The Connecticut Wits and Other Essays

For many years after his death, Cowley’s continued to be a great name and fame; yet the swift decay of his real influence became almost proverbial. Dryden, who learned much from him; Addison, who uses him as a dreadful example in his essay on mixed wit; and Pope, who speaks of him with a traditional respect, all testify to this rapid loss of his hold upon the community of readers. It was in 1737 that Pope asked, “Who now reads Cowley?” which is much as if one should ask to-day, “Who now reads Byron?” or as if our grandchildren should inquire in 1960, “Who reads Tennyson?”

Cowley’s literary fortunes have been in marked contrast with those of his contemporary, Robert Herrick, whose “Hesperides” fell silently from the press in 1643, and who died unnoticed in his remote Devonshire vicarage in 1674. You may search the literature of England for a hundred and fifty years without finding a single acknowledgment of Herrick’s gift to that literature. The folio edition of Cowley’s works, 1668, was accompanied with an imposing account of his life and writings by Thomas Sprat, afterwards Bishop of Rochester. Dr. Johnson’s “Lives of the English Poets,” 1779–1781, begins with the life of Cowley, in which he gives his famous analysis of the metaphysical school, the locus classicus on that topic. And although Cowley’s poetry had faded long ago and he had lost his readers, Johnson treats him as a dignified memory, worthy of a solid monument. No one had thought it worth while to write Herrick’s biography, to address him in complimentary verse, to celebrate his death in elegy, to comment on his work, or even to mention his name. Dryden, Addison, Johnson, all the critics of three successive generations are quite dumb concerning Herrick. But for the circumstance that some of his little pieces, with the musical airs to which they were set, were included in several seventeenth century songbooks, there is nothing to show that there was any English poet named Herrick, until Dr. Nott reprinted a number of selections from “Hesperides” in 1810. But now Herrick is thoroughly revived and almost a favorite. His best things are in all the anthologies, and many of them are set to music by modern composers, and sung to the piano, as once to the lute. The critics rank him with Shelley among our foremost lyrical poets. Swinburne thought him the best of English song writers. The “Hesperides” is frequently reprinted, sometimes in editions de luxe, with sympathetic illustrations by Mr. Abbey and other distinguished artists.

There are several reasons why Cowley cut so disproportionate a figure in his own generation. In the first place, he was a marvel of precocity. He wrote an epic at the age of ten and another at twelve. His first volume of verse, “Poetical Blossoms,” was published in his fifteenth year, and one or two of the pieces in it were as good as anything that he did afterward. Chatterton was perhaps equally wonderful; while Milton, Pope, Keats, and Bryant all produced work, while still under age, which outranks Cowley’s. Yet none of them showed quite so early maturity.

Again Cowley’s personal character, learning, and public employments conferred dignity upon his literary work. He was the darling of Cambridge; and, when ejected by the parliament, joined the king at Oxford, and then followed the queen to Paris. He was a steadfast loyalist; but among the reckless, intriguing, dissolute Cavaliers who formed the entourage of the exiled court, Cowley’s serious and thoroughly respectable character stood out in high relief. He took a medical degree from Oxford, and became proficient in botany, composing a Latin poem on plants. Dr. Johnson thought his Latin verse better than Milton’s. After 1660 a member of the triumphant party, he was, notwithstanding, highly esteemed by political opponents. He held a position of authority like Addison’s or Southey’s at a later day. When he died, Charles II said that Mr. Cowley had not left a better man behind him in England.

But, after all, the chief reason why Cowley was rated so high by his contemporaries was that his poetry fell in with the prevailing taste. Matthew Arnold said that the trouble with the Queen Anne poetry was that it was conceived in the wits and not in the soul. Cowley’s poetry was cerebral, “stiff with intellection,” as Coleridge said of another. He anticipated Dryden in his power of reasoning in verse. He is pedantically learned, bookish, scholastic, smells of the lamp, crams his verse with allusions and images drawn from physics, metaphysics, geography, alchemy, astronomy, history, school divinity, logic, grammar, and constitutional law. Above all, he had the quality on which his century placed such an abnormal value – wit: i.e., ingenuity in devising far-fetched conceits and detecting remote analogies. Without the subtlety of Donne and the quaintness of Herbert, he coldly carried out the method of the concetti poets into a system. At its best, this fashion now and then struck out a brilliant effect, as where Donne says of Mistress Elizabeth Drury:

            Her pure and eloquent bloodSpoke in her cheek, and so divinely wroughtThat one might almost say her body thought.

