DA. The other day
Pan met me.
CLO. What did great Pan say?
DA. Words that transcend poor shepherds' skill.
This poem seems a distinct attempt to make of the sickly furniture of
the idyll a vehicle for the teaching of religious truth. Is it fanciful
to read in it a poetical rendering of the doctrine of conversion, the
change that may come to a careless and sensuous nature by being suddenly
brought face to face with the Divine light? It might even refer to some
religious experience of Marvell's own: Milton's "mighty Pan," typifying
the Redeemer, is in all probability the original.
The work then on which Marvell's fame chiefly subsists--with the
exception of one poem which belongs to a different class, and will be
discussed later, the Horatian Ode--may be said to belong to the regions
of nature and feeling, and to have anticipated in a remarkable degree
the minute observation of natural phenomena characteristic of a modern
school, even to a certain straining after unusual, almost bizarre
effects. The writers of that date, indeed, as Green points out, seem to
have become suddenly and unaccountably modern, a fact which we are apt
to overlook owing to the frigid reaction of the school of Pope. Whatever
the faults of Marvell's poems may be, and they are patent to all, they
have a strain of originality. He does not seem to imitate, he does not
even follow the lines of other poets; never,--except in a scattered
instance or two, where there is a faint echo of Milton,--does he recall
or suggest that he has a master.
At the same time the lyrics are so short and slight that any criticism
upon them is apt to take the form of a wish that the same hand had
written more, and grown old in his art. There is a monotony, for
instance, about their subjects, like the song of a bird, recurring again
and again to the same phrase; there is an uncertainty, an incompleteness
not so much of expression as of arrangement, a tendency to diverge and
digress in an unconcerned and vagabond fashion. There are stanzas, even
long passages, which a lover of proportion such as Gray (who excised one
of the most beautiful stanzas of the Elegy because it made too long a
parenthesis) would never have spared. It is the work of a young man
trying his wings, and though perhaps not flying quite directly and
professionally to his end, revelling in the new-found powers with a
delicious ecstasy which excuses what is vague and prolix; especially
when over all is shed that subtle, precious quality which makes a sketch
from one hand so unutterably more interesting than a finished picture
from another,--which will arrest with a few commonplace phrases, lightly
touched by certain players, the attention which has wandered throughout
a whole sonata.
The strength of Marvell's style lies in its unexpectedness. You are
arrested by what has been well called a "pre-destined" epithet, not a
mere otiose addition, but a word which turns a noun into a picture; the
"hook-shouldered" hill "to abrupter greatness thrust," "the sugar's
uncorrupting oil," "the vigilant patrol of stars," "the squatted
thorns," "the oranges like golden lamps in a green night," "the garden's
fragrant innocence,"--these are but a few random instances of a tendency
that meets you in every poem. Marvell had in fact the qualities of a
consummate artist, and only needed to repress his luxuriance and to
confine his expansiveness. In his own words,
Height with a certain grace doth bend,
But low things clownishly ascend.
Before passing on to discuss the satires I may be allowed to say a few
words on a class of poems largely represented in Marvell's works, which
may be generally called Panegyric.
Quite alone among these--indeed, it can be classed with no other poem in
the language--stands the Horatian Ode on Cromwell's return from Ireland.
Mr. Lowell said of it that as a testimony to Cromwell's character it was
worth more than all Carlyle's biographies; he might without exaggeration
have said as much of its literary qualities. It has force with grace,
originality with charm, in almost every stanza. Perhaps the first
quality that would strike a reader of it for the first time is its
quaintness; but further study creates no reaction against this in the
mind--the usual sequel to poems which depend on quaintness for effect.
But when Mr. Lowell goes on to say that the poem shows the difference
between grief that thinks of its object and grief that thinks of its
rhymes (referring to Dryden), he is not so happy. The pre-eminent
quality of the poem is its art; and its singular charm is the fact that
it succeeds, in spite of being artificial, in moving and touching the
springs of feeling in an extraordinary degree. It is a unique piece in
the collection, the one instance where Marvell's undoubted genius burned
steadily through a whole poem. Here he flies _penna metuente solvi_. It
is in completeness more than in quality that it is superior to all his
other work, but in quality too it has that lurking divinity that cannot
be analysed or imitated.
