The Complete Works of Richard Crashaw Volume II Part 3

Ashton, a conformable citizen.' Wren, Cosin, and others of Cambridge, not being named by Crashaw, do not come under these remarks. The new poems on Dr. Porter (vol. i. pp. 293-4), Dr. Mansell (vol. ii. p. 323), and others, explain themselves--with our notes. Of Cardinal Palotta, or Palotto, we get most satisfying glimpses in Dr. Bargrave's volume (already quoted). The Protestant Canon's testimony is: 'He is very papable [placable], and esteemed worthy by all, especially the princes that know his virtue and qualities, being a man of angelical life; and Rome would be glad to see him Pope, to pull down the pride of the Barberini. Innocent the Xth, now reigning, hath a great regard for him, though his kindred care not for him, because he speaketh his mind freely of them to the Pope' (p. 36).[26]

It only remains that I notice our Crashaw's friendship with (_a_) Abraham Cowley; (_b_) the Countess of Denbigh.

(_a_) ABRAHAM COWLEY. Of the alternate-poem on Hope, composed by Cowley and Crashaw (vol. i. pp. 175-181), and that 'Vpon two greene Apric.o.c.kes sent to Cowley by Sir Crashaw' (ib. pp. 269-70), more in our next division. These remain as the ever-enduring 'memorial' of their friendship, while the thought-full, love-full 'Elegy,' devoted by the survivor to the memory of his Friend, can never pale of its glory (vol.

i. pp. x.x.xvi.-viii.). All honour to Cowley that he kept the traduced 'Apostate' and 'Revolter' in his heart-of-hearts, and 'sought' him out in his lowly 'lodgings' in the gay, and yet (to him) sad Paris. It is my purpose one day worthily to reproduce the Works of this in form fantastic, but in substance most intellectual, of our Poets; and I shall have then, perhaps, something additional to communicate on this beautiful Friendship. They had appeared together as Poets in the 'Voces Votivae.' The various readings show that Cowley's portion of Hope was revised in Paris; and this, with the gift of the 'apric.o.c.kes,' expresses that they had some pleasant intercourse.[27]

(_b_) COUNTESS OF DENBIGH. By the confiding goodness of the present Earl and Countess of Denbigh, I have, among my 'Sunny Memories,' most pleasant hours of a long summer day spent in examining the Library and family MSS. and portraits at Newnham Paddox, and a continued and sympathetic correspondence, supplemented with kindred helpfulness on the part of the good Father-priest of the house. It is one of the anomalies of our national historic Biography that the sister of Buckingham--Susan, daughter of Sir George Villiers, of Brokesby, first Countess of Denbigh--should have died and made no 'sign,' and left no memorial; for it is absolutely unknown when or where she did die. But as it is known that _she_ became a Roman Catholic,[28] while it is not known that Elizabeth, daughter and co-heir of Edward Bourchier, Earl of Bath, who became third wife (of four) of Basil, second Earl of Denbigh, so 'changed,' we must conclude that Turnbull and others are mistaken in regarding the latter as Crashaw's 'patron' and friend. The family-papers show that Susan Countess of Denbigh was a lady of intellect and force; equally do they show that Elizabeth Bourchier was (to say the least) un-literary. I have from Newnham Paddox a sheaf of rarely-vivid and valuable Letters of 'Susan'--with some of 'Elizabeth;' and if I can only succeed in discovering the date of the former's death, so as to determine whether she was living up to Crashaw's death in 1650, or thereby--as dowager-countess--I intend to prepare a short Monograph on her, wherein I shall print, for the first time, such a series of Letters as will compare with any ever given to the world; and I should greatly like to engrave her never-yet engraved magnificent face at Newnham Paddox. For the present, a digression may be allowed, in order to introduce, as examples of these recovered Letters, a short and creditable one from Buckingham to his mother, and one from Susan, Countess of Denbigh, to her son; others, that are long and fact-full, hereafter (as _supra_). These in order:

I. Buckingham to his Mother [undated]:

Dere Mother,--Give me but as many blessings and pardons as I shall make falts, and then you make happie

Your most obedient Sonne,

For my Mother. BUCKINGHAM.

