I owe somewhat to myself; not that I think it worth my time to enter
the lists with one Milbourn and one Blackmore, but barely to take
notice that such men there are who have written scurrilously against
me without any provocation. Milbourn, who is in orders, pretends amongst
the rest this quarrel to me, that I have fallen foul on priesthood;
if I have, I am only to ask pardon of good priests, and am afraid his
part of the reparation will come to little. Let him be satisfied that
he shall not be able to force himself upon me for an adversary. I
contemn him too much to enter into competition with him. His own
translations of Virgil have answered his criticisms on mine. If (as
they say he has declared in print) he prefers the version of Ogilby
to mine, the world has made him the same compliment, for it is agreed
on all hands that he writes even below Ogilby. That, you will say. is
not easily to be done; but what cannot Milbourn bring about? I am
satisfied, however, that while he and I live together, I shall not be
thought the worst poet of the age. It looks as if I had desired him
underhand to write so ill against me; but upon my honest word, I have
not bribed him to do me this service, and am wholly guiltless of his
pamphlet. 'Tis true, I should be glad if I could persuade him to
continue his good offices, and write such another critique on anything
of mine; for I find by experience he has a great stroke with the reader,
when he condemns any of my poems, to make the world have a better
opinion of them. He has taken some pains with my poetry, but nobody
will be persuaded to take the same with his. If I had taken to the
church (as he affirms, but which was never in my thoughts), I should
have had more sense, if not more grace, than to have turned myself out
of my benefice by writing libels on my parishioners. But his account
of my manners and my principles are of a piece with his cavils and his
poetry; and so I have done with him for ever.
As for the City Bard, or Knight Physician, I hear his quarrel to me
is, that I was the author of _Absalom and Achitophel_, which he thinks
was a little hard on his fanatic patrons in London.
But I will deal the more civilly with his two poems, because nothing
ill is to be spoken of the dead, and therefore peace be to the Manes
of his Arthurs. I will only say that it was not for this noble knight
that I drew the plan of an Epic poem on King Arthur in my preface to
the translation of Juvenal. The guardian angels of kingdoms were
machines too ponderous for him to manage; and therefore he rejected
them, as Dares did the whirlbats of Eryx, when they were thrown before
him by Entellus. Yet from that preface he plainly took his hint; for
he began immediately upon his story, though he had the baseness not
to acknowledge his benefactor; but instead of it, to traduce me in a
libel.
I shall say the less of Mr. Collier, [Footnote: His _Short View of the
Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage_ (1698) was largely
directed against Dryden. See the account of it given in Macaulay's
_Comic Dramatists of the Restoration_.] because in many things he has
taxed me justly, and I have pleaded guilty to all thoughts and
expressions of mine which can be truly argued of obscenity, profaneness,
or immorality, and retract them. If he be my enemy, let him triumph;
if he be my friend, as I have given him no personal occasion to be
otherwise, he will be glad of my repentance. It becomes me not to draw
my pen in the defence of a bad cause when I have so often drawn it for
a good one. Yet it were not difficult to prove that in many places he
has perverted my meaning by his glosses, and interpreted my words into
blasphemy and bawdry, of which they were not guilty--besides that he
is too much given to horseplay in his raillery, and comes to battle
like a dictator from the plough. I will not say the zeal of God's house
has eaten him up, but I am sure it has devoured some part of his good
manners and civility. It might also be doubted whether it were
altogether zeal which prompted him to this rough manner of proceeding;
perhaps it became not one of his function to rake into the rubbish of
ancient and modern plays. A divine might have employed his pains to
better purpose than in the nastiness of Plautus and Aristophanes, whose
examples, as they excuse not me, so it might be possibly supposed that
he read them not without some pleasure. They who have written
commentaries on those poets, or on Horace, Juvenal, and Martial, have
explained some vices which, without their interpretation, had been
unknown to modern times. Neither has he judged impartially betwixt the
former age and us.
There is more bawdry in one play of Fletcher's, called the _Custom of
the Country_, than in all ours together. Yet this has been often acted
on the stage in my remembrance. Are the times so much more reformed
now than they were five and twenty years ago? If they are, I
congratulate the amendment of our morals. But I am not to prejudice
the cause of my fellow-poets, though I abandon my own defence; they
have some of them answered for themselves, and neither they nor I can
think Mr. Collier so formidable an enemy that we should shun him. He
has lost ground at the latter end of the day by pursuing his point too
far, like the Prince of Conde at the battle of Senneffe: from immoral
plays to no plays--_ab abusu ad usum, non valet consequentia_.