Or in Crashaw’s celebrated line about the miracle at Cana:

Nympha pudica deum vidit et ernbuit,Englished by Dryden asThe conscious water saw its God and blushed.

But except in such rarely felicitous instances, this manner of writing is deplorable. Some of its most flagrant offenses are still notorious. Crashaw’s description of Mary Magdalene’s eyes as:

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

Or Carew’s lines on Maria Wentworth:

Else the soul grew so fast withinIt burst the outward shell of sin,And so was hatched a cherubin.

Cowley is full of these tasteless, unnatural conceits. His sins of the kind have been so insisted upon by Johnson and others that I need give but a single illustration. In an ode to his friend, Dr. Scarborough, he thus compliments him upon his skill in operating for calculus:

The cruel stone, that restless pain,That’s sometimes rolled away in vainBut still, like Sisyphus his stone, returns again,Thou break’st and melt’st by learned juices’ force(A greater work, though short the way appear,Than Hannibal’s by vinegar).Oppressed Nature’s necessary courseIt stops in vain; like Moses, thouStrik’st but the rock, and straight the waters freely flow.

Here, in a passage of nine lines, the stone which the doctor removes from his patient’s bladder is successively compared to the stone rolled away from Christ’s sepulchre, the stone of Sisyphus, the Alps that Hannibal split with vinegar, and the rock which Moses smote for water. Manifestly this way of writing lends itself least of all to the poetry of passion. Cowley’s love poems are his very worst failures. One can take a kind of pleasure in the sheer mental exercise of tracking the thought through one of his big Pindaric odes – the kind of pleasure one gets from solving a riddle or an equation, but not the kind which we ask of poetry. It is as Pope says: his epic and Pindaric art is forgotten; forgotten the four books, in rimed couplets, of the “Davideis”; forgotten the odes on Brutus, on the plagues of Egypt, on his Majesty’s restoration, to Mr. Hobbes, and to the Royal Society. Cowley had a genius for friendship, and his elegies are among his best things. There are passages well worthy of remembrance in his elegy on Crashaw, and several fine stanzas in his memorial verses on his Cambridge friend Hervey; though the piece, as a whole, is too long, and Dr. Johnson is probably singular in preferring it to “Lycidas.” A hundred readers are familiar with the invocation to light in “Paradise Lost,” for one who knows Cowley’s ingenious and, in many parts, really beautiful “Hymn to Light.”

The only writings of Cowley which keep afloat on time’s current are his simplest and least ambitious – what Pope called “the language of his heart.” His prose essays may still be read with enjoyment, though Lowell somewhat cruelly describes them as Montaigne and water. His translations from the Pseudo-Anacreon are standard, particularly the first ode, Θέλω λέγειν Ἀτρείδας; the Τέττιξ, or cicada; and the ode in praise of drinking, Ἡ γῆ μέλαινα πίνει. There is one little poem which remains an anthology favorite, “The Chronicle,” Cowley’s solitary experiment in society verse, a catalogue of the quite imaginary ladies with whom he has been in love. This is well enough, but compared with the “agreeable impudence,” the Cavalier gayety and ease of a genuine society verser, like Suckling, it is sufficiently tame. For the Cowleian wit is so different from the spirit of comedy that one would have predicted that anything which he might undertake for the stage would surely fail. Nevertheless, one of his plays, “Cutter of Coleman Street,” has been selected by Professor Gayley for his series of representative comedies, as a noteworthy transition drama, with “political and religious satire of great importance.”

The scene is London in 1658, the year when Cromwell died, and Cowley, though under bonds, escaped a second time to Paris. The plot in outline is this: Colonel Jolly, a gentleman whose estate was confiscated in the late troubles for taking part with the King at Oxford, finds himself in desperate straits for money. He has two disreputable hangers-on, “merry, sharking fellows about the town,” who have been drinking and feasting at his expense. One of these, Cutter of Coleman Street, pretends to have been a colonel in the royal army and to have fought at Newbury – the action, it will be remembered, in which Clarendon’s friend, Lord Falkland, met his tragic death (1643); or, as Carlyle rather brutally puts it, “Poor Lord Falkland, in his ‘clean shirt,’ was killed here.” Worm, the other rascal, professes likewise to have been in the King’s service and to have been at Worcester and shared in the romantic escape of the royal fugitive. This precious pair are new types in English comedy and are evidently from the life. They represent the class of swashbucklers, impostors, and soldiers of fortune, who lurked about the lowest purlieus of London during the interregnum, living at free quarters on loyalist sympathizers. They were parodies of the true “distressed Cavaliers,” such as Colonel Richard Lovelace, who died in London in this same year, 1658, in some obscure lodging and in abject poverty, having spent all his large fortune in the King’s cause.

