SOURCE: Dwyer, June. “Fulke Greville's Aesthetic: Another Perspective.” Studies in Philology LXXVIII, no. 3 (summer 1981): 255-74.

[In the following essay, Dwyer considers several of Greville's works in an attempt to define his aesthetic philosophy.]

Fulke Greville's work has always been considered opaque and difficult. Of late, critics seem wisely to have decided that an understanding of Greville's aesthetic philosophy is the best way to penetrate his obscurity. But this task, too, has proved a difficult one. Twice in the recent past this journal has published articles on Greville's poetic philosophy,¹ each making valid points, but neither being completely satisfying. This paper, in an effort to make a definitive statement on Greville's aesthetic philosophy, will not only consider the standard statements he makes in his Life of Sidney and his Treatie of Humane Learning, it will look beyond them to certain metaphors he uses in his poetry which reflect his attitude toward language. Further, it will suggest that his Calvinism exerts a considerable influence on the way he looks at the task of writing poetry.

In Caelica “66”, “Caelica, you … / Aduise me to delight my minde with books,” Greville condemns books as “halfe-fast helps of erring wit, … / Which dazell truth by representing it, / And so entayle clouds to posterity” (ll. 43-5). He expresses similar thoughts elsewhere in his work,² so one must assume that this opinion is not a pose of the persona's, but something like what the author actually believes. Clearly Greville does not consider writing useless, for he is a writer himself, but he does see it as potentially dangerous. As a result of this belief, he has applied several limitations to his work, limitations that many would say rob it of a beauty and a liveliness that it might otherwise have had. In this context, it becomes most important to understand Greville's attitude toward language in general and metaphor in particular. Otherwise we might accuse him of ineptitude or lack of imagination, when he is in reality doing precisely what he set out for himself to do.

I. METAPHORS OF LANGUAGE IN CAELICA

“Words” and “names” are frequent metaphors in Caelica, and the way Greville uses them gives us some indication of his attitude toward language. When Greville speaks of words in Caelica, he is almost always suggesting something external and misleading. In the Golden Age, words were not synonymous with falsehood and deception:

The Golden-Age was when the world was yong,
Nature so rich, as Earth did need no sowing,
Malice not knowne, the Serpents had not stung,
Wit was but sweet Affections ouerflowing.
Desire was free, and Beauties first-begotten;
Beauty then neither net, nor made by art,
Words out of thoughts brought forth, and not forgotten,
The Lawes were inward that did rule the heart.

(Caelica 44, ll. 1-8, my underlining)

But the Golden Age is gone:

The Brasen Age is now when Earth is worne,
Beauty growne sicke, Nature corrupt and nought,
Pleasure vntimely dead as soone as borne,
Both words and kindnesse strangers to our thought.

(ll. 9-12)

In Christian terms, the human word (as seen in Caelica) is one with the fallen flesh—unable to adhere to the truth:

True words passe out, but haue no being within,
Wee pray to Christ, yet helpe to shed his blood.

(Caelica “97”, ll. 15-16)

Accordingly, Christ is described as one “that in life, neuer words obey'd” (Caelica “89”, l. 12). In Greville's mind there is a falling off between a man's word and the action it promises. Words in this sense are agents of deception, flattery, and distraction. They do not do what they should, which is to bring home certain truths to man the way they did in the Golden Age.

Names, as opposed to words in Caelica, are used almost without exception to mean something specific. They signify entities that can be circumscribed. They are to be held distinct from words, which can be played on and twisted to any number of purposes. It seems clear that Greville wanted to write poetry to name things, and not to play games with words. In Caelica “71”, “Loue, I did send you forth enamel'd faire,” the defeated Cupid explains

And I no more will stirre this earthly dust,
Wherein I lose my name, to take on lust.

(ll. 17-18)

Here Greville is speaking of the kind of transformation that he fears and wants to avoid. He does not want a name that once meant one thing to change into something else. The courtly love game turns love to lust, but continues to use the word love. Cupid quits the field in Caelica “71” in order to preserve his true identity, the name of love.

With all the confusion and “Word-Magike” (Humane Learning [hereafter known as HL], st. 30, l. 2) purveyed by the “Word-sellers” (l. 5), it is essential in Greville's cosmos to hold on to names, those things that man before the fall “gaue … / To euery creature, and describ'd the same” (HL 50, 5-6). Loss of name is Greville's way of describing loss of order and loss of guidelines which result in displacement and inability to function. Adam named the creatures of God's creation in Paradise; Greville in his writing attempts to name things in the fallen world.

