autograph, assuming the request to come from some sincere lover of
books and bookmen. It is an affair of different complection when he is
importuned to give time and attention to the innumerable unknown who
“collect” autographs as they would collect postage stamps, with no
interest in the matter beyond the desire to accumulate as many as
possible. The average autograph hunter, with his purposeless insistence,
reminds one of the queen in Stockton's story whose fad was “the
buttonholes of all nations.”
In our population of eighty millions and upward there are probably two
hundred thousand persons interested more or less in what is termed the
literary world. This estimate is absurdly low, but it serves to cast
a sufficient side-light upon the situation. Now, any unit of these two
hundred thousand is likely at any moment to indite a letter to some
favorite novelist, historian, poet, or what not. It will be seen, then,
that the autograph hunter is no inconsiderable person. He has made it
embarrassing work for the author fortunate or unfortunate enough to
be regarded as worth while. Every mail adds to his reproachful pile
of unanswered letters. If he have a conscience, and no amanuensis,
he quickly finds himself tangled in the meshes of endless and futile
correspondence. Through policy, good nature, or vanity he is apt to
become facile prey.
A certain literary collector once confessed in print that he always
studied the idiosyncrasies of his “subject” as carefully as another
sort of collector studies the plan of the house to which he meditates
a midnight visit. We were assured that with skillful preparation and
adroit approach an autograph could be extracted from anybody. According
to the revelations of the writer, Bismarck, Queen Victoria, and
Mr. Gladstone had their respective point of easy access--their one
unfastened door or window, metaphorically speaking. The strongest man
has his weak side.
Dr. Holmes's affability in replying to every one who wrote to him was
perhaps not a trait characteristic of the elder group. Mr. Lowell, for
instance, was harder-hearted and rather difficult to reach. I recall one
day in the library at Elmwood. As I was taking down a volume from the
shelf a sealed letter escaped from the pages and fluttered to my feet. I
handed it to Mr. Lowell, who glanced incuriously at the superscription.
“Oh, yes,” he said, smiling, “I know 'em by instinct.” Relieved of its
envelope, the missive turned out to be eighteen months old, and began
with the usual amusing solecism: “As one of the most famous of American
authors I would like to possess your autograph.”
Each recipient of such requests has of course his own way of responding.
Mr. Whittier used to be obliging; Mr. Longfellow politic; Mr. Emerson,
always philosophical, dreamily confiscated the postage stamps.
Time was when the collector contented himself with a signature on a
card; but that, I am told, no longer satisfies. He must have a letter
addressed to him personally--“on any subject you please,” as an immature
scribe lately suggested to an acquaintance of mine. The ingenuous
youth purposed to flourish a letter in the faces of his less fortunate
competitors, in order to show them that he was on familiar terms with
the celebrated So-and-So. This or a kindred motive is the spur to many
a collector. The stratagems he employs to compass his end are
inexhaustible. He drops you an off-hand note to inquire in what year you
first published your beautiful poem entitled “A Psalm of Life.” If you
are a simple soul, you hasten to assure him that you are not the author
of that poem, which he must have confused with your “Rime of the
Ancient Mariner”--and there you are. Another expedient is to ask if your
father's middle name was not Hierophilus. Now, your father has probably
been dead many years, and as perhaps he was not a public man in his day,
you are naturally touched that any one should have interest in him after
this long flight of time. In the innocence of your heart you reply by
the next mail that your father's middle name was not Hierophilus, but
Epaminondas--and there you are again. It is humiliating to be caught
swinging, like a simian ancestor, on a branch of one's genealogical
tree.
Some morning you find beside your plate at breakfast an imposing
parchment with a great gold seal in the upper left-hand corner. This
document--I am relating an actual occurrence--announces with a flourish
that you have unanimously been elected an honorary member of The
Kalamazoo International Literary Association. Possibly the honor does
not take away your respiration; but you are bound by courtesy to make
an acknowledgment, and you express your insincere thanks to the obliging
secretary of a literary organization which does not exist anywhere on
earth.
