Complete Works of Samuel Johnson

by Samuel Johnson

  The holy book like the eighth sphere doth shine

  With thousand lights of truth divine,

  So numberless the stars, that to our eye

  It makes all but one galaxy.

  Yet reason must assist too; for, in seas

  So vast and dangerous as these,

  Our course by stars above we cannot know

  Without the compass too below.

  After this, says Bentley:

  Who travels in religious jars,

  Truth mix’d with error, shade with rays,

  Like Whiston wanting pyx or stars,

  In ocean wide or sinks or strays.

  Cowley seems to have had what Milton is believed to have wanted, the skill to rate his own performances by their just value, and has, therefore, closed his miscellanies with the verses upon Crashaw, which apparently excel all that have gone before them, and in which there are beauties which common authors may justly think not only above their attainment, but above their ambition.

  To the miscellanies succeed the Anacreontiques, or paraphrastical translations of some little poems, which pass, however justly, under the name of Anacreon. Of these songs dedicated to festivity and gaiety, in which even the morality is voluptuous, and which teach nothing but the enjoyment of the present day, he has given rather a pleasing, than a faithful representation, having retained their sprightliness, but lost their simplicity. The Anacreon of Cowley, like the Homer of Pope, has admitted the decoration of some modern graces, by which he is undoubtedly more amiable to common readers, and, perhaps, if they would honestly declare their own perceptions, to far the greater part of those whom courtesy and ignorance are content to style the learned.

  These little pieces will be found more finished in their kind than any other of Cowley’s works. The diction shows nothing of the mould of time, and the sentiments are at no great distance from our present habitudes of thought. Real mirth must be always natural, and nature is uniform. Men have been wise in very different modes; but they have always laughed the same way.

  Levity of thought naturally produced familiarity of language, and the familiar part of language continues long the same; the dialogue of comedy, when it is transcribed from popular manners, and real life, is read, from age to age, with equal pleasure. The artifices of inversion, by which the established order of words is changed, or of innovation, by which new words, or meanings of words, are introduced, is practised, not by those who talk to be understood, but by those who write to be admired.

  The Anacreontiques, therefore, of Cowley, give now all the pleasure which they ever gave. If he was formed by nature for one kind of writing more than for another, his power seems to have been greatest in the familiar and the festive.

  The next class of his poems is called the Mistress, of which it is not necessary to select any particular pieces for praise or censure. They have all the same beauties and faults, and nearly in the same proportion. They are written with exuberance of wit, and with copiousness of learning; and it is truly asserted by Sprat, that the plenitude of the writer’s knowledge flows in upon his page, so that the reader is commonly surprised into some improvement. But, considered as the verses of a lover, no man that has ever loved will much commend them. They are neither courtly nor pathetick, have neither gallantry nor fondness. His praises are too far-sought, and too hyperbolical, either to express love, or to excite it; every stanza is crowded with darts and flames, with wounds and death, with mingled souls, and with broken hearts.

  The principal artifice by which the Mistress is filled with conceits, is very copiously displayed by Addison. Love is by Cowley, as by other poets, expressed metaphorically by flame and fire; and that which is true of real fire is said of love, or figurative fire, the same word in the same sentence retaining both significations. Thus, “observing the cold regard of his mistress’s eyes, and, at the same time, their power of producing love in him, he considers them as burning-glasses made of ice. Finding himself able to live in the greatest extremities of love, he concludes the torrid zone to be habitable. Upon the dying of a tree on which he had cut his loves, he observes that his flames had burnt up and withered the tree.”

  These conceits Addison calls mixed wit; that is, wit which consists of thoughts true in one sense of the expression, and false in the other. Addison’s representation is sufficiently indulgent: that confusion of images may entertain for a moment; but, being unnatural, it soon grows wearisome. Cowley delighted in it, as much as if he had invented it; but, not to mention the ancients, he might have found it full-blown in modern Italy. Thus Sannazaro:

  Aspice quam variis distringar, Lesbia, curis!

  Uror, et heu! nostro manat ab igne liquor:

  Sum Nilus, sumque Aetna simul; restringite flammas

  O lacrimae, aut lacrimas ebibe, flamma, meas.

  One of the severe theologians of that time censured him, as having published “a book of profane and lascivious verses.” From the charge of profaneness, the constant tenour of his life, which seems to have been eminently virtuous, and the general tendency of his opinions, which discover no irreverence of religion, must defend him; but that the accusation of lasciviousness is unjust, the perusal of his work will sufficiently evince.

  Cowley’s Mistress has no power of seduction: she “plays round the head, but reaches not the heart.” Her beauty and absence, her kindness and cruelty, her disdain and inconstancy, produce no correspondence of emotion. His poetical account of the virtues of plants, and colours of flowers, is not perused with more sluggish frigidity. The compositions are such as might have been written for penance by a hermit, or for hire by a philosophical rhymer, who had only heard of another sex; for they turn the mind only on the writer, whom, without thinking on a woman but as the subject for his task, we sometimes esteem as learned, and sometimes despise as trifling, always admire as ingenious, and always condemn as unnatural.

