The contrast is perhaps unique as regards the dead colourlessness of the beginning, and the splendid colour of the end. But contrasts like it occur all over Crashaw's work.
He was a much younger man than either of the poets with whom we have leashed him, and his birth year used to be put at 1616, though Dr. Grosart has made it probable that it was three years earlier. His father was a stern Anglican clergyman of extremely Protestant leanings, his mother died when Crashaw was young, but his stepmother appears to have been most unnovercal. Crashaw was educated at Charterhouse, and then went to Cambridge, where in 1637 he became a fellow of Peterhouse, and came in for the full tide of high church feeling, to which (under the mixed influence of Laud's policy, of the ascetic practices of the Ferrars of Gidding, and of a great architectural development afterwards defaced if not destroyed by Puritan brutality) Cambridge was even more exposed than Oxford. The outbreak of the civil war may or may not have found Crashaw at Cambridge; he was at any rate deprived of his fellowship for not taking the covenant in 1643, and driven into exile. Already inclined doctrinally and in matters of practice to the older communion, and despairing of the resurrection of the Church of England after her sufferings at the hands of the Parliament, Crashaw joined the Church of Rome, and journeyed to its metropolis. He was attached to the suit of Cardinal Pallotta, but is said to have been shocked by Italian manners. The cardinal procured him a canonry at Loretto, and this he hastened to take up, but died in 1649 with suspicions of poison, which are not impossibly, but at the same time by no means necessarily true. His poems had already appeared under the double title of Steps to the Temple (sacred), and Delights of the Muses (profane), but not under his own editorship, or it would seem with his own choice of title. Several other editions followed,—one later than his death, with curious illustrations said to be, in part at least, of his own design. Manuscript sources, as in the case of some other poets of the time, have considerably enlarged the collection since. But a great part of it consists of epigrams (in the wide sense, and almost wholly sacred) in the classical tongues, which were sometimes translated by Crashaw himself. These are not always correct in style or prosody, but are often interesting. The famous line in reference to the miracle of Cana,
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"Vidit et erubuit nympha pudica Deum," |
is assigned to Crashaw as a boy at Cambridge; of his later faculty in the same way the elaborate and, in its way, beautiful poem entitled Bulla (the Bubble) is the most remarkable.
Our chief subject, however, is the English poems proper, sacred and profane. In almost all of these there is noticeable an extraordinary inequality, the same in kind, if not in degree, as that on which we have commented in the case of The Flaming Heart. Crashaw is never quite so great as there; but he is often quite as small. His exasperating lack of self-criticism has sometimes led selectors to make a cento out of his poems—notably in the case of the exceedingly pretty "Wishes to His Unknown Mistress," beginning, "Whoe'er she be, That not impossible she, That shall command my heart and me"—a poem, let it be added, which excuses this dubious process much less than most, inasmuch as nothing in it is positively bad, though it is rather too long. Here is the opening, preceded by a piece from another poem, "A Hymn to Saint Theresa":—
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"Whoe'er she be, That not impossible she, That shall command my heart and me; "Where'er she lie, Lock'd up from mortal eye, In shady leaves of destiny; "Till that ripe birth Of studied Fate stand forth, And teach her fair steps to our earth: "Till that divine Idea take a shrine Of crystal flesh, through which to shine: "Meet you her, my wishes Bespeak her to my blisses, And be ye call'd, my absent kisses." |
The first hymn to Saint Theresa, to which The Flaming Heart is a kind of appendix, was written when Crashaw was still an Anglican (for which he did not fail, later, to make a characteristic and very pretty, though quite unnecessary, apology). It has no passage quite up to the Invocation—Epiphonema, to give it the technical term—of the later poem. But it is, on the contrary, good almost throughout, and is, for uniform exaltation, far the best of Crashaw's poems. Yet such uniform exaltation must be seldom sought in him. It is in his little bursts, such as that in the stanza beginning, "O mother turtle dove," that his charm consists. Often, as in verse after verse of The Weeper, it has an unearthly delicacy and witchery which only Blake, in a few snatches, has ever equalled; while at other times the poet seems to invent, in the most casual and unthinking fashion, new