Critic: Elinor M. Buckingham

Source: Sewanee Review 10 (1902): 269-84.

[(essay date 1902) In the following essay, Buckingham relates the significance of Philips's contributions to English poetry.]

Every age has its little lights that burn for a time with more or less brilliancy and then go out. Possibly a memory of them lingers on into the next age or to succeeding generations; but for the most part the memory is dwindled to a mere name, and few stop to inquire what gave the name its meaning. Among the names that have come down to us from the time of Charles II. is that of "The Matchless Orinda," so called, a lady who passed for a great poetess in her day, and who attracted to her side some of the best and most distinguished men of the Restoration period; whose poetry was read and admired well on into the eighteenth century, but who is remembered now chiefly because Dryden mentioned her in his ode on Mrs. Anne Killigrew, or because Keats praised her in a letter to his friend Reynolds. Yet she was a woman of strong individuality and sprightly wit, the first English woman to make a name for herself in poetry. Her letters and her poems give abundant evidence of the charm which made her so honored in her own day, and well repay a little study in the present time.

Katherine Fowler was born in London January 1, 1631, the daughter of a prosperous merchant. Her mother was Katherine Oxenbridge, daughter of a president of the Plysicians' College, and Aubrey says that her grandmother, a friend of Francis Quarles, was in her day given to poetry. Her family was Presbyterian, evidently of the well-to-do middle class.

She must have been considered especially gifted by her family; for a cousin, who had charge of her until she was eight years old, tells how she had "read the Bible through before she was full four years old." In those days a boy's training was first the Psalter, then reading the Bible, then his accidence--that is, the Latin grammar--and it was thought worthy of note that Alexander Broome was in his accidence at four years old and a quarter; while Anthony Wood, the antiquarian and scholar, born in 1632, was not put to school even to learn the Psalter till 1637, and only when he was seven years old was he ready to go into his accidence.

Little Miss Fowler had also a remarkable memory. She could repeat whole passages from Scripture, and "enjoyed hearing sermons which she could bring away verbatim, when she was ten years old." Evidently she was somewhat vain of her precocity. Being brought up in the Presbyterian faith, "she was much against the bishops, and used to pray to God to take them to himself." She was accustomed to pray aloud by the hour together, "as the hypocritical fashion in those days was," apparently in the hope of being overheard. Tradition says she wrote verses early, but there is no certain record.

At the age of eight years, she was sent to Hackney, to a fashionable Presbyterian school, kept by a Mrs. Salmon, where presumably she learned dancing, painting, and music, as well as French, in which she became really proficient.

As she grew up, the civil war came on, and as soon as she began to think for herself, which must have been before she was seventeen years old, she adopted the tenets of the Church of England, and became an ardent adherent of the royal family. At seventeen she married, as a second wife, James Philips, Esq., of the Priory, Cardigan, her mother having previously married the father of James Philips.

Whether religious differences made any separation between her and her family, as some writers suppose, is doubtful. She never mentions them in the letters that are preserved, nor in her poems, and none of them apparently belonged to the circle of friends she gathered about her. There is record of a debt contracted by Mr. Philips in 1653, for which her uncle, J. Oxenbridge, was bound, and for which the uncle was thrown into Fleet Prison twenty-eight years later; so that there must have been pretty close friendship with some members of her family.

From the time of her marriage, when she became mistress of a household, it is evident that she began to manage her husband and her acquaintance not domineeringly but capably.

The portrait prefixed to her poems shows a rather pretty, exceedingly intelligent face, with a good deal of mild but persistent will force, eminently practical and sensible. Mr. Gosse calls her "a bustling little Welsh lady." Aubrey says she was "very good-natured, not at all high-minded; pretty fat; not tall, reddish-faced." If she was like the women of to-day who resemble her portrait, she was probably the most efficient member of the household, with an ability for conducting clubs, reading circles, and evening card parties, an aptitude for drawing about her the best and most aristocratic society of the neighborhood, and for making herself beloved as well as quietly humored in her fads.

