The Joy of Reading

chapter six

The Renaissance,

Part Two

We are not done yet with the Renaissance, which, soon after the fall of Byzantium in 1453, took on a life of its own and became not just the rebirth of the Classics but the invention of a new world with new ideas, fears, and hopes.

It is both right and proper to begin with Descartes because he spent his life fighting against the restrictions imposed by the Aristotelians on the freedom of thought. Descartes believed that the Classical worldview that Petrarch and Boccaccio had hoped to recreate had turned out to be closed and narrow, and he rebelled against his teachers as so many young men would in the following centuries. He was a good but not obedient student, which his teachers misunderstood as stupidity and punished with chastisements at which he could only laugh. In some respects he was a very modern man. Other Frenchmen followed his example, and some Englishmen as well. I will let them speak for themselves in what follows. An important thing about all of them is that they did their best work in the seventeenth century, which is one of the most fruitful since—well, since the world began.

RENÉ DESCARTES

1596–1650

Discourse on the Method of Rightly

Conducting the Reason

René Descartes (his name in Latin was Renatus Cartesius, hence the adjective “Cartesian”) was born in La Haye, France, in 1596. He received a good Jesuit education and was the kind of student that teachers both love and dread. He was a brilliant pupil who understood everything quickly. He asked challenging questions. But he was also surly and rebellious, and he seemed to doubt everything his teachers believed. His questions seemed to shake the foundations of the learning they were trying to instill in their brilliant pupil, and this was a fearful thing—for what if he were right?

When he was twenty, Descartes took his degree in law. Two years later joined the army of the Prince of Orange in Holland. Up to this point his career was uneventful, at least outwardly. Inwardly the young man was fomenting an intellectual revolution based on his perennial questioning.

Descartes was not alone in this. Francis Bacon, in England, had felt the same grave doubts, as had Galileo in Italy. But no one doubted more systematically than young Descartes and as a consequence no one did more to bring down the ancient edifice of learning that had stood for more than a thousand years.

Descartes described the reasons for his doubts, and the extent of them, in the Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting the Reason of 1637. Once you begin to doubt systematically, he says, the questions become: Where do you stop? Do you ever stop? Is there anything that cannot be doubted, that is undoubtedly true? Yes, one thing: the doubter himself exists, else he could not doubt or, as Descartes put it in a famous phrase, cogito, ergo sum (“I think, therefore I am”). Once this is established it is possible to start afresh, on solid ground, and to build up a new structure of knowledge, different from the old, and having the character, as Descartes asserts, of indubitable certainty.

Descartes called the method “geometrical.” You lay down the minimum number of assumptions and then, using them as building blocks, patiently build up a new edifice that will stand the test of time and of doubt. But the geometrical method, for Descartes, was not just a matter of taking careful logical steps. It also involved taking the smallest steps possible, because small steps are safer than big ones. And each small step, each element in the solution of the problem, ought to have the kind of certainty that numbers have. In the world of numbers, clear and distinct ideas are possible: 2 + 2 = 4, there is no doubt about that. In the process of developing this line of thinking Descartes invented analytical geometry, whereby a one-to-one relationship is established between the infinite points of the plane and (pairs of) the infinite numbers from minus infinity to plus infinity. The invention of analytical geometry is one of the milestones in the history of thought, and Descartes deserves much credit for it.

Essentially, the geometrical method, as Descartes described it in the Discourse on Method, consists in first reducing any problem to geometrical form (a system of axioms and propositions) and then making a further reduction to numbers as in analytical geometry. This works very well for problems in physics, but Descartes wanted to apply his method to everything—to philosophy as well as physics, to ethics as well as astronomy. He did not live to discover that the method works better in some fields than others—for example, the physical sciences, and that there are other fields, for example, philosophy, ethics, even history, where it does not work as well or not at all. He did live to see his method adopted by many young and vigorous thinkers who began to feel, as he may have felt himself, that those fields in which the method does work were more important to study and develop, and those in which it did not work should be relegated to second-class status and perhaps be ignored altogether.

Unfortunately, that prejudice persists to this day, and it may be called the characteristic disease of modern thought. True, science has made fantastic progress in the three hundred and fifty years since Descartes wrote his Discourse, and our world would be vastly different, and much more uncomfortable, if he had not discovered his method. But other realms of knowledge have languished in the bright glare of those sciences that can be mathematicized. Science, we have even come to think, is what can be mathematicized, and what cannot be mathematicized must be called something else—“humanities,” say. But “science” means knowledge, and thus what we are really saying is that we can know about the sciences that are mathematical—and that deal mostly with material things—but only have opinions about nonmathematical, spiritual things. And as we all know, one man’s opinion is as good as another’s.

What is even worse, we then take the further step of declaring that because we know mathematically about material things, they are more important than spiritual things. (Alternatively, we try to use mathematics in realms where it is does not really apply—in ethics, for example; see Spinoza.) As a result, our whole knowledge structure is skewed toward the material and away from the spiritual.

The knowledge structure that Descartes had doubted and then attacked, and that he helped to bring down, had been skewed the other way and this was not good either. What is needed is still another knowledge structure that discards neither Cartesian, scientific, mathematically based knowledge nor the kind of knowledge that is obtainable by other methods in other fields—by intuition, experience, or common sense. In the best of worlds both kinds of knowledge would be honored equally.

For the moment, we have what we have, and what we have is Cartesianism up to our eyebrows. Thus I cannot think of any book that is more useful to read, if you want to understand the intellectual world we live in, than Descartes’ Method. Read it, and ask yourself whether it too can be doubted. Is there a hole in Descartes’s argument? Does he go off the track partway to his goal? How would you put him back? And if you did that, would it change the goal?

JEAN DE LA FONTAINE

1621–1695

Fabliaux

The literature of France, taken altogether, is not surpassed by that of any other European nation. Yet France lacks what several other nations possess, a single preeminent poet. This lack is made up for by a number of poets of the second rank—a very high second rank, after all. La Fontaine is one of these very good poets who just miss being great.

The seventeenth century in Europe, especially in France, was the century of magnificence, when the Sun King, Louis XIV, ruled at Versailles over a populace that was the richest in the world at the time. However, grandeur is far from the leading characteristic of the two best writers of the century, La Fontaine and Molière. Molière wrote plays that made fun of wealth and magnificence; the Fabliaux (Fables) of La Fontaine do the same thing in a more modest way.

Jean de La Fontaine was born in 1621. It was an age of patrons, and he was expert at finding and retaining them. As a result he never had to work at anything other than his poems and stories; he always managed to be supported by somebody. This was important because, although most of his works are short, they are extremely polished and it took him a long time to write them. In fact, he was a hard worker, although he enjoyed giving the opposite impression.

The Fables are perfect small poems, each, however, carrying an electric charge of meaning. La Fontaine possessed a microscopic eye that was uncomfortable with large vistas. He much preferred a pinhole view of the world—through which he nevertheless was able to see everything that was important. The fable of the fox and the grapes, the mountain that gave birth to a mouse, the ant and the grasshopper—these little stories, with their big meanings, fitted his temperament and sensibilities.

A fable, of course, is a story in which the characters are animals that talk to one another, like human beings, and act like human beings, too. The form goes back to the Greek fables of Aesop, and many of La Fontaine’s fables are retellings of Aesop’s. Some are retold from other sources, a few are original. Whatever their source, all emerge from La Fontaine’s pen with the same character and quality: he changes them all into something richer and stranger than they were.

It is hard to choose a best among the Fables, but one of the most famous, and most typical, is the Fable of the Grasshopper and the Ant. The grasshopper sings happily all summer long while the ant works from morning to night storing up food for the winter. When winter comes the grasshopper goes to the ant’s little house and asks for something to eat. The ant refuses; the grasshopper should have stored up his own food. Where were you, the ant asks, while I was working? I was singing, replies the grasshopper, to entertain you! Well, says the hardhearted ant, start dancing, then!

