SOURCE: Chambers, A. B. “Waller and the Painter.” In Andrew Marvell and Edmund Waller: Seventeenth-Century Praise and Restoration Satire, pp. 85-107. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991.

[In the following essay, Chambers examines Waller's role in the evolution of painter poems.]

On 3 June 1665, English forces commanded by James, Duke of York, defeated a Dutch navy under the admiralty of Jacob Wassenaer, Baron von Opdam, in a battle fought in the North Sea off the coast of Lowestoft, the easternmost extreme of England. That much is clear enough, and since almost everything thereafter was evidently mishandled, it probably is true that “the English victory off Lowestoft” was “the high point of this Second Dutch War.”¹ The first one (1652-54) had been ended by the Treaty of Westminster, some of the terms of which included Dutch reparations for actions dating from as far back as 1623, but this second one was to be concluded indecisively, and part of it was to be humiliating. As of July 1664, the Dutch were sufficiently wary to avoid the English Channel, preferring—when feasible—to send cargos north around Scotland despite the longer distance. One month later, an English fleet was so ill-prepared to counter the Dutch presence at Guinea that it got as far as Portsmouth but not out of that port. On 20 November, however, some Dutch ships en route from Bordeaux were seized, and the taking of two more off Smyrna on 29 December was followed, two weeks later, by an official declaration of war by Holland on 14 January 1665. Presumably this was the action that England, which had not yet declared war itself, had been trying to provoke. In early May, a divided Dutch fleet declined to leave the harbors of Texel and Vlie to encounter English ships on patrol between those ports, but by the middle of the month the English themselves withdrew to Harwich to replenish provisions. The Duchess of York turned the occasion into a fête of sorts with a visit which began on 16 May, and the Dutch improved on the occasion by taking unprotected English merchant ships sailing from Hamburg.

The battle of Lowestoft is foregrounded against this unstable backdrop, and in view of subsequent English disasters, it is as important as it may be difficult to remember that this engagement was the first direct confrontation between official instruments of war and that it seemed, at first or possibly even second glance, to put England in a commanding position. Not long afterwards, true enough, it was abundantly clear that a splendid chance for decisive victory had somehow been squandered rather than made the most of. Parliamentary questions were asked, acrimonious charges laid, scapegoats sought, and sardonic instructions written for imaginary painters of bungled battles. Waller, however, had no reason to anticipate the deeply troubled waters which actually lay ahead. In writing a poem about Lowestoft, he supposed, in fact, that he had an entirely different set of problems on his hands, one of them being that the Duchess of York had unaccountably neglected to bring with her a shield when visiting the Duke and the fleet at Harwich in May.

A difficulty of that kind may seem trivial, but my phrasing is not meant facetiously, or not entirely so, for the implications are by no means minimalistic from an artistic point of view. It can be shown that Virgil and Homer are specifically relevant for Waller's poem, but a brief way to introduce evidence for the point just suggested is to recall, first of all, the title of a work by Hesiod. When the Greek poet invited his hearers to attend to “The Shield of Heracles,” the initial impact must have been notably different from whatever impression is made by the title Waller had to settle for:

INSTRUCTIONS TO A PAINTER

For the Drawing of the Posture and Progress of His Majesty's Forces at Sea, under the Command of His Highness-Royal; together with the Battle and Victory Obtained over the Dutch,

June 3, 1665.

The abyss which seems here to yawn between the two titles admittedly was less deep in Waller's day than now, partly because of topical excitement generated by the event and partly because ponderous titles were not only less unfashionable but may even have had some sales value. Waller, however, was aware of considerable difference between his subject and Hesiod's, a fact clearly evident from two strategies which initially appear to be self-contradictory: He calls attention to the gap on the one hand and yet tries to bridge over it on the other. The bridging techniques must be postponed until I am in a better position to offer an explanatory account of them, but an illustrative example of more or less explicit discrepancy is easily given now.

In visiting Harwich, “Th' illustrious Duchess and her glorious train” had made their appearance “Like Thetis with her nymphs” (81-82);

The gazing sea-gods, since the Paphian queen
Sprung from among them, no such sight had seen.

(83-84)

Thetis, however, had brought a shield to Achilles; Venus—“the Paphian Queen”—had done the same for Aeneas. In doing so they had not only armed those heroes but also supplied them with art works measurably superior to and even more famous than Hesiod's. In appearance, or so Waller can hyperbolically claim, the Duchess out-rivals her divine and classical counterparts, but the heroes visited differ in at least one noteworthy respect.

The great Achilles march'd not to the field
Till Vulcan that impenetrable shield
And arms had wrought.

(127-29)

“Our bolder hero,” however, “on the deck does stand / Exposed” (131-32). Another difference is that Waller, with no impenetrable shield to describe, must resort to giving instructions to a painter instead. Or rather, as “bolder hero” partly indicates, Waller is determined to make poetic capital from deficiency in two ways.

He describes not only what the painter is to paint but also what he is not. Indeed, until nearly the end of the poem, absence will be fully as important as presence is. The finished canvas could be impressive, no doubt, if the instructions were literally real and well executed, but the picture fictionally envisaged is in process and not yet finished, and Waller cannot guarantee results since he himself can only instruct, not paint. The same is true of another work, the impressive kingdom for which the canvas is intended to be the artistic and expressive symbol. If that larger work which Waller has in mind is ever to exist, then Charles will certainly have to oversee its production and probably will need to be the painter of much of it. Mythic and poetic pasts can be incorporated into present-tense directions to one of these artists in order to offer suggestions to the other of them, but the perfected works themselves are future possibilities, not certainties, because the only work that Waller himself can control is his own poem. A fundamentally important point here is the metaphoric principle which informs Waller's ingenious device of advising others both explicitly and implicitly, along with producing polished art himself as a specific illustration of what might be accomplished, in a picture or a kingdom, by following his example.

