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Title: Homage to John Dryden
       Three Essays on Poetry of the Seventeenth Century

Author: Thomas Stearns Eliot

Release Date: October 25, 2020 [EBook #63547]

Language: English

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HOMAGE TO
JOHN DRYDEN



THREE ESSAYS ON POETRY OF THE
SEVENTEENTH CENTURY



T. S. ELIOT




PUBLISHED BY LEONARD AND VIRGINIA WOOLF
AT THE HOGARTH PRESS, TAVISTOCK SQUARE
LONDON, W.C.1

1924




TO

GEORGE SAINTSBURY




PREFACE


The three essays composing this small book were written several years
ago for publication in the "Times Literary Supplement," to the editor of
which I owe the encouragement to write them, and now the permission to
reprint them. Inadequate as periodical criticism, they need still more
justification in a book. Some apology, therefore, is required.

My intention had been to write a series of papers on the poetry of the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: beginning with Chapman and Donne,
and ending with Johnson. This forbidden fruit of impossible leisure
might have filled two volumes. At best, it would not have pretended to
completeness; the subjects would have been restricted by my own
ignorance and caprice, but the series would have included Aurelian
Townshend and Bishop King, and the authors of "Cooper's Hill" and "The
Vanity of Human Wishes," as well as Swift and Pope. That which
dissipation interrupts, the infirmities of age come to terminate. One
learns to conduct one's life with greater economy: I have abandoned this
design in the pursuit of other policies. I have long felt that the
poetry of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, even much of that of
inferior inspiration, possesses an elegance and a dignity absent from
the popular and pretentious verse of the Romantic Poets and their
successors. To have urged this claim persuasively would have led me
indirectly into considerations of politics, education, and theology
which I no longer care to approach in this way. I hope that these three
papers may in spite of and partly because of their defects preserve in
cryptogram certain notions which, if expressed directly, would be
destined to immediate obloquy, followed by perpetual oblivion.


T. S. ELIOT.




CONTENTS
PREFACE
I. JOHN DRYDEN
II. THE METAPHYSICAL POETS
III. ANDREW MARVELL




I. JOHN DRYDEN


If the prospect of delight be wanting (which alone justifies the perusal
of poetry) we may let the reputation of Dryden sleep in the manuals of
literature. To those who are genuinely insensible of his genius (and
these are probably the majority of living readers of poetry) we can only
oppose illustrations of the following proposition: that their
insensibility does not merely signify indifference to satire and wit,
but lack of perception of qualities not confined to satire and wit and
present in the work of other poets whom these persons feel that they
understand. To those whose taste in poetry is formed entirely upon the
English poetry of the nineteenth-century--to the majority--it is
difficult to explain or excuse Dryden: the twentieth century is still
the nineteenth, although it may in time acquire its own character. The
nineteenth century had, like every other, limited tastes and peculiar
fashions; and, like every other, it was unaware of its own limitations.
Its tastes and fashions had no place for Dryden; yet Dryden is one of
the tests of a catholic appreciation of poetry.

He is a successor of Jonson, and therefore the descendant of Marlowe; he
is the ancestor of nearly all that is best in the poetry of the
eighteenth century. Once we have mastered Dryden--and by mastery is
meant a full and essential enjoyment, not the enjoyment of a private
whimsical fashion--we can extract whatever enjoyment and edification
there is in his contemporaries--Oldham, Denham, or the less remunerative
Waller; and still more his successors--not only Pope, but Phillips,
Churchill, Gray, Johnson, Cowper, Goldsmith. His inspiration is
prolonged in Crabbe and Byron; it even extends, as Mr. van Doren
cleverly points out, to Poe. Even the poets responsible for the revolt
were well acquainted with him: Wordsworth knew his work, and Keats
invoked his aid. We cannot fully enjoy or rightly estimate a hundred
years of English poetry unless we fully enjoy Dryden; and to enjoy
Dryden means to pass beyond the limitations of the nineteenth century
into a new freedom.


All, all of a piece throughout!
Thy Chase had a Beast in View;
Thy Wars brought nothing about;
Thy Lovers were all untrue.
'Tis well an Old Age is out,
And time to begin a New.

* * * *

The world's great age begins anew,
The golden years return,
The earth doth like a snake renew
Her winter weeds outworn:
Heaven smiles, and faiths and empires gleam
Like wrecks of a dissolving dream.


The first of these passages is by Dryden, the second by Shelley; the
second is found in the "Oxford Book of English Verse," the first is not;
yet we might defy anyone to show that the second is superior on
intrinsically poetic merit. It is easy to see why the second should
appeal more readily to the nineteenth, and what is left of the
nineteenth under the name of the twentieth, century. It is not so easy
to see propriety in an image which divests a snake of "winter weeds";
and this is a sort of blemish which would have been noticed more quickly
by a contemporary of Dryden than by a contemporary of Shelley.

These reflections are occasioned by an admirable book on Dryden which
has appeared at this very turn of time, when taste is becoming perhaps
more fluid and ready for a new mould.[1] It is a book which every
practitioner of English verse should study. The consideration is so
thorough, the matter so compact, the appreciation so just, temperate,
and enthusiastic, and supplied with such copious and well-chosen
extracts from the poetry, the suggestion of astutely placed facts leads
our thought so far, that there only remain to mention, as defects which
do not detract from its value, two omissions: the prose is not dealt
with, and the plays are somewhat slighted. What is especially impressive
is the exhibition of the very wide range of Dryden's work, shown by the
quotations of every species. Everyone knows "MacFlecknoe," and parts of
"Absalom and Achitophel"; in consequence, Dryden has sunk by the persons
he has elevated to distinction--Shadwell of Settle, Shaftesbury and
Buckingham. Dryden was much more than a satirist; to dispose of him as a
satirist is to place an obstacle in the way of our understanding. At all
events, we must satisfy ourselves of our definition of the term satire;
we must not allow our familiarity with the word to blind us to
differences and refinements; we must not assume that satire is a fixed
type, and fixed to the prosaic, suited only to prose; we must
acknowledge that satire is not the same thing in the hands of two
different writers of genius. The connotations of "satire" and of "wit,"
in short, may be only prejudices of nineteenth-century taste. Perhaps,
we think, after reading Mr. van Doren's book, a juster view of Dryden
may be given by beginning with some other portion of his work than his
celebrated satires; but even here there is much more present, and much
more that is poetry, than is usually supposed.

The piece of Dryden's which is the most fun, which is the most sustained
display of surprise after surprise of wit from line to line, is
"MacFlecknoe." Dryden's method here is something very near to parody; he
applies vocabulary, images, and ceremony which arouse epic associations
of grandeur, to make an enemy helplessly ridiculous. But the effect,
though disastrous for the enemy, is very different from that of the
humour which merely belittles, such as the satire of Mark Twain. Dryden
continually enhances: he makes his object great, in a way contrary to
expectation; and the total effect is due to the transformation of the
ridiculous into poetry. As an example may be taken a fine passage
plagiarized from Cowley, from lines which Dryden must have marked well,
for he quotes them directly in one of his prefaces. Here is Cowley:--


Where their vast courts the mother-waters keep,
And undisturbed by moons in silence sleep. . . .
Beneath the dens where unfledged tempests lie,
And infant winds their tender voices try.