One of her fads was Friendship, of the conscious and demonstrative sort. As early as 1651 she had gathered about her a circle of friends, both men and women, who took fanciful names, Calanthe, Lucasia, Regina, etc., by which they were always known among themselves. One imagines her husband, a man older than herself and, if accounts do not misrepresent, a trifle sluggish of temperament, as good-naturedly allowing himself to be dubbed Antenor; but there were other men, men of note, who did not belong to her immediate neighborhood, who also joined the mystic circle. Jeremy Taylor, who was living in Wales, when she went there, became the noble Palamon; Sir Charles Cotterel was the most generous Poliarchus, and so on. She herself became Orinda the Matchless.

Whether the other members thought so highly as she of this bond of friendship is a question. One after another the ladies married and moved away; but it is quite plain that a large part of her thoughts were devoted to Friendship, friendship in the abstract made concrete in the persons of her neighbors. She was troubled by the sentiment some one expressed that women are incapable of true friendship, and asked the opinion of her friend Palamon on that and three other points concerning friendship: How far is a dear and perfect friendship authorized by Christianity? How far may it extend? and, How are friendships to be conducted? To which he replied with a most satisfactory and complimentary "Discourse on Friendship," concluding with the assurance that, though a woman may not assist a friend in just the same way as a man, yet her friendship is as real and comforting.

All these magnanimous and magniloquent sentiments were intended for her private delectation, unless she thought fit that they should pass further than her eye and closet, in which case she was entreated to consign them to Dr. Wedderburne, to whose guidance Dr. Taylor committed himself. This called out an effusion from Mrs. Philips, "To the most noble Palamon, on his incomparable Discourse on Friendship:"

We had been still undone, wrapt in disguise;
Secure, not happy; cunning, and not wise;
War had been our design, int'rest our trade;
We had not dwelt in safety, but in shade,
Hadst thou not hung out light, more welcome far
Than wand'ring seamen think the northern star.

Apart from these interests she had plenty to occupy her mind in her husband's affairs. As Aubrey says in his succinct note-taking fashion, "He had a good estate, but bought crown lands; he mortgaged," etc., with all that etc. implies. "His brother Hector took off the mortgages and has the lands." Mrs. Philips set herself resolutely to disencumbering his estate, and the few letters of hers that are preserved are taken up alternately with poetry, her friends, and the account of how the business prospers. In 1662 she crossed the channel to Ireland, partly to accompany her dear friend, Lucasia, who had just committed the much-to-be-lamented act of marrying. Orinda was sure she would be eternally unhappy. She wrote to Poliarchus: "When I have tarried here awhile, I shall return home with a heavy heart, but with the satisfaction, nevertheless, that I have discharged my duty to my friend, whose loss I shall eternally regret. She tells all of us she is extremely happy, and that all that love her ought to take part in her happiness. If you have written anything to me to Cardigan relating to this affair, pray write again to me to Dublin in Italian, for I know not when I shall receive the letters that will come to Cardigan the latter end of this week, and I am very desirous to know your thoughts on this matter, that, since I cannot bring relief to your sorrows, I may at least share them with you."

Poliarchus himself had aspired to the hand of the fair Lucasia, who goes by the name of Calanthe in this part of the correspondence; and the good Orinda must have enjoyed to the uttermost her own perspicacity in divining the future wretchedness of Calanthe and the value of her own friendship for Sir Charles in condoling with him, and, if need be, receiving his sighs in Italian, safe from the prying curiosity of others. Bustling, as Gosse imagines her, I do not think she should be called, but active-minded and eager to exert her abilities in all directions she certainly was.

All this time she was taking an interest in the affairs of the world, writing verses on "His Majesty at His Passage into England," "On the Fair Weather Just at the Coronation," "To Her Royal Highness, the Duchess of York, on Her Commanding Me to Send Her Some Things I Had Written," "To Mr. Henry Lawes," besides many poems to her personal friends in varied meters. At the same time she was learning Italian, and in the course of a few months fitting herself not only to understand the Italian postscripts of Poliarchus, but to insert bits of information in that language in her own letters.

Once in Ireland and with Lucasia determined to be happy, she was turning to her husband's affairs, when she was distracted by a new interest. She had already translated a scene from Corneille's "Pompée," and, "by some accident or other," this scene having fallen into the hands of the Earl of Orrery, "he was pleased to like it so well," she writes, "that he sent me the French original, and the next time I saw him so earnestly importuned me to pursue that translation that, to avoid the shame of seeing him, who had so lately commanded a kingdom, become petitioner to me for such a trifle, I obliged him so far as to finish the act in which that scene is."

