CHAPTER X

CAROLINE POETRY

There are few periods of poetical development in English literary history

which display, in a comparatively narrow compass, such well-marked and

pervading individuality as the period of Caroline poetry, beginning, it may

be, a little before the accession of Charles I., but terminating as a

producing period almost before the real accession of his son. The poets of

this period, in which but not of which Milton is, are numerous and

remarkable, and at the head of them all stands Robert Herrick.

Very little is really known about Herrick's history. That he was of a

family which, distinguished above the common, but not exactly reaching

nobility, had the credit of producing, besides himself, the indomitable

Warden Heyrick of the Collegiate Church of Manchester in his own times, and

the mother of Swift in the times immediately succeeding his, is certain.

That he was born in London in 1591, that he went to Cambridge, that he had

a rather stingy guardian, that he associated to some extent with the tribe

of Ben in the literary London of the second decade of the century, is also

certain. At last and rather late he was appointed to a living at Dean Prior

in Devonshire, on the confines of the South Hams and Dartmoor. He did not

like it, being of that class of persons who cannot be happy out of a great

town. After the Civil War he was deprived, and his successor had not the

decency (the late Dr. Grosart, constant to his own party, made a very

unsuccessful attempt to defend the delinquent) to pay him the shabby

pittance which the intruders were supposed to furnish to the rightful

owners of benefices. At the Restoration he too was restored, and survived

it fifteen years, dying in 1674; but his whole literary fame rests on work

published a quarter of a century before his death, and pretty certainly in

great part written many years earlier.

The poems which then appeared were divided, in the published form, into two

classes: they may be divided, for purposes of poetical criticism, into

three. The _Hesperides_ (they are dated 1648, and the _Noble Numbers_ or

sacred poems 1647; but both appeared together) consist in the first place

of occasional poems, sometimes amatory, sometimes not; in the second, of

personal epigrams. Of this second class no human being who has any faculty

of criticism can say any good. They are supposed by tradition to have been

composed on parishioners: they may be hoped by charity (which has in this

case the support of literary criticism) to be merely literary

exercises--bad imitations of Martial, through Ben Jonson. They are nastier

than the nastiest work of Swift; they are stupider than the stupidest

attempts of Davies of Hereford; they are farther from the author's best

than the worst parts of Young's _Odes_ are from the best part of the _Night

Thoughts_. It is impossible without producing specimens (which God forbid

that any one who has a respect for Herrick, for literature, and for

decency, should do) to show how bad they are. Let it only be said that if

the worst epigram of Martial were stripped of Martial's wit, sense, and

literary form, it would be a kind of example of Herrick in this vein.

In his two other veins, but for certain tricks of speech, it is almost

impossible to recognise him for the same man. The secular vigour of the

_Hesperides_, the spiritual vigour of the _Noble Numbers_, has rarely been

equalled and never surpassed by any other writer. I cannot agree with Mr.

Gosse that Herrick is in any sense "a Pagan." They had in his day shaken

off the merely ascetic temper of the Middle Ages, and had not taken upon

them the mere materialism of the _Aufklaerung_, or the remorseful and

satiated attitude of the late eighteenth and nineteenth century. I believe

that the warmest of the Julia poems and the immortal "Litany" were written

with the same integrity of feeling. Here was a man who was grateful to the

upper powers for the joys of life, or who was sorrowful and repentant

towards the upper powers when he felt that he had exceeded in enjoying

those joys, but who had no doubt of his gods, and no shame in approaching

them. The last--the absolutely last if we take his death-date--of those

poets who have relished this life heartily, while heartily believing in

another, was Robert Herrick. There is not the slightest reason to suppose

that the _Hesperides_ were wholly _peches de jeunesse_ and the _Noble

Numbers_ wholly pious palinodes. Both simply express, and express in a most

vivid and distinct manner, the alternate or rather varying moods of a man

of strong sensibilities, religious as well as sensual.

Of the religious poems the already-mentioned "Litany," while much the most

familiar, is also far the best. There is nothing in English verse to equal

it as an expression of religious fear; while there is also nothing in

English verse to equal the "Thanksgiving," also well known, as an

expression of religious trust. The crystalline simplicity of Herrick's

style deprives his religious poems of that fatal cut-and-dried appearance,

that vain repetition of certain phrases and thoughts, which mars the work

of sacred poets generally, and which has led to an unjustly strong censure

being laid on them by critics, so different from each other as Dr. Johnson

and Mr. Matthew Arnold. As the alleged Paganism of some of Herrick's sacred

poems exists only in the imagination of readers, so the alleged insincerity

is equally hypothetical, and can only be supported by the argument

(notoriously false to history and to human nature) that a man who could

write the looser _Hesperides_ could not sincerely write the _Noble

Numbers_. Every student of the lives of other men--every student of his own

heart--knows, or should know, that this is an utter mistake.

Undoubtedly, however, Herrick's most beautiful work is to be found in the

profane division, despite the admixture of the above-mentioned epigrams,

the dull foulness of which soils the most delightful pages to such an

extent that, if it were ever allowable to take liberties with an author's

disposition of his own work, it would be allowable and desirable to pick

these ugly weeds out of the garden and stow them away in a rubbish heap of

appendix all to themselves. Some of the best pieces of the _Hesperides_ are

even better known than the two well-known _Noble Numbers_ above quoted. The

"Night Piece to Julia," the "Daffodils," the splendid "To Anthea," ("Bid me

to live"), "The Mad Maid's Song" (worthy of the greatest of the generation

before Herrick), the verses to Ben Jonson, those to Electra ("I dare not

ask a kiss"), the wonderful "Burial Piece to Perilla," the "Grace for a

Child," the "Corinna Maying" (the chief of a large division of Herrick's

poems which celebrate rustic festivals, superstitions, and folklore

generally), the epitaph on Prudence Baldwin, and many others, are justly

included in nearly all selections of English poetry, and many of them are

known by heart to every one who knows any poetry at all. One or two of the

least well known of them may perhaps be welcome again:--

"Good morrow to the day so fair,

Good morning, sir, to you;

Good morrow to mine own torn hair

Bedabbled with the dew.

"Good morning to this primrose too,

Good morrow to each maid;

That will with flowers the tomb bestrew

Wherein my love is laid.

"Ah, woe is me, woe, woe is me,

Alack and well-a-day!

For pity, sir, find out that bee

That bore my love away.

"I'll seek him in your bonnet brave,

I'll seek him in your eyes;

Nay, now I think, they've made his grave

I' th' bed of strawberries.

"I'll seek him there: I know ere this

The cold, cold earth doth shake him;

But I will go, or send a kiss

By you, sir, to awake him.

"Pray hurt him not; though he be dead

He knows well who do love him,

And who with green turfs rear his head,

And who do rudely move him.

"He's soft and tender, pray take heed,

With bands of cowslips bind him,

And bring him home; but 'tis decreed

That I shall never find him."

* * * * *

"I dare not ask a kiss;

I dare not beg a smile;

Lest having that or this,

I might grow proud the while.

"No, no--the utmost share

Of my desire shall be

Only to kiss that air

That lately kissed thee."

* * * * *

"Here, a little child, I stand

Heaving up my either hand:

Cold as paddocks though they be

Here I lift them up to Thee,

For a benison to fall

On our meat and on us all.

Amen."

But Herrick's charm is everywhere--except in the epigrams. It is very rare

to find one of the hundreds of little poems which form his book destitute

of the peculiar touch of phrasing, the eternising influence of style, which

characterises the poetry of this particular period so remarkably. The

subject may be the merest trifle, the thought a hackneyed or insignificant

one. But the amber to enshrine the fly is always there in larger or

smaller, in clearer or more clouded, shape. There has often been a certain

contempt (connected no doubt with certain general critical errors as they

seem to me, with which I shall deal at the end of this chapter) flavouring

critical notices of Herrick. I do not think that any one who judges poetry

as poetry, who keeps its several kinds apart and does not demand epic

graces in lyric, dramatic substance in an anthologia, could ever feel or

hint such a contempt. Whatever Herrick may have been as a man (of which we

know very little, and for which we need care less), he was a most exquisite

and complete poet in his own way, neither was that way one to be lightly

spoken of.