This fable is certainly not a simple one. There are readers who feel the ant is perfectly justified. She has worked hard all summer, refusing to rest, to take her pleasure; why should she not enjoy her wealth now instead of having to share it with the careless, happy-go-lucky grasshopper, who has done nothing but sing in the sunlight? If you wish to read the fable thus, of course you may.

I don’t read it that way, nor, I think, did La Fontaine mean it that way (although he was not entirely unsympathetic to the ant). The grasshopper is a symbol or representative of the creative artist, the man or woman who is driven, at any cost, to write or draw or sing or dance for the entertainment of mankind and as a consolation for our heavy burden in the world. The cost to the artist is often very great: not seldom it is poverty and loneliness, disease and the failure of hopes, and an early death. Yet what would our life be without these indigent, thoughtless creators? How shallow, how barren, how dull! Merely to store up sustenance against the winters of our lives is not enough. Our minds and imaginations need another kind of food as well, the rich, spiritual food that only great artists can provide. We owe them nothing; the ant is right; but she is also wrong, for we owe them everything.

The argument between the grasshopper and the ant goes on and on in our imaginations, and so with a dozen other fables, or a hundred of them. Most are good, many are wonderful, all have the same odd, sideways view of things. La Fontaine himself is nowhere visible in them; they have the sheen of polished anonymous works. Nor are they merely French. If anything in French literature has the quality of universality, it is the Fabliaux of Jean de La Fontaine.

There are several good English translations of the Fables, for example, those by Marianne Moore. However, almost any will do, if the English and French texts lie side by side. That is usually desirable when reading lyric poems written in another language. But you should not feel deprived if you have a plain English translation. La Fontaine, generous grasshopper that he was, will entertain you anyway.

MOLIÈRE

1622–1673

Plays

Jean-Baptiste Poquelin was born in Paris in 1622, the son of a prosperous merchant with an appointment as a furnisher to the royal household who gave his son an excellent education at one of the best schools in France and expected him to inherit his court position. But in his teens young Poquelin was already fascinated by the theater and when he was twenty-one he renounced his inheritance and, with nine others, formed a theatrical company. His stage name, Molière, dates from 1644.

The theatergoing audience in Paris in the middle of the seventeenth century was not large, and there were already two established companies presenting plays on a regular basis. Molière’s troupe therefore took to the provinces, where they made a meager living touring for thirteen years. They were hard times, but it was during those years that Molière learned everything there was to know about the stage. Finally the opportunity came for the production of a play in Paris, before the king. The year was 1658, the show was a success, and from that time on Molière never left Paris.

His first Paris play—only two insignificant plays from the touring years survive—was Les Precieuses Ridicules, in which two absurdly affected young ladies are contrasted with two commonsensical servants. This play, a hit, was followed by other successes. The king soon gave his patronage, and the company began to perform in a theater built for it by the great Cardinal Richelieu. But there was trouble to come: it began with the first performance, in 1662, of The School for Wives.

Many consider this play to be Molière’s masterpiece. The plot is delicious. A pedant, Arnolphe, is so frightened of women and so certain they will make a fool of him (and cuckold him) that he decides to marry an absolutely simple and uneducated girl whom he can shape to his heart’s desire. Under his tutelage the girl grows to consciousness both of herself and of society. Arnolphe slowly but surely falls in love with her and has to learn lovers’ talk. Both educations are wonderful, touching, and funny. But the play was a scandal. It suggested too much about the liberation of women from the slavery of their ignorance, as enforced by men, and about the absurdity of men’s illusions about themselves. Molière was attacked and, for a time, the play was taken off the boards.

For the next ten years he was constantly harassed by the authorities. He struggled to keep the company going and wrote play after play, although he was often ill both in body and soul. The year 1665 saw the premiere of The Misanthrope, which from the first was viewed as a masterpiece by the critics. An extraordinary comedy, it is as close to black comedy as the seventeenth century could allow. Molière himself played the hero, Alceste, a new kind of fool, a man of such probity and candor that he can never keep his mouth shut when he should. He constantly criticizes everyone else, always for good reason, but he can’t understand why this makes him unpopular.

Alceste’s beloved, Célimène, is just as upright and discerning as he, and has as sharp a tongue. But she is willing to make an accommodation with society. At the same time that she recognizes fools and makes fun of them, she also charms them out of their shoes. One of the great characters in the history of drama, she also represents a home truth. Plain speaking, no matter how correct, will always offend if it is not accompanied by a certain social grace, a certain courtesy. The insistence on the part of Alceste that all, or at least he, should always speak their minds, is finally seen as overweening pride. Célimène is vain and beautiful, but she has the humility that comes from being able to see other people as real and needful, like herself. Alceste can’t see this. He retreats into his dark corner, an almost tragic figure. Yet a comic one, too—the play is very funny, and Célimène is superb.

Molière wrote The Doctor in Spite of Himself the year after The Misanthrope. It was a time of distress for the company and for Molière personally, who was very ill, but none of his plays has a sunnier disposition than this foolish farce about a peasant who admits to being a doctor in order to avoid being beaten. He gets everything wrong; when he is taken to task for seeking the heart on the right side of the chest he explains, in the immortal phrase: “We have changed all that!” He also cures his patient with some down-home common sense. He knows when a girl is sick and when she is in love, and this one is in love; if so, he knows how to make her well. He rearranges things so that the lovers have each other and everyone else is happy, too, and there is thenceforth no more illness on this stage. Molière played the part of the doctor; he had been treated by many quacks and he knew all their tricks.

Six years after returning to Paris from his years of touring in the provinces, in 1664, Molière presented at Versailles, to a royal audience, the first version of his extraordinary play Tartuffe, or, The Imposter. This first version, in three acts, tells of a “holy” man who worms his way into the household of a good bourgeois and rewards his benefactor by attempting to seduce his wife. When he is caught in the act he reproaches himself with such aplomb that the bourgeois ends up not only forgiving him but insisting that he spend as much time with his wife as he can.

It was the custom during the seventeenth century in France for “directors of conscience,” who were usually pious laymen, not clergy, to be placed by the Church in families where they were supposed to reprove and reform conduct. Obviously this practice could lead to all kinds of hypocrisy. But it was a recognized religious procedure, and Molière’s attack on it in Tartuffe enraged the ecclesiastics of Paris. The play was banned and he was charged with several crimes.

Molière was acquitted of the charges but it was five years before he was able to free his play, which he liked very much, from the grip of the censors. He twice petitioned the king and published a “Letter on the Comedy of the Imposter” that reflected his deepest views of the essence of comedy. “The comic,” he wrote, “is the outward and visible form that nature’s bounty has attached to everything unreasonable, so that,” he went on, “we should see, and avoid, it.”

To know the comic we must know the rational, of which it denotes the absence, and we must see wherein the rational consists … Incongruity is the heart of the comic … It follows that all lying, disguise, cheating, dissimulation, all outward show different from the reality, all contradiction in fact between actions that proceed from a single source, all this is in essence comic.

These arguments apparently persuaded the king to allow Molière to present the play again. In the meantime he had doubled its length and added a depth of character seldom achieved in comedy. Orgon, the deceived bourgeois, has become a complex man, a fool for a while, but one who is eventually capable of seeing the light. His wife, Elmire, is a woman of much common sense. Their daughter, Mariane, and Mariane’s maid, Dorine, are a superb pair, and the lovers’ quarrel that Dorine first promotes between Mariane and Valère and then attempts to stop once it has gone on too long is one of the funniest scenes in theater.

