No More Learning

If we now tentatively inquire what
place may be assigned to him in our literature at large, Herrick has no
single lyric to show equal, in pomp of music, brilliancy of diction, or
elevation of sentiment to some which Spenser before, Milton in his own
time, Dryden and Gray, Wordsworth and Shelley, since have given us.
Nor has he, as already noticed, the peculiar finish and reserve (if
the phrase may be allowed) traceable, though rarely, in Ben Jonson and
others of the seventeenth century. He does not want passion; yet
his passion wants concentration: it is too ready, also, to dwell on
externals: imagination with him generally appears clothed in forms
of fancy. Among his contemporaries, take Crashaw's 'Wishes': Sir J.
Beaumont's elegy on his child Gervase: take Bishop King's 'Surrender':

My once-dear Love! --hapless, that I no more
Must call thee so. . . . The rich affection's store
That fed our hopes, lies now exhaust and spent,
Like sums of treasure unto bankrupts lent:--
We that did nothing study but the way
To love each other, with which thoughts the day
Rose with delight to us, and with them set,
Must learn the hateful art, how to forget!
--Fold back our arms, take home our fruitless loves,
That must new fortunes try, like turtle doves
Dislodged from their haunts. We must in tears
Unwind a love knit up in many years.
In this one kiss I here surrender thee
Back to thyself: so thou again art free:--

take eight lines by some old unknown Northern singer:

When I think on the happy days
I spent wi' you, my dearie,
And now what lands between us lie,
How can I be but eerie!

How slow ye move, ye heavy hours,
As ye were wae and weary!
It was na sae ye glinted by
When I was wi' my dearie:--

--O!
there is an intensity here, a note of passion beyond the deepest of
Herrick's. This tone (whether from temperament or circumstance or
scheme of art), is wanting to the HESPERIDES and NOBLE NUMBERS: nor does
Herrick's lyre, sweet and varied as it is, own that purple chord,
that more inwoven harmony, possessed by poets of greater depth and
splendour,--by Shakespeare and Milton often, by Spenser more rarely.
But if we put aside these 'greater gods' of song, with Sidney,--in the
Editor's judgment Herrick's mastery (to use a brief expression), both
over Nature and over Art, clearly assigns to him the first place as
lyrical poet, in the strict and pure sense of the phrase, among all
who flourished during the interval between Henry V and a hundred years
since. Single pieces of equal, a few of higher, quality, we have,
indeed, meanwhile received, not only from the master-singers who did not
confine themselves to the Lyric, but from many poets--some the unknown
contributors to our early anthologies, then Jonson, Marvell, Waller,
Collins, and others, with whom we reach the beginning of the wider sweep
which lyrical poetry has since taken. Yet, looking at the whole work,
not at the selected jewels, of this great and noble multitude, Herrick,
as lyrical poet strictly, offers us by far the most homogeneous,
attractive, and varied treasury. No one else among lyrists within the
period defined, has such unfailing freshness: so much variety within
the sphere prescribed to himself: such closeness to nature, whether
in description or in feeling: such easy fitness in language: melody so
unforced and delightful. His dull pages are much less frequent: he has
more lines, in his own phrase, 'born of the royal blood': the

Inflata rore non Achaico verba

are rarer with him: although superficially mannered, nature is so much
nearer to him, that far fewer of his pieces have lost vitality and
interest through adherence to forms of feeling or fashions of thought
now obsolete. A Roman contemporary is described by the younger Pliny in
words very appropriate to Herrick: who, in fact, if Greek in respect
of his method and style, in the contents of his poetry displays the
'frankness of nature and vivid sense of life' which criticism assigns
as marks of the great Roman poets. FACIT VERSUS, QUALES CATULLUS AUT
CALVUS. QUANTUM ILLIS LEPORIS, DULCEDINIS, AMARITUDINIS AMORIS! INSERIT
SANE, SED DATA OPERA, MOLLIBUS LENIBUSQUE DURIUSCULOS QUOSDAM; ET
HOC, QUASI CATULLUS AUT CALVUS. Many pieces have been, here refused
admittance, whether from coarseness of phrase or inferior value: yet
these are rarely defective in the lyrical art, which, throughout the
writer's work, is so simple and easy as almost to escape notice through
its very excellence. In one word, Herrick, in a rare and special sense,
is unique.

To these qualities we may, perhaps, ascribe the singular neglect which,
so far as we may infer, he met with in his own age, and certainly in
the century following. For the men of the Restoration period he was
too natural, too purely poetical: he had not the learned polish, the
political allusion, the tone of the city, the didactic turn, which were
then and onwards demanded from poetry. In the next age, no tradition
consecrated his name; whilst writers of a hundred years before were then
too remote for familiarity, and not remote enough for reverence.