'Tis madness to resist or blame
The force of angry heaven's flame,
And if we would speak true,
Much to the man is due
Who from his private gardens, where
He lived reserved and austere,
(As though his highest plot
To plant the bergamot,)
Could by industrious valour climb
To ruin the great work of Time,
And cast the kingdoms old
Into another mould.
This is the apotheosis of tyrants; it is the bloom of republicanism just
flowering into despotism. But the Ode is no party utterance; the
often-quoted lines on the death of Charles, in their grave yet
passionate dignity, might have been written by the most ardent of
Royalists, and have often done service on their side. But, indeed, the
whole Ode is above party, and looks dearly into the heart and motives of
man. It moves from end to end with the solemn beat of its singular
metre, its majestic cadences, without self-consciousness or sentiment,
austere, but not frigid.
Marvell's other panegyrics are but little known, though the awkward and
ugly lines on Milton have passed into anthologies, owing to their
magnificent exordium, "When I beheld the poet blind yet old." But no
one can pretend that such lines as these are anything but prosaic and
ridiculous to the last degree--
Thou hast not missed one thought that could be fit,
And all that was improper dost omit;
* * *
At once delight and horror on us seize,
Thou sing'st with so much gravity and ease--
though the unfortunate alteration in the meaning of the word _improper_
makes them now seem even more ridiculous than they are. The poems on the
"First Anniversary of the Government of the Lord Protector," on the
"Death of the Lord Protector," and on "Richard Cromwell," are melancholy
reading though they have some sonorous lines.
And as the angel of our Commonweal
Troubling the waters, yearly mak'st them heal,
may pass as an epigram. But that a man of penetrating judgment and
independence of opinion should descend to a vein of odious genealogical
compliment, and speak of the succeeding of
Rainbow to storm, Richard to Oliver,
and add that
A Cromwell in an hour a prince will grow,
by way of apology for the obvious deficiencies of his new Protector,
makes us very melancholy indeed. Flattery is of course a slough in which
many poets have wallowed; and a little grovelling was held to be even
more commendable in poets in that earlier age; but we see the pinion
beginning to droop, and the bright eye growing sickly and dull. Milton's
poisonous advice is already at work.
But we must pass through a more humiliating epoch still. The poet of
spicy gardens and sequestered fields seen through the haze of dawn is
gone, not like the Scholar Gipsy to the high lonely wood or the deserted
lasher, but has stepped down to jostle with the foulest and most venal
of mankind. He becomes a satirist, and a satirist of the coarsest kind.
His pages are crowded with filthy pictures and revolting images; the
leaves cannot be turned over so quickly but some lewd epithet or vile
realism prints itself on the eye. His apologists have said that it is
nothing but the overflowing indignation of a noble mind when confronted
with the hideous vices of a corrupt court and nation; that this
deep-seated wrath is but an indication of the fervid idealistic nature
of the man; that the generous fire that warmed in the poems, consumed,
in the satires; that the true moralist does not condone but condemn. To
this we would answer that it is just conceivable that a satirist may be
primarily occupied by an immense moral indignation, and no doubt that
indignation must bear a certain part in all satires; but it is not the
attitude of a hopeful or generous soul. The satirist is after all only
destructive; he has not learned the lesson that the only cure for old
vices is new enthusiasms. Nor if a satirist is betrayed into the
grossest and most unnecessary realism can we acquit him entirely of all
enjoyment of his subject. It is impossible to treat of vice in the
intimate and detailed manner in which Marvell treats of it without
having, if no practical acquaintance with your subject, at least a
considerable conventional acquaintance with it, and a large literary
knowledge of the handling of similar topics; and when one critic goes so
far as to call Marvell an essentially pure-minded man, or words to that
effect, we think he would find a contradiction on almost every page of
the satires.
They were undoubtedly popular. Charles II. was greatly amused by them;
and their reputation lasted as late as Swift, who spoke of Marvell's
genius as pre-eminently indicated by the fact that though the
controversies were forgotten, the satires still held the mind. He
started with a natural equipment. That he was humorous his earlier poems
show, as when for instance he makes Daphne say to Chloe:
Rather I away will pine
In a manly stubbornness,
Than be fatted up express,
For the cannibal to dine.
