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.”