The conscious water saw its God and blushed.
But except in such rarely felicitous instances, this manner of writing
is deplorable. Some of its most flagrant offenses are still notorious.
Crashaw’s description of Mary Magdalene’s eyes as:
Two walking baths, two weeping motions,
Portable and compendious oceans.
Or Carew’s lines on Maria Wentworth:
Else the soul grew so fast within
It burst the outward shell of sin,
And so was hatched a cherubin.
Cowley is full of these tasteless, unnatural conceits. His sins of the
kind have been so insisted upon by Johnson and others that I need give
but a single illustration. In an ode to his friend, Dr. Scarborough, he
thus compliments him upon his skill in operating for calculus:
The cruel stone, that restless pain,
That’s sometimes rolled away in vain
But still, like Sisyphus his stone, returns again,
Thou break’st and melt’st by learned juices’ force
(A greater work, though short the way appear,
Than Hannibal’s by vinegar).
Oppressed Nature’s necessary course
It stops in vain; like Moses, thou
Strik’st but the rock, and straight the waters freely flow.
Here, in a passage of nine lines, the stone which the doctor removes
from his patient’s bladder is successively compared to the stone rolled
away from Christ’s sepulchre, the stone of Sisyphus, the Alps that
Hannibal split with vinegar, and the rock which Moses smote for water.
Manifestly this way of writing lends itself least of all to the poetry
of passion. Cowley’s love poems are his very worst failures. One can
take a kind of pleasure in the sheer mental exercise of tracking the
thought through one of his big Pindaric odes—the kind of pleasure one
gets from solving a riddle or an equation, but not the kind which we ask
of poetry. It is as Pope says: his epic and Pindaric art is forgotten;
forgotten the four books, in rimed couplets, of the “Davideis”;
forgotten the odes on Brutus, on the plagues of Egypt, on his Majesty’s
restoration, to Mr. Hobbes, and to the Royal Society. Cowley had a
genius for friendship, and his elegies are among his best things. There
are passages well worthy of remembrance in his elegy on Crashaw, and
several fine stanzas in his memorial verses on his Cambridge friend
Hervey; though the piece, as a whole, is too long, and Dr. Johnson is
probably singular in preferring it to “Lycidas.” A hundred readers are
familiar with the invocation to light in “Paradise Lost,” for one who
knows Cowley’s ingenious and, in many parts, really beautiful “Hymn to
Light.”
The only writings of Cowley which keep afloat on time’s current are his
simplest and least ambitious—what Pope called “the language of his
heart.” His prose essays may still be read with enjoyment, though Lowell
somewhat cruelly describes them as Montaigne and water. His translations
from the Pseudo-Anacreon are standard, particularly the first ode, Θέλω
λέγειν Ἀτρείδας; the Τέττιξ, or cicada; and the ode in praise of
drinking, Ἡ γῆ μέλαινα πίνει. There is one little poem which remains an
anthology favorite, “The Chronicle,” Cowley’s solitary experiment in
society verse, a catalogue of the quite imaginary ladies with whom he
has been in love. This is well enough, but compared with the “agreeable
impudence,” the Cavalier gayety and ease of a genuine society verser,
like Suckling, it is sufficiently tame. For the Cowleian wit is so
different from the spirit of comedy that one would have predicted that
anything which he might undertake for the stage would surely fail.
Nevertheless, one of his plays, “Cutter of Coleman Street,” has been
selected by Professor Gayley for his series of representative comedies,
as a noteworthy transition drama, with “political and religious satire
of great importance.”
The scene is London in 1658, the year when Cromwell died, and Cowley,
though under bonds, escaped a second time to Paris. The plot in outline
is this: Colonel Jolly, a gentleman whose estate was confiscated in the
late troubles for taking part with the King at Oxford, finds himself in
desperate straits for money. He has two disreputable hangers-on, “merry,
sharking fellows about the town,” who have been drinking and feasting at
his expense. One of these, Cutter of Coleman Street, pretends to have
been a colonel in the royal army and to have fought at Newbury—the
action, it will be remembered, in which Clarendon’s friend, Lord
Falkland, met his tragic death (1643); or, as Carlyle rather brutally
puts it, “Poor Lord Falkland, in his ‘clean shirt,’ was killed here.”