[Footnote: From the fact that there are immoral plays to the inference
that there should be no plays the argument does not follow.] But being
a party, I am not to erect myself into a judge. As for the rest of
those who have written against me, they are such scoundrels that they
deserve not the least notice to be taken of them. Blackmore and Milbourn
are only distinguished from the crowd by being remembered to their
infamy.
----Demetri teque, Tigelli,
Discipulorum inter jubeo plorare cathedras.
SAMUEL JOHNSON.
(1709-1784.)
III. ON THE METAPHYSICAL POETS.
The criticism of the 'metaphysical poets' occurs in the Life of Cowley,
published as one of the _Lives of the Poets_ in 1780. The name
'metaphysical poetry' was first devised by Dryden, in his _Essay of
Dramatic Poesy_. It was revived by Johnson, and is now generally
accepted by historians of English literature. It is used by Johnson,
as it was used by Dryden, to express the love of remote analogies,
which was a mark of the poetry of Donne and those who wrote more or
less after the manner of Donne. But it has a deeper meaning than was
probably intended by its inventors. It is no unapt term to indicate
the vein of weighty thought and brooding imagination which runs like
a thread of gold through all the finer work of these poets. Johnson
did no harm in calling attention to the extravagance of much of the
imagery beloved by the lyric poets of the Stuart period. But it is
unpardonable that he should have had no eye for the nobler and subtler
qualities of their genius, and equally unpardonable that he should
have drawn no distinction between three men so incomparable in degree
and kind of power as Cleveland, Cowley, and Donne. Some remarks on the
place of the metaphysical poets in English literature will be found
in the Introduction.
Cowley, like other poets who have written with narrow views, and,
instead of tracing intellectual pleasure to its natural sources in the
mind of man, paid their court to temporary prejudices, has been at one
time too much praised, and too much neglected at another.
Wit, like all other things subject by their nature to the choice of
man, has its changes and fashions, and at different times takes
different forms. About the beginning of the seventeenth century appeared
a race of writers that may be termed the metaphysical poets; of whom,
in a criticism on the works of Cowley, it is not improper to give some
account.
The metaphysical poets were men of learning, and to show their learning
was their whole endeavour; but, unluckily resolving to show it in
rhyme, instead of writing poetry, they only wrote verses, and very
often such verses as stood the trial of the finger better than of the
ear; for the modulation was so imperfect, that they were only found
to be verses by counting the syllables.
If the father of criticism has rightly denominated poetry, _an imitative
art_, these writers will, without great wrong, lose their right to the
name of poets; for they cannot be said to have imitated anything; they
neither copied nature nor life; neither painted the forms of matter,
nor represented the operations of intellect.
Those, however, who deny them to be poets, allow them to be wits.
Dryden confesses of himself and his contemporaries that they fall below
Donne in wit, but maintains that they surpass him in poetry.
If wit be well described by Pope, as being "that which has been often
thought, but was never before so well expressed", they certainly never
attained, nor ever sought it; for they endeavoured to be singular in
their thoughts, and were careless of their diction. But Pope's account
of wit is undoubtedly erroneous: he depresses it below its natural
dignity, and reduces it from strength of thought to happiness of
language.
If by a more noble and more adequate conception that be considered as
wit which is at once natural and new, that which, though not obvious,
is, upon its first production, acknowledged to be just; if it be that
which he that never found it wonders how he missed; to wit of this
kind the metaphysical poets have seldom risen. Their thoughts are often
new, but seldom natural; they are not obvious, but neither are they
just; and the reader, far from wondering that he missed them, wonders
more frequently by what perverseness of industry they were ever found.
But wit, abstracted from its effects upon the hearer, may be more
rigorously and philosophically considered as a kind of _discordia
concors_; a combination of dissimilar images, or discovery of occult
resemblances in things apparently unlike. Of wit, thus defined, they
have more than enough. The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by
violence together; nature and art are ransacked for illustrations,
comparisons, and allusions; their learning instructs, and their subtlety
surprises; but the reader commonly thinks his improvement dearly bought,
and, though he sometimes admires, is seldom pleased.
From this account of their compositions it will be readily inferred
that they were not successful in representing or moving the affections.
As they were wholly employed on something unexpected and surprising,
they had no regard to that uniformity of sentiment which enables us
to conceive and to excite the pains and the pleasure of other minds:
they never inquired what, on any occasion, they should have said or
done; but wrote rather as beholders than partakers of human nature;
as Beings looking upon good and evil, impassive and at leisure; as
Epicurean deities making remarks on the actions of men and the
vicissitudes of life without interest and without emotion. Their
courtship was void of fondness, and their lamentation of sorrow. Their
wish was only to say what they hoped had never been said before.
