also sings, comparing the bird to Lesbia's sparrow, much to the latter's
disadvantage. All of Herrick's geese were swans. On the authority of
Dorothy King, the daughter of a woman who served Herrick's successor at
Dean Prior in 1674, we are told that the poet kept a pig, which he had
taught to drink out of a tankard--a kind of instruction he was admirably
qualified to impart. Dorothy was in her ninety-ninth year when she
communicated this fact to Mr. Barron Field, the author of the paper on
Herrick published in the “Quarterly Review” for August, 1810, and in the
Boston edition (1) of the “Hesperides” attributed to Southey.
(1) The Biographical Notice prefacing this volume of The
British Poets is a remarkable production, grammatically and
chronologi-cally. On page 7 the writer speaks of Herrick as
living “in habits of intimacy” with Ben Jonson in 1648. If
that was the case, Her-rick must have taken up his quarters
in Westminster Abbey, for Jonson had been dead eleven years.
What else do we know of the vicar? A very favorite theme with Herrick
was Herrick. Scattered through his book are no fewer than twenty-five
pieces entitled On Himself, not to mention numberless autobiographical
hints under other captions. They are merely hints, throwing casual
side-lights on his likes and dislikes, and illuminating his vanity. A
whimsical personage without any very definite outlines might be evolved
from these fragments. I picture him as a sort of Samuel Pepys, with
perhaps less quaintness, and the poetical temperament added. Like the
prince of gossips, too, he somehow gets at your affections. In one place
Herrick laments the threatened failure of his eyesight (quite in what
would have been Pepys's manner had Pepys written verse), and in another
place he tells us of the loss of a finger. The quatrain treating of this
latter catastrophe is as fantastic as some of Dr. Donne's _concetti_:
One of the five straight branches of my hand
Is lopt already, and the rest but stand
Expecting when to fall, which soon will be:
First dies the leafe, the bough next, next the tree.
With all his great show of candor Herrick really reveals as little of
himself as ever poet did. One thing, however, is manifest--he understood
and loved music. None but a lover could have said:
The mellow touch of musick most doth wound
The soule when it doth rather sigh than sound.
Or this to Julia:
So smooth, so sweet, so silvery is thy voice,
As could they hear, the damn'd would make no noise,
But listen to thee walking in thy chamber
Melting melodious words to lutes of amber.
. . . Then let me lye
Entranc'd, and lost confusedly;
And by thy musick stricken mute,
Die, and be turn'd into a lute.
Herrick never married. His modest Devonshire establishment was managed
by a maidservant named Prudence Baldwin. “Fate likes fine names,” says
Lowell. That of Herrick's maid-of-all-work was certainly a happy meeting
of gentle vowels and consonants, and has had the good fortune to be
embalmed in the amber of what may be called a joyous little threnody:
In this little urne is laid
Prewdence Baldwin, once my maid;
From whose happy spark here let
Spring the purple violet.
Herrick addressed a number of poems to her before her death, which
seems to have deeply touched him in his loneliness. We shall not allow a
pleasing illusion to be disturbed by the flippancy of an old writer who
says that “Prue was but indifferently qualified to be a tenth muse.” She
was a faithful handmaid, and had the merit of causing Herrick in this
octave to strike a note of sincerity not usual with him:
These summer birds did with thy master stay
The times of warmth, but then they flew away,
Leaving their poet, being now grown old,
Expos'd to all the coming winter's cold.
But thou, kind Prew, didst with my fates abide
As well the winter's as the summer's tide:
For which thy love, live with thy master here
Not two, but all the seasons of the year.
Thus much have I done for thy memory, Mistress Prew!
In spite of Herrick's disparagement of Deanbourn, which he calls “a rude
river,” and his characterization of Devon folk as “a people currish,
churlish as the seas,” the fullest and pleasantest days of his life
were probably spent at Dean Prior. He was not unmindful meanwhile of the
gathering political storm that was to shake England to its foundations.
How anxiously, in his solitude, he watched the course of events,
is attested by many of his poems. This solitude was not without its
compensation. “I confess,” he says,
I ne'er invented such
Ennobled numbers for the presse
Than where I loath'd so much.
