A History of English Literature by George Saintsbury (e novels for free .txt) π
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Indissolubly connected with Herrick in age, in character, and in the singularly unjust criticism which has at various times been bestowed on him, is Thomas Carew. His birth-date has been very differently given as 1587 and (that now preferred) 1598; but he died nearly forty years before the author of the Hesperides, and nearly ten before the Hesperides themselves were published, while his own poems were never collected till after his own death. He was of a Gloucestershire branch of the famous Devonshire family of Carew, Cary, or Cruwys, was of Merton College, Oxford, and the Temple, travelled, followed the Court, was a disciple of Ben Jonson, and a member of the learned and accomplished society of Clarendon's earlier days, obtained a place in the household of Charles I., is said by his friend Hyde to have turned to devotion after a somewhat libertine life, and died in 1639, before the evil days of triumphant Puritanism, felix opportunitate mortis. He wrote little, and the scantiness of his production, together with the supposed pains it cost him, is ridiculed in Suckling's doggerel "Sessions of the Poets." But this reproach (which Carew shares with Gray, and with not a few others of the most admirable names in literature), unjust as it is, is less unjust than the general tone of criticism on Carew since. The locus classicus of depreciation both in regard to him and to Herrick is to be found, as might be expected, in one of the greatest, and one of the most wilfully capricious and untrustworthy of English critics, in Hazlitt. I am sorry to say that there can be little hesitation in setting down the extraordinary misjudgment of the passage in question (it occurs in the sixth Lecture on Elizabethan Literature), in part, at least, to the fact that Herrick, Carew, and Crashaw, who are summarily damned in it, were Royalists. If there were any doubt about the matter, it would be settled by the encomium bestowed in the very same passage on Marvell, who is, no doubt, as Hazlitt says, a true poet, but who as a poet is but seldom at the highest height of the authors of "The Litany," "The Rapture," and "The Flaming Heart." Hazlitt, then, while on his way to tell us that Herrick's two best pieces are some trivial anacreontics about Cupid and the Beesβthings hackneyed through a dozen literatures, and with no recommendation but a borrowed prettinessβwhile about, I say, to deny Herrick the spirit of love or wine, and in the same breath with the dismissal of Crashaw as a "hectic enthusiast," informs us that Carew was "an elegant Court trifler," and describes his style as a "frequent mixture of the superficial and commonplace, with far-fetched and improbable conceits."
What Carew really is, and what he may be peremptorily declared to be in opposition even to such a critic as Hazlitt, is something quite different. He is one of the most perfect masters of lyrical form in English poetry. He possesses a command of the overlapped heroic couplet, which for sweep and rush of rhythm cannot be surpassed anywhere. He has, perhaps in a greater degree than any poet of that time of conceits, the knack of modulating the extravagances of fancy by the control of reason, so that he never falls into the unbelievableness of Donne, or Crashaw, or Cleveland. He had a delicacy, when he chose to be delicate, which is quintessential, and a vigour which is thoroughly manly. Best of all, perhaps, he had the intelligence and the self-restraint to make all his poems wholes, and not mere congeries of verses. There is always, both in the scheme of his meaning and the scheme of his metre, a definite plan of rise and fall, a concerted effect. That these great merits were accompanied by not inconsiderable defects is true. Carew lacks the dewy freshness, the unstudied grace of Herrick. He is even more frankly and uncontrolledly sensual, and has paid the usual and inevitable penalty that his best poem, The Rapture, is, for the most part, unquotable, while another, if he carried out its principles in this present year of grace, would run him the risk of imprisonment with hard labour. His largest attemptβthe masque called CΕlum Britannicumβis heavy. His smaller poems, beautiful as they are, suffer somewhat from want of variety of subject. There is just so much truth in Suckling's impertinence that the reader of Carew sometimes catches himself repeating the lines of Carew's master, "Still to be neat, still to be drest," not indeed in full agreement with them, but not in exact disagreement. One misses the "wild civility" of Herrick. This acknowledgment, I trust, will save me from any charge of overvaluing Carew.