Nor was the sublime more within their reach than the pathetic; for
they never attempted that comprehension and expanse of thought which
at once fills the whole mind, and of which the first effect is sudden
astonishment, and the second rational admiration. Sublimity is produced
by aggregation, and littleness by dispersion. Great thoughts are always
general, and consist in positions not limited by exceptions, and in
descriptions not descending to minuteness. It is with great propriety
that subtlety, which in its original import means exility of particles,
is taken in its metaphorical meaning for nicety of distinction. Those
writers who lay on the watch for novelty could have little hope of
greatness; for great things cannot have escaped former observation.
Their attempts were always analytic; they broke every image into
fragments: and could no more represent, by their slender conceits and
laboured particularities, the prospects of nature or the scenes of
life, than he who dissects a sunbeam with a prism can exhibit the wide
effulgence of a summer noon. What they wanted, however, of the sublime,
they endeavoured to supply by hyperbole; their amplification had no
limits; they left not only reason but fancy behind them; and produced
combinations of confused magnificence that not only could not be
credited, but could not be imagined.
Yet great labour, directed by great abilities, is never wholly lost:
if they frequently threw away their wit upon false conceits, they
likewise sometimes struck out unexpected truth: if their conceits were
far-fetched, they were often worth the carriage. To write on their
plan, it was at least necessary to read and think. No man could be
born a metaphysical poet, nor assume the dignity of a writer, by
descriptions copied from descriptions, by imitations borrowed from
imitations, by traditional imagery and hereditary similes, by readiness
of rhyme and volubility of syllables.
In perusing the works of this race of authors, the mind is exercised
either by recollection or inquiry; either something already learned
is to be retrieved, or something new is to be examined. If their
greatness seldom elevates, their acuteness often surprises; if the
imagination is not always gratified, at least the powers of reflection
and comparison are employed; and in the mass of materials which
ingenious absurdity has thrown together, genuine wit and useful
knowledge may be sometimes found, buried perhaps in grossness of
expression, but useful to those who know their value; and such as,
when they are expanded to perspicuity and polished to elegance, may
give lustre to works which have more propriety though less copiousness
of sentiment.
This kind of writing, which was, I believe, borrowed from Marino
[Footnote: As Marino's chief poem, _L'Adone_, was not published till
1623, and as most of Donne's poems must have been written earlier,
this is very unlikely. Besides, the resemblance is more apparent than
real. Metaphysical poetry was a native product. See Introduction.]
and his followers, had been recommended by the example of Donne, a man
of very extensive and various knowledge; and by Jonson, whose manner
resembled that of Donne more in the ruggedness of his lines than in
the cast of his sentiments.
When their reputation was high, they had undoubtedly more imitators
than time has left behind. Their immediate successors, of whom any
remembrance can be said to remain, were Suckling, Waller, Denham,
Cowley, Cleveland, and Milton. Denham and Waller sought another way
to fame, by improving the harmony of our numbers. Milton tried the
metaphysic style only in his lines upon Hobson the Carrier. Cowley
adopted it, and excelled his predecessors, having as much sentiment
and more music. Suckling neither improved versification, nor abounded
in conceits. The fashionable style remained chiefly with Cowley;
Suckling could not reach it, and Milton disdained it.
Critical remarks are not easily understood without examples, and I
have therefore collected instances of the modes of writing by which
this species of poets, for poets they were called by themselves and
their admirers, was eminently distinguished.
As the authors of this race were perhaps more desirous of being admired
than understood, they sometimes drew their conceits from recesses of
learning not very much frequented by common readers of poetry. Thus
Cowley on _Knowledge_:
The sacred tree midst the fair orchard grew;
The phoenix Truth did on it rest.
And built his perfum'd nest,
That right Porphyrian tree which did true logick shew.
Each leaf did learned notions give,
And th' apples were demonstrative:
So clear their colour and divine,
The very shade they cast did other lights outshine.
On Anacreon continuing a lover in his old age:
Love was with thy life entwin'd,
Close as heat with fire is join'd,
A powerful brand prescrib'd the date
Of thine, like Meleager's fate.
The antiperistasis of age
More enflam'd thy amorous rage.
In the following verses we have an allusion to a Rabbinical opinion
concerning Manna:
Variety I ask not: give me one
To live perpetually upon.