From this auspicious beginning she went on to what was probably the most exciting and happiest year of her life. She was introduced by the Earl of Orrery to the various members of his family in Dublin--the Duke and Duchess of Ormond, the Countess of Cork, and to the Earl of Roscommon, and others. Apparently she stayed with the Countess of Cork. It is the period of her life which we know best, because it was now that she was constantly writing to Sir Charles Cotterel for advice and criticism of her Pompey, which she undertook to translate entire. Not only so, but when it was finished the Earl of Orrery insisted upon having it acted, and "advanced one hundred pounds toward buying Egyptian and Roman habits." To increase the length of the performance, and add to the brilliancy of the occasion, she wrote five songs to be sung in the intervals of the acts, and was "promised that they should be set by the greatest masters in England."

One would think that she would have little time for anything else. No sooner was the play acted than it was necessary to publish an edition in Dublin. Then Sir Charles must be commissioned to present a copy to the Duchess of York, but His Majesty having asked for it, the original copy was given to him. Then a dedication to the Countess of Cork must be written. Meanwhile it was publishing in London, under the supervision of Sir Charles, and the poor lady was distracted between the fear that she should not preserve a proper decorum and that something should go astray or amiss.

But at last she had leisure to write about her husband's affairs, and we must suppose that she had not forgotten them all this time. Two or three trials for the possession of lands were coming off, and she was in a great state of mind because her witnesses were not forthcoming and she lost one suit.

In the end, and it was at the end of a full year, she departed from Ireland, having succeeded better than she might have hoped in Antenor's business. One wonders a trifle what he was doing all this while, though we do hear of his carrying Cardigan for Sir Charles in the parliamentary elections. And we wonder still more what was become of the little daughter five years old, whom Mrs. Philips never intrudes upon Poliarchus in her brilliant correspondence. Doubtless she engineered from a distance both the elections and the little girl's education.

No wonder that when she was finally at home in Wales she longed for a more active existence. She apologizes thus for a set of verses sent to Poliarchus: "All I desire is that when you read this poem you will not condemn me for a dullness that you will find growing upon me; but consider that my absence from all the conversation that can refine my wit, the employments of a country life, and the uneasiness of my fortune, are able to blunt a much finer pen than ever I was mistress of. And indeed I find the weight of my misfortunes sink me down so low, that unless I am quickly restored to the refreshing charms of your company, I shall be past recovery and incapable of enjoying it."

Even here, however, she found opportunities to distract her mind into some degree of activity. To her deep dismay, she had found after translating Pompey, that Waller had set his heart on doing the same thing, and that he and Sir Charles Sedley and their friends had been translating an act apiece, while her version was acting on the boards in Dublin, and the world was crying for an edition. This was sufficiently alarming to the lady, who was thus set up without intention as the rival of the most correct and most venerable poet of the day; but again in England, in this copy of verses which she sent to Poliarchus, and which he presented to the King and Queen, she found that a second time she had chosen a subject which Waller was treating. She was in great agitation. Not so much, however, as to lose command of her pen to turn pretty phrases. She wrote: "And indeed Mr. Waller has, it may be, contributed not a little to encourage me in this vanity, by writing on the same subject the worst verse that ever fell from his pen. But sure he, who is so civil to ladies, had heard that I designed such an address, and, contenting himself with having got so much the advantage of me in Pompey, was willing to yield me this mate in chess, and to write ill on purpose to keep me in countenance."

But a more serious disturbance was the surreptitious publication under her own name of her occasional poems, which by this time were numerous, and being passed from hand to hand, inquired for at court, the product, moreover, of a woman who had just achieved so great success in Dublin, had become well known and were worth publishing. This was a terrible blow to her. Naturally the book might have many errors in it, and various disasters rose in her mind. The mishap threw her into an illness from which she was slow to recover.

The accident brings out a juster view of her character and of the times than we should otherwise have had. While she was in Ireland evidently her head was a little turned; but when she understood what her success meant, and how prominent she had become, that she was entering in public upon a career hitherto sacred to men, she probably was genuinely scared. She was the first and almost the only woman who dared to write poetry. Lady Newcastle might compose poetry and essays, but Lady Newcastle was a woman of rank and could afford to be eccentric. Aphra Behn had not begun to write, and would not have been recognized by Mrs. Philips in any case. Poor Orinda was a respectable middle-class female with a turn for scribbling and a penchant for royalty and aristocracy. Moreover she had sense and ability, but to be dragged before a public whom she did not know was too much for her conservative modesty. Only after Poliarchus had offered to see a new edition through the press, and revise it if need be with his own pen, did she recover her peace of mind.

