Lives of the Poets Part 4

As men in h.e.l.l are from diseases free, So from all other ills am I, Free from their known formality: But all pains eminently lie in thee. COWLEY.

They were not always strictly curious, whether the opinions from which they drew their ill.u.s.trations were true; it was enough that they were popular. Bacon remarks, that some falsehoods are continued by tradition, because they supply commodious allusions.

It gave a piteous groan, and so it broke: In vain it something would have spoke; The love within too strong for't was, Like poison put into a Venice-gla.s.s. COWLEY.

In forming descriptions, they looked out, not for images, but for conceits. Night has been a common subject, which poets have contended to adorn. Dryden's Night is well known; Donne's is as follows:

Thou seest me here at midnight, now all rest: Time's dead low-water; when all minds divest To-morrow's business; when the labourers have Such rest in bed, that their last church-yard grave, Subject to change, will scarce be a type of this; Now when the client, whose last hearing is To-morrow, sleeps; when the condemned man, Who, when he opes his eyes, must shut them then Again by death, although sad watch he keep, Doth practise dying by a little sleep; Thou at this midnight seest me.

It must be, however, confessed of these writers, that if they are upon common subjects often unnecessarily and unpoetically subtile; yet, where scholastick speculation can be properly admitted, their copiousness and acuteness may justly be admired. What Cowley has written upon hope shows an unequalled fertility of invention:

Hope, whose weak being ruin'd is, Alike if it succeed and if it miss; Whom good or ill does equally confound, And both the horns of fate's dilemma wound; Vain shadow! which dost vanish quite, Both at full noon and perfect night!

The stars have not a possibility Of blessing thee; If things then from their end we happy call, 'Tis hope is the most hopeless thing of all.

Hope, thou bold taster of delight, Who, whilst thou should'st but taste, devour'st it quite!

Thou bring'st us an estate, yet leav'st us poor, By clogging it with legacies before!

The joys which we entire should wed, Come deflower'd virgins to our bed; Good fortunes without gain imported be, Such mighty custom's paid to thee; For joy, like wine, kept close, does better taste; If it take air before its spirits waste.

To the following comparison of a man that travels and his wife that stays at home, with a pair of compa.s.ses, it may be doubted whether absurdity or ingenuity has better claim:

Our two souls, therefore, which are one, Though I must go, endure not yet A breach, but an expansion, Like gold to airy thinness beat.

If they be two, they are two so As stiff twin compa.s.ses are two; Thy soul, the fix'd foot, makes no show To move, but doth if th' other do.

And though it in the centre sit, Yet, when the other far doth roam, It leans, and hearkens after it, And grows erect, as that comes home.

Such wilt thou be to me, who must Like th' other foot obliquely run, Thy firmness makes my circle just, And makes me end where I begun. DONNE[19].

In all these examples it is apparent, that whatever is improper or vitious is produced by a voluntary deviation from nature, in pursuit of something new and strange; and that the writers fail to give delight by their desire of exciting admiration.

Having thus endeavoured to exhibit a general representation of the style and sentiments of the metaphysical poets, it is now proper to examine, particularly, the works of Cowley, who was almost the last of that race, and undoubtedly the best.

His miscellanies contain a collection of short compositions, written some as they were dictated by a mind at leisure, and some as they were called forth by different occasions; with great variety of style and sentiment, from burlesque levity to awful grandeur. Such an a.s.semblage of diversified excellence no other poet has. .h.i.therto afforded. To choose the best, among many good, is one of the most hazardous attempts of criticism. I know not whether Scaliger himself has persuaded many readers to join with him in his preference of the two favourite odes, which he estimates, in his raptures, at the value of a kingdom. I will, however, venture to recommend Cowley's first piece, which ought to be inscribed, To my Muse, for want of which the second couplet is without reference. When the t.i.tle is added, there will still remain a defect; for every piece ought to contain, in itself, whatever is necessary to make it intelligible. Pope has some epitaphs without names; which are, therefore, epitaphs to be let, occupied, indeed, for the present, but hardly appropriated.

The ode on wit is almost without a rival. It was about the time of Cowley, that _wit_, which had been, till then, used for _intellection_, in contradistinction to _will_, took the meaning, whatever it be, which it now bears.

Of all the pa.s.sages in which poets have exemplified their own precepts, none will easily be found of greater excellence than that in which Cowley condemns exuberance of wit:

Yet 'tis not to adorn and gild each part, That shews more cost than art.

Jewels at nose and lips but ill appear; Rather than all things wit, let none be there.

