CHAPTER XXVI.
THE FANTASTIC SCHOOL OF ENGLISH POETRY
The Poetry which we call Elizabethan survived at least to the Restoration. Indeed,
the dramatic influence of Beaumont and Fletcher lasted for some time after it
in romantic plays such as Dryden’s All for Love. But the decline of that
poetry had begun so soon as a change fell upon the conditions which produced
it; and signs of that decline and of the poetic reaction which took the form of
what is known as the Fantastic Poetry appeared even before the death of
Elizabeth. The first and most powerful of the Fantastic Poets was John Donne,
who was born about 1573; and, according to Ben Jonson, he wrote all his best
pieces before he was twenty-five years old. This is not quite true; but it is
true that before the end of the sixteenth century Donne wrote many poems
possessing all the characteristics of the new poetry of the seventeenth. He was
the chief agent in a poetic revolution, which, though it was far from
universal, and though some of its effects were transitory and some injurious,
yet deserves to be studied as a part of the history both of society and of
literature. The literary changes which it effected were an expression of moral
and political changes. The Fantastic Poets were not mere triflers with words
and images. Indeed, there have seldom been writers who have tried with more
seriousness and honesty to express the truth as they saw it. Much of Donne’s
poetry may seem preposterously unreal to us; yet he was praised by his contemporaries
mainly for his novel realism. Herbert wrote of his religion with a profusion of
homely detail which proves that it was the most real and familiar part of his
life to him; and even a minor poet like Habington could be moved by the spectacle of a starry night to ideas which seem to us
both more modem and more profound than any to be found in any Elizabethan
poetry except Shakespeare’s. The faults of the Fantastic Poets are many and
glaring, but they have a peculiar interest of their own. Their extravagances
and incongruities, both of style and of thought, reflect the extravagances and
incongruities of an age of transition and revolution, an age violent and
uncompromising both in action and in ideas.
But, just
as the political conflicts of that age produced characters of a beauty and
temper not to be found in less exacting times, so the Fantastic Poets in their
conflicts of thought produced beauties, “ things extreme and scattering
bright,” to quote the words of Donne, which cannot be paralleled in any other
period of our literature.
Donne’s
object was realism, and he proved this in the Satires which were his
first works. But it was his love poems that first displayed his real powers;
and the contrast between them and any Elizabethan lovepoetry is very sharp.
Donne was a realist not so much of facts as of the imagination. His object when
he wrote love poems was not to produce beautiful verses, but to show exactly
how his own individual imagination was worked upon by his own individual
passion; and this he tried to do, so that he might explain himself to himself.
This is the chief respect in which he and most of the other Fantastic Poets
differ from the Elizabethans. The Elizabethans, in their lyrics and their
sonnets no less than in their plays, seem to write for an audience—the
Fantastic Poets seem to write for themselves alone. And this difference only
reflects the difference between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The
age of Elizabeth was one of national unity. Poets then, like everyone else, were
Englishmen first and themselves afterwards, and their poetry expressed that
national unity. Like the Venetian painters of the great age, they were all, in
spite of individual differences and disputes, members of one great school,
confident in their common aim and in the public understanding and applause. The
drama was the chief form of their art, and a living drama is always written for
an audience, and lives in the approval of that audience. The drama naturally
dominated all other forms of poetry, and imbued them with its characteristics;
and, like the drama, these other forms of poetry were written for an audience.
Elizabethan lyrics were, as hymns are now, written to be sung by all the world;
and even Shakespeare’s Sonnets, the most individual and passionate love
poems of the age, often read like lyrical and rhymed speeches out of his
earlier plays. Naturally, therefore, this poetry was apt to express universal
rather than individual emotions, since its object was to express what all felt
and could enjoy.
The
Elizabethan lyric poet wrote to express, not something that occurred to himself
alone, but something old and universal such as any lover could sing to his
mistress without incongruity, and his whole poetic energy was spent upon saying
these old things better than they had ever been said before. Hence the
extraordinary verbal beauty and the high level of execution, even in minor
poets of the Elizabethan age. It is clear, however, that Donne was tired of
this verbal beauty. Though he was anything but a Puritan himself, there was
something Puritanic in his view of his art. He despised poetry which took the
line of least resistance, as the Puritans despised men who lived easily. He
thought it the duty of a poet to wrestle with all difficulties of thought, and
he did not care if he lost all graces of manner in the process.