Molière understood the power of hypocrisy and knew that common sense and reason are often helpless against it except in the imaginative world of the stage. Tartuffe, the imposter, wins everything in the final version of the play. Orgon and his wife and children are only saved by the miraculous intercession of His Majesty, who sees all and knows all in this good world of justice and truth. That was a very nice compliment to the King, but the audience departed from the theater realizing full well that kings do not in fact know all, and that evil is a real and present thing.

Molière won his battle for Tartuffe; it ended up being his greatest stage success. He did not win in the case of another of his best plays, Don Juan. At the end of this play, which influenced Mozart’s Don Giovanni, an atheist is consigned to hell in a spectacular outburst of words and fire, but before his punishment Juan has had the temerity to mock the priests and charm the audience. The Church found this intolerable. Don Juan was banned and never played again during Molière’s lifetime.

Many productions of Molière in English attempt to make an English playwright out of him. Such productions overemphasize the farcical elements, ignore the formalisms in his plays, run over the scene breaks, present the actors in modern dress, and the like. The best place to see him played—if you know a bit of French (it need not be a lot)—is at the Salle Molière of the Comédie Française, in Paris, where the plays of this greatest of French writers are presented with all due decorum, love, and respect. Short of that they should be read—for example, in the translations by the splendid American poet Richard Wilbur—slowly and with delectation of the comic situations.

BLAISE PASCAL

1623–1662

Pensées

Among the thinkers and writers of the seventeenth century in France, Blaise Pascal, the most modest and retiring of all, takes second place to none. Born in 1623, in Clermont-Ferrand, he was a youthful prodigy. He was from childhood fascinated by mathematics, but his father destined his brilliant son for the law and consequently forbade him to study mathematics and removed all mathematical books from his library. Pascal thereupon made up his own system of geometry, using different names: a circle was “a round.” The father, coming upon this work of original creative genius, gave the boy his intellectual liberty. Pascal went on to invent truly new things in mathematics—among others, he founded the modern science of probability. His later work on that distinctive curve, the cycloid, made him famous throughout Europe. His correspondence with another mathematician, Fermat, contains much that remains of interest today. And to help his tax-collector father with his computations, Blaise Pascal, at the age of twenty, constructed a calculating device that has been termed the first digital computer.

Mathematics was not demanding enough by itself. Pascal’s restless mind sought other challenges, notably in physics, especially in the study of that illusive entity, vacuum. He invented the syringe, improved Torricelli’s barometer, and published important papers on the weight and density of air.

But when he turned twenty-three, in 1646, his father being ill, Pascal underwent a kind of conversion from the easy-going, latitudinarian Catholicism practiced by his family to the much stricter Catholicism of the Jansenists, a sect whose leadership was centered in the convent of Port Royale, in Paris. In 1652, when he was not yet thirty and after a mystical “night of fire” that seared his soul, Pascal entered Port Royale and thenceforth wrote and worked according to the dictates of the fathers of the convent.

He was almost at once swept into controversy, writing a series of “Provincial Letters” in defense of the Jansenists against the more lax (as he viewed them) Jesuits. During the course of two years spent writing the eighteen “Provincial Letters,” Pascal not only developed his mature thinking on religion but also created modern French prose. Before those interesting and readable letters, French prose had often been heavy, bombastic, and tedious. Pascal’s prose, especially as he neared the end of the series of letters, attained those qualities of lightness, variety, and flexibility—souplesse, as the French say—that are so much admired today.

Having completed the “Provincial Letters,” Pascal decided to write an important work on religion, an Apology for Christianity that would emphasize the importance for salvation of God’s grace rather than good works, and would compare in the most graphic terms the abject condition of man without grace to the bliss of those possessing it. This book was never finished, but what he wrote of it—some notes, some longer paragraphs, a few “chapters” of several pages in length—was collected by Pascal before his final illness and published soon after his death at thirty-nine under the title of Pensées (Thoughts). By this title it has been known, and published and republished, ever since.

The surviving fragments of Pascal’s original concept are more eloquent about the abjectness of a life without grace than about the bliss of a life with it. If, indeed, “eloquent” is a strong enough term to describe the potent language of these scattered thoughts, which are certainly the greatest collection of apercus ever composed. Man unredeemed, without the grace of God, is like a caged animal, constantly seeking a freedom that he does not know how to use, requiring “diversions” of all kinds but unable to face himself.

All the unhappiness of men arises from one single fact, that they cannot stay quietly in their own chamber … Nothing is so insufferable to a man as to be completely at rest, without passions, without business, without diversion, without study. He then feels his nothingness, his forlornness, his insufficiency, his dependence, his weakness, his emptiness … As men are not able to fight against death, misery, ignorance, they have taken it into their heads, in order to be happy, not to think of them at all.

What is to be done? In response to the challenge of skeptics, Pascal proposes a wager, which his study of probabilities has made it easier to explicate. Believe in God, he says; why not? If God does not exist what have you lost? It is not so great a burden to fall upon your knees. But if God does exist, think what you have gained! And if God does exist and you do not believe, think of what you will lose—an eternity of bliss exchanged for an eternity of pain. No gambler would refuse these odds, says Pascal; why should you?

There are two kinds of intellects, Pascal tells us: the geometrical and the intuitive (l’esprit de géometrie and l’esprit de finesse). The one thinks with the mind; the other, as it were, with the heart. In a famous apothegm he describes the difference between them: “The heart has its reasons,” he writes, “which reason will never know.” (Le coeur a ses raisons, que la raison ne connait pas.) The most important insights, the most valuable knowledge, come to us through intuition; we apprehend directly, by a power essentially mysterious, as opposed to thinking things through. “I can never forgive Descartes,” Pascal writes, and although the reason given is a metaphysical one, it is clear that Pascal’s philosophy is fundamentally opposed to Cartesianism. Descartes’s Discourse on Method had advocated just the sort of geometrical thinking that Pascal is here declaring to be of secondary importance. Pascal’s distinction between two kinds of thinking remains influential to this day. Probably no one can read the Pensées without asking himself which kind of mind he has, and on which kind of thinking he is accustomed to depend.

The invention by Pascal of a digital calculator—the first “real” computer—seems relevant here. One of the great controversies of our time swirls around the question of whether a computer will ever be able to “think like a man.” A test often proposed is whether a computer can “jump to a conclusion.” (This phrase may beg the question: is “jumping to a conclusion” intuition, or is it just reasoning with suppressed, unconscious steps?) There is no doubt that computers can reason, after a fashion, but will they ever be able to do what a person does when he “has an idea” or “has a flash of inspiration”? Whatever is really meant by the two phrases it seems to be closer to the intuitive than to the geometrical mind.

Even if the subject matter of Pascal’s Pensées were not so interesting, you might still want to read them because of their beauty and pellucid clarity. These qualities come through in most English translations, which has helped to make this collection of scattered observations one of the all-time bestselling books. Read a little or a lot at a time; Pascal will not only delight, but also improve your mind and help you to contemplate reality.

“The last act is tragic,” he concludes, “however happy all the rest of the play; at the last a little earth is thrown upon our head, and that is the end forever.”

JOHN DONNE

1572–1631

Poems

It is widely believed (by persons who are neither) that it is impossible to be both intellectually brilliant and deeply emotional—passionate, as it was called. John Donne is the proof that this belief is not correct.

Donne was one of the most brilliant men of his time, and it was a time of brilliant minds: Bacon, Descartes, Galileo, Newton, to say nothing of Shakespeare and Cervantes. Donne possessed a powerful, cool wit that helped him, in his later years, to attract huge throngs (including King James I) to his sermons in St. Paul’s Cathedral, the premier pulpit of England in his day. His sermons are among the finest in English and his last sermon, preached when he knew he was dying and entitled “Death’s Duel,” is, I believe, unequaled.