The person Love does to us fit,
Like manna, has the taste of all in it.
Thus Donne shows his medicinal knowledge in some encomiastic verses:
In everything there naturally grows
A Balsamum to keep it fresh and new,
If't were not injur'd by extrinsique blows;
Your youth and beauty are this balm in you.
But you, of learning and religion,
And virtue and such ingredients, have made
A mithridate, whose operation
Keeps off, or cures what can be done or said.
Though the following lines of Donne, on the last night of the year,
have something in them too scholastic, they are not inelegant:
This twilight of two years, not past nor next,
Some emblem is of me, or I of this,
Who, meteor-like, of stuff and form perplext,
Whose what and where, in disputation is,
If I should call me any thing, should miss.
I sum the years and me, and find me not
Debtor to th' old, nor creditor to th' new,
That cannot say, my thanks I have forgot,
Nor trust I this with hopes: and yet scarce true
This bravery is, since these times shew'd me you.
--_Donne_.
Yet more abstruse and profound is Donne's reflection upon Man as a
Microcosm:
If men be worlds, there is in every one
Something to answer in some proportion
All the world's riches: and in good men, this
Virtue, our form's form, and our soul's soul is.
Of thoughts so far-fetched as to be not only unexpected but unnatural,
all their books are full.
TO A LADY, WHO WROTE POESIES FOR RINGS.
They, who above do various circles find,
Say, like a ring th' aquator heaven does bind.
When heaven shall be adorn'd by thee,
(Which then more heaven than 't is, will be)
'T is thou must write the poesy there,
For it wanteth one as yet,
Though the sun pass through 't twice a year,
The sun, which is esteem'd the god of wit.
--_Cowley_.
The difficulties which have been raised about identity in philosophy
are by Cowley, with still more perplexity, applied to Love:
Five years ago (says story) I lov'd you,
For which you call me most inconstant now;
Pardon me, madam, you mistake the man;
For I am not the same that I was then;
No flesh is now the same't was then in me,
And that my mind is chang'd yourself may see.
The same thoughts to retain still, and intents,
Were more inconstant far; for accidents
Must of all things most strangely inconstant prove,
If from one subject they t' another move:
My members then, the father members were
From whence these take their birth, which now are here.
If then this body love what th' other did,
'T were incest, which by nature is forbid.
The love of different women is, in geographical poetry, compared to
travels, through different countries:
Hast thou not found each woman's breast
(The land where thou hast travelled)
Either by savages possest,
Or wild, and uninhabited?
What joy could'st take, or what repose,
In countries so unciviliz'd as those?
Lust, the scorching dog-star, here
Rages with immoderate heat;
Whilst Pride, the rugged Northern Bear,
In others makes the cold too great.
And when these are temperate known,
The soil's all barren sand, or rocky stone.
--_Cowley_.
A lover, burnt up by his affections, is compared to Egypt:
The fate of Egypt I sustain,
And never feel the dew of rain.
From clouds which in the head appear;
But all my too much moisture owe
To overflowings of the heart below.
--_Cowley_.
The lover supposes his lady acquainted with the ancient laws of augury
and rites of sacrifice:
And yet this death of mine, I fear,
Will ominous to her appear:
When found in every other part,
Her sacrifice is found without an heart.
For the last tempest of my death
Shall sigh out that too, with my breath.
That the chaos was harmonized, has been recited of old; but whence the
different sounds arose remained for a modern to discover:
Th' ungovern'd parts no correspondence knew,
And artless war from thwarting motions grew;
Till they to number and fixt rules were brought.
Water and air he for the Tenor chose.
Earth made the Base, the Treble flame arose.
--_Cowley._
The tears of lovers are always of great poetical account, but Donne
has extended them into worlds. If the lines are not easily understood,
they may be read again:
On a round ball
A workman, that hath copies by, can lay
An Europe, Afric, and an Asia,
And quickly make that, which was nothing, all.
So doth each tear,
Which thee doth wear,
A globe, yea world, by that impression grow,
Till thy tears mixt with mine do overflow
This world, by waters sent from thee my heaven dissolved so.
On reading the following lines, the reader may perhaps cry out,
"Confusion worse confounded":
Here lies a she sun, and a he moon here,
She gives the best light to his sphere,
Or each is both, and all, and so
They unto one another nothing owe.
--_Donne._
Who but Donne would have thought that a good man is a telescope?