In "MacFlecknoe" this becomes:--


Where their vast courts the mother-strumpets keep,
And undisturbed by watch, in silence sleep.
Near these, a nursery erects its head,
Where queens are formed, and future heroes bred;
Where unfledged actors learn to laugh and cry,
Where infant punks their tender voices try,
And little Maximins the gods defy.


The passage from Cowley is by no means despicable verse. But it is a
commonplace description of commonly poetic objects; it has not the
element of _surprise_ so essential to poetry, and this Dryden provides.
A clever versifier might have written Cowley's lines; only a poet could
have made what Dryden made of them. It is impossible to dismiss his
verses as "prosaic"; turn them into prose and they are transmuted, the
fragrance is gone. The reproach of the prosaic, levelled at Dryden,
rests upon a confusion between the emotions considered to be
poetic--which is a matter allowing considerable latitude of fashion--and
the _result_ of personal emotion in poetry; and, in the third place,
there is the emotion _depicted_ by the poet in some kinds of poetry, of
which the "Testaments" of Villon is an example. Again, there is the
intellect, the originality and independence and clarity of what we
vaguely call the poet's "point of view." Our valuation of poetry, in
short, depends upon several considerations, upon the permanent and upon
the mutable and upon the transitory. When we try to isolate the
essentially poetic, we bring our pursuit in the end to something
insignificant; our standards vary with every poet whom we consider. All
we can hope to do, in the attempt to introduce some order into our
preferences, is to clarify our reasons for finding pleasure in the
poetry that we like.

With regard to Dryden, therefore, we can say this much. Our taste in
English poetry has been largely founded upon a partial perception of the
value of Shakespeare and Milton, a perception which dwells upon
sublimity of theme and action. Shakespeare had a great deal more; he had
nearly everything to satisfy our various desires for poetry. The point
is that the depreciation or neglect of Dryden is not due to the fact
that his work is not poetry, but to a prejudice that the material, the
feelings, out of which he built is not poetic. Thus Matthew Arnold
observes, in mentioning Dryden and Pope together, that "their poetry is
conceived and composed in their wits, genuine poetry is conceived in the
soul." Arnold was, perhaps, not altogether the detached critic when he
wrote this line; he may have been stirred to a defence of his own
poetry, conceived and composed in the soul of a mid-century Oxford
graduate. Pater remarks that Dryden--


"Loved to emphasize the distinction between poetry and prose, the
protest against their confusion coming with somewhat diminished effect
from one whose poetry was so prosaic."

But Dryden was right, and the sentence of Pater is cheap journalism.
Hazlitt, who had perhaps the most uninteresting mind of all our
distinguished critics, says--

"Dryden and Pope are the great masters of the artificial style of poetry
in our language, as the poets of whom I have already treated--Chaucer,
Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton--were of the natural."


In one sentence Hazlitt has committed at least four crimes against
taste. It is bad enough to lump Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, and
Milton together under the denomination of "natural"; it is bad to commit
Shakespeare to one style only; it is bad to join Dryden and Pope
together; but the last absurdity is the contrast, of Milton, our
greatest master of the _artificial_ style, with Dryden, whose style
(vocabulary, syntax, and order of thought) is in a high degree natural.
And what all these objections come to, we repeat, is a repugnance for
the material out of which Dryden's poetry is built.

It would be truer to say, indeed, even in the form of the unpersuasive
paradox, that Dryden is distinguished principally by his poetic ability.
We prize him, as we do Mallarmé, for what he made of his material. Our
estimate is only in part the appreciation of ingenuity: in the end the
result is poetry. Much of Dryden's unique merit consists in his ability
to make the small into the great, the prosaic into the poetic, the
trivial into the magnificent. In this he differs not only from Milton,
who required a canvas of the largest size, but from Pope, who required
one of the smallest. If you compare any satiric "character" of Pope with
one of Dryden, you will see that the method and intention are widely
divergent. When Pope alters, he diminishes; he is a master of miniature.
The singular skill of his portrait of Addison, for example, in the
"Epistle to Arbuthnot," depends upon the justice and reserve, the
apparent determination not to exaggerate. The genius of Pope is not for
caricature. But the effect of the portraits of Dryden is to transform
the object into something greater, as were transformed the verses of
Cowley quoted above.


A fiery soul, which working out its way,
Fretted the pigmy body to decay:
And o'er informed the tenement of clay.


These lines are not merely a magnificent tribute. They create the object
which they contemplate; the poetry is purer than anything in Pope except
the last lines of the "Dunciad." Dryden is in fact much nearer to the
master of comic creation than to Pope. As in Jonson, the effect is far
from laughter; the comic is the material, the result is poetry. The
Civic Guards of Rhodes--


The country rings around with loud alarms,
And raw in fields the rude militia swarms;
Mouths without hands; maintained at vast expense,
In peace a charge, in war a weak defence;
Stout once a month they march, a blust'ring band,
And ever, but in times of need, at hand;
This was the morn, when issuing on the guard,
Drawn up in rank and file they stood prepared
Of seeming arms to make a short essay,
Then hasten to be drunk, the business of the day.


Sometimes the wit appears as a delicate flavour to the magnificence,
as in "Alexander's Feast":--


Sooth'd with the sound the king grew vain;
Fought all his battles o'er again;
And thrice he routed all his foes, and thrice he slew the slain.


The great advantage of Dryden over Milton is that while the former is
always in control of his ascent, and can rise or fall at will (and how
masterfully, like his own Timotheus, he directs the transitions!), the
latter has elected a perch from which he cannot afford to fall, and from
which he is in danger of slipping.


food alike those pure
Intelligential substances require
As doth your Rational; and both contain
Within them every lower faculty
Of sense, whereby they hear, see, smell, touch, taste,
Tasting concoct, digest, assimilate,
And corporeal to incorporeal turn.


Dryden might have made poetry out of that; his translation from
Lucretius is poetry. But we have an ingenious example, on which to test
our contrast of Dryden and Milton: it is Dryden's "Opera," called _The
State of Innocence and Fall of Man_, of which Nathaniel Lee neatly says
in his preface:--


Milton did the wealthy mine disclose,
And rudely cast what you could well dispose:
He roughly drew, on an old-fashioned ground,
A chaos, for no perfect world were found,
Till through the heap, your mighty genius shined.


In the author's preface Dryden acknowledges his debt generously
enough:--

"The original being undoubtedly, one of the greatest, most
noble, and most sublime poems, which either this age or nation
has produced."