A man is never wholly unhappy when he is writing verses. Herrick was
firmly convinced that each new lyric was a stone added to the pillar of
his fame, and perhaps his sense of relief was tinged with indefinable
regret when he found himself suddenly deprived of his benefice. The
integrity of some of his royalistic poems is doubtful; but he was not
given the benefit of the doubt by the Long Parliament, which ejected the
panegyrist of young Prince Charles from the vicarage of Dean Prior,
and installed in his place the venerable John Syms, a gentleman with
pronounced Cromwellian views.
Herrick metaphorically snapped his fingers at the Puritans, discarded
his clerical habiliments, and hastened to London to pick up such as were
left of the gay-colored threads of his old experience there. Once more
he would drink sack at the Triple Tun, once more he would breathe the
air breathed by such poets and wits as Cotton, Denham, Shirley, Selden,
and the rest. “Yes, by Saint Anne! and ginger shall be hot I' the mouth
too.” In the gladness of getting back “from the dull confines of the
drooping west,” he writes a glowing apostrophe to London--that “stony
stepmother to poets.” He claims to be a free-born Roman, and is proud
to find himself a citizen again. According to his earlier biographers,
Herrick had much ado not to starve in that same longed-for London, and
fell into great misery; but Dr. Grosart disputes this, arguing, with
justness, that Herrick's family, which was wealthy and influential,
would not have allowed him to come to abject want. With his royalistic
tendencies he may not have breathed quite freely in the atmosphere of
the Commonwealth, and no doubt many tribulations fell to his lot, but
among them was not poverty.
The poet was now engaged in preparing his works for the press, and a few
weeks following his return to London they were issued in a single volume
with the title “Hesperides; or, The Works both Humane and Divine of
Robert Herrick, Esq.”
The time was not ready for him. A new era had dawned--the era of the
commonplace. The interval was come when Shakespeare himself was to lie
in a kind of twilight. Herrick was in spirit an Elizabethan, and had
strayed by chance into an artificial and prosaic age--a sylvan singing
creature alighting on an alien planet. “He was too natural,” says Mr.
Palgrave in his Chrysomela, “too purely poetical; he had not the learned
polish, the political allusion, the tone of the city, the didactic turn,
which were then and onward demanded from poetry.” Yet it is strange that
a public which had a relish for Edmund Waller should neglect a poet who
was fifty times finer than Waller in his own specialty. What poet then,
or in the half-century that followed the Restoration, could have written
Corinna's Going a-Maying, or approached in kind the ineffable grace and
perfection to be found in a score of Herrick's lyrics?
The “Hesperides” was received with chilling indifference. None of
Herrick's great contemporaries has left a consecrating word concerning
it. The book was not reprinted during the author's lifetime, and for
more than a century after his death Herrick was virtually unread. In
1796 the “Gentleman's Magazine” copied a few of the poems, and two years
later Dr. Nathan Drake published in his “Literary Hours” three critical
papers on the poet, with specimens of his writings. Dr. Johnson omitted
him from the “Lives of the Poets,” though space was found for half a
score of poetasters whose names are to be found nowhere else. In 1810
Dr. Nott, a physician of Bristol, issued a small volume of selections.
It was not until 1823 that Herrick was reprinted in full. It remained
for the taste of our own day to multiply editions of him.
In order to set the seal to Herrick's fame, it is now only needful that
some wiseacre should attribute the authorship of the poems to some man
who could not possibly have written a line of them. The opportunity
presents attractions that ought to be irresistible. Excepting a handful
of Herrick's college letters there is no scrap of his manuscript extant;
the men who drank and jested with the poet at the Dog or the Triple Tun
make no reference to him; (1) and in the wide parenthesis formed by his
birth and death we find as little tangible incident as is discoverable
in the briefer span of Shakespeare's fifty-two years. Here is material
for profundity and ciphers!
(1) With the single exception of the writer of some verses
in the _Musarum Deliciae_ (1656) who mentions
That old sack
Young Herrick took to entertain
The Muses in a sprightly vein.
Herrick's second sojourn in London covered the period between 1648
and 1662, curing which interim he fades from sight, excepting for
the instant when he is publishing his book. If he engaged in further
literary work there are no evidences of it beyond one contribution to
the “Lacrymae Musarum” in 1649.