But language, Greville tells his reader in Caelica “82”, is not capable of complete revelation of truth:

You that seeke what Life is in Death,
Now find it aire that once was breath.
New names vnknown, old names gone:
Till time end bodies, but soules none.
                    Reader! then make time, while you be,
                    But steppes to your Eternitie.

This poem is an epitaph that states that it has no secrets to tell. The language may change when a person speculates upon changes brought about by death for example, “breath” becomes “aire.” But these new terms provide no new knowledge. Even with old names gone, the new names that will really tell us something are unknown until the end of the world. What men know will always be a part, a “steppe” and never the whole structure of God's plan for his creation. The exhortation to action in the couplet cuts short the speculation that is beginning in the first four lines. If new names are unknown until time end bodies, then there is no point in wasting time in trying to find them out. It is love and not language that finally provides some kind of window into life after death. Love, as seen in Caelica “85”, “Loue is the Peace, whereto all thoughts doe striue,” is able to clarify the name of eternity. Love is

For Glorie's of eternitie a frame,
That by all bodies else obscures her name.

(ll. 13-14)

To try to name the inscrutable secrets of God is an impertinence that Greville lays to the proud and foolish workings of the human wit. Wit in Renaissance literature is a very slippery word. William G. Crane observes that “anyone who delves into the subject of ‘wit’ [in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries] is likely to be puzzled by contradictory statements that it does or does not include judgment, will, learning or wisdom.” He notes that “at one extreme … it has signified complete mental proficiency, including balance. … At the other extreme, ‘wit’ … connoted, at times, mere cleverness, ingenuity, or roguish cunning.”³ One might say that Sidney's references to wit in the Defense favor the former definition, while Greville in all his works sees it only as the latter. Greville does not consider that wit can in any way be properly involved in the making of poetry. Sidney can cite a poet's ability to range through “the zodiac of his wit” and deliver a golden world, but Greville ignores these pronouncements. To him

The greatest pride of humane kind is Wit,
Which all Art out, and into methode drawes;

(Caelica “63”, ll. 1-2)

Greville's condemnation of wit does not, however, constitute a dismissal of reason. Reason is neither proud nor clever to him; indeed it is wit's enemy, as the first two lines of Caelica “96” show:

In those yeeres, when our Sense, Desire and Wit,
Combine, that Reason shall not rule the heart.

Wit in Greville's mind is linked to the sin of pride. The notion held by some Renaissance thinkers that man is a magus able to “absorb the infinite of God into his own mind and control the cosmos”⁴ is to Greville not only wrongheaded but sinful. The biblical story of the tower of Babel is Greville's metaphor for such grandiose presumptions, and God's response to the tower is Greville's assurance that such strainings of the wit are indeed wrong:

The pride of Flesh by reach of humane wit,
Did purpose once to ouer-reach the skye;
And where before God drown'd the world for it,
Yet Babylon it built vp, not to dye.
God knew these fooles how foolishly they wrought,
That Destiny with Policie would breake,
Straight none could tell his fellow what he thought,
Their tongues were chang'd, & men not taught to speake.

(Caelica “39”, ll. 1-8)

Wit in its pride presumes to fathom grace and claims to be able to understand and explain God's word until law and gospel become what Greville calls “riddles of the wit” (Caelica “97”, l. 20).

There is a great temptation, since the Babel story is about the confusion of tongues, to isolate it as the metaphor Greville uses specifically to explain and give authority to his poetic philosophy. Although it does seem to epitomize Greville's feeling that man should limit the scope and the style of his poetry, the metaphor is not used so narrowly by its author. Greville never singles poetry out as special among mankind's arts, as Sidney does. To Greville poetry is one of many arts, all of which must be limited in order to be useful. Although we may consider Greville's poetry unique and try to ascertain a particular philosophy governing it, he did not.

In Humane Learning Greville speaks of all arts as Babels, therefore branding them all as founded on pride and subject to confusion:

For if Mans wisedomes, lawes, arts, legends, schooles,
Be built vpon the knowledge of the evill;
And if these Trophies be the onely tooles,
Which doe maintaine the kingdome of the Diuell;
          If all these Babels had the curse of tongues,
          So as confusion still to them belongs:
Then can these moulds neuer containe their Maker,
Nor those nice formes, and different beings show,
Which figure in his works, truth, wisdome, nature,
The onely obiects for the soule to know:
                    These Arts, moulds, workes can but expresse the sinne,
                    Whence by mans follie, his fall did beginne.

