Andrew Marvell Part 20

There are several portraits of Marvell in existence--one now being in the National Portrait Gallery. A modern statue in marble adorns the Town Hall of Hull.

FOOTNOTES:

[211:1] In reading the early volumes of the _Parliamentary History_ the question has to be asked, What authority is there for the reports of speeches? In Charles the Second's time some of the speakers, both in the Lords and Commons, evidently communicated their orations to the press.

[215:1] Lord Mayor, 1667.

[220:1] See _Marvell's Ghost_, in _Poems on Affairs of State_.

[223:1] The cottage at Highgate, long called 'Marvell's Cottage,' has now disappeared. Several of Marvell's letters were written from Highgate.

CHAPTER VIII

WORK AS A MAN OF LETTERS

Marvell's work as a man of letters easily divides itself into the inevitable three parts. _First_, as a poet properly so called; _Second_, as a political satirist using rhyme; and _Third_, as a writer of prose.

Upon Marvell's work as a poet properly so called that curious, floating, ever-changing population to whom it is convenient to refer as "the reading public," had no opportunity of forming any real opinion until after the poet's death, namely, when the small folio of 1681 made its appearance. This volume, although not containing the _Horatian Ode upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland_ or the lines upon Cromwell's death, did contain, saving these exceptions, all the best of Marvell's verse.

How this poetry was received, to whom and to how many it gave pleasure, we have not the means of knowing. The book, like all other good books, had to take its chance. Good poetry is never exactly unpopular--its difficulty is to get a hearing, to secure a _vogue_. I feel certain that from 1681 onwards many ingenuous souls read _Eyes and Tears_, _The Bermudas_, _The Nymph complaining for the Death of her Fawn_, _To his Coy Mistress_, _Young Love_, and _The Garden_ with pure delight. In 1699 the poet Pomfret, of whose _Choice_ Dr. Johnson said in 1780, "perhaps no composition in our language has been oftener perused," and who Southey in 1807 declared to be "the most popular of English poets"; in 1699, I say, this poet Pomfret says in a preface, sensibly enough, "to please everyone would be a New Thing, and to write so as to please no Body would be as New, for even Quarles and Wythers (_sic_) have their Admirers." So liable is the public taste to fluctuations and reversals, that to-day, though Quarles and Wither are not popular authors, they certainly number many more readers than Pomfret, Southey's "most popular of English poets," who has now, it is to be feared, finally disappeared even from the Anthologies. But if Quarles and Wither had their admirers even in 1699, the poet Marvell, we may be sure, had his also.

Marvell had many poetical contemporaries--five-and-twenty at least--poets of mark and interest, to most of whom, as well as to some of his immediate predecessors, he stood, as I must suppose, in some degree of poetical relationship. With Milton and Dryden no comparison will suggest itself, but with Donne and Cowley, with Waller and Denham, with Butler and the now wellnigh forgotten Cleveland, with Walker and Charles Cotton, with Rochester and Dorset, some resemblances, certain influences, may be found and traced. From the order of his mind and his prose style, I should judge Marvell to have been both a reader and a critic of his contemporaries in verse and prose--though of his criticisms little remains. Of Butler he twice speaks with great respect, and his sole reference to the dead Cleveland is kindly. Of Milton we know what he thought, whilst Aubrey tells us that he once heard Marvell say that the Earl of Rochester was the only man in England that had the true vein of satire.

Be these influences what they may or must have been, to us Marvell occupies, as a poet, a niche by himself. A finished master of his art he never was. He could not write verses like his friend Lovelace, or like Cowley's _Chronicle_ or Waller's lines "On a Girdle." He had not the inexhaustible, astonishing (though tiresome) wit of Butler. He is often clumsy and sometimes almost babyish. One has frequently occasion to wonder how a man of business could allow himself to be tickled by such obvious straws as are too many of the conceits which give him pleasure.

To attribute all the conceits of this period to the influence of Dr.

