Born, at Winestead-in-Holderness, Yorks, 31 March 1621. Educated at Hull Grammar School, of which his father was master. Matric. Trin. Coll., Camb., as Sizar, 14 Dec. 1633; Scholar, 13 April 1638; B.A., 1638. Left Cambridge, 1641. Travelled abroad. Tutor to daughter of Lord Fairfax, 1650 [?]–53. Tutor to William Dutton (a ward of Oliver Cromwell), 1653–57; lived at Eton. Assistant to Milton (as Sec. of Foreign Tongues), 1657. M.P. for Hull, in Cromwell’s Parliament, 1660; re-elected, Dec. 1660 and April 1661. On Embassy to Russia, Sweden, and Denmark with Earl of Carlisle, July 1663 to Jan. 1665. Prolific political and ecclesiastical controversial writer. Died, suddenly, in London, 18 Aug. 1678; buried in the church of St. Giles-in-the-Fields. Probably married. Works: “The First Anniversary of the Government,” 1655; “The Character of Holland,” 1665; “Clarendon’s House-Warming,” 1667; “The Rehearsal Transpos’d,” pt. i. (anon.), 1672; pt. ii., 1673; “An Apology and Advice for some of the Clergy,” 1674; “Dialogue between two Horses,” 1675; “Plain Dealing” (under initials: A. M.), 1675; “A Letter from a Parliament Man to his Friend” (anon.; attrib. to Marvell), 1675; “Mr. Smirke” (under pseud.: “Andreas Rivetus, Junior”), 1686; “A Seasonable Question and a Useful Answer” (anon.; attrib. to Marvell), 1676; “An Account of the Growth of Popery … in England” (anon.), 1677; “A Seasonable Argument to persuade all the Grand Juries in England to petition for a new Parliament” (anon.; attrib. to Marvell), 1677; “Advice to a Painter” (anon.), 1678; “Remarks upon a disengenuous Discourse writ by one T. D.” (anon.), 1678. Posthumous: “A Short Historical Essay touching General Councils,” 1680; “Miscellaneous Poems,” 1681; “Characters of Popery,” 1689; “Poems on Affairs of State,” 1689; “The Royal Manual,” 1751. He contributed poems to “Musa Cantabrigiensis,” 1637; “Lacrymæ Musarum,” 1639; Lovelace’s “Poems,” 1649; Primerose’s “Popular Errors,” 1651; “Paradise Lost,” 2nd edn., 1674; and probably translated: Suetonius, 1672. Collected Works: ed. by T. Cooke (2 vols.), 1726; ed. by E. Thompson (3 vols.), 1776; ed. by Grosart, 1872–75; “Poems and Satires,” ed. by G. A. Aitken (2 vols.), 1892. Life: by J. Dove, 1832.
Personal
Near this place lyeth the body of Andrew Marvell, Esq., a man so endowed by Nature, so improved by Education, Study and Travel, so consummated by Experience, that, joining the peculiar graces of Wit and Learning, with a singular penetration and strength of judgment; and exercising all these in the whole course of his life, with an unutterable steadiness in the ways of Virtue, he became the ornament and example of his age, beloved by good men, feared by bad, admired by all, though imitated by few; and scarce paralleled by any. But a Tombstone can neither contain his character, nor is Marble necessary to transmit it to posterity; it is engraved in the minds of this generation, and will be always legible in his inimitable writings, nevertheless. He having served twenty years successively in Parliament, and that with such Wisdom, Dexterity, and Courage, as becomes a true Patriot, the town of Kingston-upon-Hull, from whence he was deputed to that Assembly, lamenting in his death the public loss, have erected this Monument of their Grief and their Gratitude, 1688.
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 alsoe offers himselfe, if there be any imployment for him. His father was the Minister of Hull; and he hath spent four years abroad, in Holland, France, Italy, and Spaine, to very good purpose, as I believe, and the gaineing of those four languages; besides, he is a scholler, and well read in the Latin and Greek authors; and no doubt of an approved conversation, for he comes now 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.
