George Herbert as a Religious Poet

To English poetry George Herbert made a notable contribution, — he devised the religious love-lyric. This forms his substantial claim to originality. To state, illustrate, and qualify that claim is the object of this paper.

I

Of course there was religious verse in England before Herbert’s time. To see how considerable it was, and how he modified it, I will roughly classify what had been written under the four headings of Vision, Meditation, Paraphrase, and Hymn. In the poetry of Vision the poet stands above his world, and is concerned rather with divine transactions than with human. So Cynewulf in Saxon times looked into the wonders of the Advent, Ascension, and Doomsday. The author of Piers Plowman, with visions of the Kingdom of Heaven before his eyes, condemned the institutions of rural England. Spenser imagined a fairy realm where chivalry, holiness, and unearthly beauty dominate all forms of evil. Giles Fletcher in Keats-like verse pictured the four Victories achieved by Christ. The young Milton, just before Herbert took orders, celebrated the Nativity, Circumcision, and Passion. And a few years after Herbert’s death, Sandys translated into English verse Grotius’ Drama of Christ’s Passion. In all these cases the writers are not primarily interested in their relations to God, but in his to the world; and these relations they behold dramatically embodied in certain divine occurrences. In such dramatic visions we may perceive a kind of survival of the early Miracle Play.

But the imaginative point of view belongs to exceptional men. Much cornmoner, especially in Herbert’s early life, was religious meditation. Spenser had practiced it with his accustomed splendor in his two Hymns in Honor of Divine Love and Beauty; so had Constable in his Spiritual Sonnets to the Honor of God and His Saints, and Drayton in his Harmonies of the Church. Many of Sidney’s sonnets, of Shakespeare’s, are reveries on the nature of the soul, its immortality, and its relation to its Maker. Sir John Davies studies these questions more abstractly in his Nosce Teipsum, as does Phineas Fletcher in The Purple Island. Lord Herbert looks at them romantically in his Tennysonian Ode, Inquiring Whether Love Should Continue Forever. Drummond gravely examines them in his Flowers of Sion. Fulke Greville draws up in verse a Treatise of Religion. Nicholas Breton has several similar discussions of sacred themes. Many of Daniel’s and of Donne’s epistles and elegies are weighty with a moral wisdom not to be distinguished from religion; while Donne’s Anatomy of the World, Progress of the Soul, and Divine Poems would, if they were not so intellectual, be genuinely devout. Quarles’s Divine Fancies are of the same character. Raleigh and Wotton, too, and many other poets less famous than they, have single meditations of sweet seriousness and depth on God, man, death, and duty. Yet religious verse of this type everywhere bears the same mark. It studies a problem and tries to reach a general truth. Its writers do not content themselves with recording their own emotions. Their poetry, therefore, lacks the individual note and is not lyric. If the preceding group of religious verse may be thought of as following the Miracle Play, this continues the traditions of the old Morality.

But there is more in religion than sacred scenes and wise meditation. There is worship, the open profession by God’s children of their exultation in Him and their need of his continual care. Worship, however, especially in the time preceding Herbert, was a collective affair in which the holy aspirations of the individual were merged in those of his fellows and went forth in company along already consecrated paths. For such national worship and such sanctified associations nothing could be a more fitting expression than the Holy Scriptures. The Bible was the Magna Charta of the Reformation. To love it was to show one’s hostility to Popery. In it all truth was contained. If one needed poetry, then, or sacred song, where could one obtain it better than in this its original source ? For a time it seemed almost profane to look elsewhere. The favorite form of religious utterance was the versified paraphrase of some portion of the Bible. Naturally the Psalms were the part most commonly chosen. The collection of paraphrases of the Psalms which goes by the name of Sternhold and Hopkins was drawn up in 1562, and was soon adopted into the use of the English churches. But almost every prominent poet attempted a few Psalms. To translate them became a literary fashion. Wyatt and Surrey engaged in it, as later did Sidney and his sister, Spenser, Sylvester, Davison, Phineas Fletcher, King James, Lord Bacon, Milton, Sandys, Wither, and even Carew. But the disposition to paraphrase the Bible did not confine itself to the Psalms. Surrey put Ecclesiastes into verse; Sylvester, Job; Quarles versified Job, Samson, Esther, and the Song of Solomon. Both he and Donne tried to make poetry out of the Lamentations of Jeremiah. Drayton told the stories of Noah, Moses, and David. Indeed, the strange fashion lasted down to the time of Cowley, who in 1656 published four books of the Troubles of King David, and translated one of them back into Latin. Paradise Lost itself may be regarded as but the full, gorgeous, and belated consummation of what Milton’s predecessors in Paraphrase and Vision had already attempted.