The only thing that has seemed important, however, is the chain reaction to the device which Waller so shrewdly chose to adopt. Fictional instructions about imaginary pictures began to appear almost immediately, including but by no means limited to Marvell's “Last Instructions to a Painter,” and these painter poems, as they came to be called, were still going if not going strong when Steele, forty years later, expressed the belief or perhaps the fervent hope that the form could not survive what Blackmore had done to it.² Osborne published a finding list of painter poems in 1949, and they have attracted considerable attention since then, notably by those who necessarily have had to take them into account in assessing Marvell's later work and career.³ The fictional necessity for the fictional instructions, however, originally had been the space left vacant by the missing shields of classical antiquity, and that fact apparently has been lost sight of. This is a development which almost certainly would have taken both Waller and Marvell by surprise.

To regain the earlier perspective, one ought to look at Waller's starting point in some detail so as to be able to see where he left off and thus where subsequent painter poems began. A useful critic to cite for these purposes—this statement will look anachronistic only for a moment—is Pope. His translation of the Iliad, both luckily and unluckily, was intended for the carriage trade, underwritten by advance subscription, and first published in imposing folio form. The expensive format is especially important toward the end of the eighteenth book because the engraving supplied for the Shield of Achilles otherwise could not have been included at all and/or the details depicted thereon would have been microscopic to an unaided eye. This is a fact which the Twickenham editors discovered to our sorrow, and they chose to leave out the plates rather than supply a magnifying glass with each set sold. They do include a bonus, however, which eighteenth-century buyers did not receive since they reproduce Pope's own rough drawing for the finished design. Both formats also, of course, include Pope's elaborate and at times highly schematic verbal descriptions of what an actualized version of the shield would be like.⁴

Pope assures us that he was “very careful to consult both the best Performers and Judges in Painting … the most distinguish'd Masters of that Art. Sir Godfrey Kneller in particular … entirely agrees with my sentiments on this Subject” (370). This self-protective coloration appears at the end of an account in which he ventures “to consider this Piece” (Homer's of course, and not his own, or at least not explicitly) “as a complete Idea of Painting, and a Sketch for what one may call an universal Picture” (363). He also offers what he refers to as “an Attempt … to shew with what exact Order all that [Homer] describes may enter into the Composition, according to the Rules of Painting” (366), an attempt which is needed, in part, because a fundamental “rule”—indeed, one of the inherent limitations of the art form—appears to be violated. Or so, at any rate, say those who complain that in painted work it is manifestly “impossible to represent the Movement of the Figures” (358) or to “hear” (359).

A comparable argument was used not too long ago to discredit the idea that Marvell could have written two of the painter poems sometimes attributed to him since they incompetently allow painted figures to speak.⁵ Waller must have had more than a little sympathy for this realistic position since at one point he finds it incumbent to justify his own departure from it.

Painter, excuse me, if I have a while
Forgot thy art and us'd another style,
For, though you draw arm'd heroes as they sit,
The task in battle does the Muses fit.
They, in the dark confusion of a fight,
Discover all, instruct us how to write,
And light and honor to brave actions yield,
Hid in the smoke and tumult of the field.

(287-94)

Even here, however, Waller aligns himself with classical practice rather than modern commentary. On the shield of Aeneas, as Dryden puts it, “Th' approaching Gauls, / Obscure in Night, ascend, and seize the Walls” (Aeneis, 8.873-74).⁶ And Virgil next chooses to give some particulars despite the fact that in doing so he “oversteps the limits of possibility,” as Page (658 n) points out, since “if the night was dark the many details … would not be visible.” Waller prefers to allow the muse to reveal more than a painting could actually show, and his own perspective, therefore, is rather like Pope's view concerning movement and speech on the shield.

“There is,” Pope observes, “a great deal of difference between the Work itself, and the Description of it” (359). On the shield, the scene is certainly silent and almost as certainly static as well. Eustathius, Homer's twelfth-century commentator, had speculated “That 'tis possible all those Figures did not stick close to the Shield, but that they were detach'd from it, and mov'd by Springs, in such a manner that they appear'd to have Motion,” but all this is “without any Necessity” and, in any case, explains only movement, not sound. Eustathius—and others, one might add—overlooked the fact that a description quite properly may describe what the scene itself can only mutely, motionlessly, or even darkly suggest. “In explaining a Painting of Raphael or Poussin,” Pope wants to know, “can we prevent animating the Figures, in making them speak conformably to the Design of the Painter?” By way of indirect answer, “Pliny says of Apelles, that he painted Clytus on Horseback going to Battel, and demanding his Helmet of his Squire” (360). Indeed, “the same Author has said much more of Apelles,” that “he painted those things which could not be painted, as Thunder.” (Apelles and thunder and especially Zeus the Thunderer, I should parenthetically say, will need further attention later on.) “And of Timanthus,” Pliny goes so far as to claim “that in all his Works there was something more understood than was seen.” (This too is a pregnant observation.) “No one sure will condemn those ways of Expression,” or at least not rightly so, and especially not in this case because the vast immensity of the scene demands them. For the truth of the matter is that the scope of the shield, as forged out by Hephaistos and described by Homer, is nothing less than “the whole World … and all the Diversions of Mankind” (358).

One needs to remember, however, that the divine artificer was “the God of Fire,” not of Water. In consequence, Homer writes (or rather Pope does),

          Thus the broad Shield complete the Artist crown'd
With his last Hand, and pour'd the Ocean round,

but “he passes over this part of the description negligently” (357 n). Oceanic matters are, however, the only omission of any consequence, and even that one has long since been remedied by Mulciber and Virgil for the comparable shield of Aeneas. Virgil “makes half his description of Aeneas's buckler consist in a sea fight” precisely “because Homer had describ'd nothing of this kind” (ibid.). “The Latin Poet,” moreover, when he “imitated the Greek one, always took care to accommodate those things which Time had chang'd, so as to render them agreeable to the Palate of his Readers” (360).