Indissolubly connected with Herrick in age, in character, and in the

singularly unjust criticism which has at various times been bestowed on

him, is Thomas Carew. His birth-date has been very differently given as

1587 and (that now preferred) 1598; but he died nearly forty years before

the author of the _Hesperides_, and nearly ten before the _Hesperides_

themselves were published, while his own poems were never collected till

after his own death. He was of a Gloucestershire branch of the famous

Devonshire family of Carew, Cary, or Cruwys, was of Merton College, Oxford,

and the Temple, travelled, followed the Court, was a disciple of Ben

Jonson, and a member of the learned and accomplished society of Clarendon's

earlier days, obtained a place in the household of Charles I., is said by

his friend Hyde to have turned to devotion after a somewhat libertine life,

and died in 1639, before the evil days of triumphant Puritanism, _felix

opportunitate mortis_. He wrote little, and the scantiness of his

production, together with the supposed pains it cost him, is ridiculed in

Suckling's doggerel "Sessions of the Poets." But this reproach (which Carew

shares with Gray, and with not a few others of the most admirable names in

literature), unjust as it is, is less unjust than the general tone of

criticism on Carew since. The _locus classicus_ of depreciation both in

regard to him and to Herrick is to be found, as might be expected, in one

of the greatest, and one of the most wilfully capricious and untrustworthy

of English critics, in Hazlitt. I am sorry to say that there can be little

hesitation in setting down the extraordinary misjudgment of the passage in

question (it occurs in the sixth Lecture on Elizabethan Literature), in

part, at least, to the fact that Herrick, Carew, and Crashaw, who are

summarily damned in it, were Royalists. If there were any doubt about the

matter, it would be settled by the encomium bestowed in the very same

passage on Marvell, who is, no doubt, as Hazlitt says, a true poet, but who

as a poet is but seldom at the highest height of the authors of "The

Litany," "The Rapture," and "The Flaming Heart." Hazlitt, then, while on

his way to tell us that Herrick's two best pieces are some trivial

anacreontics about Cupid and the Bees--things hackneyed through a dozen

literatures, and with no recommendation but a borrowed prettiness--while

about, I say, to deny Herrick the spirit of love or wine, and in the same

breath with the dismissal of Crashaw as a "hectic enthusiast," informs us

that Carew was "an elegant Court trifler," and describes his style as a

"frequent mixture of the superficial and commonplace, with far-fetched and

improbable conceits."

What Carew really is, and what he may be peremptorily declared to be in

opposition even to such a critic as Hazlitt, is something quite different.

He is one of the most perfect masters of lyrical form in English poetry. He

possesses a command of the overlapped heroic couplet, which for sweep and

rush of rhythm cannot be surpassed anywhere. He has, perhaps in a greater

degree than any poet of that time of conceits, the knack of modulating the

extravagances of fancy by the control of reason, so that he never falls

into the unbelievableness of Donne, or Crashaw, or Cleveland. He had a

delicacy, when he chose to be delicate, which is quintessential, and a

vigour which is thoroughly manly. Best of all, perhaps, he had the

intelligence and the self-restraint to make all his poems wholes, and not

mere congeries of verses. There is always, both in the scheme of his

meaning and the scheme of his metre, a definite plan of rise and fall, a

concerted effect. That these great merits were accompanied by not

inconsiderable defects is true. Carew lacks the dewy freshness, the

unstudied grace of Herrick. He is even more frankly and uncontrolledly

sensual, and has paid the usual and inevitable penalty that his best poem,

_The Rapture_, is, for the most part, unquotable, while another, if he

carried out its principles in this present year of grace, would run him the

risk of imprisonment with hard labour. His largest attempt--the masque

called _Coelum Britannicum_--is heavy. His smaller poems, beautiful as they

are, suffer somewhat from want of variety of subject. There is just so much

truth in Suckling's impertinence that the reader of Carew sometimes catches

himself repeating the lines of Carew's master, "Still to be neat, still to

be drest," not indeed in full agreement with them, but not in exact

disagreement. One misses the "wild civility" of Herrick. This

acknowledgment, I trust, will save me from any charge of overvaluing Carew.

A man might, however, be easily tempted to overvalue him, who observes his

beauties, and who sees how, preserving the force, the poetic spell, of the

time, he was yet able, without in the least descending to the correctness

of Waller and his followers, to introduce into his work something also

preserving it from the weaknesses and inequalities which deface that of

almost all his contemporaries, and which, as we shall see, make much of the

dramatic and poetical work of 1630-1660 a chaos of slipshod deformity to

any one who has the sense of poetical form. It is an unwearying delight to

read and re-read the second of his poems, the "Persuasions to Love,"

addressed to a certain A. L. That the sentiment is common enough matters

little; the commonest things in poetry are always the best. But the

delicate interchange of the catalectic and acatalectic dimeter, the

wonderful plays and changes of cadence, the opening, as it were, of fresh

stops at the beginning of each new paragraph of the verse, so that the

music acquires a new colour, the felicity of the several phrases, the

cunning heightening of the passion as the poet comes to "Oh! love me then,

and now begin it," and the dying fall of the close, make up to me, at

least, most charming pastime. It is not the same kind of pleasure, no

doubt, as that given by such an outburst as Crashaw's, to be mentioned

presently, or by such pieces as the great soliloquies of Shakespere. Any

one may say, if he likes to use words which are question-begging, when not

strictly meaningless, that it is not such a "high" kind. But it is a kind,

and in that kind perfect.

Carew's best pieces, besides _The Rapture_, are the beautiful "Ask me no

more," the first stanza of which is the weakest; the fine couplet poem,

"The Cruel Mistress," whose closing distich--

"Of such a goddess no times leave record,

That burned the temple where she was adored"--

Dryden conveyed with the wise and unblushing boldness which great poets

use; the "Deposition from love," written in one of those combinations of

eights and sixes, the melodious charm of which seems to have died with the

seventeenth century; the song, "He that loves a rosy cheek," which, by the

unusual morality of its sentiments, has perhaps secured a fame not quite

due to its poetical merits; the epitaph on Lady Mary Villers; the song

"Would you know what's soft?" the song to his inconstant mistress:

"When thou, poor excommunicate

From all the joys of love, shalt see

The full reward, and glorious fate

Which my strong faith shall purchase me,

Then curse thine own inconstancy.

"A fairer hand than thine shall cure

That heart which thy false oaths did wound;

And to my soul, a soul more pure

Than thine, shall by love's hand be bound,

And both with equal glory crown'd.

"Then shalt thou weep, entreat, complain

To Love, as I did once to thee;

When all thy tears shall be as vain

As mine were then, for thou shalt be

Damn'd for thy false apostacy."--

the pleasant pictures of the country houses of Wrest and Saxham; the

charming conceit of "Red and white roses":

"Read in these roses the sad story

Of my hard fate and your own glory:

In the white you may discover

The paleness of a fainting lover;

In the red, the flames still feeding

On my heart with fresh wounds bleeding.

The white will tell you how I languish,

And the red express my anguish:

The white my innocence displaying

The red my martyrdom betraying.

The frowns that on your brow resided

Have those roses thus divided;

Oh! let your smiles but clear the weather

And then they both shall grow together."--

and lastly, though it would be easy to extend this already long list of

selections from a by no means extensive collection of poems, the grand

elegy on Donne. By this last the reproach of vain and amatorious trifling

which has been so often levelled at Carew is at once thrown back and

blunted. No poem shows so great an influence on the masculine panegyrics

with which Dryden was to enrich the English of the next generation, and few

are fuller of noteworthy phrases. The splendid epitaph which closes it--

"Here lies a king that ruled as he thought fit

The universal monarchy of wit"--

is only the best passage, not the only good one, and it may be matched with

a fine and just description of English, ushered by a touch of acute

criticism.

"Thou shalt yield no precedence, but of time,

And the blind fate of language, whose tuned chime

More charms the outward sense: yet thou mayst claim

From so great disadvantage greater fame.

Since to the awe of thine imperious wit

Our troublesome language bends, made only fit

With her tough thick-ribbed hoops to gird about

Thy giant fancy, which had proved too stout

For their soft melting phrases."

And it is the man who could write like this that Hazlitt calls an "elegant

Court trifler!"

The third of this great trio of poets, and with them the most remarkable of

our whole group, was Richard Crashaw. He completes Carew and Herrick both

in his qualities and (if a kind of bull may be permitted) in his defects,

after a fashion almost unexampled elsewhere and supremely interesting.