He was of a middling stature, pretty strong sett, roundish faced, cherry cheek’t, hazell eie, browne haire. He was in his conversation very modest, and of very few words: and though he loved wine he would never drinke hard in company, and was wont to say that, he would not play the good-fellow in any man’s company in whose hands he would not trust his life…. He lies interred under the pewes in the south side of Saint Giles’ church in-the-fields, under the window wherein is painted in glasse a red lyon, (it was given by the inneholder of the Red Lyon Inne in Holborne) and is the … window from the east. This account I had from the sexton that made his grave.
As neither wits nor poets have been always remarkable for moral firmness, and are as vulnerable in their vanity and fears as politicians in their avarice and ambition, no means were omitted to win over Marvell. He was threatened, he was flattered, he was thwarted, he was caressed, he was beset with spies, and, if all tales be true, he was way-laid by ruffians, and courted by beauties. But no Dalilah could discover the secret of his strength: his integrity was proof alike against danger and against corruption; nor was it enervated by that flattery, which, more frequently than either, seduces those weak, amiable creatures, whom, for lack of better, we are fain to call good. Against threats and bribes, pride is the ally of principle; but how often has virtue pined away to a shadow, by too fondly contemplating its own image, reflected by insidious praise; as Narcissus, in the fable, consumed his beauty by gazing on its watery shade. In a Court which held no man to be honest, and no woman chaste, this soft sorcery was cultivated to perfection; but Marvell, revering and respecting himself, was proof against its charms. There is a story told of his refusing a bribe, which has been heard and repeated by many, who perhaps did not know in what king’s reign he lived, and which has been so often paralleled with the turnips of Curius, and the like common places, that some sceptical persons have held that there is as little truth in the one as in the other. However, we believe it to have been founded in fact, and that the mistake has been in the dulness of those who took a piece of dry English humour for a stoical exhibition of virtue.
The strong views which Marvell took on public affairs—the severe, satirical things which he had said and written from time to time—and the conviction of his enemies, that it was impossible to silence him by the usual methods of a place or a bribe, must have rendered a wary and circumspect conduct very necessary. In fact, we are informed that on more than one occasion he was menaced with assassination. But, though hated by the Court party generally, he was as generally feared, and in some few instances respected. Prince Rupert continued to honour him with his friendship long after the rest of his party had honoured him by their hatred, and occasionally visited the patriot at his lodgings. When he voted on the side of Marvell, which was not infrequently the case, it used to be said that “he had been with his tutor.”… But admirable as were Marvell’s intellectual endowments, it is his moral worth, after all, which constitutes his principal claim on the admiration of posterity, and which sheds a redeeming lustre on one of the darkest pages of the English annals. Inflexible integrity was the basis of it—integrity by which he has not unworthily earned the glorious name of the “British Aristides.” With talents and acquirements which might have justified him in apsiring to almost any office, if he could have disburdened himself of his conscience; with wit which, in that frivolous age, was a surer passport to fame than any amount either of intellect or virtue, and which, as we have seen, mollified even the monarch himself in spite of his prejudices; Marvell preferred poverty and independence to riches and servility.
