The "Hesperides" was received with chilling indifference. None of Herrick"s great contemporaries has left a consecrating word concerning it. The book was not reprinted during the author"s lifetime, and for more than a century after his death Herrick was virtually unread. In 1796 the "Gentleman"s Magazine" copied a few of the poems, and two years later Dr. Nathan Drake published in his "Literary Hours" three critical papers on the poet, with specimens of his writings. Dr. Johnson omitted him from the "Lives of the Poets," though s.p.a.ce was found for half a score of poetasters whose names are to be found nowhere else. In 1810 Dr. Nott, a physician of Bristol, issued a small volume of selections.
It was not until 1823 that Herrick was reprinted in full. It remained for the taste of our own day to multiply editions of him.
In order to set the seal to Herrick"s fame, it is now only needful that some wiseacre should attribute the authorship of the poems to some man who could not possibly have written a line of them. The opportunity presents attractions that ought to be irresistible. Excepting a handful of Herrick"s college letters there is no sc.r.a.p of his ma.n.u.script extant; the men who drank and jested with the poet at the Dog or the Triple Tun make no reference to him; (1) and in the wide parenthesis formed by his birth and death we find as little tangible incident as is discoverable in the briefer span of Shakespeare"s fifty-two years. Here is material for profundity and ciphers!
(1) With the single exception of the writer of some verses in the _Musarum Deliciae_ (1656) who mentions
That old sack Young Herrick took to entertain The Muses in a sprightly vein.
Herrick"s second sojourn in London covered the period between 1648 and 1662, curing which interim he fades from sight, excepting for the instant when he is publishing his book. If he engaged in further literary work there are no evidences of it beyond one contribution to the "Lacrymae Musarum" in 1649.
He seems to have had lodgings, for a while at least, in St. Anne"s, Westminster. With the court in exile and the grim Roundheads seated in the seats of the mighty, it was no longer the merry London of his early manhood. Time and war had thinned the ranks of friends; in the old haunts the old familiar faces were wanting. Ben Jonson was dead, Waller banished, and many another comrade "in disgrace with fortune and men"s eyes." As Herrick walked through crowded Cheapside or along the dingy river-bank in those years, his thought must have turned more than once to the little vicarage in Devonshire, and lingered tenderly.
On the accession of Charles II. a favorable change of wind wafted Herrick back to his former moorings at Dean Prior, the obnoxious Syms having been turned adrift. This occurred on August 24, 1662, the seventy-first anniversary of the poet"s baptism. Of Herrick"s movements after that, tradition does not furnish even the shadow of an outline.
The only notable event concerning him is recorded twelve years later in the parish register: "Robert Herrick, vicker, was buried ye 15th day October, 1674." He was eighty-three years old. The location of his grave is unknown. In 1857 a monument to his memory was erected in Dean Church.
And this is all.
II
THE details that have come down to us touching Herrick"s private life are as meagre as if he had been a Marlowe or a Shakespeare. But were they as ample as could be desired they would still be unimportant compared with the single fact that in 1648 he gave to the world his "Hesperides." The environments of the man were accidental and transitory. The significant part of him we have, and that is enduring so long as wit, fancy, and melodious numbers hold a charm for mankind.
A fine thing incomparably said instantly becomes familiar, and has henceforth a sort of dateless excellence. Though it may have been said three hundred years ago, it is as modern as yesterday; though it may have been said yesterday, it has the trick of seeming to have been always in our keeping. This quality of remoteness and nearness belongs, in a striking degree, to Herrick"s poems. They are as novel to-day as they were on the lips of a choice few of his contemporaries, who, in reading them in their freshness, must surely have been aware here and there of the ageless grace of old idyllic poets dead and gone.
Herrick was the bearer of no heavy message to the world, and such message as he had he was apparently in no hurry to deliver. On this point he somewhere says:
Let others to the printing presse run fast; Since after death comes glory, I "ll not haste.
He had need of his patience, for he was long detained on the road by many of those obstacles that waylay poets on their journeys to the printer.
Herrick was nearly sixty years old when he published the "Hesperides."
It was, I repeat, no heavy message, and the bearer was left an unconscionable time to cool his heels in the antechamber. Though his pieces had been set to music by such composers as Lawes, Ramsay, and Laniers, and his court poems had naturally won favor with the Cavalier party, Herrick cut but a small figure at the side of several of his rhyming contemporaries who are now forgotten. It sometimes happens that the light love-song, reaching few or no ears at its first singing, outlasts the seemingly more prosperous ode which, dealing with some pa.s.sing phase of thought, social or political, gains the instant applause of the mult.i.tude. In most cases the timely ode is somehow apt to fade with the circ.u.mstance that inspired it, and becomes the yesterday"s editorial of literature. Oblivion likes especially to get hold of occasional poems. That makes it hard for feeble poets laureate.
