Why is modern criticism so unsympathetic towards Cowley? Compared with the amount that has been written on some other metaphysical poets in this age of mass production, there hasn't been a great deal of work on him—the more important things are a straight-forward biography by A. H. Nethercott, the recent Metaphysical to Augustan by Geoffrey Walton, and a few, but not many, full-scale assessments in individual essays and periodical articles.¹ Usually Cowley comes in for briefer, more incidental treatment. But he has never, as far as I know, been made a point at issue in modern criticism. None of the critics I have read give the impression that there are any outstanding questions to be settled about him, any misconceptions that need correcting, and in general outline the judgments they make about him are the same. He is the last of the metaphysical poets, and represents the movement in its decline; but he is also a transitional figure, and in him we can see a development towards the poetic norms that were finally established in the later part of the century. His poetry is interesting as a reflection of current tendencies, as part of the history of taste. But it is not intrinsically interesting, and none of the critics, even when praising Cowley's abilities, does so with very much conviction. Instead, I have been aware of an almost patronising attitude towards him—at least, that seems to me a fair word to describe the tone of the opening paragraph of Mr. Walton's Scrutiny article (the tone persists in his new book):

It is generally recognised that Cowley is a transitional figure … the transition, that is, from the seventeenth century of Donne and Jonson to the seventeenth century of the Restoration and Dryden, and, later, the eighteenth century…. He was aware of the business of writing poetry, but his search after modes of expression and his versatility are signs of weakness of creative talent. His versatility is merely adaptability. It is therefore impossible to trace a steady line of development through his works, and each one may establish his talents and his failings [my italics].

The current notion of Cowley is of a kind of Aldous Huxley of the age (as he has been called), that is, he is a writer sensitive to the fashionably advanced intellectual movements and taste of the time, but responding to them without any deeply-felt conviction. Professor Ruth Wallerstein in an early article (in Trans. Wisconsin Academy of Sciences Arts and Lettres) and Professor J. C. Ghosh more recently reach this sort of judgment; Professor Wallerstein finds Cowley successful as a 'man of letters' but unrewarding as a poet (though she hasn't Mr. Walton's dislike of Cowley, evident in the above quotation). Modern critics seem to be agreed in consigning him this kind of role in the century, and in characterising him rather unpleasantly as brilliant and superficial. It is a depressing reputation. Cowley, it seems unnecessary to say, is not a poet of the first rank—of the order claimed by his contemporaries, for example. A considerable portion of his output must be rejected at once as inferior and in a characteristically effervescent way, hyperbolical and without feeling. Cowley's reputation should rest on a comparatively small body of work—a selection of his best poems that would not be very long. But of how many poets, except the really great, is this not true? Even Marvell, obviously a greater poet than Cowley, is great in only a few poems, and King and Carew (who are generally admired) are at their best only occasionally. If we were to judge them on their routine performances they would appear routine indeed. But this is what has too often happened to Cowley. Dr. Leavis wrote many years ago that the century is remarkable for the high quality of its minor or lesser poetry (for minor is too derogatory a word); poets of the stature of King and Carew and even Marvell would probably have achieved far less had they lived in the following centuries. And yet no-one has seemed able to enjoy Cowley as they have enjoyed other lesser poets of the period. I want to suggest that Cowley's best poetry—of which there is enough to make him a poet of real substance and interest—is personal and distinctive, and forms a positive contribution to the poetry of the century in a way which modern criticism seems to have missed.