The Hymn, however, that form of religious aspiration most natural to us, developed slowly in the England of Elizabeth and James, and gained only a partial acceptance during the reign of Charles. The Catholic Church had always had its Latin hymns. Many of these were translated by Luther and the German reformers, and freely used in their churches. Luther’s own hymns were much prized. The English Prayer Book is largely a translation of the Roman Breviary, and the Breviary contains many hymns; but the makers of the Prayer Book left tire hymns untranslated. Why so low an estimate was set on hymns in England is not altogether clear, but for some reason English Protestants contented themselves for the most part with versions of the Psalms. Perhaps they took example from Geneva. Clement Marot in 1541 translated fifty Psalms into French, and these were completed in 1562 by Beza, and adopted into the service of the Reformed Swiss and French churches. Genevan influences, being strong in George Herbert’s England, may have cooperated with other causes to hold back the promising movement toward giving the English people their own religious songs. For such a movement did start. Coverdale in 1539 published some Spiritual Songs in company with thirteen Goodly Psalms, mostly translated from German originals. The collection of Sternhold and Hopkins contained a group of hymns beside its translated Psalms, while a more marked advance in this direction was made by Wedderburn’s widely used book of Psalms and Spiritual Songs, printed in Scotland in 1560. This had three parts: the first consisting of Psalms, the second of hymns, and the third of popular secular songs to which a religious meaning had been attached. Half a dozen Songs of Sadness and Piety were in William Byrd’s book of songs, 1587. But these admirable beginnings — English and Scotch — were only slenderly followed up. Such songs were apparently too individual, and could not compete with the broad and universal Psalms. As Puritanism advanced, the Bible tended to overshadow all other inspiration. It was not until 1623 that George Wither in his Hymns and Songs of the Church composed the first hymn book that ever appeared in England, and obtained permission to have it used in churches. Eighteen years later he published a second and larger volume under the title of England’s Hallelujah, but like the former it met with much opposition. Hymns were not a natural form of devotion in the first half of the seventeenth century, and few were even in existence previously to Wither’s book. Wither complained in his Scholar’s Purgatory (1624) that “for divers ages together there have been but so many hymns composed and published as make not above two sheets and a half of paper. ”

II

Such, then, was the condition of English sacred poetry when Herbert began to write. To each of its four varieties he made good contributions. In The Sacrifice and The Bag he has visions of divine events. The massive reflections of The Ch urch-Porch, The Church-Militant, and many of the shorter poems give him a high rank among the meditative religious poets. He also translated half a dozen Psalms; and possibly the two Antiphons, one of the poems entitled Praise, and the songs which are appended to Easter, The Holy Communion, and An Offering, may pass for hymns. I do not mention Vertue and The Elixer; for though these bear his name in our hymn books, their popular form is not due to him, but to John Wesley.

Yet in spite of the worth of Herbert’s work in all these four accredited varieties and his real eminence in the second, his distinctive merit must be sought elsewhere. For he originated a new species of sacred verse, the religious lyric, a species for which the English world was waiting, which it welcomed with enthusiasm, and which at once became so firmly established that it is now difficult to conceive that it did not always exist. In reality, though cases of something similar may be discovered in earlier poetry, it was Herbert who thought it out, studied its aesthetic possibilities, and created the type for future generations. Wherein, then, does this fifth type of Herbert’s differ from the preceding four? In this: the religious lyric is a cry of the individual heart to God. Standing face to face with Him, its writer describes no event, explores no general problem, leans on no authoritative book. He searches his own soul, and utters the love, the timidity, the joy, the vacillations, the remorse, the anxieties, he finds there. That is not done in the hymn. Though its writer often speaks in the first person, he gives voice to collective feeling. He thinks of himself as representative, and selects from that which he finds in his heart only what will identify him with others. On God and himself his attention is not exclusively fixed. Always in the lyric it is thus fixed. When Burns sings of Mary Morison, he has no audience in mind, nor could his words be adopted by any company. Just so the religious lyric is a supreme love-song, involving two persons and two only, — the individual soul as the lover, and its divine and incomparable love. We hear the voice of the former appealing in introspective monologue to the distant and exalted dear one. “Divinest love lies in this book,” says Crashaw in writing of Herbert’s Temple; and he justly marks its distinctive feature.