In the shield of Aeneas, therefore, though not in Achilles',

We see the famous Battel of Actium, where we may distinguish the Captains: Agrippa with the Gods, and the Winds favorable; and Anthony leading on all the Forces of the East, Egypt, and the Bactrians: The Fight begins, The Sea is red with Blood, Cleopatra gives the Signal for a Retreat, and calls her Troops with a Systrum. Patrio vocat agmina Systro <696 [this insert and the one below are the Twickenham's]=. The Gods, or rather the Monsters of Egypt, fight against Neptune, Venus, Minerva, Mars and Apollo: We see Anthony's Fleet beaten, and the Nile sorrowfully opening his Bosom to receive the Conquer'd: Cleopatra looks pale and almost dead at the Thought of that Death she had already determined; nay we see the very Wind Iapis < actually Iapyx>, which hastens her Flight: We see the three Triumphs of Augustus; that Prince consecrates three hundred Temples, the Altars are fill'd with Ladies offering up Sacrifices, Augustus sitting at the Entrance of Apollo's Temple, receives Presents, and hangs them on the Pillars of the Temple; while all the conquer'd Nations pass by …

(360-61)

In Pope's view, “Nothing can better justify Homer, or shew the Wisdom and Judgment of Virgil.” Virgil, quite rightly, “was charm'd with Achilles's Shield, and therefore would give the same Ornament to his Poem.” “But as Homer had painted the Universe, he was sensible that nothing remain'd for him to do”—except, that is, an amplifying of the seascape and a “Prophecy” to “shew what the Descendant of his Hero should perform.” Pope does not bother to say so, but from Virgil's standpoint, of course, though not that of Aeneas, the prophecy had already been fulfilled so that the future history displayed on the shield had become a living and present reality. This was not to prove true for Waller, or not without significant restrictions.

Pope also makes no comment, though he could have, on that profusion of painter poems which Waller inadvertently called into existence when he looked about, or rather behind, him to see whether Virgil had exhausted the only possible extension of Homer or whether there remained something that a poet might yet do with a sea battle in which the ducal brother of the reigning “Augustus” had played a major role. Here, in a sense, we return to well-charted territory, since Waller's precedents for describing the painter's task have themselves been often described.⁷ Regularly mentioned in this connection are Anacreon, Horace, and the tradition of ut pictura poesis which regards poems as speaking pictures and pictures as silent poems. Waller's prime source, however, has been identified as a poem by Giovanni Busenello in which the painter Liberi is told how to depict (or possibly how he was already in the process of depicting) a climactic event of a twenty-five-year war, the defeat inflicted in 1655 by Venice on the Turks at Crete. The painting, as of 1949, “still occupies its appointed place in the Sala dello Scrutinio of the Palace of the Doges” (Osborne, 9) and thus has long overshadowed Busenello's poem and, one supposes, Waller's as well.

I have not seen the fact mentioned in connection with the painter poems, but Busenello, in this respect also like Waller, was better known formerly than now. A respected writer of poems to be read in their own right, he also was a librettist for Monteverdi, who wrote his last two operas, Il ritorno d'Ulysse (The Return of Odysseus, 1641) and L'incoronazione di Poppea (The Crowning of Poppea, 1642) for Venice, at that time the operatic capital of Italy.⁸ Sir Thomas Higgons, sometime ambassador to Venice, may have seen some analogues in such works for happenings in England when he published his translation of Busenello's victory poem as A Prospective of the Naval Triumph of the Venetians over the Turk (1658). I also have seen no mention of the fact that this is the same Higgons who, as MP from New Windsor, was to be one of Marvell's satiric butts in “The Last Instructions” (197-98), but Waller's debt to Busenello, directly and/or through Higgons is well established. Indeed, it is so much taken for granted that Waller's commendatory poem “To his Worthy Friend Sir THOMAS HIGGONS, upon his Translation of the VENETIAN TRIUMPH” (Fenton, 95-96) evidently is no longer read any more than Higgons and Busenello are. The assumption appears to be that the mere fact of its existence is all that usefully needs to be known, but that is not, I think, the case.

Waller begins by carefully distinguishing among several levels of artistic merit in different artistic mediums. The heraldic Lion of Venice, as displayed on that city's coat of arms and by the famous sculptures before San Marco, is “not so fierce in fight, / As LIBERI's hand presents him to our sight.” Yet the painter's brush (“his pencil”) does not show him “half so fierce, / Or roar so loud, as BUSINELLO's verse.” And yet Higgons's English translation “does all three excel, / The fight, the piece, and lofty BUSINEL.” If, moreover, words are sufficiently lofty, then even loftier deeds may be inspired by them. It thus is not beyond all hope that

If, list'ning to your charms, we could our jars
Compose, and on the TURK discharge these wars;
Our BRITISH arms the sacred tomb might wrest
From Pagan hands, and triumph o'er the east:
And then you might our own high deeds recite.
And with great TASSO celebrate the fight.

Waller in extreme old age abandoned such ideas, a point made at the outset of this study, but Tasso had earlier been such a great favorite of Waller's that Fenton (xxx) gives a brief biography. Jerusalem delivered was Tasso's theme, of course, but there was no point in worrying about taking that city back from the Turks when dissonant jarring was not composed at home. Shakespeare's Henry IV made that discovery years earlier when, receiving battle news from Wales, he observed, “It seems then that the tidings of this broil / Brake off our business for the Holy Land” (1.1.47-48). And that conclusion could hardly have been less compelling in 1658. The return of Charles in 1660 temporarily papered over only some of the deep divisions and only in some quarters. In On St. James's Park, Waller had already urged the king to press forward with the further reforms still so very much needed. By 1665-66, moreover, factional strife at home, while not evident in verse and restricted almost exclusively to “radical prose pamphlets” (as Lord [xxxiv] calls them), was dangerously accompanied by Dutch threats abroad.

