But Cleveland never failed in it: and unfortunately it wants a failure or two at least of this kind to make a poet. To illustrate what I mean, let me refer readers to Benlowes--comparison of Cleveland with whom would not long ago have been impossible except in a large library. Benlowes is as extravagant as Cleveland, whom (I rather think) he sometimes copied.[5] But he cannot help this kind of poetic 'failure' from breaking in. Cleveland can, or rather I should say that he does not try--or has no need to try--to keep it out. In 'Fuscara', eminently; in 'To the State of Love', perhaps most prettily; in the 'Antiplatonic', most vigorously--in all his poems more or less, he sets himself to work to accumulate and elaborate conceits for their own sake. They are not directly suggested by the subject and still less by each other; they are no spray or froth of passion; they never suggest (as all the best examples and many not so good in others do) that indomitable reaching after the infinite which results at least in an infinite unexpectedness. They are merely card-castles of 'wit' in its worst sense; mechanical games of extravagant idea-twisting which simply aim at 'making records'. It is true that people admired them for being this. It is still truer that similar literary exercises may be found, and found popular, at the present day. It is even true, as will be shown later, that it is possible positively to enjoy them still. But these are different questions.
If Cleveland had little or nothing of the poetry of enthusiastic thought and feeling, he had not much more of the poetry of accomplished form, though here also he is exceptionally interesting. His 'Mark Antony'[6] has been indicated as an early example of 'dactylic' metre. It certainly connects interestingly with some songs of Dryden's, and has an historical position of its own, but I am by no means sure (_v. inf._) that it was meant to be dactylic or even anapaestic.
Cleveland, therefore, was not a great poet, nor even a failure of one: but he was but just a failure of a very great satirist. Even here, of course, the Devil's Advocate will find only too much to say against him. Every one of the pieces requires the editing, polishing, and criticizing which (we know pretty well) the author never gave to anything of his. Every one suffers from Cleveland's adoption of the same method which he used in his purely metaphysical poems, that of stringing together and heaping up images and observations, instead of organizing and incorporating them. Every one is a tangled tissue of temporary allusion, needing endless scholiastry to unravel and elucidate it. It has been said, and it is true, that we find not a few reminiscences of Cleveland in Dryden. There is even in the couplet of the older and smaller poet something of the weight, the impetus, the _animosity_ of that of the younger and greater. But of Dryden's _ordonnance_, his generalship, his power of coupling up his couplets into irresistible column, Cleveland has practically nothing. He has something of his own 'Rupertismus': but nothing more.