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In English Institute Essays 1946, Professor Cleanth Brooks, attacking
“the specific problem of the speaker’s attitude toward Cromwell,” gives
an elaborate and acute analysis of the ode which is intended to illustrate,
in contrast to the “coarse” method of historical criticism, the critic’s
obligation to interpret the poem as it stands, to bring out all the
conscious and unconscious hints and complexities that it contains, and
thereby to define Marvell’s view of Cromwell from the inside. One might
stop
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to quarrel with
such an arbitrary doctrine of criticism, since the critic’s obligation
is surely to use all helpful evidence of any kind (and Mr. Brooks himself,
when he wishes, goes outside the poem), but in this case one may be
quite willing to suspend disbelief and consider the ode on Mr. Brooks’s
terms. Accepting the judgment of Marvell’s editor; Mr. Margoliouth,
that “royalist principles and admiration for Cromwell the Great Man
exist side by side,” Mr. Brooks holds that the problem is a subtle one
of poetic organization and therefore addresses itself properly to the
critic.
But the moment
we enter upon Mr. Brooks’s exegesis we see that, far from making a disinterested
inquiry into the evidence provided by the poem, he is forcing the evidence
to fit an unspoken assumption—namely, that a sensitive, penetrating,
and well-balanced mind like Marvell could not really have admired a
crude, single-minded, and ruthless man of action like Cromwell. This
is a prejudice natural enough in a good modern liberal, who is bound
to see Cromwell, even the Cromwell of 1650, as a sort ‘of Puritan Stalin,
but it is a prejudice; and it leads, as I have said, to frequent straining
or distortion of what Marvell says and to the supplying of things he
does not say.
Indeed, if people
in 1681 would have read the poem with Mr. Brooks’s eyes, as in the main
a condemnation of Cromwell, there would not have been much reason for
the poem’s being cut out of the first edition of Marvell, since such
a view of Cromwell would have been welcome enough to the Restoration.
But that is irrelevant
historical speculation, and we must look at the poem.
Mr. Brooks’s special pleading begins with his gloss on the first lines:
The forward Youth
that would appear
Must now forsake his Muses dear,
Nor in the Shadows sing
His Numbers languishing.
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‘Tis time to leave the Books in dust,
And oyl th’ unused Armours rust:
Removing from the Wall
The Corslet of the Hall.
To the unprejudiced
reader, the lines say that, in these troubled times, the young man of
spirit must leave bookish and poetical pursuits for military action.
Says Mr. Brooks (pp. 135-6): “‘Forward’ may mean no ‘more than ‘high-spirited’,
‘ardent’, properly ambitious’; but the New English Dictionary sanctions
the possibility that there lurks in the word the sense of ‘presumptuous’,
‘pushing’,” and “It is the ‘forward’ youth whose attention the speaker
directs to the example of Cromwell.” Thus the critic has already made
up his mind about the poet’s view of Cromwell, and, instead of taking
“forward” in its common and natural sense, must grasp at a pejorative
possibility (the meaning “presumptuous,” to judge from the New English
Dictionary, has been commoner in modern times than it was in Marvell’s).
After the prelude,
Marvell shifts to Cromwell, stressing his tremendous, superhuman energy,
with the aid of a violent and elaborate simile:
So restless Cromwel
could not cease
In the inglorious Arts of Peace,
But through adventrous war
Urged his active Star,
And, like the three-fork’d Lightning, first
Breaking the Clouds where it was nurst,
Did thorough his own Side
His fiery way divide.
For ’tis all one to Courage high
The Emulous or Enemy;
And with such to inclose Is more than to oppose.
Then burning through the Air he went,
And pallaces and Temples rent:
And Caesura head at last
Did through his Laurels blast.
[366]
Here, as before,
Mr. Brooks makes a pejorative choice among “ambiguous” possibilities.
“‘Restless’ is as ambiguous in its meanings as ‘forward’ and in its
darker connotations even more damning” (p. 136) The critic finds Cromwell’s
thirst for glory hinted at in many phrases— “could not cease,”
“the inglorious Arts of Peace,” in the fact that, instead of being led
by his star, Cromwell “Urged” his (pp. 140, 143). Mr. Brooks may, theoretically,
or ultimately, be correct, but has Marvell, so far, given warrant for
these “darker connotations”? At any rate Mr. Brooks is consistent in
always loading the dice against Cromwell.
