As a satirist in rhyme Marvell has shared the usual and not undeserved fate of almost all satirists of their age and fellow-men.  The authors of lines written in heat to give expression to the anger of the hour may well be content if their effusions give the pain or teach the lesson they were intended to give or teach.  If you lash the age, you do so presumably for the benefit of the age.  It is very hard to transmit even a fierce and genuine indignation from one age to another.  Marvell’s satires were too hastily composed, too roughly constructed, too redolent of the occasion, to enter into the kingdom of poetry.  To the careful and character-loving reader of history, particularly if he chance to have a feeling for the House of Commons, not merely as an institution, but as a place of resort, Marvell’s satirical poems must always be intensely interesting.  They strike me as honest in their main intention, and never very wide of the mark.  Hallam says, in his lofty way, “We read with nothing but disgust the satirical poetry of Cleveland, Butler, Oldham, Marvell,” and he adds, “Marvell’s satires are gross and stupid."[231:1] Gross they certainly occasionally are, but stupid they never are.  Marvell was far too well-informed a politician and too shrewd a man ever to be stupid.

As a satirist Marvell had, if he wanted them, many models of style, but he really needed none, for he just wrote down in rough-and-ready rhyme whatever his head or his spleen suggested to his fancy.  Every now and again there is a noble outburst of feeling, and a couplet of great felicity.  I confess to taking great pleasure in Marvell’s satires.

As a prose writer Marvell has many merits and one great fault.  He has fire and fancy and was the owner and master of a precise vocabulary well fitted to clothe and set forth a well-reasoned and lofty argument.  He knew how to be both terse and diffuse, and can compress himself into a line or expand over a paragraph.  He has touches of a grave irony as well as of a boisterous humour.  He can tell an anecdote and elaborate a parable.  Swift, we know, had not only Butler’s Hudibras by heart, but was also (we may be sure) a close student of Marvell’s prose.  His great fault is a very common one.  He is too long.  He forgets how quickly a reader grows tired.  He is so interested in the evolutions of his own mind that he forgets his audience.  His interest at times seems as if it were going to prove endless.  It is the first business of an author to arrest and then to retain the attention of the reader.  To do this requires great artifice.

Among the masters of English prose it would be rash to rank Marvell, who was neither a Hooker nor a Taylor.  None the less he was the owner of a prose style which some people think the best prose style of all—­that of honest men who have something to say.

FOOTNOTES: 

[229:1] “Indecently” is the doctor’s own expression.