Hardly any one of the three could have appeared at any other time, and not

one but is distinguished from the others in the most marked way. Herrick,

despite his sometimes rather obtrusive learning, is emphatically the

natural man. He does not show much sign of the influence of good society,

his merits as well as his faults have a singular unpersonal and, if I may

so say, _terraefilian_ connotation. Carew is a gentleman before all; but a

rather profane gentleman. Crashaw is religious everywhere. Again, Herrick

and Carew, despite their strong savour of the fashion of the time, are

eminently critics as well as poets. Carew has not let one piece critically

unworthy of him pass his censorship: Herrick (if we exclude the filthy and

foolish epigrams into which he was led by corrupt following of Ben) has

been equally careful. These two bards may have trouble with the _censor

morum_,--the _censor literarum_ they can brave with perfect confidence. It

is otherwise with Crashaw. That he never, as far as can be seen, edited the

bulk of his work for press at all matters little or nothing. But there is

not in his work the slightest sign of the exercise of any critical faculty

before, during, or after production. His masterpiece, one of the most

astonishing things in English or any other literature, comes without

warning at the end of _The Flaming Heart_. For page after page the poet has

been poorly playing on some trifling conceits suggested by the picture of

Saint Theresa and a seraph. First he thinks the painter ought to have

changed the attributes; then he doubts whether a lesser change will not do;

and always he treats his subject in a vein of grovelling and grotesque

conceit which the boy Dryden in the stage of his elegy on Lord Hastings

would have disdained. And then in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye,

without warning of any sort, the metre changes, the poet's inspiration

catches fire, and there rushes up into the heaven of poetry this marvellous

rocket of song:--

"Live in these conquering leaves: live all the same;

And walk through all tongues one triumphant flame;

Live here, great heart; and love, and die, and kill;

And bleed, and wound, and yield, and conquer still.

Let this immortal life where'er it comes

Walk in a crowd of loves and martyrdoms.

Let mystic deaths wait on't; and wise souls be

The love-slain witnesses of this life of thee.

O sweet incendiary! show here thy art,

Upon this carcase of a hard cold heart;

Let all thy scatter'd shafts of light, that play

Among the leaves of thy large books of day,

Combin'd against this breast at once break in,

And take away from me myself and sin;

This gracious robbery shall thy bounty be

And my best fortunes such fair spoils of me.

O thou undaunted daughter of desires!

By all thy pow'r of lights and fires;

By all the eagle in thee, all the dove;

By all thy lives and deaths of love;

By thy large draughts of intellectual day;

And by thy thirsts of love more large than they;

By all thy brim-fill'd bowls of fierce desire;

By thy last morning's draught of liquid fire;

By the full kingdom of that final kiss

That seized thy parting soul, and seal'd thee his;

By all the heavens thou hast in him,

(Fair sister of the seraphim)

By all of him we have in thee;

Leave nothing of myself in me.

Let me so read thy life, that I

Unto all life of mine may die."

The contrast is perhaps unique as regards the dead colourlessness of the

beginning, and the splendid colour of the end. But contrasts like it occur

all over Crashaw's work.

He was a much younger man than either of the poets with whom we have

leashed him, and his birth year used to be put at 1616, though Dr. Grosart

has made it probable that it was three years earlier. His father was a

stern Anglican clergyman of extremely Protestant leanings, his mother died

when Crashaw was young, but his stepmother appears to have been most

unnovercal. Crashaw was educated at Charterhouse, and then went to

Cambridge, where in 1637 he became a fellow of Peterhouse, and came in for

the full tide of high church feeling, to which (under the mixed influence

of Laud's policy, of the ascetic practices of the Ferrars of Gidding, and

of a great architectural development afterwards defaced if not destroyed by

Puritan brutality) Cambridge was even more exposed than Oxford. The

outbreak of the civil war may or may not have found Crashaw at Cambridge;

he was at any rate deprived of his fellowship for not taking the covenant

in 1643, and driven into exile. Already inclined doctrinally and in matters

of practice to the older communion, and despairing of the resurrection of

the Church of England after her sufferings at the hands of the Parliament,

Crashaw joined the Church of Rome, and journeyed to its metropolis. He was

attached to the suit of Cardinal Pallotta, but is said to have been shocked

by Italian manners. The cardinal procured him a canonry at Loretto, and

this he hastened to take up, but died in 1649 with suspicions of poison,

which are not impossibly, but at the same time by no means necessarily

true. His poems had already appeared under the double title of _Steps to

the Temple_ (sacred), and _Delights of the Muses_ (profane), but not under

his own editorship, or it would seem with his own choice of title. Several

other editions followed,--one later than his death, with curious

illustrations said to be, in part at least, of his own design. Manuscript

sources, as in the case of some other poets of the time, have considerably

enlarged the collection since. But a great part of it consists of epigrams

(in the wide sense, and almost wholly sacred) in the classical tongues,

which were sometimes translated by Crashaw himself. These are not always

correct in style or prosody, but are often interesting. The famous line in

reference to the miracle of Cana,

"Vidit et erubuit nympha pudica Deum,"

is assigned to Crashaw as a boy at Cambridge; of his later faculty in the

same way the elaborate and, in its way, beautiful poem entitled _Bulla_

(the Bubble) is the most remarkable.

Our chief subject, however, is the English poems proper, sacred and

profane. In almost all of these there is noticeable an extraordinary

inequality, the same in kind, if not in degree, as that on which we have

commented in the case of _The Flaming Heart_. Crashaw is never quite so

great as there; but he is often quite as small. His exasperating lack of

self-criticism has sometimes led selectors to make a cento out of his

poems--notably in the case of the exceedingly pretty "Wishes to His Unknown

Mistress," beginning, "Whoe'er she be, That not impossible she, That shall

command my heart and me"--a poem, let it be added, which excuses this

dubious process much less than most, inasmuch as nothing in it is

positively bad, though it is rather too long. Here is the opening, preceded

by a piece from another poem, "A Hymn to Saint Theresa":--

"Those rare works, where thou shalt leave writ

Love's noble history, with wit

Taught thee by none but him, while here

They feed our souls, shall clothe thine there

Each heavenly word by whose hid flame

Our hard hearts shall strike fire, the same

Shall flourish on thy brows and be

Both fire to us and flame to thee:

Whose light shall live bright, in thy face

By glory, in our hearts by grace.

"Thou shalt look round about, and see

Thousands of crown'd souls throng to be

Themselves thy crown, sons of thy vows:

The virgin births with which thy spouse

Made fruitful thy fair soul; go now

And with them all about thee, bow

To Him, 'Put on' (He'll say) 'put on,

My rosy love, that thy rich zone,

Sparkling with the sacred flames,

Of thousand souls whose happy names

Heaven heaps upon thy score, thy bright

Life brought them first to kiss the light

That kindled them to stars.' And so

Thou with the Lamb thy Lord shall go,

And whereso'er He sets His white

Steps, walk with Him those ways of light.

Which who in death would live to see

Must learn in life to die like thee."

* * * * *

"Whoe'er she be,

That not impossible she,

That shall command my heart and me;

"Where'er she lie,

Lock'd up from mortal eye,

In shady leaves of destiny;

"Till that ripe birth

Of studied Fate stand forth,

And teach her fair steps to our earth:

"Till that divine

Idea take a shrine

Of crystal flesh, through which to shine:

"Meet you her, my wishes

Bespeak her to my blisses,

And be ye call'd, my absent kisses."

The first hymn to Saint Theresa, to which _The Flaming Heart_ is a kind of

appendix, was written when Crashaw was still an Anglican (for which he did

not fail, later, to make a characteristic and very pretty, though quite

unnecessary, apology). It has no passage quite up to the

Invocation--Epiphonema, to give it the technical term--of the later poem.

But it is, on the contrary, good almost throughout, and is, for uniform

exaltation, far the best of Crashaw's poems. Yet such uniform exaltation

must be seldom sought in him. It is in his little bursts, such as that in

the stanza beginning, "O mother turtle dove," that his charm consists.