In his
reaction from Elizabethan fluency and ease he was often wilfully harsh and obscure. Ben Jonson said that he deserved hanging “ for not keeping
of accent ”; and he said this because he knew that the violence which Donne
often did to his rhythm was wilful. He was so
determined not to smooth his verse away to suit his rhythm, that he would often
purposely avoid some rhythmical beauty because it was usual in Elizabethan
poetry. This dislike of the obvious is a common disease in writers who come at
the end of a great age of literature. It often implies an exhaustion of
subject-matter. Poets are careful to say nothing as it has been said before,
when they have little to say. But Donne and his chief followers do not lack
subject-matter. Far from it. Their defect usually is that they have too much to
say, and that much of their subject-matter is not proper to poetry. What poetry
ought to express is the result rather than the process of reasoning. But Donne
is for ever arguing in his verse. He was the earliest
poet of a new age which argued about everything with a passion that has died
out of modem controversy; and it is passion which often turns his versified
arguments into great poetry. In his case it is not the passion of political or
theological controversy, but that of love or devotion, or of an intense
contemplation of the mysteries of life and death. Yet that passion nearly
always expresses itself in an argumentative form. He is always labouring to prove that his love is not like the love of
other men. When he leaves his wife he argues that their bodily separation is
not a real separation. In the strange and beautiful poem called Air and
Angels he argues with extraordinary subtlety about the incorporeal nature
of love and the fallacy that it can only be excited by a corporeal beauty. In
another poem, Love's Growth, he discusses the paradox that love is
infinite, yet capable of continual increase. And this passion for argument is
the real cause of his celebrated “ wit ” and of his frequent misuse of it.
“Wit” was
not an invention of Donne’s, nor did he or the other Fantastic Poets get it
altogether from foreign sources. It is doubtful indeed whether most of them got
it from foreign sources at all. The Elizabethans delighted in “ wit,” but only
as an ornament. They had the superfluity of energy which spends itself in
putting old things in a new way. They would often digress into a mere juggling
of words, into puns and arbitrary analogies suggested by sound rather than by
sense, which, even in Shakespeare, seem to us irrelevant and tiresome. This
kind of wit was a favourite amusement not only among
the poets, but in fashionable society; yet it was always a mere amusement, the
mere expression of a superfluous energy. But Donne’s wit and the wit of all the
Fantastic Poets was serious. It became their natural medium of expression, even
when they were treating the most serious subjects. Their deepest imagination
expressed itself in wit, because it expressed itself in argument. In fact,
their wit was the result of an attempt to argue poetically; for images are
natural to poetry, and their wit is usually the condensation of an argument
into an image or an analogy. By its frequent incongruity it expresses the
incongruity of their aims. They had the ambition to be both poets and
metaphysicians in the same breath. They analysed their emotions with as much passion as if they had been simply expressing them.
They sought to convince and charm by one and the same process. Argument
delights in novel analogies and images. It tries to convince by the very
ingenuity of its illustrations. But passion thinks too rapidly to be ingenious,
and convinces not by the ingenuity but by the beauty of its expression. That
famous image of Donne’s of the “ stiff twin compasses ” might illustrate and
advance a prosaic argument very neatly. It is an incongruous illustration of
the unity of two lovers, because it is so ingenious that we cannot believe any
man in a rapture of devotion could have exercised his mind coolly enough to hit
upon it, and because it is not one of those illustrations taken from beautiful
objects to which the passion of love naturally flies. The poem in which that
illustration occurs, The Valediction forbidding mourning, is a good
example of the manner in which Donne’s mind, and indeed the minds of most of
the Fantastic Poets were apt to work. When he begins, passion and argument are
harmonious in his mind, but their harmony is only accidental since they are
produced by different instincts. As Donne is writing a love poem, the argument
should be subordinate to the emotion; but it is not, and so their concord is
only momentary. After a few verses the reason overpowers the emotion and settles
down into an expression, not of that emotion, but of its own ingenuity.
This
confusion and incongruity of aim are to be found not only in all the most
serious verse and prose of the age, excepting only the verse of Milton; they
are also to be found in its entire life. In the seventeenth century there was a
general confusion of reason and passion. An elaborate machinery of dialectics
had survived from the Middle Ages, when differences of religious belief were
determined more often by the sword than by argument, and when argument was
mainly about abstract subjects in which the personal interests of the
disputants were not deeply concerned. The Reformation and the Renaissance
produced enough scepticism to make argument about
first principles possible; and the seventeenth century was an age of Revolution
because then men argued about first principles and about matters which concerned
them deeply. But the passions engendered by this new kind of argument
disordered the old machinery of dialectics which was still employed, and
produced a general confusion of mind, in which men could not distinguish
between their reason and their emotions, and in which poetry and prose were
often employed to do each other’s work. The object of most of Milton’s prose is
controversial, but his arguments are confused with passion, just as the
passions of the Fantastic Poets are confused s with their arguments. His prose is half poetry,
impeded by its medium of expression, because he tried to write prose in an age
which was not only unable to argue without passion, but which mistook passion
for argument. And so the poetry of the Fantastic Poets is half prose, impeded
by its medium of expression, because they tried to write poetry in an age k which could not express its emotions without reasoning
about them.
