Academician and later distinguished editor of Marvell's poems and letters, H.M.Margoliouth (1887–1959) published the two-part essay on Marvell anonymously. He is identified as its author by Legouis, André Marvell (Paris-London, 1928), p. 480.
(a) ‘Marvell and Cowley,’ Saturday Review, 127 (7 June 1919), pp. 550–1.
With a few exceptions, and those not of the first importance, the poems of Andrew Marvell were first printed in 1681. But practically all were written in the decade 1649–1658, and they owe more hints than is generally known to the work of contemporaries and immediate predecessors. It is, of course, to be expected that there should be reminiscences of Shakespeare and Jonson, and Marvell's close familiarity with ‘Lycidas’ among the other works of Milton, at first his patron and afterwards his protege, is obvious enough. But readers who find Marvell's charm unfailing but could still ask with Pope,
Who now reads Cowley?
can hardly be aware of the suggestions which Marvell drew from Cowley's ‘Mistress’ and built up into great poetry.
Cowley's ‘Mistress: or, Several Copies of Love-Verses,’ was first published in 1647. It would be rash to say that Marvell was unfamiliar with any of these poems before publication, for Cowley had been the precocious genius of that age and he and Marvell were scholars of Trinity, Cambridge together, being elected in 1637 and 1638 respectively; and this may be one reason why Marvell, familiar though he was with most of the numerous volumes of poems which thronged to the press on the cessation of fighting in 1646, was familiar above all with ‘The Mistress.’
Perhaps the most striking instance to bring forward is that of Marvell's opening lines ‘To his Coy Mistress.’ If only Time would allow, he would consent to as slow a wooing as might be:
[Quotes ll. 13–18, 21–4.]
Not for nothing had Cowley, in ‘My Dyet,’ written:
On a Sigh of Pity I a year can live,
One Tear will keep me twenty at least,
Fifty a gentle Look will give;
An hundred years on one kind word I'll feast;
A thousand more will added be,
If you an Inclination have for me;
And all beyond is vast Eternity, [st. 3]
Cowley is here trying a difficult metre and Marvell an easy one; but that does not alter the fact that, if the merit of suggestion is Cowley's, the merit of accomplishment is Marvell's. To begin with, there is all the difference between them which, to use Cole-ridge's vocabulary, exists between the product of Fancy and that of Imagination, and then Marvell develops the last line of ‘The Dyet’ into that wonderfully solemn quatrain, sounding a note as though blown with subdued breath on the trumpet of the Dweller in the Innermost—a note familiar to the Marvellian, who comes upon it even in a poem on weeping, that trite and sometimes nauseating subject of the Caroline poets,
How wide they dream! The Indian slaves
That sink for Pearl through Seas profound,
Would find her Tears yet deeper Waves
And not of one the bottom sound. [‘Mourning,’ ll. 29–32]
The conceit in the third line jars one, but it is the true note and it indicates that the true afflatus had come on the poet, a ‘ditty of no tone’ had been piped to his spirit, for the whole feeling of the poem changes, and instead of the ‘conceited’ and ‘metaphysical’ nonsense of which it has hitherto consisted, it ends simply and surprisingly:
I yet my silent Judgment keep,
Disputing not what they believe:
But sure as oft as Women weep,
It is to be suppos'd they grieve.
Marvell grew up under the influence of the conceit. On the whole it was not a good influence. Usually he has to escape from it into poetry, but sometimes he subdues and makes poetry of it.
My soul is of a birth as rare
As ’tis for object strange and high:
It was begotten by despair
Upon Impossibility. [‘Definition of Love,’ ll. 1–4]
It is not fanciful to see here a reminiscence of Cowley's poem ‘Impossibilities,’ for Marvell's last stanza,
Therefore the Love which us doth bind
But Fate so enviously debars,
Is the Conjunction of the Mind,
And Opposition of the Stars,
is clearly not unrelated to Cowley's third verse,
So thy Heart in Conjunction with mine,
Shall our own fortunes regulate;
And to our Stars themselves prescribe a Fate. [st. 3]
The contrast of sentiment here is noticeable and instinctive, Cowley, indeed, though the lesser poet, is the greater love poet. ‘Impossibilities’ is a fine poem; the lines quoted are as sturdy as those of Henley's which they suggest; and it has a beautiful ending. Marvell's love poetry, where chiefly Cowley's influence is to be noted, is small in bulk and lacks cumulative evidence of sincerity, how great soever are the individual merits of ‘To his Coy Mistress’ and ‘The Fair Singer,’ not to mention isolated lines and stanzas elsewhere. The writer of ‘Bermudas,’ ‘The Garden’ and ‘An Horation Ode’ does not live as a poet of love, but as a master of words, a maker of a sweet and solemn music and a revealer of the greatness of men and their actions.
