BOOKS.

ANDREW MARVELL.*

BIRRELL'S Life of Marvell is a welcome addition to Messrs. Macmillan's well-known series of biographies of 'English Men of Letters." Marvell, who is now remembered almost solely for his exquisite lyrics, filled in his own day a distinguished place in public life. His contemporaries doubtless thought of him as an eminent politician who had written verses in his youth : we think of him as a great poet who happened to take an interest in politics. Thus the whirligig of Time brings in his revenges. Mr. Birrell, however, has evidently attempted to steer clear of these extremes, and to correct our somewhat one-sided vision of a great man who was great on more sides than one. He has aimed at giving a picture of Marvell in his true perspective. He shows him to us by turns as the poet, the Civil servant, the satirist, the Member of Parliament, and the protagonist in ecclesiastical controversy. Amid this great variety of topics Mr. Birrell guides us with a sure and dexterous hand, and with all the sympathy which it is, indeed, only natural that he should feel for a politician who was also a man of letters. Perhaps Mr. Birrell, in his attempt to do justice to the various activities of Marvell, has a little overshot the mark. Now and then his book has more the air of being a history of Restoration politics than a literary biography, and the general impression of Marvell which it leaves upon the reader is rather that of a. noble and gifted public character than that of a consummate artist. This is unfortunate, for Marvell was both of these things ; and to forget his art is to forget the least mortal part of him.

The known events of Marvell's life are very few; and this scantiness of material makes itself somewhat markedly felt in Mr. Birrell's biography. The mere fact that it is still a matter of dispute whether Marvell was ever married is sufficient to show the vagueness which surrounds his private life; and the whole of his public career might be summed up in a few sentences. Marvell, whose father was a schoolmaster in Hull, was born in 1621, fourteen years after the birth of Milton, and ten before that of Dryden. His education was the orthodox education of a seventeenth-century poet: he was a scholar at Cambridge, and he travelled for several years in France, Spain, and Italy. He returned to England to enter the service of Lord Fairfax as tutor to his daughter; and it was not till his thirty-sixth year that he became con- nected with public life as assistant to Milton in his office of Latin Secretary to Parliament. Curiously enough, Dryden at that very moment became attached to the same Depart. meat of State. "Poets," says Mr. Birrell, "like pigeons, have often taken shelter under our public roofs; but Milton, Marvell, and Dryden, all at the same time, form a remarkable constellation. Old Noll," he adds, "we may be sure, had nothing to do with it." This assumption, is a little unfair to the Lord Protector. Bat, whatever Cromwell's views may have been with regard to the poetical

• Andrew Marvell. By Augustine Birrell. London: Macmillan and Co. [2s. net.]

talents of his subordinates, there can be no doubt about the admiration which Marvell on his side felt for "The War's and Fortune's son." In a poem "Upon the Death of

his late Highness, the Lord Protector "—a poem too little known to modern readers—Marvell expressed, in lines more

obviously dictated by personal feeling than any in the "Horatian Ode," his sense of Cromwell's greatness :—

" I saw him dead: a leaden slumber lies, And mortal sleep over those wakeful eyes . . . . That port, which so majestic was and strong, Loose, and deprived of vigour, stretched along; All withered, all discoloured, pale and wan, How much another thing, no more that man ! 0, human glory vain ! 0, Death ! 0, wings ! 0, worthless world ! 0, transitory things ! Yet dwelt that greatness in his shape decayed, That still, though dead, greater than Death he laid, And in his altered face you something feign That threatens Death, he yet will live again."

During the period of confusion which followed the Protector's death, Marvell abandoned his place in the Civil Service, and plunged into active politics. A year before the Restoration he was elected a Member of Parliament for Hull, and he continued to act in that capacity until his death in 1678, nearly twenty years later.

"Never had poor nation so many complicated, mortal, incurable diseases." Such was Marvell's view of the political situation during the last period of his life. The diseases were indeed obvious enough. Cromwell's eulogist found very little to admire in the statesmanship of Charles II. Marvell's private letters are crowded with instances of the rapacity of the King's favourites, of the omnipotence of the King's mistresses, of the cynicism of the King. "We truckle to France," he bursts out, "in all things, to the prejudice of our honour." The House of Commons itself, he declares, "have run almost to the end of their line, and are grown extreme chargeable to the King, and odious to the people." A private Member, without position, without wealth, with no defence but his integrity, and no weapon but his pen, it is easy to understand how Marvell, as he watched the rising flood of "Popery and Arbitrary Government" (as the good old phrase was), felt that the nation's ills were in truth "incurable."

