Part 6

Quite alone among these--indeed, it can be classed with no other poem in the language--stands the Horatian Ode on Cromwell's return from Ireland. Mr. Lowell said of it that as a testimony to Cromwell's character it was worth more than all Carlyle's biographies; he might without exaggeration have said as much of its literary qualities. It has force with grace, originality with charm, in almost every stanza. Perhaps the first quality that would strike a reader of it for the first time is its quaintness; but further study creates no reaction against this in the mind--the usual sequel to poems which depend on quaintness for effect. But when Mr. Lowell goes on to say that the poem shows the difference between grief that thinks of its object and grief that thinks of its rhymes (referring to Dryden), he is not so happy. The pre-eminent quality of the poem is its art; and its singular charm is the fact that it succeeds, in spite of being artificial, in moving and touching the springs of feeling in an extraordinary degree. It is a unique piece in the collection, the one instance where Marvell's undoubted genius burned steadily through a whole poem. Here he flies _penna metuente solvi_. It is in completeness more than in quality that it is superior to all his other work, but in quality too it has that lurking divinity that cannot be analysed or imitated.

'Tis madness to resist or blame The force of angry heaven's flame, And if we would speak true, Much to the man is due Who from his private gardens, where He lived reserved and austere, (As though his highest plot To plant the bergamot,) Could by industrious valour climb To ruin the great work of Time, And cast the kingdoms old Into another mould.

This is the apotheosis of tyrants; it is the bloom of republicanism just flowering into despotism. But the Ode is no party utterance; the often-quoted lines on the death of Charles, in their grave yet passionate dignity, might have been written by the most ardent of Royalists, and have often done service on their side. But, indeed, the whole Ode is above party, and looks dearly into the heart and motives of man. It moves from end to end with the solemn beat of its singular metre, its majestic cadences, without self-consciousness or sentiment, austere, but not frigid.

Marvell's other panegyrics are but little known, though the awkward and ugly lines on Milton have passed into anthologies, owing to their magnificent exordium, "When I beheld the poet blind yet old." But no one can pretend that such lines as these are anything but prosaic and ridiculous to the last degree--

Thou hast not missed one thought that could be fit, And all that was improper dost omit;

* * *

At once delight and horror on us seize, Thou sing'st with so much gravity and ease--

though the unfortunate alteration in the meaning of the word _improper_ makes them now seem even more ridiculous than they are. The poems on the "First Anniversary of the Government of the Lord Protector," on the "Death of the Lord Protector," and on "Richard Cromwell," are melancholy reading though they have some sonorous lines.

And as the angel of our Commonweal Troubling the waters, yearly mak'st them heal,

may pass as an epigram. But that a man of penetrating judgment and independence of opinion should descend to a vein of odious genealogical compliment, and speak of the succeeding of

Rainbow to storm, Richard to Oliver,

and add that

A Cromwell in an hour a prince will grow,

by way of apology for the obvious deficiencies of his new Protector, makes us very melancholy indeed. Flattery is of course a slough in which many poets have wallowed; and a little grovelling was held to be even more commendable in poets in that earlier age; but we see the pinion beginning to droop, and the bright eye growing sickly and dull. Milton's poisonous advice is already at work.

But we must pass through a more humiliating epoch still. The poet of spicy gardens and sequestered fields seen through the haze of dawn is gone, not like the Scholar Gipsy to the high lonely wood or the deserted lasher, but has stepped down to jostle with the foulest and most venal of mankind. He becomes a satirist, and a satirist of the coarsest kind. His pages are crowded with filthy pictures and revolting images; the leaves cannot be turned over so quickly but some lewd epithet or vile realism prints itself on the eye. His apologists have said that it is nothing but the overflowing indignation of a noble mind when confronted with the hideous vices of a corrupt court and nation; that this deep-seated wrath is but an indication of the fervid idealistic nature of the man; that the generous fire that warmed in the poems, consumed, in the satires; that the true moralist does not condone but condemn. To this we would answer that it is just conceivable that a satirist may be primarily occupied by an immense moral indignation, and no doubt that indignation must bear a certain part in all satires; but it is not the attitude of a hopeful or generous soul. The satirist is after all only destructive; he has not learned the lesson that the only cure for old vices is new enthusiasms. Nor if a satirist is betrayed into the grossest and most unnecessary realism can we acquit him entirely of all enjoyment of his subject. It is impossible to treat of vice in the intimate and detailed manner in which Marvell treats of it without having, if no practical acquaintance with your subject, at least a considerable conventional acquaintance with it, and a large literary knowledge of the handling of similar topics; and when one critic goes so far as to call Marvell an essentially pure-minded man, or words to that effect, we think he would find a contradiction on almost every page of the satires.