A certain preparation for Herbert’s work was already laid in the poetry of Robert Southwell. This heroic young Englishman was born in high station in 1560, became a Jesuit priest, and in 1592 was arrested by Elizabeth on account of his religion. After three years of imprisonment in the Tower, where he was thirteen times subjected to torture, lie was executed in February, 1595. In the same year were printed two volumes of his verse. These include the long St. Peter’s Complaint and about fifty short poems, many of them written during his imprisonment. Perhaps the best known is the Christmas Song of The Burning Babe. All are vivid, sincere, and accomplished, and all without exception deal with religious themes, Southwell is accordingly our earliest religious poet, the only one before Herbert who confined himself to that single field. Possibly Herbert derived from him the idea of taking religion for his province. Southwell’s book was popular in Herbert’s boyhood; and when Herbert as a young man announces to his mother his resolve to dedicate his poetic powrers to God’s service, he uses language strikingly similar to that in Southwell’s Epistle of the Authour to the Reader. Herbert’s long early poem, too, The ChurchPorch, is in the metre of St. Peter’s Complaint. Yet the temper of the two men is unlike and their aims divergent. In style Soutlrwell connects with Spenser, Herbert with Donne. Southwell, too, like Crashaw afterwards, lives in a beautiful Romish world where the saints claim more attention than his own salvation. Fortitude is his principal theme, and reflections on the emptiness of the world. His is a stout heart. It does not seek intimate communings wTith its Master, and is seldom alone wTith God. The lyric yearning of the fearful lover is not his; though in such poems as Content arid Rich, Sin’s Heavy Load, and Lewd Love is Loss, he nearly approaches the meditative and sententious power of Herbert. That religious love-song, however, in which Herbert traces all the waywardness of his affection for the mighty object of his love, exhibiting the same fervency of passion which enters into the human relation, does not occur in Southwell.

Nearer to Herbert is Thomas Campion, who about 1613 published twenty Divine and Moral Songs. Campion is an exquisite experimenter, skillful in discovering every sweet subtlety which song admits. Both in the personal quality of his religious verse and in its beauty of structure. he may fairly be called a predecessor ol Herbert. But he, too, is under Spenserian influence. His religious poems are pure songs, written — like most of his verse — with reference to a musical setting. They lack, therefore, that introspective passion which fills Herbert’s throbbing stanzas. Herbert could have obtained little direct aid from them. He is more likely to have been indebted to Donne’s few hymns and to his Holy Sonnets. In these there is Herbert’s own deep communing with God. But instances of this occur all the way down the long line of English poetry. The Early English Text Society has published several volumes of religious verse, .which, while for the most part of the types I have named Vision and Meditation, show occasional instances of personal appeal. Religious poetry of the personal life had never been uncommon among continental Catholics, the mystics, and the German Reformers, though it had not yet found full voice in England. In no strict sense, then, can Herbert be said to have created it, for it is grounded in one of the most constant cravings of human nature. Yet the true discoverer is not he who first perceives a thing, but he who discerns its importance and its place in human life. And this is what Herbert did. He is the first in England to bring this universal craving to adequate utterance. He rediscovered it, enriched it with his own ingenuity, precision, and candor, and established it as a theme for English poetry, freed from the mystic and sensuous morbidity which has often disfigured it in other literatures.

III

Certain general tendencies of Herbert’s time combined with peculiarities of his own nature to bring about the new poetry. Individualism was abroad, disturbing “the unity and married calm of states,” and sending its subtle influence into every department of English life. The rise of Puritanism was but one of its manifestations. Everywhere the Renaissance movement pressed toward a return to nature and an assertion of the rights of the individual. At its rise these tendencies were partially concealed. Its first fruits were delivery from oppressive seriousness, a general emancipation of human powers, the enrichment of daily life, beauty, splendor, scholarship, a quickened and incisive intelligence. But as it advanced, the Renaissance opened doors to all kinds of self-assertion. Each person, each desire, each opinion, became clamorous and set up for itself, regardless of all else. In its remoteness England was tardy in feeling these disintegrating influences. The splendor, too, of the Renaissance was somewhat dimmed in Italy and France before it shone on the age of Elizabeth. There it found a society exceptionally consolidated under a forceful queen. Foreign dangers welded the nation together. It is doubtful if at any other period of its history the English people has believed, acted, enjoyed, and aspired so nearly like a single person as during the first three quarters of the age of Elizabeth. She, her great ministers, and the historical plays of Shakespeare, set forth its ideals of orderly government. Spenser’s poem consummated its ideals of orderly beauty, as did Hooker’s Ecclesiastical Polity those of an orderly church. Men in those days marched together. Dissenters, either of a religious, political, or artistic sort, were few and despised.