One more passage from ‘The Mistress’ must be quoted, though there are others which can be found for the looking, for by it we are able to clinch the restoration of a line in Marvell that has gone wrong from its first printing to the present day. The first piece printed in the original (1681) issue of Marvell's poems is ‘A Dialogue, Between The Resolved Soul, and Created Pleasure.’ It is an attractive poem in two parts in which Pleasure first attacks the soul by offering inducements to each of the five senses, to that of touch, for instance, by suggesting that the ‘Lord of Earth’ should
On these soft downy Pillows lye,
Whose soft Plumes will thither fly. [ll. 19–20]
To which the almost Shelleian reply is
My gentler Rest is on a Thought. [l. 23]
After each sense has been attacked and the attack rebuffed, there is an interval in which the Soul is encouraged to persevere, and then Pleasure tries again by offers of Beauty, Wealth, Power and Knowledge, and again the attack is beaten off. The offer of Beauty comes first and appears thus in the original edition:
All this fair, and cost, and sweet,
Which scatteringly doth shine,
Shall within one Beauty meet,
And she be only thine.
Two things are clear here. One is the meaning—all these attractions which were presented to each sense separately shall be combined in a single Beauty. The other is that something has gone wrong with the word ‘cost.’ Marvell's next editor (‘Hesiod’ Cooke in 1726) cut the Gordian knot and printed
All that's costly, fair, and sweet,
which is not only a hopelessly unscholarly correction, but misses half the meaning. All succeeding editors have followed him, yet it is clear that ‘cost’ (with a long's) is only a misprint, and not a very bad one, for ‘soft,’ which harks back to the ‘downy Pillows.’ Any doubt is dispelled when we turn to Cowley and in a poem called ‘The Soul,’ a title shorter than but similar to Marvell's, read first an appeal to each sense in turn and then these lines:
If all things that in Nature are
Either soft, or sweet, or fair,
Be not in Thee so ‘Epitomiz'd.’ [ll. 17–19]
Apart from ‘The Mistress,’ there is one point of comparison between Marvell and Cowley not to be overlooked. In his Essay ‘Of Obscurity,’ the latter translated into twenty-six turgid lines a thirteen-line passage from a chorus in Seneca's ‘Thyestes.’ Marvell englished the same into fourteen lines beginning:—
Climb at Court for me that will,
using a metre which may be considered the exact equivalent in our language of Seneca's, giving a perfect and almost literal translation, and yet creating a little poem that contains no hint of foreign origin. A full comparison of it with Seneca and with Cowley well repays interest, but it may be mere coincidence that both English poets translated the same passage. Cowley's Essays were published in 1668, after his death, and, if it is not a coincidence, Marvell either knew ‘Of Obscurity’ long before its publication or wrote his own lines after 1668.1 The latter is on several grounds almost impossible.
(b) ‘Marvell and Other Contemporaries,’ Saturday Review, 128 (19 July 1919), pp. 55–6.
From Cowley we turn to the older poet who shared with him such great contemporary reputation and such posthumous decline, Edmund Waller. He, too, was a Cambridge man, but he had ‘gone down’ many years before the time of Cowley or Marvell. But the latter was extremely well acquainted with Waller's ‘Battle of the Summer Islands,’ first published in 1645. The ‘Summer Islands’ are the Bermudas. The subject was not suggested to Marvell by this poem, which, after an account of the Islands, goes on to describe a fight with two stranded whales. Marvell's subject, the arrival of Puritan exiles at this western Paradise, was suggested by his residence as tutor to a ward of Cromwell at the house of the Oxenbridges, who had twice visited the Bermudas Religionis causa. But he drew largely on Waller for his description of the islands, and almost begins with an allusion to the subject of Waller's poem:—
Where he the huge Sea-Monsters wracks,
That lift the Deep upon their Backs,
He lands us on a grassy stage. [ll. 9–11]
The italics of us are our own, but the emphasis and contrast with the ‘huge Sea-Monsters’ is often missed.