Brilliant as he was, he was even more a man of passion, of feelings, of emotion. Sometimes the depth and power of his feelings overcame his intellect, or wit, and then he was wild, like a powerful spring popping out of a watch. When this happened his sermons became bizarre, almost unintelligible, and his poems became almost unintelligible, too. They seem to burst the bonds of their form, their rhythm and meter; they are trying to say more than a person can say, in poetry or otherwise.

Donne was like a walking bomb, ready to explode at any time. Born in London in 1572, the son of a prosperous merchant, his early career was very successful. But in 1601, when he was nearly thirty, he eloped with the niece of his patron, Sir Thomas Egerton, who was the Keeper of the Great Seal, an extremely important government post. Ann More’s father was also a member of the Egerton household, and he seriously disapproved of the marriage partly because Ann was, at fifteen, still a minor. The result of this was that Donne lost his position and was left without any means of making a living. He was pardoned and the marriage was declared legally valid—they were madly in love with one another—but Donne had to spend the next ten years as an outcast, without steady employment, without prospects.

He retrieved his fortunes in the end, partly because his sermons were much admired by King James and by his successor, King Charles I. But even his best friends were a little afraid of him and of the sudden passions that darted through him. Ben Jonson, one of his closest friends, said that Donne ought to have been hanged “for not keeping of meter,” and although this applied primarily to his undisciplined verse, it also applied to his life, which was as undisciplined and chaotic as his poetry.

The passionate, unpredictable character of John Donne is very much apparent in his poems. They are rough, awkward, often obscure, sometimes absurd. But when they work, when everything fits together, they are as good as any lyrics in English. Donne only misses being counted in the very first rank of poets because he failed to write an epic or “major work.” (Perhaps he would have written such a poem if he had not devoted his efforts in his later years to preaching.)

The poems fall into three categories. First, there are the many love poems, written before he met Ann More and while he was courting her. A dozen or more of these are among the best love poems ever written. But they are “difficult”; that is, they require careful reading and intense study—an odd requirement for a love poem!

The second category is religious poems—the “Holy Sonnets,” and others. One begins:

Death be not proud, though some have

callèd thee Mighty and dreadful, for

thou art not so.

Not all the Holy Sonnets are as famous as that one, but a choice dozen are nevertheless very fine. They have a deep, throbbing note, like this one, about the Day of Judgment:

At the round earth’s imagin’d corners blow Your trumpets, Angels, and arise, arise From death, you numberless infinities Of souls, and to your scatter’d bodies go.

“At the round earth’s imagin’d corners” is so typical of Donne. Four great Archangels will blow their trumpets on the Last Day to wake the living and the dead. But Earth is round, so where will the four Angels stand? (Do angels have to stand anywhere?) Why, at the world’s “imagin’d corners”! If you try to imagine what he means the effort will show you what is necessary when reading Donne.

Finally, there is a third category, the so-called “Anniversaries.” Donne had another patron after 1611, the death of whose young daughter occasioned a series of overwrought poems celebrating her and “anatomizing” the world: taking it apart and examining it. Donne’s vision of the world in the “Anniversaries” is not delightful. Like all good poets he was unsentimental; what is more, his time was no better than ours and maybe worse. It was above all a time of change, of intellectual revolution. Donne was deeply disturbed by that, but he understood it as well as anyone.

When reading lyric poems it is always appropriate to start by reading out loud. Read the poem again silently, more than once, as many times as necessary to understand it—and then read it aloud again to see the difference and to test your comprehension. Does it sound “right”? I say “always,” but it is truly difficult to do this with many poems of Donne. Coleridge, in a remark, gave the hint that should be heeded: “To read Dryden, Pope, etc., you need only count syllables, but to read Donne you must measure Time, and discover the Time of each word by the sense of Passion.”

Among the love poems of Donne, the following are not to be missed: “Song (Go and catch a falling star),” “Love’s Deity,” “The Funeral,” “The Good Morrow,” “The Blossom,” “The Undertaking,” “The Canonization,” “Love’s Alchemy,” and “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning.” Among the religious poems, read these: “Good Friday, 1613. Riding Westward,” “Hymn to God My God, in My Sickness,” “A Hymn to God the Father,” and Holy Sonnets numbers 1, 5, 7, 10, 14, and 18. The Third Anniversary is the most interesting of the series, although deeply flawed. Read all this, and then read on. These lists are far from exhausting the poetical interest and beauty of Donne.

Finally, you may wish to have a taste of Donne’s extraordinary sermons. “Death’s Duel” should at least be looked at: try to discover what is happening in it. And the “Devotions upon Emergent Occasions” contain many wonderful things, including these famous lines:

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were. Any man’s death diminishes me because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

GEORGE HERBERT

1593–1633

Poems

The great events of George Herbert’s life took place within him, not in the outside world.

His career, such as it was, was undistinguished. Born in 1593 and a member of an important and influential English family in the early seventeenth century, he was neither rich nor important nor influential himself. However, with the help of his family and particularly of his mother, a great lady who was also a close friend of John Donne’s, Herbert attained an important university post at Cambridge and appeared, while still in his twenties, to have worldly success within his grasp. But this was dependent on the patronage of the old king, James I, and when James died in 1625 Herbert was left adrift. More importantly, he had made the decision to leave the outer world and concentrate on the inner, and to resolve the struggle between his will and God’s. He was ordained and became a country parson in the little church at Bemerton, in Wiltshire. He died a few years later, in 1633, at the age of thirty-nine, leaving a sheaf of poems with a friend, “to be published or not, as you see fit.” The friend saw fit to publish the works of George Herbert in a volume that he called The Temple: Sacred Poems and Private Ejaculations, and so we have them today.

The devotion and humility of Herbert in his post at Bemerton became legendary. He gave himself entirely to his parishioners, exhausting himself in their behalf. But he continued to write poems in his last years and to practice the lute, his only diversion.

Izaak Walton, author of The Compleat Angler, wrote a biography of Herbert and one of the stories Walton told is well known. When Herbert took up his duties in Bemerton he realized he needed a wife to share the work and the loneliness. But he had never had anything to do with women and was perplexed about how to find a wife. He did remember, however, that an older friend, also a clergyman, had had six young daughters whom Herbert had liked when he was young. He wrote the friend and told him he needed a wife and wondered if he—the friend—would choose one of his daughters (if any remained unmarried, Herbert added delicately) for him. In fact, all were as yet unmarried. The friend chose one (the second oldest) and sent her to Bemerton, where she shortly became Mrs. Herbert. The couple were said to have been extremely happy for the few years they had together before Herbert died.

In a letter that accompanied the manuscript of his poems, Herbert had described them as “a picture of the many spiritual conflicts that have passed between God and my soul, before I could subject mine to the will of Jesus my Master, in whose service I have now found perfect freedom.” The description is accurate regarding the greatest of the poems in The Temple. They record a neverending struggle, fought in the silence of the heart and waged against the temptations of worldly ambition and of spiritual lassitude—accidie, or sloth. Herbert’s claim that he had finally triumphed in this struggle and had won “perfect freedom” may or may not have been true. The reader of his poems can decide for himself. Certainly they have the ring of sincerity; their power, which is great, derives from the strength of the feelings they describe and with which they deal.

George Herbert has often been likened to John Donne, with justice, but there are differences between them. Herbert wrote no passionate love poems like those of Donne, but on the other hand the intensity of his spiritual striving is probably even greater, and more affecting, than that of Donne. In short, there are hardly any greater religious poems in English than George Herbert’s.