Several lights will not be seen, If there be nothing else between.

Men doubt, because they stand so thick i'th' sky, If those be stars which paint the galaxy.

In his verses to lord Falkland, whom every man of his time was proud to praise, there are, as there must be in all Cowley's compositions, some striking thoughts, but they are not well wrought. His elegy on sir Henry Wotton is vigorous and happy; the series of thoughts is easy and natural; and the conclusion, though a little weakened by the intrusion of Alexander, is elegant and forcible.

It may be remarked, that in this elegy, and in most of his encomiastick poems, he has forgotten or neglected to name his heroes.

In his poem on the death of Hervey, there is much praise, but little pa.s.sion; a very just and ample delineation of such virtues as a studious privacy admits, and such intellectual excellence as a mind not yet called forth to action can display. He knew how to distinguish, and how to commend, the qualities of his companion; but, when he wishes to make us weep, he forgets to weep himself, and diverts his sorrow by imagining how his crown of bays, if he had it, would crackle in the fire. It is the odd fate of this thought to be the worse for being true. The bay-leaf crackles remarkably as it burns; as, therefore, this property was not a.s.signed it by chance, the mind must be thought sufficiently at ease that could attend to such minuteness of physiology. But the power of Cowley is not so much to move the affections, as to exercise the understanding.

The Chronicle is a composition unrivalled and alone: such gaiety of fancy, such facility of expression, such varied similitude, such a succession of images, and such a dance of words, it is in vain to expect, except from Cowley. His strength always appears in his agility; his volatility is not the flutter of a light, but the bound of an elastick mind. His levity never leaves his learning behind it; the moralist, the politician, and the critick, mingle their influence even in this airy frolick of genius. To such a performance Suckling could have brought the gaiety, but not the knowledge; Dryden could have supplied the knowledge, but not the gaiety.

The verses to Davenant, which are vigorously begun and happily concluded, contain some hints of criticism very justly conceived and happily expressed. Cowley's critical abilities have not been sufficiently observed: the few decisions and remarks, which his prefaces and his notes on the Davideis supply, were, at that time, accessions to English literature, and show such skill as raises our wish for more examples.

The lines from Jersey are a very curious and pleasing specimen of the familiar descending to the burlesque.

His two metrical disquisitions _for_ and _against_ reason are no mean specimens of metaphysical poetry. The stanzas against knowledge produce little conviction. In those which are intended to exalt the human faculties, reason has its proper task a.s.signed it; that of judging, not of things revealed, but of the reality of revelation. In the verses for reason, is a pa.s.sage which Bentley, in the only English verses which he is known to have written, seems to have copied, though with the inferiority of an imitator.

The holy book like the eighth sphere doth shine With thousand lights of truth divine, So numberless the stars, that to our eye It makes all but one galaxy.

Yet reason must a.s.sist too; for, in seas So vast and dangerous as these, Our course by stars above we cannot know Without the compa.s.s too below.

After this, says Bentley[20]:

Who travels in religious jars, Truth mix'd with error, shade with rays, Like Whiston wanting pyx or stars, In ocean wide or sinks or strays.

Cowley seems to have had what Milton is believed to have wanted, the skill to rate his own performances by their just value, and has, therefore, closed his miscellanies with the verses upon Crashaw, which apparently excel all that have gone before them, and in which there are beauties which common authors may justly think not only above their attainment, but above their ambition.

To the miscellanies succeed the Anacreontiques, or paraphrastical translations of some little poems, which pa.s.s, however justly, under the name of Anacreon. Of these songs dedicated to festivity and gaiety, in which even the morality is voluptuous, and which teach nothing but the enjoyment of the present day, he has given rather a pleasing, than a faithful representation, having retained their sprightliness, but lost their simplicity. The Anacreon of Cowley, like the Homer of Pope, has admitted the decoration of some modern graces, by which he is undoubtedly more amiable to common readers, and, perhaps, if they would honestly declare their own perceptions, to far the greater part of those whom courtesy and ignorance are content to style the learned.

These little pieces will be found more finished in their kind than any other of Cowley's works. The diction shows nothing of the mould of time, and the sentiments are at no great distance from our present habitudes of thought. Real mirth must be always natural, and nature is uniform.

Men have been wise in very different modes; but they have always laughed the same way.

Levity of thought naturally produced familiarity of language, and the familiar part of language continues long the same; the dialogue of comedy, when it is transcribed from popular manners, and real life, is read, from age to age, with equal pleasure. The artifices of inversion, by which the established order of words is changed, or of innovation, by which new words, or meanings of words, are introduced, is practised, not by those who talk to be understood, but by those who write to be admired.

