Poetical Works of Edmund Waller and Sir John Denham Part 37

No mortal parts are requisite to raise Her that, unbodied, can her Maker praise.

The seas are quiet when the winds give o'er; So, calm are we when pa.s.sions are no more!

For then we know how vain it was to boast Of fleeting things, so certain to be lost.

Clouds of affection from our younger eyes Conceal that emptiness which age descries.

The soul's dark cottage, batter'd and decay'd, Lets in new light through c.h.i.n.ks that time has made; Stronger by weakness, wiser men become, As they draw near to their eternal home.

Leaving the old, both worlds at once they view, That stand upon the threshold of the new.

....Miratur limen Olympi.--VIRG.

END OF WALLER'S POEMS.

THE POETICAL WORKS

OF

SIR JOHN DENHAM.

LIFE OF SIR JOHN DENHAM.

Next to those poets who have exerted an influence on the _matter_, should be ranked those who have improved the _manner_, of our song. So that thus the same list may include the names of a Chaucer and a Waller, of a Milton and a Denham--the more as we suspect none but a true poet can materially improve even a poetical _mode_, can contrive even a new stirrup to Pegasus, or even to retune the awful organ of Pythia. Neither Denham nor Waller were great poets; but they have produced lines and verses so good, and have, besides, exerted an influence so considerable on modern versification, and the style of poetical utterance, that they are ent.i.tled to a highly respectable place amidst the sons of British song.

Sir John Denham, although thoroughly English both in descent and in complexion of mind, was born in Dublin in 1615. His father, whose name also was Sir John (of Little Horseley, in Ess.e.x), was, at the time of our poet's birth, the Chief Baron of Exchequer in Ireland. His mother was Eleanor More, daughter of Sir Garret More, Baron of Mellefont. Two years after the son's birth, the father, being made an English Baron of Exchequer, returned to his native country, and educated young John in London. Thence, at the age of sixteen, he went to study at Oxford, where he became celebrated rather for dissipation than diligence. He was, although a youth of imaginative temperament, excessively fond of gambling; and it was said of him, that he was more given to "dreams and dice than to study." His future eminence might be foreseen by some of his friends; but, in general, men looked on him rather as an idle and misled youth of fortune, than as a genius. Three years after, he removed to Lincoln's Inn, where he continued occasionally to gamble, and was sometimes punished for his pains, being plundered by more skilful or unscrupulous gamesters, but did not forget his studies. His conscience, on one occasion, aroused by a rebuke from a friend, awoke; and, to confirm the resolutions which it forced upon him, he wrote and published an "Essay on Gaming." In this respect he resembles Sir Richard Steele when a young soldier, who, in order to cure himself of his dissipations, wrote and published "The Christian Hero"--his object being, by drawing the picture of a character exactly opposite to his own, to commit himself irrevocably to virtue, and to break down all the bridges between him and a return to vice. It is, alas! notorious, that Steele's holiness turned out only to be a FIT, of not much longer duration than a morning headache, and that the "Christian Hero" remains not as a model to which its author's conduct was ever conformed, but as a severe, self-written satire on his whole career. And so with Denham. For some time he forsook the gambling-table, and applied his attention partly to law, and partly to poetry, translating, in 1636, the "Second Book of the Aeneid;" but when his father died, two years afterwards, and left him some thousands, he rushed again to the dice-box, and melted them as rapidly as the wind melts the snow of spring.

"In 1642 he broke out," as Waller remarks of him, "like the Irish Rebellion, threescore thousand strong, when n.o.body was aware, or in the least suspected it," in the play of "Sophy;" and, sooth to say, like that rebellion, his outbreak is lawless and irregular, as well as strong; as in that rebellion, too, there is a rather needless expenditure of blood. What Byron says of Dr. Polidori's tragedy, is nearly true of "Sophy"--

"All stab, and everybody dies."

Nothing can be more horrible and disgusting than many of the incidents.