He was a genial, warm-hearted man, an elegant scholar, a finished gentleman, at home, and the life of every circle which he entered, whether that of the gay court of Charles II., amidst such men as Rochester and L’Estrange, or that of the republican philosophers who assembled at Miles’s Coffee House, where he discussed plans of a free representative government with the author of “Oceana,” and Cyriack Skinner, that friend of Milton, whom the bard has immortalized in the sonnet which so pathetically, yet heroically, alludes to his own blindness. Men of all parties enjoyed his wit and graceful conversation. His personal appearance was altogether in his favor. A clear, dark, Spanish complexion, long hair of jetty blackness falling in graceful wreaths to his shoulders, dark eyes, full of expression and fire, a finely chiseled chin, and a mouth whose soft voluptuousness scarcely gave token of the steady purpose and firm will of the inflexible statesman; these, added to the prestige of his genius, and the respect which a lofty, self-sacrificing patriotism extorts even from those who would fain corrupt and bribe it, gave him a ready passport to the fashionable society of the metropolis. He was one of the few who mingled in that society, and escaped its contamination, and who,
| “Amidst the wavering days of sin | |
| Kept himself icy chaste and pure.” |
On the Death of the Lord Protector
There is a splendid Ode to Cromwell—a worthy companion of Milton’s glorious sonnet—which is not generally known, and which we transfer entire to our pages. Its simple dignity, and the melodious flow of its versification, commend themselves more to our feelings than its eulogy of war. It is energetic and impassioned, and probably affords a better idea of the author, as an actor in the stirring drama of his time, than the “soft Lydian airs” of the poems that we have quoted.
Marvell showed how well he understood what he was giving to the world in this ode—one of the least known but among the grandest which the English language possesses—when he called it “Horation.” In its whole treatment it reminds us of the highest to which the greatest Latin Artist in lyrical poetry did, when at his best, attain. To one unacquainted with Horace, this ode, not perhaps so perfect as his are in form, and with occasional obscurities of expression which Horace would not have left, will give a truer notion of the kind of greatness which he achieved than, so far as I know, could from any other poem in the language be obtained.
Marvell’s “Horatian Ode,” the most truly classic in our language, is worthy of its theme. The same poet’s Elegy, in parts noble, and everywhere humanly tender, is worth more than all Carlyle’s biography as a witness to the gentler qualities of the hero, and of the deep affection that stalwart nature could inspire in hearts of truly masculine temper.
The “Horatian Ode on Cromwell’s Return from Ireland” cannot be positively proved to be the work of Marvell. Yet we can hardly doubt that he was its author. The point of view and the sentiment, combining admiration of Cromwell with respect and pity for Charles, are exactly his: the classical form would be natural to him; and so would the philosophical conceit which disfigures the eleventh stanza. The epithet “indefatigable” applied to Cromwell recurs in a poem which is undoubtedly his; and so does the emphatic expression of belief that the hero could have been happier in private life, and that he sacrificed himself to the State in taking the supreme command. The compression and severity of style are not characteristic of Marvell; but they would be imposed on him in this case by his model. If the ode is really his, to take it from him would do him great wrong. It is one of the noblest in the English language, and worthily presents the figures and events of the great tragedy as they would impress themselves on the mind of an ideal spectator, at once feeling and dispassionate.
The pre-eminent quality of the poem is its art; and its singular charm is the fact that it succeeds, in spite of being artificial, in moving and touching the springs of feeling in an extraordinary degree. It is a unique piece in the collection, the one instance where Marvell’s undoubted genius burned steadily through a whole poem. Here he flies penna metuente solvi. It is in completeness more than in quality that it is superior to all his other work, but in quality too it has that lurking divinity that cannot be analysed or imitated.
General
We still read Marvell’s answer to Parker with pleasure, though the book it answers be sunk long ago.
| … in those worst of times, | |
| The hardy poet raised his honest rhymes | |
| To dread rebuke, and bade Controlment speak | |
| In guilty blushes on the villain’s cheek; | |
| Bade Power turn pale, kept mighty rogues in awe, | |
| And made them fear the Muse, who fear’d not law. |
His pen was always properly directed, and had some effect upon such as were under no check or restraint from any laws human or divine. He hated corruption more than he dreaded poverty; and was so far from being venal, that he could not be bribed by the king into silence, when he scarce knew how to procure a dinner. His satires give us a higher idea of his patriotism, parts, and learning, than of his skill as a poet.
