World Enough and Time (14 page)

Marvell himself dated his involvement in public affairs to this time, denying that he had any prior political engagement, despite his having consorted for several years with leading Puritan figures in ways that had aroused the suspicions of Royalists. In a passage from the second part of
The Rehearsal Transpros'd,
published in 1673 when Marvell was distancing himself from these associations, he wrote:

for as to myself, I never had any, not the remotest relation to publick matters, nor correspondence with the persons then predominant, until the year 1657, when indeed I enter'd into an imployment, for which I was not altogether improper, and which I consider'd to be the most innocent and inoffensive towards his Majesties affairs of any in that usurped and irregular Government, to which all men were then exposed. And this I accordingly discharg'd without disobliging any one person, there having been opportunity and indeavours since his Majesties happy return to have discover'd had it been otherwise.
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This is a very dubious passage, which contains a straight lie: we have already seen several examples of his ‘correspondence with the persons then predominant'. His representation of himself as someone who reluctantly took up a civil service post because it was the best use of his abilities, and exercised it in strict neutrality without any endorsement of the administration, always with a disinterested care for ‘his Majesties affairs', is laughable if it is not something worse. ‘He was Latin secretary to Oliver, and very intimate and conversant with that person,' wrote Anthony Wood of the reluctant civil servant.
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Even his reference to ‘that usurped and irregular Government' – one in which he eagerly served and sought preferment and whose poetic propagandist he became – is a slippery piece of hindsight that does him little credit.

Meanwhile two marriages took place that autumn. The first was of his former pupil at Nun Appleton, Mary Fairfax, who on 15 September married the second Duke of Buckingham, George Villiers, a rake later satirised by John Dryden as Zimri in
Absalom and Achitophel
(1681). Cromwell disapproved of the match, unsurprisingly, if Bishop Burnet's brief character sketch of the groom is a true one: ‘He had no principles of religion, vertue, or friendship. Pleasure, frolick, or extravagant diversion was all that he laid to heart. He was true to nothing.'
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It was an unfortunate fate for the innocent emblem of ideal virtue celebrated in the poems written at Nun Appleton House. Two months later, on 19 November, Cromwell's third daughter, also called Mary, married Thomas Belasyse, second Viscount Fauconberg, a kinsman of Lord Fairfax, at Hampton Court and Marvell composed two songs for what was probably a musical entertainment devised for the occasion (‘Two Songs at the Marriage of the Lord Fauconberg and Lady Mary Cromwell'). They are both in the pastoral mode that Marvell loved, the first a dialogue between the shepherd, Endymion, and the moon, Cynthia, the second between three rustics, Hobbinol, Phillis, and Tomalin. The first contains an oblique reference to the marriage of Frances Cromwell to Robert Rich, frustrating Cromwell's plans to have her marry William Dutton. The second alludes to Fauconberg's Yorkshire origins by calling him
‘the Northern Shepheard's Son'.
Listening to the applause die away after the performance of these songs, Marvell might reflect on the marriages of all these young people he had known and contrast them with his own increasingly confirmed bachelor status.

The fact that, amid all his official duties and political tribute poems, Marvell was still writing pastoral verses is a reminder that poems like ‘The Garden', or, as some have suggested,
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‘Upon the Hill and Grove at Bill-borow', could have been written after the Yorkshire period to which they are customarily assigned.