The simile, says
Mr. Brooks (p. 138), makes Cromwell like an elemental force—with as
little will as the lightning bolt, and with as little conscience.” Cromwell
manifestly is likened to an elemental force, but, again, has Marvell
given any warrant for the interpretative phrases, or are they a prejudiced
addition? Does a lightning bolt have “Courage high”? But comment on
the full meaning of the simile must wait for a moment. The nature of
Mr. Brooks’s special pleading becomes conspicuous in his treatment of
the next two lines, which are, for his problem, perhaps the most significant
lines in the whole poem:
’Tis Madness
to resist or blame
The force of angry Heavens flame.
Mr. Brooks writes
(p. 139):
Does the poet mean
to imply that Charles has angered heaven—that he has merited his destruction?
There is no suggestion that Cromwell is a thunderbolt hurled by an angry
Jehovah—or even by an angry Jove. The general emphasis on Cromwell as
an elemental force is thoroughly relevant here to counter this possible
misreading. Certainly, in the lines that follow there is nothing to
suggest that Charles has angered heaven, or that the Justice which complies
against his fate is anything less than justice.
I do not know what
to make of such a statement as “There is
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no suggestion that Cromwell is a thunderbolt hurled by an angry Jehovah—or
even by an angry love” since that is what Marvell unmistakably says.
In keeping with the pagan tone of a Horatian ode, of course, he nowhere
permits a Christian allusion, but the poem is not a period piece of
artificial classicism and the reader makes an obvious transfer from
pagan Rome to Christian England. Even if Cromwell be conceived only
as a traditional “Scourge of God” he is the agent of the Providence
whose will, in the common view of history, has worked in human affairs.
Mr. Brooks seems to be merely rejecting evidence that is signally inconvenient
for his reading of the poem.
Since, as we observed,
Mr. Brooks himself, in spite of his premise, goes outside the poem for
desired data, one may venture to do likewise—although the poem itself
is sufficiently dear and emphatic in presenting Cromwell as the agent
of angry heaven. We need not assume that Marvell’s view of men and events
remained quite unaltered up to the time, between four and five years
later, when he wrote so wholly eulogistic a poem as “The First Anniversary
of the Government under O. C ," but it is altogether unlikely either
that he had made a volte-face or that he had become a mere time-server.
We might take a few bits from the later poem as glosses on “angry Heavens
flame” which—however inferior the poetry—are not less reliable than
a modern critic’s inferences:
While indefatigable
Cromwell hyes,
And cuts his way still nearer to the Skyes,
Learning a Musique in the Region clear,
To tune this lower to that higher Sphere. (ll. 4548)
Hence oft I think,
if in some happy Hour
High Grace should meet in one with highest Pow’r,
And then a seasonable People still
Should bend to his, as he to Heavens will,
What we might hope, what wonderful Effect
From such a wish’d Conjuncture might reflect. (131-36)
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What since he did, an higher Force him push’d
Still from behind, and it before him rush’d,
Though undiscern’d among the tumult blind,
Who think those high Decrees by Man design’d.
‘Twas Heav’n would not that his Pow’r should cease,
But walk still middle betwixt War and Peace
Choosing each Stone, and poysing every’ weight,
Trying the Measures of the Bredth and Height;
Here pulling down, and there erecting New,
Founding a firm State by Proportions true. (239-48)
And, especially
for the sake of one phrase, we might add a couplet from the opening
of Marvell’s “Poem upon the Death of O. C.”:
And he whom Nature
all for Peace had made,
But angry Heaven unto War had sway’d ....
In these later
poems Cromwell is unquestionably the instrument of God, and-if in the
earlier one the lines about “angry Heavens flame” do not say the same
thing, one does not know what they do say. The modern liberal—who normally
reacts against Toynbee and Butterfield—can seldom fully, understand
the providential conception of history which was traditional in Marvell’s
age (witness Ralegh’s History of the World) and which was indeed a necessary
part of Christian belief; and Marvell, however liberal and emancipated
from common prejudices, was a Christian. All this is not to say that
he takes, here or elsewhere, a simple, one-sided view of either Cromwell
or Charles, but one must emphasize the central importance of Cromwell’s
being a divine agent and hence endowed with the power of a force of
nature.
