No More Learning

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. 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.