Matthew Green

Matthew Green (1696-1737), The Spleen, and other poems (1796). Forgotten Books, 2018. Courtesy Amazon.com.

Matthew Green (1696-1737) was an English poet.

Life

Overview

Green is known as the author of The Spleen, a lively and original poem in octosyllabic verse on the subject of low spirits and the best means of prevention and cure. It has life-like descriptions, sprightliness, and lightness of touch, and was admired by Pope and Gray. The poem owes its name to the use of the term in the author's day to denote depression. Green, who held an appointment in the Customs, appears to have been a quiet, inoffensive person, an entertaining companion, and a Quaker.

Youth

Green is said to have belonged to a dissenting family, whose puritanical strictness disgusted him, so that he took up "some free notions on religious subjects."

Career

He held a place in the custom-house, where he discharged his duty very well.

Green had an original turn of mind. His idiosyncratic conversation "occasioned one of the commissioners of the Customs, a very dull man, to observe that he did not know how it was, but Green always expressed himself in a different manner from other people".

A few anecdotes are recorded to show that he was a witty and pleasant companion. When an allowance for supplying the custom-house cats with milk was threatened by the authorities, he wrote a successful petition in their name.

When a waterman insulted him as he was bathing by calling out "Quaker," and a friend asked how his sect could be detected when he had no clothes, he immediately replied, "By my swimming against the stream.' His poem on 'Barclay's Apology' implies that he admired the Quakers, though without belonging to them.

His wit is shown more decisively by the Spleen. The poem appeared posthumously in 1737, with a preface by his friend, Richard Glover. Pope praised its originality, and Gray expressed a warm admiration for it.

He died, aged 41, in 1737, at his lodging in Nag's Head Court, Gracechurch Street.

Writing

The Spleen, written in Swift's favorite octosyllabic meter, is one of the best poems of its class. The Spleen, which was not originally intended for publication, is an epistle to Cuthbert Jackson, advocating cheerfulness, exercise and a quiet content as remedies. It is full of witty sayings. The line "Throw but a stone, the giant dies," is one of the stock quotations. The poem was a favorite with Gray and many good judges.

A poem called The Grotto (on Queen Caroline's grotto at Richmond) was privately printed in 1732. These and 3 or 4 previously unpublished trifles were published in the 1st volume of Dodsley's collection (1748). They were afterwards in Johnson's poems and have since appeared in Chalmers's and other collections. An edition by Aikin in 1796 has a preface of twaddle without facts.

Critical introduction

by Henry Austin Dobson

To most people the name of Matthew Green, if it suggests anything, suggests a line in his longest poem,— the familiar

‘Fling but a stone, the giant dies,’

which occurs in his general plea for physical exercise. It would almost appear as if the 1st discoverer of this happily concise precept, exhausted by the effort, had rested from further enquiry, for it is not often that one hears reference made to any other part of the poem. And yet The Spleen is full of things almost if not quite as good, and marked in all cases by distinct originality and a fresh and unfettered mode of utterance. Now it is a clever simile, as when poetasters are spoken of as those who

buzz in rhyme, and, like blind flies,

Err with their wings for want of eyes’;

now a picture-couplet, such as this of the divine

‘in whose gay red-lettered face,

We read good living more than grace’;

now a perfectly poetic line like

‘Brown fields their fallow sabbaths keep’;

or lastly such a pleasantly ingenious passage as that in which the effect of blue eyes on the old is compared to the miracle of St. Januarius:—

‘Shine but on age, you melt its snow;
Again fires long-extinguished glow,
And, charmed by witchery of eyes,
Blood long congealèd liquefies!
True miracle, and fairly done
By heads which are adored while on.’

But to multiply quotations would be practically to reproduce the entire poem, which is not long.

