Andrew Marvell Part 4

This poem, having a biographical value, I have quoted at, perhaps, too great length. Other poems of this garden-period of Marvell's life are better known. His own English version of his Latin poem _Hortus_ contains lovely stanzas:--

"How vainly men themselves amaze To win the palm, the oak, or bays; And their uncessant labours see Crowned from some single herb or tree, Whose short and narrow-verged shade Does prudently their toils upbraid; While all the flowers and trees do close, To weave the garlands of Repose!

Fair Quiet, have I found thee here, And Innocence, thy sister dear?

Mistaken long, I sought you then In busy companies of men.

Your sacred plants, if here below, Only among the plants will grow; Society is all but rude To this delicious solitude.

No white nor red was ever seen So amorous as this lovely green.

What wond'rous life is this I lead!

Ripe apples drop about my head; The luscious cl.u.s.ters of the vine Upon my mouth do crush their wine; The nectarine, and curious peach, Into my hands themselves do reach; Stumbling on melons, as I pa.s.s, Insnared with flowers, I fall on gra.s.s.

Meanwhile the mind, from pleasure less, Withdraws into its happiness;-- The mind, that ocean where each kind Does straight its own resemblance find;-- Yet it creates, transcending these, Far other worlds, and other seas, Annihilating all that's made To a green thought in a green shade."[46:1]

Well known as are Marvell's lines to his Coy Mistress, I have not the heart to omit them, so eminently characteristic are they of his style and humour:--

"Had we but world enough and time, This coyness, lady, were no crime.

We would sit down and think which way To walk, and pa.s.s our long love's day.

Thou by the Indian Ganges' side Should'st rubies find: I by the tide Of Humber would complain. I would Love you ten years before the Flood, And you should, if you please, refuse Till the conversion of the Jews.

My vegetable love should grow Vaster than empires and more slow.

An hundred years should go to praise Thine eyes, and on thy forehead gaze; Two hundred to adore each breast, But thirty thousand to the rest; An age at least to every part, And the last age should show your heart.

For, lady, you deserve this state, Nor would I love at lower rate.

But at my back I always hear Time's winged chariot hurrying near, And yonder all before us lie Deserts of vast eternity.

Thy beauty shall no more be found, Nor in thy marble vault shall sound My echoing song; then worms shall try That long-preserved virginity, And your quaint honour turn to dust, And into ashes all my l.u.s.t.

The grave's a fine and private place, But none, I think, do there embrace.

Now, therefore, while the youthful hue Sits on thy skin like morning dew, And while thy willing soul transpires At every pore with instant fires, Now, let us sport us while we may; And now, like amorous birds of prey, Rather at once our time devour, Than languish in his slow-chapt power!

Let us roll all our strength, and all Our sweetness up into one ball; And tear our pleasures with rough strife, Through the iron gates of life!

Thus, though we cannot make our sun Stand still, yet we will make him run."

Mr. Aitken's valuable edition of Marvell's poems and satires can now be had of all booksellers for two s.h.i.+llings,[47:1] and with these volumes in his possession the judicious reader will be able to supply his own reflections whilst life beneath the sun is still his. Poetry is a personal matter. The very canons of criticism are themselves literature.

If we like the _Ars Poetica_, it is because we enjoy reading Horace.

FOOTNOTES:

[20:1] For an account of Flecknoe, see Southey's _Omniana_, i. 105. Lamb placed some fine lines of Flecknoe's at the beginning of the Essay _A Quakers' Meeting_.

[24:1] Grosart, vol. iii. p. 175.

[24:2] _See_ preface to _Religio Laici_, Scott's _Dryden_, vol. x. p.

27.

[24:3] Jeremy Collier in his _Historical Dictionary_ (1705) describes Marvell, to whom he allows more s.p.a.ce (though it is but a few lines) than he does to Shakespeare, "as to his opinion he was a dissenter." In Collier's opinion Marvell may have been no better than a dissenter, but in fact he was a Churchman all his life, and it was Collier who lived to become a non-juror and a dissenter, and a schismatical bishop to boot.

[31:1] _Life of Lord Fairfax_, by C.R. Markham (1870), p. 365.

[35:1] The fifth edition is dated 1703.

[46:1] Many a reader has made his first acquaintance with Marvell on reading these lines in the _Essays of Elia_ (_The Old Benchers of the Inner Temple_).

[47:1] _Poems and Satires of Andrew Marvell_, 2 vols. Routledge, 1905.

CHAPTER III

A CIVIL SERVANT IN THE TIME OF THE COMMONWEALTH

When Andrew Marvell first made John Milton's acquaintance is not known.

