Such considerations, cast in this general form, may appear
commonplaces. But I believe that it is always opportune to call
attention to the torpid superstition that appreciation is one thing,
and 'intellectual' criticism something else. Appreciation in
popular psychology is one faculty, and criticism another, an arid
cleverness building theoretical scaffolds upon one's own perceptions or those of others. On the contrary, the true generalization 57
ESSAYS OF GENERAI.I ZATION · 1 9 1 8- 1 9 3 0
i s not something superposed upon an accumulation of perceptions ; the perceptions do not, i-n a really appreciative mind, accumulate as a mass, but form themselves as a structure ; and
criticism is the statement in language of this structure ; it is a
development of sensibility. The bad criticism, on the other
hand, is that which is nothing but an expression of emotion.
And emotional people - such as stockbrokers, politicians, men of
science - and a few people who pride themselves on being unemotional - detest or applaud great writers such as Spinoza or Stendhal because of their 'frigidity'.
The writer of the present essay once committed himself to the
statement that 'The poetic critic is criticizing poetry in order to
create poetry.' He is now inclined to believe that the 'historical'
and the 'philosophical' critics had better be called historians and
philosophers quite simply. As for the rest, there are merely
various degrees of intelligence. It is fatuous to say that criticism is
for the sake of 'creation' or creation for the sake of criticism. It is
also fatuous to assume that there are ages of criticism and ages of
creativeness, as if by plunging ourselves into intellectual darkness
we were in better hopes of finding spiritual light. The two directions of sensibility are complementary ; and as sensibility is rare, unpopular, and desirable, it is to be expected that the critic and
the creative artist should frequently be the same person.
ss
THE METAPHY S I CAL POETS
By collecting these poems1 from the work o f a generation more
often named than read, and more often read than profitably
studied, Professor Grierson has rendered a service of some
importance. Certainly the reader will meet with many poems
already preserved in other anthologies, at the same time that he
discovers poems such as those of Aurelian Townshend or Lord
Herbert of Cherbury here included. But the function of such an
anthology as this is neither that of Professor Saintsbury's admirable edition of Caroline poets nor that of the Oxford Book of English Verse. Mr. Grierson's book is in itself a piece of criticism,
and a provocation of criticism ; and we think that he was right in
including so many poems of Donne, elsewhere {though not in
many editions) accessible, as documents in the case of 'metaabuse, or as the label of a quaint and pleasant taste. The
)
physical poetry'. The phrase has long done duty as a term o
question
is to what extent the so-called metaphysicals formed a school (in
our own time we should say a 'movement'), and how far this socalled school or movement is a digression from the main current Not only is it extremely difficult to define metaphysical poetry,
but difficult to decide what poets practise it and in which of their
verses.
of
{to whom Marvell and Bishop King
are sometimes nearer than any of the other authors) .is-late.
its feeling often very close to that of Chapman. The
poetry is derivative from Jonson, who borrowed liberally
from the Latin ; it expires in the next century with the sentiment
and witticism of Prior. There is finally the devotional verse of
Herbert, Vaughan, and Crashaw (echoed long after by Christina
Rossetti and Francis Thompson) ; Crashaw, sometimes more
profound and less sectarian than the others, has a quality which
returns through the Elizabethan period to the early Italians. It is
difficult to find any precise use of metaphor, simile, or other
conceit, which is common to all the poets and at the same time
1 Metaph_ysical L_yrics a11d Poems ofthe Sermtemth Cmtur_y: Donne
to Butler. Selected and edited, with an Essay, by Herbert J. C. Grierson (Oxford : Clarendon Press, London : Milford).
59
ESSAYS O F GENERAL, Z ATION · 1 9 1 8 - 1 9 3 0
important enough as a n element o f style to isolate these poets as a
group. Donne, and often Cowley, employ a device which is
sometimes considered characteristically 'metaphysiciil' ;-tne
elaboration (contrasted with the condensation) of a figure of
speech to the furthest stage to which ingenuity can carry it. Thus
Cowley develops the commonplace comparison of the world to a
chess-board through long stanzas (To Destiny), and Oonne, with
more grace, in A Valediction, the comparison of two lovers to a
pair_of comp�es. But elsewhere we find, instead of the mere
'explication of the content of a comparison,- a development by
on the part of the reader.
On a round ball
A workeman that hath copies by, can lay
An Europe, Afrique, and an Asia,
And quick(y make that, which was nothing, All,
So doth each teare,
Which thee doth weare,
A globe, yea world by that impression grow,
Till thy tears mixt with mine doe overflow
This world, by waters sent from thee, my heaven dissolved so.
