SOURCE: Bateson, F. W. “A Word for Waller.” In English Poetry: A Critical Introduction, pp. 116-22. London: Longmans, 1950.

[In the following essay, Bateson explores reasons for the decline in Waller's reputation as a poet.]

Waller is the Augustan Wyatt. ‘Unless he had written’, Dryden owned, ‘none of us could write.’¹ In the memorial volume that Rymer, the critic and historian, edited in 1688 Sir Thomas Higgons compared Waller's contribution to the English language with Petrarch's to Italian:

The English he hath to Perfection brought;
And we to speak are by his Measures taught.
Those very Words, which are in Fashion now,
He brought in Credit half an Age ago.
Thus Petrarch mended the Italian Tongue:
And now they speak the Language which he sung.(2)

And Atterbury paid a similar tribute in 1690:

He undoubtedly stands first in the List of Refiners, and for ought I know, last too; for I question whether in Charles the Second's Reign, English did not come to its full perfection; and whether it has not had its Augustean Age, as well as the Latin … In the mean time, 'tis a surprizing Reflection, that between what Spencer wrote last, and Waller first, there should not be much above twenty years distance; and yet the one's Language, like the Money of that time, is as currant now as ever; whilst the other's words are like old coyns, one must go to an Antiquary to understand their true meaning and value.³

Nor was it only on historical grounds that Waller was admired. Hume considered him the English Horace.⁴ Chesterfield recommended him to his son for spare-time reading with Horace, Boileau and La Bruyère.⁵ And he is frequently quoted by the two most dazzling creations of Restoration comedy—Etherege's Dorimant⁶ and Congreve's Millamant.⁷

But today Waller's name is mud. The following is a typical pronouncement:

No poetical reputation of the seventeenth century has been so completely and irreparably eclipsed as that of Edmund Waller. … Whereas Cowley and Cleveland can still give pleasure, Waller's name calls up scarcely more than two lyrics of attenuated cavalier grace, ‘On a Girdle’ and ‘Go lovely Rose’, and a dim memory of much complimentary and occasional verse. … Any public or private occasion could release a stream of his lucid rhetoric. … For us he remains a fluent trifler, the rhymer of a court gazette.⁸

The gap between the eulogies of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and the modern assessment is clearly a wide one. It can only be bridged, I believe, by the application of the critical principles laid down earlier in this book. In particular we need to know what the audience was that Waller originally addressed and what that audience expected from poetry.

Goldsmith included two poems by Waller in his Beauties of English Poesy (1767). They were not, however, ‘On a Girdle’ and ‘Go lovely Rose’, but ‘On the Death of the Lord Protector’ and ‘The Story of Phœbus and Daphne Applied’. And Goldsmith, in his critical notes, makes no mention of Waller's cavalier grace. What he says is: ‘A modern reader will chiefly be struck with the strength of thinking.’ The fact is there are two Wallers—a minor Renaissance poet and a major Augustan poet. To concentrate on the former and overlook the latter is as uncritical as it would be to identify Yeats with ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ and then complain of his attenuated Romanticism.

Miss C. V. Wedgwood has recently accused the cavalier poets of belonging ‘to the arrière, not to the avant garde’:

Their whole trend of thought reached back into a receding past, away from the cold and probing realism, both in thought and politics, which was gradually submerging the older world. They were in fact anti-political, just as the King's view was anti-political—an attempt to do without politics, not an attempt to reform them.⁹

Waller at any rate escapes this indictment. He was an extremely able Member of Parliament, and after the Restoration, as Father of the House, exercised a useful restraining influence on royalist extremists. And Waller's best poem, ‘A Panegyric to my Lord Protector’ (c. 1654) is specifically political, one of the finest political poems in English. It might be described as a seventeenth-century equivalent of W. H. Auden's ‘Spain’, or of the ‘Prologue’ to his Look, Stranger! Although the phrasing is not as brilliant as in Marvell's famous ‘Horatian Ode’ (1650), it is in some ways a better poem because it makes better sense. The political advice that Marvell gave Cromwell was much of it extremely inept—the recommendation to invade France and Italy, for example, or to exterminate the Scots. Waller's prescriptions, in these two matters, were the eminently sensible ones of a balance of power policy in Europe and a union with Scotland. And the analysis of England's economic position is equally shrewd. Unfortunately the poem is too long to quote. Here instead is ‘The Story of Phœbus and Daphne Applied’, which Goldsmith admired and which Elijah Fenton (Pope's collaborator in the translation of the Odyssey) considered ‘one of the most beautiful Poems in our own, or any other modern language’:¹⁰

Thyrsis, a youth of the inspirèd train,
Fair Sacharissa loved, but loved in vain.
Like Phœbus sung the no less amorous boy,
Like Daphne she, as lovely and as coy.
With numbers he the flying nymph pursues,
With numbers such as Phœbus' self might use.
Such is the chase when Love and Fancy leads,
O'er craggy mountains and through flowery meads,
Invoked to testify the lover's care
Or form some image of his cruel fair.
Urged with his fury, like a wounded deer,
O'er these he fled; and now approaching near,
Had reached the nymph with his harmonious lay,
Whom all his charms could not incline to stay.
Yet what he sung in his immortal strain,
Though unsuccessful, was not sung in vain.
All but the nymph that should redress his wrong,
Attend his passion, and approve his song.
Like Phœbus thus, acquiring unsought praise,
He catched at love, and filled his arm with bays.

