Part 46 (1/2)
Boyle, not satisfied with the undeserved celebrity conceded to his volume, ventured to write poetry, in which no one appears to have suspected the aid of ”The Bees”--
”See a fine scholar sunk by wit in Boyle!
After his foolish rhymes, both friends and foes Conclude they know _who did not write his prose_.”
_A Satire against Wit._
PARKER AND MARVELL.
MARVELL the founder of ”a newly-refined art of jeering buffoonery”--his knack of nicknaming his adversaries--PARKER'S Portrait--PARKER suddenly changes his principles--his declamatory style--MARVELL prints his anonymous letter as a motto to ”The Rehearsal Transprosed”--describes him as an ”At-all”--MARVELL'S ludicrous description of the whole posse of answers summoned together by PARKER--MARVELL'S cautious allusion to MILTON--his solemn invective against PARKER--anecdote of MARVELL and PARKER--PARKER retires after the second part of ”The Rehearsal Transprosed”--The Recreant, reduced to silence, distils his secret vengeance in a posthumous libel.
One of the legitimate ends of satire, and one of the proud triumphs of genius, is to unmask the false zealot; to beat back the haughty spirit that is treading down all; and if it cannot teach modesty, and raise a blush, at least to inflict terror and silence. It is then that the satirist does honour to the office of the executioner.
As one whose whip of steel can with a lash Imprint the characters of shame so deep, Even in the brazen forehead of proud Sin, That not eternity shall wear it out.[307]
The quarrel between PARKER and MARVELL is a striking example of the efficient powers of genius, in first humbling, and then annihilating, an unprincipled bravo, who had placed himself at the head of a faction.
Marvell, the under-secretary and the bosom-friend of Milton, whose fancy he has often caught in his verse, was one of the greatest wits of the luxuriant age of Charles II.; he was a master in all the arts of ridicule; and his inexhaustible spirit only required some permanent subject to have rivalled the causticity of Swift, whose style, in neatness and vivacity, seems to have been modelled on his.[308] But Marvell placed the oblation of genius on a temporary altar, and the sacrifice sunk with it; he wrote to the times, and with the times his writings have pa.s.sed away; yet something there is incorruptible in wit, and wherever its salt has fallen, that part is still preserved.
Such are the vigour and fertility of Marvell's writings, that our old Chronicler of Literary History, Anthony Wood, considers him as the founder of ”the then newly-refined art (though much in mode and fas.h.i.+on almost ever since) of sportive and jeering buffoonery;”[309]
and the crabbed humorist describes ”this pen-combat as briskly managed on both sides; a jerking flirting way of writing entertaining the reader, by seeing two such right c.o.c.ks of the game so keenly engaging with sharp and dangerous weapons.”--Burnett calls Marvell ”the liveliest droll of the age, who writ in a burlesque strain, but with so peculiar and entertaining a conduct, that from the king to the tradesman, his books were read with great pleasure.” Charles II. was a more polished judge than these uncouth critics; and, to the credit of his impartiality,--for that witty monarch and his dissolute court were never spared by Marvell, who remained inflexible to his seduction--he deemed Marvell the best prose satirist of the age. But Marvell had other qualities than the freest humour and the finest wit in this ”newly-refined art,” which seems to have escaped these grave critics--a vehemence of solemn reproof, and an eloquence of invective, that awes one with the spirit of the modern Junius,[310] and may give some notion of that more ancient satirist, whose writings are said to have so completely answered their design, that, after perusal, their victim hanged himself on the first tree; and in the present case, though the delinquent did not lay violent hands on himself, he did what, for an author, may be considered as desperate a course, ”withdraw from the town, and cease writing for some years.”[311]
The celebrated work here to be noticed is Marvell's ”Rehearsal Transprosed;” a t.i.tle facetiously adopted from Bayes in ”The Rehearsal Transposed” of the Duke of Buckingham. It was written against the works and the person of Dr. Samuel Parker, afterwards Bishop of Oxford, whom he designates under the character of Bayes, to denote the incoherence and ridiculousness of his character. Marvell had a peculiar knack of calling names,--it consisted in appropriating a ludicrous character in some popular comedy, and dubbing his adversaries with it. In the same spirit he ridiculed Dr. Turner, of Cambridge, a brother-genius to Parker, by nicknaming him ”Mr. Smirk, the Divine in Mode,” the name of the Chaplain in Etherege's ”Man of Mode,” and thus, by a stroke of the pen, conveyed an idea of ”a neat, starched, formal, and forward divine.” This application of a fict.i.tious character to a real one, this christening a man with ridicule, though of no difficult invention, is not a little hazardous to inferior writers; for it requires not less wit than Marvell's to bring out of the real character the ludicrous features which mark the fact.i.tious prototype.
Parker himself must have his portrait, and if the likeness be justly hit off, some may be reminded of a resemblance. Mason applies the epithet of ”Mitred Dullness” to him: but although he was at length reduced to railing and to menaces, and finally mortified into silence, this epithet does not suit so hardy and so active an adventurer.
The secret history of Parker may be collected in Marvell,[312] and his more public one in our honest chronicler, Anthony Wood. Parker was originally educated in strict sectarian principles; a starch Puritan, ”fasting and praying with the Presbyterian students weekly, and who, for their refection feeding only on thin broth made of oatmeal and water, were commonly called _Gruellers_.” Among these, says Marvell, ”it was observed that he was wont to put more graves than all the rest into his porridge, and was deemed one of the _preciousest_[313] young men in the University.” It seems that these mortified saints, both the brotherhood and the sisterhood, held their chief meetings at the house of ”Bess Hampton, an old and crooked maid that drove the trade of laundry, who, being from her youth very much given to the G.o.dly party, as they call themselves, had frequent meetings, especially for those that were her customers.” Such is the dry humour of honest Anthony, who paints like the Ostade of literary history.
