No More Learning

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. Compare Herrick with Marlowe, Greene, Breton, Drayton,
or other pretty pastoralists of the HELICON--his general and radical
unlikeness is what strikes us; whilst he is even more remote from the
passionate intensity of Sidney and Shakespeare, the Italian graces of
Spenser, the pensive beauty of PARTHENOPHIL, of DIELLA, of FIDESSA, of
the HECATOMPATHIA and the TEARS OF FANCY.

Nor is Herrick's resemblance nearer to many of the contemporaries who
have been often grouped with him. He has little in common with
the courtly elegance, the learned polish, which too rarely redeem
commonplace and conceits in Carew, Habington, Lovelace, Cowley, or
Waller. Herrick has his CONCETTI also: but they are in him generally
true plays of fancy; he writes throughout far more naturally than these
lyrists, who, on the other hand, in their unfrequent successes reach a
more complete and classical form of expression. Thus, when Carew speaks
of an aged fair one

When beauty, youth, and all sweets leave her,
Love may return, but lovers never!

Cowley, of his mistress--

Love in her sunny eyes does basking play,
Love walks the pleasant mazes of her hair:

or take Lovelace, 'To Lucasta,' Waller, in his 'Go, lovely rose,'--we
have a finish and condensation which Herrick hardly attains; a literary
quality alien from his 'woodnotes wild,' which may help us to understand
the very small appreciation he met from his age. He had 'a pretty
pastoral gale of fancy,' said Phillips, cursorily dismissing Herrick in
his THEATRUM: not suspecting how inevitably artifice and mannerism, if
fashionable for awhile, pass into forgetfulness, whilst the simple cry
of Nature partake in her permanence.

Donne and Marvell, stronger men, leave also no mark on our poet. The
elaborate thought, the metrical harshness of the first, could find no
counterpart in Herrick; whilst Marvell, beyond him in imaginative power,
though twisting it too often into contortion and excess, appears to have
been little known as a lyrist then:--as, indeed, his great merits have
never reached anything like due popular recognition. Yet Marvell's
natural description is nearer Herrick's in felicity and insight than any
of the poets named above. Nor, again, do we trace anything of Herbert
or Vaughan in Herrick's NOBLE NUMBERS, which, though unfairly judged if
held insincere, are obviously far distant from the intense conviction,
the depth and inner fervour of his high-toned contemporaries.

It is among the great dramatists of this age that we find the only
English influences palpably operative on this singularly original
writer. The greatest, in truth, is wholly absent: and it is remarkable
that although Herrick may have joined in the wit-contests and
genialities of the literary clubs in London soon after Shakespeare's
death, and certainly lived in friendship with some who had known him,
yet his name is never mentioned in the poetical commemorations of the
HESPERIDES. In Herrick, echoes from Fletcher's idyllic pieces in the
FAITHFUL SHEPHERDESS are faintly traceable; from his songs, 'Hear
what Love can do,' and 'The lusty Spring,' more distinctly.
But to Ben
Jonson, whom Herrick addresses as his patron saint in song, and ranks
on the highest list of his friends, his obligations are much more
perceptible. In fact, Jonson's non-dramatic poetry,--the EPIGRAMS and
FOREST of 1616, the UNDERWOODS of 1641, (he died in 1637),--supply
models, generally admirable in point of art, though of very unequal
merit in their execution and contents, of the principal forms under
which we may range Herrick's HESPERIDES. The graceful love-song, the
celebration of feasts and wit, the encomia of friends, the epigram
as then understood, are all here represented: even Herrick's vein in
natural description is prefigured in the odes to Penshurst and Sir
Robert Wroth, of 1616. And it is in the religious pieces of the NOBLE
NUMBERS, for which Jonson afforded the least copious precedents, that,
as a rule, Herrick is least successful.

Even if we had not the verses on his own book, (the most noteworthy
of which are here printed as PREFATORY,) in proof that Herrick was no
careless singer, but a true artist, working with conscious knowledge of
his art, we might have inferred the fact from the choice of Jonson as
his model. That great poet, as Clarendon justly remarked, had 'judgment
to order and govern fancy, rather than excess of fancy: his productions
being slow and upon deliberation. ' No writer could be better fitted for
the guidance of one so fancy-free as Herrick; to whom the curb, in the
old phrase, was more needful than the spur, and whose invention, more
fertile and varied than Jonson's, was ready at once to fill up
the moulds of form provided. He does this with a lively facility,
contrasting much with the evidence of labour in his master's work.
Slowness and deliberation are the last qualities suggested by Herrick.
Yet it may be doubted whether the volatile ease, the effortless grace,
the wild bird-like fluency with which he

Scatters his loose notes in the waste of air

are not, in truth, the results of exquisite art working in cooperation
with the gifts of nature. The various readings which our few remaining
manuscripts or printed versions have supplied to Mr Grosart's
'Introduction,' attest the minute and curious care with which Herrick
polished and strengthened his own work: his airy facility, his seemingly
spontaneous melodies, as with Shelley--his counterpart in pure lyrical
art within this century--were earned by conscious labour; perfect
freedom was begotten of perfect art;--nor, indeed, have excellence and
permanence any other parent.

With the error that regards Herrick as a careless singer is closely
twined that which ranks him in the school of that master of elegant
pettiness who has usurped and abused the name Anacreon; as a mere
light-hearted writer of pastorals, a gay and frivolous Renaissance
amourist. He has indeed those elements: but with them is joined the
seriousness of an age which knew that the light mask of classicalism and
bucolic allegory could be worn only as an ornament, and that life held
much deeper and further-reaching issues than were visible to the narrow
horizons within which Horace or Martial circumscribed the range of their
art. Between the most intensely poetical, and so, greatest, among the
French poets of this century, and Herrick, are many points of likeness.
He too, with Alfred de Musset, might have said

Quoi que nous puissions faire,
Je souffre; il est trop tard; le monde s'est fait vieux.
Une immense esperance a traverse la terre;
Malgre nous vers le ciel il faut lever les yeux.