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

Is lifting up one broad beam, like
A 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 all
Who meet her, look so sad—
That even to herself it is
Quite 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 years
Shall I feel! God forbid it should be!
How bitter will then be the tears
Shed, 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 case
Tears 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 rush
To his favourite books, French chiefly, that his blood might boil and gush
Over 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 not
The 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 found
Too 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 suspect
It 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—