World Enough and Time (40 page)

As for myself, I expect in this litigious age, that some or other will sue me for having trespassed thus far on theological ground: but I have this for my plea, that I stepped over on no other reason than (which any man legally may do) to hinder one divine from offering violence to another.
4

With those words, Marvell's career as a prose polemicist ended.

Marvell's enemies as well as his panegyrists were active in the years after his death. John Dryden, whom Marvell had done much to provoke, made in the preface to his poem ‘Religio Laici' an indirect allusion to an earlier Elizabethan pamphleteer: ‘And
Martin Mar-Prelate
(the
Marvel
of those times) was the first Presbyterian Scribler, who sanctify'd Libels and Scurrility to the use of the Good Old Cause.'
5
In the contest between Whig and Tory, Marvell was inevitably conscripted into the former's ranks and his reputation became embroiled in their quarrels.

Apart from those brief biographical sketches by his contemporaries – John Aubrey, Gilbert Burnet, Anthony Wood, Samuel Parker
6
– the first attempt at a biography of Marvell was the short
Life of Andrew Marvell
attached to the first collected edition of his works published in 1726, nearly fifty years after his death, by Thomas Cooke, who claimed to have had the benefit of privileged conversations with the poet's surviving relatives, or as he put it, ‘the Ladies his Nieces'.
7
Cooke – nicknamed ‘Hesiod Cooke' after he translated the poet – was a man of Grub Street who died in poverty in Lambeth, his daughter being forced on to the streets. Cooke made no bones about representing Marvell as a Whig hero: ‘My design in this is to draw a pattern for all free-born Englishmen in the life of a worthy patriot.' He sketched out the first draft of the Marvell legend by painting him as combining poverty and high principle, and living dangerously because of the threat he posed to the rich and powerful. Another fifty years later, a large three-volume edition of Marvell's works, retailing at three guineas a set with a subscribers' list that included Edmund Burke and John Wilkes MP, ‘the friend of liberty', was edited by Captain Edward Thompson and dedicated to the Mayor and Aldermen of Hull. It too contained a floridly characterised
Life of That Most Excellent Citizen and Uncorrupted Member of Parliament, Andrew Marvell
that recapitulated the anecdotes of Cooke to confirm the developing image of one ‘who was so far from being venal that he could not be bribed by the King into silence, when he scarce knew how to procure a dinner'.
8
The lyric poetry did not seem to be at the centre of this enterprise, which was closely involved with the agenda of the eighteenth-century Whigs.

In the nineteenth century Marvell's lyric poetry slowly began to emerge from behind the shadow of his political work. In 1819, Thomas Campbell printed ‘The Bermudas', ‘Young Love' and ‘The Nymph complaining for the death of her Faun' in his ‘Specimens of the British Poets' and two years later Charles Lamb mentioned Marvell's ‘witty delicacy'.
9
The critic William Hazlitt praised Marvell several times, observing in 1825: ‘Marvell is a writer almost forgotten: but undeservedly so. His poetical reputation seems to have sunk with his political party … His verses leave an echo on the ear, and find one in the heart.'
10
Other nineteenth-century poets and critics expressing their admiration in passing included Leigh Hunt, Ralph Waldo Emerson, John Clare (who paid him the compliment of passing off one of his own poems as being by Marvell), Edgar Allan Poe, John Greenleaf Whittier, James Russell Lowell, Matthew Arnold (who called the ‘Horatian Ode' ‘beautiful and vigorous') and Tennyson who loved to quote long passages from Marvell.

The first book-length, separately published life of Marvell was written by John Dove and appeared in 1832. In the same year, confusingly, Hartley Coleridge published a life of Marvell in a series called
The Worthies of Yorkshire and Lancashire
whose text seems indistinguishable from Dove's. In 1872 Alexander Grosart published a four-volume edition of Marvell's
Complete Works in Verse and Prose,
the last volume of which is still in use by scholars for those works which have not found a modern scholarly edition. He too attached an
Essay on the Life and Writings of Marvell,
which was an advance on all previous attempts and remained the standard account of his life until the start of the twentieth century when Augustine Birrell's
Andrew Marvell
appeared in 1905 in the
English Men of Letters
series. Birrell was an MP and there is great emphasis in this biography on Marvell's Parliamentary career. Birrell observed: ‘A more elusive, non-recorded character is hardly to be found … the man Andrew Marvell remains undiscovered.'
11
This seems to have been the verdict of the twentieth century, even when the critical rediscovery of Marvell accelerated with breakneck speed in the wake of T.S. Eliot's 1921 essay on the poet. This was also in spite of the appearance in 1928 of the major critical biography by French scholar Pierre Legouis:
André Marvell: Poète, Puritain, Patriote.
Written in French, the book was published in an edition of only 500 copies so many libraries do not have a copy, yet it has remained the standard biography of Marvell even though Legouis insisted that it was as much about the writing as the life (
‘la biographie n'occupe pas ici la première place'
). In 1965 he produced an abridged English version, shorn of its valuable footnotes, but nonetheless updated.