A father suspecting and plotting against a dear and n.o.ble son; a son deprived of sight by the command of a father, and meditating in his rage and revenge the murder of his own favourite daughter, because she is beloved by his father; and the deaths of both son and father by poison, administered through means of a courtier who has betrayed both. Such are the main hinges on which the plot of the piece turns. The versification, too, is exceedingly unequal; sometimes swelling into rather full and splendid blank verse, and anon shrinking up into lines stunted and shrivelled, like boughs either touched by frost, or lopped by the axe of the woodman. Still there are in "Sophy" a force of style, a maturity of mind, an energy of declamation, and, here and there, an appreciation of Shakspeare--shewn in a generous though hopeless rivalry of his manner-- which account for the reception it at first met with, and seem to have excited in Denham's contemporaries expectations which were never fulfilled. This uprise, as well as that of the Irish (which took place the year before it), turned out, on the whole, abortive. And yet what fine lines and sentiments are the following, culled from "Sophy" almost _ad aperturam libri_:--

"Fear and guilt Are the same thing, and when our _actions are not_, _Our fears are crimes_.

The east and west Upon the globe, a _mathematic point Only divides_; thus happiness and misery, And all extremes, are still contiguous.

More gallant actions have been lost, for want of being Completely wicked, than have been performed By being exactly virtuous. 'Tis hard to be Exact in good, or excellent in ill; Our will wants power, or else our power wants skill.

When in the midst of fears we are surprised With unexpected happiness, the first _Degrees of joy are mere astonishment_.

Fear, the shadow Of danger, like the shadow of our bodies, _Is greater, then, when that which is the cause Is farthest off_."

The blinded prince's soliloquy, in the first scene of the fifth act, is worthy of Shakspeare. We must quote the following lines:--

"Reason, my soul's eye, still sees Clearly, and clearer for the want of eyes, For gazing through the windows of the body It met such several, such distracting objects; But now confined within itself it sees A strange and unknown world, and there discovers _Torrents of anger, mountains of ambition, Gulfs of desire, and towers of hope, large giants_, Monsters and savage beasts; to vanquish these Will be a braver conquest, than the old Or the new world."

Shortly after the appearance of "Sophy," he was admitted, by the form then usual, Sheriff of Surrey, and appointed governor of Farnham Castle for the king; this important post, however, he soon resigned, and retreated to Oxford, where, in 1643, he published his poem ent.i.tled "Cooper's Hill." This instantly became popular, and many who might have seen in "Sophy" greater powers than were disclosed in this new effort, envied its fame, and gave out that he had bought it of a vicar for forty pounds. For this there was, of course, no proof, and it is only worth mentioning because it is one of a large cla.s.s of cases, in which envious mediocrity, or crushed dulness, or jealous rivalry, has sought to s.n.a.t.c.h hard-won laurels from the brow of genius. As if these laurels were so smooth, and so soothing, as always to invite ambition, or as if they were so flexible as to suit every brow! As if FIRE lurked not sometimes in their leaves, and as if there were not, besides, a n.o.bler jealousy in the public mind ready to watch and to avenge their misappropriation.

Certain it is that not only, as Johnson remarks, was the attempt made to rob Addison of "Cato," and Pope of the "Essay of Criticism," but it has a hundred times taken place in the history of poetry. Rolt, as we saw in our late life of Akenside, tried to s.n.a.t.c.h the honour of writing "The Pleasures of Imagination" from its author. Lauder accused Milton of plundering the Italians wholesale. Scott's early novels have only the other day been most absurdly claimed for his brother Thomas. And notwithstanding Shakspeare's well-known lines over his sepulchre at Stratford--

"Bless'd be the man who spares these stones, But curs'd be he who moves my bones"--

a worse outrage has been recently committed on his memory, than were his dust, like Wickliffe's, tossed out of his tomb into the Avon--his plays have been, with as much stupidity as malice, attributed to Lord Bacon!

Homer, too, has been found out to be a myth; and we know not if even Dante's originality has altogether pa.s.sed unquestioned in this age of disbelief and downpulling; although what brow, save that thunder-scathed pile, could wear those scorched laurels, and who but the "man who had been in h.e.l.l" could have written the "Inferno?" Worst of all, a cla.s.s of writers have of late sought to prove that there is no such thing as originality--that genius means just dexterous borrowing-that the "Appropriation Clause" is of divine right--and have certainly proved themselves true to their own principles.