Often, as in verse after verse of _The Weeper_, it has an unearthly

delicacy and witchery which only Blake, in a few snatches, has ever

equalled; while at other times the poet seems to invent, in the most casual

and unthinking fashion, new metrical effects and new jewelries of diction

which the greatest lyric poets since--Coleridge, Shelley, Lord Tennyson,

Mr. Swinburne--have rather deliberately imitated than spontaneously

recovered. Yet to all this charm there is no small drawback. The very

maddest and most methodless of the "Metaphysicals" cannot touch Crashaw in

his tasteless use of conceits. When he, in _The Weeper_ just above referred

to, calls the tears of Magdalene "Wat'ry brothers," and "Simpering sons of

those fair eyes," and when, in the most intolerable of all the poet's

excesses, the same eyes are called "Two waking baths, two weeping motions,

Portable and compendious oceans," which follow our Lord about the hills of

Galilee, it is almost difficult to know whether to feel most contempt or

indignation for a man who could so write. It is fair to say that there are

various readings and omissions in the different editions which affect both

these passages. Yet the offence is that Crashaw should ever have written

them at all. Amends, however, are sure to be made before the reader has

read much farther. Crashaw's longest poems--a version of Marini's _Sospetto

d'Herode_, and one of the rather overpraised "Lover and Nightingale" story

of Strada--are not his best; the metre in which both are written, though

the poet manages it well, lacks the extraordinary charm of his lyric

measures. It does not appear that the "Not impossible she" ever made her

appearance, and probably for a full half of his short life Crashaw burnt

only with religious fire. But no Englishman has expressed that fire as he

has, and none in his expression of any sentiment, sacred and profane, has

dropped such notes of ethereal music. At his best he is far above singing,

at his worst he is below a very childish prattle. But even then he is never

coarse, never offensive, not very often actually dull; and everywhere he

makes amends by flowers of the divinest poetry. Mr. Pope, who borrowed not

a little from him, thought, indeed, that you could find nothing of "The

real part of poetry" (correct construction and so forth) in Crashaw; and

Mr. Hayley gently rebukes Cowley (after observing that if Pope borrowed

from Crashaw, it was "as the sun borrows from the earth") for his "glowing

panegyrick." Now, if the real part of poetry is anywhere in Hayley, or

quintessentially in Pope, it certainly is not in Crashaw.

The group or school (for it is not easy to decide on either word, and

objections might be taken to each) at the head of which Herrick, Carew, and

Crashaw must be placed, and which included Herbert and his band of sacred

singers, included also not a few minor groups, sufficiently different from

each other, but all marked off sharply from the innovating and classical

school of Waller and his followers, which it is not proposed to treat in

this volume. All, without exception, show the influence in different ways

of Ben Jonson and of Donne. But each has its own peculiarity. We find these

peculiarities, together with anticipations of post-Reformation

characteristics, mixed very curiously in the miscellanies of the time.

These are interesting enough, and may be studied with advantage, if not

also with pleasure, in the principal of them, _Wit's Recreations_ (1640).

This, with certain kindred works (_Wit Restored_, and the very unsavoury

_Musarum Deliciae_ of Sir John Mennis and Dr. Smith), has been more than

once republished. In these curious collections, to mention only one

instance, numerous pieces of Herrick's appeared with considerable variants

from the text of the _Hesperides_; and in their pages things old and new,

charming pastoral poems, _vers de societe_ of very unequal merit, ballads,

satires, epigrams, and a large quantity of mere scatology and doggerel, are

heaped together pell-mell. Songs from the dramatists, especially Fletcher,

make their appearance, sometimes with slight variants, and there are forms

of the drinking song in _Gammer Gurton's Needle_ long after, and of Sir

John Suckling's "Ballad on a Wedding," apparently somewhat before, their

respective publication in their proper places. Here is the joke about the

wife and the almanack which reckless tradition has told of Dryden; printed

when Lady Elizabeth Howard was in the nursery, and Dryden was not yet at

Westminster. Here we learn how, probably about the second or third decade

of the century, the favourite authors of learned ladies were "Wither,

Draiton, and Balzack" (Guez de Balzac of the _Letters_), a very singular

trio; and how some at least loved the "easy ambling" of Heywood's prose,

but thought that he "grovelled on the stage," which it must be confessed he

not uncommonly did. _Wit Restored_ contains the charming "Phillida flouts

Me," with other real "delights." Even Milton makes his appearance in these

collections, which continued to be popular for more than a century, and

acquired at intervals fresh vogue from the great names of Dryden and Pope.

Neglecting or returning from these, we may class the minor Caroline poets

under the following heads. There are belated Elizabethans like Habington,

sacred poets of the school of Herbert, translators like Stanley, Sherburne,

and Quarles, philosophico-theological poets like Joseph Beaumont and More,

and poets of society, such as Lovelace and Suckling, whose class

degenerated into a class of boon companion song-writers, such as Alexander

Brome, and, at the extremity of our present period, Charles Cotton, in

whose verse (as for the matter of that in the famous muses of Lovelace and

Suckling themselves) the rapidly degenerating prosody of the time is

sometimes painfully evident. This is also apparent (though it is

compensated by much exquisite poetry, and on the strictly lyric side rarely

offends) in the work of Randolph, Corbet, Cartwright, Chamberlayne of the

_Pharonnida_, Sidney Godolphin, Shakerley Marmion, Cleveland, Benlowes,

Kynaston, John Hall, the enigmatic Chalkhill, Patrick Carey, Bishop King.

These about exhaust the list of poets who must be characterised here,

though it could be extended. Cowley, Marvell, and Waller fall outside our

limits.

George Herbert, the one popular name, if we except Lovelace and Suckling,

of the last paragraph, was born at Montgomery Castle in 1593, of the great

house now represented in the English peerage by the holders of the titles

of Pembroke, Carnarvon, and Powis. George was the younger brother of the

equally well-known Lord Herbert of Cherbury; and after being for some years

public orator at Cambridge, turned, it is said, on some despite or

disappointment, from secular to sacred business, accepted the living of

Bemerton, and, after holding it for a short time, died in 1633. Walton's

_Life_ was hardly needed to fix Herbert in the popular mind, for his famous

volume of sacred poems, _The Temple_, would have done so, and has done so

far more firmly. It was not his only book by any means; he had displayed

much wit as quite a boy in counter-lampooning Andrew Melville's ponderous

and impudent _Anti-Tami-Cami-Categoria_, an attack on the English

universities; and afterwards he wrote freely in Greek, Latin, and English,

both in prose and verse. Nothing, however, but _The Temple_ has held

popular estimation, and that has held it firmly, being as much helped by

the Tractarian as by the Romantic movement. It may be confessed without

shame and without innuendo that Herbert has been on the whole a greater

favourite with readers than with critics, and the reason is obvious. He is

not prodigal of the finest strokes of poetry. To take only his own

contemporaries, and undoubtedly pupils, his gentle moralising and devotion

are tame and cold beside the burning glow of Crashaw, commonplace and

popular beside the intellectual subtlety and, now and then, the inspired

touch of Vaughan. But he never drops into the flatness and the extravagance

of both these writers, and his beauties, assuredly not mean in themselves,

and very constantly present, are both in kind and in arrangement admirably

suited to the average comprehension. He is quaint and conceited; but his

quaintnesses and conceits are never beyond the reach of any tolerably

intelligent understanding. He is devout, but his devotion does not

transgress into the more fantastic regions of piety. He is a mystic, but of

the more exoteric school of mysticism. He expresses common needs, common

thoughts, the everyday emotions of the Christian, just sublimated

sufficiently to make them attractive. The fashion and his own taste gave

him a pleasing quaintness, which his good sense kept from being ever

obscure or offensive or extravagant. The famous "Sweet day so cool, so

calm, so bright," and many short passages which are known to every one,

express Herbert perfectly. The thought is obvious, usual, in no sense far

fetched. The morality is plain and simple. The expression, with a

sufficient touch of the daintiness of the time, has nothing that is

extraordinarily or ravishingly felicitous whether in phrasing or versing.

He is, in short, a poet whom all must respect; whom those that are in

sympathy with his vein of thought cannot but revere; who did England an

inestimable service, by giving to the highest and purest thoughts that

familiar and abiding poetic garb which contributes so much to fix any

thoughts in the mind, and of which, to tell the truth, poetry has been much

more prodigal to other departments of thought by no means so well

deserving. But it is impossible to call him a great poet even in his own

difficult class. The early Latin hymn writers are there to show what a

great religious poet must be like. Crashaw, if his genius had been less

irregular and jaculative, might have been such. Herbert is not, and could

not have been. With him it is an almost invariable custom to class Vaughan

the "Silurist," and a common one to unite George Sandys, the traveller,

translator of Ovid, and paraphrast of the Psalms and other parts of the

Bible. Sandys, an older man than Herbert by fifteen, and than Vaughan by

more than forty years, published rather late, so that he came as a sacred

poet after Herbert, and not long before Vaughan. He was son of the

Archbishop of York, and brother of that Edwin Sandys who was a pupil of

Hooker, and who is said to have been present on the melancholy occasion

when the judicious one was "called to rock the cradle." He is interesting

for a singular and early mastery of the couplet, which the following

extract will show:--

"O Thou, who all things hast of nothing made,

Whose hand the radiant firmament displayed,

With such an undiscerned swiftness hurled

About the steadfast centre of the world;

Against whose rapid course the restless sun,

And wandering flames in varied motions run.

Which heat, light, life infuse; time, night, and day

Distinguish; in our human bodies sway:

That hung'st the solid earth in fleeting air

Veined with clear springs which ambient seas repair.