Both the
prose and the poetry therefore are laboured and
cloudy; yet in both cases the clouds are sometimes pierced by dazzling
lightnings which could not be kindled except out of so fierce a conflict of
reason and passion. Donne, said Ben Jonson, was the first poet in the world in
some things; and in all the great Fantastic Poets things are to be found so
deeply and so finely said that for the moment all other kinds of poetry seem to
be shallow beside them. Their beauties delight the more because they seem to be
undesigned like the beauties of nature and, like the most beautiful actions, to
spring out of a war of opposing forces. In their poetry we see not merely the
triumphs of expression, but the labour and sweat that
have gone before them; and so the triumphs, when they come, seem the more
splendid. The failures of their poetry, glaring as they are, do not incline us
to distrust their successes. These failures are not plausible like those of
poets whose chief aim is to please. No one could be deceived for a moment into
thinking that their defects were excellences. They seem always to be working
against the grain—to be following the line of greatest resistance. They court
difficulties. They will not pretend to be sure of beauty when they are not
sure, to be more impassioned than they are. They will not even yield to passion
when they are also possessed by thought. So their passion has to master their
thought, if it is to master them; and when it does master them, and triumphs in
their poetry, it is enriched and weighted by all the rebellious mass of thought
which it has overcome. It satisfies simultaneously both our sense of beauty
and our reason.
It must be
confessed that there are not many even of Donne’s love poems which, like the
magnificent Anniversary, satisfy our sense of beauty from the first line
to the last. His other poems, satiric, philosophic, familiar, and devotional,
are beautiful only by fits and starts. Only in his youth was he a poet by
profession, and he soon came to repent of his youthful amorous verse. He never
published it and wished to efface the memory of it. Even in the most reckless
moods of that youth he is never really light-hearted, as many Elizabethan
lyrists are light-hearted. He argues with a kind of perverted strenuousness in favour of frivolity and inconstancy; and in later years he
became the most serious of men. He brooded over his sins and the thought of his
own death like a medieval ascetic; yet he enriched his broodings with all the
new critical and analytical methods of his own time.
The most
famous of his religious poems, if they can be called religious poems, are the
first and second Anniversaries, written at the request of a generous
patron in memory of his daughter, Elizabeth Drury, whom Donne had never seen.
Donne enumerates her perfections with an extravagance that might seem servile
if it were not redeemed with images so magnificent and thoughts so profound.
These thoughts and images prove that his real object was not to pay compliments
to an individual but to brood upon death as the inexplicable end of things
beautiful and excellent; and not only upon death but upon the whole universe,
the spectacle of which, seen in the fitful light of the new knowledge, dazzled
and bewildered him for all his passionate faith.
‘‘New Philosophy calls all in
doubt;
The element of fire is quite
put out;
The sun is lost, and the
Earth, and no man’s wit
Can well direct him where to
look for it.
And freely men confess that
this world’s spent,
When in the planets, and the
firmament,
They seek so many new; they
see that this
Is crumbled out again to his
atomies.
’Tis all in pieces, all
coherence gone,
All just supply and all
relation.”
Death was not a simple and tragical fact to
Donne, as it had been to the Elizabethans. Indeed no fact was simple to him. He
was filled with a new sense of the relations of things. But the relations were
not clear in his mind. Life was a tangled web through which he felt, seeking
for an end and not finding one; and so he was seldom a poet of pure religion,
as he had been seldom a poet of pure passion. The latter part of his life (he
was made Dean of St Paul’s in 1621, and died in 1631) was clouded with a
melancholy produced partly by ill-health, partly by too intense a sense of the
mystery of things. The final impression produced by his verse is that he was
the Hamlet of poetry; that he overtasked himself with the process of thought
preliminary to writing; and that his verse, for all its fitful magnificence,
never expressed the full extent of his powers.
Apart from
Donne, most of the best verse of the Fantastic Poets is religious. Both in
their subject-matter and in their way of treating it they express the character
of their age. Religion is taken for granted by most Elizabethans. In the
seventeenth century it becomes self- conscious, as love becomes self-conscious
in Donne. It takes stock of itself and of the world. It reasons and analyses.