But change was impending. A second period of the Renaissance began, a period of introspection, where each man was prone to insist on the importance of whatever was his own. At the coming of the Stuarts this great change was prepared, and was steadily fostered by their inability to comprehend it. In science Bacon had already questioned established authority, and sent men to nature to observe for themselves. In government the king’s prerogative was speedily questioned, and parliaments became so rebellious that they were often dismissed. A revolution in poetic taste was under way. Spenser’s lulling rhythms and bloodless heroes were being displaced by the jolting and passionate realism of Donne.

The changes wrought in religion were of a deeper and more varied kind. Forms and ceremonies, the product of a collective religious consciousness, gradually became objects of suspicion. Personal religion, the sense of individual responsibility to God, was regarded as the one thing needful. Already the setting up of a national church and the rejection of a Catholic or world-church had admitted the principle of individual judgment, and now the further progress of this principle could not be stayed. If a single nation might seek what was best for itself, regardless of the Papacy, why might not also a single body of Christians, regardless of the nation, — or even an individual soul, regardless of its fellows? Our souls, the Puritans held, are our own. No man can save his brother. Each stands single before his Maker, answerable to him alone. The social sense, it may be said, had decayed as an instinct and had not yet been rationally reconstructed. It needed to decay if a fresh and varied religious experience was to invigorate English life. The call to individualism was the most sacred summons of the age. All sections of the community heard it. Puritanism merely accepted it with a peculiar heartiness and reverence. In the High Church party ideas substantially similar were at work. By them too asceticism and “ freedom from the world” were often regarded as the path of piety. What a sign of the times is the conduct of Herbert’s friend, Nicholas Ferrar, who would cut all ties, stand naked before God, and so seek holiness! Ferrar was a religious genius, able to discern the highest ideals of his age, and courageous enough to carry them out. But how widely and in what unlike forms these individualistic ideas pervaded the community may be seen in three other powerful men, all born before Herbert died, Thomas Hobbes, George Fox, and John Bunyan. The best and the worst tendencies of that age demanded that each man should seek God for himself, unhampered by his neighbor.

And just as the seeker after God is at this time conceived as a detached individual, so is the object of the search,— God himself. Notions of the divine immanence do not belong to this age. God is not a spiritual principle, the power that makes for righteousness, universal reason, collective natural force. Such ideas come later, in the train of that Deistic movement of which Herbert’s brother was the precursor. God is an independent person, exactly like ourselves, having foresight, skill, love and hatred, grief, self-sacrifice, and a power of action a good deal limited by the kind of world and people among whom he works. From him Jesus Christ is indistinguishable. With him one may talk as with a friend; and though no answering sound comes back, the Bible — every portion of which is his living word — reports his instructions, while the conditions of mind and heart in which we find ourselves after communion with him disclose his influence and indicate his will. In all this religious realism there is a vitality and precision, a permission to take God with us into daily affairs, a banishment of loneliness, and a refreshment of courage impossible to those who accept the broader but vaguer notions fashionable in our day. Without attempting to assess the completeness or truth of the opposing conceptions, we must see that the earlier has immense advantages for artistic purposes. This concrete, vivid thought of God sets the religious imagination free and makes it creative in poetry as nothing else can. All art is personal and anthropomorphic.

IV

Herbert was a true child of this eager, individualistic, realistic age. In its full tide he lived. An exceptionally wide acquaintance with its leaders of philosophy, poetry, and the Church brought his impressionable nature to accept its ideals as matters of course. He has not the hardy and spacious nature that asks fundamental questions. His mind is receptive, even if anticipatory. Too proud and independent for an imitator, and ever disposed to build his own pathway, he still employs in that building only the material he finds at hand. Rarely does he desire more. Small modifications, readjustments, the application of refinement and elevation where coarseness had been before, — these rather than revolutionary measures are what he adds to the intellectual stock of his age. He is no Wordsworth, Keats, or Browning; he is related to his time rather as an early Gray or Arnold, as one who voices with exquisite art what those around him already feel. But if the ideals of his time shaped him, he in turn shaped them. Through his responsive heart and dexterous fingers they attained a precision, beauty, and compelling power which bore them far past the limits of that age.