A scheme of lighter creative touch is that of the correspondent who
advises you that he is replenishing his library and desires a detailed
list of your works, with the respective dates of their first issue,
price, style of binding, etc. A bibliophile, you say to yourself. These
interrogations should of course have been addressed to your publisher;
but they are addressed to you, with the stereotyped “thanks in advance.”
The natural inference is that the correspondent, who writes in a brisk
commercial vein, wishes to fill out his collection of your books, or,
possibly, to treat himself to a complete set in full crushed Levant.
Eight or ten months later this individual, having forgotten (or hoping
you will not remember) that he has already demanded a chronological list
of your writings, forwards another application couched in the self-same
words. The length of time it takes him to “replenish” his library (with
your books) strikes you as pathetic. You cannot control your emotions
sufficiently to pen a reply. From a purely literary point of view this
gentleman cares nothing whatever for your holograph; from a mercantile
point of view he cares greatly and likes to obtain duplicate specimens,
which he disposes of to dealers in such frail merchandise.
The pseudo-journalist who is engaged in preparing a critical and
biographical sketch of you, and wants to incorporate, if possible, some
slight hitherto unnoted event in your life--a signed photograph and
a copy of your bookplate are here in order--is also a character which
periodically appears upon the scene. In this little Comedy of Deceptions
there are as many players as men have fancies.
A brother slave-of-the-lamp permits me to transfer this leaf from the
book of his experience: “Not long ago the postman brought me a letter of
a rather touching kind. The unknown writer, lately a widow, and plainly
a woman of refinement, had just suffered a new affliction in the loss
of her little girl. My correspondent asked me to copy for her ten or a
dozen lines from a poem which I had written years before on the death of
a child. The request was so shrinkingly put, with such an appealing
air of doubt as to its being heeded, that I immediately transcribed the
entire poem, a matter of a hundred lines or so, and sent it to her. I am
unable to this day to decide whether I was wholly hurt or wholly amused
when, two months afterward, I stumbled over my manuscript, with a neat
price attached to it, in a second-hand bookshop.”
Perhaps the most distressing feature of the whole business is the very
poor health which seems to prevail among autograph hunters. No other
class of persons in the community shows so large a percentage of
confirmed invalids. There certainly is some mysterious connection
between incipient spinal trouble and the collecting of autographs. Which
superinduces the other is a question for pathology. It is a fact that
one out of every eight applicants for a specimen of penmanship bases
his or her claim upon the possession of some vertebral disability which
leaves him or her incapable of doing anything but write to authors
for their autograph. Why this particular diversion should be the sole
resource remains undisclosed. But so it appears to be, and the appeal
to one's sympathy is most direct and persuasive. Personally, however,
I have my suspicions, suspicions that are shared by several men of
letters, who have come to regard this plea of invalidism, in the
majority of cases, as simply the variation of a very old and familiar
tune. I firmly believe that the health of autograph hunters, as a class,
is excellent.
ROBERT HERRICK
I
A LITTLE over three hundred years ago England had given to her a poet of
the very rarest lyrical quality, but she did not discover the fact for
more than a hundred and fifty years afterward. The poet himself was
aware of the fact at once, and stated it, perhaps not too modestly, in
countless quatrains and couplets, which were not read, or, if read, were
not much regarded at the moment. It has always been an incredulous world
in this matter. So many poets have announced their arrival, and not
arrived!
Robert Herrick was descended in a direct line from an ancient family
in Lincolnshire, the Eyricks, a mentionable representative of which was
John Eyrick of Leicester, the poet's grandfather, admitted freeman
in 1535, and afterward twice made mayor of the town. John Eyrick or
Heyricke--he spelled his name recklessly--had five sons, the second of
which sought a career in London, where he became a goldsmith, and in
December, 1582, married Julian Stone, spinster, of Bedfordshire, a
sister to Anne, Lady Soame, the wife of Sir Stephen Soame. One of the
many children of this marriage was Robert Herrick.
It is the common misfortune of the poet's biographers, though it was
the poet's own great good fortune, that the personal interviewer was an
unknown quantity at the period when Herrick played his part on the stage
of life. Of that performance, in its intimate aspects, we have only the
slightest record.