Here we find at least two connections which are not implicit in
the first figure, but are forced upon it by the poet : from the
geographer's globe to the tear, and the tear to the deluge. On the
other hand, some of
leffects are
by brief words and sudden contrasts :
A bracelet of bright hair about the bone,
where the most powerful effect is produced by the sudden contrast
bf associations of 'bright hair' and of 'bone'. This telescoping of
images and multiplied associations is characteristic of the phrase
bf some of the dramatists of the period which Donne knew : not to
mention Shakespeare, it is frequent in Middleton, Webster, and
Tourneur, and is one of the sources of the vitality of their
language.
Johnson, who employed the term 'metaphysical poets', apparently having Donne, Cleveland, and Cowley chiefly in mind, remarks of them i:hin 'the most
ideas �J;"e-S.Qke.dJ>_y
violence togetl}_�r�. The Torce-of this
lies in the
tailureoftlie-conjunction, the fact that often the ideas are yoked
but not united ; and if we are to judge of styles of poetry by their
abuse, enough examples may be found in Cleveland to justify
6o
THE META P HYSI CAL P O ETS
Johnson's condemnation. But a degree of heterogeneity of material
compelled into unity by the operation of the poet's mind is
omnipresent in poetry. We need not select for illustration such a
line as :
Notre ame est un trois-mats cherchant son lcarie;
we may find it in some of the best lines of Johnson himself (The
Vanity of Human Wishes) :
His fate was destined to a barrm strand,
A petty fortress, and a
dubious hand;
He left a name at which the world grew pale,
To poi11t a moral, or adorn a tale.
where the effect is due to a contrast of ideas, different in degree
but the same in principle, as that which Johnson mildly reprehended. And in one of the finest poems of the age (a poem which could not have been written in any other age), the Exequy of
Bishop King, the extended comparison is used with perfect
success : the idea and the simile become one, in the passage in
which the Bishop illustrates his impatience to see his dead wife,
under the figure of a journey :
Stll)' for me there; I will not faile
To meet thee in that hollow Vale.
And think not much of my delaJ','
I am already on the way,
And follow thee with all the speed
Desire can make, or sorrows breed.
Each minute is a short degree,
And ev'ry houre a step towards thee.
At night when I betake to rest,
Next morn I rise nearer 11�)' West
Of life, almost b)' eight lwures sail,
Tha11 whm sleep breath'd his droWSJ' gale . . . .
But heark! MJ' Pulse, like a soft Drum
Beats 111)' approach, tells Thee I come;
And slow horvere 111)' marches be,
I shall at last sit down kr Thee.
(In the last few lines there is that effect of terror which is several
times attained by one of Bishop King's admirers, Edgar Poe.)
Again, we may justly take these quatrains from Lord Herbert's
ESSAYS OF GENERAL I ZA T I O N
1 9 1 8- 1 9 3 0
·
Ode, stanzas which would, we thi.n](;, be immediately pronounced
to be of the metaphysical school :
So when from hence we shall be gone,
And be no more, nor you, nor I,
As one another's mystery,
Each shall be both, yet both but one.
This said, in her up-lifted face,
Her eyes, which did that beauty crown,
Were like two starrs, that having fain down,
Look up again to find their place:
While such a moveless silent peace
Did seize on their becalmed sense,
One would have thought some influence
Their ravished spirits did possess.
There is nothing in these lines (with the possible exception of the
stars, a simile not at once grasped, but lovely and justified) which
fits Johnson's general observations on the metaphysical poets in
his essay on Cowley. A good deal resides in the richness of
association which is at the same time borrowed from and given to
the word 'becalmed' ; but the meaning is clear, the language
simple and elegant. It is to be observed that the language of these
poets is as a rule simple and pure ; in the verse of George Herbert
this simplicity is carried as far as it can go - a simplicity emulated
without success by numerous modern poets. The structure of the
sentences, on the other hand, is sometimes far from simple, but
this is not a vice ; it is a fidelity to thought and feeling. The effect,
at its best, is far less artificial than that of an ode by Gray. And as
this fidelity induces variety of thought and feeling, so it induces
variety of music. We doubt whether, in the eighteenth century,
could be found two poems in nominally the same metre, so
dissimilar as Marvell's Coy Mistress and Crashaw's Saint Teresa ;
the one producing a n effect o f great speed by the use o f short
syllables, and the other an ecclesiastical solemnity by the use of
long ones :
Love thou art absolute sole lord
OJ life and death.