Donne is but a poor excuse after all. The worst thing that can be said against poetry is that there is so much tedium in it. The glorious moments are all too few. It is his honest recognition of this woeful fact that makes Dr. Johnson, with all his faults lying thick about him, the most consolatory of our critics to the ordinary reading man.

"Tediousness is the most fatal of all faults.... Unhappily this pernicious failure is that which an author is least able to discover. We are seldom tiresome to ourselves.... Perhaps no man ever thought a line superfluous when he wrote it" (_Lives of the Poets_. Under _Prior_--see also under _Butler_).

That Marvell is never tiresome I will not a.s.sert. But he too has his glorious moments, and they are all his own. In the whole compa.s.s of our poetry there is nothing quite like Marvell's love of gardens and woods, of meads and rivers and birds. It is a love not learnt from books, not borrowed from brother-poets. It is not indulged in to prove anything. It is all sheer enjoyment.

"Bind me, ye woodbines, in your twines, Curb me about, ye gadding vines, And oh, so close your circles lace, That I may never leave this place!

But, lest your fetters prove too weak, Ere I your silken bondage break, Do you, O brambles, chain me too, And, courteous briars, nail me through.

Here at the fountain's sliding foot, Or at some fruit-tree's mossy root, Casting the body's vest aside, My soul into the boughs does glide; There, like a bird, it sits and sings."

No poet is happier than Marvell in creating the impression that he made his verses out of doors.

"He saw the partridge drum in the woods; He heard the woodc.o.c.k's evening hymn; He found the tawny thrush's broods, And the shy hawk did wait for him.

What others did at distance hear And guessed within the thicket's gloom Was shown to this philosopher, And at his bidding seemed to come."

(From Emerson's _Wood Notes_.)

Marvell's immediate fame as a true poet was, I dare say, obscured for a good while both by its original note (for originality is always forbidding at first sight) and by its author's fame as a satirist, and his reputation as a lover of "liberty's glorious feast." It was as one of the poets encountered in the _Poems on Affairs of State_ (fifth edition, 1703) that Marvell was best known during the greater part of the eighteenth century. As Milton's friend Marvell had, as it were, a side-chapel in the great Miltonic temple. The patriotic member of Parliament, who refused in his poverty the Lord-Treasurer Danby's proffered bribe, became a character in history before the exquisite quality of his garden-poetry was recognised. There was a cult for Liberty in the middle of the eighteenth century, and Marvell's name was on the list of its professors. Wordsworth's sonnet has preserved this tradition for us.

"Great men have been among us; hands that penn'd And tongues that utter'd wisdom, better none: The later Sydney, Marvell, Harrington."

In 1726 Thomas Cooke printed an edition of Marvell's works which contains the poetry that was in the folio of 1681, and in 1772 Cooke's edition was reprinted by T. Davies. It was probably Davies's edition that Charles Lamb, writing to G.o.dwin on Sunday, 14th December 1800, says he "was just going to possess": a notable addition to Lamb's library, and an event in the history of the progress of Marvell's poetical reputation. Captain Thompson's edition, containing the _Horatian Ode_ and other pieces, followed in 1776. In the great Poetical Collection of the Booksellers (1779-1781) which they improperly[229:1] called "Johnson's _Poets_" (improperly, because the poets were, with four exceptions, the choice not of the biographer but of the booksellers, anxious to retain their imaginary copyright), Marvell has no place. Mr.

George Ellis, in his _Specimens_ of the early English poets first published in 1803, printed from Marvell _Daphne and Chloe_ (in part) and _Young Love_. When Mr. Bowles, that once famous sonneteer, edited Pope in 1806, he, by way of belittling Pope, quoted two lines from Marvell, now well known, but unfamiliar in 1806:--

"And through the hazels thick espy The hatching throstle's shining eye."

He remarked upon them, "the last circ.u.mstance is new, highly poetical, and could only have been described by one who was a real lover of nature and a witness of her beauties in her most solitary retirement."