The poem begins auspiciously:--


_Lucifer_: Is this the seat our conqueror has given?
And this the climate we must change for Heaven?
These regions and this realm my wars have got;
This mournful empire is the loser's lot:
In liquid burnings, or on dry to dwell,
Is all the sad variety of hell.


It is an early work; it is on the whole a feeble work; it is not
deserving of sustained comparison with "Paradise Lost." But "all the sad
variety of hell"! Dryden is already stirring; he has assimilated what he
could from Milton; and he has shown himself capable of producing as
splendid verse.

The capacity for assimilation, and the consequent extent of range, are
conspicuous qualities of Dryden. He advanced and exhibited his variety
by constant translation; and his translations of Horace, of Ovid, of
Lucretius, are admirable. His gravest defects are supposed to be
displayed in his dramas, but if these were more read they might be more
praised. From the point of view of either the Elizabethan or the French
drama they are obviously inferior; but the charge of inferiority loses
part of its force if we admit that Dryden was not quite trying to
compete with either, but was pursuing a direction of his own. He created
no character; and although his arrangements of plot manifest exceptional
ingenuity, it is the pure magnificence of diction, of poetic diction,
that keeps his plays alive:--


How I loved
Witness ye days and nights, and all ye hours,
That danced away with down upon your feet,
As all your business were to count my passion.
One day passed by, and nothing saw but love;--
Another came, and still 'twas only love:
The suns were wearied out with looking on,
And I untired with loving.
I saw you every day and all the day;
And every day was still but as the first:
So eager was I still to see you more . . .

While within your arms I lay,
The world fell mould'ring from my hands each hour.


Such language is pure Dryden: it sounds, in Mr. van Doren's phrase,
"like a gong." _All for Love_, from which the lines are taken, is
Dryden's best play, and this is perhaps the highest reach. In general,
he is best in his plays when dealing with situations which do not demand
great emotional concentration; when his situation is more trivial, and
he can practise his art of making the small great. The back-talk between
the Emperor and his Empress Nourmahal, in _Aurungzebe_ is admirable
purple comedy:--


_Emperor_: Such virtue is the plague of human life:
A virtuous woman, but a cursed wife.
In vain of pompous chastity y'are proud:
Virtue's adultery of the tongue, when loud.
I, with less pain, a prostitute could bear,
Than the shrill sound of virtue, virtue hear.
In unchaste wives--
There's yet a kind of recompensing ease:
Vice keeps 'em humble, gives 'em care to please:
But against clamourous virtue, what defence?
It stops our mouths, and gives your noise pretence. . .

What can be sweeter than our native home?
Thither for ease, and soft repose, we come;
Home is the sacred refuge of our life:
Secure from all approaches but a wife.
If thence we fly, the cause admits no doubt:
None but an inmate foe could force us out.
Clamours, our privacies uneasy make:
Birds leave their nests disturbed, and beasts their haunts
forsake.


But drama is a mixed form; pure magnificence will not carry it through.
The poet who attempts to achieve a play by the single force of the word
provokes comparison, however strictly he confine himself to his
capacity, with poets of other gifts. Corneille and Racine do not attain
their triumphs by magnificence of this sort; they have concentration
also, and, in the midst of their phrases, an undisturbed attention to
the human soul as they knew it.

Nor is Dryden unchallenged in his supreme ability to make the
ridiculous, or the trivial, great.


Avez-vous observé que maints cercueils de vieilles
Sont presque aussi petits que celui d'un enfant?


Those lines are the work of a man whose verse is as magnificent as
Dryden's, and who could see profounder possibilities in wit, and in
violently joined images, than ever were in Dryden's mind. For Dryden,
with all his intellect, had a commonplace mind. His powers were, we
believe, wider, but no greater, than Milton's; he was confined by
boundaries as impassable, though less strait. He bears a curious
antithetical resemblance to Swinburne. Swinburne was also a master of
words, but Swinburne's words are all suggestions and no denotation; if
they suggest nothing, it is because they suggest too much. Dryden's
words, on the other hand, are precise, they state immensely, but their
suggestiveness is almost nothing.


That short dark passage to a future state;
That melancholy riddle of a breath,
That something, or that nothing, after death.


is a riddle, but not melancholy enough, in Dryden's splendid verse. The
question, which has certainly been waiting, may justly be asked:
whether, without this which Dryden lacks, verse can be poetry? What is
man to decide what poetry is? Dryden's use of language is not, like that
of Swinburne, weakening and demoralizing. Let us take as a final test
his elegy upon Oldham, which deserves not to be mutilated:--


Farewell, too little and too lately known,
Whom I began to think and call my own;
For sure our souls were near allied, and thine
Cast in the same poetic mould with mine.
One common note on either lyre did strike,
And knaves and fools we both abhorred alike.
To the same goal did both our studies drive;
The last set out the soonest did arrive.
Thus Nisus fell upon the slippery place,
Whilst his young friend performed and won the race.
O early ripe! to thy abundant store
What could advancing age have added more?
It might (what nature never gives the young)
Have taught the numbers of thy native tongue.
But satire needs not those, and wit will shine
Through the harsh cadence of a rugged line.
A noble error, and but seldom made,
When poets are by too much force betrayed.
Thy generous fruits, though gathered ere their prime,
Still showed a quickness; and maturing time
But mellows what we write to the dull sweets of rhyme.
Once more, hail, and farewell; farewell, thou young,
But ah! too short, Marcellus of our tongue!
Thy brows with ivy and with laurels bound;
But fate and gloomy night encompass thee around.


From the perfection of such an elegy we cannot detract; the lack of
nebula is compensated by the satisfying completeness of the statement.
Dryden lacked what his master Jonson possessed, a large and unique view
of life; he lacked insight, he lacked profundity. But where Dryden fails
to satisfy, the nineteenth-century does not satisfy us either; and where
that century has condemned him, it is itself condemned. In the next
revolution of taste it is possible that poets may turn to the study of
Dryden. He remains one of those who have set standards for English verse
which, it is desperate to ignore.


[Footnote 1: "John Dryden," by Mark van Doren (New York: Harcourt,
Brace and Howe).]




II. THE METAPHYSICAL
POETS


By collecting these poems[2] from the work of a generation more often
named than read, and more often read than profitably studied, Professor
Grierson has rendered a service of some importance. Certainly the reader
will meet with many poems already preserved in other anthologies, at the
same time that he discovers poems such as those of Aurelian Townshend or
Lord Herbert of Cherbury here included. But the function of such an
anthology as this is neither that of Professor Saintsbury's admirable
edition of Caroline poets nor that of the "Oxford Book of English
Verse." Mr. Grierson's book is in itself a piece of criticism, and a
provocation of criticism; and we think that he was right in including so
many poems of Donne, elsewhere (though not in many editions) accessible,
as documents in the case of "metaphysical poetry." The phrase has long
done duty as a term of abuse, or as the label of a quaint and pleasant
taste. The question is to what extent the so-called metaphysicals formed
a school (in our own time we should say a "movement"), and how far this
so-called school or movement is a digression from the main current.

