"If thou hadst not
Been stern to me,
But left me free,
I had forgot
Myself and thee;
"For sin's so sweet,
As minds ill bent
Rarely repent,
Until they meet
Their punishment."
The way had been prepared for Ben Jonson's success as a dramatist—not to speak now of Shakespeare, Beaumont and Fletcher, Massinger, and Marlowe—by the miracle plays or mysteries of the middle ages, similar to those which are acted at the present time among the Indians in Mexico, and the famous Ammergau, or Passion Play, in Bavaria. In these plays, The Fall of Man, The Death of Abel, The Flood, Lazarus, Pilate's Wife's Dream, St. Catharine's Wheel, and the like, were brought on the stage with the approbation of the clergy, in order that they might bring home the mysteries of the faith to people's heart and imagination, and supply in some measure the place of books. The miracle plays had been succeeded in time by moral plays, which, from the early part of Henry VI.'s long reign, had represented apologues, not histories, by means of allegorical characters. Vices and Virtues, however, did not stand their ground long at the theatre. They gradually changed into beings less vague and shadowy, who, while they represented vices or virtues in the concrete, had, in addition, the charm of resembling real life.
Richard Crashaw's fame as a poet rests mainly on one line, and that in Latin; nor was the rest of his poetry of sufficient force and merit to enable him always to retain the credit of that single line. It has over and over again been attributed to Dryden and other hands. Yet it is positively his, and a poem in itself. It is to be found in a volume of Latin poems published by Crashaw in the year in which he graduated at Cambridge (1635). The line is a pentameter—on the miracle at Cana of Galilee—and consists of two dactyls, a spondee, and two anapests. It is often quoted inaccurately, but we give it exactly:
Nympha pudica Deum vidit, et erubuit.
"The modest water saw its God, and blushed."
The author's mind was devotional from his earliest years. He had always been hearing about religion; for his father preached at the Temple, and took part largely in the controversies of the day. There was one favorable feature in the religious polemics of that period—both sides professed belief in God and in the Christian religion; now our warfare is with atheists, deists, pantheists, positivists, with whom we have scarcely any common ground. After his election as a Fellow of Peterhouse in 1637—about the time that Hampden, Pym, and Cromwell himself were embarking for New England, and were forcibly detained from sailing—he became noted in the university as a preacher, and passed so much of his time in devotion that the author of the preface to his poems says: "He lodged under Tertullian's roof of angels. There he made his nest more gladly than David's swallow near the house of God. There, like a primitive saint, he offered more prayers in the night than others usually offer in the day. There he penned these poems: Steps for Happy Souls to climb to Heaven by."
In 1644, sorrow came to his calm nest; and as he would not sign the covenant, he was driven from the university he loved and from surroundings increasingly dear. Accomplished in Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Italian, and Spanish, skilled in drawing, music, and engraving, he was still more noted for his talent in the higher art of poetry. He belonged to what is called the fantastic school of Cowley, which is full of conceits. But "conceits" are often original and beautiful ideas quaintly expressed. The poetry of conceits was a reflex of the times, and is, with all its faults, far preferable to classic platitudes in flowing verse.
The overthrow of the Church of England by the Commonwealth was to Crashaw a cause of poignant regret. He could no longer bear to look on the towers and spires of venerable churches given over into the hands of bawling, nasal Puritans. He quitted England, and, crossing the Channel, found that, in France, he was a member of no church at all. His own communion was extinct, and he was a stranger to the Catholic Church, before whose altars he now stood as an alien. But he had taken up his residence in France, and it was not long before he decided on embracing the faith which that land prized as its most precious heritage. After the decisive battle of the Civil War had been fought at Naseby, the poet Cowley, who was an ardent royalist, visited Paris, and found Crashaw in great distress. He represented his case to Henrietta Maria, the exiled queen of England, and presented him to her. He received kindness from her majesty, and letters of recommendation to her friends in Italy. Having made his way to Rome, he became secretary to one of the cardinals, and was subsequently appointed canon of the church of Our Lady at Loretto. Here he resided during the remainder of his days, and died "a poet and a saint" (as Cowley calls him) in 1650, the year after the execution of Charles I.
Two years after his death, a volume of his posthumous poems was published; and his memory was honored by Cowley in what Thomas Arnold calls "one of the most loving and beautiful elegies ever written." His Steps to the Temple: Sacred Poems, and other Delights of the Muses, which appeared in 1646, had reached a second edition before his decease, and a third was published in 1670. In 1785, his entire poems were published in London, and included a translation of part of the Sospetto di Herode of Marini. His style resembled that of Herbert, and a few lines breathing a Catholic spirit shall be quoted from his works. It is called A Hymn to the Nativity:
"Gloomy night embraced the place
Where the noble Infant lay:
The babe looked up, and showed his face—
In spite of darkness, it was day.