(st. 46-7)

Nevertheless, all is not hopeless for Man—but his works must stay close to God's truths and away from Babel:

And to conclude, whether we would erect
Our selves, or others by this choice of Arts;
Our chiefe endeauour must be to effect
A sound foundation, not on sandy parts
                    Of light Opinion, Selfenesse, Words of men,
                    But that sure rocke of truth; Gods Word, or Penne.
Next that we doe not ouerbuild our states,
In searching secrets of the Deity,
Obscurities of Nature, casualtie of Fates;
But measure first our own Humanity;
Then on our gifts impose an equall rate,
And so seeke wisedome with sobriety:
          Not curious what our fellowes ought to doe,
          But what our owne creation bindes vs to.
Lastly, we must not to the world erect
Theaters, nor plant our Paradise in dust,
Nor build vp Babels to the Diuels elect;
Make temples of our hearts to God we must;
          And then, as Godlesse wisdomes follies be,
          So are his lights our true Philosophie.

(st. 145-7)

God's Bible and not men's Babels should comprise the foundation of all human arts and learning.

The building image that runs through these three stanzas is one of Greville's metaphors for human activity. He does not discourage building—only “overbuilding” (st. 146, l. 1). We may recall that in Caelica “82”, “You that seeke what Life is in Death,” Greville refers to men's actions as “steppes” to eternity. This metaphor suggests that human activity should be viewed not as a grandiose building, but an architectural fragment. In Humane Learning he warns against the showy and prideful buildings that are symbolized by the Babel structure. With the suggestion of Jeremiah's reply to the Diaspora Jews, who complained they had no temple in which to worship, Greville allows that the structures a man builds within himself are the most important: “Make temples of our hearts to God we must” (st. 147, l. 4).

The Babel image repeats the same warning that the comparison of words and names suggests. A man may act and write; he may name and build. But he must not twist names so that they become proud and empty words, and he must not overbuild, lest he create Babels. Man must recognize his limits and realize that failure to do so will leave him worse off than before. As Greville points out in his unfinished Letter to an Honorable Lady:

When the fleshly Bablyonians [sic] went about to preuent a second deluge, and so, with man's power to limit God's; they purposed to raise a tower equall to the heauens, thinking thereby, that God should either fauour their dwellings or destroy His owne. What came vpon them? Marry, a ‘confusion of tongues’ to the end, that they which understood not their Maker, might much lesse vnderstand themselues: An excellent course of the Wisedome, to punish vaine ends by fruitlesse labors.⁵

Greville's attitude toward language is guided by this lesson. If language and poetry are not used carefully and humbly, the end product will be confusion and the task of writing will have become a “fruitlesse labor.”

II. HUMANE LEARNING AND THE LIFE OF SIDNEY: GREVILLE'S STATEMENTS ON METAPHORICAL LANGUAGE

The metaphors we have just looked at give some notion of Greville's attitude on the use and limitations of language. For more specific information on the language of poetry and particularly on the place of metaphor in poetry, we must turn to Greville's treatise on Humane Learning and his Life of Sidney. The major difficulty in relying on these pronouncements on poetry is that the one in Humane Learning is clear but somewhat theoretical while the one in the Life of Sidney is personal, but open to two very different interpretations.

In Humane Learning Greville begins to explain his poetic philosophy by carefully setting out the need for and proper use of metaphor:

Besides, this Art, [rhetoric] where scarcity of words
Forc'd her, at first to Metaphorike wings,
Because no Language in the earth affords
Sufficient Characters to expresse all things;
                    Yet since, she playes the wanton with this need,
                    And staines the Matrone with the Harlots weed.
Whereas those words in euery tongue are best,
Which doe most properly expresse the thought;
For as of pictures, which should manifest
The life, we say not that is fineliest wrought,
                    Which fairest simply showes, but faire and like:
                    So words must sparkes be of those fires they strike.

(st. 108-9)

Greville is not against metaphor, as certain critics have suggested,⁶ indeed he uses metaphor to make clear his opinion on the proper use of metaphor. Images should not be far-fetched, but “sparkes” of the “fires they strike.” An author's rhetoric, Greville goes on, must not be neutral, but confer value:

For the true Art of Eloquence indeed
Is not this craft of words, but formes of speech,
Such as from liuing wisdomes doe proceed;
Whose ends are not to flatter, or beseech,
          Insinuate, or perswade, but to declare
          What things in Nature good, or euill are.

(st. 110)

To proceed otherwise, to be “wanton” (st. 108) or crafty with words makes rhetoric appear degenerate and illegitimate. And here Greville again makes his point with a metaphor. Injudicious use of language “staines the Matrone with the Harlots weed.” The subject matter of poetry, like the tone, is carefully limited by Greville in Humane Learning:

The other twinne [Poetry], if to describe, or praise
Goodnesse, or God she her Ideas frame,
And like a Maker, her creations raise
On lines of truth, it beautifies the same;
And while it seemeth onley but to please,
Teacheth vs order vnder pleasures name;
                    Which in a glasse, shows Nature how to fashion
                    Her selfe again, by ballancing of passion.