When “Cutter of Coleman Street”5 was first given in 1661, the characters of Cutter and Worm were ill received by the audience at the Duke’s Theatre; and, in his preface to the printed play, the author defended himself against the charge “that it was a piece intended for abuse and satire against the king’s party. Good God! Against the king’s party! After having served it twenty years, during all the time of their misfortunes and afflictions, I must be a very rash and imprudent person if I chose out that of their restitution to begin a quarrel with them.” The representation of those two scoundrels, “as pretended officers of the royal army, was made for no other purpose but to show the world that the vices and extravagancies imputed vulgarly to the cavaliers were really committed by aliens who only usurped that name.”

Colonel Jolly is guardian to his niece, Lucia, who has an inheritance of five thousand pounds which, by the terms of her father’s will, is to be forfeited if she marries without her uncle’s consent. This is now a very stale bit of dramatic convention. Experienced play readers do not need to be reminded that “forfeited if transferred” is written large over the fortune of nearly every heiress in eighteenth century comedy. Colonel Jolly sees through his rascally followers, but is so reduced in purse that he offers Lucia’s hand to whichever of the two can gain her consent, on condition that the favored suitor will make over to him one thousand pounds out of his niece’s dowry. Of course she rejects both of them. This unprincipled bargain was quite properly censured as out of keeping with the character of an honorable old Cavalier gentleman who had fought for the King. And again the dramatist defends himself in his preface. “They were angry that the person whom I made a true gentleman and one both of considerable quality and sufferings in the royal party.. should submit, in his great extremities, to wrong his niece for his own relief… The truth is I did not intend the character of a hero.. but an ordinary jovial gentleman, commonly called a good fellow, one not so conscientious as to starve rather than do the least injury.”

The failure of his plan puts the colonel upon an almost equally desperate enterprise, which is no less than to espouse the widow of Fear-the-Lord Barebottle, a saint and a soap-boiler, who had bought Jolly’s confiscated estate, and whose name is an evident allusion to the leather-seller, Praise-God Barebones, who gave baptism to the famous Barebones’ Parliament. The colonel succeeds in this matrimonial venture; although, to ingratiate himself with the soap-boiler’s widow, he has to feign conversion. His daughter Aurelia tries to dissuade him from the match. “Bless us,” she says, “what humming and hawing will be in this house; what preaching and howling and fasting and eating among the saints! Their first pious work will be to banish Fletcher and Ben Jonson out o’ the parlour, and bring in their rooms Martin Mar Prelate and Posies of Holy Honeysuckles and A Salve-Box for a wounded Conscience and a Bundle of Grapes from Canaan… But, Sir, suppose the king should come in again and you have your own again of course. You’d be very proud of a soap-boiler’s widow then in Hyde Park, Sir.” “O,” replies her father, “then the bishops will come in, too, and she’ll away to New England.”

