Those who most admire the Poet from whose many pieces a selection only
is here offered, will, it is probable, feel most strongly (with
the Editor) that excuse is needed for an attempt of an obviously
presumptuous nature. The choice made by any selector invites challenge:
the admission, perhaps, of some poems, the absence of more, will be
censured:--Whilst others may wholly condemn the process, in virtue of an
argument not unfrequently advanced of late, that a writer's judgment on
his own work is to be considered final. And his book to be taken as he
left it, or left altogether; a literal reproduction of the original text
being occasionally included in this requirement.
If poetry were composed solely for her faithful band of true lovers and
true students, such a facsimile as that last indicated would have claims
irresistible; but if the first and last object of this, as of the other
Fine Arts, may be defined in language borrowed from a different range
of thought, as 'the greatest pleasure of the greatest number,' it is
certain that less stringent forms of reproduction are required and
justified. The great majority of readers cannot bring either leisure or
taste, or information sufficient to take them through a large mass (at
any rate) of ancient verse, not even if it be Spenser's or Milton's.
Manners and modes of speech, again, have changed; and much that was
admissible centuries since, or at least sought admission, has now, by
a law against which protest is idle, lapsed into the indecorous. Even
unaccustomed forms of spelling are an effort to the eye;--a kind of
friction, which diminishes the ease and enjoyment of the reader.
These hindrances and clogs, of very diverse nature, cannot be
disregarded by Poetry. In common with everything which aims at human
benefit, she must work not only for the 'faithful': she has also the
duty of 'conversion.' Like a messenger from heaven, it is hers to
inspire, to console, to elevate: to convert the world, in a word, to
herself. Every rough place that slackens her footsteps must be made
smooth; nor, in this Art, need there be fear that the way will ever
be vulgarized by too much ease, nor that she will be loved less by the
elect, for being loved more widely.
Passing from these general considerations, it is true that a selection
framed in conformity with them, especially if one of our older poets be
concerned, parts with a certain portion of the pleasure which poetry may
confer. A writer is most thoroughly to be judged by the whole of what
he printed. A selector inevitably holds too despotic a position over
his author. The frankness of speech which we have abandoned is an
interesting evidence how the tone of manners changes. The poet's own
spelling and punctuation bear, or may bear, a gleam of his personality.
But such last drops of pleasure are the reward of fully-formed taste;
and fully-formed taste cannot be reached without full knowledge.
This, we have noticed, most readers cannot bring. Hence, despite all
drawbacks, an anthology may have its place. A book which tempts many to
read a little, will guide some to that more profound and loving study of
which the result is, the full accomplishment of the poet's mission.
We have, probably, no poet to whom the reasons here advanced to justify
the invidious task of selection apply more fully and forcibly than to
Herrick. Highly as he is to be rated among our lyrists, no one who reads
through his fourteen hundred pieces can reasonably doubt that whatever
may have been the influences,--wholly unknown to us,--which determined
the contents of his volume, severe taste was not one of them. PECAT
FORTITER:--his exquisite directness and simplicity of speech repeatedly
take such form that the book cannot be offered to a very large number of
those readers who would most enjoy it. The spelling is at once arbitrary
and obsolete. Lastly, the complete reproduction of the original text,
with explanatory notes, edited by Mr Grosart, supplies materials equally
full and interesting for those who may, haply, be allured by this little
book to master one of our most attractive poets in his integrity.
In Herrick's single own edition of HESPERIDES and NOBLE NUMBERS, but
little arrangement is traceable: nor have we more than a few internal
signs of date in composition. It would hence be unwise to attempt
grouping the poems on a strict plan: and the divisions under which they
are here ranged must be regarded rather as progressive aspects of a
landscape than as territorial demarcations. Pieces bearing on the poet
as such are placed first; then, those vaguely definable as of idyllic
character, 'his girls,' epigrams, poems on natural objects, on character
and life; lastly, a few in his religious vein. For the text, although
reference has been made to the original of 1647-8, Mr Grosart's
excellent reprint has been mainly followed. And to that edition this
book is indebted for many valuable exegetical notes, kindly placed at
the Editor's disposal. But for much fuller elucidation both of words
and allusions, and of the persons mentioned, readers are referred to Mr
Grosart's volumes, which (like the same scholar's 'Sidney' and 'Donne'),
for the first time give Herrick a place among books not printed only,
but edited.