In clouds the mountains wrap their hoary heads;

Luxurious valleys clothed with flowery meads;

Her trees yield fruit and shade; with liberal breasts

All creatures she, their common mother, feasts."

Henry Vaughan was born in 1622, published _Poems_ in 1646 (for some of

which he afterwards expressed a not wholly necessary repentance), _Olor

Iscanus_ (from Isca Silurum) in 1651, and _Silex Scintillans_, his

best-known book, in 1650 and 1655. He also published verses much later, and

did not die till 1695, being the latest lived of any man who has a claim to

appear in this book, but his aftergrowths were not happy. To say that

Vaughan is a poet of one poem would not be true. But the universally known

"They are all gone into the world of light"

is so very much better than anything else that he has done that it would be

hardly fair to quote anything else, unless we could quote a great deal.

Like Herbert, and in pretty obvious imitation of him, he set himself to

bend the prevailing fancy for quips and quaintnesses into sacred uses, to

see that the Devil should not have all the best conceits. But he is not so

uniformly successful, though he has greater depth and greater originality

of thought.

Lovelace and Suckling are inextricably connected together, not merely by

their style of poetry, but by their advocacy of the same cause, their date,

and their melancholy end. Both (Suckling in 1609, Lovelace nine years

later) were born to large fortunes, both spent them, at least partially, in

the King's cause, and both died miserably,--Suckling, in 1642, by his own

hand, his mind, according to a legend, unhinged by the tortures of the

Inquisition; Lovelace, two years before the Restoration, a needy though not

an exiled cavalier, in London purlieus. Both have written songs of quite

marvellous and unparalleled exquisiteness, and both have left doggerel

which would disgrace a schoolboy. Both, it may be suspected, held the

doctrine which Suckling openly champions, that a gentleman should not take

too much trouble about his verses. The result, however, was in Lovelace's

case more disastrous than in Suckling's. It is not quite true that Lovelace

left nothing worth reading but the two immortal songs, "To Lucasta on going

to the Wars" and "To Althea from Prison;" and it is only fair to say that

the corrupt condition of his text is evidently due, at least in part, to

incompetent printing and the absence of revision. "The Grasshopper" is

almost worthy of the two better-known pieces, and there are others not far

below it. But on the whole any one who knows those two (and who does not?)

may neglect Lovelace with safety. Suckling, even putting his dramatic work

aside, is not to be thus treated. True, he is often careless in the bad

sense as well as in the good, though the doggerel of the "Sessions" and

some other pieces is probably intentional. But in his own vein, that of

coxcombry that is not quite cynical, and is quite intelligent, he is

marvellously happy. The famous song in _Aglaura_, the Allegro to Lovelace's

Penseroso, "Why so pale and wan, fond lover?" is scarcely better than "'Tis

now since I sat down before That foolish fort a heart," or "Out upon it! I

have loved Three whole days together." Nor in more serious veins is the

author to be slighted, as in "The Dance;" while as for the "Ballad on a

Wedding," the best parts of this are by common consent incomparable. Side

by side by these are to be found, as in Lovelace, pieces that will not even

scan, and, as _not_ in Lovelace (who is not seldom loose but never nasty),

pieces of a dull and disgusting obscenity. But we do not go to Suckling for

these; we go to him for his easy grace, his agreeable impudence, his

scandalous mock-disloyalty (for it is only mock-disloyalty after all) to

the "Lord of Terrible Aspect," whom all his elder contemporaries worshipped

so piously. Suckling's inconstancy and Lovelace's constancy may or may not

be equally poetical,--there is some reason for thinking that the lover of

Althea was actually driven to something like despair by the loss of his

mistress. But that matters to us very little. The songs remain, and remain

yet unsurpassed, as the most perfect celebrations, in one case of

chivalrous devotion, in the other of the coxcomb side of gallantry, that

literature contains or is likely ever to contain. The songwriting faculty

of the English, which had broken out some half century before, and had

produced so many masterpieces, was near its death, or at least near the

trance from which Burns and Blake revived it more than a century later,

which even Dryden's superhuman faculty of verse could only galvanise. But

at the last it threw off by the mouths of men, who otherwise seem to have

had very ordinary poetical powers, this little group of triumphs in song,

to which have to be added the raptures--equally strange and sweet, equally

unmatched of their kind, but nobler and more masculine--of the "Great

Marquis," the few and wonderful lines of Montrose. To quote "My dear and

only love, I pray," or "Great, good, and just, could I but rate," would be

almost as much an insult to the reader as to quote the above-mentioned

little masterpieces of the two less heroic English cavaliers.

Quarles, More, and Joseph Beaumont form, as it were, a kind of appendix to

the poetry of Herbert and Vaughan--an appendix very much less distinguished

by poetical power, but very interesting as displaying the character of the

time and the fashion (strange enough to us moderns) in which almost every

interest of that time found its natural way into verse. The enormous

popularity of Francis Quarles's _Emblems_ and _Enchiridion_ accounts to

some extent for the very unjust ridicule which has been lavished on him by

men of letters of his own and later times. But the silly antithesis of

Pope, a writer who, great as he was, was almost as ignorant of literary

history as his model, Boileau, ought to prejudice no one, and it is

strictly true that Quarles's enormous volume hides, to some extent, his

merits. Born in 1592 at Romford, of a gentle though not very distinguished

family, which enters into that curious literary genealogy of Swift, Dryden,

and Herrick, he was educated at Cambridge, became cup-bearer to the

ill-fated and romantically renowned "Goody Palsgrave," held the post which

Middleton and Jonson had held, of chronologer to the city of London,

followed the King to Oxford to his loss, having previously had losses in

Ireland, and died early in 1644, leaving his memory to be defended in a

rather affecting document by his widow, Ursula. Quarles was a kind of

journalist to whom the vehicle of verse came more easily than the vehicle

of prose, and the dangers of that state of things are well known. A mere

list of his work (the _Enchiridion_ is in prose, and a good thing too)

would far exceed any space that can be given to him here. All Quarles's

work is journey-work, but it is only fair to note the frequent wealth of

fancy, the occasional felicity of expression, which illustrate this

wilderness.

More and Beaumont were not, like Quarles, poetical miscellanists and

periodical writers; but they seem to have shared with him the delusion

that poetry is an instrument of all work. Henry More, a man well

connected and who might have risen, but who preferred to pass the greater

part of a long and studious life as a fellow of Christ's College,

Cambridge, is best known as a member of the theological school,

indifferently called the Cambridge Platonists and the Cambridge

Latitudinarians. His chief work in verse is a great philosophical poem,

entitled the _Song of the Soul_, with such engaging sub-titles as

_Psychozoia_, _Psychathanasia_, _Antipsychopannychia_, and

_Antimonopsychia_. I shall not, I hope, be suspected of being ignorant of

Greek, or disinclined to metaphysics, if I say that the _Song of the

Soul_ appears to me a venerable mistake. A philosophical controversy

carried on in this fashion--

"But contradiction, can that have place

In any soul? Plato affirms ideas;

But Aristotle, with his pugnacious race,

As idle figments stiffly them denies,"

seems to me to be a signal instance of the wrong thing in the wrong place.

It is quite true that More has, as Southey says, "lines and passages of

sublime beauty." A man of his time, actuated by its noble thought, trained

as we know More to have been in the severest school of Spenser, and thus

habituated to the heavenly harmonies of that perfect poet, could hardly

fail to produce such. But his muse is a chaotic not a cosmic one.

Something the same may be said of Joseph Beaumont, a friend of Crashaw, and

like him ejected from Peterhouse, son-in-law of Bishop Wren, and, later,

head of Jesus College. Beaumont, a strong cavalier and an orthodox

churchman, was a kind of adversary of More's, whose length and quaintness

he has exceeded, while he has almost rivalled his learning in _Psyche_ or

_Love's Mystery_, a religious poem of huge dimensions, first published in

1648 and later in 1702. Beaumont, as both fragments of this vast thing and

his minor poems show, had fancy, taste, and almost genius on opportunity;

but the prevailing mistake of his school, the idea that poetry is a fit

vehicle for merely prosaic expression, is painfully apparent in him.

First, for various reasons, among the nondescripts of the Caroline school,

deserves to be mentioned William Habington, a Roman Catholic gentleman of

good upper middle-class station, whose father was himself a man of letters,

and had some trouble in the Gunpowder Plot. He was born at Hindlip Hall,

near Worcester, in the year of the plot itself, courted and married Lucy

Herbert, daughter of his neighbour, Lord Powis, and published her charms

and virtues in the collection called _Castara_, first issued in 1634.

