SOURCE: Fontana, Ernest. “Patmore, Pascal, and Astronomy.” Victorian Poetry 41, no. 2 (summer 2003): 277-86.

[In the following essay, Fontana underscores the influence of the Catholic author Blaise Pascal and his use of extended astronomical metaphors on Patmore's poetry.]

In Victories of Love, written three years before Patmore's 1864 conversion to Catholicism in Rome, extended astronomical metaphors begin to appear with such frequency in his poetry that one might consider the later Patmore a rival of Tennyson as the Victorian poet who demonstrates the greatest knowledge of contemporary astronomy.¹ What could have prompted such an emphasis? I contend that Patmore shortly before and after his conversion to Catholicism grapples with the legacy of the great Jansenist Catholic writer, Blaise Pascal, whose Pensées we know Patmore read² and which he conspicuously imitated in his late collection of apothegms, “The Aurea Dicta,” from The Rod, The Root, and The Flower (1895).

Pascal employs astronomical references to express feelings of dread, terror, and alienation. For him, the heavenly cosmos does not affirm God's existence, but instead reveals an immense abyss from which He is absent or hidden: “The eternal silence of these infinite spaces fills me with dread.”³ For Patmore, the dominant focus of his post-conversion poetry, specifically The Unknown Eros (1877), is the nuptial metaphor for “man's basic relationship with God, with the universe, and with his fellow human beings.”⁴ Patmore, unlike Pascal, assumes a benign, eroticized universe in which sexuality, rather than evidence of sinful concupiscence, is a preparation and model for the reciprocal desires linking man and God. My argument is that for Patmore, astronomical metaphor is the site in which he enacts his quarrel with Pascal, the site of a differentiation of importance, given Pascal's eminence as a Catholic apologist and thinker. I shall also argue that Patmore's astronomical metaphors demonstrate a close acquaintance with Sir John Herschel's Outlines of Astronomy, which was published in five editions between 1849 and 1866 and “which for decades was deemed the most authoritative astronomy text in English.”⁵ A close examination of the content and language of Patmore's astronomical metaphors and the relevant corresponding passages in Herschel's Outlines suggests that it was Herschel's book that enabled Patmore to contend with Pascal's astronomy of dread.⁶

For Pascal the human condition is one of “inconstancy, boredom, anxiety” (24:36). Man exists in “a state of corruption and sin”; fallen from his first state, he “has become like the beasts” (131:66). For Pascal Christianity is strange; it “bids man to recognize that he is vile, and even abominable, and bids him want to be like God” (351:133). How different is the tenor of Patmore's apothegms from his “Aurea Dicta”; for example, “if you wish to influence the world for good, leave it, forget it and think of nothing but your own interest,”⁷ or “the power of the soul for good is in proportion to the strength of its passion. Sanctity is not the negation of passion, but its order” (The Rod, p. 51). Whereas Pascal's Pensées seemed to Pater “the utterance of a soul diseased, a soul permanently ill at ease,”⁸ Patmore's Catholic writings are robust, affirmative, and, at times, healthy to excess.⁹ As John Maynard has shown, for Patmore “sexual desire is both the source of man's humanity, the essence of human nature, and also the connection to the divine.”¹⁰

Patmore's first extended astronomical metaphor appears in the epistolary Victories of Love (1863). Frederick Graham, in a letter written to his mother from an inn at Plymouth, tells of his disappointed love for his cousin Honoria Churchill, who has become betrothed to Felix Vaughn, the male protagonist of the earlier Angel in the House:

Blest in her place, blissful is she;
And I, departing, seem to be
Like the strange waif that comes to run
A few days flaming near the sun,
And carries back, through boundless night,
Its lessening memory of light.

(p. 220)¹¹

In this self-pitying metaphor, Frederick compares himself to a comet that, as it approaches the sun (Honoria), is for a brief period illuminated before passing into “boundless night.” In his Outlines Herschel writes that comets appear to “accelerate, enlarge, and throw out from them this appendage, [the tail] which increases in length and brightness till … they approach the sun, and are lost in its beams.” Herschel then notes that immediately after passing the sun, the comets' tails “shine forth in all their splendour … thus indicating plainly the action of the sun's rays as the exciting cause of that extraordinary emanation.” But as the comets recede from the sun “the tail dies away” and the comet itself “is at length altogether lost sight of, in by far the greater number of cases never to be seen more.”¹² Patmore appropriates Herschel's description and identification of the sun as “the exciting cause” of the comet's extraordinary emanation before it disappears into the darkness, that is, the ocean upon which the warship commanded by the disconsolate, homeless Frederick will soon venture forth from Plymouth. Of course, Honoria has been “the exciting cause” of Frederick's brief illumination.

Unlike Pascal, for whom the heavens are “the infinite immensity of spaces of which I know no thing and which know nothing of me” (68:48), Patmore's heavens are, because of the astronomical knowledge available to him in Herschel's Outlines of Astronomy, a source of analogy and metaphor for states of human consciousness and the relation of human beings to each other. For Patmore, “the worthiest use of natural science is in its provision of similes and parables, whereby the facts of higher knowledge are approximately expressed.”¹³ Whereas Pascal emphasizes the immensity and unknowableness of the heavens, Patmore sees astronomical knowledge as a source of metaphor for psychological and/or spiritual relationships.

In the Dean's long “Wedding Sermon” that concludes The Victories of Love, the Dean cites the traditional metaphor of Christ's marriage to the Church. He then turns to astronomy to figure the mysteries and delights which only a few select married couples attain; these delights are likened to “a strange sky / Of brighter stars” seen by sailors who move from the northern to the southern hemisphere:

          But here I speak of heights, and heights
Are hardly scaled. The best delights
Of even this homeliest passion, are
In the most perfect souls so rare,
That they who feel them are as men
Sailing the Southern ocean, when,
At midnight, they look up, and eye
The starry Cross, and a strange sky
Of brighter stars; and sad thoughts come
To each how far he is from home.

(p. 324)

Once again Herschel's Outlines can be cited as the source of this metaphor. Herschel himself had spent, with his wife, five years between 1833 and 1838 at Feldhausen in the Cape Colony where he discovered “hundreds of new double stars [and] 1,269 new nebulae” (Crowe, p. 161). In Outlines Herschel observes that a traveler, journeying southward, will as he passes the equator

find the whole phenomena of the heavens reversed. The stars which at his original station described their whole diurnal circles above his horizon and never set, now describe them entirely below it, and never rise, but remain, constantly invisible to him; and vice versa, those stars which at his former station he never saw, he will now never cease to see.

(pp. 52-53)

The strange stars of the southern hemisphere are not sources of dread for the Dean, but metaphors for the unimagined mysteries and delights marriage offers “most perfect souls so rare.”

In the odes from The Unknown Eros (1877), written after his 1864 conversion, we see even more clearly Patmore's use of Sir John Herschel's Outlines of Astronomy to correct the astronomy of dread that is so central to Pascal's Pensées. In the “Proem” the speaker's mentor attempts to goad him to undertake again the writing of poetry that will “Pierce, then, with thought's steel probe, the trodden ground, / Till passion's buried floods be found” (p. 347). The mentor then turns to a startling astronomical conceit. He likens these buried passions, undiscovered “pulsings of the heart,” to remote suns and their revolving planets in “the dim and undiscover'd sky” (p. 347). The remote reaches of inner emotion are figured in terms of the remote regions of space. Patmore carries this figure further. The words of the poet are “transpicuous”; they will serve to take us beyond sight and glow themselves as distant, undiscovered suns. Here Patmore establishes a metaphoric equivalency between his metaphorical vehicle—undiscovered suns and planets—his subject matter, uncharted human emotion, and his medium, language. Once again he echoes Herschel's Outlines of Astronomy. Herschel writes of distant stars as “magnificent bodies scattered through the abyss of space” that may themselves be “suns, and may, perhaps, each in its sphere, be the presiding centre round which other planets, or bodies of which we can form no conception from any analogy offered by our own system, may be circulating” (p. 467).

In “The Two Deserts,” one of the nine odes of The Unknown Eros published privately in 1868 (Reid, p. 281), Patmore most clearly undertakes a revision of a specific text from Pascal's Pensées, his extended reflection on the “Disproportion of man” (199:88-95), in which he argues that the human condition is “between these two abysses of infinity and nothingness” (199:90). Pascal begins this extended reflection by observing that according to astronomy the earth is “a mere speck compared to the vast orbit” of the sun, “a little dungeon, in which he finds himself lodged,” and “the whole visible world … an imperceptible dot in nature's ample bosom.” The cosmos itself is “an infinite space whose centre is everywhere and circumference nowhere” (199:89). He then turns to “a new abyss” of “minute parts, legs with joints, veins in its legs, blood in the veins, humours in the blood, drops in the humours, vapours in the drops” and “all the conceivable immensity enclosed in [the] miniature atom” (pp. 89-90). Cognizant of his position between these two abysses of infinity and nothingness man should “tremble at these marvels,” “his curiosity changing into wonder.” In this middle point “between all and nothing,” man, according to Pascal, becomes aware of how remote he is from understanding these two extremes “whose principles are unattainably hidden from him in impenetrable secrecy” (p. 90).

In “The Two Deserts” Patmore modernizes Pascal's two abysses: the astronomical void becomes specifically the universe revealed by the telescope;¹⁴ the abyss of anatomical dissection and Pre-Socratic atomic theory becomes the world revealed by the microscope. Neither “abyss” moves him to Pascalian awe or to a sense of the puniness of the human mind. In an explicit reply to Pascal's reflection on the “Disproportion of man,” Patmore's odist returns from Pascal's twin abysses with a new sense of the beauty and value of “our royal-fair estate / Betwixt those deserts blank of small and great,” the human middle station where “Wonder and beauty our own courtiers are.” Because of its importance to my argument I shall quote “The Two Deserts” in its entirety:

          Not greatly moved with awe am I
To learn that we may spy
Five thousand firmaments beyond our own.
The best that's known
Of the heavenly bodies does them credit small.
View'd close, the Moon's fair ball
Is of ill objects worst,
A corpse in Night's highway, naked, fire-scarr'd, accurst;
And now they tell
That the Sun is plainly seen to boil and burst
Too horribly for hell.
So, judging from these two,
As we must do,
The Universe, outside our living Earth,
Was all conceiv'd in the Creator's mirth,
Forecasting at the time Man's spirit deep,
To make dirt cheap.
Put by the Telescope!
Better without it man may see,
Stretch'd awful in the hush'd midnight,
The ghost of his eternity.
Give me the nobler glass that swells to the eye
The things which near us lie,
Till Science rapturously hails,
In the minutest water-drop,
A torment of innumerable tails.
These at the least do live.
But rather give
A mind not much to pry
Beyond our royal-fair estate
Betwixt these deserts blank of small and great.
Wonder and beauty our own courtiers are,
Pressing to catch our gaze,
And out of obvious ways
Ne'er wandering far.

(pp. 381-382)

If “The Two Deserts,” in its juxtaposition of immensity and minuteness, is Patmore's most explicit reply to a specific text of Pascal, his ode “To the Unknown Eros,” which opens Bk. II of The Unknown Eros and serves as its invocation, is an implicit refutation of Pascal's dark vision of man as a weak reed, “the weakest in nature” (200:95), alienated from the surrounding cosmos and from a God who wishes to hide himself (242:103). In this ode the speaker begins by interrogating a winged breeze of inspiration that is fanning his face and that seems to be “Speeding at far returns of time from interstellar space” (p. 392). This breeze of poetic inspiration reaches Patmore like the light of living stars that, according to Herschel, “must have occupied upwards of 2,000 years in travelling over the distance which separates them from our system.” Herschel then asserts “that when we observe the place and note the appearance of such stars, we are only reading the history of two thousand years' anterior date, thus wonderfully recorded” (p. 457). Patmore transposes the tactile image of the perception of a cosmic breeze for the visual phenomenon, described by Herschel, of stellar light. The implication of Patmore's conflating the traditional image of the winds of inspiration with astronomical fact is that the second part of The Unknown Eros is, we are to imagine, inspired by the winds of an ancient, primordial cosmic force that emanates from the farthest regions of the universe.

