aggregate were considerable, and by the notable reduction of the military and naval expenditure which formed so onerous a burden before the war. It may, therefore, be estimated that Germany's possible surplus should be twice as large as before the war, provided reasonable efficiency prevails in production and reasonable economy is maintained in public and private expenditure. Her capacity to pay is much greater than is generally realised. A government which has the will to create order could easily convert Germany's poverty into abounding prosperity. The mark can be stabilised at any moment by stopping the printing of notes. It is true that that step will bring about a crisis in finance, industry, and commerce, accompanied by widespread unemployment; but such crisis must occur in any case. When it comes it will teach the German workers that they cannot consume more than they produce, and will cause individual production not merely to equal but to exceed pre-war production; for the improvement of machinery effected since 1914 will make increased production per worker per day quite easy. Vastly increased production will furnish a great surplus of goods for export on the one hand and will reduce the importation of those goods which Germany herself can produce on the other. If German miners produced as much coal per day as they did in 1914, Germany would have an exportable surplus of coal of about 40,000,000 tons per year in excess of all the Reparation coal demanded. She need not import foreign coal. Before the war, she exported a million tons of sugar per year. Lately she has been importing sugar instead of exporting it. She has been importing enormous quantities of breadcorn, although her leading experts are of opinion that, with the large amount of nitrates, potash, etc., produced at home she can raise all the breadcorn she requires. At present, German imports vastly exceed the exports. This cannot continue much longer, since foreign nations refuse to accept German marks. Greatly increased production will create a favourable balance in German foreign trade which can be applied to reparations. Unfortunately, the determination not to pay reparations has become general, and therein, not in economic circumstances, lies the difficulty. Art. 8.—COVENTRY PATMORE. 1. Poems (Collective Edition in two vols, including Poems by Henry Patmore). Bell, 1896. 2. Principle in Art, etc. Bell, 1896. 3. Religio Poeta. Bell, 1893. 4. The Rod, the Root, and the Flower. Bell, 1895. 5. Memoirs and Correspondence of Coventry Patmore. By Basil Champneys. Two vols. Bell, 1900. 6. Coventry Patmore. & Stoughton, 1905. And other works. By Edmund Gosse. Hodder COVENTRY KERSEY DIGHTON PATMORE was born on July 23, 1823. The calendar alone is faithful in its mute reminder that a hundred years have passed, for men's affections are not occupied with Patmore's work, and it would be foolish to speak of his name in connexion with a centenary celebration.' He is celebrated but as a lonely hill in a quiet land, shown on the map, but visited merely by those to whom the hill air, and its solitude, are a stimulation and a delight. The greatness that his admirers have never ceased to claim for him may have been silently acknowledged, but has never been widely felt; and for most readers he remains a name in a catalogue, an illustration, a cipher, a shade. Great poets are creatures of their age, even if they show greatness equally in expressing and transcending it. Patmore and Tennyson were both Victorian poets and in the truest sense the voices of their time; and they each, but in different degree, transcended their time. Tennyson was a dominating figure, standing firm amid his generation, and only distinguished by his loftiness of thought and grave attitude of a spiritual legislator; but Patmore was isolated alike by his genius and by the intense arrogance of his regard of a world surging turbulently beneath him. He expressed his time in 'The Angel in the House,' he transcended it in 'The Unknown Eros,' standing scornfully or sorrowfully remote in many odes in the latter, consciously and even proudly alien in certain prose essays. Exceptions to these general statements may be noted, but the statements represent the broad facts. It is not altogether fanciful to read his character in his face. The portraits, especially that by Mr Sargent, by which he is best known, show a mind alert, bold and perverse, a spirit impetuous and unconciliating. The eyes are gem-like, but the light in them is not cold, and it is that quick light that redeems the countenance from hardness. Nor is it fanciful, perhaps, to read his history into his face. The son of Peter G. Patmore, who was concerned as second in John Scott's duel with Lockhart's friend, Christie; educated at home and in Paris, and thus escaping, I cannot say whether unfortunately, the influence of Oxford and Cambridge in the 'forties; entering the Civil Service (through the British Museum), that great nursery of men of letters; marrying once, twice, thrice, and each time gaining in temporalities and inward happiness; joining the Roman Catholic Church at the point of his second marriage; publishing the first part of The Angel in the House' when he was but thirty-one and tasting briefly the sweets of popularity; staying silent from 1863 to 1877, and finding then scarce any audience; reconciling himself to obscurity, and a little disdainful of what was denied him; saddening as he looked out upon his time, but serene in obedience to