These poems, therefore, are not to be read lightly. They demand attention and care, and a willingness of the heart. Give this to them, just the slightest bit, and they will lead you to give more of yourself. It is astonishing how they are able to draw even reluctant readers in. Read “The Collar,” “Love,” “The Pulley,” “The Flower,” “Denial,” and “Man.” Then read “Prayer,” “The Temper,” “Employment,” “Sighs and Groans,” “Whitsunday,” “The Star,” and “The Rose.” Finally, read “The Sacrifice,” with its heartbreaking refrain of Christ on the Cross: “Was ever grief like mine?” You must be strong to read this one.

Finally, read “Virtue,” which begins:

Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright,

The bridal of the earth and sky;

The dew shall weep thy fall to-night,

For thou must die.

And think of that young poet who died so many years ago and who felt so deeply the loss of one day, as deeply as you feel the loss of any day of your own.

ROBERT HERRICK

1591–1664

Poems

Robert Herrick led an entirely uneventful life of little note. Born in London in 1591, but for most of his life a country parson, he seems to have gone down to London only once during the last half of his life, to arrange for the publication of the collection of poems he had been writing for many years. They were published, under the title Hesperides, or Noble Numbers, in 1648. It was not the best time for such a volume to appear. England had only recently been embroiled in a desperate civil war, which had ended with the ritual execution of the king, Charles I, and the mood of the time was passionate and serious, or passionately serious. Herrick was not serious at all, at least not like the Puritans who took over the government after the death of Charles, and his poems presumed the existence of readers who could enjoy pleasures of an older style, before politics had become so important. As a consequence hardly anybody bought or paid attention to his book. He returned home, wrote more poems, and may have licked his wounds—we know very little about him. Nearly two centuries later, in the early nineteenth century, the gentle critic Charles Lamb discovered a copy of Hesperides among some old books, read it, and began to tell everybody that this Herrick had been a great poet. As indeed he was.

Knowing that, and understanding why Herrick is a great poet, is not easy. Many readers, even relatively practiced readers of poetry, fail to see more in him than a graceful skill at describing minor country matters. But look deeper and you begin to recognize a profound melancholy, which is after all the stuff of much of the greatest poetry. At the same time that he is always light and graceful, Herrick struggles in his poems with the most important of poetic ideas: the fact that beautiful as the world is, it is not permanent, it will die. More than any other idea, that is the central one that poets understand and write about.

Both parts of the idea, or all four parts, in fact, are present in the best lyrics. First, that the world is beautiful. If you do not think so, you cannot be a poet, for all good poets share the belief in the exquisite loveliness, charm, and desirability of the world as it is—even though it is also bad and ugly in many respects. Now the beauty of the world is various, and poets have seen it from many points of view. Herrick saw it from the point of view of a country parson in the middle of the English civil war. He saw fields and meadows, flowers and young girls, children and old gnarled people. And he found them all good.

Second, that the world’s beauty is not permanent, that it must pass. The world is always changing, its beauty always diminishing—ever since that first morning when God made it perfect, long, long ago. Why does this beauty lessen? Well, there are various theories, having to do with original sin, entropy, and such concepts. Poets do not always bother their heads about the reason. They only know it is so.

Third, that this beauty will not only diminish, it will die. Every living thing that is beautiful in itself and adds to the sum total of the world’s beauty will die, sooner or later, and for most living things, very soon—like flowers and butterflies and this very day, which must come to an end tonight. “Everything” includes, of course, both the poet and the reader, who are conceived by the poet to be single: one-on-one is the essential poetical relationship, one writer, one reader, and the poem in between, holding them together with a grip that is firmer than death.

This is the fourth part of the idea: that despite the death of the world and its beauty this poem will endure, will survive both writer and reader and will help readers in other times and places to endure the melancholy facts of human life.

All of this is present in the best poems of Robert Herrick, which are not few, although his most valuable work is not vast, either. All of it is present in what may be his best poem, “To Meadows.” He addresses the meadows:

Ye have been fresh and green,

Ye have been filled with flowers;

And ye the walks have been

Where maids have spent their hours.

It is now autumn, the grass is brown, the flowers and the maidens have departed, and the meadows are left to beweep their fate:

Like unthrifts, having spent

Your stock and needy grown,

You’re left here to lament

Your poor estates, alone.

The gentle suggestion that it is the meadows’ own fault (they have spent all their “stock,” all their capital), that they are now deserted where once they have been so rich, is the heartbreaking note of the poem. Indeed, it is not the meadows’ fault, it is the fault of the world itself, of things, of the conditions of life. But as we say that, as we defend the meadows from the charge that is implicit in those last lines, we come to understand the point Herrick is making. “Yes, you are right,” he nods, “it is not the fault of the meadows, it is the conditions of life and of man of which I am speaking here, and I am glad you have come to understand it.”

Here is a suggested list of poems by Herrick that I believe you should read: “The Argument of His Book,” “An Ode for Ben Jonson,” “To Live Merrily and to Trust to Good Verses,” “To Daffodils,” “Upon Julia’s Clothes,” “Sweet Disorder,” “Grace for a Child,” “To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time,” “The Mad Maid’s Song,” “To Meadows,” “A Thanksgiving to God, for His House,” “His Litany, to the Holy Spirit,” and “To Death.” You may wish to read more, but these are often anthologized and are therefore fairly easy to find.

THOMAS HOBBES

1588–1679

Leviathan

In April 1588 rumors were rife in England concerning the approach of the dreaded Spanish Armada. Mrs. Hobbes, wife of the vicar of Westport, in Wiltshire, was beset with fears, as were all of her neighbors. She was pregnant, and because of her fear and distress she gave birth prematurely. The boy, Thomas, was not adversely affected, for he lived in good health and with the full possession of his faculties until the age of ninety-one.

He was slow to mature although he entered Oxford at fourteen, but he learned little or nothing, he later said, from the scholastic program based upon Aristotle that was offered there. Rather, he learned from other men, and not least from his friends and benefactors, the family of Cavendish, Earls and Dukes of Devonshire, with whom he was connected as tutor, fellow traveler, and companion throughout his long life.

It was as the companion of a nobleman that Hobbes found himself in Paris in 1628, when he was forty years old. There he came upon mathematics for the first time and a great revelation it was to him. His friend John Aubrey described it:

Being in a gentleman’s library … Euclid’s Elements lay open, and it was the 47th Prop. Lib. I. So he reads the proposition. “By G-,” says he, “this is impossible.” So he reads the demonstration, which referred him back to another, which he also read, and sic deinceps, that at last he was demonstratively convinced of that truth. That made him in love with geometry.

The forty-seventh proposition of the first book of Euclid’s Elements is the famous Pythagorean Theorem, that the square on the hypotenuse of a right triangle is equal to the sum of the squares on the other two sides. It is typical of Hobbes 1. that he had never heard of this geometric truth before; 2. that he crustily denied it until he had determined its truth with his own eyes and mind (in other words, he was distrustful of any intellectual authority); 3. that he did follow up the train of demonstration to its beginning, and was convinced by it; and 4. that he ever after loved “not the theorems,” as he said, “but the method of geometry, its art of reasoning.”

Crusty, stubborn, willful—that is Hobbes to a T. But these are not intellectual vices when combined with a good mind, much experience, and a long life. In fact, they then may turn into virtues, the fruit of which in Hobbes’s case was a number of works, one of which was the very important book, Leviathan. Its full title was Leviathan; or, the Matter, Form, and Power of a Commonwealth, Ecclesiastical and Civil.

The full title is both accurate and instructive. The book is in four parts, the last two of which are closely connected. The first part deals with the matter of a commonwealth, which is to say with human beings. The second part deals with the form of a commonwealth, the traditional differences in which—as between monarchy and democracy, say—Hobbes thought were trivial. The third and fourth parts deal with the vexing problem of the relations of the laws of man and of God in a commonwealth.