Cowley is worth reconsidering at the present moment not simply for his own sake, however, but because his 'case' raises doubts about current criticism of the century generally; doubts which have been raised elsewhere but which seem especially clear and unavoidable here. Has the modern taste for metaphysical poetry become merely conventional? In the period since the 'great break-through' of thirty years ago, has admiration for the early seventeenth century poets become orthodox, something as academic and unreal as the taste for nineteenth century poetry which Mr. Eliot and Dr. Leavis were tilting against? After reading samples of modern criticism of the poetry of the period, it is impossible not to have an uneasy sense that our relation to these poets has ceased to be a serious one. We are at the very worst repeating commonplaces and conventionalities without making the effort to come to grips with the experiences the poems offer. The effort is always 'difficult' in the sense that no criticism, however adequate, can make it easy. The best criticism can only give hints and inspire through example, and the effort of getting close to the poems is still there for us to make as it was there for, say, the Georgian reader, although Mr. Eliot and Dr. Leavis may have helped. But much modern writing on the period gives the impression that its poetry (I include the 'followers of Jonson' as well as the 'followers of Donne') is being read badly; the critics, and presumably their readers as well, are ready to arrange the poetry into categories and make orthodox approving criticisms while their actual relation to the poems seems an external one. Mr. Walton particularly is given to thinking in terms of critical cliché. In view of the all-pervasive influence of the early essays of Mr. Eliot, it is important to stress yet again that the interests which Mr. Eliot brought to the metaphysical poets in the first place were specialised and limited. He was concerned, as a practising poet, to 'change expression'; Donne was relevant to his need (the need to prove to the public that poetry to be poetry need not answer to the Georgian conception) and other poets were not, or at least they would not have been so useful for his purposes. But in a criticism which has absorbed Mr. Eliot's writing too readily and used it in an uncritical way, the familiar formulations ('a mechanism of sensibility which could devour any kind of experience', 'a thought to Donne was an experience; it modified his sensibility' and so on) have tended to take on a final value they never were intended to have. Poetry which is as different from Donne's as Cowley's best, and which makes its effect in such different ways, is in danger of being overlooked or ignored. In Mr. Walton's book, the ideas of Mr. Eliot and Dr. Leavis are reduced, as the author repeats them in a stale and second-hand way, almost to the level of routine. Even when he writes of poetry which meets his full approval, he is very bad at communicating any enthusiasm for it (in his chapters on Jonson and Marvell). His language is cold and abstract. Cowley is mistrusted for not being a metaphysical, or, rather, for being a bad metaphysical. His poetry does not answer to these notions of what seventeenth century poetry ought to be like. When Mr. Walton compares Cowley with Ben Jonson it is, I feel, only with the intention of showing how Cowley fails to measure up to the earlier poet. The possibility that Cowley may have something to give in compensation is not seriously considered. There is a danger that criticism may lose touch with what is alive in seventeenth century poetry through an undiscerning and external admiration of the poetry of Jonson and Donne.

The prominence usually given to The Mistress in criticism of Cowley is evidence of the way he has been read. None of the critics fails to deal with it at length and in detail. The poems in this volume are an early series of love poems written in the metaphysical manner; and unmistakably the metaphysical manner to Cowley was merely a literary style, an intellectual game which was fashionable in the aristocratic circles in which he wanted to make himself a reputation. There seems no reason to disagree with Samuel Johnson's pithy and well-directed judgment:

Cowley's Mistress has no power of seduction; 'she plays round the head, but comes not at the heart'. Her beauty and absence, her disdain and inconsistency, produce no correspondence of emotion. His poetical account of the virtues of plants and the colours of flowers, is not purused with more sluggish frigidity. The compositions are such as might have been written for penance by a hermit, or for hire by a philosophical rhymer who had only heard of another sex.

Reading The Mistress one feels principally that Cowley is not interested; the mode is a mechanism, handled ingeniously, but nothing more. And in fact there is no need to elaborate any further on the point, for Cowley himself has told us not to take the poems seriously:

Poets are scarce thought free men of their company, without paying some duties, and obliging themselves to be true to Love. Sooner or later they must all pass through that tryal, like some muhametan Monks, that are bound by their order, once at least, in their life, to make a pilgrimage to Mecca….

This was the spirit in which The Mistress was written. But Professor Wallerstein, whatever the incidental merits of her account, as she is drawing towards her final judgment on Cowley and 'placing' him by comparison with Donne, writes in these terms:

Donne's images most often represent the truth of the world of inner experience, their outer curiousness being a simple truth in that world, their logic the logic of philosophical imagination seeking to pierce through objects in their casual, temporal juxtaposition, to spiritual and emotional reality; and in his satires his figures make an appeal from worldly values to human. Cowley's imagery, if we define it by this comparison, represents not inner life, but sentiment, wit, fancy. Whereas Donne has imagination in the Coleridgean sense, handling and shifting objects to get at what is behind them, Cowley's is fancy musing upon objects and playing with them indeed, to see all their facets, but still focusing on them as fixed objects. Analysis of Cowley turns into analysis not of the emotion or situation, but of the figure itself.