Charles II. was a more polished judge than these uncouth critics; and, to the credit of his impartiality,—for that witty monarch and his dissolute court was never spared by Marvell, who remained inflexible to his seduction—he deemed Marvell the best prose satirist of the age. But Marvell had other qualities than the freest humour and the finest wit in this “newly-refined art,” which seems to have escaped these grave critics—a vehemence of solemn reproof, and an eloquence of invective, that awes one with the spirit of the modern Junius, and may give some notion of that more ancient satirist, whose writings are said to have so completely answered their design, that, after perusal, their victim hanged himself on the first tree; and in the present case, though the delinquent did not lay violent hands on himself, he did what, for an author, may be considered as desperate a course, “withdraw from the town, and cease writing for some years.”
The humour and eloquence of Marvell’s prose tracts were admired and probably imitated by Swift. In playful exuberance of figure he sometimes resembles Burke. For consistency of principles, it is not so easy to find his parallel. His few poetical pieces betray some adherence to the school of conceit, but there is much in it that comes from the heart warm, pure, and affectionate.
The poems of Marvell are, for the most part, productions of his early youth. They have much of that over-activity of fancy, that remoteness of allusion, which distinguishes the school of Cowley; but they have also a heartfelt tenderness, a childish simplicity of feeling, among all their complication of thought, which would atone for all their conceits, if conceit were indeed as great an offence against poetic nature as Addison and other critics of the French school pretend.
Marvell wrote sometimes with more taste and feeling than was usual; but his satires are gross and stupid.
The characteristic of Marvell’s genius was unquestionably wit…. Though Marvell was so great a master of wit, and especially of that caustic species which is appropriate to satirists, we will venture to say that he was singularly free from many of the faults which distinguish that irritable brotherhood. Unsparing and merciless as his ridicule is, contemptuous and ludicrous as are the lights in which he exhibits his opponent; nay, further, though his invectives are not only often terribly severe, but (in compliance with the spirit of the age) often grossly coarse and personal, it is still impossible to detect a single particle of malignity. His general tone is that of broad laughing banter, or of the most cutting invective; but be appears equally devoid of malevolence in both…. His Latin poems are amongst his best. The composition often shows no contemptible skill in that language; and here and there the diction and versification are such as would not have absolutely disgraced his great coadjutor, Milton. In all the higher poetic qualities there can of course be no comparison between them…. The style of Marvell is very unequal. Though often rude and unpolished, it abounds in negligent felicities, presents us with frequent specimens of vigorous idiomatic English, and now and then attains no mean degree of elegance. It bears the stamp of the revolution which was then passing on the language; it is a medium between the involved and periodic structure so common during the former half of the century, and which is ill adapted to a language possessing so few inflections as ours, and that simplicity and harmony which were not fully attained till the age of Addison.
To read the noble ode on “Cromwell,” in which such a generous compliment is paid to Charles the First,—the devout and beautiful one entitled “Bermuda,” and the sweet overflowing fancies put into the mouth of the “Nymph lamenting the loss of her Faun,”—and then to follow up their perusal with some, nay most of the lampoons that were so formidable to Charles and his brother, you would hardly think it possible for the same man to have written both, if examples were not too numerous to the contrary. Fortunately for the reputation of Marvel’s wit, with those who chose to become acquainted with it, he wrote a great deal better in prose than verse, and the prose does not take the license of the verse.
His poems possess many of the finest elements of popularity; a rich profusion of fancy which almost dazzles the mind as bright colours dazzle the eye; an earnestness and heartiness which do not always,—do not often belong to these flowery fancies, but which when found in their company add to them inexpressible vitality and savor; and a frequent felicity of phrase, which, when once read, fixes itself in the memory, and will not be forgotten…. His mind was a bright garden, such a garden as he has described so finely, and that a few gaudy weeds should mingle with the healthier plants does but serve to prove the fertility of the soil.
The genius of Andrew Marvel was as varied as it was remarkable;—not only was he a tender and exquisite poet, but entitled to stand facile princeps as an incorruptible patriot, the best of controversialists, and the leading prose wit of England. We have always considered his as the first of the “sprightly runnings” of that brilliant stream of wit, which will carry with it to the latest posterity the names of Swift, Steele, and Addison. Before Marvel’s time, to be witty was to be strained, forced, and conceited; from him—whose memory consecrates that cottage—wit came sparkling forth, untouched by baser matter. It was worthy of him; its main feature was an open clearness. Detraction or jealousy cast no stain upon it; he turned aside, in the midst of an exalted panegyric to Oliver Cromwell, to say the finest things that ever were said of Charles I.