Ever mindful of the lessons of the forty-seventh proposition of the first book of Euclid, Hobbes begins his discourse with a presentation of his thoughts about first things: sense, imagination, speech, reasoning, and the like. In a series of short chapters, some of them no more than a paragraph in length, he offers the kinds of sound conclusions that are usually associated with the philosophical school of British Empiricism, of which he may be counted a founding member. He then goes on to examine man in his essence, without sentimentality. Mankind is physically weak but vain and full of desires, Hobbes says, which creates difficulties for him: he is a quarrelsome creature who always wants what he does not have. In the absence of law and government, this natural propensity leads to a condition of war, which is described by Hobbes in one of the most famous passages in the literature of political theory.

Whatsoever therefore is consequent to a time of war, where every man is enemy to every man, the same is

consequent to the time wherein men live without other security than what their own strength and their own invention shall furnish them withal. In such condition there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

The last three adjectives only are usually quoted, which spoils the wonderful rhythm of the passage; and the word “nasty” is often misunderstood: in the seventeenth century it simply meant “dirty.”

Given these facts about the “state of nature,” it is not surprising, says Hobbes, that men everywhere are willing to give up their individual liberty for the sake of the security that a commonwealth alone can guarantee. They do this by handing over their individual sovereignties to a single sovereign, who may be an individual (a king) or a legislative body (a parliament).

This done, the multitude so united in one person is called COMMONWEALTH; in Latin, CIVITAS. This is the generation of that great LEVIATHAN, or rather, to speak more reverently, of that mortal god to which we owe, under the immortal God, our peace and defense.

Hobbes lived through troubled times, the English civil war (including the execution of King Charles I) and its aftermath. He was perhaps more willing, as a consequence, than he would have been in more peaceful circumstances, to give up all his sovereignty for the sake of security. He was also a stalwart Loyalist and follower of the King throughout the war. In any case, he did suppose that it was necessary to give up more sovereignty than it is. And the reason for this is that he did not see how sovereignty could reside in anything other than a person or persons. “That great LEVIATHAN,” he wrote, “… is but an artificial man, though of greater stature and strength than the natural, for whose protection and defence it was intended.”

The idea, in short, of a government of laws, instead of a government of men, escaped him. He thought all government was necessarily of men and he could not imagine such a commonwealth as that of the United States of America, in which the Constitution rules (or is supposed to), and all men and women obey it, even the president, who is (supposed to be) the servant rather than the ruler of the people.

Maybe he was able to imagine such a government but could not believe it would ever be a reality. He did believe that good governance exists only where there are good rulers, and that is certainly true whether the state be constitutional or not. At any rate he was able to imagine almost everything else, and to discourse upon it in his book, in his customary brusque, direct, down-to-earth, commonsensical manner.

It is this manner that is the greatest value, I think, in Hobbes’s book. Most of his major conclusions and ideas are better stated by Locke and Rousseau and other political philosophers who followed him. But his comments about all sorts of ordinary things are rich and memorable.

Hobbes is a man to read and ponder over: concerning this sentence or that—is he correct in what he says or not? The pondering leads to a deeper understanding of that commonplace subject. Much of what he has to say deals with the words that were then used to name important philosophical and political ideas. Some of these names have changed since 1651 when Leviathan was published. See if you can detect these changes. When you are able to do so, you have learned an important lesson, for the old name often throws much light on the modern idea, which you knew and understood in another dress.

JOHN MILTON

1608–1674

Paradise Lost

Selected Poems

Areopagitica

Much is known about the life of John Milton—vastly more than about Shakespeare, for example—but this has not added to Milton’s reputation. For the fact is that Milton was, if not an unpleasant, then certainly a difficult man. A very hard worker and a man of absolute integrity, he nevertheless suffered from traits that do not recommend him to moderns: stubbornness, inflexibility, impatience. Even so, his genius was so great that, like Beethoven, who was fully as difficult, we end up admiring him if not loving him as we love Shakespeare and Mozart.

At any rate, Milton was incomparably brilliant; no young man was ever more so. Born in 1608, he excelled in all of his studies, at school and at Christ’s College, Cambridge, learning the three ancient languages—Greek, Latin, and Hebrew—and several modern ones as well. After years of postgraduate study he journeyed to Italy to polish his Italian and there wrote poems in Italian that were hailed by the cognoscenti. He was sharpening his tools, readying himself, as he felt, for the great task that faced him: the task of writing the English epic, as Homer had written the Greek one, Virgil the Latin, and Dante the Italian. The subject would be the so-called matter of Britain, that is, the grand old stories about the half-mythical court of King Arthur and his Round Table of famous knights. Milton returned from abroad in July 1639, apparently ready to begin his work. But great events intervened.

England had been entangled in religious controversy since the beginning of the seventeenth century, now threatening to break out in civil war. Milton, with the certainty that attached to all his moral choices, knew on which side his sympathies lay: with the Parliament and the Puritans, against the King and the established church. He set to with a will to defend those that the King called rebels from the charges of political illegitimacy that flew from all sides. Milton’s superb knowledge of Latin—the international language of the seventeenth century—was a considerable help to the Puritans, who were soon led to victory after victory by the astounding adventurer Oliver Cromwell. The King was defeated, captured, tried, and condemned; Milton justified all of these actions to the world, and when King Charles I was beheaded at Whitehall on January 30, 1649, Milton justified that, too. He worked day and night in his capacity as Latin Secretary, what we might call today press secretary, particularly for communications with foreign governments.

The hard work, combined with a probable congenital weakness, cost him his eyesight. By 1652, when he was only forty-four, Milton was blind. He continued to labor, but with the death of Oliver Cromwell in 1658, the cause was lost. Within two years Charles II had returned from France to be a new king of England. The question for Milton was not so much what he would do now as whether he would be allowed to live at all. Only generosity on the part of the new government—prompted, it is said, by the pleas of another poet, Andrew Marvell, Member of Parliament for Hull—made it possible for him to survive.

That hurdle overcome, the decision for Milton was, as usual, clear-cut: he would return to the work he had abandoned in order to throw himself into the defense, as he saw it, of English liberty. But the “matter of Britain” no longer seemed attractive to the experienced man of fifty. A greater story needed to be told in heroic verse, the story of mankind himself, the story of his fall from grace in Eden, that singular event that had made man what he was (and woman, too) and had led to the inexpressibly loving act of God in sending His only begotten Son to purchase man’s forgiveness with His blood.

Milton was at work even before the Restoration, as early as 1655 or 1656, often waking early in the morning—at three or four o’clock—and composing lines in his head. He sometimes wrote a hundred lines or more and then waited, impatient as always, “to be milked” by one of his nephews who took down the old man’s dictation. Thus was Paradise Lost written, being slowly built up, day by day, by the blind bard, on a gigantic plan that Milton had been forming for many years.

By 1665 the poem was finished, all ten books of it. (A second edition of 1674 divided the work into the present twelve books.) It was praised, albeit with some coolness: Its author had been a rebel and had justified the murder of the king, and Milton had chosen to write in blank verse instead of the established heroic couplets of the time. What is more, the Miltonic blank verse is different from anyone else’s; it possesses the grandeur but also the excessiveness of the baroque in art, and for some of Milton’s contemporaries—as for some of us—it was often hard to read.