In “The Unknown Eros” Patmore then turns to a second astronomical metaphor to express the lingering effect of the odist having been touched momentarily by the mysterious breeze of cosmic Eros:

In me life's even flood
What eddies thus?
What in its ruddy orbit lifts the blood,
Like a perturbed moon of Uranus,
Reaching to some great world in ungauged darkness hid.

(p. 393)

Maynard comments that “here the huge power of a ‘perturbed moon of Uranus’ lifts the blood like a tremendous tidal force toward ‘some great world in ungauged darkness hid’ (the moon was indeed the planet Neptune, discovered by the gravitational irregularities it exerted on Uranus)” (Maynard, p. 233). The blood of the odist is disturbed, lifted like the planet Uranus, by “the existence of an exterior, and hitherto undiscovered, planet, disturbing, according to the received laws of planetary disturbance, the motion of Uranus by its attraction” (Herschel, p. 429). Once again Patmore draws on Herschel's Outlines of Astronomy for an elaborate, astronomical metaphor that suggests the almost tactile emanation of Divinity intimately accessible, unlike Pascal's Deus absconditus, to the responsive Christian soul, that like Psyche lies “Between those quivering plumes that thro' fine ether pant, / For hopeless, sweet eternity” (“To the Unknown Eros,” p. 393).

Patmore's emphasis on the tactile presence of a cosmic Eros appears again in “The Contract.” Here Patmore imagines that prelapsarian erotic desire did not lead to genital contact between Eve and Adam but instead to a heightened state of unconsummated virginal desire. Eve figures her relation to Adam in terms of the metaphor of Venus illuminated by the power of sun's light. Patmore's metaphor suggests here intense somatic reciprocity without actual bodily contact:

          ‘My Lord, my Wisdom, nay!
Does not yon love-delighted Planet run,
(Haply against her heart,)
A space apart
For ever from her strong-persuading Sun!
O say,
Shall we no voluntary bars
Set to our drift? I, Sister of the Stars,
And Thou, my glorious, course-compelling Day!’

(p. 395)

Again the likely source for this metaphor is Herschel, who, in his Outlines, observes that the planets Mercury, Venus, and Mars “are opaque bodies, shining only by reflected light, which can be of no other than that of the sun's” (p. 246). Furthermore, when the planet Venus, as evening star, appears on occasion immediately after sunset it shines with a reflected if “dazzling lustre” (p. 246). Thus for Patmore, Eve's virginal prelapsarian erotic response to Adam is figured as Venus' reflected illumination by the Adamic sun. By using Herschel's analysis of the interaction of planetary bodies with solar light, Patmore corrects Pascal's more static astronomy in which both human and celestial bodies are isolated from each other in an abyss of unreciprocating terror. Both Herschel's concepts of planetary disturbance and reflected solar light enable Patmore to discover metaphors for various forms of male-female interaction. In contrast, Pascal's universe is notably asexual, lacking the reciprocities of gender so important to Patmore and so richly mirrored for him in Herschel's Outlines of Astronomy.

