The tercentenary of the former member for Hull deserves not only the
celebration proposed by that favoured borough, but a little serious
reflection upon his writing. That is an act of piety, which is very
different from the resurrection of a deceased reputation. Marvell has
stood high for some years; his best poems are not very many, and not
only must be well known, from the "Golden Treasury" and the "Oxford Book
of English Verse," but must also have been enjoyed by numerous readers.
His grave needs neither rose nor rue nor laurel; there is no imaginary
justice to be done; we may think about him, if there be need for
thinking, for our own benefit, not his. To bring the poet back to
life--the great, the perennial, task of criticism--is in this case to
squeeze the drops of the essence of two or three poems; even confining
ourselves to these, we may find some precious liquor unknown to the
present age. Not to determine rank, but to isolate this quality, is the
critical labour. The fact that of all Marvell's verse, which is itself
not a great quantity, the really valuable part consists of a very few
poems indicates that the unknown quality of which we speak is probably a
literary rather than a personal quality; or, more truly, that it is a
quality of a civilization, of a traditional habit of life. A poet like
Donne, or like Baudelaire or Laforgue, may almost be considered the
inventor of an attitude, a system of feeling or of morals. Donne is
difficult to analyse: what appears at one time a curious personal point
of view may at another time appear rather the precise concentration of a
kind of feeling diffused in the air about him. Donne and his shroud, the
shroud and his motive for wearing it, are inseparable, but they are not
the same thing. The seventeenth century sometimes seems for more than a
moment to gather up and to digest into its art all the experience of the
human mind which (from the same point of view) the later centuries seem
to have been partly engaged in repudiating. But Donne would have been an
individual at any time and place; Marvell's best verse is the product of
European, that is to say Latin, culture.
Out of that high style developed from Marlowe through Jonson (for
Shakespeare does not lend himself to these genealogies) the seventeenth
century separated two qualities: wit and magniloquence. Neither is as
simple or as apprehensible as its name seems to imply, and the two are
not in practice antithetical; both are conscious and cultivated, and the
mind which cultivates one may cultivate the other. The actual poetry, of
Marvell, of Cowley, of Milton, and of others, is a blend in varying
proportions. And we must be on guard not to employ the terms with too
wide a comprehension; for like the other fluid terms with which literary
criticism deals, the meaning alters with the age, and for precision we
must rely to some degree upon the literacy and good taste of the reader.
The wit of the Caroline poets is not the wit of Shakespeare, and it is
not the wit of Dryden, the great master of contempt, or of Pope, the
great master of hatred, or of Swift, the great master of disgust. What
is meant is something which is a common quality to the songs in "Comus"
and Cowley's Anacreontics and Marvell's Horatian Ode. It is more than a
technical accomplishment, or the vocabulary and syntax of an epoch; it
is, what we have designated tentatively as wit, a tough reasonableness
beneath the slight lyric grace. You cannot find it in Shelley or Keats
or Wordsworth; you cannot find more than an echo of it in Landor; still
less in Tennyson or Browning; and among contemporaries Mr. Yeats is an
Irishman and Mr. Hardy is a modern Englishman--that is to say, Mr. Hardy
is without it and Mr. Yeats is outside of the tradition altogether. On
the other hand, as it certainly exists in Lafontaine, there is a large
part of it in Gautier. And of the magniloquence, the deliberate
exploitation of the possibilities of magnificence in language which
Milton used and abused, there is also use and even abuse in the poetry
of Baudelaire.
Wit is not a quality that we are accustomed to associate with "Puritan"
literature, with Milton or with Marvell. But if so, we are at fault
partly in our conception of wit and partly in our generalizations about
the Puritans. And if the wit of Dryden or of Pope is not the only kind
of wit in the language, the rest is not merely a little merriment or a
little levity or a little impropriety or a little epigram. And, on the
other hand, the sense in which a man like Marvell is a "Puritan" is
restricted. The persons who opposed Charles I. and the persons who
supported the Commonwealth were not all of the flock of Rabbi
Zeal-of-the-land Busy or the United Grand Junction Ebenezer Temperance
Association. Many of them were gentlemen of the time who merely
believed, with considerable show of reason, that government by a
Parliament of gentlemen was better than government by a Stuart; though
they were, to that extent, Liberal Practitioners, they could hardly
foresee the tea-meeting and the Dissidence of Dissent. Being men of
education and culture, even of travel, some of them were exposed to that
spirit of the age which was coming to be the French spirit of the age.
This spirit, curiously enough, was quite opposed to the tendencies
latent or the forces active in Puritanism; the contest does great damage
to the poetry of Milton; Marvell, an active servant of the public, but a
lukewarm partisan, and a poet on a smaller scale, is far less injured by
it. His line on the statue of Charles II., "It is such a King as no
chisel can mend," may be set off against his criticism of the Great
Rebellion: "Men . . . ought and might have trusted the King." Marvell,
therefore, more a man of the century than a Puritan, speaks more clearly
and unequivocally with the voice of his literary age than does Milton.
This voice speaks out uncommonly strong in the "Coy Mistress." The theme
is one of the great traditional commonplaces of European literature. It
is the theme of "O mistress mine," of "Gather ye rosebuds," of "Go,
lovely rose"; it is in the savage austerity of Lucretius and the intense
levity of Catullus. Where the wit of Marvell renews the theme is in the
variety and order of the images. In the first of the three paragraphs
Marvell plays with a fancy which begins by pleasing and leads to
astonishment.
Had we but world enough and time,
This coyness, lady, were no crime,
. . . I would
Love you ten years before the Flood,
And you should, if you please, refuse
Till the conversion of the Jews;
My vegetable love should grow
Vaster than empires and more slow. . . .
We notice the high speed, the succession of concentrated images, each
magnifying the original fancy. When this process has been carried to the
end and summed up, the poem turns suddenly with that surprise which has
been one of the most important means of poetic effect since Homer:--
But at my back I always hear
Time's wingèd chariot hurrying near,
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.