This passage with its semi-philosophical language is fairly representative of a kind of commentary that has since become familiar in seventeenth century criticism. The fallaciousness of arguing in terms of large, generalised, semi-metaphysical concepts in the absence of any really sound critical grasp of the poetry becomes clear when Professor Wallerstein goes on to compare Donne's Sweetest Love I Do Not Go with Cowley's "On The Juice of a Lemon," and to make conclusions about Cowley's 'externality' on the strength of the comparison. Surely, to give as much prominence as this to an analysis of so unimportant and frivolous a poem is to be critically irresponsible (the Donne poem seems to me charming but nothing more). In view of the poems she is dealing with, I find it hard to attach any serious meaning to Professor Wallerstein's elaborate and very academic Coleridgean distinctions quoted above; this is what is meant by 'external' admiration of Donne. This analysis comes just prior to her final conclusions—it is offered as clinching her argument—and it is hard not to feel that The Mistress has weighed particularly heavily in her judgment and has coloured her whole impression of Cowley. Professor Ghosh and Mr. Walton give the volume detailed treatment and solemnly condemn its 'decadence'. I had better add, by the way, that I believe Dr. Leavis has perhaps accidentally done Cowley a disservice in Revaluation by giving prominence to an uninteresting poem (the "Ode of Wit"—it seems to me merely an exercise) and thereby leaving an impression of dullness and unattractiveness in the poet.

To offset the impression left by The Mistress, and to underline the ineptness of the stress that has fallen on that collection, there is no better place to go in Cowley than the "Elegy on the Death of Mr. William Hervey," which is certainly one of Cowley's best poems. The way it has sometimes been treated illustrates convincingly the inappropriateness for Cowley of expectations founded too narrowly and rigorously on the earlier poetry of the century. To Mr. Walton, the poem is an example of Cowley's 'simple sensibility':

He talks about his life at Cambridge with Hervey in the idiom and tone of courtly conversation. He has not the high, formal tone of Dryden [in the "Ode on Mr. Oldham"]. The social note of his wit is of a quieter kind. It is not metaphysical wit, for there is no element of levity. It is eminently tactful.

That is, in the poem Cowley is an Augustan precursor, and the word 'social', in this context, is a pejorative one (compare: ¢ certain fulness of life was being deliberately [my italics] forced out of English poetry in the name of the social and scientific virtues of correctness and decorum'). Professor Wallerstein puts the matter another way by saying that the poem lapses into prose. It is, certainly, very unlike the great metaphysical elegies. It renders personal emotion in an altogether new way:

The moving directness of this poetry (it loses a good deal in short extracts) is surely much more impressive than Mr. Walton finds it. That he should want to invoke 'wit' at all, as he does in the comment quoted above, shows how preconceived and 'planned' his critical thinking has become; in neither of the senses in which he uses the term does it seem to me called for. To describe the poem as 'simple' is misleading. The poetry will not answer to analysis in terms of 'the complexity of imagery and metaphor': its concentration cannot readily be explained in terms of paradox, conceit and so on. It succeeds by open, candid statement; there is a touching self-surrender of the poet which we instantly accept as natural and justified. The intellectual excitement conventionally expected from seventeenth century poetry is missing, and the felicity of the images of the ghost and the Ledean stars is certainly not witty aptness. But after thirty years of high praise of 'intellection' the Hervey elegy comes almost as a corrective, refreshingly personal and immediate as it is: there is never any question of the poet succumbing to the fascination of what's difficult. The subdued, emotionally charged note, which makes the extravagances of The Mistress unthinkable here, is finely sustained from the opening.