In his first years at Cambridge Herbert had thought of religion as primarily an affair of ritual and ordinance. This is painfully evident in the Latin epigrams written at this time in reply to Andrew Melville. That learned and witty Scotchman in some verses entitled Anti-TamiCami - Categoria had attacked certain features of the English Church as meaningless and injurious to piety. Herbert replies, but shows no devotional spirit in his smart and scurrilous lines. He does not write as a defender of God, of his own soul, or of holy agencies personally found dear. He defends an established and external institution, whose usages must all alike be exempt from criticism. But such blind partisanship was brief. The love of Anglicanism which fills Herbert’s later poems and his Country Parson is of a different type. It springs from a belief in the aid his Church can afford to individual holiness, collective convenience, and permanent beauty. That Church he thinks of as a means and not an end; and the end is everywhere communion of the individual soul with God.

Strangely enough it was at this very time of the Melville controversy and while defending ecclesiasticism that Herbert heard and accepted his deeper call to vindicate personal religion as a poetic theme. On New Year’s Day, 1610, at the age of seventeen he sent his mother two momentous sonnets. They and their accompanying letter announce a literary and religious programme, which marks an epoch in the life of Herbert and in the development of English poetry. “In these sonnets,” Walton reports him as saying, “I declare my resolution to be that my poor abilities in poetry shall be all and ever consecrated to God’s glory.” Herbert, thus early discovering himself to be a poet, here fixes the field most suitable to his genius. He will give himself exclusively to religious verse, something never before attempted in England except by Southwell. But he fixes a special aim, too. He will “reprove those many love-poems that are daily writ and consecrated to Venus.” Though love is the proper theme of poetry, why should it be studied in its pettiest form as the half physical tie between men and women, and not where it shows its full force, volume, and variety, when God and man are drawn together ? “ Cannot thy love heighten a spirit to sound out thy praise as well as any she?” These are accordingly his resolves: he will become a lifelong poet; an exclusively religious poet; and while studying love, as do secular poets, — “that fire which by God’s power and might each breast does feel,” — he will present it freed from those sexual limits and artificialities in which it is usually set.

V

To these resolves Herbert remained, I believe, substantially true. Edmund Gosse and some others have asserted that he wrote secular verse also, destroying it when he took orders. For evidence they urge that it is improbable that a courtly poet should have written nothing in the current styles, that the religious verse left by Herbert is extremely small in amount, while it still shows an excellence hardly possible without long practice. As this is a point crucial for the understanding of Herbert, I will briefly sum up the strong opposing evidence.

Herbert’s secular verse is purely supposititious. Nobody ever saw it and mentioned it, though in certain quarters it would have been mentioned had it existed. Oley and Walton, his early biographers, know nothing of it. They give us to understand that he wrote only on religion. In none of his letters is it alluded to, nor in his poems, — full though these latter are of regrets for youthful follies. On the other hand, we know that in pursuance of his early purpose he set himself at Cambridge to create a poetry of divine love. On this he was still engaged at Bemerton. In what period of his life, then, do his secular poems fall ? Surely not in the years when he was antagonizing secular poetry. But what others remain ? Already eight years before Herbert’s death Bacon, dedicating to him some Psalms, knows of his great reputation for “divinity and poesy met.” And twenty years after his death Henry Vaughan looks back on the loose lovepoetry of the previous half-century and counts it Herbert’s glory to have opposed it. In the preface of Silex Scintillans he writes: “The first that with any effectual success attempted a diversion of this foul and overflowing stream was the blessed man, Mr. George Herbert, whose holy life and verse gained many pious converts, of whom I am the least.”

Nor need we be disturbed over the small quantity of sacred verse included in The Temple. Herbert may have written much more. In the early manuscript of his verse preserved in the Williams Library are six poems which were not included in Ferrar’s Edition. How many others were similarly rejected we do not know. Differences of style among those preserved indicate that his writing extended over many years. The many changes in the Williams manuscript show how largely he revised such poems as he intended to retain. In order, then, to give his pen long and sufficient practice, we have no need to invent secular poetry. And as regards the choice character of what was finally published, it may be said that fineness rather than fecundity was ever Herbert’s characteristic. Till he settled at Bemerton he wrote no English prose.

In view, then, of the fact that there is no evidence in behalf of his secular poetry, while there are strong probabilities against it, we may fairly accept Herbert’s declared purpose as final, and believe that he dedicated all his verse to the exposition of divine love, experienced in the communion of each individual heart with God, and announced as a world-force in the coming of Christ.