They must both have had common friends at or belonging to Cambridge.

Fairfax may have made the two men known to each other, although it is just as likely that Milton introduced Marvell to Fairfax. All we know is that when the engagement at Nunappleton House came to an end, Marvell, being then minded to serve the State in some civil capacity, applied to the Secretary for Foreign Tongues for what would now be called a testimonial, which he was fortunate enough to obtain in the form of a letter to the Lord-President of the Council, John Bradshaw. Milton seems always to have liked Bradshaw, who was not generally popular even on his own side, and in the _Defensio Secunda pro populo Anglicano_ extols his character and attainments in sonorous latinity. Bradshaw had become in February 1649 the first President of the new Council of State, which, after the disappearance of the king and the abolition of the House of Lords, took over the burden of the executive, and claimed the right to sc.r.a.pe men's consciences by administering to anybody it chose an oath requiring them to approve of what the House of Commons had done against the king, and of their abolition of kingly government and of the House of Peers, and that the legislative and supreme power was wholly in the House of Commons.

Before the creation of this Council the duties of Latin Secretary to the Parliament had been discharged by Georg Rudolph Weckherlin, a German diplomat who had married an Englishwoman. He retired in bad health at this time, and Milton was appointed to his place in 1649. When, later on, the sight of the most ill.u.s.trious of all our civil servants failed him, Weckherlin returned to the office as Milton's a.s.sistant. In December 1652 ill-health again compelled Weckherlin's retirement.[49:1]

Milton's letter to Bradshaw, who had made his home at Eton, is dated February 21, 1653, and is as follows:--

"MY LORD,--But that it would be an interruption to the public wherein your studies are perpetually employed, I should now and then venture to supply thus my enforced absence with a line or two, though it were onely my business, and that would be no slight one, to make my due acknowledgments of your many favours; which I both do at this time and ever shall; and have this farther, which I thought my part to let you know of, that there will be with you to-morrow upon some occasion of business a gentleman whose name is Mr. Marvile, a man whom both by report and the converse I have had with him of singular desert for the State to make use of, who also offers himself, if there be any employment for him. His father was the Minister of Hull, and he hath spent four years abroad in Holland, France, Italy, and Spain to very good purpose, as I believe, and the gaining of these four languages, besides he is a scholer and well-read in the Latin and Greek authors, and no doubt of an approved conversation, for he now comes lately out of the house of the Lord Fairfax, who was Generall, where he was intrusted to give some instructions in the languages to the Lady, his daughter. If upon the death of Mr. Weckerlyn the Councell shall think that I shall need any a.s.sistance in the performance of my place (though for my part I find no enc.u.mbrance of that which belongs to me, except it be in point of attendance at Conferences with Amba.s.sadors, which I must confess in my condition I am not fit for) it would be hard for them to find a man so fit every way for that purpose as this gentleman: one who, I believe, in a short time would be able to do them as much service as Mr. Ascan. This, my Lord, I write sincerely without any other end than to perform my duty to the publick in helping them to an humble servant; laying aside those jealousies and that emulation which mine own condition might suggest to me by bringing in such a coadjutor; and remain, my Lord, your most obliged and faithful servant, JOHN MILTON.

"_Feb. 21, 1652_ (O.S.)."

Addressed: "For the Honourable the Lord Bradshawe."

No handsomer testimonial than this was ever penned. It was unsuccessful.

When Milton wrote to Bradshaw, Weckherlin was in fact dead, and on his retirement in the previous December, John Thurloe, the very handy Secretary of the Council, had for the time a.s.sumed Weckherlin's duties, and obtained on that score an addition to his salary. No actual vacancy, therefore, occurred on Weckherlin's death. None the less, shortly afterwards, Philip Meadows, also a Cambridge man, was appointed Milton's a.s.sistant, and Marvell had to wait four years longer for his place.

When Marvell's connection with Eton first began is not to be ascertained. His friend, John Oxenbridge, who had been driven from his tutors.h.i.+p at Magdalen Hall, Oxford, by Laud in 1634 to

"Where the remote Bermudas ride,"

but had returned home, became in 1652 a Fellow of Eton College. Oliver St. John, who at this time was Chancellor of the University of Cambridge, and had married Oxenbridge's sister, was known to Marvell, and may have introduced him to his brother-in-law. At all events Marvell frequently visited Eton, where, however, he had the good sense to frequent not merely the cloisters, but the poor lodgings where the "ever memorable" John Hales, ejected from his fellows.h.i.+p, spent the last years of his life.