Here comes in the satire on the Puritans which is the most interesting feature of the play. Anti-Puritan satire was nothing new on the stage in 1661, and it had been much better done in Jonson’s “Alchemist” and “Bartholomew Fair” nearly a half century before. The thing that is new in Cowley’s play is its picture of the later aspects of the Puritan revolution; when what had been in Jonson’s time a despised faction had now been seated in power for sixteen years, and had developed all those extravagances of fanaticism which Carlyle calls “Calvinistic Sansculottism.” Widow Barebottle is a Brownist and a parishioner of Rev. Joseph Knockdown, of the congregation of the spotless in Coleman Street. But her daughter Tabitha is of the Fifth Monarchy persuasion and was wont to go afoot every Sunday over the bridge to hear Mr. Feak,6 when he was a prisoner in Lambeth House. Visions and prophesyings have been vouchsafed to Tabitha. And when Cutter, following his patron’s lead, pays court to her in a puritanical habit, he assures her that it has been revealed to him that he is no longer to be called Cutter, a name of Cavalero darkness: “My name is now Abednego. I had a vision, which whispered to me through a keyhole, ‘Go call thyself Abednego. It is a name that signifies fiery furnaces and tribulation and martyrdom.’ ” He is to suffer martyrdom and return miraculously upon “a purple dromedary, which signifies magistracy, with an axe in my hand that is called reformation; and I am to strike with that axe upon the gate of Westminster Hall and cry ‘Down, Babylon,’ and the building called Westminster Hall is to run away and cast itself into the river; and then Major General Harrison is to come in green sleeves from the north upon a sky-colored mule which signifies heavenly instruction.. and he is to have a trumpet in his mouth as big as a steeple and, at the sounding of that trumpet, all the churches in London shall fall down.. and then Venner shall march up to us from the west in the figure of a wave of the sea, holding in his hand a ship that shall be called the ark of the reformed.”

All this is frankly farcical but has a certain historical basis. The Venner here mentioned was a Fifth Monarchist cooper whose followers held a rendezvous at Mile-End Green, and who issued a pamphlet entitled “A Standard Set Up,” adopting as his ensign the Lion of the Tribe of Judah, with the motto, “Who shall rouse him up?” The passage furthermore seems to allude to one John Davy, to whom in 1654 the spirit revealed that his true name was Theauro John; and who was arrested at the door of the Parliament House for knocking and laying about him with a drawn sword. “Poor Davy,” comments Carlyle, “his labors, life-adventures, financial arrangements, painful biography in general, are all unknown to us; till, on this ‘Saturday, 30th December, 1654,’ he very clearly knocks loud at the door of the Parliament House, as much as to say, ‘what is this you are upon?’ and ‘lays about him with a drawn sword.’ ”

The dialogue abounds in the biblical phrases and the peculiar cant of the later Puritanism, familiar in “Hudibras.” Brother Abednego is joined to Tabitha in the holy bond of sanctified matrimony at a zealous shoemaker’s habitation by that chosen vessel, Brother Zephaniah Fats, an opener of revelations to the worthy in Mary White-Chapel. But as soon as they are safely married, the newly converted Cutter throws off his Puritan disguise and dons a regular Cavalier costume, hat and feather, sword and belt, broad laced band and periwig, and proceeds to pervert his bride. He makes her drink healths in sack, and sing and dance home after the fiddlers, under the threat of taking coach and carrying her off to the opera. Tabitha, after a faint resistance, falls into his humor and proves an apt pupil in the ways of worldliness. For it is a convention of seventeenth century, as it is of twentieth century, comedy that all Puritans are hypocrites and that

Every woman is at heart a rake.

MILTON’S TERCENTENARY

IT is right that this anniversary should be kept in all English-speaking lands. Milton is as far away from us in time as Dante was from him; destructive criticism has been busy with his great poem; formidable rivals of his fame have arisen – Dryden and Pope, Wordsworth and Byron, Tennyson and Browning, not to speak of lesser names – poets whom we read perhaps oftener and with more pleasure. Yet still his throne remains unshaken. By general – by well-nigh universal – consent, he is still the second poet of our race, the greatest, save one, of all who have used the English speech.

The high epics, the Iliad, the Divine Comedy, do not appear to us as they appeared to their contemporaries, nor as they appeared to the Middle Ages, or to the men of the Renaissance or of the eighteenth century. These peaks of song we see foreshortened or in changed perspective or from a different angle of observation. Their parallax varies from age to age, yet their stature does not dwindle; they tower forever, “like Teneriffe or Atlas unremoved.” “Paradise Lost” does not mean the same thing to us that it meant to Addison or Johnson or Macaulay, and much that those critics said of it now seems mistaken. Works of art, as of nature, have perishable elements, and suffer a loss from time’s transshifting. Homer’s gods are childish, Dante’s hell grotesque; and the mythology of the one and the scholasticism of the other are scarcely more obsolete to-day than Milton’s theology. Yet in the dryest parts of “Paradise Lost” we feel the touch of the master. Two things in particular, the rhythm and the style, go on victoriously as by their own momentum. God the Father may be a school divine and Adam a member of parliament, but the verse never flags, the diction never fails. The poem may grow heavy, but not languid, thin, or weak. I confess that there are traits of Milton which repel or irritate; that there are poets with whom sympathy is easier. And if I were speaking merely as an impressionist, I might prefer them to him. But this does not affect my estimate of his absolute greatness.