That there was one cure, and one cure alone, he had the perspicacity to perceive and the courage to declare.

"But canst thou devise when things will be mended?"

he asks in one of his satires ; and the answer is sufficiently straightforward :—

"When the reign of the line of the Stuarts is ended."

Marvell was only fifty-seven when he died; if he had lived ten years longer, he would have seen the fulfilment of his wish.

The most striking expression of Marvell's view of public affairs is to be found in his satires. These remarkable works can hardly be described as poems, for they are almost entirely devoid of literary quality; that was the price which Marvell was obliged to pay for the extraordinary virulence of invective with which he managed to fill them to the brim. To combine

the most disgusting forms of scurrilous abuse with the highest flights of inspiration is an achievement demanding a power and a temperament so unusual as to have been granted once, and once only, in the whole history of literature. Marvell was not a Juvenal ; but he was a writer of great skill and force, and his satires produce an impression which no reader can forget,—a sudden torchlit vision of degradation and folly and disgust. The violence of his methods can only be justified by the severity of the crisis which called his satires forth ; it was a war to the death, and there was no time to be scrupulous over weapons. In his satires, no less than in the controversial theology of his Rehearsal Transprosed, he wrote with an un- compromising fury which expected and allowed no quarter.

His object was not to convince his adversary, but to destroy him. And it is this extreme of tone which makes it well-nigh impossible for the modern reader to appreciate this section of Marvell's writings. To do so, one must be able to enter into

their fiery spirit with all the vigour of personal partisan- ship ; one must hate the Duchess of Cleveland, one must

despise Bishop Parker, with the rage and the scorn of the seventeenth century. For a spectator who cannot take part in the fight the excitement is at best second-hand; but when one is watching Marvell this sort of reflected exhilaration is rarely absent. No one can help warming at the sight of

blows so excellently given, and with a relish so obvious and so complete.

The satires offer a curious contrast to the poems of Marvell's youth. It is upon these that his fame rests ; and their title to remembrance is their possession of precisely those qualities which the satires most conspicuously lack,— brilliance of expression and beauty of form. Mr. Birrell, it is true, comparing Marvell, to his disadvantage, with Lovelace, Cowley, and Waller, denies that he was a "finished master of his art." Of all Mr. Birrell's dicta, this is surely the most

surprising. It is difficult to guess what kind of "finished art" that can be of which Lovelace, Cowley, and Waller were masters, and which Marvell was without. Does Mr. Birrell seriously contend that, as a master of words, as a creator of

expressions, as a stylist in short, Marvell is inferior to Cowley P Poets, no less than prose writers, may be divided into two classes,—into those pre-eminent for their style, and those pre-eminent for their matter. In English, the most notorious example of a poet without style is Byron, while

Milton clearly stands at the head of the opposite school. No one can doubt that Cowley is one of those poets whose claim to distinction rests upon their matter ; his elegy on the death of Harvey is a striking instance of literary excellence without literary style, just as " Lycidas " is a proof that style alone may confer immortality. After reading the former poem it is difficult to remember the expression, and it is impossible to forget the feelings expressed ; alter reading the latter the expression seems to have absorbed into itself the whole value of the work, so that there is nothing else upon which the mind

can dwell. Pace Mr. Birrell, Marvell belongs as clearly to the

Miltonic type as Cowley does not. His poems possess the crowning quality of style,—their meaning has become an integral and inseparable part of the words by which it is expressed :—

"But at my back I always hear

Time's wined chariot hurrying near, And yonder all before us lie Deserts of vast eternity. . . .

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 Thorough the iron gates of life."

It is impossible to think of the sentiments conveyed by these lines expressed in any other form ; alter the form, and the meaning itself, like the subtly compounded elixir of an

alchemist, vanishes to nothing. Who can deny, after reading "The Garden," and "Bermudas," and the "Coy Mistress," that Marvell was one of the greatest of alchemists, or, in other

words, that he was—what Mr. Birrell will not allow him to be— a "finished master of his art" ?