VI

Good examples of the latter sort of love-lyric, where God solicits us, are The Pulley, Misery, Sion, Decay, The Agony, The Second Prayer, The Second Love. In these the progress of God’s love is traced, advancing majestically through humiliation and suffering to rescue little, fallen, headlong, runaway man. Yet here, too, while love is examined on its divine side, its work is not — as in the Visions previously considered — viewed pictorially and as a purely celestial affair. God is the lover of man, and his slighted appeal to the individual soul is the subject of the song. These poems are accordingly veritable lyrics. They deal with the inner life, — with moods, affections, solicitations,—not with heavenly transactions, dramatic scenes, objective situations. Indeed, facts and outward events have no place in Herbert’s poetry. He might well say with Browning, whom in many respects he strongly resembles, “My stress lay on the incidents in the development of a soul; little else is worth study.”

But it is when Herbert turns to man’s side of the great alliance, to man’s wavering yet inevitable love of God, that he is most truly himself. For here he can be frankly psychological, and mental analysis is really his whole stock in trade. Yet what passion and tenderness does he contrive to weave into his subtle introspections! Hardly do the impetuous love-songs of Shelley yearn and sob more profoundly than these tangled, allusive, self-conscious, and over-intellectual verses of him who first in English poetry spoke face to face with God. The particular poems I have in mind are the following: The Afflictions, The Call, Clasping of Hands, The Collar, Denial, The Elixer, The Flower, The Glance, The Glimpse, Gratefulness, Longing, The Method, The Odour, The Pearl, The Search, Submission, The Temper, Unlcindness, A Wreath. But where shall one stop ? To specify what belongs under this heading wmuld be to enumerate a third of all Herbert has written. Perhaps those already named are enough to explain the mighty impact on his generation of the Herbertian conception of religious verse as personal aspiration. Out of his one hundred and sixty-nine poems only twenty-three do not employ the first person; and half a dozen of these are addresses in the second person to his own soul, while several others are dramatic. Practically all his poetry is poetry of the personal life. “He speaks of God like a man that really believeth in God,” says Richard Baxter of Herbert. His matter is individual experience, reported in all the variety of mood and shifting fancy which everywhere characterizes veritable experience. In that experience he will exhibit the profundities of love, and thus confute the love-poets.

And who are these love-poets? Of course the whole airy company of Elizabethan songsters, including Donne with his early wild poems of love. But it may be conjectured that in his two sonnets Herbert has especially in mind those men who have left behind them their long sonnet sequences. And this is the more likely because most of these sonneteers came into close connection with him through the Pembrokes of Wilton. Sidney, who wrote the Stella series, was the uncle of the Earl of Pembroke. Spenser was the friend of Sidney, edited his sonnets, and four years after, in 1595, published his own series of Amoretti. Daniel, who brought out his Sonnets to Delia in 1592, had for his patroness the Countess of Pembroke. So had Constable, who printed his Sonnets to Diana in 1592, and prefaced Sidney’s Apology for Poctrie in 1595. Drayton’s series to Idea appeared in 1593, their author the only one not closely connected with the Herbert and Pembroke circle. But in the very year in which Herbert declared his resolve to his mother, Shakespeare’s Sonnets were published and dedicated to Mr. W. H., mysterious initials often supposed — though in my judgment erroneously— to be those of William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, to whom the first folio of Shakespeare’s plays is also dedicated. With the leaders, therefore, of that group of men who domesticated in England the love sonnet of Petrarch, Herbert was brought into close relation, and he probably had them in mind when he resolved to initiate a movement in opposition to the artificial love-poetry of his day.

For these men were artificial, and much disposed to “doleful sonnets made to their mistress’ eyebrow.” They undertook the complete anatomy of love. No phase of the passion was too tririal to receive their detailed attention, though the emotional situation itself often became so paramount as somewhat to hide the features of her who was supposed to inspire it. In fact, her existence became comparatively unimportant. Whether there ever was a heroine or hero of a single one among the several sonnet sequences just named has been strongly doubted. The elder Giles Fletcher, printing in 1593 his Sonnets to Licia, says, “This kind of poetry wherein I write I did it only to try my humour.” The writers of such sonnets were engaged in exploiting an ideal situation and in recording what was demanded by it. Nothing of the sort may ever have occurred in their own experience. Very largely they borrowed their situations and even their phrases from French and Italian sonneteers. A stock of poetic motives had been accumulated among the disciples of Petrarch from which each poet now helped himself at will. Sighing was thus made easy. Mr. Sidney Lee computes that between 1591 and 1597 more than two thousand sonnets were printed in England, and there were nearly as many more lyrics. The aim of their authors was literature, not life, their ideals Italian rather than English, while under the sacred name of love they spun their thin web of delicate fancies, exquisite wordings, and intellectual involvement, prized the more the farther it could be removed from reality.

