Was Cromwell an Alligator?

Some people—who at least avoid the error of ascribing the invention to Steele or Addison—say that Abraham Cowley was the Father of the English Essay. It might alternatively be suggested that Q. Horatius Flaccus was one of its parents and Montaigne the other; Bacon having, so to speak, a watching brief at the birth. But the other statement is true in a sense: for though in patches Bacon (and Burton) anticipated the tone and method of that type of writing which was brought to its fullest perfection by Charles Lamb, Cowley was the man who fixed the type. His essays have just been republished in a beautiful little edition of the Collected Prose Works, issued by the Oxford University Press, and edited by Mr. A. B. Gough. Mr. Gough is a most painstaking editor, and his notes are abnormally full. They are so full that one feels that most people who are likely to acquire such a book will find nine-tenths of them unnecessary; but one ought not to grumble at that, since they have the complementary advantage of always supplying information when one looks for it.

The edition is especially to be welcomed as there are many persons capable of appreciating Cowley who have never come into contact with him. “Who now reads Cowley?” Pope asked in 1737; if the question were repeated to-day you certainly would not get a forest of hands raised, even in an audience replete with pince-nez and bulging brows. It was Cowley’s misfortune, as it was his ambition, to be known in his own days as one of the greatest poets of his time; when men discovered that he was not that, they at once concluded that he was nothing else. Not that his poems are as negligible as some critics assert; his mere skill and neatness make him worth reading. Even if he had, as Mr. Gough remarks, “too little passion and spontaneity to be a great lyric poet,” he was at any rate a good metrist and a most admirable phrasemaker. But his prose writings are certainly superior to the others; and this is true not only of the Essays. His Vision Concerning Oliver Cromwell, for example, is full of witty and whimsical things. Occasionally he employs very drastic language, as when he refers to the Protector as an “alligator” and when he abuses him for meditating the calling in of the Jews. This is how Cowley disports himself. The italics are mine:

“From which he was rebuked by the universal outcry of the Divines, and even of the Citizens too, who took it ill that a considerable number at least among themselves were not thought Jews enough by their own Herod. And for this design, they say, he invented ... to sell St. Pauls to them for a synagogue, if their purses and devotions could have reacht to the purchase. And this indeed if he had done onely to reward that Nation which had given the first noble example of crucifying their King, it might have had some appearance of gratitude, but he did it onely for love of their Mammon; and would have sold afterwards for as much more St. Peters (even at his own Westminster) to the Turks for a Mosquito [Mosque]. Such was his extraordinary Piety to God, that he desired he might be worshipped in all manners, excepting only that heathenish way of the Common Prayer Book.”

But this strong language is not the strong language of a man whose breast is a burning fiery furnace; it is the invective of a man who is amused by his opponents and who regards them chiefly as pegs for cunning sentences. His hard words would certainly have broken no bones; and one can even imagine that, in the secrecy of their chambers, the Puritans themselves—at all events, the less ironsided of them—may have shaken their sides over his character-sketch of the man whom they doubtless referred to in public as “our great leader.”

But if such qualities are defects when a man is writing political tracts or attempting the higher flights of poetry, they are invaluable to him if he is writing essays. Cowley’s Essays—and his Prefaces are as good—are most delightful, and they have as personal a turn as Lamb’s. They all, virtually, have one text: the Sabine Farm text; the retired Urbs in Rure text. They speak of the country’s charms in the ex-townsman’s way; they gibe at the turmoil and press of cities in a manner which attests a still lively interest in these contemptible things; they praise the pleasures of horticulture, solitary meditation, and à Kempis’s “little book in a corner.” Their learning is lightly worn; their language natural; their arguments not so serious as to stand in the way of any jest that offers itself; and many passages in them might almost as well have been written in 1720 or 1820 as in 1660. These, for instance:

“There is no saying shocks me so much as that which I hear often that a man does not know how to pass his Time. ’Twould have been but ill spoken by Methusalem in the nine hundred sixty ninth year of his Life.

“I have been drawn twice or thrice by company to go to Bedlam, and have seen others very much delighted with the fantastical extravagancie of so many various madnesses, which upon me wrought so contrary an effect, that I always returned, not only melancholy, but e’en sick with the sight. My compassion there was perhaps too tender, for I meet a thousand Madmen abroad, without any perturbation; though, to weigh the matter justly, the total loss of Reason is less deplorable than the total depravation of it.

“I thought when I went first to dwell in the country, that without doubt I should have met there with the simplicity of the old Poetical Golden Age: I thought to have found no inhabitants there, but such as the Shepherds of Sir Phil. Sydney in Arcadia, or of Monsieur d’Urfé upon the Banks of Lignon; and began to consider with myself, which way I might recommend no less to Posterity the Happiness and Innocence of the Men of Chertsea; but to confess the truth, I perceived quickly, by infallible demonstrations, that I was still in Old England.

“The civilest, methinks, of all Nations, are those whom we account the most barbarous. There is some moderation and good Nature in the Toupinamhaltians who eat no men but their Enemies, whilst we learned and polite and Christian Europeans, like as many Pikes or Sharks prey upon everything we can swallow.”

The last sentence reads, perhaps, more like a certain living writer than like, say, Charles Lamb.

The best of Cowley’s Essays are Of My Self and Of Greatness. I have no room to quote them at length. The first—in which he is writing of poetry and of his childhood’s memories—is more full of feeling than is usual with him. The other is one of the most picturesque pieces of light moralizing in the language, full of what we all call the Playful Irony of the Gentle Elia, as in sentences like: “The Ancient Roman Emperours, who had the Riches of the whole world for their Revenue, had wherewithal to live (one would have thought) pretty well at ease, and to have been exempt from the pressures of extream Poverty”; and it describes the pleasures of littleness most alluringly. But somehow, in spite of his assertions, one never quite believes in the genuineness of his middle-aged preference for “Prettiness,” as against “Majestical Beauty.” One suspects the existence in him of a disappointed ambition, a hankering after action, which frequently afflict men who are constitutionally fitted for nothing but looking on and making charming comments. But he had certainly been very badly treated by the Stuart family, which he had faithfully served. The Restoration gave him neither employment nor money. It gave him, however, a very fine funeral. Evelyn says that his coffin was followed to the Abbey by a hundred noblemen’s coaches and large numbers of wits, bishops, and clergymen.