Lives of the Poets Part 7

The diction, being the vehicle of the thoughts, first presents itself to the intellectual eye; and, if the first appearance offends, a further knowledge is not often sought. Whatever professes to benefit by pleasing, must please at once. The pleasures of the mind imply something sudden and unexpected; that which elevates must always surprise. What is perceived by slow degrees may gratify us with the consciousness of improvement, but will never strike with the sense of pleasure.

Of all this, Cowley appears to have been without knowledge, or without care. He makes no selection of words, nor seeks any neatness of phrase: he has no elegancies, either lucky or elaborate: as his endeavours were rather to impress sentences upon the understanding than images on the fancy, he has few epithets, and those scattered without peculiar propriety or nice adaptation. It seems to follow from the necessity of the subject, rather than the care of the writer, that the diction of his heroick poem is less familiar than that of his slightest writings. He has given not the same numbers, but the same diction, to the gentle Anacreon and the tempestuous Pindar.

His versification seems to have had very little of his care; and, if what he thinks be true, that his numbers are unmusical only when they are ill read, the art of reading them is at present lost; for they are commonly harsh to modern ears. He has, indeed, many n.o.ble lines, such as the feeble care of Waller never could produce. The bulk of his thoughts sometimes swelled his verse to unexpected and inevitable grandeur; but his excellence of this kind is merely fortuitous: he sinks willingly down to his general carelessness, and avoids, with very little care, either meanness or asperity.

His contractions are often rugged and harsh:

One flings a mountain, and its rivers too Torn up with 't.

His rhymes are very often made by p.r.o.nouns, or particles, or the like unimportant words, which disappoint the ear, and destroy the energy of the line.

His combination of different measures is, sometimes, dissonant and unpleasing; he joins verses together, of which the former does not slide easily into the latter.

The words _do_ and _did_, which so much degrade, in present estimation, the line that admits them, were, in the time of Cowley, little censured or avoided; how often he used them, and with how bad an effect, at least to our ears, will appear by a pa.s.sage, in which every reader will lament to see just and n.o.ble thoughts defrauded of their praise by inelegance of language:

Where honour or where conscience _does_ not bind, No other law shall shackle me; Slave to myself I ne'er will be; Nor shall my future actions be confin'd By my own present mind.

Who by resolves and vows engag'd _does_ stand For days, that yet belong to fate, _Does_, like an unthrift, mortgage his estate, Before it falls into his hand; The bondman of the cloister so, All that he _does_ receive _does_ always owe: And still, as time comes in, it goes away, Not to enjoy, but debts to pay!

Unhappy slave, and pupil to a bell, Which his hour's work, as well as hours, _does_ tell!

Unhappy till the last, the kind releasing knell.

His heroick lines are often formed of monosyllables; but yet they are sometimes sweet and sonorous.

He says of the Messiah:

Round the whole earth his dreaded name shall sound, _And reach to worlds that must not yet be found_.

In another place, of David:

Yet bid him go securely, when he sends; _'Tis Saul that is his foe, and we his friends.

The man who has his G.o.d, no aid can lack; And we who bid him go, will bring him back._

Yet, amidst his negligence, he sometimes attempted an improved and scientifick versification; of which it will be best to give his own account subjoined to this line:

Nor can the glory contain itself in th' endless s.p.a.ce.

"I am sorry that it is necessary to admonish the most part of readers, that it is not by negligence that this verse is so loose, long, and, as it were, vast; it is to paint in the number the nature of the thing which it describes, which I would have observed in divers other places of this poem, that else will pa.s.s for very careless verses: as before,

And overruns the neighb'ring fields with violent course.

"In the second book,

Down a precipice deep, down he casts them all.

"And,

And fell a-down his shoulders with loose care

"In the third,

Bra.s.s was his helmet, his boots bra.s.s, and o'er His breast a thick plate of strong bra.s.s he wore.

"In the fourth,

Like some fair pine o'erlooking all th' ign.o.bler wood.

"And,

Some from the rocks cast themselves down headlong.

"And many more: but it is enough to instance in a few. The thing is, that the disposition of words and numbers should be such, as that, out of the order and sound of them, the things themselves may be represented. This the Greeks were not so accurate as to bind themselves to; neither have our English poets observed it, for aught I can find.

The Latins (qui musas colunt severiores) sometimes did it; and their prince, Virgil, always, in whom the examples are innumerable, and taken notice of by all judicious men, so that it is superfluous to collect them."