Seen in this light, it is quite clear, I think, that Waller proposed to celebrate an external victory in terms that would also invite the further composing of internal “jars” and thus enable British arms, whether literal or verbal, to be discharged on someone other than the British themselves. His failure on the second of these proposals was to be conspicuous, among other reasons because he did not anticipate the ignominy of a Dutch fleet sailing more or less unopposed up the Thames and the jeering painter poems which “celebrated” that shaming “triumph.” What Waller could and did do was take a relatively long view of the past as it might be brought to bear upon the present and upon a future which (unrealistically as it turned out) he hoped would come to pass. He therefore certainly looked at the more or less current work of Busenello and Higgons, but in doing so also looked long past them to the example of Homer and Virgil and the heroic leadership of antiquity. Discrepancies between the now and the then were obvious, sometimes blatantly so, and thus had to be taken into account, but they also had to be bridged over wherever and insofar as possible lest the future distance between present and past become greater, not less. Waller evidently saw that quite clearly. What he could not have foreseen was that from the satiric perspective of subsequent painter poems, the distance was already grotesquely absurd.

Strictly speaking, simultaneous affirmation of presence-absence is as impossible in a poem as on a canvas where audible figures are seen to move; some suspension of disbelief is required of those who attend to either kind of work. Waller also suffers the further disadvantage inherent in his own verbal medium: He can set forth the pictorial framework of the whole only by tracing out its sequentially linear parts. On the other hand, by the time Waller's reader is actually asked to visualize the Paphian and Thetis-like Duchess and the unshielded and therefore bolder Duke, an ongoing system of referential allusion has already been gradually but firmly established. I earlier lifted those movable figures from their true position in Waller's scene because of the immediate usefulness of the allusive language whereby they are described. Waller, however, is more circumspect both in his approach to and recessional from them. In theory, as Pope indicates, the example of Homer, or at least of Homer and Virgil combined, would justify the inclusion of anything and everything in the surrounding canvas area since the classical scope is universal. This opendoor policy of indefinite expansion proved very handy, in fact, for satirists eager to scatter broadside shot at diverse targets of not quite miscellaneous kinds, but it was also an invitation to disordered lack of structure and seemingly endless prolixity which was not always declined. Waller is circumspect on these matters too, but his instructions do run to 336 lines—Marvell's “Last Instructions” run to 990, in this case not a pejorative fact—and several locales at separable time periods are on view. To manage a firm control requires blocking out the painting's compositional scene with considerable care.

Waller begins, therefore, not with the Duchess and Duke at Harwich nor the other events leading up to 3 June 1665, but rather, as it were, in medias res. “First draw the sea,” he says, or more accurately, “that portion which between / The greater world and this of ours is seen” (1-2). The initial effect, surely, is diminution since a greater world can only contrast with a smaller one presumably less significant. Virgil, however, effects a transition from earlier events on land to those at sea in a verbally similar way. “Haec inter,” between these, he says (8.671); or as Dryden translates, “Betwixt the Quarters, flows a Golden Sea” (8.891). “The groups hitherto described,” to quote Page's explanation,

are on the border of the shield and have been mentioned beginning with those ‘at the top’ ([v.] 652) and ending with those representing the under-world, which would naturally be at the bottom. Then ‘between these’ groups and the central groups (675 in medio), which all deal with the exploits of Augustus, is a band of gold, representing (cf. imago) the circumambient Ocean.

For those able to see this background, either now or after it has been more clearly limned, Waller's opening lines probably expand as well as contract. The circumambient English channel, North Sea, Atlantic Ocean, and so on implicitly establish England as nearer to, not farther from, the controlling center of everything, namely the exploits—or more probably the figure—of an Augustus. From this point of view, the greater world is so in size but not in significance. “Vast floating armies,” watched closely by “the whole world” (4-5), further reveal where the truly important focus is, and the painter is to confirm that fact with watchful heavens: “Make Heav'n concern'd and an unusual star / Declare th' importance of th' approaching war” (7-8).

Lord's note suggests that this is “perhaps the comet reported by Pepys on 6 April 1665: ‘great talk of a new comet.’” The note could have cited Dryden's allusions in Annus Mirabilis (64-72, 1161-64) or Waller's own later reference to the Duke's “dreadful streamer, like a comet's hair” (269). But if the comet of 1665 specifically is meant, then Waller's “unusual” is itself an unusual adjective since comets regularly are “baneful,” “dread,” or—as Dryden (1162) has it—“dire.” This “unusual star,” while possibly modern, is in any case the counterpart to Virgil's “patrium … sidus” (8.681): The “beamy Temples” of “Young Caesar” “shoot their Flames afar, / And o'er his Head is hung the Julian star” (Dryden, 899-902); “i.e., the star of … Julius Caesar, which appeared shortly after his death and was supposed to mark his reception into heaven” (Page, 680 n). That we are to glance back at the regicide of January 1649 seems doubtful to me since I doubt that Waller would here have wanted to refan those flames, but I shall later question Waller's artistic control in two passages, and an inflammatory allusion here is not impossible. More certain is that, having set this scene, Waller next asks that we look back at the “early deeds” of the “valiant Duke” (11) and to those events of the immediate past which prefaced or rather provoked the confrontation about to begin. A summary was given at the outset of this discussion and needs no repeating, but some of the details given earlier were chosen precisely because Waller alludes to them. The editorial notes repeatedly (and necessarily) say (to quote one example from many), “these lines … refer to” (48-50 n). The notes also point out with some regularity that “Waller tactfully omits all reference to …” (55-64 n) or that “Waller's account is especially fanciful here” (65-76 n).