(st. 114)

From these verses we may conclude that Greville felt (at least in theory) that the subject matter of poetry should be goodness or God; the tone should be moral; and the metaphor pleasing but germane.

Given the limitations of the aesthetic as expressed in Humane Learning, one can understand why Bullough stated that Greville's “mind did not overflow with bright images.”⁷ However, Bullough might have qualified his statement to make the reader understand that Greville distrusted elaborate words. Hugh Maclean, like Bullough, makes some perceptive observations about Greville's idea of poetry, but he does not accurately qualify his assessments of Greville's use of metaphorical language either. He says:

Where Sidney … has developed a theory of poetry in terms primarily of “right Poets,” whose art is different in kind from all others, especially in that their power to move turns on their capacity to make persuasive images of wit, Greville has been content with an aggregate of observations reflecting his primary concern with the practical utility of poetry, and only slightly with the image-making function of the poet.⁸

Greville's primary concern may not be with the image-making function of the poet, but not because he feels that image and metaphor are unimportant. To him their function is not to deliver a golden world, or to create things that never were, but to bring the reader back to the “liuing wisdomes” (HL st. 110, above) whose truth is already known but carelessly forgotten.

In the Life of Sidney we find a rare example of Greville speaking personally on his own poetry. He does so metaphorically, and alas, quite cryptically, while discussing the merits of his friend Sidney's work. As a consequence, the particular passage which should be a source of insight to the reader is instead an additional stumbling block to him. Because modern critics see Greville as being a great deal more different from Sidney than Greville himself chose to admit, there has been widespread misreading of Greville's assessment of his own and his friend's approaches to the imagery of poetry in the Life of Sidney. Readers tend to view this assessment as a simple contrast between the two poets' styles, with a derogatory emphasis falling on Greville's own. A closer look, however, reveals that though Greville may have been belittling his own talents, he was not running down his own choice of style. Indeed, he felt that his greatly gifted friend was a fellow practitioner of such a style. The passage where all this is set out requires some careful unravelling. What Greville says is:

And though my Noble Friend had that dexterity, even with the dashes of his pen to make the Arcadian Antiques beautifie the Margents of his works; yet the honor which (I beare him record) he never affected, I leave unto him, with this addition, that his end in them was not vanishing pleasure alone, but morall Images and Examples, (as directing threds) to guide every man through the confused Labyrinth of his own desires, and life. …

For my own part, I found my creeping Genius more fixed upon the Images of Life, than the Images of Wit, and therefore chose not to write to them on whose foot the blacke Oxe had not already trod, as the Proverbe is, but to those only, that are weather-beaten in the Sea of this World, such as having lost the sight of their Gardens, and groves, study to sail on a right course among Rocks, and quick-sands.⁹

Since in the first paragraph Greville has been speaking of the style of Sidney's Arcadia and in the second he describes his own approach to poetry, many readers hastily conclude that Greville meant for Sidney's poetry to exemplify “images of wit” while his own is an example of the more humble “images of life.” However, what Greville is actually saying is that Sidney had the ability, the “dexterity” to use classical material (the “Arcadian antiques”) without dealing out “vanishing pleasure alone.” Sidney, in Greville's mind, was able to moralize the “images of wit,” to which classical material lends itself, into “images of life.” His ability was such that he could fulfill most of the prescriptions for poetry set forth by Greville in Humane Learning while drawing on a wide range of potentially frivolous metaphor. Though Greville does not say specifically in this passage that his friend is a poet who uses “images of life,” he has already allowed that this is the case elsewhere in the Life. In the book's first chapter he characterizes Sidney's intention in the Arcadia as a wish to turn “the barren philosophy percepts into pregnant images of life.”¹⁰

Once one has accepted the notion that Greville considers Sidney a poet who chooses “images of life,” a great many problems are cleared away. To proceed reading Greville's lyrics with the idea that his adored friend used “images of wit” in his own poetry would be most disconcerting, for the term “wit” as we have seen is never used admiringly anywhere in Greville's work. Though understanding Greville's attitude toward wit does not provide a specific definition for his term “images of wit,” it does indicate that he neither admired nor envied those poets who made use of such images. Clearly he himself, rather than cultivating wit in his metaphorical language, strove to eliminate it.