They were undoubtedly popular. Charles II. was greatly amused by them; and their reputation lasted as late as Swift, who spoke of Marvell's genius as pre-eminently indicated by the fact that though the controversies were forgotten, the satires still held the mind. He started with a natural equipment. That he was humorous his earlier poems show, as when for instance he makes Daphne say to Chloe:

Rather I away will pine In a manly stubbornness, Than be fatted up express, For the cannibal to dine.

And he shows, too, in his earlier poems, much of the weightier and more dignified art of statement that makes the true satirist's work often read better in quotations than entire; as for instance--

Wilt thou all the glory have, That war or peace commend? Half the world shall be thy slave, The other half thy friend.

But belonging as they do to the period of melancholy decadence of Marvell's art, we are not inclined to go at any length into the question of the satires. We see genius struggling like Laocoon in the grasp of a power whose virulence he did not measure, and to whom sooner or later the increasing languor must yield. Of course there are notable passages scattered throughout them. In "Last Instructions to a Painter," the passage beginning, "Paint last the king, and a dead shade of night," where Charles II. sees in a vision the shapes of Charles I. and Henry VIII. threatening him with the consequences of unsympathetic despotism and the pursuit of sensual passion, has a tragic horror and dignity of a peculiar kind; and the following specimen from "The Character of Holland" gives on the whole a good specimen of the strength and weakness of the author:

Holland, that scarce deserves the name of land, As but the off-scouring of the British sand, And so much earth as was contributed By English pilots when they heaved the lead, Or what by the Ocean's slow alluvion fell Of shipwrecked cockle and the mussel-shell, This undigested vomit of the sea, Fell to the Dutch by just propriety.

Clever beyond question; every couplet is an undeniable epigram, lucid, well-digested, elaborate; pointed, yet finikin withal,--it is easy to find a string of epithets for it. But to what purpose is this waste? To see this felicity spent on such slight and intemperate work is bitterness itself; such writing has, it must be confessed, every qualification for pleasing except the power to please.

Of the remainder of Marvell's life, there is little more to be said. He was private tutor at Eton to a Master Dutton, a relative of Cromwell's, and wrote a delightful letter about him to the Protector; but the serious business of his later life was Parliament. Of his political consistency we cannot form a high idea. He seems, as we should expect him to have been, a Royalist at heart and by sympathy all along; "Tis God-like good," he wrote, "to save a falling king." Yet he was not ashamed to accept Cromwell as the angel of the Commonweal, and to write in fulsome praise of Protector Richard; and his bond of union with the extreme Puritans was his intense hatred of prelacy and bishops which is constantly coming up. In "The Loyal Scot" he writes:

The friendly loadstone has not more combined, Than Bishops cramped the commerce of mankind.

And in "The Bermudas" he classes the fury of the elements with "Prelates' rage" as the natural enemies of the human race. Such was not the intermeddling in affairs that Milton had recommended. To fiddle, while Rome burnt, upon the almost divine attributes of her successive rulers, this was not the austere storage of song which Milton himself practised.