She had tasted the sweets of popularity, however, as well as the bitter, and she could not resign herself to her quiet country life. At last all things were in train for her start for the city, and her last letter but one is full of the expected journey. In May, 1664, she was in London, where she must have been some six or eight weeks, and we are sure from her friends, her favor at court, and her own sprightliness and wit, that they must have been happy.

Smallpox was rife nearly all the time in those days, however. The highest as well as the lowest succumbed to it. She was seized when her life seemed only half run, and on July 22, 1664, when she was little more than thirty-three years old, she was in her grave.

Had she lived, her poems might have appeared very soon; as it was, the plague; the fire, and the war with the Dutch delayed this monument to her fame, which was not licensed till 1667, and apparently waited for printing till 1678. The poems made a goodly quarto, prefaced by laudatory effusions by the Earls of Orrery and Roscommon, Abraham Cowley, James Tyrrell, and others.

That she was held in high esteem by these persons is clear, though it is hard to believe that Lord Roscommon was quite in earnest when he borrowed Horace's lions in the desert, and wrote:

The magic of Orinda's name
Not only can their fierceness tame;
But if that mighty name I once rehearse,
They seem submissively to roar in verse.

The most remarkable tribute of all is contained in the preface, which we may suppose was written by Poliarchus himself: "As for her virtues, they as much surpassed those of Sappho as the theological do the moral."

In the midst of all this extravagance, however, it is evident that the men were trying to say something that they really felt. Even in the next century the Duke of Wharton wrote, without any motive for flattery: "And 'tis not the first time I have been wonderfully pleased with her solid masculine thoughts, in no feminine expression. Her refined and rational thoughts of friendship, which is a subject she very much delights in, show a soul much above the common level of mankind, and mightily raise my desire of practicing what she so nobly describes." And in the early part of the nineteenth century her poems were picked up in a second-hand bookstall, inscribed with verses of praise and love, written and signed by successive members of a family named Bonner, showing that she came home to the hearts of readers of the eighteenth century.

Probably most of this intimate love was due to her many poems on friendship, most of which are in one way or another devoted to her dearest Lucasia. They began as early as December 28, 1651, when the excellent Mrs. Anne Owen was adopted into the society and received the name of Lucasia; and they continue to the end. Then there are poems on the marriage and death of friends, a poem on "Country Life," one on "Retirement," and so on, nearly all of them coming home in subject, if not always in treatment, to the most intimate relations of our lives.

This personal note is especially prominent in Mrs. Philips's poetry, when we compare it with the poems of other writers of the period, and on the whole it seems that she was best in this vein, which flowed spontaneously. Here is a specimen taken almost at haphazard:

Come, my Lucasia, since we see
That miracles men's faith do move,
By wonder and by prodigy,
To the dull angry world let's prove
There's a religion in our love.
For though we were designed t' agree
That fate no liberty destroys,
But our election is as free
As angels, who with greedy choice
Are yet determined to their joys--
We court our own captivity,
Than thrones more great and innocent.
'Twere banishment to be set free
Since we wear fetters whose intent
Not bondage is but ornament.

Many of these poems are songs, and some were set to music. Almost all of this class are in stanza form, and in these the movement is pretty and the thought more succinctly expressed than in the more ambitious poems, which were written in heroic couplets. They show a surprising variety of cadence and of rhythm, too. There was still something of the Elizabethan lyric power in Mrs. Philips, which did not leave her entirely even after she had long practiced the rhymed pentameter; and for the ideas, it seems that the quatrain or any set stanza forced her to express more definite thought in given space than the couplet, which could be multiplied indefinitely.

Here are a few specimens of the variety of her stanzas:

'Tis true, our life is but a long disease
Made up of real pain and seeming ease;
Yon stars, who these entangled fortunes give,
O tell me why
It is so hard to die,
Yet such a task to live.

Content, the false world's best disguise,
The search and faction of the wise
Is so abstruse and hid in night
That, like that fairy red-cross knight,
Who treacherous falsehood for clear truth had got,
Men think they have it when they have it not.

