Ardelia

THE Decennial Publications of the University of Chicago, which have included many interesting and substantial contributions to the circle of the sciences and arts, have numbered no more excellent volume than Miss Reynolds’s piously careful edition of the poems of the Countess of Winchilsea, better known to her few truelovers under the fragrant name of Ardelia. Some ungentlemanly gibes by Swift and Pope, an admiring paragraph or two in Wordsworth and Leigh Hunt, a pleasant essay by Mr. Gosse, a slender selection from her work in Ward’s English Poets, a brief notice in the Dictionary of National Biography, — the bibliography of Ardelia is complete. Hence the curious student, and even more the reader, who cares for whatever in literature is delightful and significant, must be grateful to Miss Reynolds for this portly volume in which the complete poetical works of a notable woman — reproduced from a rare octavo and two manuscript volumes — are preceded by a lively and thorough account of her career and character.

Ardelia — who, when off the bi-forked hill, was Mrs. Anne Finch— was a lady poetess of a singularly wholesome type. A clever and charming girl, she served as maid of honor to Mary of Modena, and walked the devious ways of the corrupt courts of the second Charles and James without reproach. By her own showing she disdained the

yet her pen can treat tenderly of love as the most worthy of all the excursions and transports of the mind. Later, when married to Heneage Finch, a talented gentleman with a “nice relish ” of antiquity, she can write bravely and poetically of her happiness, in an age when such happiness was hopelessly unfashionable. As with Cowley and the other poets who were passing from the stage when she was a young girl, the country-side delighted her more than London: of the citified pose of Mrs. Behn she was as impatient as of her amorous flights. She stoutly affirms that “Women are Education’s and not Nature’s fools, ” yet there is little in her writing to suggest the femme savante who has contributed so much of depression and gayety to our later literature. There are, indeed, but two notes of pathos in the record of a life exceptionally happy and well ordered: she was, alas, afflicted with the spleen, and — a keener sorrow! — she was childless.

It might have been well had Miss Reynolds added to her firm if somewhat academic examination of the traits of Ardelia’s poetry a sharper discrimination of its relation to some of the subtlest and most pervasive intellectual currents of the time. Wordsworth’s praise of Ardelia as the only poet between Milton and Thomson, to use a new image from external nature, is misleading. Despite a certain natural and unaffected note in her singing, her mind was receptive rather than energetic, and few poets are likely to be more profitable to the earnest seeker after Einfluss.

All things considered, it was Cowley who had the greatest part in shaping the form of her work. Cowley’s imitations of “Pindar his enthusiastical manner ” were the model poems of the age, and Ardelia was easily the best of the crowd of bad and indifferent poets who were “sequacious of his lyre.” If Ardelia never has quite the flood of song which

or never quite equals Cowley at his best in forging such unforgettable mouthfillers as

at least her demurer Muse is never guilty of such turgidities as most of those fell into who adventured the “enthusiastical manner.” Yet there is much, not only in her Pindaric flights, but in all her vigorous versified rhetoric, which goes to show her admiring study of the poet whom men were only just beginning to suspect might be a little lower than Homer and Virgil. Miss Reynolds will have it that Ardelia was not given to the Cowleyesque pursuit of conceits. Her metaphors and similitudes are indeed rarely as tall as those which inspired Dr. Johnson’s famous charge against the “metaphysical ” poets, but her verses are compact of analogical curiosities akin to theirs, and when she makes a lover lamenting the charms and cruelty of his mistress cry out that he has

Donne himself might yield his bays.

Another of Ardelia’s admired poets was Denham, the author of one of the noblest nature-poems in the language, and much of her own descriptive writing is obviously patterned after Cooper’s Hill. There is more of it, however, which is quite artless, the poetic and sentimental reaction of a sensitive mind upon a beautiful environment. The reader of such writers as Temple is not likely to believe that the love of nature was ever, even in the last decade of the seventeenth century, so nearly dead in English hearts as Wordsworth would wish us to believe. Nowhere is the persistence of a sensitiveness to natural beauty seen more clearly than in such poems as Ardelia’s To a Nightingale and her Nocturnal Reverie. On the other hand, it is quite true that in most of the poets of her age nature is seen under the malign light of an artificial “pathetic fallacy, ” widely removed from the poetic effectiveness of the real pathetic fallacy Which was to appear within the next half century. It is to Ardelia’s everlasting credit that either by the clarity of her temperament, or by a specially emergent Providence, her Muse escaped this contagion. The greater portion of her imagery drawn from nature carries with it a singular conviction of actual observation and delight. It is still more remarkable that in some passages, such as the invocation to Peace

she partakes of the impressiveness without the disturbance of that Ossianic sublimity, sometimes supposed to be an invention of a later generation.

The heat of Ardelia’s poetic flame was fitful rather than constant, and she is seen at her best in fortunate couplets rather than in passages and poems. Many of her best couplets are marked by that crisp, adversative turn so essentially an English gift, as in the lines to Sleep, —

Sometimes, again, she shows traces of the high, Pythagorean reverie to which the more generous spirits, even of that age of prose, were addicted. When she tells us that the Soul may

we seem to be listening to the persistent voice of that gentle idealist John Norris, who, in tiiose very years at Bemerton, was composing his amiable, ample, and curiously popular works in verse and prose.

In short, Ardelia was neither the solitary survivor of the old order of poetry nor the lonely herald of the new. She was a charming and clever woman with a flexible, sympathetic, chameleon-like mind. She read poetry and wrote it for her own and her friends’ pleasure, yet by the very sensitiveness of her nature she contrived to produce many vague adumbrations of moods and thoughts that were already, always indeed, alive in men’s minds, but which were repressed by an artificial and accidental convention in literature, and were not to appear conspicuously therein for another fifty years.

F. G.