Palmer's Herbert

GEORGE HERBERT is conventionally ranked among the minor poets. The classification has no great value, and instead of serving a useful purpose may only hinder the recognition of poetic greatness. In this edition of Herbert’s poems, Professor Palmer has freed himself from the trammels of relative and conventional estimates. He has done for a minor poet, if such he must be called, what has hitherto only been done for the great masters of song. He has subjected him to a study, encyclopædic in its range, a study minute, thorough, and seemingly exhaustive. He has done a work never attempted before, and it is so final in its results that henceforth every student of Herbert must reckon with it. So long as Herbert is read, or studied, will Mr. Palmer be associated with his name, as the commentator who rescued him from the neglect or ignorance which obscured his meaning and purpose. It is no slight task which Mr. Palmer has accomplished. In the absence of creative work which is the characteristic of our time, he has lifted the veil from the poet of another age, and has revealed to us his beauty and his power. Herbert now lives again, better understood than he was even by his contemporaries, and he speaks to the modern world, bringing to it a message needed and longed for. He can hardly again be classed among minor poets. He is not to be judged by the amount of his poetic work alone but by its quality, by the purpose which inspired him, and by his influence on those who followed him. In the light in which Mr. Palmer has disclosed him he is great and to be ranked among the few to whom the world is most indebted.

Herbert has always had his admirers, — a small number it is true, —who have seen that he possessed some subtle charm for the religious imagination beyond any other. Such was Mr. Emerson, who in his address on Books (1872) said of him: “He was a person of singular elevation of mind, and I think every young man and every young woman who wishes inspiration from books, should find for their Sunday reading and their Monday reading the little volume of George Herbert’s poems. I speak of it, because it is a little the best religious English book that I recall. I don’t know any one who has spoken so sweetly to the religious sentiment in us as George Herbert.” The late Senator Hoar was a devotee of Herbert, one of those who was looking forward to the appearance of this new study of his life and works. Over the fireplace in his library at his home in Worcester were inscribed these lines from Herbert, —

There is deep significance in the ups and downs of Herbert’s popularity, or in the names of those who have admired him. In his own age he was recognized for his high merit by his friend Lord Bacon, by Walton and Bunyan; by other poets, —Donne, Vaughan, and Crashaw. King Charles I found solace in reading him; Baxter thought he spoke of God as one who knew Him. But in the eighteenth century he was neglected; with the exception of Addison, Cowper stands alone in praising him, “finding delight in reading him all day long.” In the last century there came a renewed interest. “During the last quarter of the century,” says Mr. Palmer, “ a new edition of Herbert has appeared almost every other year.” But he also adds, “In this period of Herbert’s popularity he is more bought than read. Half a dozen of his poems are famous; but the remainder, many of them equally fitted for household words, nobody looks at. They lie hidden beneath ancestral encumbrances which editors have not had the courage to clear away. . . . The arrangement of the book preserves its original chaos. No attempt has ever been made to set the poems in intelligible order. The many religious, artistic, and personal problems which they involve remain unexamined. . . . Present means of access to him are in short elementary.”

It has been Mr. Palmer’s object to remedy these defects, and to enable the many to find in Herbert what has hitherto been accessible only to the few. It was to have been expected from the author that his research would go as deep as the inmost spring of the poet’s life. There is here also a rich combination of author and subject, for Mr. Palmer has put himself into the work. Everywhere is visible the hand of the accomplished translator of the Odyssey and of the Antigone, the subtle and profound critic, the incessant student and observer of the ways of man in the world. No man, poet or other, could have been more fortunate than Herbert has been in meeting with such a mind whose gifts have been concentrated in one supreme effort to know and to make known. In the preface, Mr. Palmer has told us, better than any one reviewing his work can do, exactly what he proposed to himself to accomplish. It is a preface which will strike the reader with its unwonted tone of personal disclosure. It tells what otherwise we should not have known, why he should have bestowed all his powers, this marvelous labor, these prodigious pains, these years of toil, in elucidating the life and poetry of George Herbert. “There are few to whom this book will seem worth while. It embodies long labor spent on a minor poet, and will probably never be read entire by any one. But that is a reason for its existence. Lavishness is its aim. The book is a box of spikenard, poured in inappeasable love over one who has attended my life. ... He has rendered me profoundly grateful for what he has shown me of himself, — the struggling soul, the high-bred gentleman, the sagacious observer, the master of language, the persistent artist. I could not die in peace, if I did not raise a costly monument to his memory.”