Since these notes are factual rather than interpretive, it would be totally unfair to complain that they miss the point, but it can be said without prejudice that they may be misleading in an unintentional way. By line 65 it ought to be obvious that Waller is busily translating history into myth and that one of his methods of doing so is to redesign some of the strategies often employed by Homer and Virgil.

So hungry wolves, though greedy of their prey,
Stop when they find a lion in their way.

(23-24)

While his tall ships in the barr'd channel stand,
He grasps the Indies in his armed hand.

(27-28)

Like falcons these, those like a num'rous flock
Of fowl which scatter to avoid the shock.

(57-58)

Europe and Africa, from either shore,
Spectators are and hear our cannon roar,
While the divided world in this agree,
Men that so fight deserve to rule the sea.

(61-64)

The last lines quoted include line 64; line 65 itself (“But nearer home, thy pencil use once more”), to which is appended the note about Waller being “especially fanciful,” merely initiates a new variation on a process which began much earlier.

When Waller wrote this poem, he probably was right in thinking that he could take liberties wiht this kind of historical material and that, to requote Pope, “No one sure will condemn those ways of Expression.” Shakespeare, admittedly dealing with a past more remote but even so a very famous one, had worked comparable transformations with the reign of Henry IV, partly in the business about the holy land and notably in making Hotspur roughly the same age as Prince Hal despite the historical reality that Percy was twenty-three years older and thus older than the king himself. But once the hard facts of 1665-66 became not merely known but publically satirized, then it was Waller, of course, who appeared to mislead, and not unintentionally. When, moreover, Waller introduces the Duchess of York as a goddess, he must have been sailing very near the wind even in 1666. It has to have been well known in court circles, if not well publicized elsewhere, that Anne Hyde was pregnant at the time of her marriage and that she gave birth two months afterward. In “The Last Instructions,” Marvell exclaims upon her ingenuity in finding a method whereby “royal heirs might be matured / In fewer months than mothers once endur'd” (55-56). “The Second Advice to a Painter” drives home the point with sexual vulgarities. Venus, now “the Cytherean girl” had made do with “One thrifty ferry-boat of mother-pearl” (63-64), but the Duchess must have “navies” as stage “properties” for a “small sea-masque” (65-66). She is addressed as “dear” (66), a cheapening title for a duke's wife but also expressive of the idea that she was uncheap or dear at any price despite being a cheap piece of goods. Waller claims that Harwich is “where such beauties spring” (88) and that

The soldier here his wasted store supplies
And takes new valor from the ladies' eyes.

(89-90)

But in “The Second Advice,” the soldier is leaving it behind in a different place.

See where the Duchess, with triumphant tail
Of num'rous coaches, Harwich does assail!
So the land crabs, at Nature's kindly call,
Down to engender at the sea do crawl.

(55-58)

Waller's allusions to Venus and Thetis surely cannot have been prudent, not even before the satiric adaptations were made, but Waller needed his picture of the Duchess, or one very like it, to continue tracing out the border for the shield that is not quite there. The two further extensions which almost immediately follow were, however, much safer to draw in every way, and both are about as explicit as possible.

For a less prize, with less concern and rage,
The Roman fleets at Actium did engage;
They, for the empire of the world they knew,
These for the old contend and for the new.

(113-16)

This is Virgil's scene, of course. Homer's appears quite shortly, in lines earlier quoted but abridged.

The great Achilles march'd not to the field
Till Vulcan that impenetrable shield
And arms had wrought, yet there no bullets flew,
But shafts and darts which the weak Phrygians threw.
Our bolder hero on the deck does stand
Expos'd, the bulwark of his native land:
Defensive arms laid by as useless here
Where massy balls the neighboring rocks do tear.
Some power unseen those princes does protect,
Who for their country thus themselves neglect.

(127-36)

This résumé conveniently overlooks, of course, the presence of Hector, not to mention Paris and the arrow that found its way to Achilles' vulnerable heel. That very fact, however, underscores the point that the diminution with which the poem apparently began has been openly inverted; by this stage, it is the world of Achilles, inhabited by weak Phrygians, that now seems small. Not only that, the absence of the shield has now become a disadvantage which is turned into an asset; taking it away reveals the presence of a courage all the more to be admired. It might be thought that if Waller supposes he can get away with hyperbole of this kind for the Duke, then the illusion of the Duchess vis-à-vis the realities of the former Anne Hyde would not have troubled him at all. York himself, however, was never seriously discredited for his personal conduct in this engagement, though others were, whereas the Duchess had small credit, by some standards, well before it began.

The question of artistic control does not arise, however, in considering the fact that the lines on Augustus at Actium, anachronistically in terms of literary (and world) history, precede those on Achilles at Troy. Foregrounding Virgil at the expense of Homer is not accidental and not bad strategy. Waller is more than willing to have the Dutch compared to “trembling Indians and Egyptians” or to “soft Sabaeans” (Dryden, 8.937-38). Indeed, he refers to “the trembling Dutch” (273) as “sheep” (274) and jests at proverbially “Dutch” courage: “The Dutch their wine and all their brandy lose, / Disarm'd of that from which their courage grows” (43-44). Some of them, presumably the still softer sort, “At home, preserv'd from rocks and tempests, lie, / Compell'd, like others, in their beds to die” (71-72). But Waller has no intention whatsoever of elevating “greedy mariners” (69) to the status of Hector and Paris or of raising The Hague and Amsterdam (which “tremble” [266]) to the heights of towered Ilium. He cannot discredit the enemy entirely, of course, since to downplay the foe too much is also to minimize the victory. The Dutch admiral is justifiably “Proud of his late success against the Swedes” (139). They were merely Swedes, of course, not English, but nonetheless he is “Made by that action and his high command / Worthy to perish by a prince's hand” (139-40). Since not all of the hyperbole can be reserved for the English side,

                                                                                we reach our foes,
Who now appear so numerous and bold,
The action worthy of our arms we hold.
A greater force than that which here we find
Ne'er press'd the ocean nor employ'd the wind.

