Few poets are of sufficiently tough and impenetrable fibre to be able
with impunity to mix with public affairs. Even though the spring of
their inspiration be like the fountain in the garden of grace, "drawn
from the brain of the purple mountain that stands in the distance
yonder," that stream is apt to become sullied at the very source by the
envious contact of the world. Poets conscious of their vocation have
generally striven sedulously, by sequestering their lives somewhat
austerely from the current of affairs, to cultivate the tranquillity and
freshness on which the purity of their utterance depends. If it be hard
to hear sermons and remain a Christian, it is harder to mix much with
men and remain an idealist. And if this be true of commerce in its
various forms, law, medicine, and even education, it seems to be still
more fatally true of politics. Of course the temptation of politics to a
philosophical mind is very great. To be at the centre of the machine,
to be able perhaps to translate a high thought into a practical measure;
to be able to make some closer reconciliation between law and morality,
as the vertical sun draws the shadow nearer to the feet,--all this to a
generous mind has an attraction almost supreme.
And yet the strain is so great that few survive it. Sophocles was more
than once elected general, and is reported to have kept his colleagues
in good humour by the charm of his conversation through a short but
disagreeable campaign. Dante was an ardent and uncompromising
revolutionary. Goethe and Lamartine were statesmen. Among our own poets,
the lives of Spenser and Addison might perhaps be quoted as fairly
successful compromises; but of poets of the first rank Milton is the
only one who deliberately abandoned poetry for half a lifetime, that he
might take an active part in public life.
It is perhaps to Milton's example, and probably to his advice, that we
owe the loss of a great English poet. It seems to have been, if not at
Milton's instigation, at any rate by his direct aid, that Andrew Marvell
was introduced to public life. The acquaintance began at Rome; but
Marvell was introduced into Milton's intimate society, as his assistant
secretary, at a most impressionable age. He had written poetry, dealing
like _L'Allegro_ and _Il Penseroso_ mainly with country subjects, and
was inclined no doubt to hang on the words of the older poet as on an
oracle of light and truth. We can imagine him piecing out his
aspirations and day-dreams, while the poet of sterner stuff, yet of all
men least insensible to the delights of congenial society, points out to
him the more excellent way, bidding him to abjure Amaryllis for a time.
He has style, despatches will give it precision; knowledge of men and
life will confirm and mature his mind; the true poet must win a stubborn
virility if he is to gain the world. The younger and more delicate mind
complies; and we lose a great poet, Milton gains an assistant secretary,
and the age a somewhat gross satirist.
At a time like this, when with a sense of sadness we can point to more
than one indifferent politician who might have been a capable writer,
and so very many indifferent writers who could have been spared to swell
the ranks of politicians, we may well take the lesson of Andrew Marvell
to heart.
The passion for the country which breathes through his earlier poems,
the free air which ruffles the page, the summer languors, the formal
garden seen through the casements of the cool house, the close scrutiny
of woodland sounds, such as the harsh laughter of the woodpecker, the
shrill insistence of the grasshopper's dry note, the luscious content of
the drowsy, croaking frogs, the musical sweep of the scythe through the
falling swathe; all these are the work of no town-bred scholar like
Milton, whose country poems are rather visions seen through the eyes of
other poets, or written as a man might transcribe the vague and
inaccurate emotions of a landscape drawn by some old uncertain hand and
dimmed by smoke and time. Of course Milton's _Il Penseroso_ and
_L'Allegro_ have far more value even as country poems than hundreds of
more literal transcripts. From a literary point of view indeed the
juxtapositions of half a dozen epithets alone would prove the genius of
the writer. But there are no sharp outlines; the scholar pauses in his
walk to peer across the watered flat, or raises his eyes from his book
to see the quiver of leaves upon the sunlit wall; he notes an effect it
may be; but his images do not come like treasures lavished from a secret
storehouse of memory.
With Andrew Marvell it is different, though we will show by instances
that even his observation was sometimes at fault. Where or when this
passion came to him we cannot tell; whether in the great walled garden
at the back of the old school-house at Hull, where his boyish years were
spent; at Cambridge, where the oozy streams lapped and green fens
crawled almost into the heart of the town, where snipe were shot and
wild-duck snared on the site of some of its now populous streets; at
Meldreth perhaps, where doubtless some antique kindred lingered at the
old manor-house that still bears his patronymic, "the Marvells."--Wherever
it was,--and such tastes are rarely formed in later years--the delicate
observation of the minute philosopher, side by side with the art of
intimate expression, grew and bloomed.
We see a trace of that leaning nature, the trailing dependence of the
uneasy will of which we have already spoken, in a story of his early
years. The keen-eyed boy, with his fresh colour and waving brown hair,
was thrown on the tumultuous world of Cambridge, it seems, before he was
thirteen years of age; a strange medley no doubt,--its rough publicity
alone saving it, as with a dash of healthy freshness, from the
effeminacy and sentimentalism apt to breed in more sheltered societies.
