Poetical Works of Edmund Waller and Sir John Denham

by Edmund Waller; Sir John Denham

When in the midst of fears we are surprised With unexpected happiness, the first Degrees of joy are mere astonishment. Fear, the shadow Of danger, like the shadow of our bodies, Is greater, then, when that which is the cause Is farthest off."

The blinded prince's soliloquy, in the first scene of the fifth act, is worthy of Shakspeare. We must quote the following lines:—

"Reason, my soul's eye, still sees
Clearly, and clearer for the want of eyes,
For gazing through the windows of the body
It met such several, such distracting objects;
But now confined within itself it sees
A strange and unknown world, and there discovers
Torrents of anger, mountains of ambition,
Gulfs of desire, and towers of hope, large giants,
Monsters and savage beasts; to vanquish these
Will be a braver conquest, than the old
Or the new world."

Shortly after the appearance of "Sophy," he was admitted, by the form then usual, Sheriff of Surrey, and appointed governor of Farnham Castle for the king; this important post, however, he soon resigned, and retreated to Oxford, where, in 1643, he published his poem entitled "Cooper's Hill." This instantly became popular, and many who might have seen in "Sophy" greater powers than were disclosed in this new effort, envied its fame, and gave out that he had bought it of a vicar for forty pounds. For this there was, of course, no proof, and it is only worth mentioning because it is one of a large class of cases, in which envious mediocrity, or crushed dulness, or jealous rivalry, has sought to snatch hard-won laurels from the brow of genius. As if these laurels were so smooth, and so soothing, as always to invite ambition, or as if they were so flexible as to suit every brow! As if FIRE lurked not sometimes in their leaves, and as if there were not, besides, a nobler jealousy in the public mind ready to watch and to avenge their misappropriation. Certain it is that not only, as Johnson remarks, was the attempt made to rob Addison of "Cato," and Pope of the "Essay of Criticism," but it has a hundred times taken place in the history of poetry. Rolt, as we saw in our late life of Akenside, tried to snatch the honour of writing "The Pleasures of Imagination" from its author. Lauder accused Milton of plundering the Italians wholesale. Scott's early novels have only the other day been most absurdly claimed for his brother Thomas. And notwithstanding Shakspeare's well-known lines over his sepulchre at Stratford—

"Bless'd be the man who spares these stones,
But curs'd be he who moves my bones"—

a worse outrage has been recently committed on his memory, than were his dust, like Wickliffe's, tossed out of his tomb into the Avon—his plays have been, with as much stupidity as malice, attributed to Lord Bacon! Homer, too, has been found out to be a myth; and we know not if even Dante's originality has altogether passed unquestioned in this age of disbelief and downpulling; although what brow, save that thunder-scathed pile, could wear those scorched laurels, and who but the "man who had been in hell" could have written the "Inferno?" Worst of all, a class of writers have of late sought to prove that there is no such thing as originality—that genius means just dexterous borrowing-that the "Appropriation Clause" is of divine right—and have certainly proved themselves true to their own principles.

In 1647, circumstances brought our poet more closely in connexion with the royal family, and on one occasion he carried a message from the Queen to King Charles, then in prison. He subsequently conducted, with great success, the King's correspondence; and in April 1648 he conveyed the young Duke of York (afterwards James II.) from London to France, and delivered him to the charge of the Queen and the Prince of Wales. He had, ere leaving Britain, written a translation of Cato-Major on Old Age. While in France, attending on the exiled prince, he wrote a number of poetical pieces at his master's desire; among others, a song in honour of an embassy to Poland, which he and Lord Crofts undertook for Charles II., and during which they are said to have collected £10,000 for the royal cause from the Scotchmen who then abounded in that country as travelling merchants or pedlars. Meanwhile his political misdemeanours were punished by the Parliament confiscating the remnant of his estate. In 1652, he returned to England penniless, and was supported by the Earl of Pembroke. After the Restoration, Charles, more mindful of him than of many of his friends and the partners of his exile, bestowed on Denham the Surveyorship of the King's Buildings and the Order of the Bath. The situation of Surveyor, even in his careless and improvident hands, turned out a lucrative one; for it is said that he cleared by it no less than £7000. Of his first wife, we hear little or nothing; but about this time, flushed as he was with prosperity, and the popularity of the writings he continued to produce, he contracted a second marriage, which was so far from happy that its consequences led to a fit of temporary derangement. Butler, then a disappointed and exacerbated man, was malignant enough to lampoon him for lunacy—an act which, Dr. Johnson well remarks, "no provocation could excuse." It was, in Fuller's fine old quaint language, "breaking one whom God had bowed before." Our readers will find Butler's squib in our edition of that poet, vol. ii. p. 200, under the title of "A Panegyrick on Sir John Denham's Recovery from his Madness." It is a piece quite unworthy of Butler's powers, and its sting lies principally in charging Denham with plagiarising "Cooper's Hill" and "Sophy," with gambling, and with overreaching the King as Surveyor of the Public Buildings, and with an overbearing and quarrelsome temper—but it contains no allusion to his domestic infelicity. Some have hinted that the cause of his insanity lay in jealousy—that Denham suspected his wife to be too intimate with the Duke of York—that he poisoned her, and maddened in remorse. Whatever the cause, the distemper was not of long continuance. He recovered in time to write some verses on the death of Cowley, which took place in 1667; but in the next year he himself expired, and was buried by the side of his friend in Westminster Abbey, not very far from Chaucer and Spencer. His funeral took place on the 19th of March 1668. He had attained the age of fifty-three.

