H.C.Beeching (1859–1919) was a churchman and a man of letters. His essay with its historical survey of Marvell's fortuna signals in his own words ‘the recent rise into fame’ of the lyric poet. Despite an occasional idiosyncratic judgment (as on the ‘Horatian Ode’), he is a sensitive critic.
Extract from the National Review, 37 (July 1901), pp. 747–59.
Any one who wished to defend the thesis that our own generation, however it may fall below its predecessors in outstanding poetical genius, is markedly their superior in poetical taste, might find matter for his argument in the recent rise into fame of the lyrical verse of Marvell. It may be interesting to trace the progress of this growth of appreciation.
In 1681, three years after Marvell's death, a well printed folio was brought out by his widow containing all his poetry that existed in manuscript, except the political pieces, which, as the Stuarts were still upon the throne, could not be published with safety. Of this book no second edition was called for. In 1726 a literary hack, one Thomas Cooke, who translated Hesiod, and for attacking Pope was rewarded with immortality:
From these the world will judge of men and books,
Not from the Burnets, Oldmixons, and Cookes,
[Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, ll. 145–6]
issued an edition of Marvell's poems including the political satires, and rests Marvell's fame almost exclusively on political grounds. ‘My design,’ he says, ‘in this is to draw a pattern for all freeborn Englishmen, in the life of a worthy Patriot, whose every Action has truely merited to him, with Aristides, the surname of the Just.’ How little capable Cooke was of appreciating any of the distinctive qualities of Marvell's verse may be judged from the poems he singles out for special praise. ‘If we have any which may be properly said to come finished from his Hands, they are these, “On Milton's Paradise Lost,” “On Blood's Stealing the Crown,” and “A Dialogue between two Horses.”’
Just fifty years after Cooke's pretty little edition, there appeared another in three great quarto volumes by an editor as little competent to appreciate Marvell's peculiar charm as his predecessor; though he, like Cooke, was a poet in his way. This was Edward Thompson, a captain in the Royal Navy, who was interested in the fame of Marvell, from being himself a native of Hull, and also on the political side, from his friendship with Wilkes. Thompson puts on his title-page some lines from his namesake of The Seasons, ‘Hail, Independence, Hail,’ &c.; and dedicates his volumes to the Mayor and Aldermen of Hull as the ‘Friends of Liberty and England’; professing that his labour was undertaken to show his esteem for ‘a person who had been a general friend to mankind, a public one to his country, and a partial and strenuous one to the town of Hull.’ Thompson's gifts as a critic may be estimated from his assigning to Marvell not only Addison's hymn, ‘The Spacious Firmament on High,’ which at least is in Marvell's metre, if not in his manner, but also Mallet's ‘William and Margaret,’ a poem that could not have been written before Allan Ramsay's publications had revived interest in the old Scots ballads. Thompson had found these poems with others in a manuscript book, some part of which he declared to be in Marvell's handwriting; and of this fact he would have been a very competent judge from his familiarity with the many letters of Marvell written to his constituents at Hull, which he printed in his edition. From this invaluable autograph he set up his text. ‘Afterwards, as rare things will, it vanished.’ But it restored to the world the poem by which Marvell is generally known, ‘An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland.’ I must not speak here about Captain Thompson, but I may perhaps be allowed to say I have come to regard his volumes with much more interest since reading in the Cornhill Magazine for May 1868 some extracts from a manuscript journal of his kept in the year 1783–5. The only entry there precisely bearing on our subject is the following, under date 1784, ‘A nephew of Emma's [his mistress] was named by me Andrew Marvell; when he comes to reason, the name may inspire him to be virtuous.’ This would show, if more evidence were needed, that it was mainly on the political side that Marvell interested the Captain. His own poetical effusions were chiefly squibs and epigrams, and what he well called ‘Meretricious Miscellanies.’ The list of subscribers to Thompson's volumes tells the same tale. It includes the Duke of G—, the Marquis of Granby, the Earl of Shelburne and other Whig peers, the Lord Mayor of London (Sawbridge), and a dozen Members of Parliament, among them Burke, and such stalwarts as Wilkes and Oliver. It includes, more remarkably, the notorious Rigby, who was said by the wits to have bequeathed by his will ‘near half a million of public money.’ Learning is represented by that stout republican, Thomas Hollis, and by Daines Barrington the antiquary and naturalist, and correspondent of White of Selborne, who, according to Charles Lamb, was so much the friend of gardens that he paid the gardener at the Temple twenty shillings to poison the sparrows. But literature has only a few names. There is the Rev. Prebendary Mason, his friend the eccentric Dr. Glynn, who once wrote a prize poem, Mrs. Macaulay, and Mr. William Woty. Samuel Johnson, LL.D., is conspicuous by absence. The theatre (for Captain Thompson was himself something of a playwright) contributes David Garrick, Esq., Samuel Foote, Esq., and Mr. Colman; and among other personal friends of the editor is the notorious John Stevenson Hall, better known as Hall Stevenson. This worthy and the Duke of Cumberland (Henry Augustus), who heads the list, may have been attracted by the indelicacy of the satires, hardly by anything else.