Robert Herrick was born in Wood street, Cheapside, London, in 1591, and
baptized at St. Vedast's, Foster Lane, on August 24 of that year. He had
several brothers and sisters, with whom we shall not concern ourselves.
It would be idle to add the little we know about these persons to the
little we know about Herrick himself. He is a sufficient problem without
dragging in the rest of the family.
When the future lyrist was fifteen months old his father, Nicholas
Herrick, made his will, and immediately fell out of an upper window.
Whether or not this fall was an intended sequence to the will, the high
almoner, Dr. Fletcher, Bishop of Bristol, promptly put in his claim to
the estate, “all goods and chattels of suicides” becoming his by law.
The circumstances were suspicious, though not conclusive, and the
good bishop, after long litigation, consented to refer the case to
arbitrators, who awarded him two hundred and twenty pounds, thus leaving
the question at issue--whether or not Herrick's death had been his own
premeditated act--still wrapped in its original mystery. This singular
law, which had the possible effect of inducing high almoners to
encourage suicide among well-to-do persons of the lower and middle
classes, was afterward rescinded.
Nicholas Herrick did not leave his household destitute, for his estate
amounted to five thousand pounds, that is to say, twenty-five thousand
pounds in to-day's money; but there were many mouths to feed. The poet's
two uncles, Robert Herrick and William Herrick of Beaumanor, the
latter subsequently knighted (1) for his usefulness as jeweller and
money-lender to James I., were appointed guardians to the children.
(1) Dr. Grosart, in his interesting and valuable Memorial
Introduction to Herrick's poems, quotes this curious item
from Win-wood's _Manorials of Affairs of State_: “On Easter
Tuesday [1605], one Mr. William Herrick, a goldsmith in
Cheapside, was Knighted for making a Hole in the great
Diamond the King cloth wear. The party little expected the
honour, but he did his work so well as won the King to an
extraordinary liking of it.”
Young Robert appears to have attended school in Westminster until his
fifteenth year, when he was apprenticed to Sir William, who had learned
the gentle art of goldsmith from his nephew's father. Though Robert's
indentures bound him for ten years, Sir William is supposed to have
offered no remonstrance when he was asked, long before that term
expired, to cancel the engagement and allow Robert to enter Cambridge,
which he did as fellow-commoner at St. John's College. At the end of two
years he transferred himself to Trinity Hall, with a view to economy and
the pursuit of the law--the two frequently go together. He received his
degree of B. A. in 1617, and his M. A. in 1620, having relinquished the
law for the arts.
During this time he was assumed to be in receipt of a quarterly
allowance of ten pounds--a not illiberal provision, the pound being then
five times its present value; but as the payments were eccentric, the
master of arts was in recurrent distress. If this money came from his
own share of his father's estate, as seems likely, Herrick had cause for
complaint; if otherwise, the pith is taken out of his grievance.
The Iliad of his financial woes at this juncture is told in a few
chance-preserved letters written to his “most careful uncle,” as he
calls that evidently thrifty person. In one of these monotonous and
dreary epistles, which are signed “R. Hearick,” the writer says: “The
essence of my writing is (as heretofore) to entreat you to paye for
my use to Mr. Arthour Johnson, bookseller, in Paule's Churchyarde, the
ordinarie sume of tenn pounds, and that with as much sceleritie as you
maye.” He also indulges in the natural wish that his college bills
“had leaden wings and tortice feet.” This was in 1617. The young man's
patrimony, whatever it may have been, had dwindled, and he confesses to
“many a throe and pinches of the purse.” For the moment, at least, his
prospects were not flattering.
Robert Herrick's means of livelihood, when in 1620 he quitted the
university and went up to London, are conjectural. It is clear that he
was not without some resources, since he did not starve to death on his
wits before he discovered a patron in the Earl of Pembroke. In the court
circle Herrick also unearthed humbler, but perhaps not less useful,
allies in the persons of Edward Norgate, clerk of the signet, and Master
John Crofts, cup-bearer to the king. Through the two New Year anthems,
honored by the music of Henry Lawes, his Majesty's organist at
Westminster, it is more than possible that Herrick was brought to the
personal notice of Charles and Henrietta Maria. All this was a promise
of success, but not success itself. It has been thought probable that
Herrick may have secured some minor office in the chapel at Whitehall.
