’d, still spread around;The same was on her eyelids, if she look’d towards the ground;When she spoke, you knew directly that the same was in the sound;”

By and by, a young gentleman, of the name of Winton, comes to visit Lilian and her father:—

“A formerly-loved companion—he was fresh from sprightly France,And with many volumes laden, essay, poem, and romance.”

He, and his pursuits after leaving school, are thus elegantly described:—

“When free, all healthy study was put by, that he might rushTo his favourite books, French chiefly, that his blood might boil and gushOver scenes which set his visage glowing crimson—not a blush.”

This gentleman and Lilian’s lover strike up a strong friendship for one another, and the latter makes Winton his confidant. As yet no suspicions arise to break the blind sleep of the infatuated dreamer.

“Delights were still remaining—hate—shame—rage—I can’t tell what,Comes to me at their memory; none that, more or less, was notThe soul’s unconscious incest, on creations self-begot.”

He still continues to doat on Lilian.

“Oh friend, if you had seen her! heard her speaking, felt her grace,When serious looks seem’d filling with the smiles which, in a space,Broke, sweet as Sabbath sunshine, and lit up her shady face.“Try to conceive her image—does it make your brain reel round?But all of this is over. Well, friend—various signs (I foundToo late on rumination) then and thenceforth did abound,“Wherefrom—but that all lovers look too closely to see clear—I might have gather’d matter fit for just and jealous fear.From her face, the nameless something now began to disappear.“What I felt for her I often told her boldly to her face;Blushes used to blush at blushes flushing on in glowing chace!But latterly she listen’d, bending full of bashful grace.“It was to hide those blushes, I thought then, but I suspectIt was to hide their absence.”

How great this writer is on the subject of blushing we shall have another opportunity of showing.—(See Lady Mabel’s shoulders, in the poem of Sir Hubert.) Meanwhile, the fair deceiver is now undergoing a course of French novels, under the tuition of young Winton. The consequence was,

“Her voice grew louder”—no great harm in that—

“Her voice grew louder—losing the much meaning it once bore,The passion in her carriage, though it every day grew more,Was now the same to all men—and that was not so before.”

We suppose that there was now “heavy passion in her walk,” whoever the man might be that approached her.

“And grosser signs, far grosser I remember now; but theseI miss’d of course, and counted with those light anomalies,Too frequent to disturb us into searching for their keys.”

These misgivings, which might have ripened into suspicions, are suddenly swept away by a stroke of duplicity on the part of his mistress, inconceivable in any woman except one inclined naturally, and without any prompting, to practise the profoundest artifices of vice.

“Even the dreadful glimpses now began to fade away,And disappear’d completely, when my Lilian asked one day,If I knew what reason Winton had to make so long a stay“In England—‘For,’ said Lilian, with untroubled countenance,‘Winton of course has told you of the love he left in France.’I seized her hand, and kiss’d it—joy had left no utterance.”

Winton, according to the account of the false Lilian, having a love in France, could not, of course be supposed to be paying court to her. Thus the lover is thrown off the scent, and his doubts are entirely laid asleep. He is again in the seventh heavens of assured love, and continues thus:—

“Another calm so perfect I should think is only shedOn good men dying gently, who recall a life well led,Till they cannot tell, for sweetness, if they be alive or dead.“I’ll stop here. You already have, I think, divined the rest.There’s a prophetic moisture in your eyes:—yet, tears being blestAnd delicate nutrition, apt to cease, too much suppress’d,“I’ll go on; but less for your sake than my own:—my skin is hot,And there’s an arid pricking in my veins; their currents clot:Tears sometimes soothe such fever, where the letting of blood will not.”

At length his eyes are opened, and the whole truth flashes upon him, on overhearing an acquaintance ask Winton whether his suit with Lilian has been successful. Upon this he writes out his opinion of the lady’s behaviour, presents it to her, and watches her while she peruses it, occupying himself at intervals as follows:—

“I turn’d a volume, waiting her full leisure to reply,The book was one which Winton had ask’d me to read, and IHad stopp’d halfway for horror, lest my soul should putrify.”

When Lilian has finished the perusal of the document, she endeavours at first to stand on the defensive,—

“She stood at bay, depending on that crutch made like a stilt,The impudent vulgarity wherewith women outstare guilt.”

But she finally succumbs under the influence of the following refined vituperation:—

“Don’t speak! You would not have me unacquainted with what ledTo this result? No! listen, and let me relate what bredThy tears and cheapen’d chasteness—(we may talk now as if wed.)“This book here, that lay open when I came in unaware,Is not the first—I thought so!—but the last of many a stairOf easy fall. Such only could have led you to his lair.“These drugs, at first, had scarcely strength to move your virgin blood;They slowly rose in action, till they wrought it to a flood,Fit for their giver’s purpose, who—who turn’d it into mud!”

The lover then leaves Lilian to her own meditations, and commences to rant and rave against her seducer in good set terms, of which the following is a specimen:—

“Pardon, Heaven! that I doubted whether there was any hell.Oh! but now I do believe it! Firmly, firmly! I foretellOf one that shall rank high there: he’s a scoffer, and must dwell“Where worms are—ever gnawing scoffers’ hearts into belief;Where weepings, gnashings, wailings, thirstings, groanings, ghastly grief,For ever and for ever pay the price of pleasures brief;“Where Gallios, who while living knew but cared for none of these,Now amazed with shame, would gladly, might it God (Fate there) appease,Watch and pray a million cycles for a single moment’s ease.”

After having thus breathed his passion, in a diatribe which beats in abomination any slang that was ever ranted out of a tub by a mountebank saint, he harps back upon the prodigious attractiveness of his mistress, in the following pathetic, though not very consistent terms—

“Ah but had you known my Lilian! (a sweet name?) Indeed, indeed,I doted on my Lilian. None can praise her half her meed.Perfect in soul; too gentle—others’ need she made her need;“Quite passionless, but ever bounteous-minded even to waste;Much tenderness in talking; very urgent, yet no haste;And chastity—to laud it would have seem’d almost unchaste.“Graced highly, too, with knowledge; versed in tongues; a queen of dance;An artist at her playing; a most touching utteranceIn song; her lips’ mild music could make sweet the clack of France.”

Amid such outpourings of feculent folly, it is scarcely worth our while to take notice of the minor offences against good taste that abound in these poems; yet we may remark, that the writer who here condescends to use such a word as clack, and who, on other occasions, does not scruple to talk of a repeat and a repay, instead of “a repetition,” and “a repayment,” does not consider the word watch-dog sufficiently elevated for his compositions. Whenever he alludes to this animal, he calls him a guard-hound—a word which we do not remember ever to have encountered either in conversation or in books, but which, for ought we know, may be drawn from those “pure wells of English undefiled,” which irrigate with their fair waters the provincial districts of the modern Babylon.

The author of “Lillian” evidently piques himself on the fidelity with which he has adhered to nature in his treatment of that story. But there are two ways in which nature may be adhered to in verse; and it is only one of these ways which can be considered poetical. The writer may adhere to the truth of human nature, while he elevates the emotions of the heart in strains which find a cordial echo in the sentiments of all mankind. Or, if his whole being is sicklied over with silliness and affectation, he may adhere to the truth of his own nature, and while writing perfectly naturally for him, he may unfold his delineations of character in such a manner as shall strip every passion of its dignity, and every emotion of its grace. Now, it is only by reason of their adherence to the latter species of nature, that “Lillian” and the other compositions of Mr Patmore can be considered natural, and, viewed under this aspect, they certainly are natural exceedingly.