With all this against it, Paradise Lost nevertheless was soon recognized for what it is: the greatest long poem in the English language, containing descriptive passages of such force and loveliness—and horror—that the blind poet makes you shiver as you read. And this despite an even greater defect, as some view it: the inability of Milton to make his hero, Christ, more interesting than his villain, Satan (Adam and Eve are pawns in the grasp of greater powers). William Blake, who loved Milton, said he was “of the Devil’s party without knowing it.” Whatever the justice of that remark, it is true that Satan possesses a doomed, dark splendor, especially at the beginning of the poem. However, if you read carefully, you perceive the transformation of this archfiend from a classic tragic figure into his final form as an enormous bloated worm, thrashing about in the squalid mud and darkness of Hell. At the end Satan is a loathsome figure, the despised of God, condemned to eternal misery and awareness of his loss.

The story of Adam and Eve, read as a love story between two very human (though rather large) people, is deeply affecting. Adam is devoted to Eve from the first time he sees her, a devotion so enveloping that Eve is led to plead with her husband to be allowed to go off by herself for a day so that she may learn to be more independent, and so be a more useful helpmeet. Reluctantly Adam agrees. Satan takes advantage, of course, seducing Eve into tasting of the Tree of Knowledge of good and evil. The Devil’s arguments are masterful, the temptation is irresistible, and we forgive Eve at once: she is confronted by a power of which she can have no comprehension.

As soon as she returns Adam realizes what has happened and almost immediately forgives her, although he knows better than she the consequences of her fall. She offers him the apple and he eats, knowing full well that he will lose Paradise but knowing, too, that without Eve there is no paradise for him anywhere. And so they are punished, after first having the future of mankind foretold them by the Archangel. They look back at the flaming sword over the gate and then turn away from Paradise and toward their new life:

Some natural tears they dropped, but wiped them soon. The world was all before them, where to choose Their place of rest, and Providence their guide: They hand in hand with wandering steps and slow Through Eden took their solitary way.

It is surely one of the most beautiful partings in poetry.

The story of Adam and Eve is more than just a biblical tale. Every newly married couple has something like the same experience to undergo and something like the same suffering to endure. Paradise Lost is therefore much more than the greatest of all baroque literary monuments. It is a story for all people at all times. In addition, it is a profound apologia for the Christian religion capable, I believe, of softening even the hardest heart.

At the end of his life Milton wrote a kind of sequel to Paradise Lost that he called Paradise Regained. It is not much read today except by Milton scholars and their students, yet it is an interesting work. Paradise was to be regained, of course, through the intercession of Christ for all mankind. Satan knew very well what the birth of Christ meant, so he set about the task of tempting the Son of God as he had tempted Eve. Temptation was Milton’s great subject: as a young man he had written a masque, or musical show, Comus, about temptation; Paradise Lost was about the temptation of both Adam and Eve; in his tragic play Samson Agonistes, Milton reveals Samson tempted by Dalila; and here at the end Christ is tempted by Satan in many and diverse ways. Christ, like the Lady in Comus but unlike Samson and Eve and Adam, is proof against temptation, and so man will be saved and ultimately find Paradise again. The verse of Paradise Regained is heavy and ornate, with little of the graciousness and beauty of Paradise Lost, but the conception of the work is fascinating.

Samson Agonistes, too, is but a partial success. It is too long and insufficiently dramatic: one imagines Shakespeare handling the scenes between Samson and Dalila. On the other hand, not even Shakespeare, perhaps, could have outdone the magnificence of the final moments of Samson, as he brings down his enemies in his own fall. His epitaph is spoken by his father:

Nothing is here for tears, nothing to wail Or knock the breast, no weakness, no contempt, Dispraise or blame; nothing but well and fair And what may quiet us in a death so noble.

Shakespeare is unquestionably the greatest English poet and Milton is almost certainly the second greatest, although there are some who might claim the latter distinction for Chaucer or Wordsworth or Yeats—no others, probably. The reason Milton’s claim is so secure is that he not only wrote the magnificent long works of his old age—Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, Samson—but that he also composed, at various times in his life, a collection of lyric poems that, taken all together, constitute an achievement that would earn him a high rank even without Paradise Lost.

Even Milton’s juvenile poems are worth reading if you would know the beginnings of this mighty poet, but at any rate do not skip over “L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso.” This pair of lyrics—the one about the charms of life and happiness and comedy, the other about melancholy and deep thoughtfulness and tragedy—is the best example of an academic exercise ever written. In the dainty four-foot meter that we usually associate with poets like Marvell, rather than Milton, they prove that the great baroque poet had a light side, however difficult this may sometimes be to believe. The best way to read both “L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso” is to read them out loud, rather softly, while playing Vivaldi’s “The Seasons,” also rather softly, in the background. The combination is dynamite.

Do not try to read “Lycidas” while listening to Vivaldi; the greater weight of Bach (say, the Brandenburg Concertos) is needed for this bigger, more serious poem. An acquaintance of Milton’s, a young and aspiring poet and clergyman, has been lost in the Irish Channel and Milton contributes to a slim volume published in his memory. But the poem goes far beyond mourning for Edward King. It also mourns for Milton himself, for his lost youth, and for the waste of his time in other deeds and activities when he should be writing his great poem.

The lines in which Milton reminds us of the chanciness of life are justly famous—but so are many others in this poem, which stands as one of the greatest English lyrics:

Fame is the spur that the clear spirit doth raise (That last infirmity of noble mind) To scorn delights, and live laborious days; But the fair guerdon when we hope to find, And think to burst out into sudden blaze, Comes the blind Fury with th’ abhorrèd shears, And slits the thin-spun life.

“And slits the thin-spun life”—did ever a line of poetry more perfectly sound what it means?

Do not pass over, either, the sonnets of Milton. Half a dozen are among the finest sonnets in any language.

Finally, try some of Milton’s prose, though it is often antique and clumsy to our modern ear. At least read Areopagitica, Milton’s passionate plea for the freedom of the press. Do not censor books, he cries:

As good almost kill a man as kill a good book; who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God’s image; but he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were in the eye . . . A good book is the precious life-blood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life.

Every lover of books also loves those lines. In Areopagitica Milton also writes about temptation and the need to face it, to overcome it frankly and fearlessly, and not to shrink away:

I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race, where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat.

It was a hard man who wrote that, who had lived a hard life.

ANDREW MARVELL

1621–1678

Poems

Andrew Marvell was born in Hull, Yorkshire, in 1621 and enjoyed an exceptionally fortunate life throughout his fifty-seven years; all his clouds had silver linings.

He attended Cambridge but had to leave without a degree when his father died; however, to gain his living, he then traveled on the Continent as a tutor and thus missed the civil war. He was at first opposed to Cromwell’s government, but the character of Cromwell won him over and he became Latin Secretary (succeeding Milton). This might have caused him grave difficulties, but he was elected a Member of Parliament from his native city in 1659. When Charles II was restored, in 1660, it was thought prudent to allow MPs to continue in office (else there might have been another civil war), so Marvell weathered the transition. He served in the Commons as the Member for Hull for the rest of his life.

During the 1660s and 1670s he wrote a number of engaging political satires, in verse and prose, and was a well-known man in London and throughout the realm. He did not publish any of his serious poems, but they were published after his death by a woman claiming to be his wife, although they had probably never been married. Thus the few superb poems of Marvell survived. They are very few; perhaps only three short poems belong in the great canon of English literature.

“An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland,” written in 1650, shows Marvell’s growing admiration for Cromwell but it is most famous for its lines describing the death upon the scaffold of King Charles I.

He nothing common did or mean

Upon that memorable scene …

But laid his comely head

Down, as upon a bed.

The poem expresses the way many Englishmen must have felt about “that memorable scene,” when the king stood upon the scaffold erected at Whitehall on Tuesday, January 30, 1649. That is, they approved of the act in principle but deeply regretted the death of this man whose last moments were the best of his life.

