Matthew Green was born in 1696, and died in 1737; held a position in the Custom House; and was distinguished as a poet and wit. He wrote “The Grotto,” and other poems; but his most noted production is “The Spleen,” whose cheerful, thoughtful octosyllabics dealt with remedy for the depression of spirits which was said to have its source in the spleen.
Personal
We find that he had obtained a place in the Custom house, the duties of which he is said to have discharged with great diligence and fidelity. It is further attested, that he was a man of great probity and sweetness of disposition, and that his conversation abounded with wit, but of the most inoffensive kind. He seems to have been subject to low spirits, as a relief from which he composed his principal poem, “The Spleen.”
The Spleen, 1737
His poem, “The Spleen,” was never published during his lifetime. Glover, his warm friend, presented it to the world after his death; and it is much to be regretted, did not prefix any account of its interesting author. It was originally a very short copy of verses, and was gradually and piecemeal increased. Pope speedily noticed its merit, Melmoth praised its strong originality in Fitzosborne’s Letters, and Gray duly commended it in his correspondence with Walpole, when it appeared in Dodsley’s collection. In that walk of poetry, where Fancy aspires no further than to go hand in hand with common sense, its merit is certainly unrivalled.
Such is this singular poem on the “Spleen,” which few persons, it is imagined, will once read, without frequent re-perusals, every one of which will be repaid by new discoveries of uncommon and ingenious turns of thought. It possesses that undoubted mark of excellence, the faculty of impressing the memory with many of its strong sentiments and original images: and perhaps not more lines of “Hudibras” itself have been retained by its admirers, than of this poem.
Something of the quaker may be observable in the stiffness of his versification, and its excessive endeavors to be succinct. His style has also the fault of being occasionally obscure; and his wit is sometimes more labored than finished. But all that he says is worth attending to. His thoughts are the result of his own feeling and experience; his opinions rational and cheerful, if not very lofty; his warnings against meddling with superhuman mysteries admirable; and he is remarkable for the brevity and originality of his similes. He is of the school of Butler; and it may be affirmed of him as a rare honor, that no man since Butler has put so much wit and reflection into the same compass of lines.
“The Spleen,” a reflective effusion in octosyllabic verse, is somewhat striking from an air of originality in the vein of thought, and from the laboured concentration and epigrammatic point of the language; but, although it was much cried up when it first appeared, and the laudation has continued to be duly echoed by succeeding formal criticism, it may be doubted if many readers could now make their way through it without considerable fatigue, or if it be much read in fact at all. With all its ingenious or energetic rhetorical posture-making, it has nearly as little real play of fancy as charm of numbers, and may be most properly characterized as a piece of bastard or perverted Hudibrastic,—an imitation of the manner of Butler to the very dance of his verse, only without the comedy,—the same antics, only solemnized or made to carry a moral and serious meaning.
Green suffered really or poetically from the fashionable eighteenth-century disorder which Pope has so well described in “The Rape of the Lock,” and in this “motley piece,” as he calls it, he sets forth the various expedients which he employed to evade his enemy. Taken altogether, his precepts constitute a code of philosophy not unlike that advocated in more than one of the Odes of Horace. To observe the religion of the body; to cultivate cheerfulness and calm; to keep a middle course, and possess his soul in quiet; content, as regards the future, to ignore what Heaven withholds,—such are the chief features of his plan. But, in developing his principles he takes occasion to deal many a side-long stroke at imperfect humanity, and not always at those things only which are opposed to his theory of conduct. Female education, faction, law, religious sects, reform, speculation, place-hunting, poetry, ambition,—all these are briefly touched and seldom left unmarked by some quivering shaft of ridicule. Towards the end of the poem comes an ideal picture of rural retirement, which may be compared with the joint version by Pope and Swift of Horace’s sixth satire in the second book; and the whole closes with the writer’s views upon immorality and a summary of his practice. Regarded as a whole, we can recall few discursive poems which contain so much compact expression and witty illustration. The author was evidently shrewd and observant, and unusually gifted in the detection of grotesque aspects and remote affinities.
He is remembered by his poem of “The Spleen;” less known than it deserves to be to modern readers. It contains less than nine hundred lines; is full of happy expressions, and evidently the production of a profound, original, and independent thinker.
It was one of the most original works of the day; and I am not sure that anything so good, of the same kind, is to be found in our later literature. There is something of the humour of Butler of its fluent and yet vigorous octosyllabic couplets; but the character of the thought and its mode of expression are Green’s own. He was almost Pope’s equal in the art of packing a thought into terse and pithy phrases.
In style and temper he was astonishingly like his French contemporary, J. B. L. Gresset (1709–1777), whose poems, first printed in 1734, it is needless to say Green had never heard of. He is a master of refined philosophic wit and gentle persiflage; his delicate raillery is without the least element of rancour; he addresses a little circle of private friends, and is charming because so easy, natural, and sincere…. It calls forth the reader’s surprise to note how wide a range of reflection Green’s little poem moves across, yet whatever his witty muse touches she adorns. The originality of Matthew Green, the fact that he never wastes a line by repeating a commonplace, together with his fine cheerfulness as of a Jabez, desiring neither poverty nor riches, makes us regret that he left so little behind him, and so narrowly escaped the poppy of oblivion.
The “Spleen,” written in Swift’s favourite octosyllabic metre, is one of the best poems of its class.
General
All there is of M. Green here, has been printed before; there is a profusion of wit everywhere; reading would have formed his judgment, and harmonised his verse, for even his wood-notes often break out into strains of real poetry and music.
We incline to think that if it be not, as a whole, a poem, it sparkles, at least, with some genuine poetry. We are far from wishing to exalt Green to the topmost summits of Parnassus, but surely the critic who praised Blackmore, and Pitt, and “Rag Smith” might have spared a word and a smile for the many poetical and brilliant thoughts to be found in the “Spleen.” Green’s chief power, however, lay not in imagination, nor perhaps even in art, so much as in keen, strong sense, which he has the power, too, of shaping into the most condensed couplets and sharp-edged lines…. Pope, when he read the “Spleen,” said “there was a great deal of originality in it.” There are, here and there, indeed, traces of resemblance to “Hudibras” and to “Alma,” but on the whole, Green has a brain, an eye, and a tongue of his own—a brain piercing if not profound—an eye clear if not comprehensive—and an utterance terse and vigorous, if not grand and lyrical.
A poet of whimsical and dainty vein, who wrote with great sprightliness of humor and lightness of touch.