The pastoral mode was commonly used by poets in the seventeenth century and, without an appreciation of its conventions and properties, one cannot fully appreciate Marvell's way of reanimating conventional material. The case against pastoral is plain enough and the prevailing eighteenth-century view was expressed with his habitual trenchancy by Dr Johnson when he argued that the pastoral machinery of Milton's elegy
Lycidas
was inconsistent with ‘the effusion of real passion' and that: ‘Where there is leisure for fiction there is little grief.'
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Such naive views of poetic spontaneity, which were also a characteristic of English poetry in the postwar period – one thinks of Larkin's denunciations of ‘the myth-kitty' – may have receded in the more complicated critical climate of the late twentieth century, although some readers may still have difficulty with a poetry that is not plain utterance but that speaks through a poetic convention. The special pleasure of Marvell's poetry lies often precisely in this play with tradition. Understanding it is the key to enjoying him. The critic J.B. Leishman put it well when he wrote: ‘For, although Marvell's poetry is highly original and, at its best, unmistakably his own and no one else's, he is almost always acting upon hints and suggestions provided by earlier poets, and almost never writing entirely, as children would say, out of his own head.'
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Marvell was also a learned classicist and would be familiar with the origins of the pastoral tradition in the
Idylls
of Theocritus, the third-century
BC
Sicilian poet who laid the groundwork of this bucolic genre where shepherds and shepherdesses acted out their little dramas with an interesting mixture of idealisation and realism that Marvell's talent readily embraced. Virgil's eclogues and the second-century
AD
Greek poem by Longus,
Daphnis and Chloe,
developed the tradition which, after disappearing in the middle ages, returned at the Renaissance in the poetry of Torquato Tasso, Miguel de Cervantes, Sir Philip Sidney, William Browne and many others. The genre eventually expired when the Romantic poets rediscovered a more naturalistic response to rural life, throwing the convention aside to commune directly, as they supposed, with nature. But Marvell, as well as drawing on the historical tradition of the genre, also played with and echoed the work of his contemporaries working with the same matter. Sometimes he appears even to be answering their poetic arguments in his own variations. As the Marvell scholar and critic Frank Kermode put it: ‘It seems to have been Marvell's habit to assume in his readers an acquaintance with the other poems of the genres in which he chose to work.'
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A modern reader, impatient with these conventions – which can admittedly invite on occasion a wry or satiric response – could reflect that much popular entertainment in late twentieth-century culture, particularly television comedy, practises an identical generic parasitism.

Grouped together in the 1681 Folio, and probably intended to be read as a sequence, are four poems where a mower rather than a shepherd is the pastoral protagonist. The poems play with the theme of art versus nature – the mower's work being, symbolically, to disturb the latter in pursuit of the former. Poems by Thomas Randolph, Ben Jonson, William Shakespeare's
Winter's Tale,
and Christopher Marlowe, as well as Horace, Ovid, Seneca, Pliny and Theocritus, signal their presence under the surface of these poems. The first of the sequence, ‘The Mower Against Gardens', is a diatribe by the mower against ‘Luxurious' (lecherous or voluptuous) man who corrupted the simplicity of naturally occurring flora by creating gardens, artificially cordoned-off zones of corrupt pleasure where plant-breeding, grafting, importation of new species – and even statuary – become the signs of moral delinquency. To this Puritan argument against decoration (a bone of contention between the Puritan party and Archbishop Laud in the Church of England, where church architecture, rite and even church organs became a contested issue) is added a sexual undertone. The gardener has ‘dealt' – acted as a pander – ‘between the Bark and Tree' by grafting:

'Tis all enforc'd; the Fountain and the Grot;

    
While the sweet Fields do lye forgot:

Where willing Nature does to all dispence

    
A wild and fragrant Innocence.

The paradox of a highly artificial poem celebrating natural simplicity against artifice is not meant to be missed. Marvell, in the Nun Appleton poems and others, would celebrate the garden, its very artificiality, the comparison of ranked flowers with military drill yielding up memorable conceits. He loved gardens, their formality, their sensual pleasures (‘Stumbling on Melons, as I pass'), the way they stood as emblems of moderate civility. The poem is thus a carefully crafted argument, a form of aesthetic play, a tease, a gesture towards the pleasures of poetic genre. Yet there is, like a vein of colour in marble, as always with this poet, the tinge of a serious argument that links it to the real political world. It is a characteristic Marvellian movement, from art to society and back again, the mediation being done through the conventions of an informed literary tradition. The personal tension, too, is there, between an artistic sensibility that relished richness and ‘luxuriousness' and a more dutiful social conscience.