Not only is it extremely difficult to define metaphysical poetry, but
difficult to decide what poets practise it and in which of their verses.
The poetry of Donne (to whom Marvell and Bishop King are sometimes
nearer than any of the other authors) is late Elizabethan, its feeling
often very close to that of Chapman. The "courtly" poetry is derivative
from Jonson, who borrowed liberally from the Latin; it expires in the
next century with the sentiment and witticism of Prior. There is finally
the devotional verse of Herbert, Vaughan, and Crashaw (echoed long after
by Christina Rossetti and Francis Thompson); Crashaw, sometimes more
profound and less sectarian than the others, has a quality which returns
through the Elizabethan period to the early Italians. It is difficult to
find any precise use of metaphor, simile, or other conceit, which is
common to all the poets and at the same time important enough as an
element of style to isolate these poets as a group. Donne, and often
Cowley, employ a device which is sometimes considered characteristically
"metaphysical"; the elaboration (contrasted with the condensation) of a
figure of speech to the farthest stage to which ingenuity can carry it.
Thus Cowley develops the commonplace comparison of the world to a
chess-board through long stanzas ("To Destiny"), and Donne, with more
grace, in "A Valediction," the comparison of two lovers to a pair of
compasses. But elsewhere we find, instead of the mere explication of the
content of a comparison, a development by rapid association of thought
which requires considerable agility on the part of the reader.


On a round ball
A workeman that hath copies by, can lay
An Europe, Afrique, and an Asia,
And quickly make that, which was nothing, _All_,
So doth each teare,
Which thee doth weare,
A globe, yea world by that impression grow,
Till thy tears mixt with mine doe overflow
This world, by waters sent from thee, my heaven dissolved so.


Here we find at least two connexions which are not implicit in the first
figure, but are forced upon it by the poet: from the geographer's globe
to the tear, and the tear to the deluge. On the other hand, some of
Donne's most successful and characteristic effects are secured by brief
words and sudden contrasts--


A bracelet of bright hair about the bone,


where the most powerful effect is produced by the sudden contrast of
associations of "bright hair" and of "bone." This telescoping of images
and multiplied association is characteristic of the phrase of some of
the dramatists of the period which Donne knew: not to mention
Shakespeare, it is frequent in Middleton, Webster, and Tourneur, and is
one of the sources of the vitality of their language.

Johnson, who employed the term "metaphysical poets," apparently having
Donne, Cleveland, and Cowley chiefly in mind, remarks of them that "the
most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together." The force of
this impeachment lies in the failure of the conjunction, the fact that
often the ideas are yoked but not united; and if we are to judge of
styles of poetry by their abuse, enough examples may be found in
Cleveland to justify Johnson's condemnation. But a degree of
heterogeneity of material compelled into unity by the operation of the
poet's mind is omnipresent in poetry. We need not select for
illustration such a line as--


Notre âme est un trois-mâts cherchant son Icarie;


we may find it in some of the best lines of Johnson himself ("The
Vanity of Human Wishes"):--


His fate was destined to a barren strand,
A petty fortress, and a dubious hand;
He left a name at which the world grew pale,
To point a moral, or adorn a tale,


where the effect is due to a contrast of ideas, different in degree but
the same in principle, as that which Johnson mildly reprehended. And in
one of the finest poems of the age (a poem which could not have been
written in any other age), the "Exequy" of Bishop King, the extended
comparison is used with perfect success: the idea and the simile become
one, in the passage in which the Bishop illustrates his impatience to
see his dead wife, under the figure of a journey:--


Stay for me there; I will not faile
To meet thee in that hollow Vale.
And think not much of my delay;
I am already on the way,
And follow thee with all the speed
Desire can make, or sorrows breed.
Each minute is a short degree,
And ev'ry houre a step towards thee.
At night when I betake to rest,
Next morn I rise nearer my West
Of life, almost by eight houres sail,
Than when sleep breath'd his drowsy gale. . . .
But heark! My Pulse, like a soft Drum
Beats my approach, tells _Thee_ I come;
And slow howere my marches be,
I shall at last sit down by _Thee._


(In the last few lines there is that effect of terror which is several
times attained by one of Bishop King's admirers, Edgar Poe.) Again, we
may justly take these quatrains from Lord Herbert's Ode, stanzas which
would, we think, be immediately pronounced to be of the metaphysical
school:--


So when from hence we shall be gone,
And be no more, nor you, nor I,
As one another's mystery,
Each shall be both, yet both but one.

This said, in her up-lifted face,
Her eyes, which did that beauty crown,
Were like two starrs, that having faln down,
Look up again to find their place:

While such a moveless silent peace
Did seize on their becalmed sense,
One would have thought some influence
Their ravished spirits did possess.


There is nothing in these lines (with the possible exception of the
stars, a simile not at once grasped, but lovely and justified) which
fits Johnson's general observations on the metaphysical poets in his
essay on Cowley. A good deal resides in the richness of association
which is at the same time borrowed from and given to the word
"becalmed"; but the meaning is clear, the language simple and elegant.
It is to be observed that the language of these poets is as a rule
simple and pure; in the verse of George Herbert this simplicity is
carried as far as it can go--a simplicity emulated without success by
numerous modern poets. The _structure_ of the sentences, on the other
hand, is sometimes far from simple, but this is not a vice; it is a
fidelity to thought and feeling. The effect, at its best, is far less
artificial than that of an ode by Gray. And as this fidelity induces
variety of thought and feeling, so it induces variety of music. We doubt
whether, in the eighteenth century, could be found two poems in
nominally the same metre, so dissimilar as Marvell's "Coy Mistress" and
Crashaw's "Saint Teresa"; the one producing an effect of great speed by
the use of short syllables, and the other an ecclesiastical solemnity by
the use of long ones:--


Love, thou art absolute sole lord
Of life and death.


If so shrewd and sensitive (though so limited) a critic as Johnson
failed to define metaphysical poetry by its faults, it is worth while to
inquire whether we may not have more success by adopting the opposite
method: by assuming that the poets of the seventeenth century (up to the
Revolution) were the direct and normal development of the precedent age;
and, without prejudicing their case by the adjective "metaphysical,"
consider whether their virtue was not something permanently valuable,
which subsequently disappeared, but ought not to have disappeared.
Johnson has hit, perhaps by accident, on one of their peculiarities,
when he observes that "their attempts were always analytic"; he would
not agree that, after the dissociation, they put the material together
again in a new unity.