Worm, the other rascal, professes likewise to have been in the King’s
service and to have been at Worcester and shared in the romantic escape
of the royal fugitive. This precious pair are new types in English
comedy and are evidently from the life. They represent the class of
swashbucklers, impostors, and soldiers of fortune, who lurked about the
lowest purlieus of London during the interregnum, living at free
quarters on loyalist sympathizers. They were parodies of the true
“distressed Cavaliers,” such as Colonel Richard Lovelace, who died in
London in this same year, 1658, in some obscure lodging and in abject
poverty, having spent all his large fortune in the King’s cause.
When “Cutter of Coleman Street”[5] was first given in 1661, the
characters of Cutter and Worm were ill received by the audience at the
Duke’s Theatre; and, in his preface to the printed play, the author
defended himself against the charge “that it was a piece intended for
abuse and satire against the king’s party. Good God! Against the king’s
party! After having served it twenty years, during all the time of their
misfortunes and afflictions, I must be a very rash and imprudent person
if I chose out that of their restitution to begin a quarrel with them.”
The representation of those two scoundrels, “as pretended officers of
the royal army, was made for no other purpose but to show the world that
the vices and extravagancies imputed vulgarly to the cavaliers were
really committed by aliens who only usurped that name.”
Colonel Jolly is guardian to his niece, Lucia, who has an inheritance of
five thousand pounds which, by the terms of her father’s will, is to be
forfeited if she marries without her uncle’s consent. This is now a very
stale bit of dramatic convention. Experienced play readers do not need
to be reminded that “forfeited if transferred” is written large over the
fortune of nearly every heiress in eighteenth century comedy. Colonel
Jolly sees through his rascally followers, but is so reduced in purse
that he offers Lucia’s hand to whichever of the two can gain her
consent, on condition that the favored suitor will make over to him one
thousand pounds out of his niece’s dowry. Of course she rejects both of
them. This unprincipled bargain was quite properly censured as out of
keeping with the character of an honorable old Cavalier gentleman who
had fought for the King. And again the dramatist defends himself in his
preface. “They were angry that the person whom I made a true gentleman
and one both of considerable quality and sufferings in the royal party
. . . should submit, in his great extremities, to wrong his niece for
his own relief. . . . The truth is I did not intend the character of a
hero . . . but an ordinary jovial gentleman, commonly called a good
fellow, one not so conscientious as to starve rather than do the least
injury.”
The failure of his plan puts the colonel upon an almost equally
desperate enterprise, which is no less than to espouse the widow of
Fear-the-Lord Barebottle, a saint and a soap-boiler, who had bought
Jolly’s confiscated estate, and whose name is an evident allusion to the
leather-seller, Praise-God Barebones, who gave baptism to the famous
Barebones’ Parliament. The colonel succeeds in this matrimonial venture;
although, to ingratiate himself with the soap-boiler’s widow, he has to
feign conversion. His daughter Aurelia tries to dissuade him from the
match. “Bless us,” she says, “what humming and hawing will be in this
house; what preaching and howling and fasting and eating among the
saints! Their first pious work will be to banish Fletcher and Ben Jonson
out o’ the parlour, and bring in their rooms Martin Mar Prelate and
Posies of Holy Honeysuckles and A Salve-Box for a wounded Conscience and
a Bundle of Grapes from Canaan. . . . But, Sir, suppose the king should
come in again and you have your own again of course. You’d be very proud
of a soap-boiler’s widow then in Hyde Park, Sir.” “O,” replies her
father, “then the bishops will come in, too, and she’ll away to New
England.”
