Pippa Middleton, I learnt from the Daily Telegraph, has a ‘passion’ for writing. Justin Welby, the next Archbishop of Canterbury, the BBC said, has a ‘passion for resolving conflict’. The Times, in a piece about entrepreneurs, quoted a lawyer as saying: ‘Passion is very, very important.’
Can any of this be true? Certainly not if passion is meant in the pleasantly old-fashioned sense found in Alice. Tweedledum points at his broken rattle, saying: ‘Do you see THAT?’ in a voice ‘choking with passion’. Humpty Dumpty accuses Alice of listening at doors, ‘breaking into a sudden passion’. It was a nursery emotion 150 years ago, and would not help in resolving conflicts, writing books or starting a business.
Oddly enough, Lewis Carroll had an older sense of passion in his mind as he wrote Through the Looking Glass. The Garden of Live Flowers is based on a section of Tennyson’s Maud (‘Come into the garden, Maud’ — you probably remember Michael Balfe’s setting sung by Webster Booth accompanied by Gerald Moore). Tennyson wrote: ‘There has fallen a splendid tear/ From the passion-flower at the gate… She is coming, my own, my sweet;/ Were it ever so airy a tread,/ My heart would hear her and beat.’ Lewis Carroll makes it: ‘ “She’s coming!” cried the Larkspur. “I hear her footstep, thump, thump, thump”.’ He expected children to get the reference and the joke, but he changed Tennyson’s passion-flower into a tiger-lily in consideration of the flower’s name. ‘The parts of the flower were imagined to correspond to the instruments and circumstances of Jesus’s Passion: the three stigmas to the nails, the five stamens to the wounds, the corona to the crown of thorns,’ says the OED. It is in this sense, the Passion of Jesus, that passion was first used in English, before the Norman Conquest.
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