The poem's success is primarily due to the series of surprises that the working out of the Waller-Sacharissa and Phœbus-Daphne parallel provides. The impersonality of the poem is in striking contrast to Renaissance egotism. Although in comparing himself to Phœbus Waller might be thought to run the risk of being caught blowing his own trumpet, in fact he is so detached from the whole situation that the danger does not arise. His love for Sacharissa and her rejection of it have been abstracted out of their human context and are here simply disembodied concepts that the mind can play with in the dry light of reason. Even metaphor, the fundamental Renaissance device, is adapted to non-Renaissance uses. Half-way through the poem, indeed, the metaphoric level suddenly changes. The mountains and meads begin, as it were, in quotation marks; they are simply the conventional similes of the conventional love poet. But at ‘Urged with his fury’ the imagery turns into real places that the poet is imagined to be actually traversing, and he is finally said to be ‘like a wounded deer’. There are therefore three metaphoric levels altogether: (i) the conventional similes, (ii) Waller imagined on the mountains, (iii) Waller on the mountains compared to a deer. Though this confusion is, I think, attractive, the metaphoric sophistication it implies is an indication how far Waller is outside the Renaissance tradition. Such acrobatics would have been impossible for a poet like Donne, a fantastic, who thought in metaphors. Waller is playing with metaphor here in the interests of paradox.

It is tempting to compare the poem with Marvell's ‘Garden’. It is even possible that Marvell's

Apollo hunted Daphne so
Only that she might laurel grow

derives directly from Waller's poem. But the basic attitudes to life are very different. Marvell's green thought in a green shade is sheer solipsism, even if it is tinged with irony. Waller, on the other hand, is well aware of the worldly value of a crown of bays. He is the man of sense for whom a success in one direction compensates a disappointment in another. Here there are no heart-breaks. The synthesis of man the individual and man the social unit is complete.

Waller's reputation as a poet has suffered because of his political changes of front. To Gosse he is ‘the easy turncoat,’ the author of ‘smooth emasculated lyrics’.¹¹ And H. J. Massingham, after a cascade of inaccurate abuse, sums it all up in the statement that ‘his literary product is no less contemptible than his public career’.¹² It is true that Waller was an ardent Royalist in the Civil War, that he made his peace with Cromwell, who was his cousin, in 1651, and that at the Restoration he gave Charles II an effusive poetic welcome. But in all this he was only doing what the rest of his class were doing, if rather more noisily. The younger squires were not believers in the Divine Right of Kings or of anybody else. Intellectually they were rationalists (Waller, Denham and Dryden were among the earliest members of the Royal Society), and their economic roots were not at court but in the land. Their principal political requirement was a government that would enable them to develop their country estates without interference. Waller's objection to the abolition of episcopacy was not religious but economic:

I look upon episcopacy as a counterscarp or outwork, which, if it is taken by this assault of the people … we may in the next place have as hard a task to defend our property as we have lately had to recover it from the prerogative. If, by multiplying hands and petitions, they prevail for an equality in things ecclesiastical, the next demand may perhaps be Lex Agraria, the like equality in things temporal.¹³

And this was essentially the point of view taken by Cromwell and Ireton in the Army's Leveller debates. Ireton's objection to universal suffrage was: ‘If you admitt any man that hath a breath and being … we destroy propertie. … Noe person that hath nott a locall and permanent interest in the Kingdome should have an equal dependance in Elections.’¹⁴

To Waller and to Ireton property is land. ‘Real’ estate, as it came to be called at this period¹⁵ in contradistinction to the intangible estates of the merchants, provided the only rational basis of society. ‘Law’, as Swift put it, ‘in a free Country: is, or ought to be the Determination of the Majority of those who have Property in Land.’¹⁶ The conclusion reflected fairly enough the distribution of wealth at the time. According to Gregory King's estimate, the capital value of the country's land and buildings in 1688 was £234 million, whereas the liquid capital, including livestock, only amounted to £86 million. As long as the balance of property retained this ratio, as Harrington, the political theorist of the squirearchy, had shown, the ruling class was necessarily made up of the landowners, of whom the King was only one. The balance only swung away from land about 1800, when a new ruling class of urban capitalists emerged.

The agricultural roots are important if Augustan poetry is to be read and understood. When the King of Brobdingnag had completed his cross-examination of Gulliver on European institutions he ‘gave it for his opinion, that whoever could make two ears of corn or two blades of grass to grow upon a spot of ground where only one grew before, would deserve better of mankind, and do more essential service to his country than the whole race of politicians put together’.¹⁷ There are two points to be noted in this famous pronouncement. The first is the animus against ‘politicians’, who represent the central government—an artificial creation often at cross-purposes with the ‘natural’ autocracy of the Justices of the Peace. The second is the emphasis on agricultural improvement—a movement generally associated with the second half of the eighteenth century, the period of the Parliamentary Enclosures and Arthur Young's Board of Agriculture, but in fact already active, as the Royal Society's inquiries had shown, at the Restoration. The two points are complementary and they must both be borne in mind when reading the poems of the great Augustans—Dryden, Pope, Gray, Goldsmith and Cowper, as well as Swift—and the plays of Gay and Fielding.