In the next few
lines Cromwell is associated with peaceful rural nature:
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And, if we would speak true,
Much to the Man is due.
Who, from his private Gardens, where
He liv’d reserved and austere,
As if his highest plot
To plant the Bergamot, . . .
The first two lines
are something more than a transition. “Much to the Man is due,” in focusing
on the actual person in himself, helps to define the previous conception
of the being who was an instrument of Providence. The next quatrain
is clearly intended to link Cromwell the man with the simple, frugal
heroes of Roman tradition, like Cincinnatus, called from the plough
to rule the state. In what they say, and in the affinity they imply,
the lines are a quiet refutation of some of Mr. Brooks’s darker inferences.
Then we come to
a passage where the warts may seem to protrude. The man who lived as
if only to plant the bergamot
Could by industrious
Valour climbe
To ruine the great Work of Time,
And cast the Kingdome old
Into another Mold.
Though Justice against Fate complain,
And plead the antient Rights in vain:
But those do hold or break
As Men are strong or weak.
Nature that hateth emptiness
Allows of penetration less:
And therefore must make room
Where greater Spirits come.
What Field of all the Civil Wars
Where his were not the deepest Scars? . . .
Mr. Brooks thinks
that “climbe” certainly connotes a kind of aggressiveness” and a thirst
for glory, and that, in the lines on “Nature,” “The question of right,
the imagery insists, is beside
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the point,” since
the question of power alone is being weighed (pp. 136, 138-9). He admits
that Marvell recognizes Cromwell’s martial valor, even a dedicated rather
than a merely selfish sense of glory, and the role of a man of destiny,
and he points out, following Margoliouth and Firth, that there is no
ground for the contemporary charge, which Marvell repeats, that Cromwell
had engineered Charles’s flight to Carisbrooke Castle. But the critic
maintains nevertheless that Cromwell has “thus far . . . been treated
as naked force” (p. 140); he has been praised for “the tremendous disciplined
powers” he has brought to bear against the king. However, Mr. Brooks
proceeds,
For the end
served by those powers, the speaker has no praise at all. Rather he
has gone out of his way to insist that Cromwell was deaf to the complaint
of Justice and its pleading of the “antient Rights.” The power achieved
by Cromwell is a “forced Pow’r”—a usurped power. On this point the
speaker is unequivocal. I must question therefore Margoliouth’s statement
that Marvell sees in Cromwell “the man of destiny moved by . ·
a power that is above justice.” Above justice, yes, in the sense that
power is power and justice is not power. The one does not insure the
presence of the other. Charles has no way to vindicate his “helpless
Right,” but it is no less Right because it is helpless, But the speaker,
though he is not a cynic, is a realist. A kingdom cannot be held by
mere pleading of the “antient Rights”:
But those do
hold or break
As Men are strong or weak.
In short, the
more closely we look at the “Ode,” the more clearly apparent it becomes
that the speaker has chosen to emphasize Cromwell’s virtues as a man,
and likewise, those of Charles as a man. The poem does not debate
which of the two was right, for that issue is not even in question.
