Lives of the English Poets : Waller, Milton, Cowley

This consideration cannot but abate in some measure the reader’s esteem for the works and the author.  To love excellence is natural; it is natural likewise for the lover to solicit reciprocal regard by an elaborate display of his own qualifications.  The desire of pleasing has in different men produced actions of heroism, and effusions of wit; but it seems as reasonable to appear the champion as the poet of an airy “nothing,” and to quarrel as to write for what Cowley might have learned from his master Pindar to call “the dream of a shadow.”

It is surely not difficult, in the solitude of a college, or in the bustle of the world, to find useful studies and serious employment.  No man needs to be so burdened with life as to squander it in voluntary dreams of fictitious occurrences.  The man that sits down to suppose himself charged with treason or peculation, and heats his mind to an elaborate purgation of his character from crimes which he was never within the possibility of committing, differs only by the infrequency of his folly from him who praises beauty which he never saw; complains of jealousy which he never felt; supposes himself sometimes invited, and sometimes forsaken; fatigues his fancy, and ransacks his memory for images which may exhibit the gaiety of hope or the gloominess of despair; and dresses his imaginary Chloris or Phyllis sometimes in flowers fading as her beauty, and sometimes in gems lasting as her virtues.

At Paris, as secretary to Lord Jermyn, he was engaged in transacting things of real importance with real men and real women, and at that time did not much employ his thoughts upon phantoms of gallantry.  Some of his letters to Mr. Bennet, afterwards Earl of Arlington, from April to December, in 1650, are preserved in “Miscellanea Aulica,” a collection of papers published by Brown.  These letters, being written like those of other men whose minds are more on things than words, contribute no otherwise to his reputation, than as they show him to have been above the affectation of unseasonable elegance, and to have known that the business of a statesman can be little forwarded by flowers of rhetoric.

One passage, however, seems not unworthy of some notice.  Speaking of the Scotch treaty then in agitation:

“The Scotch treaty,” says he, “is the only thing now in which we are vitally concerned; I am one of the last hopers, and yet cannot now abstain from believing that an agreement will be made; all people upon the place incline to that opinion.  The Scotch will moderate something of the rigour of their demands; the mutual necessity of an accord is visible; the king is persuaded of it.  And to tell you the truth (which I take to be an argument above all the rest), Virgil has told me something to that purpose.”

This expression, from a secretary of the present time, would be considered as merely ludicrous, or at most as an ostentatious display of scholarship; but the manners of that time were so tinged with superstition, that I cannot but suspect Cowley of having consulted on this great occasion the Virgilian lots, and to have given some credit to the answer of his oracle.

Some years afterwards, “business,” says Sprat, “passed of course into other hands;” and Cowley, being no longer useful at Paris, was in 1656 sent back into England, that, “under pretence of privacy and retirement, he might take occasion of giving notice of the posture of things in this nation.”

Soon after his return to London, he was seized by some messengers of the usurping powers, who were sent out in quest of another man; and being examined, was put into confinement, from which he was not dismissed without the security of a thousand pounds given by Dr. Scarborough.

This year he published his poems, with a preface, in which he seems to have inserted something suppressed in subsequent editions, which was interpreted to denote some relaxation of his loyalty.  In this preface he declares, that “his desire had been for some days past, and did still very vehemently continue, to retire himself to some of the American plantations, and to forsake this world for ever.”

From the obloquy which the appearance of submission to the usurpers brought upon him, his biographer has been very diligent to clear him, and indeed it does not seem to have lessened his reputation.  His wish for retirement we can easily believe to be undissembled; a man harassed in one kingdom, and persecuted in another, who, after a course of business that employed all his days and half his nights, in ciphering and deciphering, comes to his own country and steps into a prison, will be willing enough to retire to some place of quiet and of safety.  Yet let neither our reverence for a genius, nor our pity for a sufferer, dispose us to forget, that, if his activity was virtue, his retreat was cowardice.

He then took upon him the character of physician, still, according to Sprat, with intention “to dissemble the main design of his coming over;” and, as Mr. Wood relates, “complying with the men then in power (which was much taken notice of by the royal party), he obtained an order to be created doctor of physic; which being done to his mind (whereby he gained the ill-will of some of his friends), he went into France again, having made a copy of verses on Oliver’s death.”

This is no favourable representation; yet even in this not much wrong can be discovered.  How far he complied with the men in power is to be inquired before he can be blamed.  It is not said that he told them any secrets, or assisted them by intelligence or any other act.  If he only promised to be quiet, that they in whose hands he was might free him from confinement, he did what no law of society prohibits.

The man whose miscarriage in a just cause has put him in the power of his enemy, may, without any breach of his integrity, regain his liberty, or preserve his life, by a promise of neutrality: for the stipulation gives the enemy nothing which he had not before.  The neutrality of a captive may be always secured by his imprisonment or death.  He that is at the disposal of another may not promise to aid him in any injurious act, because no power can compel active obedience.  He may engage to do nothing, but not to do ill.

