Essays by Arthur Christopher Benson Part 4

The pa.s.sion for the country which breathes through his earlier poems, the free air which ruffles the page, the summer languors, the formal garden seen through the cas.e.m.e.nts of the cool house, the close scrutiny of woodland sounds, such as the harsh laughter of the woodp.e.c.k.e.r, the shrill insistence of the gra.s.shopper's dry note, the luscious content of the drowsy, croaking frogs, the musical sweep of the scythe through the falling swathe; all these are the work of no town-bred scholar like Milton, whose country poems are rather visions seen through the eyes of other poets, or written as a man might transcribe the vague and inaccurate emotions of a landscape drawn by some old uncertain hand and dimmed by smoke and time. Of course Milton's _Il Penseroso_ and _L'Allegro_ have far more value even as country poems than hundreds of more literal transcripts. From a literary point of view indeed the juxtapositions of half a dozen epithets alone would prove the genius of the writer. But there are no sharp outlines; the scholar pauses in his walk to peer across the watered flat, or raises his eyes from his book to see the quiver of leaves upon the sunlit wall; he notes an effect it may be; but his images do not come like treasures lavished from a secret storehouse of memory.

With Andrew Marvell it is different, though we will show by instances that even his observation was sometimes at fault. Where or when this pa.s.sion came to him we cannot tell; whether in the great walled garden at the back of the old school-house at Hull, where his boyish years were spent; at Cambridge, where the oozy streams lapped and green fens crawled almost into the heart of the town, where snipe were shot and wild-duck snared on the site of some of its now populous streets; at Meldreth perhaps, where doubtless some antique kindred lingered at the old manor-house that still bears his patronymic, "the Marvells."--Wherever it was,--and such tastes are rarely formed in later years--the delicate observation of the minute philosopher, side by side with the art of intimate expression, grew and bloomed.

We see a trace of that leaning nature, the trailing dependence of the uneasy will of which we have already spoken, in a story of his early years. The keen-eyed boy, with his fresh colour and waving brown hair, was thrown on the tumultuous world of Cambridge, it seems, before he was thirteen years of age; a strange medley no doubt,--its rough publicity alone saving it, as with a dash of healthy freshness, from the effeminacy and sentimentalism apt to breed in more sheltered societies.

The details of the story vary; but the boy certainly fell into the hands of Jesuits, who finally induced him to abscond to one of their retreats in London, where, over a bookseller's shop, after a long and weary search, his father found him and persuaded him to return. Laborious Dr.

Grosart has extracted from the Hull Records a most curious letter relating to this incident, in which a man whose son has been inveigled away in similar circ.u.mstances, asks for advice from Andrew Marvell's father.

Such an escapade belongs to a mind that must have been ardent and daring beyond its fellows; but it also shows a somewhat s.h.i.+fting foundation, an imagination easily dazzled, and a pliability of will that cost us, we may believe, a poet. After Cambridge came some years of travel, which afforded material for some of his poems, such as the satire on Holland, of which the cleverness is still apparent, though its elaborate coa.r.s.eness and pedantic humour make it poor pasture to feed the mind upon.

But the period to which we owe almost all the true gold among his poems, is the two years which he spent at Nunappleton House, 1650-1652, as tutor to the daughter of the great Lord Fairfax, the little Lady Mary Fairfax, then twelve years old. Marvell was at this time twenty-nine; and that exquisite relation which may exist between a grown man, pure in heart, and a young girl, when disparity of fortune and circ.u.mstance forbids all thought of marriage, seems to have been the mainspring of his song. Such a relation is half tenderness which dissembles its pa.s.sion, and half wors.h.i.+p which laughs itself away in easy phrases. The lyric "Young Love," which indubitably though not confessedly refers to Mary Fairfax, is one of the sweetest poems of pure feeling in the language.

Common beauties stay fifteen; Such as yours should swifter move, Whose fair blossoms are too green Yet for l.u.s.t, but not for love.

Love as much the snowy lamb, Or the wanton kid, doth prize As the l.u.s.ty bull or ram, For his morning sacrifice.

Now then love me; Time may take Thee before thy time away; Of this need we'll virtue make, And learn love before we may.

It is delightful in this connection to think of the signet-ring with the device of a fawn,--which he used in early life and may still be seen on his papers,--as a gift of his little pupil, earned doubtless by his poem on the Dying Fawn, which is certainly an episode of Lady Mary's childhood.

In this group of early poems, which are worth all the rest of Marvell's work put together, several strains predominate. In the first place there is a close observation of Nature, even a grotesque transcription, with which we are too often accustomed only to credit later writers. For instance, in "Damon the Mower" he writes:

The gra.s.shopper its pipe gives o'er, And hamstringed frogs can dance no more; But in the brook the green frog wades, And gra.s.shoppers seek out the shades.

The second line of this we take to refer to the condition to which frogs are sometimes reduced in a season of extreme drought, when the pools are dry. Marvell must have seen a frog with his thighs drawn and contracted from lack of moisture making his way slowly through the gra.s.s in search of a refres.h.i.+ng swamp; this is certainly minute observation, as the phenomenon is a rare one. Again, such a delicate couplet as,

And through the hazels thick espy The hatching throstle's s.h.i.+ning eye,

is not the work of a scholar who walks a country road, but of a man who will push his way into the copses in early spring, and has watched with delight the timorous eye and the upturned beak of the thrush sunk in her nest. Or again, speaking of the dwindled summer stream running so perilously clear after weeks of drought that the fish are languid:

The stupid fishes hang, as plain As flies in crystal overta'en,

Or of the hayfield roughly mown, into which the herd has been turned to graze:

And what below the scythe increast, Is pinched yet nearer by the beast.

