Part 5 (1/2)
The table, free for ev'ry guest, No doubt will thee admit, And feast more upon thee, than thou on it.
He sometimes extends his author's thoughts without improving them. In the Olympionick an oath is mentioned in a single word, and Cowley spends three lines in swearing by the Castalian stream. We are told of Theron's bounty, with a hint that he had enemies, which Cowley thus enlarges in rhyming prose:
But in this thankless world the giver Is envied even by the receiver; 'Tis now the cheap and frugal fas.h.i.+on Rather to hide than own the obligation: Nay, 'tis much worse than so; It now an artifice does grow Wrongs and injuries to do, Lest men should think we owe.
It is hard to conceive that a man of the first rank in learning and wit, when he was dealing out such minute morality in such feeble diction, could imagine, either waking or dreaming, that he imitated Pindar.
In the following odes, where Cowley chooses his own subjects, he sometimes rises to dignity truly Pindarick; and, if some deficiencies of language be forgiven, his strains are such as those of the Theban bard were to his contemporaries:
Begin the song, and strike the living lyre: Lo, how the years to come, a numerous and well-fitted quire, All hand in hand do decently advance.
And to my song with smooth and equal measure dance; While the dance lasts, how long soe'er it be, My musick's voice shall bear it company; Till all gentle notes be drown'd In the last trumpet's dreadful sound.
After such enthusiasm, who will not lament to find the poet conclude with lines like these:
But stop, my muse-- Hold thy Pindarick Pegasus closely in, Which does to rage begin --'Tis an unruly and a hard-mouth'd horse-- 'Twill no unskilful touch endure, But flings writer and reader too that sits not sure.
The fault of Cowley, and, perhaps, of all the writers of the metaphysical race, is that of pursuing his thoughts to the last ramifications, by which he loses the grandeur of generality; for of the greatest things the parts are little; what is little can be but pretty, and, by claiming dignity, becomes ridiculous. Thus all the power of description is destroyed by a scrupulous enumeration, and the force of metaphors is lost, when the mind, by the mention of particulars, is turned more upon the original than the secondary sense, more upon that from which the ill.u.s.tration is drawn, than that to which it is applied.
Of this we have a very eminent example in the ode ent.i.tled the Muse, who goes to ”take the air” in an intellectual chariot, to which he harnesses fancy and judgment, wit and eloquence, memory and invention: how he distinguished wit from fancy, or how memory could properly contribute to motion, he has not explained; we are, however, content to suppose that he could have justified his own fiction, and wish to see the muse begin her career; but there is yet more to be done:
Let the _postillion_, nature, mount, and let The _coachman_ art be set; And let the airy _footmen_, running all beside, Make a long row of goodly pride; Figures, conceits, raptures, and sentences, In a well-worded dress, And innocent loves, and pleasant truths, and useful lies, In all their gaudy _liveries_.
Every mind is now disgusted with this c.u.mber of magnificence; yet I cannot refuse myself the four next lines:
Mount, glorious queen, thy travelling throne, And bid it to put on; For long, though cheerful, is the way, And life, alas! allows but one ill winter's day.
In the same ode, celebrating the power of the muse, he gives her prescience, or, in poetical language, the foresight of events hatching in futurity; but, having once an egg in his mind, he cannot forbear to show us that he knows what an egg contains:
Thou into the close nests of time dost peep, And there with piercing eye Through the firm sh.e.l.l and the thick white dost spy Years to come a-forming lie, Close in their sacred fecundine asleep.
The same thought is more generally, and, therefore, more poetically expressed by Casimir, a writer who has many of the beauties and faults of Cowley:
Omnibus mundi dominator horis Aptat urgendas per inane pennas, Pars adhuc nido latet, et futuros Crescit in annos.
Cowley, whatever was his subject, seems to have been carried, by a kind of destiny, to the light and the familiar, or to conceits which require still more ign.o.ble epithets. A slaughter in the Red sea ”new dies the water's name;” and England, during the civil war, was ”Albion no more, nor to be named from white.” It is, surely, by some fascination not easily surmounted, that a writer professing to revive ”the n.o.blest and highest writing in verse,” makes this address to the new year:
Nay, if thou lov'st me, gentle year, Let not so much as love be there, Vain, fruitless love I mean; for, gentle year, Although I fear There's of this caution little need, Yet, gentle year, take heed How thou dost make Such a mistake; Such love I mean alone As by thy cruel predecessors has been shewn: For, though I have too much cause to doubt it, I fain would try, for once, if life can live without it.
The reader of this will be inclined to cry out, with Prior,
Ye criticks, say, How poor to this was Pindar's style!
Even those who cannot, perhaps, find in the Isthmian or Nemaean songs what antiquity has disposed them to expect, will, at least, see that they are ill represented by such puny poetry; and all will determine, that if this be the old Theban strain, it is not worthy of revival.
To the disproportion and incongruity of Cowley's sentiments, must be added the uncertainty and looseness of his measures. He takes the liberty of using, in any place, a verse of any length, from two syllables to twelve. The verses of Pindar have, as he observes, very little harmony to a modern ear; yet, by examining the syllables, we perceive them to be regular, and have reason enough for supposing that the ancient audiences were delighted with the sound. The imitator ought, therefore, to have adopted what he found, and to have added what was wanting; to have preserved a constant return of the same numbers, and to have supplied smoothness of transition and continuity of thought.
It is urged by Dr. Sprat, that the ”irregularity of numbers is the very thing” which makes ”that kind of poesy fit for all manner of subjects.”
But he should have remembered, that what is fit for every thing can fit nothing well. The great pleasure of verse arises from the known measure of the lines, and uniform structure of the stanzas, by which the voice is regulated, and the memory relieved.
If the Pindarick style be, what Cowley thinks it, ”the highest and n.o.blest kind of writing in verse,” it can be adapted only to high and n.o.ble subjects; and it will not be easy to reconcile the poet with the critick, or to conceive how that can be the highest kind of writing in verse, which, according to Sprat, is ”chiefly to be preferred for its near affinity to prose.”