There is reason to think that Cowley promised little.  It does not appear that his compliance gained him confidence enough to be trusted without security, for the bond of his bail was never cancelled; nor that it made him think himself secure, for, at that dissolution of government which followed the death of Oliver, he returned into France, where he resumed his former station, and stayed till the restoration.

“He continued,” says his biographer, “under these bonds till the general deliverance;” it is therefore to be supposed that he did not go to France, and act again for the king, without the consent of his bondsman: that he did not show his loyalty at the hazard of his friend, but by his friend’s permission.

Of the verses on Oliver’s death, in which Wood’s narrative seems to imply something encomiastic, there has been no appearance.  There is a discourse concerning his government, indeed, with verses intermixed, but such as certainly gained its author no friends among the abettors of usurpation.

A doctor of physic, however, he was made at Oxford in December, 1657; and in the commencement of the Royal Society, of which an account has been published by Dr. Birch, he appears busy among the experimental philosophers with the title of Doctor Cowley.

There is no reason for supposing that he ever attempted practice: but his preparatory studies have contributed something to the honour of his country.  Considering botany as necessary to a physician, he retired into Kent to gather plants; and as the predominance of a favourite study affects all subordinate operations of the intellect, botany in the mind of Cowley turned into poetry.  He composed, in Latin, several books on plants, of which the first and second display the qualities of herbs, in elegiac verse; the third and fourth, the beauties of flowers, in various measures; and the fifth and sixth, the use of trees, in heroic numbers.

At the same time were produced, from the same university, the two great poets, Cowley and Milton, of dissimilar genius, of opposite principles, but concurring in the cultivation of Latin poetry; in which the English, till their works and May’s poem appeared, seemed unable to contest the palm with any other of the lettered nations.

If the Latin performances of Cowley and Milton be compared (for May I hold to be superior to both), the advantage seems to lie on the side of Cowley.  Milton is generally content to express the thoughts of the ancients in their language; Cowley, without much loss of purity or elegance, accommodates the diction of Rome to his own conceptions.

At the Restoration, after all the diligence of his long service, and with consciousness, not only of the merit of fidelity, but of the dignity of great abilities, he naturally expected ample preferments; and, that he might not be forgotten by his own fault, wrote a song of triumph.  But this was a time of such general hope, that great numbers were inevitably disappointed; and Cowley found his reward very tediously delayed.  He had been promised, by both Charles the First and Second, the mastership of the Savoy; “but he lost it,” says Wood, “by certain persons, enemies to the Muses.”

The neglect of the court was not his only mortification; having by such alteration as he thought proper, fitted his old comedy of “The Guardian” for the stage, he produced it under the title of “The Cutter of Coleman Street.”  It was treated on the stage with great severity, and was afterwards censured as a satire on the king’s party.

Mr. Dryden, who went with Mr. Sprat to the first exhibition, related to Mr. Dennis, “that, when they told Cowley how little favour had been shown him, he received the news of his ill success, not with so much firmness as might have been expected from so great a man.”

What firmness they expected, or what weakness Cowley discovered, cannot be known.  He that misses his end will never be as much pleased as he that attains it, even when he can impute no part of his failure to himself; and when the end is to please the multitude, no man perhaps has a right, in things admitting of gradation and comparison, to throw the whole blame upon his judges, and totally to exclude diffidence and shame, by a haughty consciousness of his own excellence.

For the rejection of this play it is difficult now to find the reason: it certainly has, in a very great degree, the power of fixing attention and exciting merriment.  From the charge of disaffection he exculpates himself in his preface, by observing how unlikely it is, that, having followed the royal family through all their distresses, “he should choose the time of their restoration to begin a quarrel with them.”  It appears, however, from the theatrical register of Downes the prompter, to have been popularly considered as a satire on the royalists.

That he might shorten this tedious suspense, he published his pretensions and his discontent in an ode called “The Complaint;” in which he styles himself the melancholy Cowley.  This met with the usual fortune of complaints, and seems to have excited more contempt than pity.

These unlucky incidents are brought, maliciously enough, together in some stanzas, written about that time on the choice of a laureate; a mode of satire, by which, since it was first introduced by Suckling, perhaps every generation of poets has been teased.

Savoy-missing Cowley came into the court,
Making apologies for his bad play;
Every one gave him so good a report,
That Apollo gave heed to all he could say:

Nor would he have had, ’tis thought, a rebuke,
Unless he had done some notable folly;
Writ verses unjustly in praise of Sam Tuke,
Or printed his pitiful Melancholy.

His vehement desire of retirement now came again upon him.  “Not finding,” says the morose Wood, “that preferment conferred upon him which he expected, while others for their money carried away most places, he retired discontented into Surrey.”

“He was now,” says the courtly Sprat, “weary of the vexations and formalities of an active condition.  He had been perplexed with a long compliance to foreign manners.  He was satiated with the arts of a court; which sort of life, though his virtue made it innocent to him, yet nothing could make it quiet.  Those were the reasons that moved him to follow the violent inclination of his own mind, which, in the greatest throng of his former business, had still called upon him, and represented to him the true delights of solitary studies, of temperate pleasures, and a moderate revenue below the malice and flatteries of fortune.”