Robert Herrick's personal fate is in one point like Shakespeare's.
We know or seem to know them both, through their works, with singular
intimacy. But with this our knowledge substantially ends. No private
letter of Shakespeare, no record of his conversation, no account of the
circumstances in which his writings were published, remains: hardly
any statement how his greatest contemporaries ranked him. A group of
Herrick's youthful letters on business has, indeed, been preserved;
of his life and studies, of his reputation during his own time, almost
nothing. For whatever facts affectionate diligence could now gather.
Readers are referred to Mr Grosart's 'Introduction.' But if, to
supplement the picture, inevitably imperfect, which this gives, we turn
to Herrick's own book, we learn little, biographically, except the
names of a few friends,--that his general sympathies were with the
Royal cause,--and that he wearied in Devonshire for London. So far as is
known, he published but this one volume, and that, when not far from his
sixtieth year. Some pieces may be traced in earlier collections; some
few carry ascertainable dates; the rest lie over a period of near forty
years, during a great portion of which we have no distinct account where
Herrick lived, or what were his employments. We know that he shone with
Ben Jonson and the wits at the nights and suppers of those gods of our
glorious early literature: we may fancy him at Beaumanor, or Houghton,
with his uncle and cousins, keeping a Leicestershire Christmas in the
Manor-house: or, again, in some sweet southern county with Julia and
Anthea, Corinna and Dianeme by his side (familiar then by other names
now never to be remembered), sitting merry, but with just the sadness of
one who hears sweet music, in some meadow among his favourite flowers of
spring-time;--there, or 'where the rose lingers latest.' .... But 'the
dream, the fancy,' is all that Time has spared us. And if it be curious
that his contemporaries should have left so little record of this
delightful poet and (as we should infer from the book) genial-hearted
man, it is not less so that the single first edition should have
satisfied the seventeenth century, and that, before the present, notices
of Herrick should be of the rarest occurrence.
The artist's 'claim to exist' is, however, always far less to be looked
for in his life, than in his art, upon the secret of which the fullest
biography can tell us little--as little, perhaps, as criticism can
analyse its charm. But there are few of our poets who stand less in need
than Herrick of commentaries of this description,--in which too often we
find little more than a dull or florid prose version of what the author
has given us admirably in verse. Apart from obsolete words or allusions,
Herrick is the best commentator upon Herrick. A few lines only need
therefore here be added, aiming rather to set forth his place in the
sequence of English poets, and especially in regard to those near his
own time, than to point out in detail beauties which he unveils in his
own way, and so most durably and delightfully.
When our Muses, silent or sick for a century and more after Chaucer's
death, during the years of war and revolution, reappeared, they brought
with them foreign modes of art, ancient and contemporary, in the forms
of which they began to set to music the new material which the age
supplied. At the very outset, indeed, the moralizing philosophy which
has characterized the English from the beginning of our national
history, appears in the writers of the troubled times lying between the
last regnal years of Henry VIII and the first of his great daughter. But
with the happier hopes of Elizabeth's accession, poetry was once more
distinctly followed, not only as a means of conveying thought, but as a
Fine Art. And hence something constrained and artificial blends with
the freshness of the Elizabethan literature. For its great underlying
elements it necessarily reverts to those embodied in our own earlier
poets, Chaucer above all, to whom, after barely one hundred and fifty
years, men looked up as a father of song: but in points of style
and treatment, the poets of the sixteenth century lie under a double
external influence--that of the poets of Greece and Rome (known
either in their own tongues or by translation), and that of the modern
literatures which had themselves undergone the same classical impulse.