Habington also wrote a tragic comedy, _The Queen of Aragon_, and some other

work, but died in middle life. It is upon _Castara_ that his fame rests. To

tell the truth it is, though, as had been said, an estimable, yet a rather

irritating work. That Habington was a true lover every line of it shows;

that he had a strong infusion of the abundant poetical inspiration then

abroad is shown by line after line, though hardly by poem after poem, among

its pieces. His series of poems on the death of his friend Talbot is full

of beauty. His religion is sincere, fervent, and often finely expressed;

though he never rose to Herbert's pure devotion, or to Crashaw's flaming

poetry. One of the later _Castara_ poems may be given:--

"We saw and woo'd each other's eyes,

My soul contracted then with thine,

And both burnt in one sacrifice,

By which our marriage grew divine.

"Let wilder youths, whose soul is sense,

Profane the temple of delight,

And purchase endless penitence,

With the stolen pleasure of one night.

"Time's ever ours, while we despise

The sensual idol of our clay,

For though the sun do set and rise,

We joy one everlasting day.

"Whose light no jealous clouds obscure,

While each of us shine innocent,

The troubled stream is still impure;

With virtue flies away content.

"And though opinions often err,

We'll court the modest smile of fame,

For sin's black danger circles her,

Who hath infection in her name.

"Thus when to one dark silent room

Death shall our loving coffins thrust:

Fame will build columns on our tomb,

And add a perfume to our dust."

But _Castara_ is a real instance of what some foreign critics very unjustly

charge on English literature as a whole--a foolish and almost canting

prudery. The poet dins the chastity of his mistress into his readers' heads

until the readers in self-defence are driven to say, "Sir, did any one

doubt it?" He protests the freedom of his own passion from any admixture of

fleshly influence, till half a suspicion of hypocrisy and more than half a

feeling of contempt force themselves on the hearer. A relentless critic

might connect these unpleasant features with the uncharitable and more than

orthodox bigotry of his religious poems. Yet Habington, besides

contributing much agreeable verse to the literature of the period, is

invaluable as showing the counterside to Milton, the Catholic Puritanism

which is no doubt inherent in the English nature, and which, had it not

been for the Reformation, would probably have transformed Catholicism in a

very strange fashion.

There is no Puritanism of any kind in a group--it would hardly be fair to

call them a school--of "Heroic" poets to whom very little attention has

been paid in histories of literature hitherto, but who lead up not merely

to Davenant's _Gondibert_ and Cowley's _Davideis_, but to _Paradise Lost_

itself. The "Heroic" poem was a kind generated partly by the precepts of

the Italian criticism, including Tasso, partly by the practice of Tasso

himself, and endeavouring to combine something of the unity of Epic with

something and more of the variety of Romance. It may be represented here by

the work of Chalkhill, Chamberlayne, Marmion, and Kynaston. John Chalkhill,

the author of _Thealma and Clearchus_, was, with his work, introduced to

the public in 1683 by Izaak Walton, who styles him "an acquaintant and

friend of Edmund Spenser." If so, he must have been one of the first of

English poets to adopt the very loose enjambed decasyllabic couplet in

which his work, like that of Marmion and still more Chamberlayne, is

written. His poem is unfinished, and the construction and working-up of the

story are looser even than the metre; but it contains a great deal of

charming description and some very poetical phrase.

Much the same may be said of the _Cupid and Psyche_ (1637) of the dramatist

Shakerley Marmion (_v. inf._), which follows the original of Apuleius with

alternate closeness and liberty, but is always best when it is most

original. The _Leoline and Sydanis_ (1642) of Sir Francis Kynaston is not

in couplets but in rhyme royal--a metre of which the author was so fond

that he even translated the _Troilus and Cressida_ of Chaucer into Latin,

retaining the seven-line stanza and its rhymes. Kynaston, who was a member

of both universities and at one time proctor at Cambridge, was a man

interested in various kinds of learning, and even started an Academy or

_Museum Minervae_ of his own. In _Leoline and Sydanis_ he sometimes comes

near to the mock heroic, but in his lyrics called _Cynthiades_ he comes

nearer still to the best Caroline cry. One or two of his pieces have found

their way into anthologies, but until the present writer reprinted his

works[60] he was almost unknown.

[60] In _Minor Caroline Poets_, vols. i. and ii. (Oxford, 1905-6). An

important addition to the religious verse of the time was made by Mr.

Dobell with the _Poems_ (London, 1903) of Thomas Traherne, a follower of

Herbert, with some strange anticipations of Blake.

The most important by far, however, of this group is William Chamberlayne,

a physician of Shaftesbury, who, before or during the Civil War, began and

afterwards finished (publishing it in 1659) the very long heroic romance of

_Pharonnida_, a story of the most involved and confused character but with

episodes of great vividness and even sustained power: a piece of

versification straining the liberties of _enjambement_ in line and want of

connection in syntax to the utmost; but a very mine of poetical expression

and imagery. Jewels are to be picked up on every page by those who will

take the trouble to do so, and who are not offended by the extraordinary

nonchalance of the composition.

The _Theophila_ of Edward Benlowes (1603?-1676) was printed in 1652 with

elaborate and numerous engravings by Hollar, which have made it rare, and

usually imperfect when met with. Benlowes was a Cambridge man (of St.

John's College) by education, but lived latterly and died at Oxford, having

been reduced from wealth to poverty by the liberality which made his

friends anagrammatise his name into "Benevolus." His work was abused as an

awful example of the extravagant style by Butler (_Character of a Small

Poet_), and by Warburton in the next century; but it was never reprinted

till the date of the collection just noted. It is a really curious book,

displaying the extraordinary _diffusion_ of poetical spirit still existing,

but in a hectic and decadent condition. Benlowes--a Cleveland with more

poetry and less cleverness, or a very much weaker Crashaw--uses a

monorhymed triplet made up of a heroic, an octosyllable, and an Alexandrine

which is as wilfully odd as the rest of him.

Randolph, the youngest and not the least gifted of the tribe of Ben, died

before he was thirty, after writing some noteworthy plays, and a certain

number of minor poems, which, as it has been well observed, rather show

that he might have done anything, than that he did actually do something.

Corbet was Bishop first of Oxford and then of Norwich, and died in 1635.

Corbet's work is of that peculiar class which is usually, though not

always, due to "University Wits," and which only appeals to people with a

considerable appreciation of humour, and a large stock of general

information. It is always occasional in character, and rarely succeeds so

well as when the treatment is one of distinct _persiflage_. Thus the elegy

on Donne is infinitely inferior to Carew's, and the mortuary epitaph on

Arabella Stuart is, for such a subject and from the pen of a man of great

talent, extraordinarily feeble. The burlesque epistle to Lord Mordaunt on

his journey to the North is great fun, and the "Journey into France,"

though, to borrow one of its own jokes, rather "strong," is as good. The

"Exhortation to Mr. John Hammond," a ferocious satire on the Puritans,

distinguishes itself from almost all precedent work of the kind by the

force and directness of its attack, which almost anticipates Dryden. And

Corbet had both pathetic and imaginative touches on occasion, as here:--

"What I shall leave thee none can tell,

But all shall say I wish thee well,

I wish thee, Vin, before all wealth,

Both bodily and ghostly health;

Nor too much wealth, nor wit, come to thee,

So much of either may undo thee.

I wish thee learning, not for show,

Enough for to instruct and know;

Not such as gentlemen require

To prate at table, or at fire.

I wish thee all thy mother's graces,

Thy father's fortunes, and his places.

I wish thee friends, and one at court,

Not to build on, but support

To keep thee, not in doing many

Oppressions, but from suffering any.

I wish thee peace in all thy ways,

Nor lazy nor contentious days;

And when thy soul and body part

As innocent as now those art."

Cartwright, a short-lived man but a hard student, shows best in his dramas.

In his occasional poems, strongly influenced by Donne, he is best at

panegyric, worst at burlesque and epigram. In "On a Gentlewoman's Silk

Hood" and some other pieces he may challenge comparison with the most

futile of the metaphysicals; but no one who has read his noble elegy on Sir

Bevil Grenvil, unequal as it is, will think lightly of Cartwright. Sir

Edward Sherburne was chiefly a translator in the fashionable style. His

original poems were those of a very inferior Carew (he even copies the name

Celia), but they are often pretty. Alexander Brome, of whom very little is

known, and who must not be confounded with the dramatist, was a lawyer and

a cavalier song-writer, who too frequently wrote mere doggerel; but on the

other hand, he sometimes did not, and when he escaped the evil influence,

as in the stanzas "Come, come, let us drink," "The Trooper," and not a few

others, he has the right anacreontic vein.