The Anacreontiques, therefore, of Cowley, give now all the pleasure which they ever gave. If he was formed by nature for one kind of writing more than for another, his power seems to have been greatest in the familiar and the festive.

The next cla.s.s of his poems is called the Mistress, of which it is not necessary to select any particular pieces for praise or censure.

They have all the same beauties and faults, and nearly in the same proportion. They are written with exuberance of wit, and with copiousness of learning; and it is truly a.s.serted by Sprat, that the plenitude of the writer's knowledge flows in upon his page, so that the reader is commonly surprised into some improvement. But, considered as the verses of a lover, no man that has ever loved will much commend them. They are neither courtly nor pathetick, have neither gallantry nor fondness. His praises are too far-sought, and too hyperbolical, either to express love, or to excite it; every stanza is crowded with darts and flames, with wounds and death, with mingled souls, and with broken hearts.

The princ.i.p.al artifice by which the Mistress is filled with conceits, is very copiously displayed by Addison. Love is by Cowley, as by other poets, expressed metaphorically by flame and fire; and that which is true of real fire is said of love, or figurative fire, the same word in the same sentence retaining both significations. Thus, "observing the cold regard of his mistress's eyes, and, at the same time, their power of producing love in him, he considers them as burning-gla.s.ses made of ice. Finding himself able to live in the greatest extremities of love, he concludes the torrid zone to be habitable. Upon the dying of a tree on which he had cut his loves, he observes that his flames had burnt up and withered the tree."

These conceits Addison calls mixed wit; that is, wit which consists of thoughts true in one sense of the expression, and false in the other.

Addison's representation is sufficiently indulgent: that confusion of images may entertain for a moment; but, being unnatural, it soon grows wearisome. Cowley delighted in it, as much as if he had invented it; but, not to mention the ancients, he might have found it full-blown in modern Italy. Thus Sannazaro:

Aspice quam variis distringar, Lesbia, curis!

Uror, et heu! nostro manat ab igne liquor: Sum Nilus, sumque Aetna simul; restringite flammas O lacrimae, aut lacrimas ebibe, flamma, meas.

One of the severe theologians of that time censured him, as having published "a book of profane and lascivious verses." From the charge of profaneness, the constant tenour of his life, which seems to have been eminently virtuous, and the general tendency of his opinions, which discover no irreverence of religion, must defend him; but that the accusation of lasciviousness is unjust, the perusal of his work will sufficiently evince.

Cowley's Mistress has no power of seduction: she "plays round the head, but reaches not the heart." Her beauty and absence, her kindness and cruelty, her disdain and inconstancy, produce no correspondence of emotion. His poetical account of the virtues of plants, and colours of flowers, is not perused with more sluggish frigidity. The compositions are such as might have been written for penance by a hermit, or for hire by a philosophical rhymer, who had only heard of another s.e.x; for they turn the mind only on the writer, whom, without thinking on a woman but as the subject for his task, we sometimes esteem as learned, and sometimes despise as trifling, always admire as ingenious, and always condemn as unnatural.

The Pindarique odes are now to be considered; a species of composition, which Cowley thinks Pancirolus might have counted in "his list of the lost inventions of antiquity," and which he has made a bold and vigorous attempt to recover.

The purpose with which he has paraphrased an Olympick and Nemaean ode, is, by himself, sufficiently explained. His endeavour was, not to show "precisely what Pindar spoke, but his manner of speaking." He was, therefore, not at all restrained to his expressions, nor much to his sentiments; nothing was required of him, but not to write as Pindar would not have written.

Of the Olympick ode, the beginning is, I think, above the original in elegance, and the conclusion below it in strength. The connexion is supplied with great perspicuity; and the thoughts, which, to a reader of less skill, seem thrown together by chance, are concatenated without any abruption. Though the English ode cannot be called a translation, it may be very properly consulted as a commentary.

The spirit of Pindar is, indeed, not every where equally preserved. The following pretty lines are not such as his _deep mouth_ was used to pour:

Great Rhea's son, If in Olympus' top, where thou Sitt'st to behold thy sacred show, If in Alpheus' silver flight, If in my verse thou take delight, My verse, great Rhea's son, which is Lofty as that, and smooth as this.

In the Nemaean ode the reader must, in mere justice to Pindar, observe, that whatever is said of "the original new moon, her tender forehead, and her horns," is super-added by his paraphrast, who has many other plays of words and fancy unsuitable to the original, as