The religious verse of the Fantastic Poets does not express pure devotion, any
more than Donne’s love poems express pure passion. These poets did not write
hymns any more than Donne wrote songs. They mused in verse, as he did, to
satisfy themselves about the truth of the things which most deeply concerned
them, and to express that truth when they had discovered it. Their poetry is
the work of men living in an age of religious controversy, and painfully
anxious to be certain of their beliefs. It is also the work of men to whom
their religion, being so much questioned and controverted, is the most real
part of their lives. None of the great Fantastic Poets were Puritans; yet the
same new seriousness which produced the Puritans made them write religious
poetry filled with a new reality and intensity. One of the chief objects of
their poetry was to justify the instinct which made them poets, to show that
their love of beautiful things was not inconsistent with a concern for
righteousness as deep as that of the Puritans, though more kindly. In all their
work there is an implied protest against the Puritan idea of the vileness of
man and the perpetual anger of God. Herbert and Vaughan in particular are
devout humanists who would prove that man is not too base to be friends with
God; that the world is not a prison of condemned criminals, but a home of beauty
and peace for the righteous, and full of hints and promises of the celestial
delights in store for them. They show a pathetic eagerness to justify the ways
of God to man; and with an imagination more truly religious than Milton’s they
cannot be content with a mere dogmatic statement that whatever God may do is
good. They must be for ever analysing the relations between God and man, and proving the beneficence of God through
that analysis. The critical, questioning spirit of *their age does not lead them
into scepticism, but into an anxious examination of
life and of their own minds as they appear in the light of the Christian faith.
Poetry, they are eager to prove, comes not from Parnassus but from heaven; and
they try to make it a kind of link between heaven and earth. They are always
tracing connexions between celestial and earthly
things. They exhibit the homeliness, and what often seems to us the incongruity,
of an imagination so possessed by religion that even the most trivial things
have a religious significance for it; and so they are only too quick to imitate
the wit of Donne. It is almost a point of duty with them to unite the homely
with the sublime in their images; and no literary tradition, no rules of good
taste deter them from doing so. Like Donne, they were contemptuous of
Elizabethan conventions, though for a different reason. It is common form for
the religious Fantastic Poets to complain that hitherto poetry has been
degraded to the service of profane themes and desecrated with heathenish
ornaments, and to declare their purpose of putting it to better uses. Herbert
indeed proclaims that, since he is to write of the truth, he will write
“Who says that fiction only and false hair
Become a verse? Is there in truth no beauty?
Is all good structure but a winding stair?
May no lines pass, except they do their duty
Not to a true but painted chair?”
It may seem strange that Herbert should protest
his intention to be plain; that he of all men should ask
“Must all be veiled while he that reads divines,
Catching the sense at two removes?”
In
Herbert’s verse as in Donne’s the sense often has to be caught at two removes
or more. But both Donne and Herbert were probably quite unaware of their
obscurities. In their restless eagerness to analyse everything it was natural to them to think of everything in terms of something
else. The principle of their realism was to illustrate ideas with objects. They
almost tried to turn ideas into objects, so that they might make them plain;
and their minds jumped from the idea to the object which illustrated it with a
rapidity hard to follow. Herbert, in intention at least, is the most realistic
of poets. He was a close friend of Donne, though twenty years his junior (he
was born in 1593 and died in 1632), and he was the closest of Donne’s followers
among the greater Fantastic Poets. No doubt it was Donne’s realism which he
admired, yet he was an original poet because, though he imitated that realism,
it was naturally suited to the character of his own mind. He was a realist
because the subject-matter of his poetry, his religion, absorbed the whole of
his life. Everything he saw or felt or did seemed to him, because it had a
religious significance for him, a fit subject for his verse; and so his verse,
though much of it is not poetry, is nearly all interesting. In his youth a
courtier, though afterwards an Anglican clergyman of the most devout life, he
was always more of a man of the world and more interested in other men than any
other of the Fantastic Poets except Marvell. Exacting from himself an extreme
piety, he could yet make allowances for the worldly preoccupations of others,
and his poem Perirrhanterium or the Church
Porch preaches a wisdom half religious, half worldly, which is intended to
smooth the way from the world to the Church. Yet in this wisdom there is no
sordid compliance with worldly aims. Herbert’s object is not to show that the
saint prospers better than the sinner, but rather to express a heavenly
philosophy in earthly terms; and he produces a series of aphorisms of
-extraordinary pregnancy and wit, as for instance:
“Pick
out of tales the mirth but not the sin.