Eleven years after Thompson's edition of Marvell, appeared that very interesting book, ominous of the dawn of a new era, Selected Beauties of Ancient English Poetry, by Henry Headley, A.B., an enthusiastic young clergyman with genuine taste for the seventeenth-century poets. He revived the memory of Drayton and Daniel, whom he praises with discrimination, quoting from the former the now famous sonnet, ‘Since there's no help, come let us kiss and part’; and he has a good word to say for Drummond, Browne, Carew and Crashaw; but Marvell is not mentioned.1 Four years later, however, Marvell makes his appearance in George Ellis's Specimens of the Early English Poets, where he is spoken of as ‘an accomplished man who, though principally distinguished by his inflexible patriotism, was generally and justly admired for his learning, his acuteness in controversial writing, his wit, and his poetical talents.’ Ellis represents him by extracts from ‘Daphnis and Chloe,’ and ‘Young Love,’ which is much as if the author of the ‘Ancient Mariner’ and ‘Kubla Khan’ should be represented by the song ‘If I had but two little wings.’ I do not recall any reference to Marvell in Coleridge,1 and Wordsworth quotes him only as a patriot:
The later Sidney, Marvell, Harrington,
Young Vane, and others who called Milton friend. [See No. 40]
It was Charles Lamb who made the discovery of Marvell's merit as a lyrical poet.2 In his essay upon the Old Benchers of the Inner Temple, printed in the London Magazine for September 1821, he quotes, apropos of the Temple sun-dial, four stanzas from ‘The Garden,’ and says of them that they ‘are full, as all his serious poetry was, of a witty delicacy.’ The phrase has become classical, as it deserves. The most popular anthology of the last half of the century has been Mr. Palgrave's Golden Treasury of Songs and Lyrics, and this shows, in its later editions, a curious and interesting growth in appreciation of Marvell. When the first edition appeared, in 1861, it contained three poems of his, ‘The Horatian Ode,’ ‘The Garden,’ and ‘The Bermudas.’ In 1883, there was added an extract from ‘The Nymph complaining for the Death of her Fawn,’ with a note saying ‘Perhaps no poem in this collection is more delicately fancied, more exquisitely finished’; and in 1891 room was found for ‘The Picture of Little T.C. in a Prospect of Flowers.’ With five poems in so small and picked a collection, Marvell's popular reputation as a lyric poet may be reckoned to have culminated.
