COWLEY has been constantly used to point a moral. He is the capital
instance, in our literary history, of the instability of fame; or,
rather, of the wide variation between contemporary rating and the
judgment of posterity. Time has given its ironical answer to the very
first line in the first poem of his collection:—
What shall I do to be forever known?
When Cowley died in 1667 and was buried in Westminster Abbey near the
tombs of Chaucer and Spenser, he was, in general opinion, the greatest
English poet since the latter. “Paradise Lost” appeared in that same
year, but at this date Milton’s fame was not comparable with Cowley’s,
his junior by ten years. Milton’s miscellaneous poems, first collected
in 1645, did not reach a second edition till 1673. Meanwhile Cowley’s
works went through eight impressions.
I believe that the only contemporaries who rivaled him in popularity
were Herbert and Cleveland, for Waller did not come to his own until
after Cowley’s death. Herbert’s “Temple,” posthumously printed in 1634,
had already become a religious classic. Masson computes its annual sale
at a thousand copies for the first twenty years of its publication. Of
Cleveland’s poems eleven editions were issued during his lifetime—and
none afterward. Apropos of the author’s arrest at Norwich in 1655 and
his magniloquent letter to Cromwell on that occasion, Carlyle
caustically remarks: “This is John Cleveland, the famed Cantab scholar,
Royalist Judge Advocate, and thrice illustrious satirist and son of the
muses, who had gone through eleven editions in those times, far
transcending all Miltons and all mortals—and does not now need any
twelfth edition that we hear of.” This was true till 1903 when Professor
Berdan brought out the first modern and critical, and probably the
final, edition of Cleveland. But neither Herbert nor Cleveland enjoyed
anything like Cowley’s literary eminence. Cleveland was a sharp
political lampooner whose verses had a temporary vogue like “M’Fingal”
or “The Gospel according to Benjamin.” A few years later Butler did the
same thing ten times as cleverly. Even “Hudibras” has lost much of its
point, though its originality, learning, and wit have given it a certain
sort of immortality, while Cleveland is utterly extinct. Herbert’s work
is, of course, more permanent than Cleveland’s, and he is a truer poet
than Cowley, though his appeal is to a smaller public, and he has but a
single note.
For many years after his death, Cowley’s continued to be a great name
and fame; yet the swift decay of his real influence became almost
proverbial. Dryden, who learned much from him; Addison, who uses him as
a dreadful example in his essay on mixed wit; and Pope, who speaks of
him with a traditional respect, all testify to this rapid loss of his
hold upon the community of readers. It was in 1737 that Pope asked, “Who
now reads Cowley?” which is much as if one should ask to-day, “Who now
reads Byron?” or as if our grandchildren should inquire in 1960, “Who
reads Tennyson?”
Cowley’s literary fortunes have been in marked contrast with those of
his contemporary, Robert Herrick, whose “Hesperides” fell silently from
the press in 1643, and who died unnoticed in his remote Devonshire
vicarage in 1674. You may search the literature of England for a hundred
and fifty years without finding a single acknowledgment of Herrick’s
gift to that literature. The folio edition of Cowley’s works, 1668, was
accompanied with an imposing account of his life and writings by Thomas
Sprat, afterwards Bishop of Rochester. Dr. Johnson’s “Lives of the
English Poets,” 1779–1781, begins with the life of Cowley, in which he
gives his famous analysis of the metaphysical school, the _locus
classicus_ on that topic. And although Cowley’s poetry had faded long
ago and he had lost his readers, Johnson treats him as a dignified
memory, worthy of a solid monument. No one had thought it worth while to
write Herrick’s biography, to address him in complimentary verse, to
celebrate his death in elegy, to comment on his work, or even to mention
his name. Dryden, Addison, Johnson, all the critics of three successive
generations are quite dumb concerning Herrick. But for the circumstance
that some of his little pieces, with the musical airs to which they were
set, were included in several seventeenth century songbooks, there is
nothing to show that there was any English poet named Herrick, until Dr.
Nott reprinted a number of selections from “Hesperides” in 1810. But now
Herrick is thoroughly revived and almost a favorite. His best things are
in all the anthologies, and many of them are set to music by modern
composers, and sung to the piano, as once to the lute. The critics rank
him with Shelley among our foremost lyrical poets. Swinburne thought him
the best of English song writers. The “Hesperides” is frequently
reprinted, sometimes in _editions de luxe_, with sympathetic
illustrations by Mr. Abbey and other distinguished artists.
There are several reasons why Cowley cut so disproportionate a figure in
his own generation. In the first place, he was a marvel of precocity. He
wrote an epic at the age of ten and another at twelve. His first volume
of verse, “Poetical Blossoms,” was published in his fifteenth year, and
one or two of the pieces in it were as good as anything that he did
afterward. Chatterton was perhaps equally wonderful; while Milton, Pope,
Keats, and Bryant all produced work, while still under age, which
outranks Cowley’s. Yet none of them showed quite so early maturity.
Again Cowley’s personal character, learning, and public employments
conferred dignity upon his literary work. He was the darling of
Cambridge; and, when ejected by the parliament, joined the king at
Oxford, and then followed the queen to Paris. He was a steadfast
loyalist; but among the reckless, intriguing, dissolute Cavaliers who
formed the entourage of the exiled court, Cowley’s serious and
thoroughly respectable character stood out in high relief. He took a
medical degree from Oxford, and became proficient in botany, composing a
Latin poem on plants. Dr. Johnson thought his Latin verse better than
Milton’s. After 1660 a member of the triumphant party, he was,
notwithstanding, highly esteemed by political opponents. He held a
position of authority like Addison’s or Southey’s at a later day. When
he died, Charles II said that Mr. Cowley had not left a better man
behind him in England.
But, after all, the chief reason why Cowley was rated so high by his
contemporaries was that his poetry fell in with the prevailing taste.
Matthew Arnold said that the trouble with the Queen Anne poetry was that
it was conceived in the wits and not in the soul. Cowley’s poetry was
cerebral, “stiff with intellection,” as Coleridge said of another. He
anticipated Dryden in his power of reasoning in verse. He is
pedantically learned, bookish, scholastic, smells of the lamp, crams his
verse with allusions and images drawn from physics, metaphysics,
geography, alchemy, astronomy, history, school divinity, logic, grammar,
and constitutional law. Above all, he had the quality on which his
century placed such an abnormal value—wit: i.e., ingenuity in devising
far-fetched conceits and detecting remote analogies. Without the
subtlety of Donne and the quaintness of Herbert, he coldly carried out
the method of the _concetti_ poets into a system. At its best, this
fashion now and then struck out a brilliant effect, as where Donne says
of Mistress Elizabeth Drury:
Her pure and eloquent blood
Spoke in her cheek, and so divinely wrought
That one might almost say her body thought.
Or in Crashaw’s celebrated line about the miracle at Cana:
Nympha pudica deum vidit et ernbuit,