A History of English Literature - George Saintsbury (romantic books to read .TXT) 📗

This group of poets seems to demand a little general criticism. They stand more by themselves than almost any other group in English literary history, marked off in most cases with equal sharpness from predecessors, followers, and contemporaries. The best of them, Herrick and Carew, with Crashaw as a great thirdsman, called themselves "sons" of Ben Jonson, and so in a way they were; but they were even more sons of Donne. That great writer's burning passion, his strange and labyrinthine conceits, the union in him of spiritual and sensual fire, influenced the idiosyncrasies of each as hardly any other writer's influence has done in other times; while his technical shortcomings had unquestionably a fatal effect on the weaker members of the school. But there is also noticeable in them a separate and hardly definable influence which circumscribes their class even more distinctly. They were, as I take it, the last set of poets anywhere in Europe to exhibit, in that most fertile department of poetry which seeks its inspiration in the love of man for woman, the frank expression of physical affection united with the spirit of chivalry, tempered by the consciousness of the fading of all natural delights, and foreshadowed by that intellectual introspection which has since developed itself in such great measure—some think out of all measure—in poetry. In the best of them there is no cynicism at all. Herrick and Carew are only sorry that the amatory fashion of this world passeth; they do not in the least undervalue it while it lasts, or sneer at it when it is gone. There is, at least to my thinking, little coarseness in them (I must perpetually except Herrick's epigrams), though there is, according to modern standards, a great deal of very plain speaking. They have as much frank enjoyment of physical pleasures as any classic or any mediævalist; but they have what no classic except Catullus and perhaps Sappho had,—the fine rapture, the passing but transforming madness which brings merely physical passion sub specie æternitatis; and they have in addition a faint preliminary touch of that analytic and self-questioning spirit which refines even further upon the chivalric rapture and the classical-renaissance mysticism of the shadow of death, but which since their time has eaten up the simpler and franker moods of passion itself. With them, as a necessary consequence, the physical is (to anticipate a famous word of which more presently) always blended with the metaphysical. It is curious that, as one result of the change of manner, this should have even been made a reproach to them—that the ecstasy of their ecstasies should apparently have become not an excuse but an additional crime. Yet if any grave and precise person will read Carew's Rapture, the most audacious, and of course wilfully audacious expression of the style, and then turn to the archangel's colloquy with Adam in Paradise Lost, I should like to ask him on which side, according to his honour and conscience, the coarseness lies. I have myself no hesitation in saying that it lies with the husband of Mary Powell and the author of Tetrachordon, not with the lover of Celia and the author of the lines to "A. L."

There are other matters to be considered in the determination of the critical fortunes of the Caroline school. Those fortunes have been rather odd. Confounded at first in the general oblivion which the Restoration threw on all works of "the last age," and which deepened as the school of Dryden passed into the school of Pope, the writers of the Donne-Cowley tradition were first exhumed for the purposes of post-mortem examination by and in the remarkable "Life" of Johnson, devoted to the last member of the class. It is at this time of day alike useless to defend the Metaphysical Poets against much that Johnson said, and to defend Johnson against the charge of confusion, inadequacy, and haste in his generalisations. The term metaphysical, originating with Dryden, and used by Johnson with a slight difference, may be easily miscomprehended by any one who chooses to forget its legitimate application both etymologically and by usage to that which comes, as it were, behind or after nature. Still Johnson undoubtedly confounded in one common condemnation writers who have very little in common, and (which was worse) criticised a peculiarity of expression as if it had been a deliberate substitution of alloy for gold. The best phrases of the metaphysical poets more than justify themselves to any one who looks at poetry with a more catholic appreciation than Johnson's training and associations enabled him to apply; and even the worst are but mistaken attempts to follow out a very sound principle, that of "making the common as though it were not common." Towards the end of the eighteenth century some of these poets, especially Herrick, were revived with taste and success by Headley and other men of letters. But it so happened that the three great critics of the later Romantic revival, Hazlitt, Lamb, and Coleridge, were all strongly attracted to the bolder and more irregular graces of the great dramatic poets, to the not less quaint but less "mignardised" quaintnesses of prose writers like Burton, Browne, and Taylor, or to the massive splendours of the Elizabethan poets proper. The poetry of the Caroline age was, therefore, a little slurred, and this mishap of falling between two schools has constantly recurred to it. Some critics even who have done its separate authors justice, have subsequently indulged in palinodes, have talked about decadence and Alexandrianism and what not. The majority have simply let the Cavalier Poets (as they are sometimes termed by a mere historical coincidence) be something more than the victims of the schools that preceded and followed them. The lovers of the school of good sense which Waller founded regard the poets of this chapter as extravagant concettists; the lovers of the Elizabethan school proper regard them as effeminate triflers. One of Milton's gorgeous but constantly illogical phrases about the poets of his day may perhaps have created a prejudice against these poets. But Milton was a politician as well as a poet, a fanatic as well as a man of letters of seldom equalled, and never, save in two or three cases, surpassed powers. He was also a man of a more morose and unamiable private character than any other great poet the world has known except Racine. The easy bonhomie of the Caroline muse repelled his austerity; its careless good-breeding shocked his middle-class and Puritan Philistinism; its laxity revolted his principles of morality. Not improbably the vein of sympathy which discovers itself in the exquisite verse of the Comus, of the Allegro and Penseroso, of Lycidas itself, infuriated him (as such veins of sympathy when they are rudely checked and turned from their course will often do) with those who indulged instead of checking it. But because Lycidas is magnificent, and Il Penseroso charming poetry, we are not to think meanly of "Fair Daffodils," or "Ask me no more," of "Going to the Wars," or "Tell me no more how fair she is."

Let us clear our minds of this cant, and once more admit, as the student of literature always has to remind himself, that a sapphire and diamond ring is not less beautiful because it is not a marble palace, or a bank of wild flowers in a wood because it is not a garden after the fashion of Lenôtre. In the division of English poetry which we have been reviewing, there are to be found some of the most exquisite examples of the gem and flower order of beauty that can be found in all literature. When Herrick bids Perilla