On Anti-Climax
The centenary of the birth of Coventry Patmore has produced many handsome tributes to that once popular, but now little-read poet. When I was a boy The Angel in the House was as familiar as In Memoriam, and Patmore was a more prominent figure in the literary landscape than Browning. He has long lost that eminence, but his haughty genius, like that of Landor, will always command the respectful, if slightly chilly, admiration of certain minds. “I shall dine late,” said Landor, “but the rooms will be well-lighted and the company fit, though few.”
Patmore, who outlived his earlier reputation, felt the same assurance about himself. And rightly, for though it is probable that the dust will be allowed to gather on the unthumbed Angel in the House, some of his later poems have an energy and nobility that will keep them alive. The Farewell, for example, has the ring of deathlessness in it as assuredly as Drayton’s Parting, of which it is reminiscent, or Browning’s Last Ride Together. He will not be forgotten, too, for another reason. Fine poet though he was, he could come to grief badly, and the stanza with which he closed his most famous poem will live as an example of anti-climax:
But here their converse had its end;
For, crossing the Cathedral Lawn,
There came an ancient college-friend,
Who, introduced to Mrs. Vaughan,
Lifted his hat and bowed and smiled,
And filled her kind large eyes with joy,
By patting on the cheek her child,
With, “Is he yours, this handsome boy?”
“Who, introduced to Mrs. Vaughan”! Shades of Parnassus! It is easy to see how he came to grief. He had carried his high theme to a close, and wished to end his flight with composed wings and the negligible twitter of the bird at rest. But in the attempt to be simple he stumbled, as much greater poets like Wordsworth have stumbled, on the banal and the commonplace. We suffer from it something of the shock we receive from the historic greeting by Stanley of Livingstone in the depths of the African forest, which is an immortal example of anti-climax. The expedition for the discovery of Livingstone touched the epic note of grand adventure. It held the attention of the world, and the moment of the meeting was charged with the high emotions of a sublime occasion. And when they met (so the record stands), Stanley held out his hand and said, “Dr. Livingstone, I presume.” At that artificial word the epic collapses to the dimensions of a suburban reception. It is not easy to imagine what salutation would have fitted the end of so mighty a quest, but if Stanley had said, “Dr. Livingstone, I suppose,” or preferably simply the name, the feeling of the occasion would not have been outraged, so slight are the things which separate the sublime from the ridiculous.
A lack of humour as much as of taste is usually the source of the anti-climax, as in the familiar example from the prize poem on the Mayflower:
And so, directed by the hand of God,
They sailed away until they reached Cape Cod.
The impossible transition from the plane of high spiritual ideas to a mere geographical fact was made grotesque by the name which only a very humourless person could have used in such a connection. Similarly, in the hardly less familiar illustration of bathos:
Here comes Dalhousie, the great God of War,
Lieutenant-colonel to the Earl of Mar,
the plunge from the Homeric vein to the Army List could only have been possible to a man who lacked humour even more than the sense of poetry.
That was what was wrong with Alfred Austin, the great master of bathos, who perpetrated more banalities than any poet since Pye. I like best his tribute to the dauntless soldiers:
They did not know what blench meant,
So they stayed in their entrenchment.
Here the grotesqueness of the rhyme emphasises the absurdity of the illustration. It is not staying in an entrenchment, but leaving an entrenchment that requires courage. Like the much greater Patmore, Austin could collapse into the commonplace in trying to achieve the simple and artless, as when he wrote:
The spring time, O, the spring time,
Who does not know it well—
When the little birds begin to sing
And the buds begin to swell.
Contrast these tinkling syllables with the surge of emotion with which another poet could charge the song of the birds and the bloom of the flowers:
Ye flowery banks o’ bonnie Doon,
How can ye blume sae fair?
How can ye chant, ye little birds,
And I sae fu’ o’ care?
I suppose no poet was ever more royally regardless of the smaller niceties of the poet’s craft than Burns was, but it would not be easy to find in all his work a case where he comes down with the broken wing of anti-climax.