The likeness to Spenser on the one hand and Milton and the eighteenth century on the other has been dwelt on overmuch. Cowley does make use of imagery that suggests Spenser, but the poem is never allowed to slip into conventional sweetness and plangency—the personal urgency is too strong to be suppressed in favour of orthodox poetical successes. In the following stanza,

Cowley seems, in the fifth, sixth and seventh lines, to be approaching something resembling the manner of Lycidas; but he never becomes Spenserian, for the poignant return to actuality in the last line—something an eighteenth-century poet couldn't do—gives the 'darksome shades' an intimate, personal overtone they would not have in post-Spenserian verse. 'It is the hidden emotional pattern that makes poetry', wrote Lawrence to Edward Marsh, 'not the obvious form. … It doesn't depend on the ear, particularly, but on the sensitive soul. And the ear gets a habit, and becomes master, when the ebbing and lifting emotion should be master and the ear the transmitter. …' In this poem the ear does not become master as it does in Spenserian poetry; the sensitive soul is always in command, and it is only when abstracted from the poetry that the 'Spenserian' images, or the exclamations with their striking lack of sophisticated self-consciousness and 'dangerous' likeness to prose may seem unsuccessful. The modern critics, with their interest in intellectual complication, seem to have been unable to reach this very open, very accessible poetry, whose lack of intellectual 'plan' is not a sign of lack of grip on the poet's part but of the unpremeditated impulse on which the poem was written (the ebbing and lifting emotion is master).

The poem is ultimately not as great as Donne's best—though personally I would give it a high place among the short poems of the century—but it is free from the suspicion one often has with Donne about the point at which real emotion begins and intellectuality or (I have the long Anniversary poems in mind) eccentricity ends. How many critics who generalise about Donne as Professor Wallerstein does in the quoted passage are really severe with themselves? (Mr. Cruttwell's more recent The Shakespearian Moment may seem to some readers another example of uncritical largeness about Donne). Surely no-one has any cause to speak in these terms of Donne unless they have gone through his poems asking themselves rigorously which ones will really stand up against Samuel Johnson's criticisms. I have the impression that it is too easy nowadays to regard Johnson as finally 'answered' by Eliot: he has some genuine criticisms to make, even though there are elements in metaphysical poetry he could not appreciate. But the uneasiness one has about large statements about Donne is stronger where lesser poets are concerned. The Cowley makes good comparison with Henry King's Exequy, a 'metaphysical' elegy which has often been admired (for instance, Mr. Douglas Brown in a note on the poem in a recent anthology finds it controlled and successful throughout). The ending is certainly very fine; but the whole does not reach the level of the ending, and a good deal of it seems to me notably inferior. Consider the passage near the opening:

Dear loss! Since thy untimely fate
My task hath been to meditate
On thee, on thee: thou art the book
The library whereon I look
Though almost blind. For thee (lov'd clay)
I languish out, not live the day,
Using no other exercise
But what I practise with mine eyes;
By which wet glasses I find out
How lazily time creeps about
To one that mourns; this, only this
My exercise and business is:
So I compute the weary hours
With sighs dissolved into showers.

No context of irony or 'serious levity', it seems to me, can retrieve some of these lines from a conventional flatness and dullness:

And in the following lines ('Thou hast benighted me', etc.) the metaphysical imagery seems neatly turned but orthodox, 'literary' we might say. 'The earth now interposed is': the imagery is reminiscent of Marvell's The Definition of Love, a poem which is now fairly generally recognised to be a highly competent, almost virtuose elaboration of a seventeenth century poetic commonplace. There is nothing wrong with a display of wit for wit's sake, but to find a suggestion of this sort in the Exequy is surely to make a severe criticism. King is elaborating on his main ideas, but I miss the sense of a 'hidden emotional pattern'. The poetry is external—it is only later in the poem that King becomes unusually vivid and immediate:

But hark, my pulse, like a soft drum,
Beats my approach, tells thee I come … etc.

(the rhythm of these lines is noticeably more alive than that of the lines quoted above). But uneasiness about King's Exequy is less than uneasiness about a poem like Lord Herbert's Ode on a Question Whether Love Should Continue Forever, which Mr. Eliot originally picked out as one of the high points of metaphysical poetry. It seems to me an academic performance, a competent variation on a stock theme without anything memorable or striking to distinguish it: it is possible to remember arguments and images from the poem, but very hard to recall any actual emotion conveyed. But it is in just this way that the Cowley is memorable. The passionate feeling of irreparable loss; the compelling realisation that it is in personal friendship that most of our best and highest interests find expression and nourishment; the sense of value and significance in things discovered newly and poignantly at the moment of loss; these must 'find an echo in every bosom'. The situation of the writer of the poem is one we can hardly hope to avoid, and he expresses the sort of grief at personal bereavement which we can never reconcile ourselves to and which we can only live down. To have done this is no small achievement. The rare qualities of the poem should have won it a high place among the short poems of the century; it is not the work of a 'merely adaptable, transitional' figure.