Though God be our true glass, through which we see
All, since the being of all things is He,
Yet are the trunks, which do to us derive
Things, in proportion fit, by perspective
Deeds of good men; for by their living here,
Virtues, indeed remote, seem to be near.
Who would imagine it possible that in a very few lines so many remote
ideas could be brought together?
Since't is my doom, Love's undershrieve,
Why this reprieve?
Why doth my She Advowson fly
Incumbency?
To sell thyself dost thou intend
By candle's end,
And hold the contrast thus in doubt,
Life's taper out?
Think but how soon the market fails,
Your sex lives faster than the males;
As if to measure age's span,
The sober Julian were th' account of man,
Whilst you live by the fleet Gregorian.
--_Cleveland_.
Of enormous and disgusting hyperboles, these may be examples:
By every wind, that comes this way,
Send me at least a sigh or two,
Such and so many I'll repay
As shall themselves make winds to get to you.
--_Cowley_.
In tears I'll waste these eyes,
By Love so vainly fed;
So lust of old the Deluge punished.
--_Cowley_.
All arm'd in brass the richest dress of war,
(A dismal glorious sight) he shone afar.
The sun himself started with sudden fright,
To see his beams return so dismal bright.
--_Cowley_.
An universal consternation:
His bloody eyes he hurls round, his sharp paws
Tear up the ground; then runs he wild about,
Lashing his angry tail and roaring out.
Beasts creep into their dens, and tremble there;
Trees, though no wind is stirring, shake with fear;
Silence and horror fill the place around:
Echo itself dares scarce repeat the sound.
--_Cowley_.
Their fictions were often violent and unnatural.
OF HIS MISTRESS BATHING.
The fish around her crowded, as they do
To the false light that treacherous fishers shew,
And all with as much ease might taken be,
As she at first took me:
For ne'er did light so clear
Among the waves appear,
Though every night the sun himself set there.
--_Cowley_.
The poetical effect of a lover's name upon glass:
My name engrav'd herein
Doth contribute my firmness to this glass;
Which, ever since that charm, hath been
As hard as that which grav'd it was.
--_Donne_.
Their conceits were sometimes slight and trifling.
ON AN INCONSTANT WOMAN.
He enjoys thy calmy sunshine now,
And no breath stirring hears,
In the clear heaven of thy brow,
No smallest cloud appears.
He sees thee gentle, fair and gay,
And trusts the faithless April of thy May.
--_Cowley_.
Upon a paper written with the juice of lemon, and read by the fire:
Nothing yet in thee is seen:
But when a genial heat warms thee within,
A new-born wood of various lines there grows;
Here buds an L, and there a B,
Here sprouts a V, and there a T,
And all the flourishing letters stand in rows.
--_Cowley_
As they sought only for novelty, they did not much inquire whether
their allusions were to things high or low, elegant or gross; whether
they compared the little to the great, or the great to the little.
PHYSICK AND CHIRURGERY FOR A LOVER.
Gently, ah gently, madam, touch
The wound, which you yourself have made;
That pain must needs be very much,
Which makes me of your hand afraid.
Cordials of pity give me now,
For I too weak for purgings grow.
--_Cowley_.
THE WORLD AND A CLOCK.
Mahol, th' inferior world's fantastic face,
Through all the turns of matter's maze did trace;
Great Nature's well-set clock in pieces took;
On all the springs and smallest wheels did look
Of life and motion; and with equal art
Made up again the whole of every part.
--_Cowley_.
A coal-pit has not often found its poet; but, that it may not want its
due honour, Cleveland has paralleled it with the sun:
The moderate value of our guiltless ore
Makes no man atheist, and no woman whore;
Yet why should hallow'd vestals' sacred shrine
Deserve more honour than a flaming mine?
These pregnant wombs of heat would fitter be
Than a few embers, for a deity.
Had he our pits, the Persian would admire
No sun, but warm's devotion at our fire:
He'd leave the trotting whipster, and prefer
Our profound Vulcan 'bove that waggoner.
For wants he heat or light? or would have store
Of both? 'tis here: and what can suns give more?
Nay, what's the sun but, in a different name,
A coal-pit rampant, or a mine on flame!
Then let this truth reciprocally run
The sun's heaven's coalery, and coals our sun.
DEATH, A VOYAGE.
No family
E'er rigg'd a soul for heaven's discovery,
With whom more venturers might boldly dare
Venture their stakes, with him in joy to share.
--_Donne_.
Their thoughts and expressions were sometimes grossly absurd, and such
as no figures or licence can reconcile to the understanding.
A LOVER NEITHER DEAD NOR ALIVE.