It is certain that the dramatic verse of the later Elizabethan and early
Jacobean poets expresses a degree of development of sensibility which is
not found in any of the prose, good as it often is. If we except
Marlowe, a man of prodigious intelligence, these dramatists were
directly or indirectly (it is at least a tenable theory) affected by
Montaigne. Even if we except also Jonson and Chapman, these two were
notably erudite, and were notably men who incorporated their erudition
into their sensibility: their mode of feeling was directly and freshly
altered by their reading and thought. In Chapman especially there is a
direct sensuous apprehension of thought, or a recreation of thought into
feeling, which is exactly what we find in Donne:--


in this one thing, all the discipline
Of manners and of manhood is contained;
A man to join himself with th' Universe
In his main sway, and make in all things fit
One with that All, and go on, round as it;
Not plucking from the whole his wretched part,
And into straits, or into nought revert,
Wishing the complete Universe might be
Subject to such a rag of it as he;
But to consider great Necessity.


We compare this with some modern passage:--


No, when the fight begins within himself,
A man's worth something. God stoops o'er his head,
Satan looks up between his feet--both tug--
He's left, himself, i' the middle; the soul wakes
And grows. Prolong that battle through his life!


It is perhaps somewhat less fair, though very tempting (as both poets
are concerned with the perpetuation of love by offspring), to compare
with the stanzas already quoted from Lord Herbert's Ode the following
from Tennyson:--


One walked between his wife and child,
With measured footfall firm and mild,
And now and then he gravely smiled.
The prudent partner of his blood
Leaned on him, faithful, gentle, good,
Wearing the rose of womanhood.
And in their double love secure.
The little maiden walked demure,
Pacing with downward eyelids pure.
These three made unity so sweet,
My frozen heart began to beat,
Remembering its ancient heat.


The difference is not a simple difference of degree between poets. It is
something which had happened to the mind of England between the time of
Donne or Lord Herbert of Cherbury and the time of Tennyson and Browning;
it is the difference between the intellectual poet and the reflective
poet, Tennyson and Browning are poets, and they think; but they do not
feel their thought as immediately as the odour of a rose. A thought to
Donne was an experience; it modified his sensibility. When a poet's mind
is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating
disparate experience; the ordinary man's experience is chaotic,
irregular, fragmentary. The latter falls in love, or reads Spinoza, and
these two experiences have nothing to do with each other, or with the
noise of the typewriter or the smell of cooking; in the mind of the poet
these experiences are always forming new wholes.

We may express the difference by the following theory:--The poets of the
seventeenth century, the successors of the dramatists of the sixteenth,
possessed a mechanism of sensibility which could devour any kind of
experience. They are simple, artificial, difficult, or fantastic, as
their predecessors were; no less nor more than Dante, Guido Cavalcanti,
Guinizelli, or Cino. In the seventeenth century a dissociation of
sensibility set in, from which we have never recovered; and this
dissociation, as is natural, was due to the influence of the two most
powerful poets of the century, Milton and Dryden. Each of these men
performed certain poetic functions so magnificently well that the
magnitude of the effect concealed the absence of others. The language
went on and in some respects improved; the best verse of Collins, Gray,
Johnson, and even Goldsmith satisfies some of our fastidious demands
better than that of Donne or Marvell or King. But while the language
became more refined, the feeling became more crude. The feeling, the
sensibility, expressed in the "Country Churchyard" (to say nothing of
Tennyson and Browning) is cruder than that in the "Coy Mistress."

The second effect of the influence of Milton and Dryden followed from
the first, and was therefore slow in manifestation. The sentimental age
began early in the eighteenth century, and continued. The poets revolted
against the ratiocinative, the descriptive; they thought and felt by
fits, unbalanced; they reflected. In one or two passages of Shelley's
"Triumph of Life," in the second "Hyperion," there are traces of a
struggle toward unification of sensibility. But Keats and Shelley died,
and Tennyson and Browning ruminated.

After this brief exposition of a theory--too brief, perhaps, to carry
conviction--we may ask, what would have been the fate of the
"metaphysical" had the current of poetry descended in a direct line from
them, as it descended in a direct line to them? They would not,
certainly, be classified as metaphysical. The possible interests of a
poet are unlimited; the more intelligent he is the better; the more
intelligent he is the more likely that he will have interests: our only
condition is that he turn them into poetry, and not merely meditate on
them poetically. A philosophical theory which has entered into poetry is
established, for its truth or falsity in one sense ceases to matter, and
its truth in another sense is proved. The poets in question have, like
other poets, various faults. But they were, at best, engaged in the task
of trying to find the verbal equivalent for states of mind and feeling.
And this means both that they are more mature, and that they wear
better, than later poets of certainly not less literary ability.

It is not a permanent necessity that poets should be interested in
philosophy, or in any other subject. We can only say that it appears
likely that poets in our civilization, as it exists at present, must be
_difficult._ Our civilization comprehends great variety and complexity,
and this variety and complexity, playing upon a refined sensibility,
must produce various and complex results. The poet must become more and
more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to
dislocate if necessary, language into his meaning. (A brilliant and
extreme statement of this view, with which it is not requisite to
associate oneself, is that of M. Jean Epstein, "La Poésie
d'aujourd-hui.") Hence we get something which looks very much like the
conceit--we get, in fact, a method curiously similar to that of the
"metaphysical poets," similar also in its use of obscure words and of
simple phrasing.


O géraniums diaphanes, guerroyeurs sortilèges,
Sacrilèges monomanes!
Emballages, dévergondages, douches! O pressoirs
Des vendanges des grands soirs!
Layettes aux abois,
Thyrses au fond des bois!
Transfusions, représailles,
Relevailles, compresses et l'éternal potion,
Angélus! n'en pouvoir plus
De débâcles nuptiales! de débâcles nuptiales!


The same poet could write also simply:--


Elle est bien loin, elle pleure,
Le grand vent se lamente aussi . . .


Jules Laforgue, and Tristan Corbière in many of his poems, are nearer
to the "school of Donne" than any modern English poet. But poets more
classical than they have the same essential quality of transmuting ideas
into sensations, of transforming an observation into a state of mind.


Pour l'enfant, amoureux de cartes et d'estampes,
L'univers est égal à son vaste appétit.
Ah, que le monde est grand à la clarté des lampes!
Aux yeux du souvenir que le monde est petit!


In French literature the great master of the seventeenth
century--Racine--and the great master of the nineteenth--Baudelaire--are
more like each other than they are like anyone else. The greatest two
masters of diction are also the greatest two psychologists, the most
curious explorers of the soul. It is interesting to speculate whether it
is not a misfortune that two of the greatest masters of diction in our
language, Milton and Dryden, triumph with a dazzling disregard of the
soul. If we continued to produce Miltons and Drydens it might not so
much matter, but as things are it is a pity that English poetry has
remained so incomplete. Those who object to the "artificiality" of
Milton or Dryden sometimes tell us to "look into our hearts and write."
But that is not looking deep enough; Racine or Donne looked into a good
deal more than the heart. One must look into the cerebral cortex, the
nervous system, and the digestive tracts.