If so shrewd and sensitive (though so limited) a critic as
Johnson failed to define metaphysical poetry by its faults, it is
worth while to inquire whether we may not have more success by
adopting the opposite method : by assuming that the poets of the
62
THE METAP HYS I CA L P OETS
seventeenth century (up to the Revolution) were the direct and
normal development of the precedent age ; and, without prejudicing their case by the adjective 'metaphysical', consider whether their virtue was not something permanently valuable, which subsequently disappeared, but ought not to have disappeared .
Johnson has hit, perhaps by accident, on one of their peculiarities,
when he observed that 'their attempts were always analytic' ; he
would not agree that, after the dissociation, they put the material
together again in a new unity.
It is certain that the dramatic verse of the later Elizabethan and
early Jacobean poets expresses a degree of development of sensibility which is not found in any of the prose, good as it often is.
If we except Marlowe, a man of prodigious intelligence, these
dramatists were directly or indirectly (it is at least a tenable
theory) affected by Montaigne. Even if we except also Jonson and
Chapman, these two were notably erudite, and were notably men
who incorporated their erudition into their sensibility : their mode
of feeling was directly and freshly altered by their reading and
thought. In Chapman especially there is a direct sensuous apprehension of thought, or a recreation of thought into feeling, which is exactly what we find in Donne :
in this one thing, all the discipline
OJ mamzers and of manhood is contained;
A ma'n to join himself with th' Universe
In his main sway, and make in all things fit
011e with that All, and go on, round as it;
Not plucking from the whole his wretched part
And into straits, or into nought revert,
Wishing the complete Universe might be
Subject to such a rag of it as he;
But to consider great Necessi�y.
We compare this with some modern passage :
No, whm the fight begins within himself;
A man's worth somethiug. God stoops o'er his head,
Satan looks up between his feet - both tug -
He's left, himself, i' the middle; the soul wakes
And grows. Prolo11g that battle through his life!
It is perhaps somewhat less fair, though very tempting as both
poets are concerned with the perpetuation of love by offspring), to
compare with the stanzas already quoted from Lord Herbert's
Ode the following from Tennyson :
ESSAYS OF GENERALtZATION · 1 9 1 8- 1 9 3 0
One walked between his wife and child,
With measured footfatl firm and mild,
And now and then he gravei.J' smiled.
The prudent partner of his blood
Leaned on him, faithful, gentle, good
Wearing the rose of womanhood.
And in their double love secure,
The little maiden walked demure,
Pacing with downward eyelids pure.
These three made unity so sweet,
My frozen heart began to beat,
Remembering its ancient heat.
The difference is not a simple difference of degree between poets.
It is something which had happened to the mind of England
between the time of Donne or Lord Herbert of Cherbury and the
time of Tennyson and Browning; it is the difference between the
intellectual poet and the reflective poet. Tennyson and Browning
are poets, and they think ; but they do not feel their thought as
; immediately as the odour of a rose. A
was an
it
�erfectly eqUipp@ for Its work, 1t 1s constantly
disparate experience ; the ordinary man's experience is chaotic,
.irregular, fragm�tary. The latter falls in love, or reads Spinoza,
and these two experiences have nothing to do with each other, or
with the noise of the typewriter or the smell of cooking ; in the
mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new
wholes.
We may express the difference by the following theory : The
poets of the seventeenth century, the successors of the dramatists
of the sixteenth, possessed a mechanism of sensibility which
could devour any kind of experience. They are simple, artificial,
difficult, or fantastic, as their predecessors were ; no less nor more
than Dante, Guido Cavalcanti, Guinicelli, or Cino. In the
seventeenth century a dissociation of sensibility set in, from which
we have never recovered ; and this dissociation, as is natural, was
aggravated by the influence of the two most powerful poets of the
century, Milton and Dryden. Each of these men performed
certain poetic functions so magnificently well that the magnitude
of the effect concealed the absence of others. The language went
on and in some respects improved ; the best verse of Collins,
Gray, Johnson, and even Goldsmith satisfies some of our fastidious demands better than that of Donne or Marvell or King. But while the language became more refined, the feeling became more
crude. The feeling, the sensibility, expressed in the Country
64
THE METAPH YS I CA L P OETS
Churchyard (to say nothing of Tennyson and Browning) is cruder
than that in the Coy Mistress.
The second effect of the influence of Milton and Dryden
followed from the first, and was therefore slow in manifestation.
The sentimental age began early in the eighteenth century, and
continued. The poets revolted against the ratiocinative, the
descriptive ; they thought and felt by fits, unbalanced ; they
reflected. In one or two passages of Shelley's Triumph of Life, in
the second Hyperion there are traces of a struggle toward unification of sensibility. But Keats and Shelley died, and Tennyson and Browning ruminated.
After this brief exposition of a theory - too brief, perhaps, to
carry conviction - we may ask, what would have been the fate of