Professor Palmer’s study of Herbert is so comprehensive in its range, so rich and varied, exhaustive and yet suggestive, there is so much which compels attention as new and striking where mere allusion or reference would be of no avail, that it baffles the reviewer who would fain do justice to the subject. His work must be described in his own words as “ encyclopædic in its character.” He has furnished a “critical dictionary” by which the meaning of the poet may be ascertained, through the text, the facts of the author’s life, and the literary criticism of his age. The comment of other students of Herbert is included. His own critical comment includes explanations of words and phrases, the tracing of connections of thought, references to similar passages whether in Herbert or his contemporaries. The cross references attached to every poem, costing an immense amount of labor, serve to illustrate Herbert’s curious tenacity of thought or phrase, making him comment on himself, and “out of his own mouth to explain his peculiar locutions.” In addition to this fullness of comment, there are chronological tables, lists of textual variations, indexes of titles of the poems, arranged in the traditional order or according to the new classification, as well as an index of first lines to be found in no other edition. These indexes are repeated in each of the two volumes containing the poems. There are numerous illustrations, among them the homes of Herbert and of his ancestors, of the churches with which his name is associated, gathered by the author “in pilgrimages to every spot where Herbert’s feet have stood.” The most important of these is the new portrait of the poet which forms the frontispiece of the first volume, and Mr. Palmer justly felicitates himself and his readers in securing a representation of Herbert’s features, exhibiting him with “a fullness, complexity and likelihood such as no written criticism can give.” The new portrait condemns as inadequate and misleading the work of earlier engravers. It is a face, to use Mr. Palmer’s words, “marked by high breeding, scholarship, devoutness, disappointment, humor, fastidiousness, pathos, and pride,” the face of one who has “moved in courtly circles, and convinces us that he was once alive.”

The greater part of Mr. Palmer’s first volume is given up to elaborate dissertations on the life of Herbert, on the man in his personality and character, on the type of religious poetry which he represents, on his style and technique as a poet, and lastly on the text and order of the poems. Special prefaces are also furnished to each of the twelve groups into which the poems are divided. Too much can hardly be said in praise of these essays and prefaces. They are terse and direct, marked by fervor and grace of diction, full of concentrated interest, illuminative and inspiring. Their effect is to beget enthusiasm in the reader, till he marvels at the author’s skill and success, as he moves on triumphantly to a great conclusion.

One would like to dwell on each of these dissertations, but they are too condensed, too full of information to be reproduced even in barest outline. One point may at least be alluded to, the analysis of the causes of Herbert’s obscurity, which is treated in masterly fashion. Mr. Palmer admits that Herbert is difficult to read beyond any other English poet, nor does “nearness of acquaintance remove the intricacy; it is perpetual.” There are moments of lucidity which merely make the prevailing darkness deeper. “What can have made a writer, whose diction is on the whole sound and who is ever alert, artistic and highly rational, so difficult to read?” In his answer to the question Mr. Palmer may be briefly summarized. The difficulty is owdng to the private character of his verse, circulated among his friends but never receiving public criticism. He was analyzing his inner life, apart from the consciousness of a possible judgment by the reading world. Fullness of record was his aim rather than the impression to be made; and he neglected the art of soliciting other minds. For these intimate disclosures we pay heavily, forced as we are to seek connections of thought, explain transitions and allusions, and, above all, catch the mood, or all is blind. Even the titles of the poems are in some cases so many enigmas, not to be solved without patience and imagination. Herbert’s object was not so much to gain a hearing as to reveal the workings of a soul. His poetry is a record or “ picture of spiritual conflicts that have passed between my soul and God.” The intricacy of his verse is in some measure inherent in his theme. In this connection and elsewhere Mr. Palmer protests against the epithet “holy,” when applied to Herbert, as most misleading. He always remained to himself, whatever he may have seemed to others,