metrical effects and new jewelries of diction which the greatest lyric poets since—Coleridge, Shelley, Lord Tennyson, Mr. Swinburne—have rather deliberately imitated than spontaneously recovered. Yet to all this charm there is no small drawback. The very maddest and most methodless of the "Metaphysicals" cannot touch Crashaw in his tasteless use of conceits. When he, in The Weeper just above referred to, calls the tears of Magdalene "Wat'ry brothers," and "Simpering sons of those fair eyes," and when, in the most intolerable of all the poet's excesses, the same eyes are called "Two waking baths, two weeping motions, Portable and compendious oceans," which follow our Lord about the hills of Galilee, it is almost difficult to know whether to feel most contempt or indignation for a man who could so write. It is fair to say that there are various readings and omissions in the different editions which affect both these passages. Yet the offence is that Crashaw should ever have written them at all. Amends, however, are sure to be made before the reader has read much farther. Crashaw's longest poems—a version of Marini's Sospetto d'Herode, and one of the rather overpraised "Lover and Nightingale" story of Strada—are not his best; the metre in which both are written, though the poet manages it well, lacks the extraordinary charm of his lyric measures. It does not appear that the "Not impossible she" ever made her appearance, and probably for a full half of his short life Crashaw burnt only with religious fire. But no Englishman has expressed that fire as he has, and none in his expression of any sentiment, sacred and profane, has dropped such notes of ethereal music. At his best he is far above singing, at his worst he is below a very childish prattle. But even then he is never coarse, never offensive, not very often actually dull; and everywhere he makes amends by flowers of the divinest poetry. Mr. Pope, who borrowed not a little from him, thought, indeed, that you could find nothing of "The real part of poetry" (correct construction and so forth) in Crashaw; and Mr. Hayley gently rebukes Cowley (after observing that if Pope borrowed from Crashaw, it was "as the sun borrows from the earth") for his "glowing panegyrick." Now, if the real part of poetry is anywhere in Hayley, or quintessentially in Pope, it certainly is not in Crashaw.
The group or school (for it is not easy to decide on either word, and objections might be taken to each) at the head of which Herrick, Carew, and Crashaw must be placed, and which included Herbert and his band of sacred singers, included also not a few minor groups, sufficiently different from each other, but all marked off sharply from the innovating and classical school of Waller and his followers, which it is not proposed to treat in this volume. All, without exception, show the influence in different ways of Ben Jonson and of Donne. But each has its own peculiarity. We find these peculiarities, together with anticipations of post-Reformation characteristics, mixed very curiously in the miscellanies of the time. These are interesting enough, and may be studied with advantage, if not also with pleasure, in the principal of them, Wit's Recreations (1640). This, with certain kindred works (Wit Restored, and the very unsavoury Musarum Deliciæ of Sir John Mennis and Dr. Smith), has been more than once republished. In these curious collections, to mention only one instance, numerous pieces of Herrick's appeared with considerable variants from the text of the Hesperides; and in their pages things old and new, charming pastoral poems, vers de société of very unequal merit, ballads, satires, epigrams, and a large quantity of mere scatology and doggerel, are heaped together pell-mell. Songs from the dramatists, especially Fletcher, make their appearance, sometimes with slight variants, and there are forms of the drinking song in Gammer Gurton's Needle long after, and of Sir John Suckling's "Ballad on a Wedding," apparently somewhat before, their respective publication in their proper places. Here is the joke about the wife and the almanack which reckless tradition has told of Dryden; printed when Lady Elizabeth Howard was in the nursery, and Dryden was not yet at Westminster. Here we learn how, probably about the second or third decade of the century, the favourite authors of learned ladies were "Wither, Draiton, and Balzack" (Guez de Balzac of the Letters), a very singular trio; and how some at least loved the "easy ambling" of Heywood's prose, but thought that he "grovelled on the stage," which it must be confessed he not uncommonly did. Wit Restored contains the charming "Phillida flouts Me," with other real "delights." Even Milton makes his appearance in these collections, which continued to be popular for more than a century, and acquired at intervals fresh vogue from the great names of Dryden and Pope.