VII

Now in protesting against these lovepoets Herbert does not take issue with their strangely elaborate method. This, indeed, he considers to be a danger, but one involved in the very nature of poetry. He had himself incurred it.

What he objects to is that the matter of such verse is unequal to its manner. Here is a vast expenditure of good brains on trivial stuff. The.love talked about is ephemeral, and there is no true beauty there. “Beauty and beauteous words should go together.” Put solid love, love of the eternal sort, underneath this “lovely enchanting language, sugar cane, honey of roses,” and we shall have a worthy union. He tries, therefore, to give the love-lyric body, by employing its secular methods upon sacred subjects, guarding them against its obvious dangers, but preserving its intellectual exuberance and aesthetic charm. Imagine Shakespeare’s sonnets with God as the adored object, instead of the lovely boy, and we shall probably have something like what Herbert was dreaming of.

He honors and imitates the poetry he attacks.

And this imitation is not confined to diction. It extends to situations as well. Coventry Patmore explains how

Accordingly his lady’s frown or smile, her temporary absence, his possible neglects, his punctilious execution of her trivial command, the annoyance his small misbehaviors may have caused her, his delight when permitted to speak her praise, all these and other such interior incidents make up the events of the lover’s agitated day. Just such are the perplexities of Herbert’s sacred love. Is he grateful enough ? What do his fluctuations of fervor and coolness import ? Surely his pains can come from nothing but God’s withdrawal, and inner peace must signify that He is near. To count up how much he sacrifices for his great Love fills him with a content almost Comparable to that which comes from seeing how unworthy he is of what he has received. To work for God is his greatest delight; his greatest hardship that he is given so little to do. But even in lack of employment praise is possible, and he can always busy himself with depicting past errors. Herbert, in short, is a veritable lover, and of true Petrarchan type. In his poem A Parody, it costs him but a slight change of phrase to turn one of Donne’s lovesongs into one of his own kind. Yet in his most ardent moments he keeps clear of eroticism. Never, like Crashaw and the Catholic mystics, does he mingle sexual passion with divine. And filled though his verses are with Biblical allusion, they contain hardly a reference to Solomon’s Song. He is a man of sobriety, of intellectual and moral self-command.

VIII

But this is not the impression one at first receives. Whoever approaches these fervid little poems with the prepossessions of our time must regard Herbert as a religious sentimentalist, a man of extreme and somewhat morbid piety, attaching undue importance to passing moods. Unfortunately this is the popular impression, and for being such a person he is even admired. Often he is pictured as an aged saint who, through spending a lifetime in priestly offices, has come to find interest only in devout emotions. For such a fantastic picture there is no evidence, though Walton’s romantic Life has done much to confirm it. In reality, Herbert died under forty; was a priest less than three years; spent his remaining thirty-six years among men who loved power, place, wit, pleasure, and learning; and held his own among them remarkably well. His Church-Porch and the compact sententiousness of his poetic style show a character the reverse of sentimental. His Latin poems on the death of his mother are distinctly lacking in piety. His Latin orations and letters are skillful attempts to win favor with the great. His admirable Country Parson is a clear-headed study of the conditions of the minister’s work and the means of performing it effectively. In it, while Herbert is much in earnest about religion, he is sagacious, too, calculating, and at times almost canny. I give an abridgment, of his discussion of preaching: —

“When the parson preaeheth, he procures attention by all possible art, both by earnestness of speech — it being natural to men to think that where is much earnestness there is somewhat worth hearing — and by a diligent and busy cast of his eye on his auditors, with letting them know that he observes who marks and who not; and with particularizing of his speech, now to the younger sort, then to the elder, now to the poor, and now to the rich. By these and other means the parson procures attention; but the character of his sermon is holiness. He is not witty, or learned, or eloquent, but holy. And this character is gained, first, by choosing texts of devotion not controversy, moving and ravishing texts, whereof the Scriptures are full. Secondly, by dipping and seasoning all words and sentences in the heart before they come to the mouth. Thirdly, by turning often and making many apostrophes to God, as ‘Oh God, bless my people and teach them on this point;’ or ‘O my Master, on whose errand I come, let. me hold my peace and do thou speak thyself.’ Some such irradiations scatteringly in the sermon carry great holiness in them. Lastly, by an often urging of the presence and majesty of God, by these and such like speeches: ‘Oh let us all take heed what we do. God sees us, He sees whether I speak as I ought or you hear as you ought. He sees hearts as we see faces.’ Such discourses show very holy.”