Defining “images of life” is a no less confusing task than defining “images of wit,” even though we have both Greville's guidelines from Humane Learning and his ideas on language that are drawn from the lyrics. A good way to begin an analysis of Greville's term “images of life” is to examine the metaphor he uses in the paragraph where he introduces the phrase:

For my own part, I found my creeping Genius more fixed upon the Images of Life, than the Images of Wit, and therefore chose not to write to them on whose foot the blacke Oxe had not already trod, as the Proverbe is, but to those only, that are weather-beaten in the Sea of this World, such as having lost the sight of their Gardens, and groves, study to sail on a right course among Rocks and quick-sands.

If Greville follows his own dictates, then the phrase “creeping genius,” the use of the proverb of the black ox, and the extended and not particularly original metaphor of the cruel and uncertain sea in opposition to the safety of land must all be “images of life.” The first image is probably borrowed from Horace;¹¹ the latter two are examples of the proverbial and the commonplace. All three carry with them the authority of thoughts that have come to be accepted as containing some truth. They fall into the category of “living wisdomes” that Greville mentions in stanza 110 of Humane Learning.

The two main sources of Greville's “living wisedomes” in Caelica are classical myths and the Bible. Images become acceptable to Greville not because of the source from which they are drawn, but because of the way they are used. Greville points out in the Life that Sidney transformed classical images (Arcadian antiques) into images of life by using them with a moral purpose in mind:

his end in them was not vanishing pleasure alone, but morall Images, and Examples, (as directing threds) to guide every man through the confused Labyrinth of his own desires, and life.

In this passage Greville is praising in his friend the very thing that he himself is doing. As Sidney used the Arcadian antiques to make a moral point, so Greville in his explanation of it does the same with the metaphor of the labyrinth. Making certain that he does not become carried away with the “witty fiction”¹² of the classical image, he uses it to illustrate the difficulty of a life lived without a moral purpose to guide it.

The classical and biblical metaphors of Caelica “56” and “39” show clearly the difference between images of wit and images of life in Greville's lyrics. Greville is wary of classical stories; he worries over their easy ability to deal out “vanishing pleasure alone.” In Caelica “56,” “All my senses, like Beacons flame,” he treats the two ways that classical images can be used. The poem is about style in lovemaking, but it also has something to say about the duality Greville has set up between images of wit and images of life. The poem's persona misuses classical metaphor. It is to heighten both his pleasure and his status that he translates his anticipated amorous adventure into classical terms. But while he foolishly imagines himself one among the gods, his mistress escapes him:

I stept forth to touch the skye,
I a God by Cupid dreames,
Cynthia who did naked lye,
Runnes away like silver streames.

(ll. 29-32)

In this sonnet there is a distinct difference between the persona's and the author's motivations in using classical metaphor. One might say that to the lover, the poem's classical allusions are “images of wit”; that is, they set his mind going furiously and uncontrollably:

Furies wit perswaded me,
Happy loue was hazards heire.

(5-6)

The lover in the poem throws away thoughtfulness and caution, believing events have their own logic in the realm of passion:

Cupid did best shoot and see
In the night where smooth is faire.

(7-8)

Such are the dangerous workings of the wit and the images of wit. If their daring and rashness is not controlled, they may lead those who follow them into dangerous, regrettable, or ridiculous situations.

The lover in Caelica “56” uses the classical metaphor to fuel his imagination and to magnify himself. But Greville's purpose, on the other hand, is to strike a moral point with these same images. He makes fun of the lover through the situation itself (especially with sexual punning) and through the sing-song tetrameter measure. Greville's wish is to diminish the position of the lover, and so to him, the poem's classical allusions are images of life—they make an ethical point. At the poem's conclusion, the persona's and Greville's attitudes have become one. The lover, sobered by his experience, tones down his language and changes his images of himself as he offers advice:

There stand I like Men that preach
From the Execution place,
At their death content to teach
All the world with their disgrace.

(41-4)

He is no longer a classical god, but a wrongdoer, recanting before he is punished. He states simply:

Let no Loue-desiring heart,
In the Starres goe seeke his fate,
Loue is onely Natures art,
Wonder hinders Loue and Hate.
          None can well behold with eyes,
          But what underneath him lies.

(49-54)

Both Greville and the persona here reject flights of fancy—the troublesome witty workings of the mind—in favor of settling for simple and obvious truths.

Biblical metaphors, too, can be twisted into images of wit. As a Calvinist, with a deep sense of the profound separation between man and God, Greville finds blasphemous the courtly love notion of the lady as some kind of paradigm of heavenly perfection. In Caelica “39,” through his metaphors, Greville sets the lady up as a heavenly being and then reveals her to be sinfully human:

The pride of Flesh by reach of humane wit,
Did purpose once to ouer-reach the skye;
And where before God drown'd the world for it,
Yet Babylon it built vp, not to dye.
God knew these fooles how foolishly they wrought,
That Destiny with Policie would breake,
Straight none could tell his fellow what he thought,
Their tongues were chang'd, & men not taught to speake:
So I that heauenly peace would comprehend,
In mortall seat of Caelica's faire heart,
To babylon my selfe there, did intend,
With naturall kindnesse, and with passions art:
                    But when I thought my selfe of her selfe free,
                    All's chang'd: she vnderstands all men but me.