Mr. Henry James once characterized Alphonse Daudet as "a great little novelist." Robert Herrick is a great little poet. The brevity of his poems, for he wrote nothing _de longue haleine_, would place him among the minor singers; his workmanship places him among the masters. The Herricks were not a family of goldsmiths and lapidaries for nothing. The accurate touch of the artificer in jewels and costly metals was one of the gifts transmitted to Robert Herrick. Much of his work is as exquisite and precise as the chasing on a dagger-hilt by Cellini; the line has nearly always that vine-like fluency which seems impromptu, and is never the result of anything but austere labor. The critic who, borrowing Milton"s words, described these carefully wrought poems as "wood-notes wild" showed a singular lapse of penetration. They are full of subtle simplicity. Here we come across a stanza as severely cut as an antique cameo--the stanza, for instance, in which the poet speaks of his lady-love"s "winter face"--and there a couplet that breaks into unfading daffodils and violets. The art, though invisible, is always there. His amatory songs and catches are such poetry as Orlando would have liked to hang on the boughs in the forest of Arden. None of the work is hastily done, not even that portion of it we could wish had not been done at all. Be the motive grave or gay, it is given that faultlessness of form which distinguishes everything in literature that has survived its own period. There is no such thing as "form" alone; it is only the close-grained material that takes the highest finish. The structure of Herrick"s verse, like that of Blake, is simple to the verge of innocence. Such rhythmic intricacies as those of Sh.e.l.ley, Tennyson, and Swinburne he never dreamed of. But his manner has this perfection: it fits his matter as the cup of the acorn fits its meat.
Of pa.s.sion, in the deeper sense, Herrick has little or none. Here are no "tears from the depth of some divine despair," no probings into the tragic heart of man, no insight that goes much farther than the pathos of a cowslip on a maiden"s grave. The tendrils of his verse reach up to the light, and love the warmer side of the garden wall. But the reader who does not detect the seriousness under the lightness misreads Herrick. Nearly all true poets have been wholesome and joyous singers.
A pessimistic poet, like the poisonous ivy, is one of nature"s sarcasms.
In his own bright pastoral way Herrick must always remain unexcelled.
His limitations are certainly narrow, but they leave him in the sunshine. Neither in his thought nor in his utterance is there any complexity; both are as pellucid as a woodland pond, content to duplicate the osiers and ferns, and, by chance, the face of a girl straying near its crystal. His is no troubled stream in which large trout are caught. He must be accepted on his own terms.
The greatest poets have, with rare exceptions, been the most indebted to their predecessors or to their contemporaries. It has wittily been remarked that only mediocrity is ever wholly original. Impressionability is one of the conditions of the creative faculty: the sensitive mind is the only mind that invents. What the poet reads, sees, and feels, goes into his blood, and becomes an ingredient of his originality. The color of his thought instinctively blends itself with the color of its affinities. A writer"s style, if it have distinction, is the outcome of a hundred styles.
Though a generous borrower of the ancients, Herrick appears to have been exceptionally free from the influence of contemporary minds. Here and there in his work are traces of his beloved Ben Jonson, or fleeting impressions of Fletcher, and in one instance a direct infringement on Suckling; but the sum of Herrick"s obligations of this sort is inconsiderable.
This indifference to other writers of his time, this insularity, was doubtless his loss. The more exalted imagination of Vaughan or Marvell or Herbert might have taught him a deeper note than he sounded in his purely devotional poems. Milton, of course, moved in a sphere apart.
Shakespeare, whose personality still haunted the clubs and taverns which Herrick frequented on his first going up to London, failed to lay any appreciable spell upon him. That great name, moreover, is a jewel which finds no setting in Herrick"s rhyme. His general reticence relative to brother poets is extremely curious when we reflect on his penchant for addressing four-line epics to this or that individual. They were, in the main, obscure individuals, whose ident.i.ty is scarcely worth establishing. His London life, at two different periods, brought him into contact with many of the celebrities of the day; but his verse has helped to confer immortality on very few of them. That his verse had the secret of conferring immortality was one of his unshaken convictions.
Shakespeare had not a finer confidence when he wrote,
Not marble nor the gilded monuments Of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme,
than has Herrick whenever he speaks of his own poetry, and he is not by any means backward in speaking of it. It was the breath of his nostrils.
Without his Muse those nineteen years in that dull, secluded Devonshire village would have been unendurable.
His poetry has the value and the defect of that seclusion. In spite, however, of his contracted horizon there is great variety in Herrick"s themes. Their scope cannot be stated so happily as he has stated it:
I sing of brooks, of blossoms, birds and bowers, Of April, May, of June, and July flowers; I sing of May-poles, hock-carts, wa.s.sails, wakes, Of bridegrooms, brides, and of their bridal-cakes; I write of Youth, of Love, and have access By these to sing of cleanly wantonness; I sing of dews, of rains, and piece by piece Of balm, of oil, of spice and ambergris; I sing of times trans-shifting, and I write How roses first came red and lilies white; I write of groves, of twilights, and I sing The Court of Mab, and of the Fairy King; I write of h.e.l.l; I sing (and ever shall) Of Heaven, and hope to have it after all.