Italy was the source most regarded during the more strictly Elizabethan
period; whence its lyrical poetry and the dramatic in a less degree, are
coloured much less by pure and severe classicalism with its closeness
to reality, than by the allegorical and elaborate style, fancy and fact
curiously blended, which had been generated in Italy under the peculiar
and local circumstances of her pilgrimage in literature and art from
the age of Dante onwards. Whilst that influence lasted, such brilliant
pictures of actual life, such directness, movement, and simplicity
in style, as Chaucer often shows, were not yet again attainable: and
although satire, narrative, the poetry of reflection, were meanwhile
not wholly unknown, yet they only appear in force at the close of this
period. And then also the pressure of political and religious strife,
veiled in poetry during the greater part of Elizabeth's actual reign
under the forms of pastoral and allegory, again imperiously breaks
in upon the gracious but somewhat slender and artificial fashions of
England's Helicon: the DIVOM NUMEN, SEDESQUE QUIETAE which, in some
degree the Elizabethan poets offer, disappear; until filling the
central years of the seventeenth century we reach an age as barren for
inspiration of new song as the Wars of the Roses; although the great
survivors from earlier years mask this sterility;--masking also the
revolution in poetical manner and matter which we can see secretly
preparing in the later 'Cavalier' poets, but which was not clearly
recognised before the time of Dryden's culmination.
In the period here briefly sketched, what is Herrick's portion? His
verse is eminent for sweet and gracious fluency; this is a real note of
the 'Elizabethan' poets. His subjects are frequently pastoral, with a
classical tinge, more or less slight, infused; his language, though not
free from exaggeration, is generally free from intellectual conceits
and distortion, and is eminent throughout for a youthful NAIVETE. Such,
also, are qualities of the latter sixteenth century literature. But if
these characteristics might lead us to call Herrick 'the last of the
Elizabethans,' born out of due time, the differences between him and
them are not less marked. Herrick's directness of speech is accompanied
by an equally clear and simple presentment of his thought; we have,
perhaps, no poet who writes more consistently and earnestly with his
eye upon his subject. An allegorical or mystical treatment is alien
from him: he handles awkwardly the few traditional fables which he
introduces. He is also wholly free from Italianizing tendencies: his
classicalism even is that of an English student,--of a schoolboy,
indeed, if he be compared with a Jonson or a Milton. Herrick's personal
eulogies on his friends and others, further, witness to the extension
of the field of poetry after Elizabeth's age;--in which his enthusiastic
geniality, his quick and easy transitions of subject, have also little
precedent.
If, again, we compare Herrick's book with those of his fellow-poets
for a hundred years before, very few are the traces which he gives of
imitation, or even of study. During the long interval between Herrick's
entrance on his Cambridge and his clerical careers (an interval all but
wholly obscure to us), it is natural to suppose that he read, at
any rate, his Elizabethan predecessors: yet (beyond those general
similarities already noticed) the Editor can find no positive proof of
familiarity. Compare Herrick with Marlowe, Greene, Breton, Drayton,
or other pretty pastoralists of the HELICON--his general and radical
unlikeness is what strikes us; whilst he is even more remote from the
passionate intensity of Sidney and Shakespeare, the Italian graces of
Spenser, the pensive beauty of PARTHENOPHIL, of DIELLA, of FIDESSA, of
the HECATOMPATHIA and the TEARS OF FANCY.
Nor is Herrick's resemblance nearer to many of the contemporaries who
have been often grouped with him. He has little in common with
the courtly elegance, the learned polish, which too rarely redeem
commonplace and conceits in Carew, Habington, Lovelace, Cowley, or
Waller. Herrick has his CONCETTI also: but they are in him generally
true plays of fancy; he writes throughout far more naturally than these
lyrists, who, on the other hand, in their unfrequent successes reach a
more complete and classical form of expression. Thus, when Carew speaks
of an aged fair one
When beauty, youth, and all sweets leave her,
Love may return, but lovers never!