No More Learning

The last of his line, he is and will probably be always the first in
rank and station of English song-writers. We have only to remember how
rare it is to find a perfect song, good to read and good to sing,
combining the merits of Coleridge and Shelley with the capabilities of
Tommy Moore and Haynes Bayly, to appreciate the unique and
unapproachable excellence of Herrick. The lyrist who wished to be a
butterfly, the lyrist who fled or flew to a lone vale at the hour
(whatever hour it may be) "when stars are weeping," have left behind
them such stuff as may be sung, but certainly cannot be read and endured
by any one with an ear for verse. The author of the Ode on France and
the author of the Ode to the West Wind have left us hardly more than a
song a-piece which has been found fit for setting to music: and, lovely
as they are, the fame of their authors does not mainly depend on the
song of Glycine or the song of which Leigh Hunt so justly and so
critically said that Beaumont and Fletcher never wrote anything of the
kind more lovely. Herrick, of course, lives simply by virtue of his
songs; his more ambitious or pretentious lyrics are merely magnified and
prolonged and elaborated songs. Elegy or litany, epicede or
epithalamium, his work is always a song-writer's; nothing more, but
nothing less, than the work of the greatest song-writer--as surely as
Shakespeare is the greatest dramatist--ever born of English race. The
apparent or external variety of his versification is, I should suppose,
incomparable; but by some happy tact or instinct he was too naturally
unambitious to attempt, like Jonson, a flight in the wake of Pindar. He
knew what he could not do: a rare and invaluable gift. Born a blackbird
or a thrush, he did not take himself (or try) to be a nightingale.

It has often been objected that he did mistake himself for a sacred
poet: and it cannot be denied that his sacred verse at its worst is as
offensive as his secular verse at its worst; nor can it be denied that
no severer sentence of condemnation can be passed upon any poet's work.
But neither Herbert nor Crashaw could have bettered such a divinely
beautiful triplet as this:--

"We see Him come, and know Him ours,
Who with His sunshine and His showers
Turns all the patient ground to flowers".

That is worthy of Miss Rossetti herself: and praise of such work can go
no higher.

But even such exquisite touches or tones of colour may be too often
repeated in fainter shades or more glaring notes of assiduous and facile
reiteration. The sturdy student who tackles his Herrick as a schoolboy
is expected to tackle his Horace, in a spirit of pertinacious and stolid
straightforwardness, will probably find himself before long so nauseated
by the incessant inhalation of spices and flowers, condiments and
kisses, that if a musk-rat had run over the page it could hardly be less
endurable to the physical than it is to the spiritual stomach. The
fantastic and the brutal blemishes which deform and deface the
loveliness of his incomparable genius are hardly so damaging to his fame
as his general monotony of matter and of manner.
It was doubtless in
order to relieve this saccharine and "mellisonant" monotony that he
thought fit to intersperse these interminable droppings of natural or
artificial perfume with others of the rankest and most intolerable
odour: but a diet of alternate sweetmeats and emetics is for the average
of eaters and drinkers no less unpalatable than unwholesome. It is
useless and thankless to enlarge on such faults or such defects, as it
would be useless and senseless to ignore. But how to enlarge, to
expatiate, to insist on the charm of Herrick at his best--a charm so
incomparable and so inimitable that even English poetry can boast of
nothing quite like it or worthy to be named after it--the most
appreciative reader will be the slowest to affirm or imagine that he can
conjecture. This, however, he will hardly fail to remark: that Herrick,
like most if not all other lyric poets, is not best known by his best
work. If we may judge by frequency of quotation or of reference, the
ballad of the ride from Ghent to Aix is a far more popular, more
generally admired and accredited specimen of Mr. Browning's work than
"The Last Ride Together"--and "The Lost Leader" than "The Lost
Mistress". Yet the superiority of the less-popular poem is in either
case beyond all question or comparison: in depth and in glow of spirit
and of harmony, in truth and charm of thought and word, undeniable and
indescribable. No two men of genius were ever more unlike than the
authors of "Paracelsus" and "Hesperides": and yet it is as true of
Herrick as of Browning that his best is not always his best-known work.
Everyone knows the song, "Gather ye rosebuds while ye may"; few, I
fear, by comparison, know the yet sweeter and better song, "Ye have been
fresh and green". The general monotony of style and motive which
fatigues and irritates his too-persevering reader is here and there
relieved by a change of key which anticipates the note of a later and
very different lyric school. The brilliant simplicity and pointed grace
of the three stanzas to OEnone ("What conscience, say, is it in thee")
recall the lyrists of the Restoration in their cleanlier and happier
mood. And in the very fine epigram headed by the words "Devotion makes
the Deity" he has expressed for once a really high and deep thought in
words of really noble and severe propriety. His "Mad Maid's Song,"
again, can only be compared with Blake's; which has more of passionate
imagination, if less of pathetic sincerity.

A. C. SWINBURNE.