Essays

This is said so naturally, with so simple and melancholy a faith, that it seems to me to reproduce the feeling of even the more refined and cultivated men of the time about such things in an infinitely affecting way.

Besides these there are published letters of Henry More's, prolix for the general reader, but interesting enough if the man's own personality appeals to you: some very disappointing hymns and didactic poems, stiff and unlovely to a strange degree for so deep and graceful a writer; and many other scattered works, such as the Enchiridion Ethicum, which it is impossible to analyse here.

More had a very facile style: he used to say that his friends had been always wanting him to go up upon a stall and speak to the people; but that was not his way: he should not have known what to have done in the world if he could not have preached at his fingers' ends. He said that when he sat down to write, though his thoughts were perfectly clear, yet they were too numerous; and that he had to cut his way through them as through a wood. However, he would never correct: the thing must go as he first wrote it; "if he saw any faults in the first draft, he could correct them, though it was not easy to him – that this correction went against the grain and seldom seemed to him so savoury as the rest." He was not inclined to overvalue his work. "Like the ostrich," he said, "I lay my eggs in the sand, and hope they will prove vital and prolific in time."

Though he produced very voluminous writings, yet he sometimes manifested a strong and healthy repugnance to the task of expressing himself: he had none of the gloomy laboriousness that is never satisfied with its performance, and yet never takes a lively pleasure in it. When he had finished one of his more lengthy works, he said pleasantly to a friend, as he threw down his pen: "Now for three months I will neither think a wise thought, nor speak a wise word, nor do a wise thing." Once in the middle of some troublesome work he said, with considerable irritation, to a friend who was sitting with him, "When I once get my hands out of the fire, I shall not very suddenly thrust them in afresh." In a letter to Dr. Worthington, Master of Jesus, he says: "I am infinitely pleased that I find my obligation of writing books not too fierce in me, and myself left free to my own more private meditations. I have lived the servant of the public hitherto: it is a great ease to me to be manumitted thus and left to the polishing of myself, and licking myself whole of the wounds I have received in these hot services;" adding, that as soon as he was free from his present business, his purpose was to recoil into that dispensation he was in before he wrote or published anything to the world – in which he says he very sparingly so much as read any books, but sought a more near union with a certain life and sense (the sixth sense), "which I infinitely prefer before the dryness of mere reason or the wantonness of the trimmest imagination."

He had no turn for dry and laborious criticism: he studied things more than words: of his own skill in dead languages, though it was in reality very considerable, he spoke jestingly, in that depreciating ironical way that he always used of himself – that he was like the man that passed by a garrison with a horseshoe hanging at his belt, when a bullet being shot at him struck right upon it, upon which he remarked, "that a little armour was sufficient, if well placed;" – and he often said, in writing his books, that when he came to criticism and quotation, it was "like going over ploughed lands."

I subjoin a few extracts from an ode by the "Ingenious and Learned" Mr. Norris, which is prefixed to Ward's Life of More. The composition has great merit; it is in Cowley's manner, but is the precursor of the art of Gray. It serves, I think, to emphasize both the opinion which his contemporaries deliberately held of him, as well as the points in his life and work which seem most worthy of our attention.

Norris writes:

 
Truth's outer courts were trod before,
Sacred was her recess: that was reserved for More.
 
 
Thou our great catholic professor art,
All science is annexed to thy unerring chair.
 
 
Some lesser synods of the wise
The Muses kept in Universities;
But never yet till in thy soul
Had they a council œcumenical.
 

And again:

 
Strange restless curiosity!
Adam himself came short of thee:
He tasted of the fruit, thou bear'st away the tree.
 

And this is a well-conceived epigram:

 
How calm thy life, how easy, how secure
Thou intellectual epicure.
 

The conclusion is:

 
Thy stage of learning ends ere that of life be done;
There's now no work for thy accomplished mind
But to survey thy conquests, and inform mankind.
 

More was a tall, spare man, well-proportioned and graceful; his face was noted for its serene and lively air. He was of ruddy complexion, which grew pale in later life, though always clear and spirited; and "his eye," says a friend who was often with him, "was hazel," and as vivid as an eagle's. He had luxurious tastes in dress, and the air of a courtier: none of the clownishness of the retired scholar was in the least perceptible in his motions, words, or general bearing.