II. Susan, Countess of Denbigh, to Lord Fielding:

My deere Sone,--The king dothe approve well of your going into Spane, and for my part I thinke it will be the best of your traviles by reson that the king doth discours moust of that plase. I am much afflicted for feare of Mr. Mason, but I hope our Lord well send him well home againe. I pray do not torment me with your going into the danger of the plauge any more. So with my blessing I take my leave.

Your loveing Mother,

For my deare Sonne theise. SU. DENBIGH.

The Verse-Letters to the Countess of Denbigh (vol. i. pp. 295-303) will be read with renewed interest in the light of the all-but certain fact that it was Susan, sister of Buckingham--every way a memorable woman--who was 'persuaded' by Crashaw to 'join' Roman Catholicism, as did her mother.[29] Reverting to the names which I have endeavoured to commemorate, where hitherto scarcely anything has been known, it will be perceived that the circle of Crashaw's friendships was a narrow one, and touched mainly the two things--his University career, and his great 'change' religiously or rather ecclesiastically. Of the Poets of his period, except Cowley and Ford, no trace remains as known to or influential over him. When Crashaw entered Cambridge, Giles Fletcher had been dead ten years; Phineas Fletcher and Herrick had left about the same number of years; Herbert, for four or five; and Milton was just going. His most choice friends were among the mighty dead. Supreme names later lay outside of his access. I wish he had met--as he might have done--Milton. I pa.s.s next to

III. _His characteristics and place as a Poet._ It is something 'new under the sun' that it should be our privilege well-nigh to double the quant.i.ty of the extant Poetry of such a Singer as Richard Crashaw, by printing, for the first time, the treasure-trove of the Sancroft-Tanner MSS.; and by translating (also for the first time) the whole of his Latin poetry. Every element of a true poetic faculty that belongs to his own published Poems is found in the new, while there are new traits alike of character and genius; and our Translations must be as the 'raising' of the lid of a gem-filled casket, shut to the many for these (fully) two hundred years. The admirer of Crashaw hitherto has thus his horizon widened, and I have a kind of feeling that perchance it were wiser to leave the completed Poetry to make its own impression on those who come to it. Nevertheless I must, however briefly, fulfil my promise of an estimate of our Worthy. Four things appear to me to call for examination, in order to give the essentials of Crashaw as a Poet, and to gather his main characteristics: (_a_) Imaginative-sensuousness; (_b_) Subtlety of emotion; (_c_) Epigrams; (_d_) Translations and (briefly) Latin and Greek Poetry. I would say a little on each.

(_a_) _Imaginative-sensuousness._ Like 'charity' for 'love,' the word 'sensuous' has deteriorated in our day. It is, I fear, more than in sound and root confused with 'sensual,' in its base application. I use it as Milton did, in the well-known pa.s.sage when he defined Poetry to be 'simple, _sensuous_, and pa.s.sionate;' and I qualify 'sensuousness' with 'imaginative,' that I may express our Poet's peculiar gift of looking at everything with a full, open, penetrative eye, yet through his imagination; his imagination not being as spectacles (coloured) astride the nose, but as a light of white glory all over his intellect and entire faculties. Only Wordsworth and Sh.e.l.ley, and recently Rossetti and Jean Ingelow, are comparable with him in this. You can scarcely err in opening on any page in your out-look for it. The very first poem, 'The Weeper,' is l.u.s.trous with it. For example, what a grand reach of 'imaginative' comprehensiveness have we so early as in the second stanza, where from the swimming eyes of his 'Magdalene' he was, as it were, swept upward to the broad transfigured sky in its wild ever-varying beauty of the glittering silver rain!

'Heauns thy fair eyes be; Heauens of ever-falling starres.

'Tis seed-time still with thee; And starres thou sow'st whose haruest dares Promise the Earth to counter-shine Whateuer makes heaun's forehead fine.'

How grandly vague is that 'counter-shine _whatever_,' as it leads upwards to the 'forehead'--superb, awful, G.o.d-crowned--of the 'heauns'!

Of the same in kind, but unutterably sweet and dainty also in its exquisiteness, is stanza vii.:

'The deaw no more will weep _dew_ The primrose's pale cheek to deck: The deaw no more will sleep Nuzzel'd in the lily's neck; Much rather would it be thy tear, And leaue them both to tremble there.'