“To His Coy Mistress” is an example—perhaps the best example in literature—of the so-called carpe diem poem. “Carpe diem” means, in the Latin of the poet Horace, “seize the day”—that is, take advantage of the present moment, for it will pass and with it youth and beauty. Carpe diem poems were written by the cartload by young men desiring to seduce young women, who are—or were in those days—deeply affected by the idea that once their beauty has passed no one will want them. Often enough, the young beauty was compared to a flower, usually a rose, which would soon wither and die. The girl was supposed to take that fact to heart and act accordingly, but when the poems were really good they rose above the occasion.

Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress” is almost unique in being at once a serious carpe diem poem and at the same time a kind of parody of such verses.

Had we but world enough, and time, This coyness, lady, were no crime. We would sit down, and think which way To walk, and pass our long love’s day. Thou by the Indian Ganges’ side Shouldst rubies find: I by the tide Of Humber would complain. I would Love you ten years before the flood And you should, if you please, refuse Till the conversion of the Jews.

“For, lady, you deserve this state, Nor would I love at lower rate,” the poet says. However, he adds:

But at my back I always hear

Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near,

And yonder all before us lie

Deserts of vast eternity.

That is of course the carpe diem reminder. Yet here it is advanced to a level seldom if ever seen before. Not only is this woman whom Marvell is addressing not just some young thing with a rising bosom but instead a lady of deep and wide intelligence; in addition, the carpe diem warning is extended to the entire race. Marvell not only deepens the relations between the sexes but also uses the ancient traditional form to say something profound about human life in general. Altogether a remarkable poem, in which you will certainly find much more than I have suggested.

“The Garden” is probably the most admired of Marvell’s poems. Written in the same rapid octosyllabic couplets as “To His Coy Mistress”—couplets of which Marvell is the acknowledged master in English—it is a good deal more mysterious than its surface suggests. In fact, what the poem is finally saying about the conflict between society and solitude, between busyness and quietude, between the great world and the proscribed one of the secluded garden, is not, at first sight, entirely clear. The poem contains symbols, as well, that are difficult to interpret. But it weaves an incomparable spell:

The mind, that ocean where each kind Does straight its own resemblance find

Yet it creates, transcending these,

Far other worlds, and

other seas,Annihilating all that’s made

To a green thought in a green shade.

T.S. Eliot admired those lines, and spoke of Marvell’s unique ability to turn thoughts into concrete things, and things into thoughts. Perhaps that is what Marvell was doing. At any rate, it was quite wonderful.

BENEDICT DE SPINOZA

1632–1677

The Ethics

In his story “The Spinoza of Market Street,” I.B. Singer tells of an old Jew who, after a lifetime of scholarly devotion to the philosophy of Spinoza, falls in love with a crude young woman and marries her, to the amused scorn of his friends. It is not long, of course, before he begins to contemplate the quiet peacefulness of his past life as compared to the turmoil of his present and, doubtless, his future. He goes to the window to gaze up at the cold, circling stars. “Forgive me, great Spinoza,” he whispers. “I have become a fool.”

Reading Spinoza’s Ethics is no guarantee against folly—there is none such—but if any book will help, this one will. It is about the passions, or emotions as we not too accurately call them now, and how to deal with them. The reason why “passions” is a better word than “emotions” for anger, envy, scorn, fear, and so forth is that it declares its derivation from a Latin word that also gives us “passive,” and it is precisely because our passions act upon us and we are passive with regard to them that they make us unhappy. Spinoza’s advice to us in his Ethics is to learn to be active toward our passions; in other words, to control them and not allow them to control us. It is good advice, although not exactly new.

Benedict de Spinoza (his Hebrew name was Baruch) was born in Amsterdam in 1632, the son of Jewish parents who provided him with a good education in traditional religious subjects. He studied philosophy, modern languages, and physics and mathematics on his own, and from the time that he discovered Descartes, in the 1650s, he was a rebel against almost all intellectual tradition. A queer, inward-turning man, he gave up his inheritance and became a grinder and polisher of lenses for microscopes and telescopes. He died at forty-five from consumption brought on by the inhalation of glass dust in his shop.

Spinoza worked on his Ethics, his masterpiece, for the last fifteen years of his life, but he knew it would never be published while he was alive; he therefore arranged for its posthumous publication. The book describes a world system that in one sense is God and in another sense has no need of God for its existence, and the doctrine was radically unacceptable to Spinoza’s contemporaries. We read the Ethics today not so much for its metaphysical system as for its solid common sense—and for its extraordinary form and style.

In fact, Spinoza had two styles, very different from one another. The first is his standard prose style, which he adopts in only a few places in Ethics—alas, too few! Paragraphs of notes and commentaries are sprinkled throughout the text and they are always welcome because of their special charm and humanity. The Fourth Book of Ethics, with its famous title “Of Human Bondage,” is particularly rich in prose comments and asides. The book deals with the power our passions hold over us; our passions enslave us, says Spinoza, hold us in bondage. In the Fifth Book, the last, titled “Of Human Freedom,” Spinoza shows how, by the intellect’s understanding alone, without the help of anything outside the mind (without the help of God—it is no wonder that he was excommunicated by the Jews and his works declared anathema by the Christians), the passions can be overcome and happiness found in a quiet life of peace and contentment. All this is summed up on the last page of the work, in a paragraph that for its sweetness is justly famous:

I have finished everything I wished to explain concerning the power of the mind over the affects and concerning its liberty … If the way which, as I have shown, leads hither seem very difficult, it can nevertheless be found. It must indeed be difficult since it is so seldom discovered; for if salvation lay ready to hand and could be discovered without great labor, how could it be possible that it should be neglected almost by everybody?But all noble things are as difficult as they are rare.

Spinoza’s other style is astonishing to those who come upon it without warning. Descartes had said that all knowledge was, if not mathematics, then based on mathematics, and his “method,” to put it very simply, was to mathematicize everything. Spinoza concluded that metaphysics and ethics, like physics and the other natural sciences, ought to benefit from the Cartesian way of looking at things, and the Ethics is therefore in geometrical form. Axioms and definitions are laid down, propositions are stated and proved, and each proof ends with “Q.E.D.” But the text does not treat such simple entities as points and lines, triangles and circles. Instead, it deals with God and His creation, the angels and the world of material things, man and his intellect and will, and his bondage to and freedom from his passions.

That Descartes’s geometrical method is inappropriate to the science (if it is that) of ethics may never have been apparent to Benedict de Spinoza. It is doubtless apparent to us from the very beginning. Spinoza’s attempt, however, has a certain splendor and is worth noting as a minor monument along the highway of the history of thought. We should remember, too, that Cartesianism, the prevalent disease of modern thought, has invaded still other realms where it does not belong: politics, philosophy, sociology, and anthropology.

I do not recommend Spinoza’s Ethics because it is a failure; I recommend it because it succeeds, despite its form, in expressing with singular force Stoic arguments about freedom and virtue. Socrates had said in the Phaedo that “no evil can come to a good man, in life or in death.” By “good man” he meant one who was in control of himself and therefore safe from internal treachery; there could be no real danger from outside, for the worst tyrant could not touch a good man’s soul. This basic Stoic tenet, which is Spinoza’s, too, may not be wholly true, but there is a rich kernel of truth in it. Courageous men and women are always more or less stoical and no one is finally so free of coercion as he who is willing to die rather than be coerced. Such is the true Stoic—a noble breed, though rare.

To be appreciated, the Ethics does not have to be read in its entirety. Read the introductory passages to each of the five books, the statements of the propositions, and all of the lengthy prose comments (Lemmas). From time to time scan a proof. Some of the terms will seem very odd; anything you know about Scholastic philosophy, for example, will come in handy. But Spinoza is not inaccessible, he is just strange. Both wonderful and strange, as befits the creator of something that is both difficult and rare.