(p. 142)
[371]
This may be the
right, or a tenable, view of the central passage we have arrived at,
and of the whole poem, yet it seems open to query. In the first place,
if the issue of “right” is not even in question, how can anyone be concerned,
as Mr. Brooks is all along, with distinguishing right from power, with
sifting moral praise and blame, and, in short, making the strongest
possible case for the prosecution? In the second place, although elsewhere
he is on the watch for sinister ambiguities, even in words that appear
innocent, here words of at least equal ambiguity have become moral absolutes
that condemn Cromwell. The word “right” (“the antient Rights,” “his
helpless Right”) may mean not only abstract rightness but traditional
claims which may or may not be wholly right. “Justice” may be absolute
justice, or it may be the limited vision of human law that must give
way before the divine will (“Fate” in Roman terms). The “great Work
of Time” that Cromwell has ruined is not necessarily or wholly the good
work of time; a great nation may have nourished wrongs that must, at
whatever cost, be righted. Marvell was assuredly not of “Machiavellian”
outlook, but in his view of Cromwell he may—with some important differences—have
somewhat resembled Machiavelli: while Machiavelli’s ideal was the old
Roman republic, a republic could not bring order out of chaos, and the
strong man who could must be welcomed. Though Marvell does not go into
the causes of the civil war but concentrates on Cromwell and his royal
opponent, he indicates that he sees “the Kingdome old” as undergoing
the pangs of both death and rebirth, and, with all his admiration for
the royal actor, he bows to the man of action who can, however violently,
establish order. And, as we have seen, he bows not only to the heroic
individual but to the providence who has raised him up.
After the account
of Charles’s execution—which for too many readers disturbs the center
of gravity of the poems the poet turns, as Mr. Brooks says, from Cromwell
the destroyer of the
[372]
monarchy to “the
agent of the new state that has been erected upon the dead body of the
King” (p. 144). The execution was “that memorable Hour Which first assur’d
the forced Pow’r.” But while Cromwell has been an illegal regicide,
the effect of “forced Pow’r” is partly countered by what follows, the
incident from Roman history in which “the State Foresaw it’s happy Fate.”
If the execution was evil, it can bring forth good. As Mr. Brooks sees
it, Marvell “does not commit himself t. the opinion that the bleeding
head is a happy augury,” but makes this the popular opinion. I doubt
if Marvell—whatever he privately felt—is here consciously disassociating
himself from “the State.” If he were, would he go so far elsewhere in
the poem in celebrating Cromwell with his own voice?
There follows at once a passage that is probably more embarrassing than
any other part of the .ode to anyone intent upon proving that Marvell’s
main attitude toward Cromwell is hostility or at most unwilling respect
for unscrupulous strength and courage:
And now the Irish
are asham’d
To see themselves in one Year tam’d:
So much one Man can do,
That does both act and know.
They can affirm his Praises best,
And have, though overcome, confest
How good he is, how just, And fit for highest Trust.
Mr. Margoliouth
remarks the “Irish testimony in favour of Cromwell at this moment is
highly improbable” (though he sees a possible reference to the voluntary
submission of part of Munster), and we may, with Mr. Brooks, take the
remark as an understatement. For Mr. Brooks the appeal “is not to what.
Marvell the Englishman must have thought, or even to what Marvell the
author must have intended, but rather to the full
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context of the
poem itself” (p. 147). One may not quite understand these several possibilities,
since the poem did not get itself written by some agency outside of
Marvell. However, Mr. Brooks is driven to what may be thought the desperate
solution of finding the lines ironical, a view he thinks sanctioned
by the earlier stanzas because the Irish have learned of the qualities
in Cromwell that Marvel had praised, energy, activity, and the like.
“The Irish, indeed,’ are best able to affirm such praise as has been
accorded to Cromwell l and they know from experience’ ‘how good he is,
how just’, for they have been blasted by the force of angry Heaven’s
flame, even as Charles has been” (p. 147).
Since I cannot
follow much of Mr. Brooks’s reading of the earlier stanzas, I cannot
follow such an explanation. Nothing in the wording seems to me to carry
the faintest trace of irony; it is as straightforward a statement as
we could have, however little we like it. Nor do I see how irony could
pass at once into what Mr. Brooks accepts as eulogy without the slightest
hint of a change of tone. Although, as he says, the recommendation of
trust has reference to the English state, it is the Irish who have “confest”
it, and I see nothing in the text to support Mr. Brooks’s oblique interpretation
of Marvell’s account of Irish feelings: “The Irish are quite proper
authorities on Cromwell’s trustworthiness in this regard, for they have
come to know him as the completely dedicated instrument of that state
whose devotion to the purpose in hand is ‘unrelenting and unswerving”
(p. 148). But, instead of twisting Marvell’s plain words into irony,
and thereby molding him into the likeness of a modern liberal, We really
must accept the unpalatable fact that he wrote as an Englishman of 1650;
and, in regard to what seems to us a strange assertion,’ we must say
that he is indulging in some wishful thinking—Cromwell is so great a
conqueror that even the Irish must share English sentiment and accept
the course of history. In the poem on Cromwell’s death, it may be added,
[374]
Marvell glanced
at his Irish campaign with nothing but admiration for his religious
zeal and martial prowess (ll. 179-ff.) It may be added further that
Milton was far closer to Marvell than any modern reader can be (and
Milton was bold enough, a few years later when Cromwell was at the height
or his power, to rebuke him for turning a republic into a dictatorship),
and we have only to look at Milton’s Observations on the Articles
of Peace (1649) to see what the English attitude was. That is not
to say that Marvell thought just as Milton thought; it is to say that
the text of Marvell’s poem means what it says, and that the suggestion
of irony raises a much more difficult problem, within the poem, than
the one it seeks to explain.