  The Pindarique odes are now to be considered; a species of composition, which Cowley thinks Pancirolus might have counted in “his list of the lost inventions of antiquity,” and which he has made a bold and vigorous attempt to recover.

  The purpose with which he has paraphrased an Olympick and Nemaean ode, is, by himself, sufficiently explained. His endeavour was, not to show “precisely what Pindar spoke, but his manner of speaking.” He was, therefore, not at all restrained to his expressions, nor much to his sentiments; nothing was required of him, but not to write as Pindar would not have written.

  Of the Olympick ode, the beginning is, I think, above the original in elegance, and the conclusion below it in strength. The connexion is supplied with great perspicuity; and the thoughts, which, to a reader of less skill, seem thrown together by chance, are concatenated without any abruption. Though the English ode cannot be called a translation, it may be very properly consulted as a commentary.

  The spirit of Pindar is, indeed, not every where equally preserved. The following pretty lines are not such as his deep mouth was used to pour:

  Great Rhea’s son,

  If in Olympus’ top, where thou

  Sitt’st to behold thy sacred show,

  If in Alpheus’ silver flight,

  If in my verse thou take delight,

  My verse, great Rhea’s son, which is

  Lofty as that, and smooth as this.

  In the Nemaean ode the reader must, in mere justice to Pindar, observe, that whatever is said of “the original new moon, her tender forehead, and her horns,” is super-added by his paraphrast, who has many other plays of words and fancy unsuitable to the original, as

  The table, free for ev’ry guest,

  No doubt will thee admit,

  And feast more upon thee, than thou on it.

  He sometimes extends his author’s thoughts without improving them. In the Olympionick an oath is mentioned in a single word, and Cowley spends three lines in swearing by the Castalian stream. We are told of Theron’s bounty, with a hint that he had enemies, which Cowley thus enlarges in rhyming prose:
<
br />   But in this thankless world the giver

  Is envied even by the receiver;

  ’Tis now the cheap and frugal fashion

  Rather to hide than own the obligation:

  Nay, ’tis much worse than so;

  It now an artifice does grow

  Wrongs and injuries to do,

  Lest men should think we owe.

  It is hard to conceive that a man of the first rank in learning and wit, when he was dealing out such minute morality in such feeble diction, could imagine, either waking or dreaming, that he imitated Pindar.

  In the following odes, where Cowley chooses his own subjects, he sometimes rises to dignity truly Pindarick; and, if some deficiencies of language be forgiven, his strains are such as those of the Theban bard were to his contemporaries:

  Begin the song, and strike the living lyre:

  Lo, how the years to come, a numerous and well-fitted quire,

  All hand in hand do decently advance.

  And to my song with smooth and equal measure dance;

  While the dance lasts, how long soe’er it be,

  My musick’s voice shall bear it company;

  Till all gentle notes be drown’d

  In the last trumpet’s dreadful sound.

  After such enthusiasm, who will not lament to find the poet conclude with lines like these:

  But stop, my muse —

  Hold thy Pindarick Pegasus closely in,

  Which does to rage begin

  — ’Tis an unruly and a hard-mouth’d horse —

  ’Twill no unskilful touch endure,

  But flings writer and reader too that sits not sure.

  The fault of Cowley, and, perhaps, of all the writers of the metaphysical race, is that of pursuing his thoughts to the last ramifications, by which he loses the grandeur of generality; for of the greatest things the parts are little; what is little can be but pretty, and, by claiming dignity, becomes ridiculous. Thus all the power of description is destroyed by a scrupulous enumeration, and the force of metaphors is lost, when the mind, by the mention of particulars, is turned more upon the original than the secondary sense, more upon that from which the illustration is drawn, than that to which it is applied.

  Of this we have a very eminent example in the ode entitled the Muse, who goes to “take the air” in an intellectual chariot, to which he harnesses fancy and judgment, wit and eloquence, memory and invention: how he distinguished wit from fancy, or how memory could properly contribute to motion, he has not explained; we are, however, content to suppose that he could have justified his own fiction, and wish to see the muse begin her career; but there is yet more to be done:

  Let the postillion, nature, mount, and let

  The coachman art be set;

  And let the airy footmen, running all beside,

  Make a long row of goodly pride;

  Figures, conceits, raptures, and sentences,

  In a well-worded dress,

  And innocent loves, and pleasant truths, and useful lies,

  In all their gaudy liveries.

  Every mind is now disgusted with this cumber of magnificence; yet I cannot refuse myself the four next lines:

  Mount, glorious queen, thy travelling throne,

  And bid it to put on;

  For long, though cheerful, is the way,

  And life, alas! allows but one ill winter’s day.

  In the same ode, celebrating the power of the muse, he gives her prescience, or, in poetical language, the foresight of events hatching in futurity; but, having once an egg in his mind, he cannot forbear to show us that he knows what an egg contains:

  Thou into the close nests of time dost peep,

  And there with piercing eye

  Through the firm shell and the thick white dost spy

  Years to come a-forming lie,

  Close in their sacred fecundine asleep.