The terms Babylon and Babel were used interchangeably in Greville's time.¹³ By referring to both, Greville emphasizes the fleshly nature of the lover's hopes. Yet he still sets his lady up as godlike. Caelica (literally “heavenly woman,” from the Late Latin adjective caelicus) is the heaven he is trying to reach, and he is punished for his “pride of flesh,” his lusting after the lady, by being unable to communicate with her. But through his own punishment, he reveals Caelica for what she really is. No matter what her name may mean, and no matter how analogous her situation may be to the Old Testament God toward whom the tower of Babel was built, she is shown to be a sinful Babylonian. In her inability to understand the poem's persona, she resembles the Babel victims, and in her promiscuous understanding of all other men she resembles the inhabitants of the wicked city.

In both Caelica “56” and Caelica “39” the persona, through the metaphor he uses, projects godhood on humanity. In each case Greville redirects these same metaphors toward what is in his view a more realistic picture of humankind. Man is no god—he is a foolish and sinful being. Greville's metaphors—his images of life—do not provide novel ways to look at man's experience. Images of wit do that, and they are often dangerously misleading in the messages they convey. Greville's metaphors aim not at new visions, but the reestablishment of old truths.

III. CALVINIST INFLUENCE ON GREVILLE'S STYLE

Greville's Calvinism would provide the authority for his view of man as a fallen and misguided being. His own exposure and commitment to Calvinism were lifelong. As G. F. Waller summarizes it, Greville “was educated under the stern Calvinist regime of Thomas Ashton at Shrewsbury in the 1560's, and he was conversant with leading European Calvinists such as Philippe de Mornay and Hubert Languet. He was variously the patron, friend or associate of leading English Calvinists like William Perkins and John Preston.”¹⁴ Greville's Calvinist beliefs are clearly present in his treatises on Religion and Humane Learning and most critics acknowledge a Calvinist influence on the religious poems at the end of Caelica as well. What has not been perceived is that though the subject matter of the first part of the series is not inspired by Calvinism, the language is. In fact, Greville's style throughout Caelica bears the stamp of his religion.

We can see it first in Greville's tone of assurance, his sense of being able to understand what is right and what is wrong that appears in almost every poem. Perry Miller remarks of English Puritan writers that “we find [among them] in extreme form the will to teach” and conversely we find that “it is the moral import of poets [such as Spenser and Sidney] which appeals to the Puritan Mind.”¹⁵ Greville, though not an avowed Puritan, certainly possesses this cast of mind.¹⁶ When he looks to the poetry of Sidney, as we have seen, he reads it morally, and when he writes his own, he condemns frivolity as Caelica “56” and “39” amply illustrate. Often he relies outright on sententious statement to make his lesson clear. For example:

Repentence still becomes desires mother.

(Caelica, “11,” l. 14)

The greatest pride of humane kind is Wit

(Caelica “63,” l. 1)

For God comes not till man be ouerthrowne;
Peace is the seed of grace, in dead flesh sowne

(Caelica “96,” l. 47-8)

Greville's distrust of the arts that we have seen expressed in Humane Learning and Caelica, and his belief in the necessity of limiting metaphorical language, are also in keeping with Calvinist and English Puritan teachings. Lawrence Sasek in The Literary Temper of the English Puritans points out that though most Puritan writers condemned the theatre, they were willing to accept poetry as a useful medium of expression. Of pagan literature, Sasek remarks that few Puritans advocated aesthetic obscurantism, but certain classical authors such as Virgil, Horace, and Homer were preferred. The authority for the use of the classics by Calvinists and Puritans was the Bible. They cited Paul, who refers to three classical authors—Aratus, Menander, and Epimenides—in his epistles.¹⁷ Concerning more recent authors, Sasek observes that “From before Perkins to the time of Baxter, the Puritans spoke almost with one voice against the popular ballads and romances that provided idle reading for the less sophisticated.” However, certain other authors were found to be most acceptable. Richard Baxter lists Quarles, Davies, Du Bartas (translated by Sylvester), Sandys, Herbert, and Greville as poets whose works make enlightening reading.¹⁸