May we not conclude, then, that Donne, Crashaw, Vaughan, Herbert and
Lord Herbert, Marvell, King, Cowley at his best, are in the direct
current of English poetry, and that their faults should be reprimanded
by this standard rather than coddled by antiquarian affection? They have
been enough praised in terms which are implicit limitations because they
are "metaphysical" or "witty," "quaint" or "obscure," though at their
best they have not these attributes more than other serious poets. On
the other hand, we must not reject the criticism of Johnson (a dangerous
person to disagree with) without having mastered it, without having
assimilated the Johnsonian canons of taste. In reading the celebrated
passage in his essay on Cowley we must remember that by wit he clearly
means something more serious than we usually mean to-day; in his
criticism of their versification we must remember in what a narrow
discipline he was trained, but also how well trained; we must remember
that Johnson tortures chiefly the chief offenders, Cowley and Cleveland.
It would be a fruitful work, and one requiring a substantial book, to
break up the classification of Johnson (for there has been none since)
and exhibit these poets in all their difference of kind and of degree,
from the massive music of Donne to the faint, pleasing tinkle of
Aurelian Townshend--whose "Dialogue between a Pilgrim and Time" is one
of the few regrettable omissions from this excellent anthology.


[Footnote 2: "Metaphysical Lyrics and Poems of the Seventeenth Century":
Donne to Butler. Selected and edited, with an Essay, by Herbert J. C.
Grierson (Oxford: Clarendon Press. London: Milford. 6s. net).]




III. ANDREW MARVELL


The tercentenary of the former member for Hull deserves not only the
celebration proposed by that favoured borough, but a little serious
reflection upon his writing. That is an act of piety, which is very
different from the resurrection of a deceased reputation. Marvell has
stood high for some years; his best poems are not very many, and not
only must be well known, from the "Golden Treasury" and the "Oxford Book
of English Verse," but must also have been enjoyed by numerous readers.
His grave needs neither rose nor rue nor laurel; there is no imaginary
justice to be done; we may think about him, if there be need for
thinking, for our own benefit, not his. To bring the poet back to
life--the great, the perennial, task of criticism--is in this case to
squeeze the drops of the essence of two or three poems; even confining
ourselves to these, we may find some precious liquor unknown to the
present age. Not to determine rank, but to isolate this quality, is the
critical labour. The fact that of all Marvell's verse, which is itself
not a great quantity, the really valuable part consists of a very few
poems indicates that the unknown quality of which we speak is probably a
literary rather than a personal quality; or, more truly, that it is a
quality of a civilization, of a traditional habit of life. A poet like
Donne, or like Baudelaire or Laforgue, may almost be considered the
inventor of an attitude, a system of feeling or of morals. Donne is
difficult to analyse: what appears at one time a curious personal point
of view may at another time appear rather the precise concentration of a
kind of feeling diffused in the air about him. Donne and his shroud, the
shroud and his motive for wearing it, are inseparable, but they are not
the same thing. The seventeenth century sometimes seems for more than a
moment to gather up and to digest into its art all the experience of the
human mind which (from the same point of view) the later centuries seem
to have been partly engaged in repudiating. But Donne would have been an
individual at any time and place; Marvell's best verse is the product of
European, that is to say Latin, culture.

Out of that high style developed from Marlowe through Jonson (for
Shakespeare does not lend himself to these genealogies) the seventeenth
century separated two qualities: wit and magniloquence. Neither is as
simple or as apprehensible as its name seems to imply, and the two are
not in practice antithetical; both are conscious and cultivated, and the
mind which cultivates one may cultivate the other. The actual poetry, of
Marvell, of Cowley, of Milton, and of others, is a blend in varying
proportions. And we must be on guard not to employ the terms with too
wide a comprehension; for like the other fluid terms with which literary
criticism deals, the meaning alters with the age, and for precision we
must rely to some degree upon the literacy and good taste of the reader.
The wit of the Caroline poets is not the wit of Shakespeare, and it is
not the wit of Dryden, the great master of contempt, or of Pope, the
great master of hatred, or of Swift, the great master of disgust. What
is meant is something which is a common quality to the songs in "Comus"
and Cowley's Anacreontics and Marvell's Horatian Ode. It is more than a
technical accomplishment, or the vocabulary and syntax of an epoch; it
is, what we have designated tentatively as wit, a tough reasonableness
beneath the slight lyric grace. You cannot find it in Shelley or Keats
or Wordsworth; you cannot find more than an echo of it in Landor; still
less in Tennyson or Browning; and among contemporaries Mr. Yeats is an
Irishman and Mr. Hardy is a modern Englishman--that is to say, Mr. Hardy
is without it and Mr. Yeats is outside of the tradition altogether. On
the other hand, as it certainly exists in Lafontaine, there is a large
part of it in Gautier. And of the magniloquence, the deliberate
exploitation of the possibilities of magnificence in language which
Milton used and abused, there is also use and even abuse in the poetry
of Baudelaire.

Wit is not a quality that we are accustomed to associate with "Puritan"
literature, with Milton or with Marvell. But if so, we are at fault
partly in our conception of wit and partly in our generalizations about
the Puritans. And if the wit of Dryden or of Pope is not the only kind
of wit in the language, the rest is not merely a little merriment or a
little levity or a little impropriety or a little epigram. And, on the
other hand, the sense in which a man like Marvell is a "Puritan" is
restricted. The persons who opposed Charles I. and the persons who
supported the Commonwealth were not all of the flock of Rabbi
Zeal-of-the-land Busy or the United Grand Junction Ebenezer Temperance
Association. Many of them were gentlemen of the time who merely
believed, with considerable show of reason, that government by a
Parliament of gentlemen was better than government by a Stuart; though
they were, to that extent, Liberal Practitioners, they could hardly
foresee the tea-meeting and the Dissidence of Dissent. Being men of
education and culture, even of travel, some of them were exposed to that
spirit of the age which was coming to be the French spirit of the age.
This spirit, curiously enough, was quite opposed to the tendencies
latent or the forces active in Puritanism; the contest does great damage
to the poetry of Milton; Marvell, an active servant of the public, but a
lukewarm partisan, and a poet on a smaller scale, is far less injured by
it. His line on the statue of Charles II., "It is such a King as no
chisel can mend," may be set off against his criticism of the Great
Rebellion: "Men . . . ought and might have trusted the King." Marvell,
therefore, more a man of the century than a Puritan, speaks more clearly
and unequivocally with the voice of his literary age than does Milton.

This voice speaks out uncommonly strong in the "Coy Mistress." The theme
is one of the great traditional commonplaces of European literature. It
is the theme of "O mistress mine," of "Gather ye rosebuds," of "Go,
lovely rose"; it is in the savage austerity of Lucretius and the intense
levity of Catullus. Where the wit of Marvell renews the theme is in the
variety and order of the images. In the first of the three paragraphs
Marvell plays with a fancy which begins by pleasing and leads to
astonishment.


Had we but world enough and time,
This coyness, lady, were no crime,
. . . I would
Love you ten years before the Flood,
And you should, if you please, refuse
Till the conversion of the Jews;
My vegetable love should grow
Vaster than empires and more slow. . . .