II

Mr. Walton compares Cowley with Jonson to bring out his 'transitional' qualities, and finds Cowley inferior because he has no 'background' in Jacobean country house civilisation. Mr. Walton is right to maintain that Cowley has no such 'background' as is celebrated in Jonson's To Penshurst and described in L. C. Knights' Drama and Society in the Age of Jonson; and it is important to be aware of the difference in intellectual atmosphere in which Cowley was writing. But it seems a pity to have to believe that all seventeenth century poetry that matters must have a 'country house' background: it would be truer to say only that a good deal of it has. The difference in situation might be brought out by comparison of Jonson's To Selden with Cowley's ode on Hobbes (neither a distinguished poem). Jonson praises a medievalist and antiquarian and shows a strong, traditional respect for learning as a body of knowledge gathered together by scholars from generation to generation; Cowley praises a philosopher and a group of specialists behind whom there lies very potently the attitude 'History is bunk'. Cowley is more accurately regarded as a son of Ben than a follower of Donne, but he is not a disciple of Jonson in any simple sense. The point is made clearer by reading the poetry of that decadent follower of Jonson, Waller, whose verse is smooth and feeble and without conviction. It was not Waller, but Cowley who had the resource and initiative to do something new. He belongs to the troubled mid-period of the century, the period of Taylor's On the Liberty of Prophesying, of the Levellers, of John Hales and the Latitudinarians and of Falkland's suicide, the period in which one has the feeling that the efforts of the best intelligences to define and meet the problems of the age were, despite their incidental insights, fragmentary, partial and often futile. It was a time when the need for 'a great critical effort' was felt by the most enlightened, but when their thought tended to be inadequate, and the temper of the age made it difficult for them to make their ideas effective. Cowley, an exile during the civil war, a friend of Falkland and later disillusioned supporter of the king at the Restoration, is inevitably committed to something different from what had gone before in the century, and in his better poems we are made more, rather than less, aware of this. "The Ode on the Death of Mr. Crashaw" is a good example of Cowley at his most impressive, and it forms a useful contrast to the Hervey elegy, quite different in manner and pitched in a much higher strain but still, I think, very successful. There is the unfortunate conceit about the Virgin in the middle, in which Cowley's train of thought becomes oddly contorted, but this is an incidental flaw. The excellent opening attack,

Poet and Saint! To thee alone are given
The two most sacred names in Earth and Heaven …

the spirited, confident movement in a firm rhetorical structure (appropriate to this poem as the lack of 'structure' was appropriate to the Hervey elegy), the sustained vitality which makes the close of the poem for me an unqualified success, are things that Waller, in an occasional piece (or anywhere else) could not do. The poem is free from suggestion of Restoration uplift. But then an occasional poem by Waller is a depressing piece of Restoration flattery (Johnson's moral judgments seem to me completely justified). Cowley's praises are not only written with more conviction than Waller could muster, they embody a very original point of view—in an age when traditional points of view were rapidly failing:

Pardon, my Mother Church, if I consent
That angels led him when from thee he went,
For even in error sure no danger is
When joyn'd with so much piety as his.

His faith perhaps in some nice tenets might
Be wrong; his life, I'm sure, was in the right.
And I myself a Catholic will be,
So far at least, great saint, to pray to thee.

Integrity of this order—the ability to perceive true value disinterestedly in the face of the strongest precommitments—is rare in the occasional verse of the period and it is anywhere a rare and precious humane quality. It is certainly very impressive in Cowley, writing in an age which destroyed so much because it could not bring itself to overlook sectarian animosities; and Catholics were the one sect that almost all Englishmen were turned against.