His portrait represents him in his later years as much such a man as we should have imagined: he wears his hair, which was light and long, over his shoulders, and a faint streak of moustache upon his upper lip; the face is grave but not displeasing; it has the broad arched forehead, strongly indented, that is characteristic of masculine intellect; very high and prominent cheek-bones, big firm lips, and a massive chin; the cheek is healthy and not attenuated; the eyes clear and steady, the right eyelid being somewhat drooped, thus conveying a humorous look to the face; he wears the black gown, with girded cassock, and a great silk scarf – the amussis dignitatis– over his shoulders; the gown is tied at the neck by strings; and the broad white bands give a precise and quiet air to the whole.

Though temperate and abstemious in life and diet, he was not in the least what we should call an ascetic: he tried some experiments in diet in early life, such as vegetarianism, which he practised for a whole year, but found it did not suit him, and came back to meat; in fact, though he usually dined in Hall, yet he absented himself on Friday, when fish was eaten, and dined in his own rooms, eating meat because he found it more wholesome; and he was not an abstainer – his regular drink was small beer, of which he uttered an enthusiastic panegyric, saying that it was a divine drink. He loved the open air; he said he would always be in it if possible; that he studied best in an arbour without his hat, so that the air might play on his temples. He was very sensitive to weather, and found that the autumn brought with it a melancholy which distressed him.

At the age of sixty-six he wrote his last book, and returned to the quiet contemplative life which suited him so well, and he says that he never had enjoyed so long a period of serene light and inward happiness; but clouds began to gather in his mind – in reality it was the failing body, but he attributed it to the mind, and was rather unhappy about himself. He was then attacked by a kind of low fever, and fainted one evening in the Combination Room after supper: however, as a healthy man is apt to do, he paid no attention to this, but he found himself growing weaker. Once pathetically, as he sat talking in his room, he spread out his hands in the sun; they were thin and delicate with growing weakness. "My body," he said, "is strangely run out." He then began to suffer from sleeplessness; for weeks together he could get no rest. "I thought I should have died laughing," he said to Dr. Ward, "but I find myself like a fish out of its element, that lies tumbling in the dust of the street." Then, after a pause: "I am but the remains of an ordinary man." His mind began to fail him; he could no longer read or think. He said to Dr. Davies, an old friend, that some one had said to him that this, if known, might prejudice his writings; "but," he added, "I have read of a person, an excellent mathematician, who at last came to dote, but none will say that any of his former demonstrations were any the worse for that."

At last he got very weary of the weakness and the long strain. "Never any person," he said, "ever thirsted more after his meat and drink than I do for a release from the body. Yet," he added, "I deserved greater afflictions from the hand of God than those I have met with."

He dwelt much on the next world. "I am glad to think when I am gone," he said, "that I shall still converse with this world in my writings. But it is a greater satisfaction to me that I am going to those with whom I shall be as well acquainted in a quarter of an hour as if I had known them many years."

The day before he died an old friend came to see him. Henry More was very silent, but at last broke out: "Doctor, I have marvellous things to tell you." "Sir," said the other, "you are full, I suppose, of Divine joy." "Full," he said, with tears in his eyes. The other saw he was so extremely weak that he forebore to question him further. When his nephew came to see him in the evening, he said that he should soon be gone. "I am going to play you no tricks," he added; "I am not going to trot and loll and hang on."

The next morning he understood that he had only a few hours to live. "O praeclarum illum diem!" he said, quoting from Cicero. They were almost his last words. He died as the day was dawning, so quietly that the nurse who sat by him did not know when the passage was. He was laid to rest in the College Chapel, having just entered upon his seventy-third year.

