Nobis, cum semel occidit brevis lux,
Nox est perpetua una dormienda.
The verse of Marvell has not the grand reverberation of Catullus's
Latin; but the image of Marvell is certainly more comprehensive and
penetrates greater depths than Horace's.
A modern poet, had he reached the height, would very likely have closed
on this moral reflection. But the three strophes of Marvell's poem have
something like a syllogistic relation to each other. After a close
approach to the mood of Donne,
then worms shall try
That long-preserved virginity . . .
The grave's a fine and private place,
But none, I think, do there embrace,
the conclusion,
Let us roll all our strength and all
Our sweetness up into one ball,
And tear our pleasures with rough strife,
Thorough the iron gates of life.
It will hardly be denied that this poem contains wit; but it may not be
evident that this wit forms the crescendo and diminuendo of a scale of
great imaginative power. The wit is not only combined with, but fused
into, the imagination. We can easily recognize a witty fancy in the
successive images ("my _vegetable_ love," "till the conversion of the
Jews"), but this fancy is not indulged, as it sometimes is by Cowley or
Cleveland, for its own sake. It is structural decoration of a serious
idea. In this it is superior to the fancy of "L'Allegro," "Il
Penseroso," or the lighter and less successful poems of Keats. In fact,
this alliance of levity and seriousness (by which the seriousness is
intensified) is a characteristic of the sort of wit we are trying to
identify. It is found in
Le squelette était invisible
Au temps heureux de l'art païen!
of Gautier, and in the _dandysme_ of Baudelaire and Laforgue. It is in
the poem of Catullus which has been quoted, and in the variation by Ben
Jonson:--
Cannot we deceive the eyes
Of a few poor household spies?
'Tis no sin love's fruits to steal,
But that sweet sin to reveal,
To be taken, to be seen,
These have sins accounted been.
It is in Propertius and Ovid. It is a quality of a sophisticated
literature; a quality which expands in English literature just at the
moment before the English mind altered; it is not a quality which we
should expect Puritanism to encourage. When we come to Gray and Collins,
the sophistication remains only in the language, and has disappeared
from the feeling. Gray and Collins were masters, but they had lost that
hold on human values, that firm grasp of human experience, which is a
formidable achievement of the Elizabethan and Jacobean poets. This
wisdom, cynical perhaps but untired (in Shakespeare, a terrifying
clairvoyance), leads toward, and is only completed by, the religious
comprehension; it leads to the point of the _Ainsi tout leur a craqué
dans la main_ of Bouvard and Pécuchet.
The difference between imagination and fancy, in view of this poetry of
wit, is a very narrow one. Obviously, an image which is immediately and
unintentionally ridiculous is merely a fancy. In the poem "Upon Appleton
House," Marvell falls in with one of these undesirable images,
describing the attitude of the house toward its master:--
Yet thus the laden house does sweat,
And scarce endures the master great;
But, where he comes, the swelling hall
Stirs, and the square grows spherical;
which, whatever its intention, is more absurd than it was intended to
be. Marvell also falls into the even commoner error of images which are
over-developed or distracting; which support nothing but their own
misshapen bodies:--
And now the salmon-fishers moist
Their leathern boats begin to hoist;
And, like Antipodes in shoes,
Have shod their heads in their canoes.
Of this sort of image a choice collection may be found in Johnson's
"Life of Cowley." But the images in the "Coy Mistress" are not only
witty, but satisfy the elucidation of Imagination given by Coleridge:--
"This power . . . reveals itself in the balance or reconcilement of
opposite or discordant qualities: of sameness, with difference; of the
general, with the concrete; the idea with the image; the individual with
the representative; the sense of novelty and freshness with old and
familiar objects; a more than usual state of emotion with more than
usual order; judgment ever awake and steady self-possession with
enthusiasm and feeling profound or vehement. . . ."
Coleridge's statement applies also to the following verses, which are
selected because of their similarity, and because they illustrate the
marked caesura which Marvell often introduces in a short line:--
The tawny mowers enter next,
Who seem like Israelites to be
Walking on foot through a green sea.
And now the meadows fresher dyed,
Whose grass, with moister colour dashed,
Seems as green silks but newly washed.
He hangs in shades the orange bright,
Like golden lamps in a green night.
Annihilating all that's made
To a green thought in a green shade.
Had it lived long, it would have been
Lilies without, roses within.