As for Charles Cotton, his "Virgil Travesty" is deader than Scarron's, and

deserves to be so. The famous lines which Lamb has made known to every one

in the essay on "New Year's Day" are the best thing he did. But there are

many excellent things scattered about his work, despite a strong taint of

the mere coarseness and nastiness which have been spoken of. And though he

was also much tainted with the hopeless indifference to prosody which

distinguished all these belated cavaliers, it is noteworthy that he was one

of the few Englishmen for centuries to adopt the strict French forms and

write rondeaux and the like. On the whole his poetical power has been a

little undervalued, while he was also dexterous in prose.

Thomas Stanley has been classed above as a translator because he would

probably have liked to have his scholarship thus brought into prominence.

It was, both in ancient and modern tongues, very considerable. His

_History of Philosophy_ was a classic for a very long time; and his edition

of AEschylus had the honour of revision within the nineteenth century by

Porson and by Butler. It is not certain that Bentley did not borrow from

him; and his versions of Anacreon, of various other Greek lyrists, of the

later Latins, and of modern writers in Spanish and Italian are most

remarkable. But he was also an original poet in the best Caroline style of

lyric; and his combination of family (for he was of the great Stanley

stock), learning, and genius gave him a high position with men of letters

of his day. Sidney Godolphin, who died very young fighting for the King in

Hopton's army, had no time to do much; but he has been magnificently

celebrated by no less authorities than Clarendon and Hobbes, and fragments

of his work, which has only recently been collected, have long been known.

None of it, except a commendatory poem or two, was printed in his own time,

and very little later; while the MSS. are not in very accomplished form,

and show few or no signs of revision by the author. Some, however, of

Godolphin's lyrics are of great beauty, and a couplet translation of the

_Fourth AEneid_ has as much firmness as Sandys or Waller. Another precocious

poet whose life also was cut short, though less heroically, and on the

other side of politics, was John Hall, a Cambridge man, who at barely

twenty (1645-6) issued a volume of poems and another, _Horae Vacivae_, of

prose essays, translated Longinus, did hack-work on the Cromwellian side,

and died, it is said, of loose and lazy living. Hall's poems are of mixed

kinds--sacred and profane, serious and comic--and the best of them, such as

"The Call" and "The Lure," have a slender but most attractive vein of

fantastic charm. Patrick Carey, again, a Royalist and brother of the famous

Lord Falkland, brought up as a Roman Catholic but afterwards a convert to

the Church of England, left manuscript pieces, human and divine, which were

printed by Sir Walter Scott in 1819, and are extremely pleasant; while

Bishop King, though not often at the height of his well-known "Tell me no

more how fair she is," never falls below a level much above the average.

The satirist John Cleveland, whose poems were extremely popular and exist

in numerous editions (much blended with other men's work and hard to

disentangle), was made a sort of "metaphysical helot" by a reference in

Dryden's _Essay of Dramatic Poesy_ and quotations in Johnson's _Life of

Cowley_. He partly deserves this, though he has real originality of thought

and phrase; but much of his work is political or occasional, and he does

not often rise to the quintessential exquisiteness of some of those who

have been mentioned. A few examples of this class may be given:--

"Through a low

Dark vale, where shade-affecting walks did grow

Eternal strangers to the sun, did lie

The narrow path frequented only by

The forest tyrants when they bore their prey

From open dangers of discovering day.

Passed through this desert valley, they were now

Climbing an easy hill, whose every bough

Maintained a feathered chorister to sing

Soft panegyrics, and the rude winds bring

Into a murmuring slumber; whilst the calm

Morn on each leaf did hang the liquid balm

With an intent, before the next sun's birth

To drop it in those wounds which the cleft earth

Received from's last day's beams. The hill's ascent

Wound up by action, in a large extent

Of leafy plains, shows them the canopy

Beneath whose shadow their large way did lie."

CHAMBERLAYNE, _Pharonnida_, iv. 1. 199-216.

It will be observed that of these eighteen lines all but _four_ are

overrun; and the resemblance to the couplet of Keats's _Endymion_ should

not be missed.

"April is past, then do not shed,

And do not waste in vain,

Upon thy mother's earthy bed

Thy tears of silver rain.

"Thou canst not hope that the cold earth

By wat'ring will bring forth

A flower like thee, or will give birth

To one of the like worth.

"'Tis true the rain fall'n from the sky

Or from the clouded air,

Doth make the earth to fructify,

Ann makes the heaven more fair.

"With thy dear face it is not so,

Which, if once overcast,

If thou rain down thy showers of woe,

They, like the sirens, blast.

"Therefore, when sorrow shall becloud

Thy fair serenest day,

Weep not: thy sighs shall be allow'd

To chase the storm away.

"Consider that the teeming vine,

If cut by chance [it] weep,

Doth bear no grapes to make the wine,

But feels eternal sleep."

KYNASTON.

"Be conquer'd by such charms; there shall

Not always such enticements fall.

What know we whether that rich spring of light

Will staunch his streams

Of golden beams

Ere the approach of night?

"How know we whether't shall not be

The last to either thee or me?

He can at will his ancient brightness gain,

But thou and I

When we shall die

Shall still in dust remain."

JOHN HALL.

This group of poets seems to demand a little general criticism. They stand

more by themselves than almost any other group in English literary history,

marked off in most cases with equal sharpness from predecessors, followers,

and contemporaries. The best of them, Herrick and Carew, with Crashaw as a

great thirdsman, called themselves "sons" of Ben Jonson, and so in a way

they were; but they were even more sons of Donne. That great writer's

burning passion, his strange and labyrinthine conceits, the union in him of

spiritual and sensual fire, influenced the idiosyncrasies of each as hardly

any other writer's influence has done in other times; while his technical

shortcomings had unquestionably a fatal effect on the weaker members of the

school. But there is also noticeable in them a separate and hardly

definable influence which circumscribes their class even more distinctly.

They were, as I take it, the last set of poets anywhere in Europe to

exhibit, in that most fertile department of poetry which seeks its

inspiration in the love of man for woman, the frank expression of physical

affection united with the spirit of chivalry, tempered by the consciousness

of the fading of all natural delights, and foreshadowed by that

intellectual introspection which has since developed itself in such great

measure--some think out of all measure--in poetry. In the best of them

there is no cynicism at all. Herrick and Carew are only sorry that the

amatory fashion of this world passeth; they do not in the least undervalue

it while it lasts, or sneer at it when it is gone. There is, at least to my

thinking, little coarseness in them (I must perpetually except Herrick's

epigrams), though there is, according to modern standards, a great deal of

very plain speaking. They have as much frank enjoyment of physical

pleasures as any classic or any mediaevalist; but they have what no classic

except Catullus and perhaps Sappho had,--the fine rapture, the passing but

transforming madness which brings merely physical passion _sub specie

aeternitatis_; and they have in addition a faint preliminary touch of that

analytic and self-questioning spirit which refines even further upon the

chivalric rapture and the classical-renaissance mysticism of the shadow of

death, but which since their time has eaten up the simpler and franker

moods of passion itself. With them, as a necessary consequence, the

physical is (to anticipate a famous word of which more presently) always

blended with the metaphysical. It is curious that, as one result of the

change of manner, this should have even been made a reproach to them--that

the ecstasy of their ecstasies should apparently have become not an excuse

but an additional crime. Yet if any grave and precise person will read

Carew's _Rapture_, the most audacious, and of course wilfully audacious

expression of the style, and then turn to the archangel's colloquy with

Adam in _Paradise Lost_, I should like to ask him on which side, according

to his honour and conscience, the coarseness lies. I have myself no

hesitation in saying that it lies with the husband of Mary Powell and the

author of _Tetrachordon_, not with the lover of Celia and the author of the

lines to "A. L."

There are other matters to be considered in the determination of the

critical fortunes of the Caroline school. Those fortunes have been rather

odd. Confounded at first in the general oblivion which the Restoration

threw on all works of "the last age," and which deepened as the school of

Dryden passed into the school of Pope, the writers of the Donne-Cowley

tradition were first exhumed for the purposes of _post-mortem_ examination

by and in the remarkable "Life" of Johnson, devoted to the last member of

the class. It is at this time of day alike useless to defend the

Metaphysical Poets against much that Johnson said, and to defend Johnson

against the charge of confusion, inadequacy, and haste in his

generalisations. The term metaphysical, originating with Dryden, and used

by Johnson with a slight difference, may be easily miscomprehended by any

one who chooses to forget its legitimate application both etymologically

and by usage to that which comes, as it were, behind or after nature. Still

Johnson undoubtedly confounded in one common condemnation writers who have

very little in common, and (which was worse) criticised a peculiarity of

expression as if it had been a deliberate substitution of alloy for gold.

