Religio Poetae by Coventry Patmore
Part 1
By Dale Nelson
In the second volume of his autobiography, Machen states for the public record that Coventry Patmore’s Religio Poetae (1893) was “a collection of essays of the profoundest wisdom” (Things Near and Far, Chapter 7).
Writing privately in 1923 to an admirer who besought Machen to let him in on esoteric lore, Machen demurred, saying, “There is no initiation from without; that is, there is no secret society that can impart anything worth hearing. The only initiation is from within, so that you have almost as much as I do, having read ‘Things Near and Far’. But I would recommend to anyone whose mind is within these lines to read Coventry Patmore’s ‘Religio Poetae’ and ‘Rod, Root, & Flower’.”
Numerous Machen readers seek traces of the Golden Dawn, which Machen outgrew and repeatedly disparaged, but evidently don’t read Patmore, whose works received Machen’s mature, forthright approval, expressed publicly and privately. In this series of columns, we will begin to read Patmore. This will take time. Religio Poetae will require several Books Around Machen columns.
Not having read the book before, I might be making a mistake, but I’m granting myself liberty to read the chapters out of order. We may start with Chapter 4, “Attention.” C. S. Lewis wrote alarmingly at the end of the 12th Screwtape Letter about how a man may surrender his attention to Nothing. Today inability to give due attention to worthy matters, and susceptibility to unending bids to distract us, may be more serious than ever. Patmore can convict us of wasting our powers of attention and missing the things that concern us most; and so we will fail to be “initiated” into the real mysteries.
Patmore proclaims that, all too often, people do not attend to realities, but dwell “easily and pleasantly and, perhaps, without external offense in unrealities.” Even “religious people” may be in “too great a hurry of spirit.” Consequently, “[t]hrough inattention to their own true desires and capacities, men walk, as in a dream, among the trees of the Hesperides… but they do not dream of plucking” the fruit.
I found myself thinking of Machen’s distinction, in Hieroglyphics, between fine literature the attentive reading of which may evoke “ecstasy,” and mere reading matter, which may amuse us by its clever imitation of so-called “life,” or tease a superficial curiosity that wants to learn the solution to a contrived puzzle.
I thought too of Machen’s introduction to The House of Souls. There he relates the anecdote about his long ramble from Gray’s Inn to Hackney, where he took note of a father, mother, and infant who got into a tram. Machen guessed that they had come from “a small shop” and were going to “spend the Sunday evening with relations or friends.”
Well, that, the Recluse of Hieroglyphics might have said, is a likely opening for a popular novel — perhaps a comedy with notes of pathos. The young woman seems to Machen like she might have “‘a temper of her own’” – now, that could be a major ingredient right off. Perhaps this little family is going to see the young mother’s maiden aunt – who disapproved of her niece’s marriage – in order to beg the loan of five pounds. Etc., etc.
But Machen pursued a different thought. That there’s a baby is evidence that “these two have partaken together of the great mystery, of the great sacrament of nature, of the source of all that is magical in the wide world. But have they discerned the mysteries?” They are married lovers, but are they truly faithful to one another and to love?
Perhaps they are. Machen doesn’t pretend to know.
And so Machen, reflecting, “was furnished with the source of ‘A Fragment of Life.’” You will remember, in Machen’s story, that Edward Darnell and his wife, Mary, are at first the playthings of conventional priorities approved by their social circle and are missing the richness of a more real life that awaits them, and which is truly theirs, if they only knew it, by right, as husband and wife.
Of this more real life, they do begin to learn as Machen’s story of develops and their attention shifts from being centered on matters such as furniture purchases. The Darnells are getting a new life and are, in a way, like good children. Children may have little reverence for certain shallow conventions, but their attention may be seized by a small wild animal or a good story. Edward and Mary Darnell are in a new story, are living a new life, as “A Fragment” draws to its conclusion. It seems to me a very Patmorean novella.
The attentiveness of which Patmore writes is not simply a matter of taking time out to think about certain topics. In fact, Patmore says that one will need to suspend “active thought.” He helpfully quotes Wordsworth:
Paradise and groves
Elysian, Fortunate Fields – like those of old
Sought in the Atlantic main – why should they be
A history only of departed things,
Or a mere fiction of what never was?
For the discerning intellect of man,
When wedded to this goodly universe
In love and holy passion, shall find these
A simple produce of the common day.
Those lines must have meant a lot to Machen.
In passing, Patmore seems to depreciate the value of philanthropy. Organized benevolence may be a good and necessary thing – ask victims of tropical storms what they think; but Dickens and George MacDonald found reason to satirize it, and Patmore is concerned about the possibility that even a worthy cause may become an absorbing occupation that leaves someone no time for attention to matters of great importance to him or her.
NOTE: The text from which I quote Things Near and Far (1923) is part of The Autobiography of Arthur Machen (Garnstone Press, 1974). I quote from Machen’s letter to George Franklin Ludington as transcribed in an entry at Henry Wessells’ blog The Endless Bookshelf, 11 December 2023, “Peak Machen II: ‘I Have Not Had to Wait Until I Am Dead.’”
My quotations from Religio Poetae are from a Duckworth edition (1913) that also includes Principle in Art. As this is my first reading of RP, I don’t expect to spend a lot of time evaluating the chapters.
Patmore was best known as the poet who wrote the once-famous Victorian narrative poem The Angel in the House (1854/1862). C. S. Lewis’s esteem for that book is documented in a 2002 article published in the Bulletin of the New York C. S. Lewis Society. Charles Williams’s biographer finds his subject “fascinated” by Patmore as a young man, and shows that when Lewis and Williams first established contact in 1936, by letter, immediately Williams referred to Patmore (Lindop, Charles Williams: The Third Inkling, pp. 58, 256).
Rolf Dobelli’s “News Is Bad for You – and Giving It Up Will Make You Happier” (Guardian 12 April 2013, available online) and blog posts by Baylor University professor Alan Jacobs may be recommended.
darklybrightpress.com 