Andrew Marvell

The Critical Heritage

Andrew Marvell, Robert Wilcher

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• Print ISBN: 9780415134149
• eBook ISBN: 9781134783199
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The Critical Heritage gathers together a large body of critical sources on major figures in literature. Each volume presents contempoprary responses to a writer's work, enabling students and researchers to read the material themselves.

POETIC REASSESSMENT

1892–1921

79. A.C.Benson on Marvell

1892

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Man of letters and Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge, A.C.Benson (1862–1925) was a prolific critic and essayist. The essay on Marvell first appeared anonymously in Macmillan's Magazine and was later reprinted in his Essays (1896).

Extract from Macmillan's Magazine, 65 (January, 1892), pp. 194–203.

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Few poets are of sufficiently tough and impenetrable fibre as to be able with impunity to mix with public affairs. Even though the spring of their inspiration be like the fountain in the garden of grace ‘drawn from the brain of the purple mountain that stands in the distance yonder,’ that stream is apt to become sullied at the very source by the envious contact of the world. Poets conscious of their vocation have generally striven sedulously, by sequestering their lives somewhat austerely from the current of affairs, to cultivate the tranquillity and freshness on which the purity of their utterance depends. If it be hard to hear sermons and remain a Christian, it is harder to mix much with men and remain an idealist. And if this be true of commerce in its various forms, law, medicine, and even education, it seems to be still more fatally true of politics. Of course the temptation of politics to a philosophical mind is very great. To be at the centre of the machine; to be able perhaps to translate a high thought into a practical measure; to be able to make some closer reconciliation between law and morality, as the vertical sun draws the shadow nearer to the feet,—all this to a generous mind has an attraction almost supreme.

And yet the strain is so great that few survive it. David,—the inspired bandit, as M.Renan with such fatal infelicity calls him—was law-giver, general, king, and poet in one. Sophocles was more than once elected general, and is reported to have kept his colleagues in good humour by the charm of his conversation through a short but disagreeable campaign. Dante was an ardent and uncompromising revolutionary. Goethe was a kind of statesman. Among our own poets Spenser might perhaps be quoted as a fairly successful compromise; but of poets of the first rank Milton is the only one who deliberately took a considerable and active part in public life.

It is perhaps to Milton's example, and probably to his advice, that we owe the loss of a great English poet. It seems to have been if not at Milton's instigation, at any rate by his direct aid that Andrew Marvell was introduced to public life. The acquaintance began at Rome; but Marvell was introduced into Milton's intimate society, as his assistant secretary, at a most impressionable age. He had written poetry, dealing like L'Allegro and Il Penseroso mainly with country subjects, and was inclined no doubt to hang on the words of the older poet as on an oracle of light and truth. We can imagine him piecing out his aspirations and day-dreams, while the poet of sterner stuff, yet of all men least insensible to the delights of congenial society, points out to him the more excellent way, bidding him to abjure Amaryllis for a time. He has style, despatches will give it precision; knowledge of men and life will confirm and mature his mind; the true poet must win a stubborn virility if he is to gain the world. The younger and more delicate mind complies; and we lose a great poet, Milton gains an assistant secretary, and the age a somewhat gross satirist.

At a time like this, when with a sense of sadness we can point to more than one indifferent politician who might have been a capable writer, and so very many indifferent writers who could well have been spared to swell the ranks of politicians, we may well take the lesson of Andrew Marvell to heart.

The passion for the country which breathes through the earlier poems, the free air which ruffles the page, the summer languors, the formal garden seen through the casements of the cool house, the close scrutiny of woodland sounds, such as the harsh laughter of the woodpecker, the shrill insistence of the grasshopper'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 they 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 his observation was sometimes at fault. Where or when this passion came to him we cannot tell…. 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….

Such an escapade [as joining the Jesuits] belongs to a mind that must have been ardent and daring beyond its fellows; but it also shows a somewhat shifting 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 coarseness 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 circumstance forbids all thought of marriage, seems to have been the mainspring of his song. Such a relation is half tenderness which dissembles its passion, and half worship 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: [quotes ll. 9–20].

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 the 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 grasshopper its pipe gives o'er,

And hamstringed frogs can dance no more;

But in the brook the green frog wades,

And grasshoppers seek out the shades. [ll. 11–14]

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 grass in search of a refreshing 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 shining eye,

[‘Appleton House,’ ll. 531–2]

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

[‘Appleton House,’ ll. 677–8]

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. [‘Appleton House,’ ll. 453–4]

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: [quotes ‘Damon the Mower,’ ll.1–4].

And again of the mowers:

[Quotes ‘Appleton House,’ ll. 389–92.]

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 pass 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!

[‘Home-Thoughts, from Abroad,’ l. 1]

Marvell's lines, On the Hill and Grove at Billborow, are an instance of this; there is a certain fantastic craving after antithesis 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?

[Quotes ll. 49–54.]

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

[Quotes ‘First Song,’ ll. 1–6.]

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

At the same time it must be confessed that his 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 hu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• THE CRITICAL HERITAGE SERIES
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• General Editor's Preface
• Contents
• PREFACE
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• NOTE ON THE TEXT
• INTRODUCTION
• Polemicist in Prose Contemporary and Later Comments 1673–1894
• B With Francis Turner
• C With Roger L'Estrange
• D With Thomas Danson
• Satirist, Patriot, and Emergent Poet 1652–1845
• Poet and Prose Writer 1806–92
• Poetic Reassessment 1892–1921
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX