Religio Poetae by Coventry Patmore
Part 5
By Dale Nelson
A “young lady, who had been brought up at one of the best convent schools in England,” heard her father speak of matrimony. “‘Why, papa, I thought that marriage was rather a wicked sacrament!’”
This anecdote, in Chapter 10 “Ancient and Modern Ideas of Purity,” came to Machen’s mind and he quoted it when he wrote “‘Consolatus’ and ‘Church-Member’”—a 1907 essay mentioned before in one of these Religio Poetae columns. Without meaning to insinuate that Patmore made it up, I do wonder about its provenance. It’s plausible, though, if Gwen Reverat’s Period Piece: A Cambridge Childhood (1952) is an accurate description of a bygone milieu.
“One has only to think of the omissions in all the mid- and late-Victorian novels, to perceive the fantastic unreality of the outlook of decent people, from about 1850 to 1914. It is often hard to believe that these decent people were not being deliberately hypocritical, when they were unwilling to face the facts; but very few of them were consciously shirking,” she wrote.
Writing during that period, Patmore was impatient with excessively straitlaced* standards.
Young men and women should, Patmore urged, be allowed to read not only the Bible and Shakespeare, but poems such as Spenser’s “Epithalamion,” the “most pure and exalted love-poem that was ever written”—and “also one of the most ‘nude.’” He feared that, when even godly sexuality is omitted from the art and literature that young people read, they are likely to pick up their notions about sexuality from sordid sources and then really be hurt in their souls. Sometimes “prudent and bold plain-speaking” are required. Machen too denounced prudery on various occasions.
The preceding essay, “Simplicity,” takes the approach we’ve seen in other papers by Patmore, of addressing a topic by distinguishing the few and the many—or, here, “some few of the very few.” Those are the ones who retain the simplicity and purity of childhood” and have acquired “the simplicity of wisdom,” even while perhaps also exhibiting defects of character. You see this in Coleridge and Blake, Patmore says. There are “deserts of dullness” in Coleridge and there is sometimes “mere imbecility” in Blake.
For a book on the “religion of a poet,” we haven’t seen many references so far to particular ones.
That’s partly because this series of columns has skipped the first chapter till now. “Religio Poetae” mentions Coleridge on its first page; next, on its third, Goethe and Dante, and by its end Wordsworth, Homer, and St. John of the Cross. But he mentions also St. Augustine, St. Bernard, St. Thomas Aquinas, and St. Francis of Sales, because “the amount of substantial poetry, of imaginative insight into the noblest and loveliest reality [is] to be found” in writings such as theirs, whether or not written in verse. “The many” might perceive in the great poets just “flights of fancy.” But it’s the faculty of imagination, not fancy, that characterizes the true poet, and Patmore believes that his own time could be “in the initial stage of a new development,” indeed a New Dispensation, that will renew and intensify the Christian faith. Patmore would have agreed with George MacDonald when he called Wordsworth and Coleridge the “prophets of the new blessing” (Wilfrid Cumbermede, Chapter 15).
Wordsworth and Coleridge inspired MacDonald, and MacDonald inspired Lewis and Tolkien. Who would have predicted the enormous blessings for the Christian mind and imagination that came about from the writings of these two Inklings (even as the world descended into violence and vileness that Patmore could not have conceived)?
It is strange to see Patmore, in this opening chapter, expressly hoping that a new era—this time of the Holy Spirit—is dawning, which will succeed the era of the Father (he means the Old Testament time) and then the era of the Son. Had he been reading Joachim of Fiore?
I see no evidence of such yearnings in Machen.
*Not “straightlaced”—which spelling is a giveaway of inattention on the part of a writer.
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