Andrew Marvell | Page 8

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CHAPTER II
"THE HAPPY GARDEN-STATE"
The seventeenth century was the century of travel for educated Englishmen--of long, leisurely travel. Milton's famous Italian tour lasted fifteen months. John Evelyn's _Wander-Jahre_ occupied four years. Andrew Marvell lived abroad in France, Spain, Holland, and Italy from 1642 to 1646, and we have Milton's word for it that when the traveller returned he was well acquainted with the French, Dutch, Spanish, and Italian languages. Andrew Marvell was a highly cultivated man, living in a highly cultivated age, in daily converse with scholars, poets, philosophers, and men of very considerable scientific attainments. In reading Clarendon and Burnet, and whilst turning over Aubrey's delightful gossip, it is impossible not to be struck with the width and variety of the learning as well as with the wit of the period. Intellectually it was a great age.
No record remains of Marvell's travels during these years. Up and down his writings the careful reader will come across pleasant references to foreign manners and customs, betokening the keen humorous observer, and the possession of that wide-eyed faculty that takes a pleasure, half contemplative, half the result of animal spirits, in watching the way of the world wherever you may chance to be. Of another and an earlier traveller, Sir Henry Wotton, we read in "Walton's Life."
"And whereas he was noted in his youth to have a sharp wit and apt to jest, that by time, travel, and conversation was so polished and made useful, that his company seemed to be one of the delights of mankind."
In all Marvell's work, as poet, as Parliamentarian, as controversialist, we shall see the travelled man. Certainly no one ever more fully grasped the sense of the famous sentence given by Wotton to Milton, when the latter was starting on his travels: "_I pensieri stretti ed il viso sciolto._"
Marvell was in Rome about 1645. I can give no other date during the whole four years. This, our only date, rests upon an assumption. In Marvell's earliest satirical poem he gives an account of a visit he paid in Rome to the unlucky poetaster Flecknoe, who was not in Rome until 1645. If, therefore, the poem records an actual visit, it follows that the author of the poem was in Rome at the same time. It is not very near, but it is as near as we can get.
Richard Flecknoe was an Irish priest of blameless life, with a passion for scribbling and for printing. His exquisite reason for both these superfluous acts is worth quoting:--
"I write chiefly to avoid idleness, and print to avoid the imputation (of idleness), and as others do it to live after they are dead, I do it only not to be thought dead whilst I am alive."[20:1]
Such frankness should have disarmed ridicule, but somehow or another this amiable man came to be regarded as the type of a dull author, and his name passed into a proverb for stupidity, so much so that when Dryden in 1682 was casting about how best to give pain to Shadwell, he devised the plan of his famous satire, "MacFlecknoe," where in biting verse he describes Flecknoe (who was happily dead) as an aged Prince--
"Who like Augustus young Was called to empire and had governed long; In prose and verse was owned, without dispute, Through all the realms of nonsense absolute."
Dryden goes on to picture the aged Flecknoe,
"pondering which of all his sons was fit To reign and wage immortal war with Wit,"
and fixing on Shadwell.
"Shadwell alone my perfect image bears, Mature in dulness from his tender years; Shadwell alone, of all my sons, is he Who stands confirmed in full stupidity: The rest to some faint meaning make pretence, But Shadwell never deviates into sense."
Thus has it come about that Flecknoe, the Irish priest, whom Marvell visited in his Roman garret in 1645, bears a name ever memorable in literature.
Marvell's own poem, though eclipsed by the splendour of Glorious John's resounding lines, has an interest of its own as being, in its roughly humorous way, a forerunner of the "Dunciad" and "Grub Street" literature, by which in sundry moods 'tis "pleasure to be bound." It describes seeking out the poetaster in his lodging "three staircases high," at the sign of the Pelican, in a room so small that it seemed "a coffin set in the stair's head." No sooner was the rhymer unearthed than straightway he began to recite his poetry in dismal tones, much to his visitor's dismay:--
"But I who now imagin'd myself brought To my last trial, in a serious thought Calm'd the disorders of my youthful breast And to my martyrdom prepar��d rest. Only this frail ambition did remain, The last distemper of the sober brain, That there had been some present to assure The future ages how I did endure."
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