Andrew Marvell was for many years member for Hull, with his expenses paid by the Corporation. His immense, minute, and elaborate correspondence with his constituents, in which he gave an exact account of the progress of public business, remains to do him credit as a sagacious and conscientious man. But it cannot be certainly imputed to any higher motive than to stand well with his employers. He was provided with the means of livelihood, he was in a position of trust and dignity, and he may well be excused for wishing to retain it. In spite of certain mysterious absences on the Continent, and a long period during which he absented himself from the House in the suite of an embassy to Russia, he preserved the confidence of his constituents for eighteen years, and died at his post. He spoke but little in the House, and his reported speeches add but little to his reputation. One curious incident is related in the Journals. In going to his place he stumbled over Sir Philip Harcourt's foot, and an interchange of blows in a humorous and friendly fashion with hand and hat, took place. At the close of the sitting the Speaker animadverted on this, Marvell being absent; and a brief debate took place the next day on the subject, Marvell speaking with some warmth of the Speaker's grave interference with what appears to have been nothing more than a piece of childish horse-play. "What passed (said Mr. Marvell) was through great acquaintance and familiarity between us: He never gave him an affront nor intended him any. But the Speaker cast a severe reflection upon him yesterday when he was out of the House, and he hopes that as the Speaker keeps us in order, he will keep himself in order for the future."

For one thing Marvell deserves high credit; in a corrupt age, he kept his hands clean, refusing even when hard pressed for money a gift of L1000 proffered him by Danby, the Lord-Treasurer, "in his garret," as a kind of retainer on the royal side. In Hartley Coleridge's life of Marvell this is told in a silly, theatrical way, unworthy and not even characteristic of the man. "Marvell," he says, "looking at the paper (an order on the Treasury which had been slipped into his hand) calls after the Treasurer, 'My lord, I request another moment.' They went up again to the garret; and Jack the servant-boy was called. 'Jack, child, what had I for dinner yesterday?' 'Don't you remember, sir? You had the little shoulder of mutton that you ordered me to bring from a woman in the market.' 'Very right, child. What have I for dinner to-day?' 'Don't you know, sir, that you bid me lay by the blade-bone to broil?' 'Tis so; very right, child; go away.' 'My lord, do you hear that? Andrew Marvell's dinner is provided. There's your piece of paper; I want it not. I know the sort of kindness you intended. I live here to serve my constituents; the Ministry may seek men for their purpose,--I am not one.'" But with the exception of perhaps the concluding words, there is no reason to think the story authentic, though the fact is unquestioned.

Over Prince Rupert, Marvell seems to have had a great influence, so much so that, when the Prince spoke in public, it was commonly said: "He has been with his tutor."

Marvell died suddenly in 1678, not without suspicion of poisoning; but it seems to have been rather due to the treatment he underwent at the hands of an old-fashioned practitioner, who had a prejudice against the use of Peruvian bark which would probably have saved Marvell's life. Upon his death a widow starts into existence, Mary Marvell by name, so unexpectedly and with such a total absence of previous allusion, that it has been doubted whether her marriage was not all a fiction. But Dr. Grosart points out that she would never have administered his estate had there been any reason to doubt the validity of her claims; and it was under her auspices that the Poems were first given to the world a few years after his death, in a folio which is now a rare and coveted book.

Of his Prose Works it is needful to say but little; they may be characterised as prose satires for the most part, or political pamphlets. "The Rehearsal Transposed" and "The Divine in Mode" are peculiarly distasteful examples of a kind of controversy then much in vogue. They are answers to publications, and to the ordinary reader contrive to be elaborate without being artistic, personal without being humorous, and digressive without being entertaining; in short, they combine the characteristics of tedium, dulness, and scurrility to a perfectly phenomenal degree. As compared with the poems themselves, the prose works fill many volumes; and any reader of ordinary perseverance has ample opportunities of convincing himself of Andrew Marvell's powers of expression, his high-spirited beginning, the delicate ideals, the sequestered ambitions of his youth, and their lamentable decline.

