BOOKS.

COWLEY AND THE METAPHYSICAL POETS.* THE enormous influence of Johnson on English criticism is nowhere better seen than in the general acceptance by later critics of his views on the metaphysical poets of the seventeenth century. The Life of Cowley, in which these views are expounded at length, he held to be the best of his Lives of the Poets; it has certainly been the most enduring and powerful in its effect on opinion. What he said of the fashion which reigned in English poetry from Donne to Dryden has been incorporated in all the histories ; and his successors have been content to follow his lead. Men who are lacking in his breadth of view and soundness of sense have repeated his judgments, exaggerating the censures, and omitting the qualifying praise. Metaphysical poetry, so named by Johnson, has become a byword for violent and unnatural fictions, enormous and disgusting hyperboles, perverse originality, affectation, absurdity, and conceit. Critic has vied with crItic in the selection of the most ridiculous examples to illustrate the excesses of the meta- physical school. When Crashaw compared the eyes of the weeping Magdalen to "portable baths, compendious oceans," he did not foresee that these portable baths would become an indispensable part of the baggage of the literary historian. Johnson's- criticism is, in the main, responsible for the treat- ment of metaphysical poetry as a museum of atrocities, and for the comparative neglect of those subtle movements of the intellect, and those strange raptures of the adventurous imagination, which give an irresistible charm to the work of Donne and his disciples.

If the London booksellers who induced Johnson to under- take the Lives had seen fit to include Donne among the English poets, the metaphysical school might have had better fortune. The movement which Donne began would then have been more fully recognised by Johnson for what it was,— a movement of thought, not a vainglorious search for extravagant and conceited expressions. Even in the work of Donne's weaker pupil Johnson finds some solid merit, some suggestion that the business of the school was not merely idle fantasy. They set themselves, he says, to discover "occult resemblances in things apparently unlike,"—which task, it may be remarked, is the essential business of all scien- tific discovery. And he admits that they sometimes achieved success :—" Great labour directed by great abilities is never wholly lost: if they frequently threw away their wit upon false conceits, they likewise sometimes struck out unexpected truth : if their conceits were far-fetched, they were often worth the carriage. To write on their plan it was at least necessary to read and think." Yet when he comes to illustrate their work, he permits their extravagances and absurdities to obliterate their virtues, and chooses examples which may serve to bear out his contention that "the authors of this race were more desirous of being admired than of being under- stood." The selection of extreme cases, the laying of emphasis on nothing which does not lend itself to a preconceived purpose, the endeavour not so much to understand a poet's mind as to exhibit his eccentricities for the diversion of a self- satisfied public,—this critical method, which came to its per- fection only in Macaulay and Jeffrey and the tribes of their begetting, receives, it must be confessed, too much counte- nance from a man of stronger and more comprehensive genius in Johnson's essay on the metaphysical school.

The metaphysical poets, it is true, have had many friends and admirers of a later date. Lamb and Coleridge praise them

• Abraham Cowley—Poems : Miscellanies, Ph. Mistress, Pindarique Odes, Davideis, Verses Written on Several Occasions. The Text Edited by A. R. Waller. Cambridge: at the University Press. [ie. ed. net.]

without demur; Wordsworth alludes to them, justly if not warmly, as "that class of curious thinkers." Yet there has been little or no attempt to justify their aims, or to elucidate the origins of their poetry. Sir Leslie Stephen treats them as a survival of the Middle Ages. "They represent," be says, " the intrusion into poetry of the love of dialectical subtlety encouraged by the still prevalent system of scholastical disputa- tion." It is true that they are both dialectical and subtle. But

no criticism is adequate which neglects the startling sensation of novelty given by these poets to their own age. The sixteenth century broke, decisively enough, with mediaeval tradition; it is a lazy account of .things which represents the seventeenth century as a pure reaction, an attempt to set up the broken idols and to regain the lost clues. The founder of the meta- physical school was, perhaps, of all the men of his generation the most alert in mind, the most sensitive to new influences, the most catholic in imaginative sympathy. The poetry that he introduced caught hold of its readers like an infection because they felt that here, at last, after the derivative and imitative glories of the Renaissance, poetry had become modern, actual, real, and was speaking to men in the language of their own age. The metaphysical poets, in short, are the heroes of the bravest attempt ever made to reconcile Poetry and Science.

The literary history of to-day has failed to do justice to their heroic attempt because, for the most part, it is written by " men of letters," or, to give them the more appropriate name which they have invented for themselves, by "book- men." Milton and Dryden, Donne and Cowley and Cleveland, were not men of letters in this narrower sense. The realm of knowledge was in their day as yet unpartitioned ; the poets of the age were students of divinity and science, of politics, history, and geography. Living as they did in the century which gave birth to modern science—the century, to name no others, of Galileo and of Harvey, of Newton and of Boyle— their minds, as Johnson says of Cowley, were set "more on things than on words." A glowing dissatisfaction with the classical machinery of the Renaissance was in the air, and the poetry of the century is a long series of attempts to break with the academic tradition, and to restore to the Muses their dominion over all the interests of life. Milton was a -writer of history, a student of geography, and the author of an epic which took for its subject the theology of his own day. Dryden was a pamphleteer, a dramatist, an importhr of foreign wares, and a Fellow of the Royal Society. Above all, the metaphysical poets were preoccupied, and at times in- toxicated, by the new discoveries and speculations of science. Science is progressive, so that many of the notions which to them were serious possibilities seem to us the gymnastics of an irresponsible fancy. The most instructive comment on metaphysical poetry is to be found, nevertheless, in Sir Thomas Browne's treatise on Vulgar Errors, or, better still, in the list of problems which the infant Royal Society propounded for the consideration of its members. These reflect the intellectual movement of the age ; it was these and such- like notions which the metaphysical poets attempted to make use of as a new light thrown on the eternal theme of poetry, —man and his relations to the world. The languate of love they stripped of its outworn mythological ornaments ; Venus and Cupid gave place to metaphors borrowed from gunnery and navigation, from the mathematician's case of instruments, and the chemist's collection of reagents. They were the realists and the rationalists of their own age; and the sincerity of their attempt is witnessed by the "pure and genuine mother-English," as Coleridge calls it, wherein they set forth ideas that are now no more than antique curiosities.