The poem suggests Cowley's connection with Falkland and the Great Tew circle, the centre of 'sweetness and light' where was gathered most of the critical intelligence of the age. L. C. Knights' Scrutiny essay, 'Reflections on Clarendon's History', gives some idea of the importance of the Great Tew circle, and Cowley at his best is more closely identified with them in spirit than with the Restoration courtiers and gentlemen. He has lapses from this level: he entertained hopes of high preferment at the Restoration on his return from France and there is real tension between his higher aspirations and his worldly ambitions. His poem to the King on his restoration is mercenary flattery and shows us a Cowley not much more interesting than Waller. But in the "Ode on the Death of Mr. Crashaw" Cowley writes not as a typically Restoration figure but as one of the untypical liberal minds of the mid-century. How far the poem is from an 'easy reliance' on the 'scientific scepticism' as a solution to the problems of the time (Mr. Walton's language) could easily be brought out by comparison with the tone of later 'freethinking'—in fact Cowley's poem was written at a time (1649) when sectarian animosity was at its strongest and protests against it were rarest. How far, in fact, Cowley was from any easy reliance on a superficially rationalistic morality can be seen from the poem "The Tree of Knowledge" ('Against the Dogmatists'):

The pithiness, trenchancy and first-handness of this poem are qualities of moral insight, and this and its companion piece (which however falls off towards the end) are convincing answers to Mr. Walton's distrust. The poems sharply condemn the attitude of mind that lies behind easy rationalistic and atheistic philosophy (Cowley sees this attitude as a kind of conceit). The poems are comparable in moral weight and depth to Ben Jonson's moral poems (the Epode for example).

Where else does Cowley write at this level? Not in the Davideis or the Pindaric Odes. Despite their historical place, and despite the critical intelligence Cowley reveals in the preface to the Pindaric Odes, these are not works worth defending. The Davideis is early, and, as Johnson says, Cowley seems to have used up his stock of poetical devices in the first four books; and Professor Wallerstein rightly judges the Odes to be 'unsuccessful intellectual experiments'—though possibly the Crashaw Ode may owe something to Cowley's experiments. The Essays in Prose and Verse, on the other hand, is a part of Cowley's work which has been often maltreated. Mr. Walton tends to regard them as a sentimental attempt to reestablish country house culture ('but he doesn't show any profound realisation of the social responsibilities of country life as it was lived that Jonson shows in his To Penshursf); the view is stated in a more extreme form by Mr. Wendell Smith. But the Essays, and Cowley's poems in imitation of Horace, were not intended to reveal an interest in rustic life. They were written in the classical belief that it is away from the centre, from the distractions, corruptions and attention-consuming trivialities of city life that a truly balanced point of view can be attained. Like Horace, Cowley felt the need for another standpoint besides that of the metropolitan. His interest in translation began at an early date, and his critical remarks on translation are important: he learned to reject the narrow notion of translation as the mere verbal rendering of literature from one language to another, the method of the pedants, 'the grammarians and the critics'. The grammarians have 'not sought to supply the lost excellencies of another language with new ones in their own' and the results are unreadable.

It does not trouble me that the grammarians perhaps will not suffer this libertine way of rendering foreign authors to be called translation; for I am not so much enamoured of the name 'translator' as not to wish for something better, though it want yet a name.

Cowley aims to write 'more as Horace would have written' had he lived in seventeenth century England, to produce something completely contemporary. He felt the relevance of Horace to his own age and situation, but the poetry he writes 'after Horace' is entirely his own. Cowley's view of translation, it is worth pointing out, became very important to the succeeding age (to Pope, for example) and Johnson gives high praise to Cowley's critical remarks. The contemporary setting of the poems in imitation of Horace and the Essays is given in Mr. Nethercott's biographies of Cowley and D'Avenant, and more fully in Beljame's English Men of Letters and the Public in the Eighteenth Century. Beljame gives a revealing account of the aristocracy of Cowley's generation who formed the taste of the audience of Restoration drama. With English life centering more and more exclusively on London, it was in the hands of this minority that cultivated taste and manners were left until the age of The Spectator; in the place of the courtly poetry of Carew, there is the coarser verse of Sedley and the wit of Dryden's prologues. But Cowley was one of the few figures to retain his personal integrity, and the Essays stand out in a period in which there is a marked decline in tone and moral feeling. In terms of strict literary history, they look forward to the moral essays in The Spectator, but Cowley is a better moralist than Addison. His tone is easy, natural and intimate, but free from the tiresome Olympian note of The Spectator, and Cowley has no bourgeois instincts—his 'background' is Montaigne, Horace and his own personal cultivation (Mr. Smith damns the Essays as 'well-bred'). I have no general impression of feebleness, except in the "Discourse Concerning the Government of Oliver Cromwell" which anyway does not belong with the rest of the Essays. The following is a good sample of Cowley's prose:

Let us begin with him by break of day: for by that time he is besieged by two or three hundred suitors; and the hall and antichambers (all the outworks) possessed by the enemy: as soon as his chamber opens, they are ready to break into that, or to corrupt the guards for entrance. This is so essential a part of greatness, that whosoever is without it, looks like a fallen favourite, like a person disgraced, and condemned to do as he pleases all morning. There are some who, rather than want this, are contented to have their rooms filled up every day with murmuring and cursing creditors, and to charge bravely through a body of them to get to their coach…

The lucidity and economy of this writing, the ease with which Cowley gets his effects, contrast strongly with most of the attempts to write 'satire' previously made in the century. I would like to mention Cowley's very liyely and engaging rendering of "The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse" which he has made completely his own:

Yet the nice guest's Epicurean mind
(Though breeding made him civil seem and kind)
Despised this country feast; and still his thought
Upon the cakes and pies of London wrought.
'Your bounty and civility (said he)
Which I'm surprised in these rude parts to see,
Shews that the gods have given you a mind
Too noble for the fate which here you find.
Why should a soul, so virtuous and so great,
Lose itself thus in an obscure retreat?
Let savage beasts lodge in a country den;
You should see towns, and manners know, and men;
And taste the generous luxury of the court,
Where all the mice of quality resort.

I don't see how Cowley can be thought a dreary or unattractive figure on the strength of this (nothing could be further from Addison's whimsey). But it is more than a charming fable, for Cowley is making serious judgments—he is defining his own position, and it gradually emerges that Cowley is the Country Mouse and the Town Mouse is the complacent, slick courtier and reveller. Cowley is treating the theme which in The Country Life is handled with a quiet, sympathetic gravity, a characteristic strong note (the corresponding weakness is a tendency to oratory). Pope felt he owed a debt to Cowley, and his tribute to him—though he wished away much of his work he still loved 'the language of his heart',—should be taken more seriously than it generally has been. The Essays are meant.

None of the critics I have mentioned give the Essays credit for being as rewarding as they are. The conventional comment is of course that Cowley is foreshadowing the eighteenth century, and this, as I have pointed out, is in some sense true. But Cowley should not be confused with his eighteenth century imitators and successors. The Augustans plainly found a good deal that was congenial to them in Cowley, but when one comes across similar sentiments to his in eighteenth century poetry, there is always the sense of having to do with something more literary, something less seriously meant. The later writers strike the same attitudes but without the same conviction—there is no real personal situation, no setting of seventeenth century strife and Restoration court. Addison had no difficulty in converting Milton into one of the 'polite' poets, and he had no difficulty with Cowley. He approved of some of Cowley's poems, but I do not feel that he read Cowley more closely or more perceptively than he was accustomed to read any other author. The eighteenth century did not produce any poems of the order of the Hervey elegy, and literary retirement became a game. The situation in which Cowley wrote gave place to something new, in which the 'dangerous' attitudes of the Crashaw Ode became easy and fashionable. It is as important to be able to distinguish Cowley from the minor eighteenth century writers as it is to be aware of a continuity. Yet it is on the grounds of his 'eighteenth century' qualities, plus his unacceptability as a metaphysical poet, that Cowley has been judged. Mr. Walton's book makes a rigid distinction between the 'social and civilised poise' of the later part of the century, and the 'spiritual and intellectual poise' of the earlier part; and he dissects Cowley into the two categories. His book is an extreme example, perhaps. But it is time we gave up contempt for Cowley as a bad metaphysical and instead drew interest and profit from him as one of the lesser figures of the century, associated in his best work with some of the most enlightened thought of the time. The Hervey elegy appears in a cut version in the Oxford Book; at least it should be there entire. It could be exchanged for many another poem (especially from the second half of the period) that appears in the volume.

Notes

¹ This article was written before the appearance of, notably, Dr. Robert Hinman's Abraham Cowley's World of Order.