What makes an author worthwhile to a Puritan is the same thing that makes an author acceptable to Greville. It is not only what an author says, but the way he says it that matters. Those of the Calvinist persuasion were wary of eloquent and ornate phrases, what we have seen Greville term “images of wit.” They looked to Paul as their authority for such condemnation, citing his first letter to the Corinthians where he expresses his avoidance of “the enticing speache of man's wisdome.”¹⁹ Calvin, in his commentaries on Corinthians, offers a detailed explanation of this phrase:

By “persuasive words of man's wisdom” [Paul] means that exquisite oratory which aims and strives rather by artifice than by truth, and also by appearance of refinement that allures the minds of men. … Human wisdom … has her allurements by which she insinuates her self and her blandishments … by which she may conciliate for herself the affections of her hearers.²⁰

Over-ornamentation in the visual arts and in the written word were related in the minds of Calvin and his English Puritan followers. Calvin denounced decoration in churches, saying “images are books for the illiterate; the Catholics subvert the word, when Paul says the Gospel is clear.”²¹ A hundred years later Richard Baxter denounced “the painted obscure Sermons (like the Painted Glass in the Windows that keeps out the Light) [because they] are too oft the Marks of painted Hypocrites.”²² The careful use of decoration in Greville's lyrics indicates that he too shares these suspicions and fears.

Distrust of ornamentation naturally alters the style of Calvinist and Puritan writers. Perry Miller, commenting on the so-called “plain style” of the Puritans, explains that “Even before New England was founded, the Puritans had advocated a prose simple, clear and restrained; fit to satisfy the reason—not charm the fancy; to instruct, not rouse the passions.”²³ Greville's style of poetry, like the prose of Puritan writers, aims at a similar kind of restraint. Both strive to make use of what William Haller has termed the “Word of Wisdom” rather than the “Wisdom of Words.”²⁴ The Renaissance infatuation with eloquence, the Humanists' “almost incredible faith in the power of the word”²⁵ was held neither by the Puritan writers nor by Greville. To them it is not man's word, but God's Word in His Scriptures that possesses the incredible power. Hence in both Puritan prose and Greville's verse we find a great number of references to the stories and the figurative language of the Bible.

Like Puritan writing, Greville's poetry avoids “carnall eloquence”²⁶ but is not without figurative language. Metaphor is acceptable be cause of its appearance in the Bible. The Bible uses comparisons and parables to teach, and so becomes for Greville both a model for style and a source of specific metaphor. Other figures of speech that appear in Caelica, such as antithesis and paradox, are used in such a way that they too reflect Calvinist thought. Waller observes “The Calvinist stresses unreservedly the schism between the secular and the timebound, the sacred and the eternal.”²⁷ This dualism that is so characteristic of Calvinism appears in any number of antitheses that Greville sets up in the Caelica poems. Caelica “98,” “Wrapt vp, O Lord, in mans degeneration” contrasts sinning man's awareness of what he deserves with his desire for deliverance through Christ. Caelica “44,” “The Golden Age was when the world was young,” sets the prelapsarian idyllic existence against the sorry state of the brazen contemporary world. And Caelica “16,” “Fye foolish Earth,” plays on a comparison between the bright and perfect heavens and the shadowy and changeable earth.

In his use of paradox, the figure that is supposed to reconcile opposites, Greville also betrays his Calvinist bias. Two distinct kinds of paradox exist in Caelica. The first are the Christian paradoxes which contain contradictory statements that nonetheless prove true. These paradoxes, all of which appear in the Bible, Greville respects and repeats in several poems. They are true because God is behind them; their opposing elements neither lose their distinction, nor war with one another when they are joined. Because God abides in another realm, because he exists in heaven and intervenes on earth, there is a logic in Christian paradoxes that all human beings can appreciate. In Caelica “99” Greville relates how God takes on human sins in order to take them away:

For on this sp'rituall Crosse condemned lying,
To paines infernall by eternall doome,
I see my Sauiour for the same sinnes dying,
And from that hell I fear'd, to free me, come;
          Depriu'd of humane graces, not diuine,
          Thus hath his death rais'd up this soule of mine.

(ll. 19-23)

In contrast, there is a second kind of paradox in Caelica which is made by man, and is, in Greville's mind, almost always ill-conceived. Profane paradox is a sign of pride, a sign of man trying to play God. Greville sets up such profane paradoxes in Caelica and then demonstrates that both members cannot logically be true. In Caelica “38,” “Caelica, I ouernight was finely vsed,” the body of the earthly lady is identified as an Edenic paradise guarded by a seraphim. Though human, the lady is supposedly one with a closed and sinless place. The poem's final couplet, however, reveals that her body is no Eden:

While that fine soyle, which all these ioyes did yeeld,
By broken fence is prou'd a common field.

Being human, the lady cannot be without sin, and Greville strikes this point with great force. The lady is not simply fallen from paradise to the earth; she is promiscuously fallen—plowed like a common field.