  The same thought is more generally, and, therefore, more poetically expressed by Casimir, a writer who has many of the beauties and faults of Cowley:

  Omnibus mundi dominator horis

  Aptat urgendas per inane pennas,

  Pars adhuc nido latet, et futuros

  Crescit in annos.

  Cowley, whatever was his subject, seems to have been carried, by a kind of destiny, to the light and the familiar, or to conceits which require still more ignoble epithets. A slaughter in the Red sea “new dies the water’s name;” and England, during the civil war, was “Albion no more, nor to be named from white.” It is, surely, by some fascination not easily surmounted, that a writer professing to revive “the noblest and highest writing in verse,” makes this address to the new year:

  Nay, if thou lov’st me, gentle year,

  Let not so much as love be there,

  Vain, fruitless love I mean; for, gentle year,

  Although I fear

  There’s of this caution little need,

  Yet, gentle year, take heed

  How thou dost make

  Such a mistake;

  Such love I mean alone

  As by thy cruel predecessors has been shewn:

  For, though I have too much cause to doubt it,

  I fain would try, for once, if life can live without it.

  The reader of this will be inclined to cry out, with Prior,

  Ye criticks, say,

  How poor to this was Pindar’s style!

  Even those who cannot, perhaps, find in the Isthmian or Nemaean songs what antiquity has disposed them to expect, will, at least, see that they are ill represented by such puny poetry; and all will determine, that if this be the old Theban strain, it is not worthy of revival.

  To the disproportion and incongruity of Cowley’s sentiments, must be added the uncertainty and looseness of his measures. He takes the liberty of using, in any place, a verse of any length, from two syllables to twelve. The verses of Pindar have, as he observes, very little harmony to a modern ear; yet, by examining the syllables, we perceive them to be regular, and have reason enough for supposing that the ancient audiences were delighted with the sound. The imitator ought, therefore, to have adopted what he found, and to have added what was wanting; to have preserved a constant return of the same numbers, and to have supplied smoothness of transition and continuity of thought.

  It is urged by Dr. Sprat, that the “irregularity of numbers is the very thing” which makes “that kind of poesy fit for all manner of subjects.” But he should have remembered, that what is fit for every thing can fit nothing well. The great pleasure of verse arises from the known measure of the lines, and uniform structure of the stanzas, by which the voice is regulated, and the memory relieved.

  If the Pindarick style be, what Cowley thinks it, “the highest and noblest kind of writing in verse,” it can be adapted only to high and noble subjects; and it will not be easy to reconcile the poet with the critick, or to conceive how that can be the highest kind of writing in verse, which, according to Sprat, is “chiefly to be preferred for its near affinity to prose.”

  This lax and lawless versification so much concealed the deficiencies of the barren, and flattered the laziness of the idle, that it immediately overspread our books of poetry; all the boys and girls caught the pleasing fashion, and they that could do nothing else could write like Pindar. The rights of antiquity were invaded, and disorder tried to break into the Latin: a poem on the Sheldonian theatre, in which all kinds of verse are shaken together, is unhappily inserted in the Musae Anglicanae. Pindarism prevailed about half a century; but, at last, died gradually away, and other imitations supply its place.

  The Pindarick odes have so long enjoyed the highest degree of poetical reputation, that I am not willing to dismiss them with unabated censure; and, surely, though the mode of their composition be erroneous, yet many parts deserve, at least, that admiration which is due to great comprehension of knowledge, and great fertility of fancy. The thoughts are often new, and often striking; but the greatness of one part is disgraced by the littlenes
s of another; and total negligence of language gives the noblest conceptions the appearance of a fabrick, august in the plan, but mean in the materials. Yet, surely, those verses are not without a just claim to praise; of which it may be said with truth, that no man but Cowley could have written them.

  The Davideis now remains to be considered; a poem which the author designed to have extended to twelve books, merely, as he makes no scruple of declaring, because the Aeneid had that number; but he had leisure or perseverance only to write the third part. Epick poems have been left unfinished by Virgil, Statius, Spenser, and Cowley. That we have not the whole Davideis, is, however, not much to be regretted; for in this undertaking Cowley is, tacitly, at least, confessed to have miscarried. There are not many examples of so great a work, produced by an author generally read, and generally praised, that has crept through a century with so little regard. Whatever is said of Cowley, is meant of his other works. Of the Davideis no mention is made; it never appears in books, nor emerges in conversation. By the Spectator it has been once quoted; by Rymer it has once been praised; and by Dryden, in Mac Flecknoe, it has once been imitated; nor do I recollect much other notice from its publication till now, in the whole succession of English literature.

  Of this silence and neglect, if the reason be inquired, it will be found partly in the choice of the subject, and partly in the performance of the work.

  Sacred history has been always read with submissive reverence, and an imagination overawed and controlled. We have been accustomed to acquiesce in the nakedness and simplicity of the authentick narrative, and to repose on its veracity with such humble confidence as suppresses curiosity. We go with the historian as he goes, and stop with him when he stops. All amplification is frivolous and vain; all addition to that which is already sufficient for the purposes of religion seems not only useless, but, in some degree, profane.