I have quoted this passage at some length because it well illustrates Herbert’s ever present use of art. Just as we are ashamed of art and conceal it where it is employed, thinking it corrupts the genuineness of feeling, so is Herbert ashamed of unregulated spontaneity. He thinks he honors feeling best by bringing all its niceties to appropriate expression. He wishes to inspect it through and through, to supply it with intelligence, and to picture precisely how it might issue in action. What comes short of such fullness is maimed, barbaric, and brutal. Art he considers the appropriate investiture of all we prize, and beauty the mark of its worth. Accordingly he ever seeks

There are few pages of his poems in which the preciousness of art-constructed beauty is not in some way expressed.

IX

When, however, one has come to view things thus artistically, it becomes a delight through the exercise of art to detach single ingredients of life, free them from the entanglements of reality, and view them in their emotional fullness. To secure beauty, this is a necessary process. In the mixed currents of daily affairs devotion to my love is crossed by the need of sleep, attention to business, books, or food. I am occupied, forgetful, listless. These foreign matters the artist clears away. Starting with a veritable mood, he allows this to dictate congenial circumstances, to color all details — however minute — with its influence, and so to exhibit a rounded completeness. For such artistic work, requiring intellectual reflection rather than the raw material of emotion, the sentimentalist is disqualified. It is not surprising, then, to find that all the six sonneteers named above, though men who profess to be spending their days pining over unrequited love, are really persons of exceptional intellect, energy, and poise. Sidney was an accomplished soldier, the idol of his time in mind and morals. Spenser was entrusted by his country with a share in the government of Ireland. Constable was a political plotter and refugee. Shakespeare was beyond all other men “self-schooled, self-scanned, self-honored, self-secure.”

Drayton was a geographer and historian of England. And “ well-languaged Daniel’s” chief defect as a poet is that his stock of good sense is somewhat excessive. These men are no love-sick dreamers. They care for other things than Diana and Stella and Idea. They are artists. Of course they have felt the power of love and have been shaken by its vicissitudes. But every poet takes on an attitude and utters the emotion which one so circumstanced would feel. It would be as absurd to suppose that in their sonnets these men are simply narrating facts of their own lives, as to imagine that Walter Scott went through all the adventures he reports. Their interest is in beauty. Out of scattered and meagre facts they develop ideal situations.

And this is just what Herbert did. Today it is usual to make a sharp distinction between the real and the artificial. But Herbert knows no such contrast. When he is most artificial, he is all aglow with passion; and when he describes one of his own moods, he is full of constructive artifice. That he was a truly religious man, no one will doubt. He certainly felt within himself the conflicts he depicts. In these strange lyrics the course of his wayward and incongruous life may accurately be traced. By attending to biographic hints, and grouping the poems in something like a living order, I believe we throw much light upon their meanings. The series becomes connectedly interesting, almost dramatic. A highly individual personality emerges and takes the place of a conventional figure, a personality wThose work cannot justly be understood without constant and minute reference to the incidents of his life and the ideals of his time. Yet there is duality even here. These personal experiences are after all not the main thing. They are starting points for subtle intellectual play, occasions for exercise of that beauty-producing art which Herbert loves. Moods which exist in him merely in germ, or which coexist with much else, he heightens, isolates, renders dominant and exclusive. One must be dull indeed not to feel the genuineness of Herbert’s religious experience. But he is no mere reporter or historian. We miss his power and splendor if we mistake his imaginative constructions for plain facts. To this sort of misconception we Americans, so little artistic, so veraciously practical, are peculiarly liable. Herbert’s contemporaries were not so misled. They knew him to be a poet — sensitive in experience, fertile in invention, rejoicing in shapely construction. Only seven years after his death Christopher Harvey wrote thus in his Stepping Stone to the Threshold of Mr. Herbert’s Church-Porch: —

Such are the triple factors — pious fervor, intellectual play, and ideal construction — which equally cooperate to fashion Herbert’s religious love-lyric.