ABRAHAM COWLEY
COWLEY has been constantly used to point a moral. He is the capital instance, in our literary history, of the instability of fame; or, rather, of the wide variation between contemporary rating and the judgment of posterity. Time has given its ironical answer to the very first line in the first poem of his collection:—
What shall I do to be forever known?
When Cowley died in 1667 and was buried in Westminster Abbey near the tombs of Chaucer and Spenser, he was, in general opinion, the greatest English poet since the latter. “Paradise Lost” appeared in that same year, but at this date Milton’s fame was not comparable with Cowley’s, his junior by ten years. Milton’s miscellaneous poems, first collected in 1645, did not reach a second edition till 1673. Meanwhile Cowley’s works went through eight impressions.
I believe that the only contemporaries who rivaled him in popularity were Herbert and Cleveland, for Waller did not come to his own until after Cowley’s death. Herbert’s “Temple,” posthumously printed in 1634, had already become a religious classic. Masson computes its annual sale at a thousand copies for the first twenty years of its publication. Of Cleveland’s poems eleven editions were issued during his lifetime—and none afterward. Apropos of the author’s arrest at Norwich in 1655 and his magniloquent letter to Cromwell on that occasion, Carlyle caustically remarks: “This is John Cleveland, the famed Cantab scholar, Royalist Judge Advocate, and thrice illustrious satirist and son of the muses, who had gone through eleven editions in those times, far transcending all Miltons and all mortals—and does not now need any twelfth edition that we hear of.” This was true till 1903 when Professor Berdan brought out the first modern and critical, and probably the final, edition of Cleveland. But neither Herbert nor Cleveland enjoyed anything like Cowley’s literary eminence. Cleveland was a sharp political lampooner whose verses had a temporary vogue like “M’Fingal” or “The Gospel according to Benjamin.” A few years later Butler did the same thing ten times as cleverly. Even “Hudibras” has lost much of its point, though its originality, learning, and wit have given it a certain sort of immortality, while Cleveland is utterly extinct. Herbert’s work is, of course, more permanent than Cleveland’s, and he is a truer poet than Cowley, though his appeal is to a smaller public, and he has but a single note.
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 blood
Spoke in her cheek, and so divinely wrought
That 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 as
The 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 within
It 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 vain
But 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 course
It stops in vain; like Moses, thou
Strik’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.
| [5] | An earlier version, entitled “The Guardian,” had been acted in 1641. |
| [6] | An Anabaptist preacher. See Carlyle’s “Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches,” iv. 3. |