Wordsworth's vision of the 'flashing daffodils' is not finer than this.

A merely realistic Poet (as John Clare or Bloomfield) would never have used the glorious singular, 'thy tear,' with its marvellous suggestiveness of the mult.i.tudinous dew regarding itself as outweighed in everything by one 'tear' of such eyes. Every stanza gives a text for commentary; and the rapid, crowding questions and replies of the Tears culminate in the splendid homage to the Saviour in the conclusion, touched with a gentle scorn:

'We goe not to seek The darlings of Aurora's bed, The rose's modest cheek, Nor the violet's humble head, Though the feild's eyes too Weepers be, Because they want such teares as we.

Much lesse mean to trace The fortune of inferior gemmes, Preferr'd to some proud face, Or pertch't vpon fear'd diadems: _Crown'd heads are toyes. We goe to meet_ A worthy object, our _Lord's feet_.'

'Feet' at highest; mark the humbleness, and the fitness too. Even more truly than of Donne (in Arthur Wilson's Elegy) may it be said of Crashaw, here and elsewhere, thou 'Couldst give both life and sense unto a flower,'--faint prelude of Wordsworth's 'meanest flower.'

Dr. Macdonald (in 'Antiphon') is perplexingly unsympathetic, or, if I may dare to say it, wooden, in his criticism on 'The Weeper;' for while he characterises it generally as 'radiant of delicate fancy,' he goes on: 'but surely such tones are not worthy of flitting moth-like about the holy sorrow of a repentant woman! Fantastically beautiful, they but play with her grief. Sorrow herself would put her shoes off her feet in approaching the weeping Magdalene. They make much of her indeed, but they show her little reverence. There is in them, notwithstanding their fervour of amorous words, a coldness, like that which dwells in the ghostly beauty of icicles shining in the moon' (p. 239). Fundamentally blundering is all this: for the Critic ought to have marked how the Poet's 'shoes' are put off his feet in approaching the weeping Magdalene; but that _she_ is approached as far-back in the Past or in a Present wherein her tears have been 'wiped away,' so that the poem is dedicate not so much to The Weeper as to her Tears, as things of beauty and pricelessness. Mary, 'blessed among women,' is remembered all through; and just as with her Divine Son we must 'sorrow' in the vision of His sorrows, we yet have the remembrance that they are all done, 'finished;' and thus we can expatiate on them not with grief so much as joy. The prolongation of 'The Weeper' is no 'moth-like flitting about the holy sorrow of a repentant woman,' but the never-to-be-satisfied rapture over the evidence of a 'G.o.dly sorrow' that has worked to repentance, and in its reward given loveliness and consecration to the tears shed. The moon 'shining on icicles' is the ant.i.thesis of the truth. Thus is it throughout, as in the backgrounds of the great Portrait-painters as distinguished from Land-scapists and Sea-scapists and Sky-scapists--Crashaw inevitably works out his thoughts through something he has looked at as transfigured by his imagination, so that you find his most mystical thinking and feeling framed (so to say) with images drawn from Nature. That he did look not at but into Nature, let 'On a foule Morning, being then to take a Journey,' and 'To the Morning; Satisfaction for Sleepe,' bear witness. In these there are penetrative 'looks' that Wordsworth never has surpa.s.sed, and a richness almost Shakesperean. Milton must have studied them keenly. There is this characteristic also in the 'sensuousness' of Crashaw, that while the Painter glorifies the ign.o.ble and the coa.r.s.e (as Hobbima's a.s.ses and red-cloaked Old Women) in introducing it into a scene of Wood, or Way-side, or Sea-sh.o.r.e, his outward images and symbolism are worthy in themselves, and stainless as worthy (pa.s.sing exceptions only establishing the rule). His epithets are never superfluous, and are, even to surprising nicety, true. Thus he calls Egypt '_white_ Egypt'

(vol. i. p. 81); and occurring as this does 'In the glorious Epiphanie of ovr Lord G.o.d,' we are reminded again how the youthful Milton must have had this extraordinary composition in his recollection when he composed his immortal Ode.[30] Similarly we have '_hir'd_ mist' (vol. i.

p. 84); '_pretious_ losse' (ib.); '_fair-ey'd_ fallacy of Day' (ib. p.