We notice the high speed, the succession of concentrated images, each
magnifying the original fancy. When this process has been carried to the
end and summed up, the poem turns suddenly with that surprise which has
been one of the most important means of poetic effect since Homer:--


But at my back I always hear
Time's wingèd chariot hurrying near,
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.


A whole civilization resides in these lines:--


Pallida Mors æqua pulsat pede pauperumb tabernas,
Regumque turris. . . .


And not only Horace but Catullus himself:--


Nobis, cum semel occidit brevis lux,
Nox est perpetua una dormienda.


The verse of Marvell has not the grand reverberation of Catullus's
Latin; but the image of Marvell is certainly more comprehensive and
penetrates greater depths than Horace's.

A modern poet, had he reached the height, would very likely have closed
on this moral reflection. But the three strophes of Marvell's poem have
something like a syllogistic relation to each other. After a close
approach to the mood of Donne,


then worms shall try
That long-preserved virginity . . .
The grave's a fine and private place,
But none, I think, do there embrace,


the conclusion,


Let us roll all our strength and all
Our sweetness up into one ball,
And tear our pleasures with rough strife,
Thorough the iron gates of life.


It will hardly be denied that this poem contains wit; but it may not be
evident that this wit forms the crescendo and diminuendo of a scale of
great imaginative power. The wit is not only combined with, but fused
into, the imagination. We can easily recognize a witty fancy in the
successive images ("my _vegetable_ love," "till the conversion of the
Jews"), but this fancy is not indulged, as it sometimes is by Cowley or
Cleveland, for its own sake. It is structural decoration of a serious
idea. In this it is superior to the fancy of "L'Allegro," "Il
Penseroso," or the lighter and less successful poems of Keats. In fact,
this alliance of levity and seriousness (by which the seriousness is
intensified) is a characteristic of the sort of wit we are trying to
identify. It is found in


Le squelette était invisible
Au temps heureux de l'art païen!


of Gautier, and in the _dandysme_ of Baudelaire and Laforgue. It is in
the poem of Catullus which has been quoted, and in the variation by Ben
Jonson:--


Cannot we deceive the eyes
Of a few poor household spies?
'Tis no sin love's fruits to steal,
But that sweet sin to reveal,
To be taken, to be seen,
These have sins accounted been.


It is in Propertius and Ovid. It is a quality of a sophisticated
literature; a quality which expands in English literature just at the
moment before the English mind altered; it is not a quality which we
should expect Puritanism to encourage. When we come to Gray and Collins,
the sophistication remains only in the language, and has disappeared
from the feeling. Gray and Collins were masters, but they had lost that
hold on human values, that firm grasp of human experience, which is a
formidable achievement of the Elizabethan and Jacobean poets. This
wisdom, cynical perhaps but untired (in Shakespeare, a terrifying
clairvoyance), leads toward, and is only completed by, the religious
comprehension; it leads to the point of the _Ainsi tout leur a craqué
dans la main_ of Bouvard and Pécuchet.

The difference between imagination and fancy, in view of this poetry of
wit, is a very narrow one. Obviously, an image which is immediately and
unintentionally ridiculous is merely a fancy. In the poem "Upon Appleton
House," Marvell falls in with one of these undesirable images,
describing the attitude of the house toward its master:--


Yet thus the laden house does sweat,
And scarce endures the master great;
But, where he comes, the swelling hall
Stirs, and the square grows spherical;


which, whatever its intention, is more absurd than it was intended to
be. Marvell also falls into the even commoner error of images which are
over-developed or distracting; which support nothing but their own
misshapen bodies:--


And now the salmon-fishers moist
Their leathern boats begin to hoist;
And, like Antipodes in shoes,
Have shod their heads in their canoes.


Of this sort of image a choice collection may be found in Johnson's
"Life of Cowley." But the images in the "Coy Mistress" are not only
witty, but satisfy the elucidation of Imagination given by Coleridge:--


"This power . . . reveals itself in the balance or reconcilement of
opposite or discordant qualities: of sameness, with difference; of the
general, with the concrete; the idea with the image; the individual with
the representative; the sense of novelty and freshness with old and
familiar objects; a more than usual state of emotion with more than
usual order; judgment ever awake and steady self-possession with
enthusiasm and feeling profound or vehement. . . ."


Coleridge's statement applies also to the following verses, which are
selected because of their similarity, and because they illustrate the
marked caesura which Marvell often introduces in a short line:--


The tawny mowers enter next,
Who seem like Israelites to be
Walking on foot through a green sea.

And now the meadows fresher dyed,
Whose grass, with moister colour dashed,
Seems as green silks but newly washed.

He hangs in shades the orange bright,
Like golden lamps in a green night.

Annihilating all that's made
To a green thought in a green shade.

Had it lived long, it would have been
Lilies without, roses within.


The whole poem, from which the last of these quotations is drawn ("The
Nymph and the Fawn"), is built upon a very slight foundation, and we can
imagine what some of our modern practitioners of slight themes would
have made of it. But we need not descend to an invidious contemporaneity
to point the difference. Here are six lines from "The Nymph and the
Fawn":--


I have a garden of my own,
But so with roses overgrown
And lilies, that you would it guess
To be a little wilderness;
And all the spring-time of the year
It only loved to be there.


And here are five lines from "The Nymph's Song to Hylas" in the "Life
and Death of Jason," by William Morris:--


I know a little garden close
Set thick with lily and red rose.
Where I would wander if I might
From dewy dawn to dewy night,
And have one with me wandering.


So far the resemblance is more striking than the difference, although we
might just notice the vagueness of allusion in the last line to some
indefinite person, form, or phantom, compared with the more explicit
reference of emotion to object which we should expect from Marvell. But
in the latter part of the poem Morris divaricates widely:--


Yet tottering as I am, and weak,
Still have I left a little breath
To seek within the jaws of death
An entrance to that happy place;
To seek the unforgotten face
Once seen, once kissed, once reft from me
Anigh the murmuring of the sea.


Here the resemblance, if there is any, is to the latter part of "The Coy
Mistress." As for the difference, it could not be more pronounced. The
effect of Morris's charming poem depends upon the mistiness of the
feeling and the vagueness of its object; the effect of Marvell's upon
its bright, hard precision. And this precision is not due to the fact
that Marvell is concerned with cruder or simpler or more carnal
emotions. The emotion of Morris is not more refined or more spiritual;
it is merely more vague: if anyone doubts whether the more refined or
spiritual emotion can be precise, he should study the treatment of the
varieties of discarnate emotion in the "Paradiso." A curious result of
the comparison of Morris's poem with Marvell's is that the former,
though it appears to be more serious, is found to be the slighter; and
Marvell's "Nymph and the Fawn," appearing more slight, is the more
serious.


So weeps the wounded balsam; so
The holy frankincense doth flow;
The brotherless Heliades
Melt in such amber tears as these.


