Herrick

Mr. F. W. Moorman has edited for the Oxford Press a new edition of Herrick, which should supersede all its predecessors. There is very little editorial matter; Mr. Moorman has already written a Life, and his introduction and notes have a purely textual reference. The text, which is as satisfactory a one as we are likely to get, is based upon a collation of various divergent copies of the first edition; for Herrick appears to have hung about the printer’s making alterations whilst the sheets were going through the press. And a full list is given of variants which occur in other printed copies of some of the poems and in MSS., of which the editor records several which have not previously been dealt with.

Any one who regards Herrick as an unsophisticated warbler pouring forth profuse strains of unpremeditated art may study these variants and correct himself. Mr. Moorman—I suppose he has sufficient reason, though he leaves one to guess what it is—assumes that the versions in MSS. and anthologies, etc., including those published after the Hesperides, are all earlier than the versions in the Hesperides. Now and then one is sorry that this should be so, as when the presumably earlier

is changed into

But almost invariably the changes are improvements; and they are exceedingly numerous. Sometimes alterations in almost every line of a poem may be studied; sometimes there is a whole series of attempts at a line; and if we had more of Herrick’s original MSS. available, we should no doubt find every poem a mass of trial trips and deletions. He blotted, filed, and pumice-stoned as much as any English poet, and he had the most delicate and deliberate sense of all the complex mechanism of verse. This rubicund Royalist rector was above all else a craftsman and a connoisseur.

What distinguishes his best—they are so well known that I need not quote them—poems from his second best is usually that the former have some especially taking touch of tenderness. It is never very deep; even in an epitaph he is more concerned with turning it well than with the, often apocryphal, death of the person commemorated. His adorations and griefs are as light as rose-leaves, but they are genuine in their way, and it is rather a slight difference in the quality of his emotion than a relative superiority of craftsmanship that distinguishes his most perfect lyrics. His strongest characteristic, one that runs through the whole body of his verse, was his intense sensual appreciation of the material world. He was a connoisseur in life as in art. His admired record of the “liquefaction” of Julia’s silks is characteristic of him. “O how that glittering taketh me!” he might have said of a thousand other things. He looked at colours and felt surfaces like a connoisseur; he tasted substances like an epicure tasting wines. He crushes all the distinctive hues and flavours out of flowers and spices, roses and primroses and violets, tulips, lilies, marigolds, cherryblossoms, virgins’ skins, jet, ivory, amber, and gums. There is nothing romantic about him, and nothing dim; all things are equally vivid and clear, no thing is mysteriously vaster than other things. The moon and cream are both white—he will compare his lady’s cheek to either indifferently or to both in a sentence; he relishes the loveliness of each and he drinks each, with exquisite pleasure, out of the same sized liqueur glass. Few other writers give one so keen a contact with the beauties of the physical world. But it is usually their sensuous appeal that is registered, sometimes their sentimental appeal, but never their mystic appeal. Herrick was a thoroughgoing pagan.

His capacity for conveying vivid impressions of the physical was not invariably employed upon such agreeable objects as daffodils and maidens. His sheer virtuosity made him compose those offensive epigrams which some bashful editors exclude from their collections. It is not to be supposed that he really wished to vent his spleen against Lungs, Gryll, Clasco, Scobble, Bunce, and his other, presumably pseudonymous, butts; though if his efforts in this direction got about in his Devonshire village and people took them to apply to themselves it is no wonder that the natives behaved towards him, as he complained, like surly savages. “Upon Batt” is one of the mildest of them:

A more characteristic, but still a mild one, is “Upon Lungs”:

He tells—I refrain from the grossest ones—of another gentleman whose eyes were so sticky in the morning that his wife had to lick them open; of another whose raw eyes would supply an angler with a day’s bait; and of another (very parsimonious) who preserved his nails, warts, and corns in boxes to make jelly for his broth. It is not astonishing that when the “sprightly Spartanesse” appeared to him in dream she remarked:

But as one goes on through these things one is too amused to be disgusted; one wonders what on earth the man is going to think of next. And that was the idea. He had compressed all the fragrance of the spring into short lyrics—how much concentrated beastliness could he get into a couplet? He had rivalled Horace and Anacreon in one line; could he rival Martial in another? You may picture him making these things—sitting at a table in the sun outside the rectory, quaffing, as was his wont, a social tankard with his favourite pig, and working and working at these singular concoctions until there came the thrill of the artist who knows he has produced a perfect cameo.

His outlook and methods being such, it is not surprising that when he gave up his “unbaptized Rhimes” and took to “Noble Numbers” he was comparatively unsuccessful. Quaintness and neatness do not go far in religious verse, and the congenital materialism of Herrick’s imagery sometimes produced the most grotesque effects.

An epigram which might have had some point if applied to a man is merely vapid when applied to the Deity. And the vapid becomes comic in

and

Herrick was not an exalted religious poet. But it doesn’t much matter what he was not; what he was is one of the greatest small masters in the history of verse.