That would accord with his subsequent appointment (September, 1627,) as
chaplain to the Duke of Buckingham's unfortunate expedition of the Isle
of Rhe.
Precisely when Herrick was invested with holy orders is not
ascertainable. If one may draw an inference from his poems, the life he
led meanwhile was not such as his “most careful uncle” would have warmly
approved. The literary clubs and coffee-houses of the day were open to a
free-lance like young Herrick, some of whose blithe measures, passing
in manuscript from hand to hand, had brought him faintly to light as
a poet. The Dog and the Triple Tun were not places devoted to worship,
unless it were to the worship of “rare Ben Jonson,” at whose feet
Herrick now sat, with the other blossoming young poets of the season. He
was a faithful disciple to the end, and addressed many loving lyrics to
the master, of which not the least graceful is His Prayer to Ben Jonson:
When I a verse shall make,
Know I have praid thee
For old religion's sake,
Saint Ben, to aide me.
Make the way smooth for me,
When I, thy Herrick,
Honouring thee, on my knee
Offer my lyric.
Candles I'll give to thee,
And a new altar;
And thou, Saint Ben, shalt be
Writ in my Psalter.
On September 30, 1629, Charles I., at the recommending of the Earl of
Exeter, presented Herrick with the vicarage of Dean Prior, near Totnes,
in Devonshire. Here he was destined to pass the next nineteen years of
his life among surroundings not congenial. For Herrick to be a mile away
from London stone was for Herrick to be in exile. Even with railway
and telegraphic interruptions from the outside world, the dullness of a
provincial English town of today is something formidable. The dullness
of a sequestered English hamlet in the early part of the seventeenth
century must have been appalling. One is dimly conscious of a belated
throb of sympathy for Robert Herrick. Yet, however discontented or
unhappy he may have been at first in that lonely vicarage, the world may
congratulate itself on the circumstances that stranded him there, far
from the distractions of the town, and with no other solace than his
Muse, for there it was he wrote the greater number of the poems which
were to make his fame. It is to this accidental banishment to Devon that
we owe the cluster of exquisite pieces descriptive of obsolete rural
manners and customs--the Christmas masks, the Twelfth-night mummeries,
the morris-dances, and the May-day festivals.
The November following Herrick's appointment to the benefice was marked
by the death of his mother, who left him no heavier legacy than “a ringe
of twenty shillings.” Perhaps this was an understood arrangement between
them; but it is to be observed that, though Herrick was a spendthrift in
epitaphs, he wasted no funeral lines on Julian Herrick. In the matter of
verse he dealt generously with his family down to the latest nephew.
One of his most charming and touching poems is entitled To His Dying
Brother, Master William Herrick, a posthumous son. There appear to
have been two brothers named William. The younger, who died early, is
supposed to be referred to here.
The story of Herrick's existence at Dean Prior is as vague and bare of
detail as the rest of the narrative. His parochial duties must have
been irksome to him, and it is to be imagined that he wore his cassock
lightly. As a preparation for ecclesiastical life he forswore sack and
poetry; but presently he was with the Muse again, and his farewell to
sack was in a strictly Pickwickian sense. Herrick had probably accepted
the vicarship as he would have accepted a lieutenancy in a troop of
horse--with an eye to present emolument and future promotion. The
promotion never came, and the emolument was nearly as scant as that
of Goldsmith's parson, who considered himself “passing rich with forty
pounds a year”--a height of optimism beyond the reach of Herrick, with
his expensive town wants and habits. But fifty pounds--the salary of
his benefice--and possible perquisites in the way of marriage and burial
fees would enable him to live for the time being. It was better than a
possible nothing a year in London.
Herrick's religious convictions were assuredly not deeper than those of
the average layman. Various writers have taken a different view of the
subject; but it is inconceivable that a clergyman with a fitting sense
of his function could have written certain of the poems which Herrick
afterward gave to the world--those astonishing epigrams upon his rustic
enemies, and those habitual bridal compliments which, among his personal
friends, must have added a terror to matrimony. Had he written only
in that vein, the posterity which he so often invoked with pathetic
confidence would not have greatly troubled itself about him.