In 1647, circ.u.mstances brought our poet more closely in connexion with the royal family, and on one occasion he carried a message from the Queen to King Charles, then in prison. He subsequently conducted, with great success, the King's correspondence; and in April 1648 he conveyed the young Duke of York (afterwards James II.) from London to France, and delivered him to the charge of the Queen and the Prince of Wales. He had, ere leaving Britain, written a translation of Cato-Major on Old Age. While in France, attending on the exiled prince, he wrote a number of poetical pieces at his master's desire; among others, a song in honour of an emba.s.sy to Poland, which he and Lord Crofts undertook for Charles II., and during which they are said to have collected 10,000 for the royal cause from the Scotchmen who then abounded in that country as travelling merchants or pedlars. Meanwhile his political misdemeanours were punished by the Parliament confiscating the remnant of his estate. In 1652, he returned to England penniless, and was supported by the Earl of Pembroke. After the Restoration, Charles, more mindful of him than of many of his friends and the partners of his exile, bestowed on Denham the Surveyorship of the King's Buildings and the Order of the Bath. The situation of Surveyor, even in his careless and improvident hands, turned out a lucrative one; for it is said that he cleared by it no less than 7000. Of his first wife, we hear little or nothing; but about this time, flushed as he was with prosperity, and the popularity of the writings he continued to produce, he contracted a second marriage, which was so far from happy that its consequences led to a fit of temporary derangement. Butler, then a disappointed and exacerbated man, was malignant enough to lampoon him for lunacy--an act which, Dr. Johnson well remarks, "no provocation could excuse." It was, in Fuller's fine old quaint language, "breaking one whom G.o.d had bowed before." Our readers will find Butler's squib in our edition of that poet, vol. ii. p. 200, under the t.i.tle of "A Panegyrick on Sir John Denham's Recovery from his Madness." It is a piece quite unworthy of Butler's powers, and its sting lies princ.i.p.ally in charging Denham with plagiarising "Cooper's Hill" and "Sophy," with gambling, and with overreaching the King as Surveyor of the Public Buildings, and with an overbearing and quarrelsome temper--but it contains no allusion to his domestic infelicity. Some have hinted that the cause of his insanity lay in jealousy--that Denham suspected his wife to be too intimate with the Duke of York--that he poisoned her, and maddened in remorse. Whatever the cause, the distemper was not of long continuance. He recovered in time to write some verses on the death of Cowley, which took place in 1667; but in the next year he himself expired, and was buried by the side of his friend in Westminster Abbey, not very far from Chaucer and Spencer. His funeral took place on the 19th of March 1668. He had attained the age of fifty-three.

This is all we can definitely state of the history of Sir John Denham, and certainly the light it casts on his character is neither very plentiful nor very pleasing. A gambler in his early days, he became a political intriguer, an unhappy husband, a maniac, and died in the prime of life. It need only further be recorded of him, that, according to some accounts, he first discovered the merits of Milton's "Paradise Lost," and went about with the book new from the press in his hands, shewing it to everybody, and exclaiming, "This beats us all, and the ancients too!" If this story be true, it says as much for his heart as his head for the generous disposition which made him praise a political adversary, as for the critical taste which discerned at a glance the value of the world's greatest poem. On the whole, however, Denham as a man stands on the same general level with the Cavalier wits in the days of Charles. If he did not rise so high as Cowley, he did not sink so low as Rochester, or even as Butler.

We may now regret, both that he did not live better, and that he did not write more. He had unquestionably in him greater powers than he ever expressed in his works. These are few, fragmentary, and unequal; but, nevertheless, must be reckoned productions of no ordinary merit. They discover a great deal of the body, and not a little of the soul, of poetry. In the pa.s.sages we cited from "Sophy," and throughout the whole of that play, there is a vigorous and profound vein of reflection, as well as of imagination. Like Shakspeare, although on a scale very much inferior, he carries on a constant stream of subtle reflection amidst all the windings of his story; and even the most critical points of the drama are studded with pearls. Coleridge speaks of himself, or some one else, as wishing to live "collaterally, or aside, to the onward progress of society;" and thus, in the drama, there should ever be, as it were, a projection, or _alias_, of the author standing collaterally, or aside, to the bustling incidents and whirling pa.s.sions, and calmly adding the commentary of wisdom, as they rush impetuously on. Such essentially was the chorus of the ancient Greek play; and a similar end is answered in Shakspeare by the subtle asides, the glancing bye-lights, which his wondrous intellect interposes amidst the rapid play of his fancy, the exuberance of his wit, and the crowded incident and interchange of pa.s.sion created by his genius. Some have maintained that the philosophy of a drama should be chiefly confined to the conceptions of the characters, the development of the plot, and the management of the dialogue--that all the reflection should be molten into the ma.s.s of the play, and none of it embossed on the surface; but certainly neither Shakspeare's, nor Schiller's, nor Goethe's dramas answer to this ideal-- all of them, besides the philosophy, so to speak, afoot in the progress of the story, contain a great deal standing still, quietly lurking in nooks and corners, and yet exerting a powerful influence on the ultimate effect and explanation of the whole. And so, according to its own proportions, it is with Denham's "Sophy." Indeed, as we have above hinted, its power lies more in these interesting individual beauties than in its general structure.

