That errors should abound in the text of Lovelace is the more lamentable because he was apt to make a play of phrases that depend upon the precision of a comma—nay, upon the precision of the voice in reading. Lucasta Paying her Obsequies is a poem that makes a kind of dainty confusion between the two vestals—the living and the dead; they are ‘equal virgins,’ and you must assign the pronouns carefully to either as you read. This, read twice, must surely be placed amongst the loveliest of his lovely writings. It is a joy to meet such a phrase as ‘her brave eyes.’
To Althea, from Prison.—Page [166].
This is a poem that takes the winds with an answering flight. Should they be ‘birds’ or ‘gods’ that wanton in the air in the first of these gallant stanzas? Bishop Percy shied at ‘gods,’ and with admirable judgment suggested ‘birds,’ an amendment adopted by the greater number of succeeding editors, until one or two wished for the other phrase again, as an audacity fit for Lovelace. But the Bishop’s misgiving was after all justified by one of the MSS. of the poem, in which the ‘gods’ proved to be ‘birds’ long before he changed them. The reader may ask, what is there to choose between birds so divine and gods so light? But to begin with ‘gods’ would be to make an anticlimax of the close. Lovelace led from birds and fishes to winds, and from winds to angels.
‘When linnet-like confined’ is another modern reading. ‘When, like committed linnets,’ daunted the eighteenth century. Nevertheless, it is right seventeenth century, and is now happily restored; happily, because Lovelace would not have the word ‘confined’ twice in this little poem.
A Horatian Ode.—Page [169].
‘He earned the glorious name,’ says a biographer of Andrew Marvell (editing an issue of that post’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, Marvell sometimes 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.