It is a perilous investment to aspire to be a poet,--_periculosae plenum opus aleae_. If you succeed, to have the world, present and to come, at your feet, to win the reluctant admiration even of the Philistine; to snuff the incense of adoration on the one hand, and on the other to feel yourself a member of the choir invisible, the sweet and solemn company of poets; to own within yourself the ministry of hope and height. And one step below success, to be laughed at or softly pitied as the dreamer of ineffectual dreams, the strummer of impotent music; to be despised alike by the successful and the unsuccessful; the world if you win,--worse than nothing if you fail.

Mediocribus esse poetis Non di, non homines, non concessere columnae.

There is no such thing as respectable mediocrity among poets. Be supreme or contemptible.

And yet we cannot but grieve when we see a poet over whose feet the stream has flowed, turn back from the brink and make the great denial; whether from the secret consciousness of aridity, the drying of the fount of song, or from the imperious temptations of the busy, ordinary world we cannot say. Somehow we have lost our poet. It seems that,

_Just for a handful of silver he left us, Just for a ribbon to stick in his coat._

And the singer of an April mood, who might have bloomed year after year in young and ardent hearts, is buried in the dust of politics, in the valley of dead bones.

VINCENT BOURNE

"I LOVE the memory of Vinny Bourne," said Cowper in a letter to Newton in 1781, thirty-four years after Bourne's death. "I think him," he went on, "a better Latin poet than Tibullus, Propertius, Ausonius, or any of the writers in his way, except Ovid, and not at all inferior to him." Landor, in 1847, thought this criticism of Cowper's an unintelligent one; he could not conceive how a poet so great as Cowper came to pass such a judgment. The truth is that Landor was a better scholar than Cowper, and was thinking more of Bourne's Latinity than of his choice of subjects or mode of treatment. Cowper was not, it appears, a very acute Latinist, and his renderings of Vincent Bourne's poems, as we shall see, proved that he cared little for the simple terseness of Bourne's elegiacs. What is remarkable in Cowper's criticism is his preference of Ovid to Propertius. Ovid must almost have thought in pentameters; he had from boyhood an incredible facility in verse; "_Et quod tentabam dicere, versus erat_," he says, in that interesting autobiographical poem about his boyhood and youth; "I lisped in numbers, for the numbers came." Ovid was a perfect master of his craft; he is one of the least amateurish of poets; he had the power of producing with luminous precision the exact effect that he intended, and as often as he intended. As a narrator he is perhaps without a rival; but his scope is limited, and his metrical scheme is, like Pope's, without variety. But if Ovid appears in his verse as a somewhat placid egotist, Propertius is full of unchastened fire and passion. His writing, like that of Catullus, bears the undefined stamp of something which can only be named genius. Bourne is more Ovidian perhaps than Propertian; and if his verses have not the easy and lucid movement of Ovid, this is amply compensated for by their originality of subject and treatment.

And we may now call into court a still better critic than either Cowper or Landor, the surefooted Charles Lamb, who in his innumerable appreciations of writers both in verse and prose, hardly ever makes a false step, save from some affectionate bias of the heart, hardly ever pronounces a judgment that has not been cordially endorsed by posterity. Writing to Wordsworth in 1815, he says, "Since I saw you, I have had a treat in the reading way, which comes not every day, the Latin poems of Vincent Bourne, which were quite new to me. What a heart that man had, all laid out upon town schemes, a proper counterpoise to _some people's_ rural extravaganzas! Why I mention him is that your 'Power of Music' reminded me of his poem of 'The Ballad-Singer in the Seven Dials.' Do you remember his epigram on the old woman who taught Newton the ABC, which, after all, he says, he hesitates not to call Newton's Principia? I was lately fatiguing myself by going through a volume of fine words by Lord Thurlow; excellent words; and if the heart could live by words alone, it could desire no better regales; but what an aching vacuum of matter! I don't stick at the madness of it, for that is only a consequence of shutting his eyes, and thinking he is in the age of the old Elizabeth poets. From thence I turned to Bourne. What a sweet, unpretending, pretty-mannered, _matterful_ creature! Sucking from every flower, making a flower of everything, his diction all Latin and his thoughts all English. Bless him! Latin wasn't good enough for him. Why was he not content with the language which Gay and Prior wrote in?" And again, in one of the "Essays of Elia," "A Complaint of the Decay of Beggars in the Metropolis," he says: "Well fare the soul of unfastidious Vincent Bourne, most classical, and, at the same time, most English of the Latinists, who has treated of this human and quadrupedal alliance, this dog-and-man friendship, in the sweetest of his poems, the 'Epitaphium ad Canem,' or 'Dog's Epitaph.' Reader, peruse it; and say if customary sights, which could call up such gentle poetry as this, were of a nature to do more harm or good to the moral sense of the passengers through the daily thoroughfares of a vast and busy metropolis." Here, of course, Lamb is really speaking of the spirit of the poems; his own Latinity, as shown by the Latin letters which he was fond of intermingling with his correspondence, was more copious than correct. Lamb, it is true, saw poetry in Bernard Barton, but that, as we have said, was an affair of the heart; if he could write as he did of Vincent Bourne, we may be sure that his words are worth attention.

