Andrew Marvell and Edmund Waller: Seventeenth-Century Praise and Restoration Satire.

The idea of pairing Marvell and Waller in a study of seventeenthcentury poetics has a certain logic. To us they may not seem like kindred sensibilities, but near contemporaries assigned the authorship of The First Anniversary to Waller, and we have long appreciated the ways in which Waller's optimistic and idealized celebration of the Battle of Lowestoft provided the occasion for Marvell's Last Instructions. The Anglo-Dutch wars were but one site of their literary and political relations. Years before, Waller had written The Battle of the Summer Islands, verse that Marvell twice echoed; and in 1649 both contributed to Lachrymae Musarum. During the 1650s they commemorated the Protectorate, and after the Restoration they both sat in the "Convention" and "Cavalier" Parliaments. We should also remind ourselves that despite the brilliant evidence of the advice-to-painter poems, Waller and Marvell were not utterly estranged after the Restoration: they both were enemies of Hyde, suspicious of popery, and friends of toleration.

But the intertwining of these careers or, more generally, the pressure that parliamentary politics and public service put on the writing of verse is not Chambers' subject. In the latter part of his book, he addresses the relations between Waller's and Marvell's "Instruction" poems, reminding us of the classical texts threaded through both, but Chambers turns away from the colloquy of poems on like occasions (13). He treats neither Waller's Summer Islands nor the Cromwell poems; and the detailed readings of the Instructions to a Painter and The Last Instructions are efforts rather to illustrate different sensibilities than to pose these texts in colloquy or contest. Indeed, in the structure of this book, with its long readings of individual pieces, Marvell and Waller seem like an apposite but distant couple. Chambers aims to restore our appreciation of Waller, to provide "right reasons" (vii) for admiring Marvell's lyric genius, and to show how Waller and Marvell together opened the "door through which Dryden made his entrance to become the dominant literary figure of the Restoration" (viii). But the historical argument is confined to a few pages at the close of the book, and the individual readings are not meditations on related themes but separate appreciations. The book seems less an argument than a series of essays on two poets who shared occasions, topics, and a chronology.

Such an enterprise can raise questions about audience and rationale, and the opening chapters raise both. The preface sets forth appreciative aims, and Chambers' initial remarks indicate a general audience; but the individual essays, and particularly the first chapter on Marvell, could hardly have been written for generalists. Chambers' assertion that the heart of this method in treating Marvell lies in his examination of minutiae proves a warning flag for what follows. Indeed, the first substantive chapter is a forty-page argument for preserving the folio reading of the rhyme word "glew" in line 34 of "To His Coy Mistress." Chambers assembles an army of exegetical and philological authorities--classical and Renaissance poets, Latin and Hebrew philologists, midrashic rabbis, Church Fathers, cardinals, Jesuits, encyclopedists, and exegetes--but his chapter bewilders in its detail, aim, and method. Lacking the anchor of a critical or historical argument, this essay, with its absorption in philological minutiae and distant points of learning, seems to float into the realm of private speculation. How are we to keep all this material fixed on an appreciation or an argument? Chambers seems aware of the difficulties; he acknowledges the haphazard quality of his method of associative citation, what he calls in one place "ransacking" (13) and in another "laborious scratching" (54), and he is diffident about what he accomplishes (53). The modesty is disarming, but the chapter needs editing and the reduction of much of the text to footnotes.

And what of the chapter's audience? Only a handful of Marvellians will have the patience to follow Chambers' textual and philological speculations or his running dialogue with Marvell's editors. If Chambers is writing for specialists, why frame the study in the apologetics of the generalist? And perhaps a specialist audience might expect more vigilance in the scholarly standards of the book itself, and a more engaged debate with current literary and historical work on Marvell. Davenant, Dorset, and Suckling are quoted from inferior texts, Pepys is cited to Wheatley's outdated edition, and transcriptions of Marvell and Dryden are marred by a number of small errors. Chambers refers to the work of Wallace, Patterson, and Chernaik, but he does not take account of recent work by N. H. Keeble, Michael Wilding, John Dixon Hunt, Christopher Hill, and Blair Worden, all of whom have addressed important aspects of Marvell's political and literary career.

The chapter on Waller's On St. James's Park is rather more successful than the initial chapter on Marvell. Here Chambers examines the way Waller reworked the poetry of Jonson and Denham, and explicates the classical sources of Waller's Restoration pastoral. The poem strikingly absent from this account of pastoral and politics is Marvell's Upon Appleton House; although not a precedent for Waller, Marvell's poem would have provided a telling contrast not only of sensibilities but also of the private and public capacities of the pastoral mode. Chambers does, however, nicely illustrate Waller's habits in his handling of classical texts: compressing and redistributing passages, adapting Latin details to English settings, and eliding difficult political references in his models. With this material Chambers is at his best, and similar appreciations of the manner in which Lucan hovers over Marvell's Restoration satires show how a critic's responsiveness to the interplay between classical models and seventeenth-century texts can both explicate specific passages and, more broadly, display the arts and ironies of seventeenth-century poets schooled in Latin literary culture.

In the epilogue Chambers argues that Waller and Marvell played an enabling role for Dryden, their careers and literary projects allowing Dryden to see a way through the points at which the older poets were stymied. Perhaps this is so; it is certainly an interesting notion of how problems in one literary career might open bilities in another. Dryden lavishly praised Waller, though in the late Discourse Concerning Satire he specifically denied the force of Waller's example; and of Marvell we hear almost nothing from Dryden. Of course neither praise nor silence is an argument about the role that Waller and Marvell may have played in Dryden's career. It is easy to see that Waller's much-praised art would not have kept Dryden awake nights, but the damaging scurrility and elegant praise embedded in The Last Instructions would have interested Dryden, even to the point of admiration and envy. Marvell took a nasty swipe at Dryden in his poem on Paradise Lost, and Dryden answered in the Preface to Religio Laici, conflating Marvell with that "first Presbyterian Scribber," Martin Marprelate. These intriguing threads suggest a subject for the more substantial study that Chambers hints at in his closing pages.

WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY - ST. LOUIS