Stanley was supposed by his contemporaries to have made himself immortal by his History of Philosophy, long a standard book, though hardly an original one. Indeed, they considered him, chiefly on account of it, ‘the glory and admiration of his time’: the phrase is that of a careful critic, Winstanley. The work went into many editions; his prose was used and read, while his verse was talked of, and passed lightly from hand to hand. As in the case of Petrarca, whose fine Latin tomes quickly perished, while his less regarded vernacular Rime rose to shine ‘on the stretched forefinger of all Time,’ so here was a little remainder of lovely English song to embalm an otherwise soon-buried name. Hardly any poet of his poetic day, to be discovered hereafter, can be appraised on a more intimate understanding, or can awaken a more endearing interest. Yet we know that save for one or two of his pieces extant here or there in anthologies; save for a private reprint in 1814 by that tireless scholar and ‘great mouser,’ Sir Egerton Brydges; save for Mr. A. H. Bullen’s valued reproduction of the Anacreontea, in 1893, Thomas Stanley’s name is utterly unknown to the modern world.
We have indeed travelled far from the ideals of the seventeenth century. Perhaps, after all, that is one of our blunders; for every hour, nowadays, we are busy breaking a backward path through the historic underbrush, in order to speak with those singing gentlemen of ‘the Warres,’ whose art and statecraft and religion some of us (who have seen the end of so much else), find incredibly attractive to our own. Their lawless vision, like that of children, and the mysterious trick of music in all their speech, are things we love instinctively, and never can regain. Out of their political storm, their hard thought, and high spirits, they can somehow give us rest: and it is chiefly rest which we crave of them. We appeal to each of these post-Elizabethans with the invitatory line of one of them:
‘Charm me asleep with thy delicious numbers!’
The pleasure they can still give is inexhaustible, for unconscious genius like theirs, however narrow, is a deeper well than Goethe’s. Cast aside, and contemned, and left in the darkness long ago, the greater number of these English Alexandrians are as alive as the lamp in Tullia’s tomb; and of these Stanley, as a craftsman, is almost first.
He was a born man of letters; he gave his whole life to meditation, to friendship, and to art; he did his beautiful best, and cared nothing for results; and though literary dynasties have come and gone, his work has sufficient vitality to-day to leap abreast of work which has never been out of the sphere of man’s appreciation, and has deserved all the appreciation which it got. Stanley’s fastidious strength, his wayward but concentrated grace, his spirit of liberty and scorn in writing of love (which was one of the novel characteristic notes of Wither’s generation, and of Robert Jones’s before him); the sunny, fearless mental motion, like that of a bird flying not far, but high, seem to our plodding scientific wits as unnatural as a Sibyllic intoxication. He strikes few notes; he recognises his limits and controls his range; but within these, he is for the most part as happy as Herrick, as mellow as Henry King, as free as Carew, and as capable as these were, and as those deeper natures, Crashaw and Vaughan, were not, of a short poem perfect throughout. He is the child of his age, moreover, in that his ingenuity never slumbers, and his speech must ever be concise and knotty. If he sports in the tangles of Neræa’s hair, it is because he likes tangles, and means to add to them. No Carolian poet was ever an idler!
Carew, perhaps, is Stanley’s nearest parallel. The latter shows the very same sort of golden pertness, masked in languid elegance, which goes to unify and heighten Carew’s memorable enchantment, and the same sheer singable felicity of phrase. But, unlike Carew, he has no glorious ungoverned swift-passing raptures; there is in Stanley less fire and less tenderness. Nor has he anything to repent of. His imagination, as John Hall discerningly said of it,
‘Makes soft Ionic turn grave Lydian.’
Except Habington’s, no considerable body of amatory verse in all that century, certainly not even Cowley’s more artificial sequence of 1647, is, on the whole, so free from stain. Stanley’s exemption did not pass unnoticed; and William Fairfax (‘no man fitter!’) is careful to instruct us that Doris, Celinda, and Chariessa were ‘various rays’ of ‘one orient sun,’ and further, that ‘no coy ambitious names may here imagine earthly flames,’ because the poet’s professional and deliberate homage was really paid to inward beauty, and never to ‘roses of the cheek’ alone. Here we run up against a sweet and famous moral of Carew’s, which not Carew, but Stanley, bears out as the better symbolist of the two. Our poet does not appear to have contributed towards the religious literature of a day when the torrent of intense life in human hearts bred so much heaven-mounting spray, as well as so much necessary scum and refuse. But his was a temperament so religious that one almost expects to find somewhere a manuscript volume of ‘pious thoughts,’ the shy fruit of Stanley’s Christian ‘retirements’ at home. It will be noticed that there is one sad devotional poem in this book, ‘The lazy hours move slow’; and as it appears only in John Gamble’s book, 1657, it may fairly be inferred that it was written later than the other lyrics. In 1657 Stanley was two-and-thirty, and his singing-time, so far as we know, was over. He had discharged it well. He fails where any true artist may ever be expected to fail, in verses occasional and complimentary. But, to balance this, he is often exceptionally happy when translating.
His portrait, in middle age, by Faithorne after Lely, commends him to us all as quite worthy of the affection and applause which surrounded him from his youth, and never spoiled him. Brown-haired, hazel-eyed, fresh-cheeked, serene rather than gay, he seems the very incarnation of the ideal for which many others, less fortunate, hungered in that vexed England: the man ‘innocent and quiet,’ whose ‘mind to him a kingdom is,’ whose ‘treasure is in Minerva’s tower,’ and ‘who in the region of himself remains.’ Through the Civil struggle, the Commonwealth, the Restoration, he had followed a way of peace, without blame, and he is almost the only poet of the stormy time who is absolutely unaffected by it. He, at least, need not be discounted as a pathetic broken crystal: he can be judged on his own little plot of ground, without allowances, and by our strictest modern standards. His light bright best, his viridaria, have borne victoriously the lava-drift of nearly three centuries. An amorist of even temper and of malice prepense, a railer with a sound heart, an untyrannic master of his Muse, Stanley sings low to his small jocund lyre, and need not be too curiously questioned about his sincerity. How can it matter? He gives delight; he deserves the bays.
This little book is the first complete reprint of Stanley ever published: it is his original and inclusive output. The text is a new text, inasmuch as it represents the Editor’s choice of readings, among many variants; but variants are noted throughout, and by their number and interest tell their own tale of Stanley’s exacting and sure taste. A few translated lyrics are gathered into an Appendix. The title-pages of his few volumes will be found cited in the accompanying List of Editions.