These verses have the suggestiveness of true poetry; and the verses of
Morris, which are nothing if not an attempt to suggest, really suggest
nothing; and we are inclined to infer that the suggestiveness is the
aura around a bright clear centre, that you cannot have the aura alone.
The day-dreamy feeling of Morris is essentially a slight thing; Marvell
takes a slight affair, the feeling of a girl for her pet, and gives it a
connexion with that inexhaustible and terrible nebula of emotion which
surrounds all our exact and practical passions and mingles with them.
Again, Marvell does this in a poem which, because of its formal pastoral
machinery, may appear a trifling object:--


_Clorinda_: Near this, a fountain's liquid bell
Tinkles within the concave shell.

_Damon_: Might a soul bathe there and be clean.
Or slake its drought?


where we find that a metaphor has suddenly rapt us to the image of
spiritual purgation. There is here the element of _surprise_, as when
Villon says:--


Necessité faict gens mesprendre
Et faim saillir le loup des boys,


the surprise which Poe considered of the highest importance, and also
the restraint and quietness of tone which make the surprise possible.
And in the verses of Marvell which have been quoted there is the making
the familiar strange, and the strange familiar, which Coleridge
attributed to good poetry.

The effort to construct a dream-world, which alters English poetry so
greatly in the nineteenth-century, a dream-world utterly different from
the visionary realities of the Vita Nuova or of the poetry of Dante's
contemporaries, is a problem of which various explanations may no doubt
be found; in any case, the result makes a poet of the nineteenth
century, of the same size as Marvell, a more trivial and less serious
figure. Marvell is no greater personality than William Morris, but he
had something much more solid behind him: he had the vast and
penetrating influence of Ben Jonson. Jonson never wrote anything so pure
as Marvell's Horatian Ode; but this ode has that same quality of wit
which was diffused over the whole Elizabethan product and concentrated
in the work of Jonson. And, as was said before, this wit which pervades
the poetry of Marvell is more Latin, more refined, than anything that
succeeded it. The great danger, as well as the great interest and
excitement, of English prose and verse, compared with French, is that it
permits and justifies an exaggeration of particular qualities to the
exclusion of others. Dryden was great in wit, as Milton in
magniloquence; but the former, by isolating this quality and making it
by itself into great poetry, and the latter, by coming to dispense with
it altogether, may perhaps have injured the language. In Dryden wit
becomes almost fun, and thereby loses some contact with reality; becomes
pure fun, which French wit almost never is.


The midwife placed her hand on his thick skull,
With this prophetic blessing: _Be thou dull._

A numerous host of dreaming saints succeed,
Of the true old enthusiastic breed.


This is audacious and splendid; it belongs to satire besides which
Marvell's Satires are random babbling; but it is perhaps as exaggerated
as--


Oft he seems to hide his face,
But unexpectedly returns,
And to his faithful champion hath in place
Bore witness gloriously; whence Gaza mourns,
And all that band them to resist
His uncontrollable intent.


How oddly the sharp Dantesque phrase "whence Gaza mourns" springs out
from the brilliant but ridiculous contortions of Milton's sentence!


Who from his private gardens, where
He lived reservèd and austere,
(As if his highest plot
To plant the bergamot)

Could by industrious valour climb
To ruin the great work of Time,
And cast the kingdoms old
Into another mold;

* * * *

The Piet no shelter now shall find
Within his parti-coloured mind,
But, from this valour sad,
Shrink underneath the plaid:


There is here an equipoise, a balance and proportion of tones, which,
while it cannot raise Marvell to the level of Dryden or Milton, extorts
an approval which these poets do not receive from us, and bestows a
pleasure at least different in kind from any they can often give. It is
what makes Marvell a classic; or classic in a sense in which Gray and
Collins are not; for the latter, with all their accredited purity, are
comparatively poor in shades of feeling to contrast and unite.

We are baffled in the attempt to translate the quality indicated by the
dim and antiquated term wit into the equally unsatisfactory nomenclature
of our own time. Even Cowley is only able to define it by negatives:--


Comely in thousand shapes appears;
Yonder we saw it plain; and here 'tis now,
Like spirits in a place, we know not how.


It has passed out of our critical coinage altogether, and no new term
has been struck to replace it; the quality seldom exists, and is never
recognized.


In a true piece of Wit all things must be
Yet all things there agree;
As in the Ark, join'd without force or strife,
All creatures dwelt, all creatures that had life.
Or as the primitive forms of all
(If we compare great things with small)
Which, without discord or confusion, lie
In that strange mirror of the Deity.


So far Cowley has spoken well. But if we are to attempt even no more
than Cowley, we, placed in a retrospective attitude, must risk much more
than anxious generalizations. With our eye still on Marvell, we can say
that wit is not erudition; it is sometimes stifled by erudition, as in
much of Milton. It is not cynicism, though it has a kind of toughness
which may be confused with cynicism by the tender-minded. It is confused
with erudition because it belongs to an educated mind, rich in
generations of experience; and it is confused with cynicism because it
implies a constant inspection and criticism of experience. It involves,
probably, a recognition, implicit in the expression of every experience,
of other kinds of experience which are possible, which we find as
clearly in the greatest as in poets like Marvell. Such a general
statement may seem to take us a long way from "The Nymph and the Fawn,"
or even from the Horatian Ode; but it is perhaps justified by the desire
to account for that precise taste of Marvell's which finds for him the
proper degree of seriousness for every subject which he treats. His
errors of taste, when he trespasses, are not sins against this virtue;
they are conceits, distended metaphors and similes, but they never
consist in taking a subject too seriously or too lightly. This virtue of
wit is not a peculiar quality of minor poets, or of the minor poets of
one age or of one school; it is an intellectual quality which perhaps
only becomes noticeable by itself, in the work of lesser poets.
Furthermore, it is absent from the work of Wordsworth, Shelley, and
Keats, on whose poetry nineteenth-century criticism has unconsciously
been based. To the best of their poetry wit is irrelevant:--


Art thou pale for weariness
Of climbing heaven and gazing on the earth,
Wandering companionless
Among the stars that have a different birth,
And ever changing, like a joyless eye,
That finds no object worth its constancy?


We should find it difficult to draw any useful comparison between these
lines of Shelley and anything by Marvell. But later poets, who would
have been the better for Marvell's quality, were without it; even
Browning seems oddly immature, in some way, beside Marvell. And nowadays
we find occasionally good irony, or satire, which lack wit's internal
equilibrium, because their voices are essentially protests against some
outside sentimentality or stupidity; or we find serious poets who are
afraid of acquiring wit, lest they lose intensity. The quality which
Marvell had, this modest and certainly impersonal virtue--whether we
call it wit or reason, or even urbanity--we have patently failed to
define. By whatever name we call it, and however we define that name, it
is something precious and needed and apparently extinct; it is what
should preserve the reputation of Marvell. _C'était une belle âme,
comme on ne fait plus à Londres._





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