Marvell was born in 1621, the son of a celebrated preacher who was also master of the Grammar School of Hull, where the boy was educated. He proceeded to Cambridge, took his degree, and then travelled in Holland, France, Italy, and Spain. When he returned to England he was engaged by Lord Fairfax as tutor to his daughter Mary, and it is to the time that he spent in retirement in Fairfax's house at Nun Appleton in Yorkshire, perhaps from 1650 to 1653, that we owe the best of his lyrical works. Before this he had written one or two things in rhymed couplets, a preface to Lovelace's Lucasta, a copy of verses on Lord Hastings' death, full of wit, and with lines here and there that haunt the memory, like—
Go stand between the morning and the flowers [l. 5];
and in 1650 was composed the Horatian Ode; but whether any of the lyrics in octosyllables are of an earlier date than these cannot be determined. It will be best, then, to waive all question of chronological precedence, and look at the poems in groups according to their subject. But a word may first be said about the poet's models. He had two; we might call them his good and bad angels. They were John Milton, whose volume of lyrics appeared in 1645, and John Donne, whose poems were not printed during his lifetime, but were widely circulated in manuscript. Donne, one of the most remarkable among seventeenth-century Englishmen of genius, had one of the greatest poetical virtues and two of the greatest poetical vices. His virtue was passion, intensity; his vices were a too cavalier indifference to accent, and a love of quaint and extravagant conceits. Marvell is the pupil of his intensity, and to a certain degree of his extravagance; but he was saved from his careless writing by the study of Milton. The best example of Marvell's work in the manner of Donne is the lyric entitled ‘The Fair Singer.’ The breathless haste of the rhythm, and the absence of any pause except at the end of the lines, are studied after that master; so is the ingenuity of the idea. The first line of the poem, ‘To make a final conquest of all me,’ is Donne pure and simple. But even in this poem there is a regularity of measure which betrays the influence of the other school, that of Ben Jonson and Milton:
I could have fled from one but singly fair;
My disentangled soul itself might save,
Breaking the curled trammels of her hair;
But how should I avoid to be her slave
Whose subtle art invisibly can wreathe
My fetters of the very air I breathe! [ll. 7–12]
Of the fantastic and forced images that Marvell copied from Donne it will suffice to offer a single example. In the ‘Dialogue between the Soul and the Body’ he makes the body say:
O who shall me deliver whole
From bonds of this tyrannic soul,
Which stretched upright impales me so
That mine own precipice I go! [ll. 11–14]
The poem called ‘Eyes and Tears,’ which is full of the same sort of thing, is, I suspect, an exercise, the inspiration of which may be traced to the appearance of Crashaw's poem of ‘The Weeper’ in his volume of 1646. As a rule, Marvell's humour saved him from the worst banalities of this school; as a rule, also, he keeps his fantastic tours de force for semi-humorous passages, and often uses these, by way of contrast, to heighten the outburst of passion that follows. Thus, in the poem ‘Upon Appleton House,’ he compares Fairfax's garden to a fort:
[Quotes ll. 309–20.]
And then, while the reader is still smiling, he finds himself in the midst of a passionate apostrophe to England:
Oh, thou, that dear and happy isle,
The garden of the world erewhile,
Thou Paradise of the four seas
Which Heaven planted us to please;
But, to exclude the world, did guard
With watery, if not flaming, sword,—
What luckless apple did we taste
To make us mortal, and thee waste? [ll. 321–8]
The influence of Milton may be traced in the fine sense of form generally, and, in particular, in the use of the octosyllabic couplet. Occasionally we seem to hear an echo of Milton's airy grace, as in the couplet:
Near this a fountain's liquid bell
Tinkles within the concave shell.
[‘Clorinda and Damon,’ ll. 13–14]
But this is only occasional. Marvell is much more rigid in his rhythms than Milton, and he never attained to Milton's simplicity. That he had read him with care is evident; and there are a few direct reminiscences in the ‘First Anniversary,’ such as the phrase ‘beaked promontories,’ and the lines—
the dragon's tail
Swindges the volumes of its horrid flail [ll. 151–2]
and
Unto the kingdom blest of peace and love. [l. 218]
A more interesting reminiscence is the line in ‘The Garden’—
Waves in its plumes the various light [l. 56],
which is certainly an echo of the difficult line in ‘II Penseroso,’
Waves at his wings in aery stream [l. 148],
though it throws no light upon its interpretation. But too much must not be made of these imitations. After all, Milton was Milton, and Marvell was Marvell; and what survives to charm us in Marvell is what he gives us of his own. Let me briefly summarise some of the elements in this charm.
The first quality to strike a reader who takes up Marvell's book is his extraordinary terseness. Look, for example, at the poem with which the only good modern edition, that of Mr. G.A. Aitken, opens, ‘Appleton House.’ The poet wishes to praise the house for not being too big, like most country-houses of the time, and this is how he does it:
Within this sober frame expect
Work of no foreign architect,
That unto caves the quarries drew,
And forests did to pastures hew.