"I account it no small honour to have grown up into some part of his acquaintance and conversed awhile with the living remains of one of the clearest heads and best prepared b.r.e.a.s.t.s in Christendom."[51:1]

Hales died in 1656, and his _Golden Remains_ were first published three years later. Marvell's words of panegyric are singularly well chosen. It is a curious commentary upon the confused times of the Civil War and Restoration that perhaps never before, and seldom, if ever, since, has England contained so many clear heads and well-prepared b.r.e.a.s.t.s as it did then. Small indeed is the influence of men of thought upon their immediate surroundings.

The Lord Bradshaw, we know, had a home in Eton, and on the occasion of one of Marvell's evidently frequent visits to the Oxenbridges, Milton entrusted him with a letter to Bradshaw and a presentation copy of the _Secunda defensio_. Marvell delivered both letter and book, and seems at once to have informed the distinguished author that he had done so. But alas for the vanity of the writing man! The sublime poet, who in his early manhood had composed _Lycidas_, and was in his old age to write _Paradise Lost_, demanded further and better particulars as to the precise manner in which the chief of his office received, not only the book, but the letter which accompanied it. n.o.body is now left to think much of Bradshaw, but in 1654 he was an excellent representative of the cla.s.s Carlyle was fond of describing as the _alors celebre_. Prompted by this desire, Milton must have written to Marvell hinting, as he well knew how to do, his surprise at the curtness of his friend's former communication, and Marvell's reply to this letter has come down to us.

It is Marvell's glory that long before _Paradise Lost_ he recognised the essential greatness of the blind secretary, and his letter is a fine example of the mode of humouring a great man. Be it remembered, as we read, that this letter was not addressed to one of the greatest names in literature, but to a petulant and often peevish scholar, living of necessity in great retirement, whose name is never once mentioned by Clarendon, and about whom the voluminous Thurloe, who must have seen him hundreds of times, has nothing to say except that he was "a blind man who wrote Latin letters." Odder still, perhaps, Richard Baxter, whose history of his own life and times is one of the most informing books in the world, never so much as mentions the one and only man whose name can, without any violent sense of unfitness, be given to the age about which Baxter was writing so laboriously.

"HONOURED SIR,--I did not satisfie my self in the account I gave you of presentinge your Book to my Lord, although it seemed to me that I writ to you all which the messenger's speedy returne the same night from Eaton would permit me; and I perceive that, by reason of that hast, I did not give you satisfaction neither concerninge the delivery of your Letter at the same time. Be pleased therefore to pardon me and know that I tendered them both together. But my Lord read not the Letter while I was with him, which I attributed to our despatch, and some other businesse tendinge thereto, which I therefore wished ill to, so farr as it hindred an affaire much better and of greater importance, I mean that of reading your Letter. And to tell you truly mine own imagination, I thought that he would not open it while I was there, because he might suspect that I, delivering it just upon my departure, might have brought in it some second proposition like to that which you had before made to him by your Letter to my advantage. However, I a.s.sure myself that he has since read it, and you, that he did then witnesse all respecte to your person, and as much satisfaction concerninge your work as could be expected from so cursory a review and so sudden an account as he could then have of it from me. Mr. Oxenbridge, at his returne from London, will, I know, give you thanks for his book, as I do with all acknowledgement and humility for that you have sent me. I shall now studie it even to the getting of it by heart; esteeming it, according to my poore judgment (which yet I wish it were so right in all things else), as the most compendious scale for so much to the height of the Roman Eloquence, when I consider how equally it turnes and rises with so many figures it seems to me a Trajan's columne, in whose winding ascent we see imboss'd the severall monuments of your learned victoryes: And Salmatius and Morus make up as great a triumph as that of Decebalus, whom too, for ought I know, you shall have forced, as Trajan the other, to make themselves away out of a just desperation.

I have an affectionate curiousity to know what becomes of Colonell Overton's businesse. And am exceeding glad that Mr. Skynner is got near you, the happinesse which I at the same time congratulate to him and envie, there being none who doth, if I may so say, more jealously honour you then, Honoured Sir, Your most affectionate humble servant, ANDREW MARVELL.

"Eaton, _June 2, 1654._"

Addressed: "For my most honoured friend, John Milton, Esquire, Secretarye for the Forrain affaires at his house in Petty France, Westminster."

To conclude Marvell's Eton experiences; in 1657, and very shortly before his obtaining his appointment as Milton's a.s.sistant in the place of Philip Meadows, who was sent on a mission to Lisbon, Marvell was chosen by the Lord-Protector to be tutor at Eton to Cromwell's ward, Mr.