silent admonitions; contented meanwhile to publish his wilful, epigrammatic essays of a beautiful prose texture, and at length slipping almost unperceived and almost unhonoured out of life at the age of seventy-three-that all this should be traceable in the portraits is impossible, but there is still a strong harmony of the painter's counterfeit and the image called up by the reader's inward eye. Patmore was the least impersonal of writers, and so his work somewhat easily yields us an image of deep shadows and high lights, to set beside the likeness made in the most personal of mediums-the painter's. As I have said, he was a very young man when he published 'The Angel in the House,' and added his still, domestic voice to the larger utterance of other singers. Tennyson, the Brownings, and Arnold were already famous, the eloquence of Ruskin and Carlyle was already familiar, philosophy already knew Mill, and science was shortly to give birth to The Origin of Species.' Patmore, in fact, rose amid the rich chaos of Victorian literature at its central point. The angel of his title has been commonly held to refer to the lady of the poem, but more reasonably to the unknown Eros of the odes. The poem still provokes the amusement of those who indolently fail to relate it to the rest of Patmore's work, and, because it seems so easy to understand, do not think it worth understanding. The same hasty indolence prevents their reading the later odes, which are not at all easy to understand; and hence the author has been dismissed, even by intelligent people, as too simple altogether and by others as too obscure. Certain professors of literature, including Mr Saintsbury, have treated him as a minor-minor poet, a chicken clucking between Tennyson's feet, a mote dancing in Ruskin's ray. The courtship of a dean's daughter, the marriage, the honeymoon journey, the unadventurous adventure of merely faithful wedlock-who will not smile at the tameness of a domestic epic? Habitual readers of verse are fondest of lyrical and dramatic poetry; the social recitals of Cowper and Crabbe no longer delight and are the mild pleasure of lax moods only. And again, the common attitude to marriage being no longer quite inflexible, the oriental view of woman being equally immoral and outworn, it is no wonder if the central idea of the narrative is itself a count against this poem. Patmore wrote it while he was still a Protestant, but the inward rigidity which it discloses, and which I cannot deny or diminish, suggests that he was already prepared for the conversion that followed it. It is by a miracle, then, that the poem remains not only readable but even delightful, tinctured faintly with dogma but quite blessedly with humour. It sailed, somewhat slowly, into popular favour, but with the rise of Swinburne and the passionate lyricism of Poems and Ballads,' Patmore's note was contemned or merely unheard. His song was like a robin or, in his own phrase, a heavenly-minded thrush; and the exuberant clamour of a new and earthly music, the audacity of that heady, intemperate beauty, drew away the attention of critical readers until at length popularity, too, waned and neglect followed. Forty years ago his very name, says Mr Gosse, was ridiculed; the wonderful odes had been published only a few years before, but they shared in the neglect or the contumely cast upon the earlier poems. Vol. 240.-No. 476. I 'The Angel in the House' is the simplest of things, and its depths are as lucid as the mental atmosphere in which it was conceived. Patmore's temper was vehement, his temper so strongly marked and, in later years, so independent of opinion that it seems hardly possible that his early work should have been so smoothly acceptable as it proved. He was made up of contradictions. He could not easily bear restraint, yet invoked it in his essays; he was proud, but exalted humility; his mind was critical but capricious; he had a great deal of ability in the practical affairs of life yet despised science; he was faithful in his affections and steady in his persuasions, yet forsook his native creed when he had reached mature years, without avowing an adequate reason; and after that change, though still inwardly defiant, he was so subdued to authority that he burnt some hundreds of copies of 'The Angel in the House' lest they should offend-singular misgiving! Long after, as we shall note, he destroyed for a similar reason the manuscript of an unpublished essay. His intellectual apprehensions were swift, but his passions were gusty, and he was at the mercy of both. There was a war in his members. His early poem, however, does not reflect this war, but rather a glittering peace. It is the expression of a mind at home in a world of its own, not wholly our common world and not wholly an alien world, but his own intersecting our common world. He makes the best of both worlds for the characters of his poem. The privileges of cultivated life, the ardours of virgin love, the sunny obscurities of poetic vision and mystic religionthese compose the twin-featured subject of his muse. In form, the verse deludes with its ease, an ease that never degenerates into carelessness or slides into vacancy; there is, on the contrary, a token of patience in the neat development of the story, with cantos and prologues, preludes and epigrams; narrative and comment advancing cunningly together. Perfect quatrains fall as thick as apples in autumn: 'One of those lovely things she was An air of immortality.' |