"Cooper's Hill," next to "Sophy," is undoubtedly his best production.

Dr. Johnson calls it the first English specimen of _local_ poetry--i.e., of poetry in which a special scene is, through the embellishments of traditionary recollection, moral reflections, and the power of a.s.sociation generally, uplifted into a poetical light. This has been done afterwards by Garth, in his "Claremont;" Pope, in his "Windsor Forest;" Dyer, in his "Gronger-hill," and a hundred other instances. The great danger in this cla.s.s of poems, is lest imported sentiment and historical reminiscence should overpower the living lineaments, and all but blot out the memory of the actual landscape. And so it is to some extent in "Cooper's Hill," the scene beheld from which is speedily lost in a torrent of political reflection and moralising. The well-known lines on the Thames are rhetorical and forcible, but not, we think, highly poetical:--

"Oh, could I flow like thee, and make thy stream My great example, as it is my theme!

Though deep, yet clear, though gentle, yet not dull, Strong without rage, without o'erflowing full."

The poem closes with another river-picture, which some will admire:--

"When a calm river, raised with sudden rains Or snows dissolved, o'erflows the adjoining plains, The husbandmen, with high-raised banks, secure Their greedy hopes, and this he can endure; But, if with bays and dams they strive to force His channel to a new or narrow course, No longer then--within his banks he dwells, First to a torrent, then a deluge swells, Stronger and fiercer by restraint he roars, And knows no bound, but makes his power his sh.o.r.es."

Again, he says of Thames:--

"Thames, the most loved of all the ocean's sons By his old sire, to his embraces runs, Hasting to pay his tribute to the sea, Like mortal life to meet eternity.

Though with those streams he no resemblance hold Whose foam is amber and their gravel gold.

His genuine and less guilty wealth t'explore, Search not his bottom, but survey his sh.o.r.e."

Yet, though fond of, and great in, describing rivers, he is not, after all, the "river-G.o.d" of poetry. Professor Wilson speaks with a far deeper voice:--

"Down falls the drawbridge with a thund'ring shock, And, in an instant, ere the eye can know, Binds the stern castle to the opposing rock, And hangs in calmness o'er the flood below; A raging flood, that, born among the hills, Flows dancing on through many a nameless glen, Till, join'd by all his tributary rills From lake and tarn, from marsh and from fen, He leaves his empire with a kingly glee, And fiercely bids retire the billows of the sea!"

Different poets are made to write on different rivers as well as on different mountains. Denham paints well the calm majestic Thames; Wilson, the rapid Spey; Scott, the immemorial and historic Forth; Burns, the wild lonely Lugar and the Doon; and Thomas Aird (see his exquisitely beautiful "River"), the pastoral Cluden. But the poet of the St. Lawrence, with Niagara flinging itself over its crag like a mad ocean--of the Ganges or the Orellana--has yet to be born, or at least has yet to bring forth his conceptions of such a stupendous object in poetry.

In "Cooper's Hill" we find well, if not fully exhibited, what were Denham's leading qualities--not high imagination or a fertile fancy, although in neither of these was he conspicuously deficient, but manly strength of thought and clearness of language. There are in him no quaintnesses, no crotchets, no conceits, and no involutions or affectations--all is transparent, masculine, and energetic. It is in these respects that he became a model to Dryden and Pope, and may even still be read with advantage for at least his style, which is

"Strong without rage, without o'erflowing full."

His translations we have included, not for their surpa.s.sing merit, but because, in the first place, there is little of our author extant, and we are happy to reprint every sc.r.a.p of him we can find, and because again he, according to Dr. Johnson, was "one of the first that understood the necessity of emanc.i.p.ating translation from the drudgery of counting lines and interpreting single words." There has, indeed, been recently a reaction, attended in some cases with brilliant success--as in Bulwer's "Ballads of Schiller"--in favour of the literal and lineal method; but since such popular pieces as Dryden's "Virgil" and Pope's "Homer" have been written on Denham's plan, it is interesting to preserve the model, however rude, which they avowedly had in their eye.