He seems to have had lodgings, for a while at least, in St. Anne's,
Westminster. With the court in exile and the grim Roundheads seated in
the seats of the mighty, it was no longer the merry London of his early
manhood. Time and war had thinned the ranks of friends; in the old
haunts the old familiar faces were wanting. Ben Jonson was dead, Waller
banished, and many another comrade “in disgrace with fortune and men's
eyes.” As Herrick walked through crowded Cheapside or along the dingy
river-bank in those years, his thought must have turned more than once
to the little vicarage in Devonshire, and lingered tenderly.
On the accession of Charles II. a favorable change of wind wafted
Herrick back to his former moorings at Dean Prior, the obnoxious
Syms having been turned adrift. This occurred on August 24, 1662, the
seventy-first anniversary of the poet's baptism. Of Herrick's movements
after that, tradition does not furnish even the shadow of an outline.
The only notable event concerning him is recorded twelve years later
in the parish register: “Robert Herrick, vicker, was buried ye 15th day
October, 1674.” He was eighty-three years old. The location of his grave
is unknown. In 1857 a monument to his memory was erected in Dean Church.
And this is all.
II
THE details that have come down to us touching Herrick's private life
are as meagre as if he had been a Marlowe or a Shakespeare. But were
they as ample as could be desired they would still be unimportant
compared with the single fact that in 1648 he gave to the world
his “Hesperides.” The environments of the man were accidental and
transitory. The significant part of him we have, and that is enduring so
long as wit, fancy, and melodious numbers hold a charm for mankind.
A fine thing incomparably said instantly becomes familiar, and has
henceforth a sort of dateless excellence. Though it may have been said
three hundred years ago, it is as modern as yesterday; though it may
have been said yesterday, it has the trick of seeming to have been
always in our keeping. This quality of remoteness and nearness belongs,
in a striking degree, to Herrick's poems. They are as novel to-day as
they were on the lips of a choice few of his contemporaries, who, in
reading them in their freshness, must surely have been aware here and
there of the ageless grace of old idyllic poets dead and gone.
Herrick was the bearer of no heavy message to the world, and such
message as he had he was apparently in no hurry to deliver. On this
point he somewhere says:
Let others to the printing presse run fast;
Since after death comes glory, I 'll not haste.
He had need of his patience, for he was long detained on the road by
many of those obstacles that waylay poets on their journeys to the
printer.
Herrick was nearly sixty years old when he published the “Hesperides.”
It was, I repeat, no heavy message, and the bearer was left an
unconscionable time to cool his heels in the antechamber. Though his
pieces had been set to music by such composers as Lawes, Ramsay, and
Laniers, and his court poems had naturally won favor with the Cavalier
party, Herrick cut but a small figure at the side of several of his
rhyming contemporaries who are now forgotten. It sometimes happens
that the light love-song, reaching few or no ears at its first singing,
outlasts the seemingly more prosperous ode which, dealing with some
passing phase of thought, social or political, gains the instant
applause of the multitude. In most cases the timely ode is somehow
apt to fade with the circumstance that inspired it, and becomes the
yesterday's editorial of literature. Oblivion likes especially to get
hold of occasional poems. That makes it hard for feeble poets laureate.
Mr. Henry James once characterized Alphonse Daudet as “a great little
novelist.” Robert Herrick is a great little poet. The brevity of his
poems, for he wrote nothing _de longue haleine_, would place him among
the minor singers; his workmanship places him among the masters. The
Herricks were not a family of goldsmiths and lapidaries for nothing. The
accurate touch of the artificer in jewels and costly metals was one
of the gifts transmitted to Robert Herrick. Much of his work is as
exquisite and precise as the chasing on a dagger-hilt by Cellini; the
line has nearly always that vine-like fluency which seems impromptu,
and is never the result of anything but austere labor. The critic who,
borrowing Milton's words, described these carefully wrought poems as
“wood-notes wild” showed a singular lapse of penetration. They are full
of subtle simplicity. Here we come across a stanza as severely cut as an
antique cameo--the stanza, for instance, in which the poet speaks of his
lady-love's “winter face”--and there a couplet that breaks into unfading
daffodils and violets. The art, though invisible, is always there. His
amatory songs and catches are such poetry as Orlando would have liked to
hang on the boughs in the forest of Arden. None of the work is hastily
done, not even that portion of it we could wish had not been done at
all. Be the motive grave or gay, it is given that faultlessness of form
which distinguishes everything in literature that has survived its
own period. There is no such thing as “form” alone; it is only the
close-grained material that takes the highest finish. The structure
of Herrick's verse, like that of Blake, is simple to the verge of
innocence. Such rhythmic intricacies as those of Shelley, Tennyson, and
Swinburne he never dreamed of. But his manner has this perfection: it
fits his matter as the cup of the acorn fits its meat.