And he shows, too, in his earlier poems, much of the weightier and more
dignified art of statement that makes the true satirist's work often
read better in quotations than entire; as for instance--
Wilt thou all the glory have,
That war or peace commend?
Half the world shall be thy slave,
The other half thy friend.
But belonging as they do to the period of melancholy decadence of
Marvell's art, we are not inclined to go at any length into the question
of the satires. We see genius struggling like Laocoon in the grasp of a
power whose virulence he did not measure, and to whom sooner or later
the increasing languor must yield. Of course there are notable passages
scattered throughout them. In "Last Instructions to a Painter," the
passage beginning, "Paint last the king, and a dead shade of night,"
where Charles II. sees in a vision the shapes of Charles I. and Henry
VIII. threatening him with the consequences of unsympathetic despotism
and the pursuit of sensual passion, has a tragic horror and dignity of a
peculiar kind; and the following specimen from "The Character of
Holland" gives on the whole a good specimen of the strength and weakness
of the author:
Holland, that scarce deserves the name of land,
As but the off-scouring of the British sand,
And so much earth as was contributed
By English pilots when they heaved the lead,
Or what by the Ocean's slow alluvion fell
Of shipwrecked cockle and the mussel-shell,
This undigested vomit of the sea,
Fell to the Dutch by just propriety.
Clever beyond question; every couplet is an undeniable epigram, lucid,
well-digested, elaborate; pointed, yet finikin withal,--it is easy to
find a string of epithets for it. But to what purpose is this waste? To
see this felicity spent on such slight and intemperate work is
bitterness itself; such writing has, it must be confessed, every
qualification for pleasing except the power to please.
Of the remainder of Marvell's life, there is little more to be said. He
was private tutor at Eton to a Master Dutton, a relative of Cromwell's,
and wrote a delightful letter about him to the Protector; but the
serious business of his later life was Parliament. Of his political
consistency we cannot form a high idea. He seems, as we should expect
him to have been, a Royalist at heart and by sympathy all along; "Tis
God-like good," he wrote, "to save a falling king." Yet he was not
ashamed to accept Cromwell as the angel of the Commonweal, and to write
in fulsome praise of Protector Richard; and his bond of union with the
extreme Puritans was his intense hatred of prelacy and bishops which is
constantly coming up. In "The Loyal Scot" he writes:
The friendly loadstone has not more combined,
Than Bishops cramped the commerce of mankind.
And in "The Bermudas" he classes the fury of the elements with
"Prelates' rage" as the natural enemies of the human race. Such was not
the intermeddling in affairs that Milton had recommended. To fiddle,
while Rome burnt, upon the almost divine attributes of her successive
rulers, this was not the austere storage of song which Milton himself
practised.
Andrew Marvell was for many years member for Hull, with his expenses
paid by the Corporation. His immense, minute, and elaborate
correspondence with his constituents, in which he gave an exact account
of the progress of public business, remains to do him credit as a
sagacious and conscientious man. But it cannot be certainly imputed to
any higher motive than to stand well with his employers. He was provided
with the means of livelihood, he was in a position of trust and dignity,
and he may well be excused for wishing to retain it. In spite of certain
mysterious absences on the Continent, and a long period during which he
absented himself from the House in the suite of an embassy to Russia, he
preserved the confidence of his constituents for eighteen years, and
died at his post. He spoke but little in the House, and his reported
speeches add but little to his reputation. One curious incident is
related in the Journals. In going to his place he stumbled over Sir
Philip Harcourt's foot, and an interchange of blows in a humorous and
friendly fashion with hand and hat, took place. At the close of the
sitting the Speaker animadverted on this, Marvell being absent; and a
brief debate took place the next day on the subject, Marvell speaking
with some warmth of the Speaker's grave interference with what appears
to have been nothing more than a piece of childish horse-play. "What
passed (said Mr. Marvell) was through great acquaintance and familiarity
between us: He never gave him an affront nor intended him any. But the
Speaker cast a severe reflection upon him yesterday when he was out of
the House, and he hopes that as the Speaker keeps us in order, he will
keep himself in order for the future."