Green suffered really or poetically from the fashionable 18th-century disorder which Pope has so well described in The Rape of the Lock, and in this ‘motley piece,’ as he calls it, he sets forth the various expedients which he employed to evade his enemy. Taken altogether, his precepts constitute a code of philosophy not unlike that advocated in more than one of the Odes of Horace. To observe the religion of the body; to cultivate cheerfulness and calm; to keep a middle course, and possess his soul in quiet; content, as regards the future, to ignore what Heaven withholds,— such are the chief features of his plan. But, in developing his principles he takes occasion to deal many a side-long stroke at imperfect humanity, and not always at those things only which are opposed to his theory of conduct. Female education, faction, law, religious sects, reform, speculation, place-hunting, poetry, ambition,— all these are briefly touched, and seldom left unmarked by some quivering shaft of ridicule. Towards the end of the poem comes an ideal picture of rural retirement, which may be compared with the joint version by Pope and Swift of Horace’s 6th satire in the 2nd book; and the whole closes with the writer’s views upon immortality and a summary of his practice. Regarded as a whole, we can recall few discursive poems which contain so much compact expression and witty illustration.

The author was evidently shrewd and observant, and unusually gifted in the detection of grotesque aspects and remote affinities. He must have been more than fairly read, and although at the outset of his task he appears to disclaim scholarship, 1 he must have been familiar with classical commonplaces—witness, for instance, the line ‘See better things and do the worst’; although for this and other examples he may have gone no farther than that eighteenth-century repertory of ready-made learning, the mottoes of the Spectator. In his verse, notwithstanding that he occasionally makes use of such hideous Latinisms as ‘nefandous’ and ‘fecundous,’ his vocabulary is fresh and exact, and remarkably free from the conventionalism of contemporary poetic diction. Of Green’s remaining pieces, The Grotto, and the lines "On Barclay’s Apology for the Quakers" are the most noteworthy. Both of these are characterised by the same qualities which are exhibited in The Spleen. The Seeker is a humorous little picture of the different professors of religion.

Quotations

Green is perhaps best remembered (if at all) for witty aphorisms, such as:

• "By happy alchemy of mind / They turn to pleasure all they find."
• "Laugh and be well."
• "Fling but a stone, the giant dies." (The Spleen)
• "Though pleased to see the dolphins play / I mind my compass and my way." (The Spleen)

Critical reputation

Thomas Gray said of Green's poetry: "There is a profusion of wit everywhere; reading would have formed his judgment, and harmonized his verse, for even his wood-notes often break out into strains of real poetry and music". Despite this praise, Green is thought of as a "1-poem" poet, to the point that he became known as "Spleen-Green."

Recognition

7 of Green's poems were included in Robert Dodsley's Collection of Poems by Several Hands.

Publications

• The Grotto: A poem (as "Peter Drake"). London: 1733.
• A Copy of Verses Wrote by a Gentleman Lately Deceased: Occasion'd by his reading Robert Barclay's Apology. London: 1735; Philadelphia: Benjamin Franklin, 1747.
• The Spleen: An epistle inscribed to his particular friend Mr. C.J. London: A. Dodd, 1737.
• The Spleen, and other poems. London: T. Cadell & W. Davies, 1796.
• Poems. Boston: Hosea Sprague, 1804.
• Poetical Works (edited by Thomas Park). London: J. Sharp, 1808.
• The Poetical Works of Thomas Gray, Thomas Parnell, William Collins, Matthew Green, and Thomas Warton (edited by Robert Aris Willmott). London: Routledge, 1853.
• Poetical Works of Armstrong, Dyer, and Green (with John Armstrong & John Dyer); edited by George Gilfillan). Edinburgh: James Nichol, 1858.

Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy WorldCat.

See also

• List of British poets
• Timeline of British poetry

References

•  Stephen, Leslie (1890) "Green, Matthew" in Stephen, Leslie; Lee, Sidney Dictionary of National Biography 23 London: Smith, Elder, p. 51 . Wikisource, Web, Jan. 20, 2018.

External links

Poems

• Matthew Green at PoemHunter ("Arbasto's Song")
• Matthew Green 1696-1737 at the Poetry Foundation
• Green in The English Poets: An anthology: Extracts from The Spleen, "On Barclay's Apology for the Quakers"
• Matthew Green at the Eighteenth-Century Poetry Archive (7 poems)

Books

• Matthew Green at Amazon.com
• Matthew Green at Poetry Nook (11 poems)

About

• Matthew Green in the Cambridge History of English and American Literature

This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain, the Dictionary of National Biography (edited by Leslie Stephen). London: Smith, Elder, 1885-1900. Original article is at: Green, Matthew