Who has not heard of the political wit of Andrew Marvell,—that stout “Old Roman” member for Hull?
Marvell appears, in biographic and political record, as a thoroughly manly person; and the same is the prevailing character of his poetic work. We observe vigorous strenuous lines, a bluff and sometimes boisterous humour, keen fencing-play of wit, a strong temper, as ready to overstate a prejudice as to pile a panegyric; often too a sharp thrill of tenderness, and a full sense and full power of expressing beauty.
The Poetry of Marvell can afford the largest deductions from it. It is ludicrous to argue that he was incapable of writing what Addison and Watts did. He had more genius and poetic afflatus in one cell of his compact brain than the pair of them altogether, regarded as Poets. Wherever you turn, you are struck with the spontaneity, the melody, the subtle suggestiveness, the underlying wealth, of these Poems. I am not prepared to defend all that is in the Satires. There is coarseness, there is fierceness, there is mercilessness,… there is disregard of others in the vehement resolve to smite crashingly down high-seated offenders…. Fundamentally, the Poetry of Marvell is genuine as a bird’s singing, or the singing of the brook on its gleaming way under the leafage.
Andrew Marvel was not only a public man of mark and the first pamphleteer of his day, but a lyric and satiric poet. As a lyric poet he still ranks high. His range of subjects and styles is wide. He touches at different points Herbert, Cowley, Waller, Dryden, and the group of Lovelace and Suckling. But his most interesting connection is with Milton. Of that intellectual lustre which was produced by the union of classical culture and ancient love of liberty with Puritan enthusiasm, Milton was the central orb, Marvell a satellite, paler yet bright…. As a poet Marvell is very unequal. He has depth of feeling, descriptive power, melody; his study of the classics could not fail to teach him form; sometimes we find in him an airy and tender grace which reminds us of the lighter manner of Milton: but art with him was only an occasional recreation, not a regular pursuit; he is often slovenly, sometimes intolerably diffuse, especially when he is seduced by the facility of the octosyllabic couplet. He was also eminently afflicted with the gift of “wit” or ingenuity, much prized in his day. His conceits vie with those of Donne or Cowley…. The Satires in their day were much admired and feared: they are now for the most part unreadable.
Is, no doubt, as Hazlitt says, a true poet, but who as a poet is not worthy to untie the shoe strings of the authors of “The Litany,” “The Rapture,” and “The Flaming Heart.”
His exquisite garden-poems, distinguished for their rich imagery and their loyal study of nature…. Marvell had learned the secret of the distich.
He used a sharp pen in controversy and wrote many pamphlets, some of which even now might serve as models for incisive speech; he was witty with the wittiest; was caustic, humorous; his pages adrip with classicisms; and he had a delicacy of raillery that amused, and a power of logic that smote heavily, where blows were in order.
Marvell holds a unique place in the seventeenth century. He stands at the parting of the ways, between the extravagancies of the lyrical Jacobeans on the one hand, and the new formalism initiated by Waller on the other. He is not unaffected by either influence. The modish handling of the decasyllable couplet is very marked here and there…. Marvell is a Puritan; but his spirit has not entered the prison-house, nor has the key turned on it there. He is a poet still, such as there has been few in any age. The lyric gift of Herrick he has not, nor Donne’s incomparable subtlety and intensity of emotion; but for imaginative power, for decent melody, for that self-restraint of phrase which is the fair half of art, he must certainly hold high rank among his fellows. The clear sign of this self-restraint is his mastery over the octosyllable couplet…. I must needs see in Marvell something of a nature-philosophy strangely anticipative of George Meredith. For the one, as for the other, complete absorption in nature, the unreserved abandonment of self to the skyey influences, is the really true and sanative wisdom.