In “Deliciae Sapientiae De Amore” (“The Wise Delights of Love”), Patmore again explores the theme of virginal desire and again employs an un-Pascalian metaphor for the reciprocal interaction of astronomical bodies to figure the relation of the male lover to the untouched body of his female beloved.¹⁵ As in “The Contract” Patmore's source is Herschel's account of the yearly elliptical movement of the earth around the sun: “We must learn to look upon the sun as the comparatively motionless center about which the earth performs an annual elliptic orbit … the sun occupying one of the foci of the ellipse, and from that station quietly disseminating on all sides its light and heat; while the earth travelling round it, and presenting itself differently to it at different times of the year and day, passes through the varieties of day and night, summer and winter, which we enjoy” (p. 192). In his ode Patmore's reference to the “ellipse,” a technical concept central to Herschel's exposition of planetary movement, indicates that the source for his metaphor is likely to have been The Outlines of Astronomy:

And, once in his long year,
With praeternuptial ecstasy and fear,
By the delicious law of that ellipse
Wherein all citizens of ether move,
With hastening pace to come
Nearer, though never near,
His Love
And always inaccessible sweet Home.

(p. 413)

The last astronomical metaphor in The Unknown Eros is to be found in “The Cry of Midnight.” Once again Patmore writes against Pascal's cosmic pessimism by asserting that both the immense star Sirius, whose “intrinsic splendour [is] equal to 63:02 times that of our sun” (Herschel, p. 466), and the infinitesimal small midge's wings are part of a benign, amorous God's creation, a God who also created the extremes of the angelic St. Michael and the human species. Only frail Philosophy, “as peacock staggering underneath his tail” (p. 416), would erroneously judge human beings as deficient because they are not angels. Once again Patmore evokes contemporary astronomy (i.e., the allusion to Sirius) and its discoveries, so lucidly explained by Herschel's Outlines of Astronomy, to correct the Jansenist philosophic pessimism of Pascal for whom “man is equally incapable of truth and good” (28:37) and, at times, less powerful than the flies that “paralyse our minds [and] eat up our bodies” (22:36).

My intention has been to place Patmore within the context of a Catholic literary tradition. If we focus upon Patmore's use of astronomical metaphors and images, we see clearly, in the poetry written immediately before and after his 1864 conversion to Catholicism, his difference from the Pascal of the Pensées, who repeatedly creates an astronomy of dread to underline man's fallen, depraved, and alienated condition. Pascal's Pensées, a book we know Patmore read, becomes an unnamed literary anxiety, in Bloomian terms, whose shadow looms particularly over the odes of The Unknown Eros. Patmore uses exact astronomical metaphors, gleaned, it is evident, from Sir John Herschel's contemporary and influential Outlines of Astronomy, to counter Pascal and to assert a neo-baroque Catholic sense of the erotic intimacies that potentially link humans to an amorous God, an emphasis most clearly evident in Bernini's statues of the sexually and spiritually ecstatic St. Teresa and Blessed Ludovica Alberoni,¹⁶ which Patmore may have seen in Rome in 1864. Moreover, in Patmore's “Two Deserts” from The Unknown Eros, the reference to a particular section of Pascal's Pensées, the reflection on the “Disproportion of man,” is explicit, given the structure, imagery, and themes of both texts. In Twilight of the Idols Nietzsche cites Pascal as a preeminent example of a true Christian anti-artist, “those starved of life: those who of necessity still have to take things and sap them, emaciate them.”¹⁷ Patmore, then, attempts to become that Nietzschean impossibility, a true Christian artist, and his most evident moves in this direction are to be found in those scientifically informed astronomical metaphors, embedded strategically in those poems written immediately before and after his 1864 conversion, most notably the odes of The Unknown Eros. These metaphors seek to correct the dark Jansenist astronomy of Pascal, his great but antithetical Catholic predecessor.

Notes

1. For Tennyson and astronomy, see A. J. Meadows, The High Firmament: A Survey of Astronomy in English Literature (Leicester: Leicester Univ. Press, 1967), pp. 170-175.