It cannot positively be asserted that all the verses in question relate
to the period of his incumbency, for none of his verse is dated, with
the exception of the Dialogue betwixt Horace and Lydia. The date of some
of the compositions may be arrived at by induction. The religious pieces
grouped under the title of Noble Numbers distinctly associate themselves
with Dean Prior, and have little other interest. Very few of them are
“born of the royal blood.” They lack the inspiration and magic of his
secular poetry, and are frequently so fantastical and grotesque as to
stir a suspicion touching the absolute soundness of Herrick's mind at
all times. The lines in which the Supreme Being is assured that he may
read Herrick's poems without taking any tincture from their sinfulness
might have been written in a retreat for the unbalanced. “For
unconscious impiety,” remarks Mr. Edmund Gosse, (1) “this rivals the
famous passage in which Robert Montgomery exhorted God to 'pause and
think.'” Elsewhere, in an apostrophe to “Heaven,” Herrick says:
Let mercy be
So kind to set me free,
And I will straight
Come in, or force the gate.
In any event, the poet did not purpose to be left out!
(1) In _Seventeenth-Century Studies_. and the general
absence of arrangement in the “Hesperides,” Dr. Grosart
advances the theory that the printers exercised arbitrary
authority on these points. Dr. Grosart assumes that Herrick
kept the epigrams and personal tributes in manuscript books
separate from the rest of the work, which would have made a
too slender volume by itself, and on the plea of this
slender-ness was induced to trust the two collections to the
publisher, “whereupon he or some un-skilled subordinate
proceeded to intermix these additions with the others. That
the poet him-self had nothing to do with the arrangement or
disarrangement lies on the surface.” This is an amiable
supposition, but merely a supposition.
Relative to the inclusion of unworthy pieces, Herrick personally placed
the “copy” in the hands of John Williams and Francis Eglesfield, and
if he were over-persuaded to allow them to print unfit verses, and to
observe no method whatever in the contents of the book, the discredit is
none the less his. It is charitable to believe that Herrick's coarseness
was not the coarseness of the man, but of the time, and that he followed
the fashion _malgre lui_. With regard to the fairy poems, they certainly
should have been given in sequence; but if there are careless printers,
there are also authors who are careless in the arrangement of their
manuscript, a kind of task, moreover, in which Herrick was wholly
unpractised, and might easily have made mistakes. The “Hesperides” was
his sole publication.
Herrick was now thirty-eight years of age. Of his personal appearance
at this time we have no description. The portrait of him prefixed to the
original edition of his works belongs to a much later moment. Whether or
not the bovine features in Marshall's engraving are a libel on the poet,
it is to be regretted that oblivion has not laid its erasing finger on
that singularly unpleasant counterfeit presentment. It is interesting to
note that this same Marshall engraved the head of Milton for the
first collection of his miscellaneous poems--the precious 1645 volume
containing Il Penseroso, Lycidas, Comus, etc. The plate gave great
offense to the serious-minded young Milton, not only because it
represented him as an elderly person, but because of certain minute
figures of peasant lads and lassies who are very indistinctly seen
dancing frivolously under the trees in the background. Herrick had more
reason to protest. The aggressive face bestowed upon him by the artist
lends a tone of veracity to the tradition that the vicar occasionally
hurled the manuscript of his sermon at the heads of his drowsy
parishioners, accompanying the missive with pregnant remarks. He has the
aspect of one meditating assault and battery.
To offset the picture there is much indirect testimony to the amiability
of the man, aside from the evidence furnished by his own writings.
He exhibits a fine trait in the poem on the Bishop of Lincoln's
imprisonment--a poem full of deference and tenderness for a person
who had evidently injured the writer, probably by opposing him in some
affair of church preferment. Anthony Wood says that Herrick “became much
beloved by the gentry in these parts for his florid and witty (wise)
discourses.” It appears that he was fond of animals, and had a pet
spaniel called Tracy, which did not get away without a couplet attached
to him:
Now thou art dead, no eye shall ever see
For shape and service spaniell like to thee.