If this were ‘transprosed,’ it would have to run something as follows: ‘ Our boasted Italian architects make houses so huge that by drawing the stone for them they hollow out quarries into caves, and cut down whole forests for timber so that they become pastures.’ As a part of the same skill it is remarkable in how few strokes he can paint a picture. In this same poem, describing a copse, he says:
Dark all without it knits; within
It opens passable and thin [ll. 505–6],
which gives exactly the difference of impression from without and upon entering. A second notable quality in Marvell's verse is its sensuousness, its wide and deep enjoyment of the world of sense. ‘The Garden,’ which everybody knows, may stand as the best example of this quality—
Stumbling on melons as I pass
Ensnared with flowers, I fall on grass [ll. 39–40]
Marvell is the laureate of grass, and of greenery. A third excellent quality is his humour, to which I have already referred, sometimes showing itself as intellectual wit, or as irony or sarcasm. Still keeping to ‘Appleton House,’ one may notice the ingenuity of the suggestion of Fairfax's generosity—
A stately frontispiece of poor
Adorns without the open door [ll. 65–6],
or the deprecation of over-large houses:
What need of all this marble crust
To impark the wanton mole [sic] of dust;
That thinks by breadth the world to unite,
Tho' the first builders failed in height. [ll. 21–4]
Once or twice the humour runs to coarseness when it allies itself with the bitter Puritanism of the time, as in the picture of the nuns defending their house:
Some to the breach against their foes
Their wooden saints in vain oppose;
Another bolder stands at push,
With their old holy-water brush. [ll. 249–52]
But most characteristic of all the qualities of Marvell's verse is what Lamb well spoke of as his ‘witty delicacy’—his delicate invention. The shining and unapproachable instances of this delicacy are ‘The Nymph complaining for the death of her Fawn’ and ‘The picture of little T.C.’ The former of these pieces is often hyperbolic in fancy, but the hyperbole fits the pastoral remoteness of the setting; the second needs not even this apology. It is a masterpiece in a genre where masterpieces are rare, though attempts are not infrequent. Prior, Waller, and Sedley have tried the theme with a certain success, but their pieces lack the romantic note. ‘The Picture of Little T.C.’ has this to perfection; it has not a weak line in it, and moves through its five stanzas, each more exquisite than the last, to its admirably mock-serious close:
One other quality of Marvell's lyrical writing remains to be noticed, which is somewhat difficult to fix with a name, unless we call it gusto. We imagine him smiling to himself as he writes, smiling at his own fancies, or his own sensuousness, or happy turns. He wrote, we are sure, for his own pleasure quite as much as for ours. I remember the remark being made to me that ‘The Bermudas,’ for a religious poem, went pretty far in the way of self-indulgence. And so it does. Lastly, it cannot fail to be noted that Marvell was an artist, with an artist's love of making experiments. Perhaps he never attained perfect facility, but he is never amateurish.
Among the various groups into which his lyrical poetry divides itself, the least satisfactory is that whose theme is love. Marvell's love-poetry has, with the exception of one piece, as little passion as Cowley's, while it is as full of conceits. ‘The Unfortunate Lover’ is probably the worst love-poem ever written by a man of genius. ‘The Definition of Love’ is merely a study after Donne's ‘Valediction.’ Cleverer and more original, and somewhat more successful, is ‘The Gallery.’ The two opposite sides of one long picture-gallery into which the chambers of his heart have been thrown by breaking down partitions are supposed to be covered with portraits of his lady. On the one side she is drawn in such characters as Aurora and Venus; on the other as an enchanter and a murderess.