The mower's work, begun and ended with the dews, in all its charming monotony, seems to have had a peculiar attraction for Marvell; he recurs to it in more than one poem.

I am the mower Damon, known Through all the meadows I have mown; On me the morn her dew distils Before her darling daffodils.

And again, of the mowers,

Who seem like Israelites to be Walking on foot through a green sea.

To them the gra.s.sy deeps divide And crowd a lane to either side.

The aspects of the country on which he dwells with deepest pleasure--and here lies the charm--are not those of Nature in her sublimer or more elated moods, but the gentler and more pastoral elements, that are apt to pa.s.s unnoticed at the time by all but the true lovers of the quiet country side, and crowd in upon the mind when surfeited by the wilder glories of peak and precipice, or where tropical luxuriance side by side with tropical aridity blinds and depresses the sense, with the feeling that made Browning cry from Florence,

Oh, to be in England, now that April's there!

Marvell's lines, "On the Hill and Grove at Billborow," are an instance of this; there is a certain fantastic craving after ant.i.thesis and strangeness, it is true, but the spirit underlies the lines. The poem however must be read in its entirety to gain the exact impression.

Again, for simple felicity, what could be more airily drawn than the following from "The Garden"?--

Here at the fountain's sliding foot, Or at some fruit-tree's mossy root, Casting the body's vest aside, My soul into the boughs doth glide, There like a bird it sits and sings, Then whets and claps its silver wings.

Or this, from the Song to celebrate the marriage of Lord Fauconberg and the Lady Mary Cromwell, of the undisturbed dead of night?--

The astrologer's own eyes are set, And even wolves the sheep forget; Only this shepherd, late and soon, Upon this hill outwakes the moon.

Hark! how he sings with sad delight Through the clear and silent night.

Other poems, such as the "Ode on the Drop of Dew" and the "Nymph Complaining for the Death of her Fawn," too long to be quoted here, are penetrated with the same essence.

At the same time it must be confessed that Marvell's imagery is sometimes at fault--it would be strange if it were not so; he falls now and then, the wonder is how rarely, to a mere literary conceit. Thus the mower Damon sees himself reflected in his scythe; the fawn feeds on roses till its lip "seems to bleed," not with a possibly lurking thorn, but with the hue of its pasturage. With Hobbinol and Tomalin for the names of swain and nymph unreality is apt to grow. When the garden is compared to a fortress and its scents to a salvo of artillery--

Well shot, ye firemen! O how sweet And round your equal fires do meet--

and,

Then in some flower's beloved hut Each bee as sentinel is shut, And sleeps so, too--but if once stirred, She runs you through, nor asks the word--

here, in spite of a certain curious felicity, we are in the region of false tradition and rococo expression. The poem of "Eyes and Tears,"

again (so whimsically admired by Archbishop Trench), is little more than a string of conceits; and when in "Mourning" we hear that

She courts herself in amorous rain, Herself both Danae and the shower;

when we are introduced to Indian divers who plunge in the tears and can find no bottom, we think of Macaulay's "Tears of Sensibility," and Crashaw's fearful lines on the Magdalene's eyes--

Two walking baths, two weeping motions, Portable and compendious oceans.

Nevertheless Marvell's poems are singularly free as a rule from this strain of affectation. He has none of the morbidity that often pa.s.ses for refinement. The free air, the wood-paths, the full heat of the summer sun--this is his scenery; we are not brought into contact with the bones beneath the rose-bush, the splintered sun-dial, and the stagnant pool. His pulses throb with ardent life, and have none of the "inexplicable faintness" of a deathlier school. What would not Crashaw have had to say of the "Nuns of Appleton" if he had been so unfortunate as to have lighted on them? But Marvell writes:

Our orient breaths perfumed are With incense of incessant prayer, And holy water of our tears Most strangely our complexion clears; Not tears of Grief, but such as those With which calm Pleasure overflows.

And pa.s.sing by a sweet and natural transition to his little pupil, the young Recluse of Nunappleton--

I see the angels, in a crown, On you the lilies showering down, And, round about you, glory breaks, That something more than human speaks

The poems contain within themselves the germ of the later growth of satire in the shape of caustic touches of humour, as well as a certain austere philosophy that is apt to peer behind the superficial veil of circ.u.mstance, yet without dreary introspection. There is a Dialogue between Soul and Body, which deals with the duality of human nature which has been the despair of all philosophers and the painful axiom of all religious teachers. Marvell makes the Soul say:

Constrained not only to endure Diseases, but what's worse, the cure, And ready oft the port to gain, Am s.h.i.+pwrecked into health again.

In the same connection in "The Coronet," an allegory of the Ideal and the Real, he says:

Alas! I find the serpent old, Twining in his speckled breast, About the flowers disguised doth fold, With wreaths of fame and interest.

Much of Marvell's philosophy however has not the same vitality, born of personal struggle and discomfiture, but is a mere echo of stoical and pagan views of life and its vanities drawn from Horace and Seneca, who seem to have been his favourite authors. Such a sentiment as the following, from "Appleton House"--

But he, superfluously spread, Demands more room alive than dead; What need of all this marble crust, To impart the wanton mole of dust?--