He
pares his apple that will cleanly feed.”
“God
gave thy soul brave wings. Put not those feathers
Into
a bed to sleep out all ill weathers.”
“Who
keeps no guard upon himself is slack,
And
rots to nothing at the next great thaw.”
Sayings
like these are not exactly poetry; yet they could not be put so tersely in
prose. As a matter of literary history, it may be noticed that they are the
beginnings of the prosaic verse of the eighteenth century, of the verse which
aims not at the beautiful expression of emotion, but at the witty expression of
facts or ideas. And this same tendency shows itself in Herbert’s poem of The
Church Militant, which is a kind of historical essay in verse, full of
philosophic ideas, such as no Elizabethan would have entertained, and expressed
often with admirable though labouring wit. The poem
indeed is much nearer in spirit to Pope’s Essay on Man than to any
Elizabethan verse. It is true that Pope, living in an age more familiar with
general ideas and with controversies, has far more tact than Herbert in dealing
with them. He knows exactly when to illustrate them with an image and when to
state them directly. Herbert, like all the writers of his time, can scarcely
express a general idea except through an image. The poetic habits of writers
accustomed only to treat of emotions and their objects still cling to him; and
the main result of his anxiety to speak plainly and simply is an indifference
about the associations of the images which he uses. Yet that very anxiety,
though tactless and clumsy compared with Pope’s art, is also more honest and
significant. He was a poet writing in an age of great poetry; and his wit is
often rather hampered or suppressed poetry than a mere play of the intellect.
He has a curious and half-modern idea of the manner in which both Christian
righteousness and pagan sin have adapted themselves to the characters of
different ages and countries. Sin in Greece, he says,
“ became a poet and would
serve
His pills of sublimate in that
conserve"’;
and he expresses the change of morality from
republican Greece and Rome to imperial Rome very tersely and profoundly in this
further couplet on the adaptation of sin:
“Glory was his chief instrument of old;
Pleasure succeeded straight when
that grew cold.”
Lines like these reveal a habit of philosophic
meditation upon the course of history which was then quite new to English
poetry; and this habit of philosophic meditation, this kind of criticism of
mankind as a whole, is to be found also in Marvell, and also, as was remarked
before, in a poet so inferior as Habington.
But
Herbert is best known for his personal poems of religion, and they best display
his genius. Some of them, of course, are trivial, mere formal puzzles and
exercises of barren wit, such as his age, retaining some medieval childishness
of intellect with all its new interest in ideas, still delighted in. But, at
his best, he writes of his unworldly hopes and fears, his ecstasies and
shortcomings with the same mixture of realism and passion that inspires the
love poems of Donne. He wrote, as Donne wrote, to express his own individual
experiences; to explain himself to himself. He was, like many other imaginative
and pious writers, troubled and perplexed by the fact that he could not stay
always at the same pitch of delight in holiness.
“How should I praise thee, Lord?
How should my rhymes
Gladly ingrave Thy
Love in steel,
If what my soul doth feel sometimes,
My soul might ever feel?
Although there were some forty Heavens, or more,
Sometimes I peer above them all;
Sometimes I hardly reach a score;
Sometimes to Hell I fall.”
Here the poetic temperament begins to criticise and to analyse itself.
Here is an early instance of that modem impatience with the physical
infirmities of the human imagination which was to produce so many poetic
laments in the nineteenth century. Herbert, however, like most poets when they
try to understand themselves, has only half managed to do so. He notes the
unevenness of his moods, but imputes it to the infirmities of his soul, not of
his body. He lived in an age which was critical both of itself and of the
universe, but whose criticisms all took a religious form; to which all folly
and infirmity appeared as sin, and all wisdom and strength as righteousness;
and in which one kind of philosophy of life expressed itself as Calvinism,
another as Roman Catholicism, and yet another as Anglicanism. Herbert was an
Anglican, trying to find a middle way of orderly freedom and sweetness and
light between what seemed to him two dark contending spiritual despotisms. He
wished himself and all other men to be in immediate communion with God; and he
also laboured to prove that God was loving and
kindly, and that a high and reasonable joy must be the noblest result of
communion with Him. His poems are records of an unceasing effort to attain that
joy, which came to him only fitfully, as it must come to all men of eager and
searching imagination; and his inspiration was as fitful as his joy—for he
would not force it, would not pretend to be in a poetic rapture when his
devotion had strained itself into morbid misgivings and searchings of heart. And for that very reason his beauties, when they come, are the more
moving. The reader knows that they have been achieved at a great cost, that
they express a spiritual joy which is the issue of a long spiritual conflict.