Marvell’s literary work is remarkable for its variety. In his own age his reputation rested mainly on his pamphlets, which have ceased to be read since the controversies which gave rise to them have been forgotten…. To the generation which immediately succeeded Marvell he seems to have been best known as a political satirist; and the number of pieces ascribed to him in “Poems on State Affairs” and similar collections is evidence of his celebrity. But his satires, like the pamphlets, are essentially of temporary interest, and are mainly of historical value. They are full of allusions unintelligible without a commentary, and so personal that they frequently become mere lampoons. The vice he attacks loses none of its grossness in the verses. Moreover, his lines are hasty and rough-hewn, and in employing the heroic couplet Marvell is never completely master of his instrument. Yet despite these defects there is much both in his satires and pamphlets which still amuses; a gift of humorous exaggeration which suggests Sydney Smith, and an irony which occasionally recalls Swift.
Deserves much more regard for his poetry than is generally allotted him…. His poetry shows two very different aspects. Prior to the Restoration it is mostly lyrical, and reveals a fine feeling for Nature with Wordsworthian touches; after that event it is satirical on the subject of vice and tyranny in Church and State, and occasionally as fierce, and even as coarse, as the invectives of Juvenal. It was Marvell’s style of satire, the regular heroic couplet, that Dryden adopted, in preference to Donne’s or Butler’s. His ablest satires are “Last Instructions to a Painter,” and “The Character of Holland;” of his lyrical pieces, “The Emigrants in the Bermudas,” “Thoughts in a Garden,” and the girl’s lament for her dead fawn are exquisite examples.
In the style of Marvell’s prose, as in the style of his satiric couplets, there are the marks of hesitation between two different manners. He is sometimes clear, quick, and succinct, sometimes he falls back into the heavier manner of the older writers. His vocabulary is various. His practice on “Bayes” involved a good deal of slang; his satiric medley is dashed with a number of spices from different languages, even from the Malay. He uses, without distress, the heavier Latin armoury.
Marvell was a party man, and the estimate formed of his political writings and their justification will always differ according to the private opinions of the critic.
One of the most original poets of the Stuart period, the new tentative features of the age in poetry, again, are clearly marked. The lyrical work belonging to his early life has often passages of imaginative quality, equally strong and delicate. If we exclude Milton, no one of that time touches sweeter or nobler lyrical notes; but he is singularly unequal; he flies high, but is not long on the wing. The characteristic Elizabethan smoothness of unbroken melody was now failing; the fanciful style of Donne, the seventeenth century concetti, seized on Marvell too strongly, and replaced in him the earlier mythological landscape characteristic of the Renaissance.
The poet of spicy gardens and sequestered fields seen through the haze of dawn is gone, not like the Scholar Gipsy to the high lonely wood or the deserted lasher, but has stepped down to jostle with the foulest and most venal of mankind. He becomes a satirist, and a satirist of the coarsest kind. His pages are crowded with filthy pictures and revolting images; the leaves cannot be turned over so quickly but some lewd epithet or vile realism prints itself on the eye. His apologists have said that it is nothing but the overflowing indignation of a noble mind when confronted with the hideous vices of a corrupt court and nation; that this deep-seated wrath is but an indication of the fervid idealistic nature of the man; that the generous fire that warmed in the poems, consumed in the satires; that the true moralist does not condone but condemn. To this we would answer that it is just conceivable that a satirist may be primarily occupied by an immense moral indignation, and no doubt that indignation must bear a certain part in all satires; but it is not the attitude of a hopeful or generous soul…. We cannot but grieve when we see a poet over whose feet the stream has flowed, turn back from the brink and make the great denial; whether from the secret consciousness of aridity, the drying of the fount of song, or from the imperious temptations of the busy, ordinary world we cannot say. Somehow we have lost our poet. It seems that,
| Just for a handful of silver he left us | |
| Just for a ribbon to stick in his coat. |