For one thing Marvell deserves high credit; in a corrupt age, he kept
his hands clean, refusing even when hard pressed for money a gift of
L1000 proffered him by Danby, the Lord-Treasurer, "in his garret," as a
kind of retainer on the royal side. In Hartley Coleridge's life of
Marvell this is told in a silly, theatrical way, unworthy and not even
characteristic of the man. "Marvell," he says, "looking at the paper (an
order on the Treasury which had been slipped into his hand) calls after
the Treasurer, 'My lord, I request another moment.' They went up again
to the garret; and Jack the servant-boy was called. 'Jack, child, what
had I for dinner yesterday?' 'Don't you remember, sir? You had the
little shoulder of mutton that you ordered me to bring from a woman in
the market.' 'Very right, child. What have I for dinner to-day?' 'Don't
you know, sir, that you bid me lay by the blade-bone to broil?' 'Tis so;
very right, child; go away.' 'My lord, do you hear that? Andrew
Marvell's dinner is provided. There's your piece of paper; I want it
not. I know the sort of kindness you intended. I live here to serve my
constituents; the Ministry may seek men for their purpose,--I am not
one.'" But with the exception of perhaps the concluding words, there is
no reason to think the story authentic, though the fact is unquestioned.
Over Prince Rupert, Marvell seems to have had a great influence, so much
so that, when the Prince spoke in public, it was commonly said: "He has
been with his tutor."
Marvell died suddenly in 1678, not without suspicion of poisoning; but
it seems to have been rather due to the treatment he underwent at the
hands of an old-fashioned practitioner, who had a prejudice against the
use of Peruvian bark which would probably have saved Marvell's life.
Upon his death a widow starts into existence, Mary Marvell by name, so
unexpectedly and with such a total absence of previous allusion, that it
has been doubted whether her marriage was not all a fiction. But Dr.
Grosart points out that she would never have administered his estate had
there been any reason to doubt the validity of her claims; and it was
under her auspices that the Poems were first given to the world a few
years after his death, in a folio which is now a rare and coveted book.
Of his Prose Works it is needful to say but little; they may be
characterised as prose satires for the most part, or political
pamphlets. "The Rehearsal Transposed" and "The Divine in Mode" are
peculiarly distasteful examples of a kind of controversy then much in
vogue. They are answers to publications, and to the ordinary reader
contrive to be elaborate without being artistic, personal without being
humorous, and digressive without being entertaining; in short, they
combine the characteristics of tedium, dulness, and scurrility to a
perfectly phenomenal degree. As compared with the poems themselves, the
prose works fill many volumes; and any reader of ordinary perseverance
has ample opportunities of convincing himself of Andrew Marvell's powers
of expression, his high-spirited beginning, the delicate ideals, the
sequestered ambitions of his youth, and their lamentable decline.
It is a perilous investment to aspire to be a poet,--_periculosae plenum
opus aleae_. If you succeed, to have the world, present and to come, at
your feet, to win the reluctant admiration even of the Philistine; to
snuff the incense of adoration on the one hand, and on the other to feel
yourself a member of the choir invisible, the sweet and solemn company
of poets; to own within yourself the ministry of hope and height. And
one step below success, to be laughed at or softly pitied as the dreamer
of ineffectual dreams, the strummer of impotent music; to be despised
alike by the successful and the unsuccessful; the world if you
win,--worse than nothing if you fail.
Mediocribus esse poetis
Non di, non homines, non concessere columnae.
There is no such thing as respectable mediocrity among poets. Be supreme
or contemptible.
And yet we cannot but grieve when we see a poet over whose feet the
stream has flowed, turn back from the brink and make the great denial;
whether from the secret consciousness of aridity, the drying of the
fount of song, or from the imperious temptations of the busy, ordinary
world we cannot say. Somehow we have lost our poet. It seems that,
_Just for a handful of silver he left us,
Just for a ribbon to stick in his coat._
And the singer of an April mood, who might have bloomed year after year
in young and ardent hearts, is buried in the dust of politics, in the
valley of dead bones.