The great and singular charm of such a life is its union of mystical tendencies with such perfect sanity. For nearly half a century Henry More lived in a light which he did not invent, but found. He cannot be suspected of fanaticism or weakness; from the day that he found peace in life to the day that he entered into rest, he lived in the strength of a magnificent ideal. His great discovery burst upon him like a flash of light – the nearness and accessibility of God, whom he had been seeking so far off and at such a transcendent height; his realization of the truth that the kingdom of God does not dwell in great sublimities, and, so to speak, upon the mountain tops, but that it is within each one of us. But this very simplicity he saw was the cause of the unpopularity of the greatest ideals. Men prefer their own Abana and Pharpar to the little river rushing in desolate places. A doctrine does not recommend itself to the busy thinkers of the world unless it be huge and arduous; and thus he made up his mind to be lonely in the world, to face and support the isolation of greatness. "At first, indeed," he said, "the truth appeared so very clear, as well as glorious to me, that I fancied I should have carried all before me; but a little experience served to cure me of this vanity. I quickly perceived that I was not likely to be over-popular."

And yet, by facing and adopting this difficulty, he gained the very thing on which he had turned his back. He made a success of life. He was not for ever dying to the world; he lived in it. Though diseased and shattered moralists may talk of the vanity of human aims and the worthlessness of this world, life surely has its meaning. We are not thrust into a pit from which our only duty is to escape. Something of the greatness and glory of the higher region dwells in the grace and beauty of the nether world. Shadows they may be of far-off transcendent realities, but the very shadows of divine things are from their origin divine. To gain a true standard; to trace the permanent elements; to fight the darkness at every inch: this is to live life to the uttermost – not to slink out of it, not to despise it, not to make light of it. These are the resources of the cynic, the disappointed man, the involuntary saint; but to live in the world and not be of it – this is the secret of the light that emanates from but is not confined to heaven.

ANDREW MARVELL

FEW poets are of sufficiently tough and impenetrable fibre to be able with impunity to mix with public affairs. Even though the spring of their inspiration be like the fountain in the garden of grace, "drawn from the brain of the purple mountain that stands in the distance yonder," that stream is apt to become sullied at the very source by the envious contact of the world. Poets conscious of their vocation have generally striven sedulously, by sequestering their lives somewhat austerely from the current of affairs, to cultivate the tranquillity and freshness on which the purity of their utterance depends. If it be hard to hear sermons and remain a Christian, it is harder to mix much with men and remain an idealist. And if this be true of commerce in its various forms, law, medicine, and even education, it seems to be still more fatally true of politics. Of course the temptation of politics to a philosophical mind is very great. To be at the centre of the machine, to be able perhaps to translate a high thought into a practical measure; to be able to make some closer reconciliation between law and morality, as the vertical sun draws the shadow nearer to the feet, – all this to a generous mind has an attraction almost supreme.

And yet the strain is so great that few survive it. Sophocles was more than once elected general, and is reported to have kept his colleagues in good humour by the charm of his conversation through a short but disagreeable campaign. Dante was an ardent and uncompromising revolutionary. Goethe and Lamartine were statesmen. Among our own poets, the lives of Spenser and Addison might perhaps be quoted as fairly successful compromises; but of poets of the first rank Milton is the only one who deliberately abandoned poetry for half a lifetime, that he might take an active part in public life.

It is perhaps to Milton's example, and probably to his advice, that we owe the loss of a great English poet. It seems to have been, if not at Milton's instigation, at any rate by his direct aid, that Andrew Marvell was introduced to public life. The acquaintance began at Rome; but Marvell was introduced into Milton's intimate society, as his assistant secretary, at a most impressionable age. He had written poetry, dealing like L'Allegro and Il Penseroso mainly with country subjects, and was inclined no doubt to hang on the words of the older poet as on an oracle of light and truth. We can imagine him piecing out his aspirations and day-dreams, while the poet of sterner stuff, yet of all men least insensible to the delights of congenial society, points out to him the more excellent way, bidding him to abjure Amaryllis for a time. He has style, despatches will give it precision; knowledge of men and life will confirm and mature his mind; the true poet must win a stubborn virility if he is to gain the world. The younger and more delicate mind complies; and we lose a great poet, Milton gains an assistant secretary, and the age a somewhat gross satirist.

At a time like this, when with a sense of sadness we can point to more than one indifferent politician who might have been a capable writer, and so very many indifferent writers who could have been spared to swell the ranks of politicians, we may well take the lesson of Andrew Marvell to heart.