85); '_black_ but faithfull perspectiue of Thee' (ib. p. 86); '_abased_ liddes' (ib. p. 88); '_gratious_ robbery' (ib. p. 156); 'thirsts of loue' (ib.); '_timerous_ light of starres' (ib. p. 172); '_rebellious_ eye of Sorrow' (ib. p. 112); and so in hundreds of parallels. Take this from 'To the Name above every Name' (ib. p. 60):

'O come away ...

O, see the weary liddes of wakefull Hope-- Love's eastern windowes--all wide ope With curtains drawn, To catch the day-break of Thy dawn.

O, dawn at last, long-lookt-for Day, Take thine own wings, and come away.'

Comparing Cowley's and Crashaw's 'Hope,' Coleridge thus p.r.o.nounces on them: 'Crashaw seems in his poems to have given the first ebullience of his imagination, unshapen into form, or much of what we now term sweetness. In the poem Hope, by way of question and answer, his superiority to Cowley is self-evident;' and he continues, 'In that on the Name of Jesus, equally so; but his lines on St. Teresa are the finest.' 'Where he does combine richness of thought and diction, nothing can excel, as in the lines you so much admire,

Since 'tis not to be had at home . . . . .

She'l to the Moores and martyrdom.'[31]

And then as never-to-be-forgotten 'glory' of the Hymn to Teresa, he adds: 'these verses were ever present to my mind whilst writing the second part of the Christabel; if indeed, by some subtle process of the mind, they did not suggest the first thought of the whole poem'

(Letters and Conversations, 1836, i. 196). Coleridge makes another critical remark which it may be worth while to adduce and perhaps qualify. 'Poetry as regards small Poets may be said to be, in a certain sense, conventional in its accidents and in its ill.u.s.trations. Thus [even] Crashaw uses an image "as sugar melts in tea away;" which although _proper then_ and _true now_, was in bad taste at that time equally with the present. In Shakespeare, in Chaucer, there was nothing of this' (as before). The great Critic forgot that 'sugar' and 'tea'

were not vulgarised by familiarity when Crashaw wrote, that the wonder and romance of their gift from the East still lay around them, and that their use was select, not common. Thus later I explain Milton's homeliness of allusion, as in the word 'breakfast,' and 'fell to,' and the like; words and places and things that have long been not prosaic simply, but demeaned and for ever unpoetised. I am not at all careful to defend the 'sugar' and 'tea' metaphor; but it, I think, belongs also to his imaginative-sensuousness, whereby orient awfulness almost, magnified and dignified it to him.

Moreover the canon in 'Antiphon' is sound: 'When we come, in the writings of one who has revealed master-dom, upon any pa.s.sage that seems commonplace, or any figure that suggests nothing true, the part of wisdom is to brood over that point; for the probability is that the barrenness lies in us, two factors being necessary for the result of sight--the thing to be seen, and the eye to see it. No doubt the expression may be inadequate; but if we can compensate the deficiency by adding more vision, so much the better for us' (p. 243).

I thank Dr. George Macdonald[32] (in 'Antiphon') for his quaint opening words on our Crashaw, and forgive him, for their sake, his blind reading of 'The Weeper.' 'I come now to one of the loveliest of our angel-birds, Richard Crashaw. Indeed, he was like a bird in more senses than one; for he belongs to that cla.s.s of men who seem hardly ever to get foot-hold of this world, but are ever floating in the upper air of it' (p. 238).

True, and yet not wholly; or rather, if our Poet ascends to 'the upper air,' and sings there with all the divineness of the skylark, like the skylark his eyes fail not to over-watch the nest among the grain beneath, nor his wings to be folded over it at the shut of eve.