Early in his essay
Mr. Brooks observed that “the critic obviously must know what the words
of the poem mean, something which immediately puts him in debt to the
linguist” (P. 134), but he neglects this sound precept in his comment
on the next lines:
Nor yet grown
stiffer with Command,
But still in the Republick’s hand-
Says Mr. Brooks:
Does the emphasis
on “still” mean that the speaker is surprised that Cromwell has continued
to pay homage to the republic? Does he imply that Cromwell may not
always do so? Perhaps not: the emphasis is upon the fact that he need
not obey and yet does. Yet the compliment derives its full force from
the fact that the homage is not forced but voluntary and even somewhat
unexpected. And a recognition of this point implies the recognition
of the possibility that Cromwell will not always so defer to the commonwealth.
(P. 145)
But such “darker connotations are quite gratuitous. “Still” here—as
later in “Still keep thy Sword erect”—has its normal sev-
[375]
enteenth-century
meaning, “always,” and Marvell’s words afford no ground for an ominous
hint of a possible change heart in Cromwell.
We need not concern
ourselves with the rest of the ode, which Marvell sees Cromwell as the
obedient servant of Parliament, the prospective conqueror of the Scots,
and a leader to feared by Europe. But we may notice the last lines,
where Mr. Brooks again find sinister implications:
But thou the
Wars and Fortunes Son
March indefatigably on;
And for the last effect
Still keep thy Sword erect:
Besides the force it has to fright
The Spirits of the shady Night,
The same Arts that did gain
A Pow’r must it maintain.
The salutation
in the first line means, as Mr. Brooks says (p. 149) that “Cromwell
is the son of the wars in that he is the master of battle, and he seems
fortune’s own son in the success that has constantly waited upon him.”
But he goes on to say that “we do not wrench the lines if we take them
to say also that Cromwell is the creature of the wars and the product
of fortune.” I think this is a very decided wrenching of the lines;
we must remember that Marvell has seen Cromwell as the agent of heaven.
And there is some further wrenching in Mr. Brooks’s comment on “Still
keep. thy Sword erect”: “Those who take up the sword shall perish by
the sword: those who have achieved their power on contravention of ancient
rights by the sword can only expect to maintain their power by the sword”
(p. 150). Does Marvell give any hint toward such an interpretation?
Mr. Brooks always offers general and particular insights that sharpen
our perceptions, and this essay, like his others, is precise and provocative.
His readers, if they came to it with the notion that Marvell’s ode is
a simple poem, could never again be misled in that way. But they could
be misled into finding a grater degree of complexity than the text warrants.
There is surely a line between legitimate and illegitimate ambiguity,
a line to be respected by both poet and critic, and Mr. Brooks seems
continually to overstep that line. He sees the poem as expressing a
“unified total attitude” though a very complex one, yet it would be
hard to merge his findings into any total unity unless Marvell is more
or less lifted out of his age into ours. As we have seen, the result,
if not the aim, of Mr. Brooks’s inquiry is, in large measure, to turn
a seventeenth-century liberal into a modern one. That is one reason
why historical conditioning has a corrective as well as a positive value,
although in this case we do not need to go outside the poem to recognize
fallacies and distortions in what purports to be a purely critical and
unprejudiced analysis.
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