2. In his Religio Poetae, Patmore writes that “you cannot read the writings of Newman, Hooker, Pascal, and St. Augustine without being impressed with the presumption that they have a real apprehension of the things they profess to believe” (London, 1898), p. 80. An early English translation of the Pensées by Joseph Walker and published by Jacob Tonson in 1688 was owned by the British Museum Library where Patmore held a position as researcher between 1846 and 1863 and which he may have read. See the reproduction of this edition in Early English Books, 1641-1700 (Ann Arbor: University Microfilms International, 1961).

3. Blaise Pascal, Pensées, trans. A. J. Krailsheimer (New York: Penguin, 1966), p. 201:95. All quotations and numbered sections of the Pensées are from this edition and quoted hereafter in the text.

4. James Parins, “Orion of Light: The Patmorean Flavor of Hopkins' ‘Wreck,’” HQ 3 (1976): 25.

5. Michael Crowe, Modern Theories of the Universe from Herschel to Hubble (Mineola, New York: Dover Publications, 1994), p. 161.

6. Although my evidence for Patmore's knowledge of Herschel's very popular Outlines of Astronomy is internal, derived from correspondences in content and language, we know that Patmore shared with his friend and correspondent Hopkins a strong interest in contemporary science; see Thomas Zaniello, Hopkins in the Age of Darwin (Iowa City: Univ. of Iowa Press, 1988), pp. 136-137.

7. Coventry Patmore, The Rod, The Root, and The Flower, ed. Derek Patmore (Freeport: Books for Libraries Press, 1968), p. 25.

8. Walter Pater, Miscellaneous Studies (London: Macmillan, 1910), p. 82.

9. Indeed in its spirited critique of Christian asceticism and its use of Pascalian aphorism, Patmore's “Aurea Dicta” and “Homo” from The Rod, The Root and The Flower show a surprising affinity with the century's greatest aphoristic critic of Christian asceticism, Frederich Nietzsche, especially the Nietzsche of The Gay Science (1882) and Thus Spake Zarathrustra (1884-1885). For example, Nietzsche affirms against the Christian denial of sensual pleasure its importance in marriage: “Sensual pleasure: the great symbolic happiness of a higher happiness and highest hope. For marriage is promised to many, and more than marriage” (Thus Spake Zarathrustra, trans. R. J. Hollingdale [Baltimore: Penguin, 1961], p. 207). Patmore, writing of the intimacies between husband and wife, asserts that “the highest angel must be overwhelmed with the confusion and terror of an intimacy altogether beyond capacity and comprehension” (p. 67). Patmore's use of aphorism in The Rod, The Root, and The Flower needs to be studied in relation to other aphoristic “dissenters” such as Pascal and Emerson (whom he read) and to Nietzsche.

10. John Maynard, Victorian Discourses on Sexuality and Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1993), p. 143.

11. Coventry Patmore, The Poems of Coventry Patmore, ed. Frederick Page (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1949), p. 220. All quotations from Patmore's poetry are from this edition. Since line numbers are not given I provide page numbers.

12. Sir John F. W. Herschel, Outlines of Astronomy (Philadelphia, 1853), p. 300. I quote from this American edition of the 4th English edition of 1851. Hereafter cited in the text.

13. Patmore, The Rod, The Root, and The Flower, p. 95. The influence of Swedenborg's doctrine of nature as a system of symbolic correspondences may derive from Patmore's readings and friendship with Henry Sutton in the 1850s. See J. C. Reid, The Mind and Art of Coventry Patmore (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1957), pp. 66-81.

14. Patmore may have been inspired to write this poem by a visit in 1866, with Aubrey DeVere, to his Sussex neighbor Dr. Prince, who had a telescope erected on his estate at Crowborough Hill (Basil Champneys, The Memoirs and Correspondence of Coventry Patmore, 2 vols. [London: G. Bell, 1900], 1:236).

15. See Maynard's discussion of this poem and Patmore's concept of the erotics of virginity, pp. 245-250.

16. See Jed Perl, “Ecstacy,” The New Republic 4,388 (February 22, 1999): 32-37.

17. Frederick Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, trans. Duncan Lange (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1998), p. 47.