The details of the story vary; but the boy certainly fell into the hands
of Jesuits, who finally induced him to abscond to one of their retreats
in London, where, over a bookseller's shop, after a long and weary
search, his father found him and persuaded him to return. Laborious Dr.
Grosart has extracted from the Hull Records a most curious letter
relating to this incident, in which a man whose son has been inveigled
away in similar circumstances, asks for advice from Andrew Marvell's
father.
Such an escapade belongs to a mind that must have been ardent and daring
beyond its fellows; but it also shows a somewhat shifting foundation, an
imagination easily dazzled, and a pliability of will that cost us, we
may believe, a poet. After Cambridge came some years of travel, which
afforded material for some of his poems, such as the satire on Holland,
of which the cleverness is still apparent, though its elaborate
coarseness and pedantic humour make it poor pasture to feed the mind
upon.
But the period to which we owe almost all the true gold among his poems,
is the two years which he spent at Nunappleton House, 1650-1652, as
tutor to the daughter of the great Lord Fairfax, the little Lady Mary
Fairfax, then twelve years old. Marvell was at this time twenty-nine;
and that exquisite relation which may exist between a grown man, pure in
heart, and a young girl, when disparity of fortune and circumstance
forbids all thought of marriage, seems to have been the mainspring of
his song. Such a relation is half tenderness which dissembles its
passion, and half worship which laughs itself away in easy phrases. The
lyric "Young Love," which indubitably though not confessedly refers to
Mary Fairfax, is one of the sweetest poems of pure feeling in the
language.
Common beauties stay fifteen;
Such as yours should swifter move,
Whose fair blossoms are too green
Yet for lust, but not for love.
Love as much the snowy lamb,
Or the wanton kid, doth prize
As the lusty bull or ram,
For his morning sacrifice.
Now then love me; Time may take
Thee before thy time away;
Of this need we'll virtue make,
And learn love before we may.
It is delightful in this connection to think of the signet-ring with the
device of a fawn,--which he used in early life and may still be seen on
his papers,--as a gift of his little pupil, earned doubtless by his poem
on the Dying Fawn, which is certainly an episode of Lady Mary's
childhood.
In this group of early poems, which are worth all the rest of Marvell's
work put together, several strains predominate. In the first place there
is a close observation of Nature, even a grotesque transcription, with
which we are too often accustomed only to credit later writers. For
instance, in "Damon the Mower" he writes:
The grasshopper its pipe gives o'er,
And hamstringed frogs can dance no more;
But in the brook the green frog wades,
And grasshoppers seek out the shades.
The second line of this we take to refer to the condition to which frogs
are sometimes reduced in a season of extreme drought, when the pools
are dry. Marvell must have seen a frog with his thighs drawn and
contracted from lack of moisture making his way slowly through the grass
in search of a refreshing swamp; this is certainly minute observation,
as the phenomenon is a rare one. Again, such a delicate couplet as,
And through the hazels thick espy
The hatching throstle's shining eye,
is not the work of a scholar who walks a country road, but of a man who
will push his way into the copses in early spring, and has watched with
delight the timorous eye and the upturned beak of the thrush sunk in her
nest. Or again, speaking of the dwindled summer stream running so
perilously clear after weeks of drought that the fish are languid:
The stupid fishes hang, as plain
As flies in crystal overta'en,
Or of the hayfield roughly mown, into which the herd has been turned to
graze:
And what below the scythe increast,
Is pinched yet nearer by the beast.
The mower's work, begun and ended with the dews, in all its charming
monotony, seems to have had a peculiar attraction for Marvell; he recurs
to it in more than one poem.
I am the mower Damon, known
Through all the meadows I have mown;
On me the morn her dew distils
Before her darling daffodils.
And again, of the mowers,
Who seem like Israelites to be
Walking on foot through a green sea.
To them the grassy deeps divide
And crowd a lane to either side.
The aspects of the country on which he dwells with deepest pleasure--and
here lies the charm--are not those of Nature in her sublimer or more
elated moods, but the gentler and more pastoral elements, that are apt
to pass unnoticed at the time by all but the true lovers of the quiet
country side, and crowd in upon the mind when surfeited by the wilder
glories of peak and precipice, or where tropical luxuriance side by side
with tropical aridity blinds and depresses the sense, with the feeling
that made Browning cry from Florence,
Oh, to be in England, now that April's there!
Marvell's lines, "On the Hill and Grove at Billborow," are an instance
of this; there is a certain fantastic craving after antithesis and
strangeness, it is true, but the spirit underlies the lines. The poem
however must be read in its entirety to gain the exact impression.