Marvell was the friend of Milton, and one conjectures that, like his respected friend, he also may have had theories as to the true relation of these sexes which interfered with the spontaneous expression of feeling. There is, nevertheless, one poem in which passion is allowed to take its most natural path, although even in it one feels that the poet is expressing the passion of the human race rather than his own individual feeling; and the passion being, as often in Marvell, masked and heightened by his wit, the effect is singularly striking: indeed, as a love-poem ‘To his Coy Mistress’ is unique. It could never be the most popular of Marvell's poems, but for sheer power I should be disposed to rank it higher than anything he ever wrote. He begins with hyperbolical protestations to his mistress of the slow and solemn state with which their wooing should be conducted, if only time and space were their servants and not their masters
Each beauty also of face and feature should have its special and agelong praise—
But at my back I always hear
Time's winged chariot hurrying near;
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity. [ll. 21–4]
The grave's a fine and private place,
But none I think do there embrace. [ll. 31–2]
A second division of Marvell's lyric poetry has for its subject religion. The most curious of the religious poems are the pastorals ‘Clorinda and Damon,’ and ‘Thyrsis and Dorinda.’ Despite their obvious artificiality I must confess that these poems give me pleasure, perhaps because religious poetry is apt to be shapeless, and these, in point of form, are admirable. It is matter for regret that in the first of the two Marvell should have made the nymph sensual and the swain pious; but the friend of Milton, as I have already suggested, probably shared his low views of the female sex. And then the conversion of the lady is sudden and leaves something to desire in its motive. In ‘Thyrsis and Dorinda’ the two young things talk together so sweetly of Elysium that they drink opium in order to lose no time in getting there. More genuine in feeling, and more religious in the ordinary sense of the word, are two dialogues: one between the ‘Resolved Soul and Created Pleasure,’ the other between ‘Soul and Body.’ The form of the first is noteworthy. The octosyllabic stanzas are alternately unshortened and shortened, the Soul speaking in serious iambics and Pleasure in dancing trochees; and the allurements of sense rise in a well-conceived scale from mere softness through art up to the pleasures of knowledge. The dialogue between Soul and Body is a brilliant duel, each party accusing the other of his proper woes; and except for the one terrible line I quoted above, the poem is an excellent piece of writing. But religious passion sounds a higher and less artificial strain in a pair of odes, the one ‘On a Drop of Dew,’ in which the soul is compared to the dewdrop upon a leaf, which reflects heaven and is reluctant to coalesce with its environment; the other called ‘The Coronet,’ an apology for religious poetry on the ground that because it admits art it leaves room for the artist's pride. ‘The Coronet’ is interesting as a study in Herbert's manner, and contains one line of exquisite modesty:
Through every garden, every mead,
I gather flowers (my fruits are only flowers). [ll. 5–6]
But the ode ‘On a Drop of Dew’ is by far the finer. The ideas are evolved after the manner of Donne, but the rhythm is slower and more contemplative.
[Quotes ll. 1–30.]
A third and final division of Marvell's lyrics would comprise his poems upon nature; and here we have Marvell at his best, because here he lets his passion inspire him. Except in Shakespeare, who includes ‘all thoughts, all passions, all desires’ we have but little passion for nature between Chaucer and Marvell; but in Marvell the love for natural beauty is not short of passion. Of course his love is not for wild nature—a feeling which only dates from Gray and Wordsworth—but for the ordinary country scenes:
Fragrant gardens, shady woods,
Deep meadows and transparent floods
[‘Appleton House,’ ll. 79–80];
and for these he brings the eye of a genuine lover and, what is more, of a patient observer. The lines upon ‘Appleton House’ are full of observation. He speaks of the ‘shining eye’ of the ‘hatching throstle,’ and has a fine imaginative description of the woodpecker:
[Quotes ll. 539–50.]
In his poem called ‘The Garden’ Marvell has sung a palinode that for richness of phrasing in its sheer sensuous love of garden delights is perhaps unmatchable. At the same time the most devout lover of gardens must agree with Marvell that even in a garden the pleasures of the mind are greater than those of the sense. The poet's thought, as he lies in the shade, can create a garden for himself far more splendid and also imperishable; as indeed, in this poem, it has done:
[Quotes ll. 41–56.]
Next to ‘The Garden’ as a descriptive poem must rank the ‘Bermudas.’ Marvell's ‘Bermudas’ are not ‘still vexed’ like Shakespeare's but an earthly paradise. His interest in these islands arose from meeting at Eton, while he was there as tutor to a ward of Cromwell's, a certain John Oxenbridge, who had been one of the exiles thither for conscience sake. The poem is built upon the same plan as ‘The Garden’; first, the sensuous delights are described as no one but Marvell could describe them:
[Quotes ll. 17–24.]