(98-102)

And yet in referring to the Dutch admiral, Waller is derisive in the way in which he uses the man's name. Abridgement of “Jacob Wassenaer, Baron von Opdam” to “Opdam” is itself insignificant since Charles Sackville, to pick an example not at random, is usually referred to as (the Earl of) “Dorset,” and Dorset himself shortened the Dutchman's name to “Opdam” in his “Song: Written at Sea, in the first Dutch War, 665, the Night Before the Engagement.” The point is that Dorset stressed the first syllable: “Should foggy Opdam chance to know.”⁹ In “The Second Advice,” a comparable metrical pattern is visible in lines 45, 178, and 198:

Then in kind visit unto Opdam's gout
And still fights Opdam through the lakes below
And promises to do what Opdam failed

Either metrical inversion occurs in “Opdam sails in, plac'd in his naval throne” (163), as seems likely, or in this instance Waller's practice, deliberately or not, has been echoed. In any case, Waller uses the name twice (in lines 137 and 170), with the second syllable stressed, not the first.

Against him first Opdam his squadron leads.
For such a loss Opdam his life must pay!

Juxtaposition of these lines indicates that leading in this case leads to loss; up-Dam quite definitely is not up and may be worse than down. His name in effect proclaims him.

Waller also wants his painter to depict the Dutch fleet, both men and ships, as now drunk on Dutch courage and tipsily reeling.

Brandy and wine (their wonted friends) at length
Render them useless and betray their strength.

(243-44)

Their reeling ships on one another fall,
Without a foe, enough to ruin all.

(249-50)

The scene at times becomes Conradesque in its grimly comic absurdity, as in “The flame invades the powder-rooms, and then, / Their guns shoot bullets, and their vessels [shoot] men” (255-56). Grim also is the irony that

Ingenious to their ruin, every age
Improves the arts and instruments of rage.
Death-hast'ning ills Nature enough has sent,
And yet men still a thousand more invent.

(237-40)

Waller's references to the brother of Charles are worth noticing too. Opdam, despite his name, was “worthy to perish by a prince's hand” (140) but not specifically by the hand of “James” or “York.” Elsewhere, it is “His Highness-Royal” (subtitle) or “the Duke” (146, 199, 268) or “our royal Admiral” (259) who customarily leads the way. But “York appears” (123) at one point, and at another, the name is emphasized by terminal position and by rhyme: “English valor” may “wonders … work” when “Led by th' example of victorious York” (277-78). “Jacob” is mentioned once, but far from being an opponent surnamed Wassenaer, the reference is to the biblical patriarch even though the occasion for introducing the name is a particularly horrible incident.

A rumor soon reached Paris that York himself had perished, and it could easily have been the truth. As Pepys (8 June 1665) reports, three men standing nearby did die, “their blood and brains flying in the Duke's face; and the head of Mr. Boyle striking down the Duke, as some say.”¹⁰ Lord's note to line 147 omits Pepys but does identify all three men:

Charles Berkeley, Earl of Falmouth, better known as Lord Fitzharding; Charles MacCarthy, Lord Muskerry (in the Irish peerage); and Richard Boyle, second son of the Earl of Burlington, “a youth of great hope, who … took the first opportunity to lose his life in the King's service.”

(Clarendon, Life, section 643).

Waller introduces dark comedy when he writes that these persons not only died but “dyed his [the Duke's] garment with their scatter'd gore” (148). What he does not do is mention their names. They are merely “three worthy persons,” and suppression of their honorifics and claims to fame has the effect of underlining “Jacob” when it does appear. A further interesting fact is that the name is transferred to otherwise nameless bystanders or witnesses to the triple death. Momentarily “struck with horror” (155), they erroneously suppose the gore to be the Duke's own, and their reaction is comparable to Jacob's when shown the parti-colored, blood-stained coat of Joseph (Genesis 37.31-34):

And they took Joseph's coat, and killed a kid of the goats, and dipped the coat in the blood. And they sent the coat of many colours, and they brought it to their father; … And Jacob rent his clothes.

“So trembl'd Jacob,” Waller says, “when he thought the stains / Of his son's coat had issu'd from his veins” (157-58).

Both reactions, strictly speaking, were equally ill-founded, but in the modern instance three men, not the kid of a goat, had lost their lives, and it is precisely for this “loss” that “Opdam his” own “life must pay!” The prince “Before for honor … fought,” but “now” for “revenge” (160-61), and he boards the Dutch ship resolved to exact vengeance “while yet their blood is warm” (174). These horrors are maximized, if anything, by the ironies of die and dye, by the horrible humor of reeling ships, and by the fiendish ingenuity of death-hastening ills. In no sense, therefore, does Waller minimize the magnitude of the “sacrifice” (153) made. These young men

                                                                                                                                                      their youth,
Their worth, their love, their valor, and their truth;
The joys of court, their mothers, and their wives,
To follow him, abandon'd—and their lives!