On this Mark Pattison makes the comment that the lines only prove that Marvell when a boy went bird-nesting (_Essays_, vol. ii. p. 374), a pursuit denied to Pope by his manifold infirmities. The poet Campbell, in his _Specimens_ (1819), gave an excellent sketch of Marvell's life, and selected _The Bermudas_, _The Nymph and Fawn_, and _Young Love_.

Then came, fresh from talk with Charles Lamb, Hazlitt, with his _Select Poets_ (1825), which contains the _Horatian Ode_, _Bermudas_, _To his Coy Mistress_, _The Nymph and Fawn_, _A Drop of Dew_, _The Garden_, _The Gallery_, _Upon the Hill and Grove at Billborow_. In this choice we may see the hand of Charles Lamb, as Tennyson's may be noticed in the selection made in Palgrave's _Golden Treasury_ (1863). Dean Trench in his _Household Book of English Poetry_ (1869) gives _Eyes and Tears_, the _Horatian Ode_, and _A Drop of Dew_. In Mr. Ward's _English Poets_ (1880) Marvell is represented by _The Garden_, _A Drop of Dew_, _The Bermudas_, _Young Love_, the _Horatian Ode_, and the _Lines on Paradise Lost_. Thanks to these later Anthologies and to the quotations from _The Garden_ and _Upon Appleton House_ in the _Essays of Elia_, Marvell's fame as a true poet has of recent years become widespread, and is now, whatever vicissitudes it may have endured, well established.

As a satirist in rhyme Marvell has shared the usual and not undeserved fate of almost all satirists of their age and fellow-men. The authors of lines written in heat to give expression to the anger of the hour may well be content if their effusions give the pain or teach the lesson they were intended to give or teach. If you lash the age, you do so presumably for the benefit of the age. It is very hard to transmit even a fierce and genuine indignation from one age to another. Marvell's satires were too hastily composed, too roughly constructed, too redolent of the occasion, to enter into the kingdom of poetry. To the careful and character-loving reader of history, particularly if he chance to have a feeling for the House of Commons, not merely as an inst.i.tution, but as a place of resort, Marvell's satirical poems must always be intensely interesting. They strike me as honest in their main intention, and never very wide of the mark. Hallam says, in his lofty way, "We read with nothing but disgust the satirical poetry of Cleveland, Butler, Oldham, Marvell," and he adds, "Marvell's satires are gross and stupid."[231:1]

Gross they certainly occasionally are, but stupid they never are.

Marvell was far too well-informed a politician and too shrewd a man ever to be stupid.

As a satirist Marvell had, if he wanted them, many models of style, but he really needed none, for he just wrote down in rough-and-ready rhyme whatever his head or his spleen suggested to his fancy. Every now and again there is a n.o.ble outburst of feeling, and a couplet of great felicity. I confess to taking great pleasure in Marvell's satires.

As a prose writer Marvell has many merits and one great fault. He has fire and fancy and was the owner and master of a precise vocabulary well fitted to clothe and set forth a well-reasoned and lofty argument. He knew how to be both terse and diffuse, and can compress himself into a line or expand over a paragraph. He has touches of a grave irony as well as of a boisterous humour. He can tell an anecdote and elaborate a parable. Swift, we know, had not only Butler's _Hudibras_ by heart, but was also (we may be sure) a close student of Marvell's prose. His great fault is a very common one. He is too long. He forgets how quickly a reader grows tired. He is so interested in the evolutions of his own mind that he forgets his audience. His interest at times seems as if it were going to prove endless. It is the first business of an author to arrest and then to retain the attention of the reader. To do this requires great artifice.

Among the masters of English prose it would be rash to rank Marvell, who was neither a Hooker nor a Taylor. None the less he was the owner of a prose style which some people think the best prose style of all--that of honest men who have something to say.

FOOTNOTES:

[229:1] "Indecently" is the doctor's own expression.

[231:1] See Hallam's _History of Literature_, vol. iv. pp. 433, 439.