Agricultural improvement meant the so-called ‘Norfolk’ or ‘four-course’ system, which by diversifying corn crops with roots and one-year leys provided winter fodder for more livestock while raising cereal yields at the same time. But the introduction of the system normally involved (i) costs of enclosure beyond the average farmer's purse, and (ii) a squeezing out of the smallholders. In the process the three-tier rural hierarchy emerged of landlords, tenant farmers and agricultural labourers. Lilliput, it will be remembered, had a similar class-structure. The rural elements in Augustan society were therefore anti-egalitarian and were consequently in uneasy partnership with its urban rationalism, which presupposed a measure of social equality. As against the ‘private sense’ of the Renaissance (alias ‘enthusiasm’ or ‘inspiration’), the Augustans had set up ‘common sense’, i.e. the rational faculty that is common to all human beings, except lunatics and babies, and that distinguishes us from animals. It was in the name of this common sense that they justified the rule of landed property. The new science was also the product of common sense. And their ethical Christianity was a common-sense religion. But this community of sense was not allowed to become a community of votes, education or income. Theoretically men were all equal, but in most of the practical affairs of life a rigid social stratification determined their relations with their fellows.

This central contradiction is the ultimate explanation of the pretentiousness and the emptiness of much Augustan poetry. With no mystical or traditional basis of authority on the one hand, and no rational basis on the other, except in the single field of agricultural improvement, the ruling class could only justify its privileges in the eyes of the nation by being an aristocracy, living in the best houses, eating the best food, reading the best books and patronizing the best poets. Hence their ‘ritual of conspicuous waste’—Palladian mansions that were too large to live in, Pindaric odes that were too dull to read. None of the Augustan poets entirely resolves the contradiction, and there is therefore no Augustan poem that can quite be called great, but the better poets succeed in mitigating it. Waller's ‘Panegyric to my Lord Protector’, Dryden's ‘Secular Masque’, Rochester's ‘Satyr against Mankind’, Pope's portrait of Lord Timon (in the fourth ‘Moral Essay’), and Gray's brilliant ‘On Lord Holland's Seat near Margate’, go some way at any rate to salving the period's social conscience.

Notes

1. Preface to Walsh's Dialogue concerning Women (1691).

2. Poems to the Memory of that Incomparable Poet Edmund Waller Esquire by Several Hands (1688), p. 3. Leland had compared Wyatt with Dante and Petrarch in the same way.

3. The Second Part of Mr Waller's Poems (1690), Preface. This passage appears to be the first in which the term ‘Augustan’ is applied to the English language. The political analogy had been drawn by Waller himself in ‘A Panegyric to my Lord Protector’ (c. 1654);

   As the vexed world, to find repose, at last
   Itself into Augustus' arms did cast:
   So England now does with like toil oppressed,
   Her weary head upon your bosom rest.

   In Astræa Redux (1660), ll, 320-3, Dryden transferred the compliment to Charles II. The first use of ‘Augustan’ in connection with English literature is apparently in John Oldmixon's Reflections on Dr Swift's Letter (1712). Oldmixon considered Charles II's reign ‘the Augustan Age of English Poetry’.

   Atterbury's difficulties with Spenser were shared by many of his contemporaries. In 1687 ‘a Person of Quality’ (who was really Edward Howard) brought out a modernization of the first book of The Faerie Queene in heroic couplets as Spencer Redivivus. It begins;

   A Worthy Knight was Riding on the Plain,
   In Armour Clad, which richly did Contain
   The Gallant Marks of many Battels fought,
   Tho' he before no Martial Habit sought.

4. ‘Of the Rise of Arts and Sciences’, Essays Moral and Political (1741).

5. Letter of 5 Feb. 1750.

6. The Man of Mode (1676), I, i (bis): II, ii: III, iii (bis): V, i: V, ii.

7. The Way of the World (1700), IV, i (bis).

8. Douglas Bush, English Literature in the Earlier Seventeenth Century (1945), p. 166.

9. ‘Poets and Politics in Baroque England’, Penguin New Writing, No. 21 (1944), pp. 129-30.

10. ‘Observations on some of Mr Waller's Poems’, p. xl (appended to Fenton's edition of Waller, 1729).

11. Seventeenth Century Studies (1914), pp. 221, 227.

12. A Treasury of Seventeenth Century English Verse (1920), p. 373.

13. Cit. M. Dobb, Studies in the Development of Capitalism (1946), p. 174.

14. Clarke Papers, vol. ii, p. 314.

15. See O.E.D. s.v. ‘real’ and ‘estate’.

16. Thoughts on Various Subjects.

17. A Voyage to Brobdingnag, ch. vii.