I did not live until this time
Crowned my felicity,
When I could say without a crime:
I am not thine, but thee.

One thing is noticeable: she refrains almost altogether from the Pindaric ode. In one poem, "Upon Mr. Abraham Cowley's Retirement," she is in duty bound to write something that looks irregular like Cowley's masterpieces, but it sounds more like Wordsworth than like Cowley. The Elizabethan cadences were too strong on her ear to allow of any monstrous irregularity. Then, too, it seems that a woman's love of orderliness and neatness and a woman's care for details entered into all her poetry. Moreover from the first she had been conscious of the roughness into which English poetry had fallen. Her earliest printed poem, which heads the list of fifty-three complimentary pieces, prefixed to the 1651 edition of Cartwright's "Comedies, Tragi-Comedies, and Other Poems," indicates her attitude toward poetry in general:

Stay, prince of phansie, stay, we are not fit
To welcome or admire thy raptures yet.
Unsequester our phansies and create
A worth that may upon thy glories walt;
Then we shall understand thee and descry
The splendor of restored poetry.

Her ear did not tolerate certain liberties which her reason did not approve, as it was also quite incapable of insisting upon the more subtle cadences and harmonies which neither she nor her age had studied. Mrs. Philips had a knack at rhyming rather than any real poetic gift; and so, though her taste forbade harsh sounds, it is not infrequently the case that both sense and true harmony suffer. Clearly, however, she went at her art with conscientiousness as well as love. By the time she came to the translation of Pompey if not earlier, she was a student of versification as well as of translation, and probably her attitude is a fair specimen of the temper of the times.

In a letter to Poliarchus, December 11, 1662, she wrote: "I had it once in my mind to tell you that I was loath to use the word effort, but not having language enough to find any other rhyme without losing all the spirit and force of the next line, and knowing that it has been naturalized at least these twelve years, besides that it was not used in that place in the French, I ventured to let it pass." And in criticism of the lines in Act V., Scene 2,

If Heaven, which does persecute me still,
Had made my power equal to my will,

she said, "My objection to them is, that the words heaven and power are used as two syllables each." Elsewhere she had already written, "As for the words heaven and power, I am of your opinion, too, especially as to the latter; for the other may, I think, be sometimes so placed as not to offend the ear when it is used in two syllables."

In another letter criticising the translation of Pompey by Waller, Sedley, Lord Buckhurst, and Filmore, she discants on the liberties the translators have taken with their original, and goes on: "But what chiefly disgusts me is that the sense most commonly languishes through three or four lines, and then ends in the middle of the fifth, for I am of opinion that the sense ought always to be confined to the couplet; otherwise the lines must needs be spiritless and dull." This concerning the correct Waller!

It is certain that her own poetry grew smoother and more regular during the fifteen years or more that she was writing, and that she cultivated the heroic couplet. All her ambitious poems are in that meter, from the "Lines to Mr. Henry Vaughan, Silurist, on His Poems," which, though not printed till 1678, deal with the subject of his first volume published in 1646, and are probably her earliest known verses, down to the address "To His Grace, Gilbert, Lord Archbishop of Canterbury, July 10, 1664," only twelve days before her burial. She succeeded in polishing her couplet much more carefully as she went on, and followed her rule for stopping the sense with the couplet more closely in Pompey than in most of her earlier works. She studied her art to some purpose, also, for the whole structure of the sentence and of the couplet is more dignified and closer knit than at first.

It must be remembered that she was really a pioneer in the new school, for men as well as women. She died at the age of thirty-three, in 1664, before Dryden, who was only eight months her junior, had accomplished anything even as good as her poetry. From 1643, the royalist poets, Davenant, Cowley, Shirley, and the Duke of Newcastle, Lady Margaret Lucas (afterwards Duchess of Newcastle), Hobbes, Killigrew, and others gathered about Henrietta Maria in France, and could learn whatever French literature and literary men had to teach them at first hand. By that time the Hotel Rambouillet had done its work, and the time of the Precieuses Ridicules had not yet come. The society of the Hotel had purified and dignified conversation and cultivated correct diction in writing, and men on the spot must gain something from the atmosphere to the benefit of their language. But the classic influence had not yet begun; nor had Mme. de la Fayette yet declared that a sentence struck out of a book was worth a louis d'or, and a word worth twenty francs. Mlle. de Scudéry, in the height of her popularity, was writing her interminable romances, built somewhat on "The Arabian Nights" pattern, which supplied Dryden with material for his dramas a generation later.