The passion for the country which breathes through his earlier poems, the free air which ruffles the page, the summer languors, the formal garden seen through the casements of the cool house, the close scrutiny of woodland sounds, such as the harsh laughter of the woodpecker, the shrill insistence of the grasshopper's dry note, the luscious content of the drowsy, croaking frogs, the musical sweep of the scythe through the falling swathe; all these are the work of no town-bred scholar like Milton, whose country poems are rather visions seen through the eyes of other poets, or written as a man might transcribe the vague and inaccurate emotions of a landscape drawn by some old uncertain hand and dimmed by smoke and time. Of course Milton's Il Penseroso and L'Allegro have far more value even as country poems than hundreds of more literal transcripts. From a literary point of view indeed the juxtapositions of half a dozen epithets alone would prove the genius of the writer. But there are no sharp outlines; the scholar pauses in his walk to peer across the watered flat, or raises his eyes from his book to see the quiver of leaves upon the sunlit wall; he notes an effect it may be; but his images do not come like treasures lavished from a secret storehouse of memory.

With Andrew Marvell it is different, though we will show by instances that even his observation was sometimes at fault. Where or when this passion came to him we cannot tell; whether in the great walled garden at the back of the old school-house at Hull, where his boyish years were spent; at Cambridge, where the oozy streams lapped and green fens crawled almost into the heart of the town, where snipe were shot and wild-duck snared on the site of some of its now populous streets; at Meldreth perhaps, where doubtless some antique kindred lingered at the old manor-house that still bears his patronymic, "the Marvells." – Wherever it was, – and such tastes are rarely formed in later years – the delicate observation of the minute philosopher, side by side with the art of intimate expression, grew and bloomed.

We see a trace of that leaning nature, the trailing dependence of the uneasy will of which we have already spoken, in a story of his early years. The keen-eyed boy, with his fresh colour and waving brown hair, was thrown on the tumultuous world of Cambridge, it seems, before he was thirteen years of age; a strange medley no doubt, – its rough publicity alone saving it, as with a dash of healthy freshness, from the effeminacy and sentimentalism apt to breed in more sheltered societies. The details of the story vary; but the boy certainly fell into the hands of Jesuits, who finally induced him to abscond to one of their retreats in London, where, over a bookseller's shop, after a long and weary search, his father found him and persuaded him to return. Laborious Dr. Grosart has extracted from the Hull Records a most curious letter relating to this incident, in which a man whose son has been inveigled away in similar circumstances, asks for advice from Andrew Marvell's father.

Such an escapade belongs to a mind that must have been ardent and daring beyond its fellows; but it also shows a somewhat shifting foundation, an imagination easily dazzled, and a pliability of will that cost us, we may believe, a poet. After Cambridge came some years of travel, which afforded material for some of his poems, such as the satire on Holland, of which the cleverness is still apparent, though its elaborate coarseness and pedantic humour make it poor pasture to feed the mind upon.

But the period to which we owe almost all the true gold among his poems, is the two years which he spent at Nunappleton House, 1650-1652, as tutor to the daughter of the great Lord Fairfax, the little Lady Mary Fairfax, then twelve years old. Marvell was at this time twenty-nine; and that exquisite relation which may exist between a grown man, pure in heart, and a young girl, when disparity of fortune and circumstance forbids all thought of marriage, seems to have been the mainspring of his song. Such a relation is half tenderness which dissembles its passion, and half worship which laughs itself away in easy phrases. The lyric "Young Love," which indubitably though not confessedly refers to Mary Fairfax, is one of the sweetest poems of pure feeling in the language.

 
Common beauties stay fifteen;
Such as yours should swifter move,
Whose fair blossoms are too green
Yet for lust, but not for love.
 
 
Love as much the snowy lamb,
Or the wanton kid, doth prize
As the lusty bull or ram,
For his morning sacrifice.
 
 
Now then love me; Time may take
Thee before thy time away;
Of this need we'll virtue make,
And learn love before we may.
 

It is delightful in this connection to think of the signet-ring with the device of a fawn, – which he used in early life and may still be seen on his papers, – as a gift of his little pupil, earned doubtless by his poem on the Dying Fawn, which is certainly an episode of Lady Mary's childhood.

In this group of early poems, which are worth all the rest of Marvell's work put together, several strains predominate. In the first place there is a close observation of Nature, even a grotesque transcription, with which we are too often accustomed only to credit later writers. For instance, in "Damon the Mower" he writes:

 
The grasshopper its pipe gives o'er,
And hamstringed frogs can dance no more;
But in the brook the green frog wades,
And grasshoppers seek out the shades.
 