In 1978, the next landmark in Marvell biography was the staging of an exhibition at the British Library to commemorate the tercentenary of Marvell's death. The catalogue of the exhibition by Hilton Kelliher, deceptively slight as its format was, represented an important advance on Legouis and was accompanied in the same year by a study of Marvell's life and writings by John Dixon Hunt. Two decades later there is no life of Marvell in print and there has arguably (given Legouis's insistence that his book was not a biography solely) never been a full biography of Marvell in the modern sense, concentrating primarily on the life and incorporating all the findings of recent biographical scholarship. In the belief that the time is right to attempt this, the present biography has worked from the premise that Marvell – however elusive and private his personality – can be known and better known than ever before. Given the cumulative work of scholars in recent decades, the old assumption that not enough was known about the poet can no longer be sustained. We have a clear outline of his life. We have his voice in public affairs. We have plentiful evidence of how he was seen by others. Above all we have the unique voice of the poetry itself: delicate, enigmatic, yet passionate as the man himself.

Marvell, since the full recovery of his reputation earlier in the twentieth century, has become one of the best-loved English poets. His life, even at its most tantalisingly elusive, remains fascinating both in itself and in the way it opens a fresh perspective on one of the most interesting periods in English history. Marvell was at the centre of that historical moment as he is at the centre of the development of English poetry in the seventeenth century. Like his contemporaries we may feel that we know him and we do not know him at the same time yet we cannot resist – nor cannot think that we would ever want to resist – the spell of his poetic voice.

Notes

Abbreviations

Aubrey:
Aubrey's Brief Lives
(1949) edited by Oliver Lawson Dick.

Burnet:
History of His Own Time
(1687; 1833 edition in six volumes). Oxford. Vol. I, p477.

Cooke: ‘The Life of Andrew Marvell Esq' from
The Works of Andrew Marvell, Esq
(1726; 1772 edition), edited by Thomas Cooke, Vol. I.

Grosart:
The Works of Andrew Marvell Esq.
(1872; four Volumes). Vol. IV contains all prose cited other than
The Rehearsal
and the letters.

DNB:
The Dictionary of National Biography.

Kelliher:
Andrew Marvell: Poet and Politician, 1621–78
(1978) by Hilton Kelliher. Catalogue of a British Library exhibition to commemorate the tercentenary of his death, 14 July-1 October 1678.

L.:
The Poems and Letters of Andrew Marvell: Volume II. Letters
(1971). Edited by H.M. Margoliouth. Third edition revised by Pierre Legouis with the collaboration of E.E. Duncan-Jones. Oxford.

Legouis 1928:
André Marvell: poète, puritain, patriote, 1621–1678
(1928). Paris and London.

Legouis 1965:
Andrew Marvell: Poet. Puritan. Patriot
(1965; second edition 1968). Oxford.

Leishman:
The Art of Marvell's Poetry
(1966; second edition 1968) by J.B. Leishman. P.:
The Poems and Letters of Andrew Marvell: Volume I. Poems
(1971) edited by H.M. Margoliouth. Third edition revised by Pierre Legouis with the collaboration of E.E. Duncan-Jones. Oxford. All quotations in the present work are from this edition.

The Rehearsal:
The Rehearsal Transpros'd and The Rehearsal Transpros'd the Second Part
(1971), edited by D.I.B. Smith. Oxford.

Thompson:
The Works of Andrew Marvell Esq … With a New Life of the Author
(1776) by Captain Edward Thompson.

Wood:
Athenae Oxoniensis: An Exact History of All the Writers and Bishops Who Have Had Their Education in the University of Oxford
(1813 edition edited by Philip Bliss in four volumes), IV.

Prologue

Chapter 1: By the Tide of Humber

Chapter 2: Cringes and Genuflexions