Katherine Philips did not have the advantage of even this French influence at first hand. Born in London, a girl of the middle class, going only to a fashionable school in the suburbs, growing up amid the tumult of the civil war, a Presbyterian in Puritan England, she showed considerable vigor of mind when, at seventeen years, she had thrown off the Presbyterian faith, was an ardent advocate of King Charles and his religion, and had married a gentleman a good many years her senior. Whatever French ideas she received she adapted rather than adopted. She must have been familiar with the ways of the Precieux, for she chose fanciful names for the members of her society, but so did nearly every one else. Undoubtedly she knew Mlle. de Scudéry by heart, probably in French. But once married and settled in Wales, she could not mingle much in the polite society of literature. Henry Vaughan was one of her dearest friends and admirers, but he did not belong to the new French school. Jeremy Taylor was another friend, but he was not a "new" poet. Sir Henry Deering and Mr. Henry Lawes she knew; at one time she visited Cowley; in 1661 she was in full possession of the friendship and esteem of Sir Charles Cotterel, who lent her French books and taught her Italian; but most of her work must have been done for herself, and her theories must have been the result of her own studies and meditation, with an occasional impetus from outside.

As was usually the case in that age, her improvement came rather in style than in matter. Indeed, one of her earliest poems, the first in the volume, has as much vigor as any. It is "Upon the Double Murther of King Charles I. in Answer to a Libellous Copy of Rhimes by Vavasor Powell:"

I think not on the state nor am concerned
Which way soever the great helm is turned,
But as that son, whose father's danger nigh
Did force his native dumbness, and untie
The fettered organs; so this is a cause
That will excuse the breach of nature's laws,
Has Charles so broke God's laws he must not have
A quiet crown, nor yet a quiet grave?
Tombs have been sanctuaries; thieves lie there
Secure from all their penalty and fear.

For the next ten years she was sequestered in the country; her circle of friends was mostly women, who served as objects for her anxiety, her eager friendship, her lavish praise, and as subjects of numerous lyrics and occasional pieces, but not otherwise as incentives to the cultivation of the poetic art. The pentameters of this period are comparatively infrequent, though the form persists, especially for such subjects as "Happiness," "A Revery," "Submission," etc.

Suddenly, in 1660, she had opportunity to chant a welcome "To His Majesty at His Passage into England," "On the Fair Weather Just at the Coronation," and other addresses, which brought her into court notice. She went to Ireland, where she met Lord Orrery, Lord Roscommon, and the ladies of their families, and between flattery and real inspiration translated Corneille's "Pompée," and wrote a few dedications and songs. Then straightway, after a few months of bustle and importance and the pleasures of society in London, she was snuffed out like a candle.

In 1664 the Restoration period of verse-making was still in its infancy. The old poetry was hopelessly dead, and the new was still to grow. In Mrs. Philips's poems there is scarcely anything so crude or so definitely bad as most of the complimentary verses prefixed to them, though Cowley and Roscommon and Tyrrell were among the men who contributed these poems. If Dryden did not learn directly from her, as he says he did, at least she must have had an indirect influence in helping him to understand the smoothness and the dangers of the couplet. We may not say, as one critic says, that "as our first poetess she at any rate should obtain rank relatively as high as that which we accord to Cadmon, our first poet;" but if Cowley and Sir John Denham and Dryden felt that to know her was a liberal education, she certainly must have given inspiration to the contemporary world.

The fact that French models were more and more studied, and that she threw all the weight of her influence into the same scale, does not detract from her claim to leadership. She was a thorough master of French, but she had devoted herself to pruning English verse according to new models before ever the court removed from Flanders or English poets came back to England. The reaction which was taking place in English poetry had many feminine traits when contrasted with the masculine vigor of the Elizabethans, and a woman of strong intellect and character was just the person to help along the movement toward polish and propriety of diction, which in France itself owed so much to Mme. Rambouillet and her associates.

Source: Elinor M. Buckingham, "The Matchless Orinda." Sewanee Review 10 (1902): 269-84.