Nowhere in our literature is the tired yet happy tranquillity,
which may come to a noble mind long vexed with its own terrors, more finely
expressed than in Herbert’s poem of The Flower'.
“ And now in age I bud again;
After so many deaths I live and write;
I once more smell the dew and rain,
And relish versing: O my only light,
It cannot be
That I am he
On whom thy
tempests fell all night.”
Herbert
had many imitators, for there were many men in his age who thought and felt as
he did, yet who lacked his original genius. But the chief of his imitators was
also an original poet of a genius very different from his own. Henry Vaughan
(1621-22-1695) was a Welshman of whose secluded life very little is known. Like
Herbert, he was an Anglican; and, like Herbert, he often expresses his own
spiritual shortcomings and misgivings in his poetry. Yet he seems to do this
mainly because Herbert did it. His most original poems are much more abstract
and more immediately concerned with beauty than Herbert’s. Vaughan, indeed, is
most remarkable for his treatment of nature, a treatment quite novel in his own
day, and anticipating the treatment of Wordsworth, Shelley, and other poets of
the nineteenth century. Yet it was the religious earnestness of his age working
upon a natural delight in the beauties of nature, which led Vaughan to see a
new significance in these beauties. He, like Herbert, was anxious to find links
between earth and heaven, to reconcile things terrestrial with things
celestial; and, as Shelley scanned the world for hints and symbols of that idea
of beauty on which his heart was set, as Wordsworth felt and laboured to express a growing intimacy between the soul of
man and the beauties of nature, so Vaughan found in those beauties both an
assurance of the goodness of God and an image of His mysteries. The
Elizabethans saw in them only ornaments to the life of man, and external images
of human beauty. Nature for them has no independent life of its own. It
suggests comparisons, but not ideas. But in Vaughan’s poetry it ceases to be
an ornament. It becomes mysterious and significant of things outside the life
of man, because he recognises in it symbols of
beauties and mysteries which the mind of man is incapable of comprehending.
Vaughan
never consciously expresses such a doctrine of the independence of nature as
later poets have expressed. Yet his poetry is filled with unconscious
expressions of that independence. He can write thus for instance of a fallen
tree:
“Sure
thou didst flourish once; and many springs,
Many
bright mornings, much dew, many showers
Passed
o’er thy head; many light hearts and wings,
Which
now are dead, lodged in thy living bowers.”
True, the poem goes on to trace a rather
fanciful connexion between the tree and a murdered
man; yet its real inspiration comes from Vaughan’s sense of the tree as
something to be loved and pitied like a human being; and this sense came to him
because he was wont to look for a kind of soul in natural things, for a life as
significant of the divine mysteries which engrossed his mind as the life of
man.
Thus his
images derived from nature have a new simplicity and profundity. They are as
natural and as mysterious as the things; from which they are taken. He speaks,
for instance, of man before the Fall as.
“All naked,
innocent, and bright
And intimate with Heaven as light.”
His own poetry, from his communion with nature,
has that same intimacy with the divine, for it was through nature that he gazed
upon and seemed to pierce the secrets beyond nature:
“He that hath found some fledged bird’s nest may
know
At first sight if the bird be flown;
But what fair dell or grove he sings in now,
That is to him unknown.”
In
childhood as in nature he found a revelation of divine things, and the most
beautiful of all his poems anticipates and is said to have suggested
Wordsworth’s Intimations of Immortality,
Another
poet, Thomas Traherne, whose works have only lately
been given to the world by a fortunate discovery, made much of his poetry out
of that theme. Traherne, who was bom perhaps in 1630, and died in 1674, was an Anglican clergyman, and perhaps a
Welshman like Vaughan. His life, like Vaughan’s, appears to have been secluded
and uneventful. His poems, though full of quiet beauty, never reach the heights
attained sometimes by Herbert or Vaughan; but they are remarkable for the
persistency with which they work out certain ideas such as that of the
remembrance of heavenly things in childhood. English minor poets have never
been so much occupied with ideas as in the seventeenth century, or at least
have never held them with so much conviction or applied them so consistently to
their lives. Traherne appears, both from his poems
and from extracts published from his prose Centuries of Meditations, to
have been more of a philosopher than either Herbert or Vaughan; and philosophic
ideas are developed in his verse with a closeness of reasoning which sometimes
hampers his inspiration. The object of all his arguments is to prove that connexion between earth and heaven which so absorbed the
minds of Herbert and Vaughan. Like them, he is an unworldly poet who will not
write of the lust of the eye and the pride of life, who pursues his own private
meditations and seeks his own spiritual joy remote from other men. But Traherne had neither Herbert’s knowledge of life and
intensity of experience, nor Vaughan’s prophetic sympathy with nature. He deals
more with abstractions than either of them. In argument he is their superior,
but he is their inferior in poetry.