(163-66)

The focus of Waller's attention, even so, must in no sense be distracted from the Duke himself. The witnesses are Jacob-like in their reaction, in part at least, because they can express the stunned reaction which their leader must himself repress in favor of immediate and vigorous response. At this point, if not earlier, one presumably is to realize that not only have “Berkeley,” “Fitzharding,” and “Boyle” been suppressed, but so has “James,” the Duke's own name. Or rather, one is to recall that “James” and “Jacob” are variant appellations of one another. The private horror of James is expressed through others so that the public personage of York can appropriately react. One also realizes that the Dutchman named “Jacob” has been a mere pretender, though a valiant one, now in the process of being unmasked, displaced, and destroyed. Pepys further mentions, “Admirall Opdam blown up,” and Waller comments, “Their … commander from his charge is toss'd” (187).

Waller's treatment of names needs to be watched closely, partly because of what was and was not done with them by Waller himself in On St. James's Park and partly because of the nominal strategies adopted in subsequent painter poems, especially “The Last Instructions.” More immediate, however, is that this careful device of naming and not naming prepares for Waller's instructions after the battle is won. However important the three worthies were, they were less important than York, and however much James-Jacob of York transcends Jacob Wassenaer of Opdam, he himself is transcended by the king. The point is glanced at in such lines as “His bright sword now a dearer int'rest draws, / His brother's glory and his country's cause” (13-14); and—later and more briefly—“he pleads his brother's cause so well” (215). It ought to be noticed, however, that while Charles is being represented in these lines, he does not present himself personally. The focus of much of the poem quite appropriately has seemed to be, perhaps actually is, the lesser of the two brothers. And indeed, Waller's prophetic hope for James, for his poem, and for future time is that “Ages to come shall know that leader's toil / And his great name on whom the Muses smile” (295-96). Nevertheless, at this point the painter is to depict a “great Monarch” whose own great name needs no mentioning at all. The modern substitute for the shield of Aeneas which Waller has and has not been describing is now to blazon forth in full glory the royal presence which hitherto—as one belatedly realizes—has been conspicuous by its absence.

          Then draw the Parliament, the nobles met,
And our great Monarch high above them set.
Like young Augustus let his image be,
Triumphing for that victory at sea,
Where Egypt's queen and eastern kings o'erthrown
Made the possession of the world his own.

(299-304)

One of the splendors of this passage is that it completes and embellishes the conceptual border of the picture with highly refined brushwork from Virgil and manages to unveil a portrait of the central, dominant figure of both pictures, Virgil's and Waller's, at one and the same time.

Lacquered surface and polished sheen notwithstanding, Waller must have been feeling especially venturesome or especially driven by urgent need when he wrote this poem. Otherwise it is difficult to account for the fact that he risked going beyond the magniloquent luster of the “image” which the lines just quoted reveal. But risk it he did, and some of the final touches—but unfortunately not all—actually succeed in adding to the gloss. Two of them take the painting device about as far, evidently, as it could go; subsequent satiric versions were able to find numerous twists whereby to subvert Waller's form but not many genuinely new ones whereby to extend it. Having finished the formal portrait, Waller ends with a formal address “To the King.” I earlier mentioned the tentative theory of Eustathius, as reported but also rejected by Pope, that Homer's figures were detached from the surface of the shield so as to be capable of motion external to the work of which they were a part. With an ingenious inversion of his own, Waller now invites the king to step inside the picture and be his own living portrait:

Great Sir, disdain not in this piece to stand,
Supreme commander both of sea and land!

(311-12)

Waller has been giving all the instructions up to this point, but if Charles were to fuse art and life within his royal figure, then further directions from Waller himself would become superfluous. With another inversion of control—from the perspective of life rather than art, it is instead a reversion—Charles himself should now become that overseer who is to “Instruct the artists” (328).

In “The Third Advice to a Painter,” the painter is told to stop after painting the “the monkey Duchess” of Albemarle “all undress'd”; the reason is that she herself is better suited, as it were, to “paint the rest” (171-72). The satire follows Waller at a distance and possibly indicates that both poems, though at even greater distance, are following the Pygmalion myth of the art object becoming a living reality. The satire does not improve upon Waller in either sense of that word, but one reason why it could be written is that Charles failed to issue the instructions that Waller urges upon him. The “artists” whom the king is said proleptically and prophetically to instruct are not painters, after all, but those who need to know “How to build ships and dreadful ordnance cast” (327). The model for Charles, flatteringly enough, is to be “Jove himself” (329), but in times of strife that deity did not think it beneath himself to descend from an Olympian throne to ensure the safety of his realm, and neither should Charles.

You as the soul, as the first mover, you,
Vigor and life on ev'ry part bestow:
How to build ships and dreadful ordnance cast,
Instruct the artists and reward their haste.
So Jove himself, when Typhon Heav'n does brave,
Descends to visit Vulcan's smoky cave,
Teaching the brawny Cyclops how to frame
His thunder mix'd with terror, wrath, and flame.

(325-32)

Teaching by example is sometimes sooty work, but Waller thought it had to be done and done with “haste” lest Typhon actually prevail at the next encounter at Actium or Lowestoft, wherever and whenever that battle actually would be waged. Waller was in no position to give this kind of instruction; Charles was. For much of the poem Waller has reshaped, in seriatim fashion, the history and artwork described by Homer and, more especially, Virgil. In ending his own work, however, he evidently recalls not only the more recent poetry of Busenello and the nearly contemporary history of 1655, when the Venetians defeated the Turks at Crete, but also the far more ancient report that Crete had been the birthplace of Zeus. In the last four lines of the poem, the small island becomes Great Britain (though not, one recalls from the poem's second line, “the greater world”), and the Thunderer is displaced by Charles. History is or could be rewritten in the present or, less unrealistically, if not today then tomorrow; the implication is confident hope and future expectancy. But the verb tense is a conditional past, and the syntax pivots on an unwritten “if” which, by its very absence, signals the presence of a condition not yet fulfilled.