This is all we can definitely state of the history of Sir John Denham, and certainly the light it casts on his character is neither very plentiful nor very pleasing. A gambler in his early days, he became a political intriguer, an unhappy husband, a maniac, and died in the prime of life. It need only further be recorded of him, that, according to some accounts, he first discovered the merits of Milton's "Paradise Lost," and went about with the book new from the press in his hands, shewing it to everybody, and exclaiming, "This beats us all, and the ancients too!" If this story be true, it says as much for his heart as his head for the generous disposition which made him praise a political adversary, as for the critical taste which discerned at a glance the value of the world's greatest poem. On the whole, however, Denham as a man stands on the same general level with the Cavalier wits in the days of Charles. If he did not rise so high as Cowley, he did not sink so low as Rochester, or even as Butler.

We may now regret, both that he did not live better, and that he did not write more. He had unquestionably in him greater powers than he ever expressed in his works. These are few, fragmentary, and unequal; but, nevertheless, must be reckoned productions of no ordinary merit. They discover a great deal of the body, and not a little of the soul, of poetry. In the passages we cited from "Sophy," and throughout the whole of that play, there is a vigorous and profound vein of reflection, as well as of imagination. Like Shakspeare, although on a scale very much inferior, he carries on a constant stream of subtle reflection amidst all the windings of his story; and even the most critical points of the drama are studded with pearls. Coleridge speaks of himself, or some one else, as wishing to live "collaterally, or aside, to the onward progress of society;" and thus, in the drama, there should ever be, as it were, a projection, or alias, of the author standing collaterally, or aside, to the bustling incidents and whirling passions, and calmly adding the commentary of wisdom, as they rush impetuously on. Such essentially was the chorus of the ancient Greek play; and a similar end is answered in Shakspeare by the subtle asides, the glancing bye-lights, which his wondrous intellect interposes amidst the rapid play of his fancy, the exuberance of his wit, and the crowded incident and interchange of passion created by his genius. Some have maintained that the philosophy of a drama should be chiefly confined to the conceptions of the characters, the development of the plot, and the management of the dialogue—that all the reflection should be molten into the mass of the play, and none of it embossed on the surface; but certainly neither Shakspeare's, nor Schiller's, nor Goethe's dramas answer to this ideal— all of them, besides the philosophy, so to speak, afoot in the progress of the story, contain a great deal standing still, quietly lurking in nooks and corners, and yet exerting a powerful influence on the ultimate effect and explanation of the whole. And so, according to its own proportions, it is with Denham's "Sophy." Indeed, as we have above hinted, its power lies more in these interesting individual beauties than in its general structure.

"Cooper's Hill," next to "Sophy," is undoubtedly his best production. Dr. Johnson calls it the first English specimen of local poetry—i.e., of poetry in which a special scene is, through the embellishments of traditionary recollection, moral reflections, and the power of association generally, uplifted into a poetical light. This has been done afterwards by Garth, in his "Claremont;" Pope, in his "Windsor Forest;" Dyer, in his "Gronger-hill," and a hundred other instances. The great danger in this class of poems, is lest imported sentiment and historical reminiscence should overpower the living lineaments, and all but blot out the memory of the actual landscape. And so it is to some extent in "Cooper's Hill," the scene beheld from which is speedily lost in a torrent of political reflection and moralising. The well-known lines on the Thames are rhetorical and forcible, but not, we think, highly poetical:—