The second line of this we take to refer to the condition to which frogs are sometimes reduced in a season of extreme drought, when the pools are dry. Marvell must have seen a frog with his thighs drawn and contracted from lack of moisture making his way slowly through the grass in search of a refreshing swamp; this is certainly minute observation, as the phenomenon is a rare one. Again, such a delicate couplet as,

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

is not the work of a scholar who walks a country road, but of a man who will push his way into the copses in early spring, and has watched with delight the timorous eye and the upturned beak of the thrush sunk in her nest. Or again, speaking of the dwindled summer stream running so perilously clear after weeks of drought that the fish are languid:

 
The stupid fishes hang, as plain
As flies in crystal overta'en,
 

Or of the hayfield roughly mown, into which the herd has been turned to graze:

 
And what below the scythe increast,
Is pinched yet nearer by the beast.
 

The mower's work, begun and ended with the dews, in all its charming monotony, seems to have had a peculiar attraction for Marvell; he recurs to it in more than one poem.

 
I am the mower Damon, known
Through all the meadows I have mown;
On me the morn her dew distils
Before her darling daffodils.
 

And again, of the mowers,

 
Who seem like Israelites to be
Walking on foot through a green sea.
To them the grassy deeps divide
And crowd a lane to either side.
 

The aspects of the country on which he dwells with deepest pleasure – and here lies the charm – are not those of Nature in her sublimer or more elated moods, but the gentler and more pastoral elements, that are apt to pass unnoticed at the time by all but the true lovers of the quiet country side, and crowd in upon the mind when surfeited by the wilder glories of peak and precipice, or where tropical luxuriance side by side with tropical aridity blinds and depresses the sense, with the feeling that made Browning cry from Florence,

 
Oh, to be in England, now that April's there!
 

Marvell's lines, "On the Hill and Grove at Billborow," are an instance of this; there is a certain fantastic craving after antithesis and strangeness, it is true, but the spirit underlies the lines. The poem however must be read in its entirety to gain the exact impression.

Again, for simple felicity, what could be more airily drawn than the following from "The Garden"? —

 
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 doth glide,
There like a bird it sits and sings,
Then whets and claps its silver wings.
 

Or this, from the Song to celebrate the marriage of Lord Fauconberg and the Lady Mary Cromwell, of the undisturbed dead of night? —

 
The astrologer's own eyes are set,
And even wolves the sheep forget;
Only this shepherd, late and soon,
Upon this hill outwakes the moon.
Hark! how he sings with sad delight
Through the clear and silent night.
 

Other poems, such as the "Ode on the Drop of Dew" and the "Nymph Complaining for the Death of her Fawn," too long to be quoted here, are penetrated with the same essence.

At the same time it must be confessed that Marvell's imagery is sometimes at fault – it would be strange if it were not so; he falls now and then, the wonder is how rarely, to a mere literary conceit. Thus the mower Damon sees himself reflected in his scythe; the fawn feeds on roses till its lip "seems to bleed," not with a possibly lurking thorn, but with the hue of its pasturage. With Hobbinol and Tomalin for the names of swain and nymph unreality is apt to grow. When the garden is compared to a fortress and its scents to a salvo of artillery —

 
Well shot, ye firemen! O how sweet
And round your equal fires do meet —
 

and,

 
Then in some flower's beloved hut
Each bee as sentinel is shut,
And sleeps so, too – but if once stirred,
She runs you through, nor asks the word —
 

here, in spite of a certain curious felicity, we are in the region of false tradition and rococo expression. The poem of "Eyes and Tears," again (so whimsically admired by Archbishop Trench), is little more than a string of conceits; and when in "Mourning" we hear that

 
She courts herself in amorous rain,
Herself both Danae and the shower;
 

when we are introduced to Indian divers who plunge in the tears and can find no bottom, we think of Macaulay's "Tears of Sensibility," and Crashaw's fearful lines on the Magdalene's eyes —

 
Two walking baths, two weeping motions,
Portable and compendious oceans.
 