The whole poem, from which the last of these quotations is drawn ("The
Nymph and the Fawn"), is built upon a very slight foundation, and we can
imagine what some of our modern practitioners of slight themes would
have made of it. But we need not descend to an invidious contemporaneity
to point the difference. Here are six lines from "The Nymph and the
Fawn":--
I have a garden of my own,
But so with roses overgrown
And lilies, that you would it guess
To be a little wilderness;
And all the spring-time of the year
It only loved to be there.
And here are five lines from "The Nymph's Song to Hylas" in the "Life
and Death of Jason," by William Morris:--
I know a little garden close
Set thick with lily and red rose.
Where I would wander if I might
From dewy dawn to dewy night,
And have one with me wandering.
So far the resemblance is more striking than the difference, although we
might just notice the vagueness of allusion in the last line to some
indefinite person, form, or phantom, compared with the more explicit
reference of emotion to object which we should expect from Marvell. But
in the latter part of the poem Morris divaricates widely:--
Yet tottering as I am, and weak,
Still have I left a little breath
To seek within the jaws of death
An entrance to that happy place;
To seek the unforgotten face
Once seen, once kissed, once reft from me
Anigh the murmuring of the sea.
Here the resemblance, if there is any, is to the latter part of "The Coy
Mistress." As for the difference, it could not be more pronounced. The
effect of Morris's charming poem depends upon the mistiness of the
feeling and the vagueness of its object; the effect of Marvell's upon
its bright, hard precision. And this precision is not due to the fact
that Marvell is concerned with cruder or simpler or more carnal
emotions. The emotion of Morris is not more refined or more spiritual;
it is merely more vague: if anyone doubts whether the more refined or
spiritual emotion can be precise, he should study the treatment of the
varieties of discarnate emotion in the "Paradiso." A curious result of
the comparison of Morris's poem with Marvell's is that the former,
though it appears to be more serious, is found to be the slighter; and
Marvell's "Nymph and the Fawn," appearing more slight, is the more
serious.
So weeps the wounded balsam; so
The holy frankincense doth flow;
The brotherless Heliades
Melt in such amber tears as these.
These verses have the suggestiveness of true poetry; and the verses of
Morris, which are nothing if not an attempt to suggest, really suggest
nothing; and we are inclined to infer that the suggestiveness is the
aura around a bright clear centre, that you cannot have the aura alone.
The day-dreamy feeling of Morris is essentially a slight thing; Marvell
takes a slight affair, the feeling of a girl for her pet, and gives it a
connexion with that inexhaustible and terrible nebula of emotion which
surrounds all our exact and practical passions and mingles with them.
Again, Marvell does this in a poem which, because of its formal pastoral
machinery, may appear a trifling object:--
_Clorinda_: Near this, a fountain's liquid bell
Tinkles within the concave shell.
_Damon_: Might a soul bathe there and be clean.
Or slake its drought?
where we find that a metaphor has suddenly rapt us to the image of
spiritual purgation. There is here the element of _surprise_, as when
Villon says:--
Necessité faict gens mesprendre
Et faim saillir le loup des boys,
the surprise which Poe considered of the highest importance, and also
the restraint and quietness of tone which make the surprise possible.
And in the verses of Marvell which have been quoted there is the making
the familiar strange, and the strange familiar, which Coleridge
attributed to good poetry.
The effort to construct a dream-world, which alters English poetry so
greatly in the nineteenth-century, a dream-world utterly different from
the visionary realities of the Vita Nuova or of the poetry of Dante's
contemporaries, is a problem of which various explanations may no doubt
be found; in any case, the result makes a poet of the nineteenth
century, of the same size as Marvell, a more trivial and less serious
figure. Marvell is no greater personality than William Morris, but he
had something much more solid behind him: he had the vast and
penetrating influence of Ben Jonson. Jonson never wrote anything so pure
as Marvell's Horatian Ode; but this ode has that same quality of wit
which was diffused over the whole Elizabethan product and concentrated
in the work of Jonson. And, as was said before, this wit which pervades
the poetry of Marvell is more Latin, more refined, than anything that
succeeded it. The great danger, as well as the great interest and
excitement, of English prose and verse, compared with French, is that it
permits and justifies an exaggeration of particular qualities to the
exclusion of others. Dryden was great in wit, as Milton in
magniloquence; but the former, by isolating this quality and making it
by itself into great poetry, and the latter, by coming to dispense with
it altogether, may perhaps have injured the language. In Dryden wit
becomes almost fun, and thereby loses some contact with reality; becomes
pure fun, which French wit almost never is.