Of passion, in the deeper sense, Herrick has little or none. Here are
no “tears from the depth of some divine despair,” no probings into the
tragic heart of man, no insight that goes much farther than the pathos
of a cowslip on a maiden's grave. The tendrils of his verse reach up to
the light, and love the warmer side of the garden wall. But the reader
who does not detect the seriousness under the lightness misreads
Herrick. Nearly all true poets have been wholesome and joyous singers.
A pessimistic poet, like the poisonous ivy, is one of nature's sarcasms.
In his own bright pastoral way Herrick must always remain unexcelled.
His limitations are certainly narrow, but they leave him in the
sunshine. Neither in his thought nor in his utterance is there any
complexity; both are as pellucid as a woodland pond, content to
duplicate the osiers and ferns, and, by chance, the face of a girl
straying near its crystal. His is no troubled stream in which large
trout are caught. He must be accepted on his own terms.
The greatest poets have, with rare exceptions, been the most indebted
to their predecessors or to their contemporaries. It has wittily been
remarked that only mediocrity is ever wholly original. Impressionability
is one of the conditions of the creative faculty: the sensitive mind is
the only mind that invents. What the poet reads, sees, and feels, goes
into his blood, and becomes an ingredient of his originality. The
color of his thought instinctively blends itself with the color of its
affinities. A writer's style, if it have distinction, is the outcome of
a hundred styles.
Though a generous borrower of the ancients, Herrick appears to have been
exceptionally free from the influence of contemporary minds. Here and
there in his work are traces of his beloved Ben Jonson, or fleeting
impressions of Fletcher, and in one instance a direct infringement
on Suckling; but the sum of Herrick's obligations of this sort is
inconsiderable.
This indifference to other writers of his time, this insularity, was
doubtless his loss. The more exalted imagination of Vaughan or Marvell
or Herbert might have taught him a deeper note than he sounded in his
purely devotional poems. Milton, of course, moved in a sphere apart.
Shakespeare, whose personality still haunted the clubs and taverns which
Herrick frequented on his first going up to London, failed to lay any
appreciable spell upon him. That great name, moreover, is a jewel which
finds no setting in Herrick's rhyme. His general reticence relative to
brother poets is extremely curious when we reflect on his penchant for
addressing four-line epics to this or that individual. They were, in
the main, obscure individuals, whose identity is scarcely worth
establishing. His London life, at two different periods, brought him
into contact with many of the celebrities of the day; but his verse has
helped to confer immortality on very few of them. That his verse had the
secret of conferring immortality was one of his unshaken convictions.
Shakespeare had not a finer confidence when he wrote,
Not marble nor the gilded monuments
Of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme,
than has Herrick whenever he speaks of his own poetry, and he is not by
any means backward in speaking of it. It was the breath of his nostrils.
Without his Muse those nineteen years in that dull, secluded Devonshire
village would have been unendurable.
His poetry has the value and the defect of that seclusion. In spite,
however, of his contracted horizon there is great variety in Herrick's
themes. Their scope cannot be stated so happily as he has stated it:
I sing of brooks, of blossoms, birds and bowers,
Of April, May, of June, and July flowers;
I sing of May-poles, hock-carts, wassails, wakes,
Of bridegrooms, brides, and of their bridal-cakes;
I write of Youth, of Love, and have access
By these to sing of cleanly wantonness;
I sing of dews, of rains, and piece by piece
Of balm, of oil, of spice and ambergris;
I sing of times trans-shifting, and I write
How roses first came red and lilies white;
I write of groves, of twilights, and I sing
The Court of Mab, and of the Fairy King;
I write of Hell; I sing (and ever shall)
Of Heaven, and hope to have it after all.