Here comes in the satire on the Puritans which is the most interesting
feature of the play. Anti-Puritan satire was nothing new on the stage in
1661, and it had been much better done in Jonson’s “Alchemist” and
“Bartholomew Fair” nearly a half century before. The thing that is new
in Cowley’s play is its picture of the later aspects of the Puritan
revolution; when what had been in Jonson’s time a despised faction had
now been seated in power for sixteen years, and had developed all those
extravagances of fanaticism which Carlyle calls “Calvinistic
Sansculottism.” Widow Barebottle is a Brownist and a parishioner of Rev.
Joseph Knockdown, of the congregation of the spotless in Coleman Street.
But her daughter Tabitha is of the Fifth Monarchy persuasion and was
wont to go afoot every Sunday over the bridge to hear Mr. Feak,[6] when
he was a prisoner in Lambeth House. Visions and prophesyings have been
vouchsafed to Tabitha. And when Cutter, following his patron’s lead,
pays court to her in a puritanical habit, he assures her that it has
been revealed to him that he is no longer to be called Cutter, a name of
Cavalero darkness: “My name is now Abednego. I had a vision, which
whispered to me through a keyhole, ‘Go call thyself Abednego. It is a
name that signifies fiery furnaces and tribulation and martyrdom.’” He
is to suffer martyrdom and return miraculously upon “a purple dromedary,
which signifies magistracy, with an axe in my hand that is called
reformation; and I am to strike with that axe upon the gate of
Westminster Hall and cry ‘Down, Babylon,’ and the building called
Westminster Hall is to run away and cast itself into the river; and then
Major General Harrison is to come in green sleeves from the north upon a
sky-colored mule which signifies heavenly instruction . . . and he is to
have a trumpet in his mouth as big as a steeple and, at the sounding of
that trumpet, all the churches in London shall fall down . . . and then
Venner shall march up to us from the west in the figure of a wave of the
sea, holding in his hand a ship that shall be called the ark of the
reformed.”
All this is frankly farcical but has a certain historical basis. The
Venner here mentioned was a Fifth Monarchist cooper whose followers held
a rendezvous at Mile-End Green, and who issued a pamphlet entitled “A
Standard Set Up,” adopting as his ensign the Lion of the Tribe of Judah,
with the motto, “Who shall rouse him up?” The passage furthermore seems
to allude to one John Davy, to whom in 1654 the spirit revealed that his
true name was Theauro John; and who was arrested at the door of the
Parliament House for knocking and laying about him with a drawn sword.
“Poor Davy,” comments Carlyle, “his labors, life-adventures, financial
arrangements, painful biography in general, are all unknown to us; till,
on this ‘Saturday, 30th December, 1654,’ he very clearly knocks loud at
the door of the Parliament House, as much as to say, ‘what is this _you_
are upon?’ and ‘lays about him with a drawn sword.’”
The dialogue abounds in the biblical phrases and the peculiar cant of
the later Puritanism, familiar in “Hudibras.” Brother Abednego is joined
to Tabitha in the holy bond of sanctified matrimony at a zealous
shoemaker’s habitation by that chosen vessel, Brother Zephaniah Fats, an
opener of revelations to the worthy in Mary White-Chapel. But as soon as
they are safely married, the newly converted Cutter throws off his
Puritan disguise and dons a regular Cavalier costume, hat and feather,
sword and belt, broad laced band and periwig, and proceeds to pervert
his bride. He makes her drink healths in sack, and sing and dance home
after the fiddlers, under the threat of taking coach and carrying her
off to the opera. Tabitha, after a faint resistance, falls into his
humor and proves an apt pupil in the ways of worldliness. For it is a
convention of seventeenth century, as it is of twentieth century, comedy
that all Puritans are hypocrites and that
Every woman is at heart a rake.
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[5] An earlier version, entitled “The Guardian,” had been acted in 1641.
[6] An Anabaptist preacher. See Carlyle’s “Cromwell’s Letters and
Speeches,” iv. 3.