As well as the great contest between King and Parliament, the seventeenth century witnessed a philosophical tussle between the old philosophy and the new. It was a great age of scientific inquiry, of hostility to the dying scholasticism and of hospitality to the new age of rational inquiry. Francis Bacon announced himself as
buccinator novi temporis
– the herald of the new age – dismissing, in
The Advancement of Learning,
the traditional thinkers, ‘their wits being shut up in the cells of a few authors (chiefly Aristotle their dictator)', in favour of an empirical, inquiring spirit. A similar movement was going on among the exponents of ‘rational theology', trying to reconcile science with religion. The great seventeenth-century prose writer, Sir Thomas Browne, called man the ‘great amphibium', thinking scientifically and religiously, trying to live reasonably in the two elements.

Marvell would find himself – at any rate at the level of language – in conflict with some of these trends, as a prose writer who loved rich expressions, linguistic borrowings, subtle allusions. His later antagonist, Samuel Parker, would rebuke him for his refusal of plain speech. In an attack on Platonism in philosophy, published in the year of the Great Fire, Parker declared: ‘Though a huge lushious style may relish sweet to childish and liquorish Fancies, yet it rather loaths and nauceats a discreet understanding then forms and nourishes it.'
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A Saussurean before his time, Parker believed language was a system of arbitrary signs: ‘The use of Words is not to explain the Natures of Things, but only to stand as marks and signs in their stead, as Arithmetical figures are only notes of Numbers.' So, in these seemingly innocent pastoral poems, one of the finest poets of the age explored, reflected, illuminated – and, above all made into poetry – all these contested questions, but he did so by holding the various elements in suspension. His effects have often been diminished by critics who try to convert them into reductive exegesis, pinning them down too tightly to specific referents that can be at best only hypothetical.

On 23 April 1658 Jane Oxenbridge, who had taken such good care of Marvell's charge, William Dutton, died at Eton. Marvell composed for her a Latin epitaph that was carved on black marble and erected in Eton College Chapel. At the Restoration it was painted over and later it was removed altogether. Anthony Wood dismissed it as a ‘large canting inscription',
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presumably hinting at the overelaboration of a monument for the wife of a Puritan minister. It was printed in the 1681 Folio.

Several months later, news would come of a far more significant death that would draw from Marvell not lapidary platitudes but a major, and in parts unusually heartfelt, poem. On 3 September 1658, Oliver Cromwell died of pneumonia, the day after a violent storm that was immediately seen as symbolic. His health had been failing since the beginning of the year and after the blow of his favourite daughter Elizabeth's death from cancer in August he lived on for less than a month. His body lay in state for weeks while people filed past to pay their respects. One of them was the Quaker, Edward Burrough, who was appalled by this outbreak of hero worship for one ‘who too much sought the greatness and the honour of the world, and loved the praise of men, and took flattering titles and vain respects of deceitful men'.
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There was, however, one man who knew that he would have to offer his tribute, and notwithstanding his later claim to have abhorred Cromwell and his circle, it was done with an unforced will.

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I Saw Him Dead

So have I seen a Vine, whose lasting Age

Of many a Winter hath surviv'd the rage.

The death of Cromwell, under whose influence Marvell had flourished throughout the mid-1650s, was a personal blow but also an omen for the future. Presumably Marvell and his friends at the centre of the administration would have made their calculations. In the wake of the fall of a strong political leader, powerful undercurrents start to run. The Royalists, waiting in the wings, would have taken heart. Doubts about the ability of Cromwell's son Richard to take over would surface. Almost a year to the day after entering government service, Marvell's patron had been whisked away, and the future, suddenly, would look less hopeful. New political masters might want to install their own civil servants and his past associations might tell against him. In spite of those alliances, at heart he was not a revolutionary and would, in an ideal world, have chosen the path of supporting a constitutional monarchy. He could live with a restoration, but would it want to live with him?