The best phrases of the metaphysical poets more than justify themselves to

any one who looks at poetry with a more catholic appreciation than

Johnson's training and associations enabled him to apply; and even the

worst are but mistaken attempts to follow out a very sound principle, that

of "making the common as though it were not common." Towards the end of the

eighteenth century some of these poets, especially Herrick, were revived

with taste and success by Headley and other men of letters. But it so

happened that the three great critics of the later Romantic revival,

Hazlitt, Lamb, and Coleridge, were all strongly attracted to the bolder and

more irregular graces of the great dramatic poets, to the not less quaint

but less "mignardised" quaintnesses of prose writers like Burton, Browne,

and Taylor, or to the massive splendours of the Elizabethan poets proper.

The poetry of the Caroline age was, therefore, a little slurred, and this

mishap of falling between two schools has constantly recurred to it. Some

critics even who have done its separate authors justice, have subsequently

indulged in palinodes, have talked about decadence and Alexandrianism and

what not. The majority have simply let the Cavalier Poets (as they are

sometimes termed by a mere historical coincidence) be something more than

the victims of the schools that preceded and followed them. The lovers of

the school of good sense which Waller founded regard the poets of this

chapter as extravagant concettists; the lovers of the Elizabethan school

proper regard them as effeminate triflers. One of Milton's gorgeous but

constantly illogical phrases about the poets of his day may perhaps have

created a prejudice against these poets. But Milton was a politician as

well as a poet, a fanatic as well as a man of letters of seldom equalled,

and never, save in two or three cases, surpassed powers. He was also a man

of a more morose and unamiable private character than any other great poet

the world has known except Racine. The easy _bonhomie_ of the Caroline muse

repelled his austerity; its careless good-breeding shocked his middle-class

and Puritan Philistinism; its laxity revolted his principles of morality.

Not improbably the vein of sympathy which discovers itself in the exquisite

verse of the _Comus_, of the _Allegro_ and _Penseroso_, of _Lycidas_

itself, infuriated him (as such veins of sympathy when they are rudely

checked and turned from their course will often do) with those who indulged

instead of checking it. But because _Lycidas_ is magnificent, and _Il

Penseroso_ charming poetry, we are not to think meanly of "Fair

Daffodils," or "Ask me no more," of "Going to the Wars," or "Tell me no

more how fair she is."

Let us clear our minds of this cant, and once more admit, as the student of

literature always has to remind himself, that a sapphire and diamond ring

is not less beautiful because it is not a marble palace, or a bank of wild

flowers in a wood because it is not a garden after the fashion of Lenotre.

In the division of English poetry which we have been reviewing, there are

to be found some of the most exquisite examples of the gem and flower order

of beauty that can be found in all literature. When Herrick bids Perilla

"Wind me in that very sheet

Which wrapt thy smooth limbs when thou didst implore

The gods' protection but the night before:

Follow me weeping to my turf, and there

Let fall a primrose and with it a tear;

Then lastly, let some weekly strewings be

Devoted to the memory of me.

_Then shall my ghost not walk about; but keep_

_Still in the cool and silent shades of sleep;_"

or when he writes that astonishing verse, so unlike his usual style--

"In this world, _the Isle of Dreams_,

While we sit by sorrow's streams,

Tears and terrors are our themes;"

when Carew, in one of those miraculous closing bursts, carefully led up to,

of which he has almost the secret, cries

"_Oh, love me then, and now begin it,_

_Let us not lose this present minute;_

_For time and age will work that wrack_

_Which time nor age shall ne'er call back;_"

when even the sober blood in Habington's decent veins spurts in this

splendid sally--

"So, 'mid the ice of the far northern sea,

A star about the Arctic circle may

Than ours yield clearer light; _yet that but shall_

_Serve at the frozen pilot's funeral_:"

when Crashaw writes as if caught by the very fire of which he speaks,--the

fire of the flaming heart of Saint Theresa; when Lovelace, most careless

and unliterary of all men, breaks out as if by simple instinct into those

perfect verses which hardly even Burns and Shelley have equalled since,--it

is impossible for any one who feels for poetry at all not to feel more than

appreciation, not to feel sheer enthusiasm. Putting aside the very greatest

poets of all, I hardly know any group of poetical workers who so often

cause this enthusiasm as our present group, with their wonderful felicity

of language; with their command of those lyrical measures which seem so

easy and are so difficult; with their almost unparalleled blend of a

sensuousness that does not make the intellect sluggish and of the loftiest

spirituality.

When we examine what is said against them, a great deal of it is found to

be based on that most treacherous of all foundations, a hard-driven

metaphor. Because they come at the end of a long and fertile period of

literature, because a colder and harder kind of poetry followed them, they

are said to be "decadence," "autumn," "over-ripe fruit," "sunset," and so

forth. These pretty analogies have done much harm in literary history. Of

the Muse it is most strictly and soberly true that "Bocca bacciata non

perde ventura, anzi rinuova come fa la luna." If there is any meaning about

the phrases of decadence, autumn, and the like, it is derived from the idea

of approaching death and cessation. There is no death, no cessation, in

literature; and the sadness and decay of certain periods is mere fiction.

An autumn day would not be sad if the average human being did not (very

properly) take from it a warning of the shortness of his own life. But

literature is not short-lived. There was no sign of poetry dying when

Shelley lived two thousand five hundred years after Sappho, when Shakespere

lived as long after Homer. Periods like the periods of the Greek Anthology

or of our Caroline poetry are not periods of decay, but simply periods of

difference. There are no periods of decay in literature so long as anything

good is produced; and when nothing good is produced, it is only a sign

that the field is taking a healthy turn of fallow. In this time much that

was good, with a quite wonderful and charming goodness, was produced. What

is more, it was a goodness which had its own distinct characteristics, some

of which I have endeavoured to point out, and which the true lover of

poetry would be as unwilling to lose as to lose the other goodnesses of all

the great periods, and of all but the greatest names in those periods. For

the unapproachables, for the first Three, for Homer, for Shakespere, for

Dante, I would myself (though I should be very sorry) give up all the poets

we have been reviewing. I should not like to have to choose between Herrick

and Milton's earlier poems; between the Caroline poets, major and minor, as

just reviewed on the one hand, and _The Faerie Queene_ on the other. But I

certainly would give _Paradise Regained_ for some score of poems of the

writers just named; and for them altogether I would give all but a few

passages (I would not give those) of _Paradise Lost_. And, as I have

endeavoured (perhaps to my readers' satiety) to point out, this comparative

estimate is after all a radically unsound one. We are not called upon to

weigh this kind of poetry against that kind; we are only incidentally, and

in an uninvidious manner, called upon to weigh this poet against that even

of the same kind. The whole question is, whether each is good in his own

kind, and whether the kind is a worthy and delightful one. And in regard of

most of the poets just surveyed, both these questions can be answered with

an unhesitating affirmative. If we had not these poets, one particular

savour, one particular form, of the poetical rapture would be lacking to

the poetical expert; just as if what Herrick himself calls "the brave

Burgundian wine" were not, no amount of claret and champagne could replace

it. For passionate sense of the good things of earth, and at the same time

for mystical feeling of their insecurity, for exquisite style without the

frigidity and the over-correctness which the more deliberate stylists

frequently display, for a blending of Nature and art that seems as if it

must have been as simply instinctive in all as it certainly was in some,

the poets of the Tribe of Ben, of the Tribe of Donne, who illustrated the

period before Puritanism and Republicanism combined had changed England

from merriment to sadness, stand alone in letters. We have had as good

since, but never the same--never any such blending of classical frankness,

of mediaeval simplicity and chivalry, of modern reflection and thought.[61]

[61] Since this book first appeared, some persons whose judgment I respect

have expressed to me surprise and regret that I have not given a higher and

larger place to Henry Vaughan. A higher I cannot give, because I think him,

despite the extreme beauty of his thought and (more rarely) of his

expression, a most imperfect poet; nor a larger, because that would involve

a critical arguing out of the matter, which would be unsuitable to the plan

and scale of this book. Had he oftener written as he wrote in the famous

poem referred to in the text, or as in the magnificent opening of "The

World"--

"I saw Eternity the other night,

_Like a great ring of pure and endless light_,

All calm as it was bright,"

there would be much more to say of him. But he is not master of the

expression suitable to his noble and precious thought except in the

briefest bursts--bursts compared to which even Crashaw's are sustained and

methodical. His admirers claim for "The Retreat" the germ of Wordsworth's

great ode, but if any one will compare the two he will hardly complain that

Vaughan has too little space here.