No More Learning

Some pieces may be traced in earlier collections; some
few carry ascertainable dates; the rest lie over a period of near forty
years, during a great portion of which we have no distinct account where
Herrick lived, or what were his employments. We know that he shone with
Ben Jonson and the wits at the nights and suppers of those gods of our
glorious early literature: we may fancy him at Beaumanor, or Houghton,
with his uncle and cousins, keeping a Leicestershire Christmas in the
Manor-house: or, again, in some sweet southern county with Julia and
Anthea, Corinna and Dianeme by his side (familiar then by other names
now never to be remembered), sitting merry, but with just the sadness of
one who hears sweet music, in some meadow among his favourite flowers of
spring-time;--there, or 'where the rose lingers latest. ' . . . . But 'the
dream, the fancy,' is all that Time has spared us. And if it be curious
that his contemporaries should have left so little record of this
delightful poet and (as we should infer from the book) genial-hearted
man, it is not less so that the single first edition should have
satisfied the seventeenth century, and that, before the present, notices
of Herrick should be of the rarest occurrence.

The artist's 'claim to exist' is, however, always far less to be looked
for in his life, than in his art, upon the secret of which the fullest
biography can tell us little--as little, perhaps, as criticism can
analyse its charm. But there are few of our poets who stand less in need
than Herrick of commentaries of this description,--in which too often we
find little more than a dull or florid prose version of what the author
has given us admirably in verse. Apart from obsolete words or allusions,
Herrick is the best commentator upon Herrick. A few lines only need
therefore here be added, aiming rather to set forth his place in the
sequence of English poets, and especially in regard to those near his
own time, than to point out in detail beauties which he unveils in his
own way, and so most durably and delightfully.

When our Muses, silent or sick for a century and more after Chaucer's
death, during the years of war and revolution, reappeared, they brought
with them foreign modes of art, ancient and contemporary, in the forms
of which they began to set to music the new material which the age
supplied. At the very outset, indeed, the moralizing philosophy which
has characterized the English from the beginning of our national
history, appears in the writers of the troubled times lying between the
last regnal years of Henry VIII and the first of his great daughter. But
with the happier hopes of Elizabeth's accession, poetry was once more
distinctly followed, not only as a means of conveying thought, but as a
Fine Art.
And hence something constrained and artificial blends with
the freshness of the Elizabethan literature. For its great underlying
elements it necessarily reverts to those embodied in our own earlier
poets, Chaucer above all, to whom, after barely one hundred and fifty
years, men looked up as a father of song: but in points of style
and treatment, the poets of the sixteenth century lie under a double
external influence--that of the poets of Greece and Rome (known
either in their own tongues or by translation), and that of the modern
literatures which had themselves undergone the same classical impulse.
Italy was the source most regarded during the more strictly Elizabethan
period; whence its lyrical poetry and the dramatic in a less degree, are
coloured much less by pure and severe classicalism with its closeness
to reality, than by the allegorical and elaborate style, fancy and fact
curiously blended, which had been generated in Italy under the peculiar
and local circumstances of her pilgrimage in literature and art from
the age of Dante onwards. Whilst that influence lasted, such brilliant
pictures of actual life, such directness, movement, and simplicity
in style, as Chaucer often shows, were not yet again attainable: and
although satire, narrative, the poetry of reflection, were meanwhile
not wholly unknown, yet they only appear in force at the close of this
period. And then also the pressure of political and religious strife,
veiled in poetry during the greater part of Elizabeth's actual reign
under the forms of pastoral and allegory, again imperiously breaks
in upon the gracious but somewhat slender and artificial fashions of
England's Helicon: the DIVOM NUMEN, SEDESQUE QUIETAE which, in some
degree the Elizabethan poets offer, disappear; until filling the
central years of the seventeenth century we reach an age as barren for
inspiration of new song as the Wars of the Roses; although the great
survivors from earlier years mask this sterility;--masking also the
revolution in poetical manner and matter which we can see secretly
preparing in the later 'Cavalier' poets, but which was not clearly
recognised before the time of Dryden's culmination.

In the period here briefly sketched, what is Herrick's portion? His
verse is eminent for sweet and gracious fluency; this is a real note of
the 'Elizabethan' poets. His subjects are frequently pastoral, with a
classical tinge, more or less slight, infused; his language, though not
free from exaggeration, is generally free from intellectual conceits
and distortion, and is eminent throughout for a youthful NAIVETE. Such,
also, are qualities of the latter sixteenth century literature. But if
these characteristics might lead us to call Herrick 'the last of the
Elizabethans,' born out of due time, the differences between him and
them are not less marked. Herrick's directness of speech is accompanied
by an equally clear and simple presentment of his thought; we have,
perhaps, no poet who writes more consistently and earnestly with his
eye upon his subject. An allegorical or mystical treatment is alien
from him: he handles awkwardly the few traditional fables which he
introduces. He is also wholly free from Italianizing tendencies: his
classicalism even is that of an English student,--of a schoolboy,
indeed, if he be compared with a Jonson or a Milton. Herrick's personal
eulogies on his friends and others, further, witness to the extension
of the field of poetry after Elizabeth's age;--in which his enthusiastic
geniality, his quick and easy transitions of subject, have also little
precedent.

If, again, we compare Herrick's book with those of his fellow-poets
for a hundred years before, very few are the traces which he gives of
imitation, or even of study. During the long interval between Herrick's
entrance on his Cambridge and his clerical careers (an interval all but
wholly obscure to us), it is natural to suppose that he read, at
any rate, his Elizabethan predecessors: yet (beyond those general
similarities already noticed) the Editor can find no positive proof of
familiarity.