Again, for simple felicity, what could be more airily drawn than the
following from "The Garden"?--
Here at the fountain's sliding foot,
Or at some fruit-tree's mossy root,
Casting the body's vest aside,
My soul into the boughs doth glide,
There like a bird it sits and sings,
Then whets and claps its silver wings.
Or this, from the Song to celebrate the marriage of Lord Fauconberg and
the Lady Mary Cromwell, of the undisturbed dead of night?--
The astrologer's own eyes are set,
And even wolves the sheep forget;
Only this shepherd, late and soon,
Upon this hill outwakes the moon.
Hark! how he sings with sad delight
Through the clear and silent night.
Other poems, such as the "Ode on the Drop of Dew" and the "Nymph
Complaining for the Death of her Fawn," too long to be quoted here, are
penetrated with the same essence.
At the same time it must be confessed that Marvell's imagery is
sometimes at fault--it would be strange if it were not so; he falls now
and then, the wonder is how rarely, to a mere literary conceit. Thus the
mower Damon sees himself reflected in his scythe; the fawn feeds on
roses till its lip "seems to bleed," not with a possibly lurking thorn,
but with the hue of its pasturage. With Hobbinol and Tomalin for the
names of swain and nymph unreality is apt to grow. When the garden is
compared to a fortress and its scents to a salvo of artillery--
Well shot, ye firemen! O how sweet
And round your equal fires do meet--
and,
Then in some flower's beloved hut
Each bee as sentinel is shut,
And sleeps so, too--but if once stirred,
She runs you through, nor asks the word--
here, in spite of a certain curious felicity, we are in the region of
false tradition and rococo expression. The poem of "Eyes and Tears,"
again (so whimsically admired by Archbishop Trench), is little more than
a string of conceits; and when in "Mourning" we hear that
She courts herself in amorous rain,
Herself both Danae and the shower;
when we are introduced to Indian divers who plunge in the tears and can
find no bottom, we think of Macaulay's "Tears of Sensibility," and
Crashaw's fearful lines on the Magdalene's eyes--
Two walking baths, two weeping motions,
Portable and compendious oceans.
Nevertheless Marvell's poems are singularly free as a rule from this
strain of affectation. He has none of the morbidity that often passes
for refinement. The free air, the wood-paths, the full heat of the
summer sun--this is his scenery; we are not brought into contact with
the bones beneath the rose-bush, the splintered sun-dial, and the
stagnant pool. His pulses throb with ardent life, and have none of the
"inexplicable faintness" of a deathlier school. What would not Crashaw
have had to say of the "Nuns of Appleton" if he had been so unfortunate
as to have lighted on them? But Marvell writes:
Our orient breaths perfumed are
With incense of incessant prayer,
And holy water of our tears
Most strangely our complexion clears;
Not tears of Grief, but such as those
With which calm Pleasure overflows.
And passing by a sweet and natural transition to his little pupil, the
young Recluse of Nunappleton--
I see the angels, in a crown,
On you the lilies showering down,
And, round about you, glory breaks,
That something more than human speaks
The poems contain within themselves the germ of the later growth of
satire in the shape of caustic touches of humour, as well as a certain
austere philosophy that is apt to peer behind the superficial veil of
circumstance, yet without dreary introspection. There is a Dialogue
between Soul and Body, which deals with the duality of human nature
which has been the despair of all philosophers and the painful axiom of
all religious teachers. Marvell makes the Soul say:
Constrained not only to endure
Diseases, but what's worse, the cure,
And ready oft the port to gain,
Am shipwrecked into health again.
In the same connection in "The Coronet," an allegory of the Ideal and
the Real, he says:
Alas! I find the serpent old,
Twining in his speckled breast,
About the flowers disguised doth fold,
With wreaths of fame and interest.
Much of Marvell's philosophy however has not the same vitality, born of
personal struggle and discomfiture, but is a mere echo of stoical and
pagan views of life and its vanities drawn from Horace and Seneca, who
seem to have been his favourite authors. Such a sentiment as the
following, from "Appleton House"--
But he, superfluously spread,
Demands more room alive than dead;
What need of all this marble crust,
To impart the wanton mole of dust?--
and from "The Coy Mistress"--
The grave's a fine and private place,
But none, methinks, do there embrace--
are mere pagan commonplaces, however daintily expressed.
But there is a poem, an idyll in the form of a dialogue between Clorinda
and Damon, which seems to contain an original philosophical motive.
Idylls in the strict sense of the word are not remarkable for including
a moral; or if they do include one it may be said that it is generally
bad, and is apt to defend the enjoyment of an hour against the
conscience of centuries; but in "Clorinda and Damon," the woman is the
tempter, and Damon is obdurate. She invites him to her cave, and
describes its pleasures.
CLO. ....... A fountain's liquid bell
Tinkles within the concave shell.
DA. Might a soul bathe there and be clean,
Or slake its drought?
CLO. What is't you mean?
D. Clorinda, pastures, caves, and springs,
These once had been enticing things.