Infinitely more, then, is to be found in Crashaw than Pope (in his Letter to his friend Henry Cromwell) found: 'I take this poet to have writ like a gentleman; that is, at leisure hours, and more to keep out of idleness than to establish a reputation: so that nothing regular or just can be expected of him. All that regards design, form, fable (which is the soul of poetry), all that concerns exactness, or consent of parts (which is the body), will probably be wanting; only pretty conceptions, fine metaphors, glittering expressions, and something of a neat cast of verse (which are properly the dress, gems, or loose ornaments of poetry), may be found in these verses.' Nay verily, the form is often exquisite; but 'neat' and 'pretty conceptions' applied to such verse is as 'pretty' applied to Niagara--so full, strong, deep, thought-laden is it. I have no wish to charge plagiarism on Pope from Crashaw, as Peregrine Phillips did (see onward); but neither is the contemptuous as ignorant answer by a metaphor of Hayley to be received. The two minds were essentially different: Pope was talented, and used his talents to the utmost; Crashaw had absolute as unique genius.[33]

(_b_) _Subtlety of emotion._ Dr. Donne, in a memorable pa.s.sage, with daring originality, sings of Mrs. Drury rapturously:

'Her pure and eloquent soul Spoke in her cheeks, and so distinctly wrought, That one might almost say her body thought.'

I have much the same conception of Crashaw's thinking. It was so emotional as almost always to tremble into feeling. Bare intellect, 'pure' (= naked) thought, you rarely come on in his Poems. The thought issues forth from (in old-fashioned phrase) the heart, and its subtlety is something unearthly even to awfulness. Let the reader give hours to the study of the composition ent.i.tled 'In the glorious Epiphanie of ovr Lord G.o.d, a Hymn svng as by the three Kings,' and 'In the holy Nativity of ovr Lord G.o.d.' Their depth combined with elevation, their grandeur softening into loveliness, their power with pathos, their awe bursting into rapture, their graciousness and lyrical music, their variety and yet unity, will grow in their study. As always, there is a solid substratum of original thought in them; and the thinking, as so often in Crashaw, is surcharged with emotion. If the thought may be likened to fire, the praise, the rapture, the yearning may be likened to flame leaping up from it. Granted that, as in fire and flame, there are coruscations and jets of smoke, yet is the smoke that 'smoak' of which Chudleigh in his Elegy for Donne sings:

'Incense of love's and fancie's _holy smoak_;'

or, rather, that 'smoke' which filled the House to the vision of Isaiah (vi. 4). The hymn 'To the admirable Sainte Teresa,' and the 'Apologie'

for it, and related 'Flaming Heart,' and 'In the glorious a.s.svmption of our Blessed Lady,' are of the same type. Take this from the 'Flaming Heart' (vol. i. p. 155):

'Leaue her ... the flaming heart: Leaue her that, and thou shalt leaue her Not one loose shaft, but Loue's whole quiver.

_For in Loue's feild was neuer found A n.o.bler weapon than a wovnd._ Loue's pa.s.siues are his actiu'st part, The wounded is the wounding heart.

Liue here, great heart; and loue and dy and kill, And bleed and wound; and yeild and conquer still.'

His homage to the Virgin is put into words that pa.s.s the bounds which we Protestants set to the 'blessed among women' in her great renown, and even while a Protestant Crashaw fell into what we must regard as the strange as inexplicable forgetfulness that it is The _Man_, not The Child, who is our ever-living High-Priest 'within the veil,' and that not in His mother's bosom, but on the Throne of sculptured light, is His place. Still, you recognise that the homage to the Virgin-mother is to the Divine Son through her, and through her in fine if also mistaken humility. 'Mary' is the Muse of Crashaw; the Lord Jesus his 'Lord' and hers. I would have the reader spend willing time, in slowly, meditatively reading the whole of our Poet's sacred Verse, to note how the thinking thus thrills into feeling, and feeling into rapture--the rapture of adoration. It is miraculous how he finds words wherewith to utter his most subtle and vanishing emotion. Sometimes there is a daintiness and antique richness of wording that you can scarcely equal out of the highest of our Poets, or only in them. Some of his images from Nature are scarcely found anywhere else. For example, take this very difficult one of ice, in the Verse-Letter to the Countess of Denbigh (vol. i. p. 298, ll. 21-26), 'persuading' her no longer to be the victim of her doubts:

'So, when the Year takes cold, we see Poor waters _their own prisoners be; Fetter'd and lock'd-up fast they lie In a cold self-captivity_.

Th' astonish'd Nymphs their Floud's strange fate deplore, To find themselves their own severer sh.o.a.r.'

Young is striking in his use of the ice-metaphor:

'in Pa.s.sion's flame Hearts melt; but _melt like ice, soon harder froze_.'

(Night-Thoughts, N. II. l. 522-3.)