Never was there so pretty a table of contents! When you open his book
the breath of the English rural year fans your cheek; the pages seem to
exhale wildwood and meadow smells, as if sprigs of tansy and lavender
had been shut up in the volume and forgotten. One has a sense of
hawthorn hedges and wide-spreading oaks, of open lead-set lattices half
hidden with honeysuckle; and distant voices of the haymakers, returning
home in the rosy afterglow, fall dreamily on one's ear, as sounds should
fall when fancy listens. There is no English poet so thoroughly English
as Herrick. He painted the country life of his own time as no other has
painted it at any time.
It is to be remarked that the majority of English poets regarded as
national have sought their chief inspiration in almost every land and
period excepting their own. Shakespeare went to Italy, Denmark, Greece,
Egypt, and to many a hitherto unfooted region of the imagination, for
plot and character. It was not Whitehall Garden, but the Garden of Eden
and the celestial spaces, that lured Milton. It is the Ode on a Grecian
Urn, The Eve of St. Agnes, and the noble fragment of Hyperion that
have given Keats his spacious niche in the gallery of England's poets.
Shelley's two masterpieces, Prometheus Unbound and The Cenci, belong
respectively to Greece and Italy. Browning's The Ring and the Book is
Italian; Tennyson wandered to the land of myth for the Idylls of the
King, and Matthew Arnold's Sohrab and Rustum--a narrative poem second in
dignity to none produced in the nineteenth century--is a Persian story.
But Herrick's “golden apples” sprang from the soil in his own day, and
reddened in the mist and sunshine of his native island.
Even the fairy poems, which must be classed by themselves, are not
wanting in local flavor. Herrick's fairy world is an immeasurable
distance from that of “A Midsummer Night's Dream.” Puck and Titania
are of finer breath than Herrick's little folk, who may be said to have
Devonshire manners and to live in a miniature England of their own. Like
the magician who summons them from nowhere, they are fond of color and
perfume and substantial feasts, and indulge in heavy draughts--from the
cups of morning-glories. In the tiny sphere they inhabit everything is
marvelously adapted to their requirement; nothing is out of proportion
or out of perspective. The elves are a strictly religious people in
their winsome way, “part pagan, part papistical;” they have their
pardons and indulgences, their psalters and chapels, and
An apple's-core is hung up dried,
With rattling kernels, which is rung
To call to Morn and Even-song;
and very conveniently,
Hard by, I' th' shell of half a nut,
The Holy-water there is put.
It is all delightfully naive and fanciful, this elfin-world, where the
impossible does not strike one as incongruous, and the England of 1648
seems never very far away.
It is only among the apparently unpremeditated lyrical flights of the
Elizabethan dramatists that one meets with anything like the lilt and
liquid flow of Herrick's songs. While in no degree Shakespearian echoes,
there are epithalamia and dirges of his that might properly have fallen
from the lips of Posthumus in “Cymbeline.” This delicate epicede would
have fitted Imogen:
Here a solemne fast we keepe
While all beauty lyes asleepe;
Husht be all things; no noyse here
But the toning of a teare,
Or a sigh of such as bring
Cowslips for her covering.
Many of the pieces are purely dramatic in essence; the Mad Maid's Song,
for example. The lyrist may speak in character, like the dramatist. A
poet's lyrics may be, as most of Browning's are, just so many
_dramatis personae_. “Enter a Song singing” is the stage-direction in a
seventeenth-century play whose name escapes me. The sentiment dramatized
in a lyric is not necessarily a personal expression. In one of his
couplets Herrick neatly denies that his more mercurial utterances are
intended presentations of himself:
To his Book's end this last line he'd have placed--
Jocund his Muse was, but his Life was chaste.
In point of fact he was a whole group of imaginary lovers in one.
Silvia, Anthea, Electra, Perilla, Perenna, and the rest of those lively
ladies ending in _a_, were doubtless, for the most part, but airy
phantoms dancing--as they should not have danced--through the brain of
a sentimental old bachelor who happened to be a vicar of the Church
of England. Even with his overplus of heart it would have been quite
impossible for him to have had enough to go round had there been so
numerous actual demands upon it.