"He earned the glorious name," says a biographer of Andrew Marvell (editing an issue of that poet's works which certainly has its faults), "of the British Aristides." The portly dulness of the mind that could make such a phrase, and having made, award it, is not, in fairness, to affect a reader's thought of Marvell himself nor even of his time.Under correction, I should think that the award was not made in his own age; he did but live on the eve of the day that cumbered its mouth with phrases of such foolish burden and made literature stiff with them.Andrew Marvell's political rectitude, it is true, seems to have been of a robustious kind; but his poetry, at its rare best, has a "wild civility," which might puzzle the triumph of him, whoever he was, who made a success of this phrase of the "British Aristides." Nay, it is difficult not to think that Marvell too, who was "of middling stature, roundish- faced, cherry-cheeked," a healthy and active rather than a spiritual Aristides, might himself have been somewhat taken by surprise at the encounters of so subtle a muse.He, as a garden- poet, expected the accustomed Muse to lurk about the fountain- heads, within the caves, and by the walks and the statues of the gods, keeping the tryst of a seventeenth century convention in which there were certainly no surprises.And for fear of the commonplaces of those visits, Marvellsometimes outdoes the whole company of garden-poets in the difficult labours of the fancy.The reader treads with him a "maze" most resolutely intricate, and is more than once obliged to turn back, having been too much puzzled on the way to a small, visible, plain, and obvious goal of thought.
And yet this poet two or three times did meet a Muse he had hardly looked for among the trodden paths; a spiritual creature had been waiting behind a laurel or an apple-tree.You find him coming away from such a divine ambush a wilder and a simpler man.All his garden had been made ready for poetry, and poetry was indeed there, but in unexpected hiding and in a strange form, looking rather like a fugitive, shy of the poet who was conscious of having her rules by heart, yet sweetly willing to be seen, for all her haste.
The political poems, needless to say, have an excellence of a different character and a higher degree.They have so much authentic dignity that "the glorious name of the British Aristides" really seems duller when it is conferred as the earnings of the Horatian Ode upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland than when it inappropriately clings to Andrew Marvell, cherry-cheeked, caught in the tendrils of his vines and melons.He shall be, therefore, the British Aristides in those moments of midsummer solitude; at least, the heavy phrase shall then have the smile it never sought.
The Satires are, of course, out of reach for their inordinate length.The celebrated Satire on Holland certainly makes the utmost of the fun to be easily found in the physical facts of the country whose people "with mad labour fished the land to shore." The Satire on "Flecno" makes the utmost of another joke we know of- -that of famine.Flecno, it will be remembered, was a poet, and poor; but the joke of his bad verses was hardly needed, so fine does Marvell find that of his hunger.Perhaps there is no age of English satire that does not give forth the sound of that laughter unknown to savages--that craven laughter.
THE PICTURE OF T.C.IN A PROSPECT OF FLOWERSThe presence of a furtive irony of the sweetest kind is the sure sign of the visit of that unlooked-for muse.With all spirit and subtlety does Marvell pretend to offer the little girl T.C.(the future "virtuous enemy ofman") the prophetic homage of the habitual poets.The poem closes with an impassioned tenderness not to be found elsewhere in Marvell.
THE DEFINITION OF LOVE
The noble phrase of the Horatian Ode is not recovered again, high or low, throughout Marvell's book, it we except one single splendid and surpassing passage from The Definition of Love -"Magnanimous despair alone Could show me so divine a thing." CHILDHOODOne of our true poets, and the first who looked at nature with the full spiritual intellect, Henry Vaughan was known to few but students until Mr.
E.K.Chambers gave us his excellent edition.The tender wit and grave play of Herbert, Crashaw's lovely rapture, are all unlike this meditation of a soul condemned and banished into life.Vaughan's imagination suddenly opens a new window towards the east.The age seems to change with him, and it is one of the most incredible of all facts that there should be more than a century--and such a century!--from him to Wordsworth.The passing of time between them is strange enough, but the passing of Pope, Prior, and Gray--of the world, the world, whether reasonable or flippant or rhetorical--is more strange.Vaughan's phrase and diction seem to carry the light.Il vous semble que cette femme degage de la lumiere en marchant? Vous l'aimez! says Marius in Les Miserables (I quote from memory), and it seems to be by a sense of light that we know the muse we are to love.
SCOTTISH BALLADS
