The 'coldness' of 'cloth and metallic threads' which the critic applies to the 'hard arguments' of Nosce Teipsum is a mere imagination. But besides, the 'metallic threads' are not for warmth but for splendour. The lining of the 'splendidly curious' garment is to be looked for for warmth. Similarly the 'hard arguments' would have been unpoetical as unphilosophical had they been 'warm' with the warmth of the 'clothing' in similes and fancies. The 'hardness' is where it ought to be—in the thinking: but it is a hardness like the bough that is green with leafage and radiant with bloom and odorous with 'sweet scent' and pliant to every lightest touch of the breeze. The leaf and bloom start from the 'hard' bough rightly, fittingly 'hard' to its utmost twig. The alleged 'too much labour' is singularly uncharacteristic. As for the 'madness' I can but exclaim—Oh for more of such 'fine lunacy' as in Donne is condemned! His and compeers' 'madness' is worth cart-loads of most men's sanity.
In our own day Dr. George Macdonald has spoken more wisely if still somewhat superficially of "Nosce Teipsum" in his charming "England's Antiphon." Having explained that by "Immortality of the Soul" is intended "the spiritual nature of the soul, resulting in continuity of existence," he proceeds:—"It [Nosce Teipsum] is a wonderful instance of what can be done for metaphysics in verse, and by means of imaginative or poetic embodiment generally. Argumentation cannot of course naturally belong to the region of poetry, however well it may comport itself when there naturalized; and consequently, although there are most poetic no less than profound passages in the treatise, a light scruple arises whether its constituent matter can properly be called poetry. At all events, however, certain of the more prosaic measures and stanzas lend themselves readily, and with much favour, to some of the more complex of logical necessities. And it must be remembered that in human speech, as in the human mind, there are no absolute divisions: power shades off into feeling; and the driest logic may find the heroic couplet render it good service." (pp. 105-6). The 'scruple' must be 'light' indeed that has to decide whether the 'reasoning' of "Nosce Teipsum" be or be not 'poetry.' It is astounding that at this time o' day any should attempt to exclude the highest region of the intellect and its noblest occupation from poetry. Poetry I must hold absolutely is poetry, whatever be its matter and form if the thinking be glorified by imagination or tremulous with emotion. It is sheer folly to refuse to the Poet any material within the compass of the universe. Especially deplorable is it to have to argue for possibilities of poetry in the greatest of all thinking, viz., metaphysics, in the face of such actualities of achievement as in Davies and Lord Brooke and Donne.
A second characteristic of "Nosce Teipsum" that calls for notice is its perfection of workmanship shown in the mastery of an extremely difficult stanza, as well as its solidity of material. Here unquestionably Sir John Davies far excels Lord Brooke and Donne, and later, Sir William Davenant in "Gondibert." The two former are occasionally (it must be granted) semi-inarticulate, and the last is very often monotonous and trying. "Nosce Teipsum" is throughout articulate and unmistakeable, and never flags. You have a fear o' times that a metaphor will prove grotesque or mean: or a vein of thought pinch and go out from ore to bare limestone. But invariably an imaginative touch, or a colour-like epithet, or a thrill of emotion, lifts up the mean into a transfiguring atmosphere as of sun-set purples and crysolites, and gives to grotesquest gargoyles (as of cathedrals) a strange fitness. Then when a thought or illustration seems about to end, debasedly, another forward-carrying and ennobling, swiftly succeeds.
There is more than dexterity, there is consummate art—the art of a conscious master—in the inter-weaving of the lines and stanzas of "Nosce Teipsum." Professor Craik recognised the difficulty and the triumph, but fails by ultra-ingenuity in accounting for either the selection of the measure or the miracle of its continuous success. His criticism is worth recalling, thus:—"A remarkable poem of this age ... is the 'Nosce Teipsum' of Sir John Davies ... a philosophical poem, the earliest of the kind in the language. It is written in rhyme, in the common heroic ten-syllable verse, but disposed in quatrains, like the early play of Misogonus, already mentioned, and other poetry of the same era, or like Sir Thomas Overbury's poem of 'The Wife,' the 'Gondibert' of Sir William Davenant, and the 'Annus Mirabilis' of Dryden, at a later period. No one of these writers has managed this difficult stanza so successfully as Davies: it has the disadvantage of requiring the sense to be in general closed at certain regularly and quickly-recurring turns, which yet are very ill adapted for an effective pause; and even all the skill of Dryden has been unable to free it from a certain air of monotony and languor,—a circumstance of which that poet may be supposed to have been himself sensible, since he wholly abandoned it after one or two early attempts. Davies, however, has conquered its difficulty; and, as has been observed, 'perhaps no language can produce a poem, extending to so great a length, of more condensation of thought, or in which fewer languid verses will be found.' (Hallam, as before.) In fact, it is by this condensation and sententious brevity, so carefully filed and elaborated, however, as to involve no sacrifice of perspicuity or fulness of expression, that he has attained his end. Every quatrain is a pointed expression of a separate thought, like one of Rochefoucault's maxims; each thought being, by great skill and painstaking in the packing, made exactly to fit and to fill the same case. It may be doubted, however, whether Davies would not have produced a still better poem if he had chosen a measure which would have allowed him greater freedom and real variety; unless, indeed, his poetical talent was of a sort that required the suggestive aid and guidance of such artificial restraints as he had to cope with in this; and what would have been a bondage to a more fiery and teeming imagination, was rather a support to his."[49]
Most of this must be read cum grano salis. Davies elected his measure and stanza with evidently entire spontaneity; and it is an odd reversal of the simple matter of fact to ascribe the 'artificial restraints' chosen, to an absence 'of a fiery and teeming imagination,' when, as all observation demonstrates, the more fiery and fecund the imagination of a Poet, the more exquisitely obedient is he to the subtlest and most intricate movements of his measure—just as the bluest-blooded race-horse is a law to itself whereas your stolid dray-cart or plough-drawer needs the "artificial restraints" of all kinds of gear, and the constraint of whip and blow and vociferation. I can well suppose that but for the "Fairy Queen" Sir John Davies might have chosen its stanza, but just as to-day "In Memoriam" has taken to itself its form and music to the exclusion of every other—though a very ancient English measure—so Spenser's immortal poem precluded "Nosce Teipsum" following in the same. I cannot admit "artificial restraints" in the sense of needed restraints or aid. There was the stanza, and the genius of Sir John Davies appropriated it—since Spenser's, in all worship, could not be taken—and, like a great Vine, clad its natural slenderness and poorness of build with wealth of bright green leafage and clustered fruitage. The nicety and daintiness of workmanship, the involute and nevertheless firmly-completed and manifested imagery of "Nosce Teipsum" wherewith this nicety and daintiness are wrought, place Sir John Davies artistically among the finest of our Poets. Southey wrote decisively on this:—"Sir John Davies and Sir William Davenant, avoiding equally the opposite faults of too artificial and too careless a style, wrote in numbers which, for precision and clearness, and felicity and strength, have never been surpassed." For 'felicity' I should have said 'flexibility.'[50]
Again our examples of the mastery and perfection of workmanship must be brief; but take these:—
"Nor can her wide imbracements fillèd bee;
For they that most, and greatest things embrace,
Inlarge thereby their minds' capacitie,
As streames inlarg'd, inlarge the channel's space.
All things receiu'd, doe such proportion take,
As those things haue, wherein they are receiu'd:
So little glasses little faces make,
And narrow webs on narrow frames be weau'd;
Then what vast body must we make the mind
Wherin are men, beasts, trees, towns, seas, and lands;
And yet each thing a proper place doth find,
And each thing in the true proportion stands?