Nevertheless Marvell's poems are singularly free as a rule from this strain of affectation. He has none of the morbidity that often passes for refinement. The free air, the wood-paths, the full heat of the summer sun – this is his scenery; we are not brought into contact with the bones beneath the rose-bush, the splintered sun-dial, and the stagnant pool. His pulses throb with ardent life, and have none of the "inexplicable faintness" of a deathlier school. What would not Crashaw have had to say of the "Nuns of Appleton" if he had been so unfortunate as to have lighted on them? But Marvell writes:

 
Our orient breaths perfumed are
With incense of incessant prayer,
And holy water of our tears
Most strangely our complexion clears;
Not tears of Grief, but such as those
With which calm Pleasure overflows.
 

And passing by a sweet and natural transition to his little pupil, the young Recluse of Nunappleton —

 
I see the angels, in a crown,
On you the lilies showering down,
And, round about you, glory breaks,
That something more than human speaks
 

The poems contain within themselves the germ of the later growth of satire in the shape of caustic touches of humour, as well as a certain austere philosophy that is apt to peer behind the superficial veil of circumstance, yet without dreary introspection. There is a Dialogue between Soul and Body, which deals with the duality of human nature which has been the despair of all philosophers and the painful axiom of all religious teachers. Marvell makes the Soul say:

 
Constrained not only to endure
Diseases, but what's worse, the cure,
And ready oft the port to gain,
Am shipwrecked into health again.
 

In the same connection in "The Coronet," an allegory of the Ideal and the Real, he says:

 
Alas! I find the serpent old,
Twining in his speckled breast,
About the flowers disguised doth fold,
With wreaths of fame and interest.
 

Much of Marvell's philosophy however has not the same vitality, born of personal struggle and discomfiture, but is a mere echo of stoical and pagan views of life and its vanities drawn from Horace and Seneca, who seem to have been his favourite authors. Such a sentiment as the following, from "Appleton House" —

 
But he, superfluously spread,
Demands more room alive than dead;
What need of all this marble crust,
To impart the wanton mole of dust? —
 

and from "The Coy Mistress" —

 
The grave's a fine and private place,
But none, methinks, do there embrace —
 

are mere pagan commonplaces, however daintily expressed.

But there is a poem, an idyll in the form of a dialogue between Clorinda and Damon, which seems to contain an original philosophical motive. Idylls in the strict sense of the word are not remarkable for including a moral; or if they do include one it may be said that it is generally bad, and is apt to defend the enjoyment of an hour against the conscience of centuries; but in "Clorinda and Damon," the woman is the tempter, and Damon is obdurate. She invites him to her cave, and describes its pleasures.

 
Clo. … A fountain's liquid bell
Tinkles within the concave shell.
 
 
Da. Might a soul bathe there and be clean,
Or slake its drought?
 
 
Clo.            What is't you mean?
 
 
D. Clorinda, pastures, caves, and springs,
These once had been enticing things.
 
 
Clo. And what late change? —
 
 
Da.                The other day
Pan met me.
 
 
Clo.           What did great Pan say?
 
 
Da. Words that transcend poor shepherds' skill.
 

This poem seems a distinct attempt to make of the sickly furniture of the idyll a vehicle for the teaching of religious truth. Is it fanciful to read in it a poetical rendering of the doctrine of conversion, the change that may come to a careless and sensuous nature by being suddenly brought face to face with the Divine light? It might even refer to some religious experience of Marvell's own: Milton's "mighty Pan," typifying the Redeemer, is in all probability the original.

The work then on which Marvell's fame chiefly subsists – with the exception of one poem which belongs to a different class, and will be discussed later, the Horatian Ode – may be said to belong to the regions of nature and feeling, and to have anticipated in a remarkable degree the minute observation of natural phenomena characteristic of a modern school, even to a certain straining after unusual, almost bizarre effects. The writers of that date, indeed, as Green points out, seem to have become suddenly and unaccountably modern, a fact which we are apt to overlook owing to the frigid reaction of the school of Pope. Whatever the faults of Marvell's poems may be, and they are patent to all, they have a strain of originality. He does not seem to imitate, he does not even follow the lines of other poets; never, – except in a scattered instance or two, where there is a faint echo of Milton, – does he recall or suggest that he has a master.