All poets, then, and lovers of poetry, all literary critics and students of language must honor in Milton the almost faultless artist, the supreme master of his craft. But there is a reason why, not alone the literary class, but all men of English stock should celebrate Milton’s tercentenary. There have been poets whose technique was exquisite, but whose character was contemptible. John Milton was not simply a great poet, but a great man, a heroic soul; and his type was characteristically English, both in its virtues and its shortcomings. Of Shakespeare, the man, we know next to nothing. But of Milton personally we know all that we need to know, more than is known of many a modern author. There is abundance of biography and autobiography. Milton had a noble self-esteem, and he was engaged for twenty years in hot controversies. Hence those passages of apologetics scattered through his prose works, from which the lives of their author have been largely compiled. Moreover he was a pamphleteer and journalist, as well as a poet, uttering himself freely on the questions of the day. We know his opinions on government, education, religion, marriage and divorce, the freedom of the press, and many other subjects. We know what he thought of eminent contemporaries, Charles I, Cromwell, Vane, Desborough, Overton, Fairfax. It was not then the fashion to write critical essays, literary reviews, and book notices. Yet, aside from his own practice, his writings are sown here and there with incidental judgments of books and authors, from which his literary principles may be gathered. He has spoken now and again of Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, of Spenser, Chaucer, Euripides, Homer, the book of Job, the psalms of David, the Song of Solomon, the poems of Tasso and Ariosto, the Arthur and Charlemagne romances: of Bacon and Selden, the dramatic unities, blank verse vs. rhyme, and similar topics.

In some aspects and relations, harsh and unlovely, egotistical and stubborn, the total impression of Milton’s personality is singularly imposing. His virtues were manly virtues. Of the four cardinal moral virtues, – the so-called Aristotelian virtues, – temperance, justice, fortitude, prudence, which Dante symbolizes by the group of stars —

Non viste mai fuor ch’ alla prima gente —

Milton had a full share. He was not always, though he was most commonly, just. Prudence, the only virtue, says Carlyle, which gets its reward on earth, prudence he had, yet not a timid prudence. Of temperance – the Puritan virtue – and all that it includes, chastity, self-reverence, self-control, “Comus” is the beautiful hymn. But, above all, Milton had the heroic virtue, fortitude; not only passively in the proud and sublime endurance of the evil days and evil tongues on which he had fallen; of the darkness, dangers, solitude that compassed him round; but actively in “the unconquerable will.. and courage never to submit or yield”; the courage which “bates no jot of heart or hope, but still bears up and steers right onward.”

There is nothing more bracing in English poetry than those passages in the sonnets, in “Paradise Lost” and in “Samson Agonistes” where Milton speaks of his blindness. Yet here it is observable that Milton, who is never sentimental, is also never pathetic but when he speaks of himself, in such lines, e.g., as Samson’s

My race of glory run, and race of shame,And I shall shortly be with them that rest.

Dante has this same touching dignity in alluding to his own sorrows; but his hard and rare pity is more often aroused by the sorrows of others: by Ugolino’s little starving children, or by the doom of Francesca and her lover. Milton is untender. Yet virtue with him is not always forbidding and austere. As he was a poet, he felt the “beauty of holiness,” though in another sense than Archbishop Laud’s use of that famous phrase. It was his “natural haughtiness,” he tells us, that saved him from sensuality and base descents of mind. His virtue was a kind of good taste, a delicacy almost womanly. It is the “Lady of Christ’s” speaking with the lips of the lady in “Comus,” who says,

– That which is not good is not deliciousTo a well governed and wise appetite.

But there is a special fitness in this commemoration at this place. For Milton is the scholar poet. He is the most learned, the most classical, the most bookish – I was about to say the most academic – of English poets; but I remember that academic, through its use in certain connections, might imply a timid conformity to rules and models, a lack of vital originality which would not be true of Milton. Still, Milton was an academic man in a broad sense of the word. A hard student of books, he injured his eyes in boyhood by too close application, working every day till midnight. He spent seven years at his university. He was a teacher and a writer on education. I need not give the catalogue of his acquirements further than to say that he was the best educated Englishman of his generation.