A Call on Robert Herrick

THE CONTRIBUTORS’ CLUB

THE name of Dean Prior, where our friend Herrick says he was of jocund Muse and chaste life, is, like one of his songs, in everybody’s memory. It is a hard, gritty little place to get to, however, even at the best season: some miles from any station, and caught in a web of winding roads and equivocating signposts. On the fiercely stormy afternoon when I had my one choice to do it or die, I nearly achieved both ends. Such a savage horizon, with sinister glimpses of the bare tors of Dartmoor; such a clotted, malign sky; such steep, miry, and stony ways, where you were alternately chased or encountered by all the infant floods of England, are not often known, let us hope, in the county of sunshine and clotted cream. At any rate, that critic who bewailed the “abominable tidiness” of the English landscape cannot have been cradled in romantic and whimsical Devon. The whole countryside, allowing for the great decrease in woods, must have looked quite the same in Herrick’s time. We think of him, shrewdly, but carelessly, as an Elizabethan ; but his grave was dug while Charles II., no longer young, was still chasing moths at Whitehall. Many trees which stand about, many thatched roofs and gables, are much as he knew them. Overhead is the same heaven of intense flamelike blue, a reflection caught, perhaps, from the tropical beauty of a not far - off sea; and on every side are the slanted fields and “cloistered hills,” dyed the most exquisite red in the world : a color so strange and sweet that it sets you thinking of mystical things, and of the sanguis martyrum of this Isle of Saints. The letter remaineth ; but where are Herrick’s merrymakers, his hock-carts, wassails, and stomachers of primroses ? From a not too cursory survey of the inhabitants of his parish, I should give them first place in a competition of miserable sinners. A more joyless set of folk I wot not of. The pilgrim, baptismally clean in the spring rain, in the jolly armor of a mackintosh and a decidedly centripetal old hat, longed to shout in passing at each of the dismal female faces at door or window: —

My private conviction is that Parson Herrick’s delicious pastoral pages are pure bluff; that there was no Anthea, no Perilla, no flute-playing, no bridecakes, no goblins, nothing! and that “dull Devon,” a phrase which came from his town-loving heart in a personal poem, hit the truth. To prove it, you need but accost the posterity of those Christians to whom that darling pagan ministered. There they are, incapable of Maypoles “to this day.”

Dean Prior is a village, pretty as a picture, which lies a mile north of Dean Church. At the latter hamlet you find, as the name implies, the church and vicarage, and a few shy houses among trees. And there, most probably in his own chancel, Herrick sleeps. Though the high ground without is sown with graves, you may look in vain there for Prew, his Maide, and for the other young names of “ a short delight, ” which are deathless in the Hesperides. The church is interesting from its comely situation, but the interior, “restored,” of course, has no character. People, you are told, do not always come there for Mr. Herrick. No, indeed ! They come for architecture. Wonderful are the ways of People. High up against the north aisle wall, at the east end, is a tablet to the poet’s memory, the wording of which, happily, I have forgotten. I retain, however, only too clear an impression of various items which nobody wants to know: especially that a family of repute in Leicestershire was responsible for the “lyric voice of England,” and that some hyphenated member of that family graciously provided his famous kinsman with a stone. Oddly enough, the inscription names Herrick as the author of the Hesperides only. It would have seemed decent, close to his old altar, to have remembered the Noble Numbers, and their genuine, though slightly decorative pieties. One discovery I made which pleased me, and sent me marching back to Totnes, over wet hill and dale, with the lovely stanza in my ears: I saw in Dean Church an epitaph which Herrick must have seen too, and liked, and which had a more immediate pathos for him, inasmuch as he must have known the living three who chose there a nobly humble tomb. The little monument, beautifully preserved in its original coloring, holds the kneeling figures separated, in the usual fashion of the time (that of King James I., judging from the dress), by a faldstool ; the wife and mother on one side, the knight and their only son upon the other. It is the latter, represented in little, for convention’s sake, whose love speaks in the mural verse cut below, without date or name for any of the dead: —

Let us summon no local antiquary to dispel for us the exquisite impersonality of those lines, with their plaintive closes marking the transition of religious feeling between a Catholicism, which asked only a Requiescat of the passer-by, and a Protestantism which spent itself on eulogy of the departed and moral precepts directed against the unarmed reader.

There were primroses and wild myrtle in the sodden hedgerows around Herrick ’ s home ; lambs were bleating by their mothers in the chilly meadows: “ And all the sweetness of the Long Ago Sounds in that song the thrush sent through the rain,” as the silent custodian closed the door of the church on the “happy spark ” which no man can find where it is still glowing. But on the way home, by thought transference or coincidence, I had a bit of humorous and illustrious luck. There in the rough, narrow, muddy lane lay a lumpy whitish stone, and in the stone was Master Robert Herrick! It was a little joke of the gods to reproduce so, in profile, the one known portrait of him, Marshall’s print, curly-headed, jovial, draped upon an urn; unbeautiful as that is, only older, with the very biggest of Roman noses, and an artificial eye - twinkle which is a joy forever to the drenched worshiper who pocketed the heaven-sent souvenir, with a grin, on that last day of March, A. D. 1901.