So differently are things seen! and so differently are they shown!  But actions are visible, though motives are secret.  Cowley certainly retired; first to Barn Elms, and afterwards to Chertsey, in Surrey.  He seems, however, to have lost part of his dread of the hum of men.  He thought himself now safe enough from intrusion, without the defence of mountains and oceans; and, instead of seeking shelter in America, wisely went only so far from the bustle of life as that he might easily find his way back when solitude should grow tedious.  His retreat was at first but slenderly accommodated; yet he soon obtained, by the interest of the Earl of St. Alban’s, and the Duke of Buckingham, such lease of the queen’s lands as afforded him an ample income.

By the lovers of virtue and of wit it will be solicitously asked, if he now was happy.  Let them peruse one of his letters accidentally preserved by Peck, which I recommend to the consideration of all that may hereafter pant for solitude.

“To Dr. Thomas Sprat,

    “Chertsey, May 21, 1665.

“The first night that I came hither I caught so great a cold, with a defluxion of rheum, as made me keep my chamber ten days.  And, two after, had such a bruise on my ribs with a fall, that I am yet unable to move or turn myself in my bed.  This is my personal fortune here to begin with.  And, besides, I can get no money from my tenants, and have my meadows eaten up every night by cattle put in by my neighbours.  What this signifies, or may come to in time, God knows; if it be ominous, it can end in nothing less than hanging.  Another misfortune has been, and stranger than all the rest, that you have broke your word with me and failed to come, even though you told Mr. Bois that you would.  This is what they call monstri simile.  I do hope to recover my late hurt so far within five or six days (though it be uncertain yet whether I shall ever recover it) as to walk about again.  And then, methinks, you and I and the dean might be very merry upon St. Ann’s Hill.  You might very conveniently come hither the way of Hampton Town, lying there one night.  I write this in pain, and can say no more: verbum sapienti.”

He did not long enjoy the pleasure or suffer the uneasiness of solitude; for he died at the Porch-house in Chertsey, in 1667 [28th July], in the forty-ninth year of his age.

He was buried with great pomp near Chaucer and Spenser; and King Charles pronounced, “That Mr. Cowley had not left behind him a better man in England.”  He is represented by Dr. Sprat as the most amiable of mankind; and this posthumous praise may safely be credited, as it has never been contradicted by envy or by faction.

Such are the remarks and memorials which I have been able to add to the narrative of Dr. Sprat; who, writing when the feuds of civil war were yet recent, and the minds of either party were easily irritated, was obliged to pass over many transactions in general expressions, and to leave curiosity often unsatisfied.  What he did not tell cannot, however, now be known; I must therefore recommend the perusal of his work, to which my narration can be considered only as a slender supplement.

Cowley, like other poets who have written with narrow views, and, instead of tracing intellectual pleasure to its natural sources in the minds of men, paid their court to temporary prejudices, has been at one time too much praised, and too much neglected at another.

Wit, like all other things subject by their nature to the choice of man, has its changes and fashions, and at different times takes different forms.  About the beginning of the seventeenth century appeared a race of writers that may be termed the metaphysical poets; of whom, in a criticism on the works of Cowley, it is not improper to give some account.

The metaphysical poets were men of learning, and to show their learning was their whole endeavour; but, unluckily resolving to show it in rhyme, instead of writing poetry they only wrote verses, and very often such verses as stood the trial of the finger better than of the ear; for the modulation was so imperfect, that they were only found to be verses by counting the syllables.

If the father of criticism had rightly denominated poetry τéχνη μιμητικὴ, an imitative art, these writers will, without great wrong, lose their right to the name of poets; for they cannot be said to have imitated anything; they neither copied nature nor life; neither painted the forms of matter, nor represented the operations of intellect.

Those, however, who deny them to be poets, allow them to be wits.  Dryden confesses of himself and his contemporaries, that they fall below Donne in wit; but maintains that they surpass him in poetry.

If wit be well described by Pope, as being “that which has been often thought, but was never before so well expressed,” they certainly never attained, nor ever sought it; for they endeavoured to be singular in their thoughts, and were careless of their diction.  But Pope’s account of wit is undoubtedly erroneous; he depresses it below its natural dignity, and reduces it from strength of thought to happiness of language.

If by a more noble and more adequate conception, that be considered as wit which is at once natural and new, that which, though not obvious, is, upon its first production, acknowledged to be just; if it be that which he that never found it, wonders how he missed; to wit of this kind the metaphysical poets have seldom risen.  Their thoughts are often new, but seldom natural; they are not obvious, but neither are they just; and the reader, far from wondering that he missed them, wonders more frequently by what perverseness of industry they were ever found.

But wit, abstracted from its effects upon the hearer, may be more rigorously and philosophically considered as a kind of discordia concors; a combination of dissimilar images, or discovery of occult resemblances in things apparently unlike.  Of wit, thus defined, they have more than enough.  The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together; nature and art are ransacked for illustrations, comparisons, and allusions; their learning instructs, and their subtlety surprises; but the reader commonly thinks his improvement dearly bought, and though he sometimes admires, is seldom pleased.