Richard
Crashaw began as an Anglican poet .like Herbert, Vaughan, and Traherne. He was, indeed, the son of an Anglican clergyman.
He was born perhaps in 1616, and was educated at the Charterhouse and at
Pembroke Hall, Cambridge. He was ejected from his fellowship at Peterhouse in
1644, because he would not subscribe to the Covenant. After this he became a Roman
Catholic and went to Paris, where Cowley rescued him from destitution. He went
to Italy and died at Loretto, where he is said (though this seems more than
doubtful) to have been appointed to a canonry about 1650.
There is
something in all Crashaw’s poetry more congruous with Roman Catholicism than
with Anglicanism. He is not, like Herbert or Donne, a critic of life, a
searcher of his own heart. He does not argue. He has no anxiety to justify the
ways of God to man. He does not look with curious, wistful eyes, like Vaughan,
upon the beauties of the earth. His gaze is set upon visionary celestial
glories. His ecstasies are troubled by no misgivings. He is in fact, like
Shelley, one of those purely lyrical poets whom English literature produces now
and then, and who are always rebels against the current English ideas of their
day. For the English love of compromise and submission to existing facts are
repellent to that lyrical temperament which times of revolution are apt to
produce in England like a kind of glorious freak. Just as extreme continental
ideas of liberty inspired Shelley, so Crashaw was inspired by Spanish and
Italian extremes of faith; and as the later poet’s interest was rather in
freedom as an abstraction than in any practical politics, so Crashaw was not
concerned with the means by which men may come to a certain trust in the
goodness of God, or with those by which they may apply that trust to all their
dealings with the world. His aim was only to express the raptures of a faith
which he assumes as an instinct. He is the poet of saints and martyrs, of
“The heirs elect of Love, whose names belong
Unto the everlasting life of Song.”
Indeed he conceives of righteousness not, like
Herbert, as a troubled and anxious thing picking its way through the darkness
of doubt and error, but simply as an “everlasting life of song,” a state of
abstract joy insensible to the delights and threats of the world. This
conception he derived, no doubt, from the great Spanish mystics, especially
from St Theresa, to whose “name and honour” he
dedicated one of the greatest pieces of lyrical poetry in our literature. He
wrote it while still an Anglican; for, when he had become a Roman Catholic, he
made an apology for its shortcomings in which he says,
“Oh pardon
if I dare to say
Thy own
dear books are guilty. For from thence
I learnt
to know that love is eloquence.”
Crashaw,
in fact, is one of the least English of our great poets. More than any of our
Fantastic Poets he was infected with the conceits of the Fantastic Poets of
Italy, especially Marino, one book of whose Strage degli Innocenti he
translated into verse alternately splendid and absurd. The extent to which
Donne or Herbert were influenced by Italian poets is doubtful. Wit was
fashionable in English poetry before the time of Marino, and the wit of Donne
is an essential part of the process of his own thought. He thinks naturally in
violent and ingenious images and analogies. So too does Herbert, though he,
like Crashaw, was certainly influenced by the Spanish mystics. But there is no
doubt of the influence of Italian poets upon Crashaw. His conceits are usually
mere ornaments taken from them and from Donne and Herbert; and they are often
very incongruous ornaments. For he was really a poet of pure emotion; and his
natural means of expression were a lyrical beauty of rhythm and sound, and not
any novelty or profundity of thought. His thought is always simple, and in his
finest verse it is simply expressed. When he writes badly—and he often 'writes
very badly indeed—it is nearly always because he is aiming at a wit unnatural
to his way of thinking; and yet the ambition of wit, the desire to enrich his
emotions with the play of his intellect, sometimes inspires him with
imaginative epigrams unparalleled in our later lyrical poetry; as when he
enumerates the marvels of the Incarnation, concluding with the marvel:
“ That Glory’s self should serve our griefs and
fears:
And free eternity submit to years.”
In strokes such as this he combines the
searching, exacting thought of Herbert or Donne with his own lyrical fire, just
as Shelley sometimes in Adonais turned a later
philosophy into music. Both of these poets, in fact, were lyrists of great
universal emotions ; yet both were children of their own age and got substance
and force both from the ideas of their age and from their rebellion against
certain of those ideas.