Had the old Greeks discover'd your abode,
Crete had not been the cradle of their god:
On that small island they had look'd with scorn
And in Great Britain thought the Thunderer born.

Marvell used similar syntax to posit a situation contrary to actual fact: “Had we but world enough and time.” The potential contrariness in Waller's language was also to be actualized. The old Greeks never could have made the discovery to which Waller refers, but that is scarcely a problem. Many Englishmen, including Marvell, were becoming convinced that in the present political climate that discovery would not be made by modern Greeks, by the Dutch, or by any one else, including the English themselves.

Waller succeeded admirably in bridging the gap between the Shield of Heracles and the Portrait of York, but his success certainly cannot have been hindered and may have been helped by the fact that in this case art really did imitate life. The editorial notes, as earlier quoted, refer to Waller's “fanciful” manipulation of reality, but they also indicate that in lines 213-20,

Waller did not exaggerate York's violent encounters with the Dutch. One of the best accounts of the end of the action is in Harris' Life of Sandwich, pp. 304-05 [I abridge the quote which follows]: “… The vessels were grappled and locked together; the fighting at close quarters was furious; man after man was cut down, or his brains were blown out by pistols held only a few feet away. … After an hour's desperate struggle the Oranje was compeled [sic] to yield, her men were taken prisoners, and she was set on fire.”

The notes further document the fact that after the battle was won, both houses of Parliament “expressed to the King their resolution to assist him with their lives and fortunes against the Dutch, or any others that would assist them. … The large sum of £1,250,000 was voted for the next year” (299 n). Given this reality, the following picture also does not “exaggerate” the facts of the matter, but Waller may later have rued the drawing of it:

Last draw the Commons at his royal feet,
Pouring out treasure to supply his fleet;
They vow with lives and fortunes to maintain
Their King's eternal title to the main.

(305-8)

The trouble with these lines is neither fancifulness nor accuracy as such but rather that this abasement of Parliament at the royal feet follows hard upon—the lines are literally contiguous—the humiliation of “Egypt's queen and eastern kings” beneath the triumphant Augustus. Bridging the gap between Charles and Augustus couldn't really be done, as it turned out, but this cannot have been a tactful or appropriate strategy to try out even when Waller wrote the poem. In these lines, he appears, recklessly, to have let himself be carried much too far away by hyperbolic exaltation. Even this might not have mattered had Charles listened hard and painted well, but he did not. It is hindsight, of course, which influences this view of Waller's conclusion, but the subsequent painter poems have long since established hindsight as a nearly inescapable perspective, and they did so on the basis that foresight had been outrageously and shamefully nonexistent except on the part of those with eyes fast fixed on their own main chance. By 1666-67, if not earlier, those with a corrupt personal vision of this kind were alleged to include the Duchess of York, the man who was both her father and the principal minister of state, and even—though some experienced vertigo at this point—the monarch named Charles who was her brother-in-law. By 1688, of course, James was no longer the name of a hero but an exiled king, and instead of the Oranje being set afire, a Dutchman named William of Orange became the English Thunderer. Fourteen years old at the time of Lowestoft, William has no more than a walk-on role in Waller's poem; he is merely “that young Prince” (187).

Notes

1. George deF. Lord, ed., Poems on Affairs of State, 1:1660-78 (New Haven and London, 1963), 20. Lord does not say so, yet his remark is surely designed to indicate not the historical reality but the English reactions (in large measure ill-founded) to reports from Lowestoft. Pepys, for example, records (8 June 1665), “and the sum of the newes is:—VICTORY OVER THE DUTCH, JUNE 3RD, 1665” (quoted from The Diary, ed. Henry B. Wheatley [London, 1893-99; rpt. 1946]). Painter poems, including Waller's, those of “Marvell,” and “The Last Instructions,” are quoted from Lord's edition. The References at the end of this book give information about other works often cited and the system used in citing them.

2. Robert Anderson, ed., “The Life of Blackmore,” in The Works of the British Poets (London, 1795), 7.583: “In 1706, he published his Advice to the Poets … and [in 1709] Instructions to Vanderbank, a sequel to the Advice to the Poets, which Steele ridiculed … with such success that he put an end to the species of writers who give advice to painters.” The Tatler, 3 (16 April 1709): “Waller and Denham had worn out the expedience of ‘Advice to a Painter’: this author has transferred the work, and … that thought is worn out also.”

3. Mary Tom Osborne, Advice-To-A-Painter Poems 1633-1856 ([Austin?] The University of Texas, 1949).

4. Pope is quoted from The Poems, 8 [Iliad, 10-24], ed. Maynard Mack et al. (London and New Haven, 1967).

5. See E. G. Fogel's attack on Lord's claim for Marvell as the author of “The Second Advice to a Painter” and “The Third Advice”: “Salmons in Both, or Some Caveats for Canonical Scholars,” Bulletin of the New York Public Library, 63 (1959), 223-36; rpt. in Evidence for Authorship: Essays in Problems of Attribution, ed. D. V. Erdman and E. G. Fogel (Ithaca, 1966).

6. Dryden is quoted from The Poems, ed. James Kinsley, 4 vols. (Oxford, 1958). Virgil is cited from The Aeneid [7-12], ed. T. E. Page (London, 1900; rpt. 1956).

7. The best account of this background is given by Annabel M. Patterson, “The ‘Painter’ Poems,” in Marvell and the Civic Crown (Princeton, 1978), 113-67 (especially 127ff. on “pictorial theory”).

8. Donald Jay Grout, A History of Western Music, 3d ed. (New York and London, 1980), 312.

9. Sackville is quoted from The Works of Dorset, in The Works of the British Poets, ed. Robert Anderson (London, 1795), 6.511.

10. The rumor mentioned above is documented by Wheatley (see note 1), annotating Pepys's entry.