Never was there so pretty a table of contents! When you open his book the breath of the English rural year fans your cheek; the pages seem to exhale wildwood and meadow smells, as if sprigs of tansy and lavender had been shut up in the volume and forgotten. One has a sense of hawthorn hedges and wide-spreading oaks, of open lead-set lattices half hidden with honeysuckle; and distant voices of the haymakers, returning home in the rosy afterglow, fall dreamily on one"s ear, as sounds should fall when fancy listens. There is no English poet so thoroughly English as Herrick. He painted the country life of his own time as no other has painted it at any time.
It is to be remarked that the majority of English poets regarded as national have sought their chief inspiration in almost every land and period excepting their own. Shakespeare went to Italy, Denmark, Greece, Egypt, and to many a hitherto unfooted region of the imagination, for plot and character. It was not Whitehall Garden, but the Garden of Eden and the celestial s.p.a.ces, that lured Milton. It is the Ode on a Grecian Urn, The Eve of St. Agnes, and the n.o.ble fragment of Hyperion that have given Keats his s.p.a.cious niche in the gallery of England"s poets.
Sh.e.l.ley"s two masterpieces, Prometheus Unbound and The Cenci, belong respectively to Greece and Italy. Browning"s The Ring and the Book is Italian; Tennyson wandered to the land of myth for the Idylls of the King, and Matthew Arnold"s Sohrab and Rustum--a narrative poem second in dignity to none produced in the nineteenth century--is a Persian story.
But Herrick"s "golden apples" sprang from the soil in his own day, and reddened in the mist and sunshine of his native island.
Even the fairy poems, which must be cla.s.sed by themselves, are not wanting in local flavor. Herrick"s fairy world is an immeasurable distance from that of "A Midsummer Night"s Dream." Puck and t.i.tania are of finer breath than Herrick"s little folk, who may be said to have Devonshire manners and to live in a miniature England of their own. Like the magician who summons them from nowhere, they are fond of color and perfume and substantial feasts, and indulge in heavy draughts--from the cups of morning-glories. In the tiny sphere they inhabit everything is marvelously adapted to their requirement; nothing is out of proportion or out of perspective. The elves are a strictly religious people in their winsome way, "part pagan, part papistical;" they have their pardons and indulgences, their psalters and chapels, and
An apple"s-core is hung up dried, With rattling kernels, which is rung To call to Morn and Even-song;
and very conveniently,
Hard by, I" th" sh.e.l.l of half a nut, The Holy-water there is put.
It is all delightfully naive and fanciful, this elfin-world, where the impossible does not strike one as incongruous, and the England of 1648 seems never very far away.
It is only among the apparently unpremeditated lyrical flights of the Elizabethan dramatists that one meets with anything like the lilt and liquid flow of Herrick"s songs. While in no degree Shakespearian echoes, there are epithalamia and dirges of his that might properly have fallen from the lips of Posthumus in "Cymbeline." This delicate epicede would have fitted Imogen:
Here a solemne fast we keepe While all beauty lyes asleepe; Husht be all things; no noyse here But the toning of a teare, Or a sigh of such as bring Cowslips for her covering.
Many of the pieces are purely dramatic in essence; the Mad Maid"s Song, for example. The lyrist may speak in character, like the dramatist. A poet"s lyrics may be, as most of Browning"s are, just so many _dramatis personae_. "Enter a Song singing" is the stage-direction in a seventeenth-century play whose name escapes me. The sentiment dramatized in a lyric is not necessarily a personal expression. In one of his couplets Herrick neatly denies that his more mercurial utterances are intended presentations of himself:
To his Book"s end this last line he"d have placed-- Jocund his Muse was, but his Life was chaste.
In point of fact he was a whole group of imaginary lovers in one.
Silvia, Anthea, Electra, Perilla, Perenna, and the rest of those lively ladies ending in _a_, were doubtless, for the most part, but airy phantoms dancing--as they should not have danced--through the brain of a sentimental old bachelor who happened to be a vicar of the Church of England. Even with his overplus of heart it would have been quite impossible for him to have had enough to go round had there been so numerous actual demands upon it.
Thus much may be conceded to Herrick"s verse: at its best it has wings that carry it nearly as close to heaven"s gate as any of Shakespeare"s lark-like interludes. The brevity of the poems and their uniform smoothness sometimes produce the effect of monotony. The crowded richness of the line advises a desultory reading. But one must go back to them again and again. They bewitch the memory, having once caught it, and insist on saying themselves over and over. Among the poets of England the author of the "Hesperides" remains, and is likely to remain, unique. As Shakespeare stands alone in his vast domain, so Herrick stands alone in his scanty plot of ground.
"Shine, Poet! in thy place, and be content."