Then Marvell writes,
He gave us this eternal spring,
Which here enamels everything
with a felicity at least equal to that of his original
For the kind spring, which but salutes us here,
Inhabits there, and courts them all the yeare. [I. 40–1]
In the same way Marvell goes on to his well-known description of the fruits of the islands and the ambergris of the sea, which was nearly all in Waller before him; but Marvell translates it all into poetry, where Waller gave little better than a catalogue or at most an attractive menu.
It is interesting, while on this subject, to notice, even though the instances are rather trifling, that Marvell twice more drew on ‘The Battle of the Summer Islands,’ once before and once after writing ‘Bermudas.’ The earlier instance is in the poem ‘Upon the Hill and Grove at Billborow,’ where he borrows the phrase ‘Groves of Pikes’ [III. 54], and later in the lines which he addressed to Cromwell on Blake's victory off Teneriffe, where, after a description of Teneriffe very much in the manner of Waller's account of the Bermudas, he breaks off,
But whilst I draw that Scene, where you ere long
Shall conquests act, your present are unsung [ll. 65–6],
just as Waller broke off,
But while I doe these pleasing dreames indite,
I am diverted from the promis'd fight. [I. 73–4]
Marvell wrote this poem on Blake's victory fresh from reading the broadside publication of Waller's lines on the victory won a few months earlier off San Lucar, near Cadiz. The two poems will repay a close comparison, though it will not bring out Marvell's strongest points, for in spite of those passages in his ‘Poem on the Death of Oliver Cromwell,’ where the true note is struck, he is not happiest with the decasyllabic couplet. Most noticeably in the poem on Blake's victor he borrows Waller's view of the Spanish treasure which was sunk in these two battles:—
What Earth in her dark bowels could not keep
From greedy hands, lies safer in the deep,
Where Thetis kindly do's from mortals hide,
Those seeds of Luxury, Debate, and Pride,
[‘Of a War with Spain, and a Fight at Sea,’ ll. 71–4]
wrote Waller, and Marvell echoed him with,
Their Gallions sunk, their wealth the sea does fill,
The only place where it can cause no Ill [ll. 151–2],
and a few lines later,
And in one War the present age may boast,
The certain seeds of many Wars are lost. [ll. 159–60]
How Waller's ‘Instructions to a Painter,’ followed by Denham's, lured or led Marvell into the path of political satire is another story. Many of the satires and lampoons ascribed to him are not by his hand; those which are certainly his have all the wit, but not much of the delicacy of Lamb's famous phrase. But that Marvell could always dispense with delicacy in our sense of the word is proved by what is very probably his earliest extant work in English, the very clever poem on ‘Fleckno, an English Priest at Rome.’ It is strange that, as a writer, he should have been known exclusively as the author of satires or of witty prose; that even in Wordsworth's day his name survived in company with those of Algernon Sidney and James Harrington [see No. 40] as that of a stalwart republican (which he was not); and that his poetry properly so-called should not have been printed till after his death, and, in spite of three eighteenth century editions, should not have been ‘discovered’ till the nineteenth.
The boom in publication at the end of the main fighting of the civil war included not only Cowley's ‘Mistress,’ but all or most of the work of Crashaw, Henry Vaughan, Herrick and Lovelace. It also included (1647) Cleveland's ‘Rebel Scot,’ which long afterwards gave a title to Marvell's ‘Loyal Scot.’ With Lovelace Marvell was, of course, acquainted. He was among many who wrote complimentary verses introducing Lovelace's volume entitled ‘Lucasta’ (1649), and he had in mind the lines of the ‘Dialogue. Lucasta, Alexis,’
Love nee're his Standard when his Hoste he sets,
Creates alone fresh-bleeding Bannerets [ll. 15–16],
when he wrote at the end of ‘The Unfortunate Lover,’
a Lover drest
In his own Blood does relish best.