I know not whether he has, in many of these instances, attained the representation or resemblance that he purposes. Verse can imitate only sound and motion. A _boundless_ verse, a _headlong_ verse, and a verse of _bra.s.s_, or of _strong bra.s.s_, seem to comprise very incongruous and unsociable ideas. What there is peculiar in the sound of the line expressing _loose care_, I cannot discover; nor why the _pine_ is _taller_ in an alexandrine than in ten syllables.

But, not to defraud him of his due praise, he has given one example of representative versification, which, perhaps, no other English line can equal:

Begin, be bold, and venture to be wise: He, who defers this work from day to day, Does on a river's bank expecting stay Till the whole stream that stopp'd him shall be gone, _Which runs, and, as it runs, for ever shall run on_.

Cowley was, I believe, the first poet that mingled alexandrines, at pleasure, with the common heroick of ten syllables; and from him Dryden borrowed the practice, whether ornamental or licentious. He considered the verse of twelve syllables as elevated and majestick, and has, therefore, deviated into that measure, when he supposes the voice heard of the supreme being.

The author of the Davideis is commended by Dryden for having written it in couplets, because he discovered that any staff was too lyrical for an heroick poem; but this seems to have been known before by May and Sandys, the translators of the Pharsalia and the Metamorphoses.

In the Davideis are some hemistichs, or verses left imperfect by the author, in imitation of Virgil, whom he supposes not to have intended to complete them: that this opinion is erroneous, may be probably concluded, because this truncation is imitated by no subsequent Roman poet; because Virgil himself filled up one broken line in the heat of recitation; because in one the sense is now unfinished; and because all that can be done by a broken verse, a line intersected by a _caesura_ and a full stop, will equally effect.

Of triplets, in his Davideis, he makes no use, and, perhaps, did not, at first, think them allowable; but he appears afterwards to have changed his mind, for, in the verses on the government of Cromwell, he inserts them liberally with great happiness.

After so much criticism on his poems, the essays which accompany them must not be forgotten. What is said by Sprat of his conversation, that no man could draw from it any suspicion of his excellence in poetry, may be applied to these compositions. No author ever kept his verse and his prose at a greater distance from each other. His thoughts are natural, and his style has a smooth and placid equability, which has never yet obtained its due commendation. Nothing is far-sought, or hard-laboured; but all is easy without feebleness, and familiar without grossness.

It has been observed by Felton, in his essay on the Cla.s.sicks, that Cowley was beloved by every muse that he courted; and that he has rivalled the ancients in every kind of poetry but tragedy.

It may be affirmed, without any encomiastick fervour, that he brought to his poetick labours a mind replete with learning, and that his pages are embellished with all the ornaments which books could supply; that he was the first who imparted to English numbers the enthusiasm of the greater ode, and the gaiety of the less; that he was equally qualified for sprightly sallies, and for lofty flights; that he was among those who freed translation from servility, and, instead of following his author at a distance, walked by his side; and that if he left versification yet improvable, he left likewise, from time to time, such specimens of excellence as enabled succeeding poets to improve it.

The insertion of Cowley's epitaph may be interesting to our readers.

Epitaphium Autoris In Ecclesia D. Petri apud Westmonasterienses Sepulti.

Abrahamus Cowleius, Anglorum Pindarus, Flaccus, Maro, Deliciae, Decus, Desiderium, Aevi sui, Hic juxta situs est.

Aurea dum volitant late tua scripta per orbem, Et fama aeternum vivis, divine poeta, Hic placida jaceas requie: custodiat urnam Cana fides, vigilentque perenni lampade musae Sit sacer iste locus; nee quis temerarius ausit Sacrilega turbare manu venerabile bustum.

Intacti maneant; maneant per saecula dulces Cowleii cineres, serventque immobile saxum.

Sic vovatque Votumque suum apud posteros sacratum esse voluit Qui viro incomparabili posult sepulchrale marmor, Georgius Dux Buckinghamiae.

Excessit e vita Anno Aetatis suae 49 et honorifica pompa elatus ex Aedibus Buckinghamianis, viris ill.u.s.tribus omnium ordinum exequias celebrantibus, sepultus est die 3 M. Augusti, Anno Domini 1667.

[Footnote 6: This volume was not published before 1633, when Cowley was fifteeyears old. Dr. Johnson, as well as former biographers, seems to have been misled by the portrait of Cowley being, by mistake, marked with the age of thirteen years. R.]