Cowley,
the friend and benefactor of Crashaw, was born in 1618, and educated at
Westminster and Trinity College, Cambridge. Like Crashaw, he was expelled from his
fellowship, and in 1646 went to Paris to the Court of Henrietta Maria. He died
in 1667, having returned to England at the Restoration. Cowley was once
esteemed the chief of the Fantastic Poets. He has lost that eminence, because
with all his ingenuity and pleasant fancies he was only half a poet by nature,
and certainly not a Fantastic Poet. Indeed, he was one of the first writers of
that prosaic kind of poetry which became the rule in the eighteenth century.
Yet the great poetic conventions which still persisted in his time influenced
him enough to make him write usually against his nature. Like Crashaw, he was
misled into the use of ornaments incongruous with his ideas, though incongruous
for different reasons. For whereas Crashaw was too poetic for his conceits,
Cowley was too prosaic. Cowley was always straining himself to give expression
to an imagination which he did not possess, and to emotions stronger than those
which were really his. The loose rhymed verse, which suited Crashaw’s genius so
well, was in his hands only the irregular instrument of very well- regulated
passions. His intellect is exercised in all his poetry, but often to little purpose, because it attempts to do the work of
the emotions. His conceits are the contortions of a mind that cannot think
itself into a frenzy. Cowley, in fact, was one of the costly failures of a time
of transition. He had the ideas of an age to come, which he tried to express in
the manner of an age that was passing away. He was an essayist at heart, who
made it his chief business to write verses; and his best poems are those which philosophise quietly about the quiet pleasures which he
most enjoyed.
Andrew
Marvell, the only one of the great Fantastic Poets who sympathised with the Puritans, was also a philosophic versifier of simple pleasures, and a
link between the more extreme Fantastic Poets and the prosaic poets who came
into vogue after the Restoration. Marvell was born in 1621, and educated at
Trinity College, Cambridge. He was tutor to the daughter of Lord Fairfax, and
assistant to Milton in his secretaryship to Cromwell. After Cromwell's death he
became member of Parliament for Hull, and was active in opposition to the
abuses of Charles Il’s Government until his death in 1678. He was therefore a
man of affairs ; and his poetry was the diversion of a man of affairs who also
happened to be a poet. It is usually free from the worst excesses of the
Fantastic Poets. It is not usually religious. It often deals with subjects most
commonly treated in prose. Yet, for all that, Marvell was one of the great
Fantastic Poets. He has their intensity of labouring thought, their command of ideas, and their critical and analytical spirit. He,
like Donne, is a master of “ things extreme and scattering bright ”; and he
produces them with less appearance of labour. He is
the only one of the Fantastic Poets who has the tact to trifle imaginatively or
rather to kindle his imagination on trifles; and his wit is more easily enjoyed
today than the wit of the others, because of the extraordinary skill with
which he can transfer it from small to great matters. The lines To his Coy
Mistress, which pass from witty trifling to witty sublimity, are the best
example of this unique power.
Marvell in
fact was more reconciled to the world than the other Fantastic Poets. He tries
to express no extremes of righteousness or passion, but rather to make the best
of life as it is, and to show what mystery and beauty there are in common
things. Thus he resembles Vaughan somewhat in his treatment of nature, except
that he writes with the careless tenderness of a man of affairs for whom the
enjoyment of nature is only a diversion. He expresses the subsidence of all
that revolutionary confusion and turmoil which trouble the poetry of his
predecessors so deeply. He is deeply troubled, but with actual events, not with
his own ideas and passions; and his troubles are expressed in his Satires, which are not fantastic poetry at all. Yet his poetry is enriched with the last
echoes of the great conflict of ideas. He is not a strainer after infinity
himself, yet he is the master of an art exercised in straining after infinity;
and there is a sense of infinity, a command of great ideas, a strangeness of
beauty in his Horatian Ode and even in his trifles. The Fantastic
Poetry, when he sets it to deal with familiar themes such as children or
gardens, has an almost pathetic charm, as of a wanderer come back from ranging
over the world, whose delight in his own house and fireside is quickened and enriched
by memories of all the wonders and terrors he has seen. There is a kind of
domesticated audacity in his imagination which makes him the true poet of the
transition from poetry to prose. The discords of that transition sound like
strange harmonies in his verse. He tamed the Fantastic Poetry and taught it
common sense; but he did not teach it not to be poetry. That task remained for
writers such as Dryden, who, belonging to an age weary of spiritual conflict
and mystery, discredited the Fantastic Poetry by sheer parody of its style,
before they superseded it with a new kind of verse formed to express new and
clearer, but less profound, ideas.