A man might, however, be easily tempted to overvalue him, who observes his beauties, and who sees how, preserving the force, the poetic spell, of the time, he was yet able, without in the least descending to the correctness of Waller and his followers, to introduce into his work something also preserving it from the weaknesses and inequalities which deface that of almost all his contemporaries, and which, as we shall see, make much of the dramatic and poetical work of 1630-1660 a chaos of slipshod deformity to any one who has the sense of poetical form. It is an unwearying delight to read and re-read the second of his poems, the "Persuasions to Love," addressed to a certain A. L. That the sentiment is common enough matters little; the commonest things in poetry are always the best. But the delicate interchange of the catalectic and acatalectic dimeter, the wonderful plays and changes of cadence, the opening, as it were, of fresh stops at the beginning of each new paragraph of the verse, so that the music acquires a new colour, the felicity of the several phrases, the cunning heightening of the passion as the poet comes to "Oh! love me then, and now begin it," and the dying fall of the close, make up to me, at least, most charming pastime. It is not the same kind of pleasure, no doubt, as that given by such an outburst as Crashaw's, to be mentioned presently, or by such pieces as the great soliloquies of Shakespere. Any one may say, if he likes to use words which are question-begging, when not strictly meaningless, that it is not such a "high" kind. But it is a kind, and in that kind perfect.
Carew's best pieces, besides The Rapture, are the beautiful "Ask me no more," the first stanza of which is the weakest; the fine couplet poem, "The Cruel Mistress," whose closing distichβ
That burned the temple where she was adored"β
Dryden conveyed with the wise and unblushing boldness which great poets use; the "Deposition from love," written in one of those combinations of eights and sixes, the melodious charm of which seems to have died with the seventeenth century; the song, "He that loves a rosy cheek," which, by the unusual morality of its sentiments, has perhaps secured a fame not quite due to its poetical merits; the epitaph on Lady Mary Villers; the song "Would you know what's soft?" the song to his inconstant mistress:
From all the joys of love, shalt see
The full reward, and glorious fate
Which my strong faith shall purchase me,
Then curse thine own inconstancy.
That heart which thy false oaths did wound;
And to my soul, a soul more pure
Than thine, shall by love's hand be bound,
And both with equal glory crown'd.
To Love, as I did once to thee;
When all thy tears shall be as vain
As mine were then, for thou shalt be
Damn'd for thy false apostacy."β
the pleasant pictures of the country houses of Wrest and Saxham; the charming conceit of "Red and white roses":
Of my hard fate and your own glory:
In the white you may discover
The paleness of a fainting lover;
In the red, the flames still feeding
On my heart with fresh wounds bleeding.
The white will tell you how I languish,
And the red express my anguish:
The white my innocence displaying
The red my martyrdom betraying.
The frowns that on your brow resided
Have those roses thus divided;
Oh! let your smiles but clear the weather
And then they both shall grow together."β
and lastly, though it would be easy to extend this already long list of selections from a by no means extensive collection of poems, the grand elegy on Donne. By this last the reproach of vain and amatorious trifling which has been so often levelled at Carew is at once thrown back and blunted. No poem shows so great an influence on the masculine panegyrics with which Dryden was to enrich the English of the next generation, and few are fuller of noteworthy phrases. The splendid epitaph which closes itβ
The universal monarchy of wit"β
is only the best passage, not the only good one, and it may be matched with a fine and just description of English, ushered by a touch of acute criticism.
And the blind fate of language, whose tuned chime
More charms the outward sense: yet thou mayst claim
From so great disadvantage greater fame.
Since to the awe of thine imperious wit
Our troublesome language bends, made only fit
With her tough thick-ribbed hoops to gird about
Thy giant fancy, which had proved too stout
For their soft melting phrases."
And it is the man who could write like this that Hazlitt calls an "elegant Court trifler!"
The third of this great trio of poets, and with them the most remarkable of our whole group, was Richard Crashaw. He completes Carew and Herrick both in his qualities and (if a kind of bull may be permitted) in his defects, after a fashion almost unexampled elsewhere and supremely interesting. Hardly any one of the three could have appeared at any other time, and not one but is distinguished from the others in the most marked way. Herrick, despite his sometimes rather obtrusive learning, is emphatically the natural man. He does not show much sign of the influence of good society, his merits as well as his faults have a singular unpersonal and, if I may so say, terræfilian connotation. Carew is a gentleman before all; but a rather profane gentleman. Crashaw is religious everywhere. Again, Herrick and Carew, despite their strong savour of the fashion of the time, are eminently
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