But the age of sectarism and thin gruel was losing all its coldness in the suns.h.i.+ne of the Restoration; and this ”preciousest young man,”
from praying and caballing against episcopacy, suddenly acquainted the world, in one of his dedications, that Dr. Ralph Bathurst had ”rescued him from the chains and fetters of an unhappy education,”
and, without any intermediate apology, from a sullen sectarian turned a flaming highflyer for the ”supreme dominion” of the Church.[314]
It is the after-conduct of Parker that throws light on this rapid change. On speculative points any man may be suddenly converted; for these may depend on facts or arguments which might never have occurred to him before. But when we watch the weatherc.o.c.k chopping with the wind, so pliant to move, and so stiff when fixed--when we observe this ”preciousest grueller” clothed in purple, and equally hardy in the most opposite measures--become a favourite with James II., and a furious advocate for arbitrary power; when we see him railing at and menacing those, among whom he had committed as many extravagances as any of them;[315] can we hesitate to decide that this bold, haughty, and ambitious man was one of those who, having neither religion nor morality for a casting weight, can easily fly off to opposite extremes? and whether a puritan or a bishop, we must place his zeal to the same side of his religious ledger--that of the profits of barter!
The quarrel between Parker and Marvell originated in a preface,[316]
written by Parker, in which he had poured down his contempt and abuse on his old companions, the Nonconformists. It was then Marvell clipped his wings with his ”Rehearsal Transprosed;” his wit and humour were finely contrasted with Parker's extravagances, set off in his declamatory style; of which Marvell wittily describes ”the volume and circ.u.mference of the periods, which, though he takes always to be his chiefest strength, yet, indeed, like too great a line, weakens the defence, and requires too many men to make it good.” The tilt was now opened, and certain masqued knights appeared in the course; they attempted to grasp the sharp and polished weapon of Marvell, to turn it on himself.[317] But Marvell, with malicious ingenuity, sees Parker in them all--they so much resembled their master! ”There were no less,” says the wit, ”than six scaramouches together on the stage, all of them of the same gravity and behaviour, the same tone, the same habit, that it was impossible to discern which was the true author of the 'Ecclesiastical Polity.' I believe he imitated the wisdom of some other princes, who have sometimes been persuaded by their servants to disguise several others in the regal garb, that the enemy might not know in the battle whom to single.” Parker, in fact, replied to Marvell anonymously, by ”A Reproof to the Rehearsal Transprosed,” with a mild exhortation to the magistrate to crush with the secular arm the pestilent wit, the servant of Cromwell, and the friend of Milton. But this was not all; something else, anonymous too, was despatched to Marvell: it was an extraordinary letter, short enough to have been an epigram, could Parker have written one; but short as it was, it was more in character, for it was only a threat of a.s.sa.s.sination! It concluded with these words: ”If thou darest to print any lie or libel against Dr. Parker, by the Eternal G.o.d I will cut thy throat.” Marvell replied to ”the Reproof,” which he calls a printed letter, by the second part of ”the Rehearsal Transprosed;” and to the unprinted letter, by publis.h.i.+ng it on his own t.i.tle-page.
Of two volumes of wit and broad humour, and of the most galling invective, one part flows so much into another, that the volatile spirit would be injured by an a.n.a.lytical process. But Marvell is now only read by the curious lovers of our literature, who find the strong, luxuriant, though not the delicate, wit of the wittiest age, never obsolete: the reader shall not, however, part from Marvell without some slight transplantations from a soil whose rich vegetation breaks out in every part.
Of the pleasantry and sarcasm, these may be considered as specimens.
Parker was both author and licenser of his own work on ”Ecclesiastical Polity;”[318] and it appears he got the licence for printing Marvell's first _Rehearsal_ recalled. The Church appeared in danger when the doctor discovered he was so furiously attacked. Marvell sarcastically rallies him on his dual capacity:--
”He is such an _At-all_, of so many capacities, that he would excommunicate any man who should have presumed to intermeddle with any one of his provinces. Has he been an author? he is too the licenser.
Has he been a father? he will stand too for G.o.dfather. Had he acted _Pyramus_, he would have been _Moons.h.i.+ne_ too, and the _Hole in the Wall_. That first author of 'Ecclesiastical Polity,' (such as his) Nero, was of the same temper. He could not be contented with the Roman empire, unless he were too his own precentor; and lamented only the detriment that mankind must sustain at his death, in losing so considerable a fiddler.”
The satirist describes Parker's arrogance for those whom Parker calls the vulgar, and whom he defies as ”a rout of wolves and tigers, apes and buffoons;” yet his personal fears are oddly contrasted with his self-importance: ”If he chance but to sneeze, he prays that the _foundations of the earth_ be not shaken.--Ever since he crept up to be but the _weatherc.o.c.k of a steeple_, he trembles and cracks at every puff of wind that blows about him, as if the _Church of England_ were falling.” Parker boasted, in certain philosophical ”Tentamina,” or essays of his, that he had confuted the atheists: Marvell declares, ”If he had reduced any atheist by his book, he can only pretend to have converted them (as in the old Florentine wars) by mere tiring them out, and perfect weariness.” A pleasant allusion to those mock fights of the Italian mercenaries, who, after parading all day, rarely unhorsed a single cavalier.