Greville's Treatise on Religion criticizes the stoic life for its easy ability to accommodate the opposing forces in the world.

                                                                                no vice is dead [in it],
But passion with her counterpassion peas'd;
The evill with it selfe both starv'd and fedde,
And in her woes with her vaine glories eas'd.

(st. 38, ll. 1-4)²⁸

His own view, expressed in his closet drama Mustapha, emphasizes instead the warring conditions of the world which men can never reconcile without God's help:

“O wearisome Condition of Humanity!
“Borne under one Law, to another bound:
“Vainely begot, and yet forbidden vanity,
“Created sicke, commanded to be sound.

(Chorvs Sacerdotvm, 1-4)²⁹

Greville's stress on the division between man and God, his tone of assurance, his careful avoidance of overly elaborate language, and his dependence on the metaphor and the metaphorical style of the Bible all indicate his closeness to the Calvinist attitude toward language and poetry. His style will always be a difficult one to approach and appreciate. However, careful reading of his metaphors and the application of his religion to his poetry does a great deal to modify Greville's reputation for crabbed obscurity.

Notes

1. Hugh Maclean, “Greville's ‘Poetic,’” SP [Studies in Philology] LXI (1964), 170-91, and David A. Roberts, “Fulke Greville's Aesthetic Reconsidered,” SP LXXIV (1977), 388-405.

2. See Greville's Treatie of Humane Learning, stanzas 29-31 and 35-9 in Poems and Dramas of Fulke Greville I, ed. Geoffrey Bullough (New York, 1945). All subsequent references to these poems are from this text.

3. Wit and Rhetoric in the Renaissance (Gloucester, Mass, 1964), p. 10.

4. G. F. Waller, speaking of Bruno in “This Matching of Contraries: Bruno, Calvin and the Sidney Circle,” Neophilologus LVI (1972), 333.

5. The Works in Verse and Prose Complete of Fulke Greville, Alexander Grosart, ed. (New York, 1966), vol. 4, p. 246.

6. See “Samuel Daniel and Fulke Greville,” TLS [Times Literary Supplement], June 5, 1930, 475.

7. Poems and Dramas I, p. 22.

8. “Greville's ‘Poetic,’” p. 191.

9. Life of Sidney, ed. Nowell Smith (Oxford, 1907), pp. 223-4.

10. Ibid., p. 15.

11. Art of Poetry, ll. 30-1.

12. Life, p. 221. Greville uses the term to stand in opposition to his own work in his tragedies, but it applies to his lyrics as well. He wished to avoid “the strangeness or perplexedness of witty Fictions in which the affections or imagination may perchance find entertainment, but the memory and judgement no enriching at all. …”

13. S. F. Johnson, “The Spanish Tragedy, or Babylon Revisited,” Essays on Shakespeare and Elizabethan Drama in Honor of Hardin Craig (Columbia, Mo., 1962), p. 25. Even the Geneva Bible mixed the two forms.

14. “Fulke Greville's Struggle with Calvinism,” Studia Neophilologica XIV (1972), 295.

15. The Puritans (New York, 1938), pp. 547, 546.

16. On the similarity of Puritan and Calvinist thought Miller says “In fact, Puritan thinking was fundamentally so much a repetition of Luther and Calvin, and Puritans were so far from contributing any new ideas that there is reason to doubt whether a distinctly Puritan thought exists.” The New England Mind (New York, 1939), p. 92.

17. (New York, 1969), pp. 42, 80.

18. Ibid., pp. 59, 75.

19. I Corinthians 2:4; this is how the phrase appears in the Geneva Bible.

20. Commentary on the Epistles of Paul the Apostle to the Corinthians, I, John Pringle, trans. (Edinburgh, 1848), p. 100.

21. Institutes of the Christian Religion, Benjamin Warfield, ed. (Philadelphia, 1936), I, p. 121.

22. Quoted by Harold Fisch, “The Puritans and the Reform of Prose-Style,” ELH XIX (1952), 240.

23. The Puritans, p. 65.

24. The Rise of Puritanism (New York, 1938), p. 23 quoting Clarke's General Martyrologie.

25. Hanna H. Gray, “Renaissance Humanism: The Pursuit of Eloquence,” Renaissance Essays from the Journal of the History of Ideas, Paul O. Kristeller and Philip P. Wiener, eds. (New York, 1968), p. 205.

26. The New England Mind, p. 307.

27. “Fulke Greville's Struggle With Calvinism,” p. 298.

28. The Remains: Being Poems of Monarchy and Religion, ed. G. A. Wilkes (Oxford, 1965).

29. Poems and Dramas II.