And then he passes on, though in this case it must be allowed with much less effect, to the spiritual advantages of the place. We may note in passing that Mr. Palgrave in his ‘Golden Treasury’ has taken the extraordinary liberty of altering the arrangement of some of the early lines, perhaps through not understanding their construction as they stand. In the folio and all the early editions the lines run as follows:
What should we do but sing His praise
That led us through the watery maze,
Unto an isle so long unknown
And yet far kinder than our own?
Where He the huge sea-monsters wracks
That lift the deep upon their backs,
He lands us on a grassy stage
Safe from the storms and prelates' rage.
Mr. Palgrave prints lines 5 and 6 before lines 3 and 4, thereby breaking up the arrangement of the line into quatrains, apparently not seeing that ‘where’ is equivalent to ‘whereas,’ and that the safety of the exiles is contrasted with the wrecking of the seamonsters. But to have introduced Marvell's verse to so wide a public should atone to the poet's manes for such an injury; especially as the Puck which sits ever upon the pen of commentators has already avenged it by making Mr. Palgrave append to the poem the following note: ‘Emigrants supposed to be driven towards America by the government of Charles I.’ There is no hint in the poem that the ‘small boat’ was bringing the emigrants across the Atlantic, or that they were describing the newly-discovered islands by the gift of prophecy.
Of the patriotic verse, which in its own way is full of interest, it is impossible to speak in this paper; except of the one poem which can claim to be a lyric, the ‘Horatian ode upon Cromwell's return from Ireland.’ As was said above, this ode was first published in Captain Thomson's edition, and so must take its stand as Marvell's only by the weight of internal evidence. But that evidence is conspicuous in every line. The poem runs on in a somewhat meandering and self-indulgent course, like all Marvell's longer poems. But many details are recognisably in Marvell's vein. The stroke of cleverness about King Charles's head being as lucky as that which was found when they were digging the foundations of Rome, and the fun he pokes at the Scotch and Irish are certainly Marvell. So is the view taken that Cromwell made a great sacrifice in renouncing a private life, which we get also in Marvell's prose; so is the touch about Cromwell's garden:
where
He lived reserved and austere,
(As if his highest plot
To plant the bergamot.) [ll. 29–32]
So also is the remarkable detachment from political prejudice, of which the verses prefixed to the cavalier poet Lovelace's Lucasta, about the same date, afford another instance, a detachment that would have been impossible for the author of ‘Lycidas.’ Even now, in an age which boasts of its tolerant spirit, it gives one a shock to remember that the stanzas about Charles, which present the very image of the cavalier saint and martyr, come in a poem to the honour and glory of the man to whom he owed his death.
[Quotes ll. 57–64.]
These two stanzas are now the only part of the ode that is remembered, and with justice; for the rest of the poem, although in form and spirit it is Horatian, yet it has little of the curiosa felicitas of Horace's diction to make it memorable.1 But in these two stanzas the diction has attained to the happiness of consummated simplicity. They recall the two stanzas at the close of the fifth ode in the third book in which Horace draws a picture of the martyred Regulus:
Atque sciebat, quae sibi barbarus
Tortor pararet: non aliter tamen
Et populum reditus morantem,
Quam si clientum longa negotia
Dijudicata lite relinqueret,
Tendens Venafranos in agros
Aut Lacedaemonium Tarentum.1
1 As mentioned in the Introduction, Headley chastizes Johnson for excluding Marvell from the Lives of the English Poets, but he does not include him in his own Select Beauties &.
1 Items 702–8 in Vol. I of the Notebooks, ed. K.Coburn (New York, 1957) include jottings from the R T.
2 Although this statement is frequently made even at this late date and Lamb's phrase ‘witty delicacy’ frequently quoted, the credit, it seems, should go to others, including Hazlitt (No. 45), Hunt (No. 46), and in particular the anonymous critic in the Retrospective Review (No. 47), followed by John Dove (No. 50) and Hartley Coleridge (No. 52).
1 For an opposite assertion, see No. 92.
1 Odes 3.5.49–56:
Yet when the barb'rous hangman did devise
For him, he knew: yet he no otherwise
His remorating kindred did adjourne,
And all the people stopping his returne,
Then if, the terme being done, he did withdraw
From all his clients tedious suits of Law,
To the Venafran fields taking his way,
Or to Tarentum of Laconia.
(Trans. Henry Rider, 1638)