The biographical facts of Bourne's life are of the simplest. He was born in 1695, educated at Westminster and proceeded to Trinity College, Cambridge, of which he became a Fellow in 1720. His earliest published poetical effort seems to have been a copy of congratulatory verses addressed to Addison on his recovery from a severe illness in 1717. In 1721 he edited _Carmina Comitialia_, containing Tripos verses, satirical poems on local events, and miscellaneous poems. From Cambridge he returned to Westminster as a master, and there he remained till his death in 1747. In 1734 he was appointed, perhaps through the influence of the Duke of Newcastle, who had been a boy at Westminster with him, and to whom he dedicated the first edition of his poems, Housekeeper and Deputy Serjeant-at-Arms to the House of Commons.

As a teacher he seems to have been wholly without energy or practical power. He made no attempt to preserve discipline, and Cowper, who was in his form for a time, says that he remembers seeing the Duke of Richmond, then a boy at the school, set fire to his greasy locks and box his ears to put the conflagration out. He does not even appear to have stimulated, as absent-minded, unpractical teachers often do, the keener and more ardent minds among his pupils. "I lost more than I got by him," says Cowper, "for he made me as idle as himself." Cowper also says that he was so inattentive to his pupils, and so utterly indifferent whether they brought him good or bad exercises, that "he seemed determined, as he was the best, so to be the last, Latin poet of the Westminster line." As to his good-nature, however, there appear to have been two opinions, as can be seen from a trenchant entry in Nichol's _Literary Anecdotes_. "Vincent Bourne was usher to the Fourth Form at Westminster, and remarkably fond of me. I never heard much of the goodness of heart. T. F." He was noted, too, for extreme slovenliness in attire. Cowper says: "He was such a sloven, as if he had trusted to his genius as a cloak for everything that could disgust you in his person; and indeed in his writings, he has almost made amends for all." And again to Mr. Rose, in 1788, he writes: "I shall have great pleasure in taking now and then a peep at my old friend Vincent Bourne, the neatest of all men in his versification, though, when I was under his ushership at Westminster, the most slovenly in his person."

So Vincent Bourne lived his shabby, unpretending life, the _secretum iter, et fallentis semita vitae_. Every one must have known some one of this kind,--good-natured, easy-going, murmuring a phantom music in his head, indifferent to what went on about him, without ambition or personal dignity. His patron, the Duke of Newcastle, was anxious to benefit him, but Vinny could not be coerced into taking Orders, and so the Prebend at Westminster and the Canonry at Christchurch, which were destined for him, went elsewhere. And yet he seems to have had some obscure visions of preferment, founded on a promise given by Dr. Arbuthnot, the friend of Pope. Bourne wrote in a copy of Arbuthnot's work on Coins: "[As] to the reputation of Dr. Arbuthnot, I never met with less honour and generosity than I have received from him; I scorn to charge that upon his country which he has been guilty of in his private character; he should have remembered his promise, and would have done it, if he had not been a courtier;" and there is a preceding passage, which looks as if Bourne had given Arbuthnot literary assistance which had neither been acknowledged nor repaid.