The midwife placed her hand on his thick skull,
With this prophetic blessing: _Be thou dull._
A numerous host of dreaming saints succeed,
Of the true old enthusiastic breed.
This is audacious and splendid; it belongs to satire besides which
Marvell's Satires are random babbling; but it is perhaps as exaggerated
as--
Oft he seems to hide his face,
But unexpectedly returns,
And to his faithful champion hath in place
Bore witness gloriously; whence Gaza mourns,
And all that band them to resist
His uncontrollable intent.
How oddly the sharp Dantesque phrase "whence Gaza mourns" springs out
from the brilliant but ridiculous contortions of Milton's sentence!
Who from his private gardens, where
He lived reservèd and austere,
(As if 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 mold;
* * * *
The Piet no shelter now shall find
Within his parti-coloured mind,
But, from this valour sad,
Shrink underneath the plaid:
There is here an equipoise, a balance and proportion of tones, which,
while it cannot raise Marvell to the level of Dryden or Milton, extorts
an approval which these poets do not receive from us, and bestows a
pleasure at least different in kind from any they can often give. It is
what makes Marvell a classic; or classic in a sense in which Gray and
Collins are not; for the latter, with all their accredited purity, are
comparatively poor in shades of feeling to contrast and unite.
We are baffled in the attempt to translate the quality indicated by the
dim and antiquated term wit into the equally unsatisfactory nomenclature
of our own time. Even Cowley is only able to define it by negatives:--
Comely in thousand shapes appears;
Yonder we saw it plain; and here 'tis now,
Like spirits in a place, we know not how.
It has passed out of our critical coinage altogether, and no new term
has been struck to replace it; the quality seldom exists, and is never
recognized.
In a true piece of Wit all things must be
Yet all things there agree;
As in the Ark, join'd without force or strife,
All creatures dwelt, all creatures that had life.
Or as the primitive forms of all
(If we compare great things with small)
Which, without discord or confusion, lie
In that strange mirror of the Deity.
So far Cowley has spoken well. But if we are to attempt even no more
than Cowley, we, placed in a retrospective attitude, must risk much more
than anxious generalizations. With our eye still on Marvell, we can say
that wit is not erudition; it is sometimes stifled by erudition, as in
much of Milton. It is not cynicism, though it has a kind of toughness
which may be confused with cynicism by the tender-minded. It is confused
with erudition because it belongs to an educated mind, rich in
generations of experience; and it is confused with cynicism because it
implies a constant inspection and criticism of experience. It involves,
probably, a recognition, implicit in the expression of every experience,
of other kinds of experience which are possible, which we find as
clearly in the greatest as in poets like Marvell. Such a general
statement may seem to take us a long way from "The Nymph and the Fawn,"
or even from the Horatian Ode; but it is perhaps justified by the desire
to account for that precise taste of Marvell's which finds for him the
proper degree of seriousness for every subject which he treats. His
errors of taste, when he trespasses, are not sins against this virtue;
they are conceits, distended metaphors and similes, but they never
consist in taking a subject too seriously or too lightly. This virtue of
wit is not a peculiar quality of minor poets, or of the minor poets of
one age or of one school; it is an intellectual quality which perhaps
only becomes noticeable by itself, in the work of lesser poets.
Furthermore, it is absent from the work of Wordsworth, Shelley, and
Keats, on whose poetry nineteenth-century criticism has unconsciously
been based. To the best of their poetry wit is irrelevant:--
Art thou pale for weariness
Of climbing heaven and gazing on the earth,
Wandering companionless
Among the stars that have a different birth,
And ever changing, like a joyless eye,
That finds no object worth its constancy?
We should find it difficult to draw any useful comparison between these
lines of Shelley and anything by Marvell. But later poets, who would
have been the better for Marvell's quality, were without it; even
Browning seems oddly immature, in some way, beside Marvell. And nowadays
we find occasionally good irony, or satire, which lack wit's internal
equilibrium, because their voices are essentially protests against some
outside sentimentality or stupidity; or we find serious poets who are
afraid of acquiring wit, lest they lose intensity. The quality which
Marvell had, this modest and certainly impersonal virtue--whether we
call it wit or reason, or even urbanity--we have patently failed to
define. By whatever name we call it, and however we define that name, it
is something precious and needed and apparently extinct; it is what
should preserve the reputation of Marvell. _C'était une belle âme,
comme on ne fait plus à Londres._