No More Learning

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.

Indeed, Herrick's deepest debt to ancient literature lies not in the
models which he directly imitated, nor in the Anacreontic tone which
with singular felicity he has often taken. These are common to many
writers with him:--nor will he who cannot learn more from the great
ancient world ever rank among poets of high order, or enter the
innermost sanctuary of art. But, the power to describe men and things as
the poet sees them with simple sincerity, insight, and grace: to paint
scenes and imaginations as perfect organic wholes;--carrying with it the
gift to clothe each picture, as if by unerring instinct, in fit metrical
form, giving to each its own music; beginning without affectation,
and rounding off without effort;--the power, in a word, to leave
simplicity, sanity, and beauty as the last impressions lingering on our
minds, these gifts are at once the true bequest of classicalism, and the
reason why (until modern effort equals them) the study of that Hellenic
and Latin poetry in which these gifts are eminent above all other
literatures yet created, must be essential. And it is success in
precisely these excellences which is here claimed for Herrick. He is
classical in the great and eternal sense of the phrase: and much more
so, probably, than he was himself aware of. No poet in fact is so far
from dwelling in a past or foreign world: it is the England, if not of
1648, at least of his youth, in which he lives and moves and loves: his
Bucolics show no trace of Sicily: his Anthea and Julia wear no 'buckles
of the purest gold,' nor have anything about them foreign to Middlesex
or Devon. Herrick's imagination has no far horizons: like Burns and
Crabbe fifty years since, or Barnes (that exquisite and neglected
pastoralist of fair Dorset, perfect within his narrower range as
Herrick) to-day, it is his own native land only which he sees and
paints: even the fairy world in which, at whatever inevitable interval,
he is second to Shakespeare, is pure English; or rather, his elves live
in an elfin county of their own, and are all but severed from humanity.
Within that greater circle of Shakespeare, where Oberon and Ariel and
their fellows move, aiding or injuring mankind, and reflecting human
life in a kind of unconscious parody, Herrick cannot walk: and it may
have been due to his good sense and true feeling for art, that here,
where resemblance might have seemed probable, he borrows nothing from
MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM or TEMPEST. if we are moved by the wider range
of Byron's or Shelley's sympathies, there is a charm, also, in this
sweet insularity of Herrick; a narrowness perhaps, yet carrying with
it a healthful reality absent from the vapid and artificial
'cosmopolitanism' that did such wrong on Goethe's genius. If he has
not the exotic blooms and strange odours which poets who derive from
literature show in their conservatories, Herrick has the fresh breeze
and thyme-bed fragrance of open moorland, the grace and greenery of
English meadows: with Homer and Dante, he too shares the strength and
inspiration which come from touch of a man's native soil.

What has been here sketched is not planned so much as a criticism in
form on Herrick's poetry as an attempt to seize his relations to his
predecessors and contemporaries. 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.