This is the only Banneret
That ever Love created yet.
From Crashaw Marvell took little. He is one of the best known exponents of the ‘tear’ motive and may have given Marvell a hint of phraseology in ‘Eyes and Tears.’ Vaughan shares with Marvell, though in a less degree, a fondness for the adjectives ‘green’ and ‘shady,’ and it can hardly be fortuitous that Marvell's description in ‘Tom May's Death’ of Ben Jonson in the Elysian Fields, where
in the dusky Laurel shade
Amongst the Chorus of old Poets laid [ll. 14–15]
he rules over ‘the Learned throng,’ can be so exactly paralleled by Vaughan's lines (published 1646) ‘To my Ingenuous Friend, R.W.’:—
First, in the shade of his owne bayes,
Great BEN they'le see, whose sacred Layes,
The learned Ghosts admire, and throng,
To catch the subject of his Song. [ll. 29–32]
We will conclude with a slightly earlier poet, Thomas Carew, whose poems were first collected in 1640, a year after his death. Here the connection is not so striking or obvious as in the case of Cowley or Waller, but where one instance might fail to carry conviction, several make it fairly certain that the earlier and lesser poet did act by way of suggestion on Marvell. Marvell in ‘Young Love’ says that
Common Beauties stay fifteen,
and Carew was fond of the expression ‘Common Beauties.’1 Marvell, perhaps, borrows from Carew the name Celia for his pupil, Mary Fairfax. Marvell's Daphnis unsuccessfully woos Chloe, for he
Knew not that the Fort to gain
Better ’twas the Siege to raise. [ll. 19–20]
Carew, in ‘Conquest by Flight,’ had declared, though with a different moral, that
only they
Conquer love that run away. [ll. 15–16]
Marvell in his charming lines on ‘The Picture of Little T.C. in a Prospect of Flowers,’ where—like Francis Thompson, though with a difference—he goes on to think of the child as she will be, speaks of her in a phrase of Carew's as ‘This Darling of the Gods,’2
whose chaster Laws
The wanton Love shall one day fear,
And, under her command severe
See his Bow broke [ll. 11–14],
as Carew, in ‘A New Year's Gift. To the Queen,’ had addressed her as
Thou great Commandress, that doest move
Thy Scepter o'r the Crown of Love,
And through his Empire with the Awe
Of Thy chaste beames, doest give the Law. [ll. 1–4]
Finally, Carew's poem, ‘To my Friend G.N. from Wrest,’ contains a long passage which cannot but have been in Marvell's mind or before his eyes when he wrote his description of Appleton House. Both houses are homely and hospitable, both have dis-pensed with the ambitious architect. In the house Carew describes
In stead of Statues to adorn their wall,
They throng with living men, their merry Hall. [ll. 33–4]
At Appleton House,
A Stately Frontispice of Poor
Adorns without the open Door:
Nor less the Rooms within commends
Daily new Furniture of Friends.
The House was built upon the Place
Only as a Mark of Grace;
And for an Inn to entertain
Its Lord awhile, but not remain. [ll. 65–72]
At Appleton House Marvell was in his poetic prime. Here he wrote his poems of garden and country, and here his master Fairfax, taking Marvell's lines metaphorically and using Marvell's metre and cadences, wrote of his house as may still be read in his own handwriting:—
Thinke not ô Man that dwells herein
This House's a stay, but as an Inne
Which for Convenience fittly stands
In way to one nott made with hands.
But if a time here thou take Rest,
Yett thinke Eternity's the Best.
[‘Upon the New-built House at Appleton’]
1 Also translated in 1676 by Sir Matthew Hale, Contemplations, Moral and Divine, and in 1684 by John Norris of Bemerton, Poems and Discourses.
1 For example, ‘Ingrateful Beauty Threat'ned,’ l. 4, and ‘To A.L.Persuasions to Love’ l. 14.
2 ‘Upon the King's Sickness,’ l. 37.