This aspect of metaphysical poetry is well illustrated in the work of Cowley, who, it might almost be said, was first of all a man of science. He was a Doctor of Physic, a botanist of repute, and an ardent friend to scientific research. His scheme for the establishment of a College devoted wholly to scientific discovery is one of the.best planned of those many similar schemes which were in part fulfilled when a charter was granted to the Royal Society. His scientific interests were not kept apart from his poetical, but were the feeders of his verse. "Botany," as Johnson again observes, "in the mind of Cowley turned into poetry." Any one who looks through the pages of The Mistress will find a new application of scientific lore on every page. Inconstancy is defended by a considera- tion of the seasons, and of the physiological changes in the human body. His haughty and cold mistress is compared to a burning-glass of ice, which inflames other objects while remaining frozen itself. The excuse for the wanderings of Love which Prior has expressed in direct and simple fashion—.

"No matter what Beauties I saw in my Way ; They were but my Visits, but Thou art my Home"— is the same excuse which Cowley bases on the behaviour of the magnetic needle :— " The Needle trembles so, and turns about,

Till it the Northern Point find out: But constant then and fiat does prove, Fixt, that his dearest Pole as soon may move."

"Upon every subject," says Johnson, "Cowley thought for himself, and such was his copiousness of knowledge that something at once remote and applicable rushed into his mind." He is as rich in political and geographical as in scientific metaphors. The conquests of the Spaniard in the Indies, the rebellion of the Low Countries against the Spanish yoke, the Salic Law of France, the great wall of China, the perpetual night of Greenland,—these and a hundred other things are made to lend themselves to the interpretation of the lover's mind.

Cowley makes use of none of the fables which, before his time and since, have been consecrated to the use of poets. There are in his poems no gods, devils, nymphs, witches, or giants, no "cold-meats of the Ancients, new-heated and new set forth." The business of poetry, as he and his brother- poets conceived of it, is to give, by the aid of subtle metaphor if need be, a true account of the mind and experience of man. The rationalism of the metaphysical poets, which was both

preached and practised by Fulke Greville, by Donne, by Davenant, and by Cowley himself, prepared the way for the less exalted rationalism of the Augustans. In yet another respect these pioneers made straight the way for their successors, and heralded the greatest revolution that has ever befallen our literature. They cultivated a simple and familiar diction, and expressed their often remote thoughts in natural, homely, idiomatic English. Cowley's writing is beautifully

simple ; and when the thought happens, as it sometimes does, to be likewise elemental and direct, the result is a perfection.

So in his lament on the death of his College friend, William Hervey :—

"Ye fields of Cambridge, our dear Cambridge, say,

Have ye not seen us walking every day ? Was there a Tree about winch did not know The Love betwixt us two?"

So, again, in "The Spring" :—

"I saw a Rose-bud ope this morn; I'll swear

The blushing Morning open'd not more fair. How could it be so fair, and you away ?"

The ease and the moving power of passages like this are

greater than the Augustans, for all their diligent search by lamplight, could often attain to. Yet these are the effects that the Augustans coveted, and it is an injustice to the metaphysical poets to treat them as eccentrics, and to over- look or deny their influence on the greatest crisis of our literary history.

In many respects Cowley is the most representative poet of the metaphysical school. In one quality only, and that the quality which has gained currency for the name given to the school by Johnson, he falls far short of some of his brethren, and especially of Donne. It seems likely that Johnson, when he hit on the title "metaphysical," or borrowed it from Dryden, meant no more by it than "supernatural," with a certain further implication of "unnatural." The name, like the later name of "spasmodic," expressed, though with much less violence, a hostile judgment. But the enrichment of meaning which the word has received from later usage makes it the best of all words to describe the poetry of Donne. Donne is a philosopher, a diviner, an alchemist, a necrornant. Like Cowley, he takes all knowledge for his material, and melts it in the crucible over which he mutters his incantations. Cowley succeeds only in producing new and strange alloys, curious and rare. But with Donne the charm works ; spirits are raised, far voices call, and for a brief moment vistas are opened into those dim underlying realities over which the world of phenomena is stretched like a bright variegated curtain. The pupil, though be too is an adept, cannot pretend to the power of the master. Yet his place is secure among the English poets, and be deserves the renewed study and recognition which it is to be hoped will come to him by means of the admirable and scholarly edition just issued from the Cambridge University Press.