And further, the age of Herbert was characterized by a mental exuberance in which he shared, — an age of intellectual audacity, full of enigmas, given to exploiting new doctrines. This intellectualism invaded the church, showing itself in theological refinements; to take a good example, in the complexity of the Westminster Confession, when compared with the briefer, simpler doctrinal statements of the sixteenth century. It was an age which enjoyed difficulties and the accomplishment of feats, such as condensing thought, and putting as much meaning as possible into a given compass. Herbert studied compactness till he became a master in the art of forcing words to carry a little more than their wonted meaning. Herbert was reacting, also, against the smooth, honeyed mellifluousness of the versifiers in the preceding age. He employed at times rugged words, jolting phrases. The impression in reading some of his poems may be compared with riding in a vehicle without springs over a road paved with cobble stones. He shared in another peculiarity of his time, the use of what are called “conceits;” whose essence, as Mr. Palmer defines it, lies in tracing resemblances. Sometimes they are far-fetched and remote, “false conceits;” or they may be noble conceits, as when “a mind aglow with meditative feeling finds its moods reflected from every object that meets its sight or remembrance.” Herbert indulges occasionally in conceits of the baser sort, and they repel the reader; but so did every poet from Shakespeare to Dryden. Herbert is saved from any excess by his artistic sense.

There are reasons enough, then, why Herbert should be a difficult poet to read. His conceits are distasteful, and everywhere he calls for intellectual effort on the part of the reader, for study and sympathetic attention; but the reward is great, — the disclosure of a rich, pathetic, and individual personality. He was a pioneer in the development of the short poem, and whatever his defects, “he chose wise means for reaching his special ends. He is the first of our lyric poets who can fairly be called a conscious artist; the first who systematically tries to shape each of his short poems by a predetermined plan, and that too a plan involved in the nature of his subject. . . . He was in possession of a new method and one of enormous importance.”

As to Herbert’s character as a man, it can best be read in his poems. It falsifies him to detach in any psychological study his conditions of temperament or intellect or body. In his essay on “ The Man ” Mr. Palmer has noted some of his peculiarities. Walton says of him that he was of “a stature inclining toward tallness,” and that “he was lean to an extremity.” Others have mentioned the “elegance of his person,” and how his looks and behavior begot “an awful reverence for his person.” He possessed great refinement of the senses, a feature of his character which Mr. Palmer has illustrated amply from his verse. He was most particular in the matter of dress, and given to enlarging on the proprieties. His eye was alert in noting the traits of natural objects, but he had none of the mystic’s brooding over nature. Music was his passion. This exquisite physical organization was an essential part of his equipment for poetry. On his moral side, the two temptations he most dreaded were idleness and lust. Woman stands to him for temptation and disturbance. There is strenuosity of temperament with comparative ineffectiveness of result, especially in the earlier part of his life. He was “a lover of retiredness,” says Walton, which does not mean that he was exactly unsocial, for he had many warm friendships with able men. Pride was in him, and fastidiousness, and a dignity which would not bend to the ways of others. A certain pessimistic vein appears in his poetry at times, the tendency of the religious artist to “blacken earthly conditions for the glory of the divine;” but in spite of his quivering sense of sin Herbert is an optimist. His mind was capacious and disciplined. He may be called a man of wide learning, in divinity and in other lines as well; he was a linguist, familiar with Greek and Latin, French, Italian, and Spanish; he was full of intellectual curiosity, not indifferent to astronomy and alchemy. But he was independent and self-sufficing; he rarely quotes; what he knows he has incorporated as his own. His friendship with Lord Bacon, and with Lord Herbert of Cherbury does not imply any taste or capacity for abstract philosophy. He does not lack fundamental ideas, but he is not a philosopher, and does not concern himself with questioning basic ideas, or inquiring into the fundamental principles of things. He is the interpreter of the deeper meaning of things. Primarily and always, he is the artist, contriving forms of beauty, accepting the world as he finds it, and out of its material ready made, constructing a beautiful intellectual home.

Turning from the man to his life and career in the world, it must be said that the Herbert whom Mr. Palmer protrays differs widely from the portrait given by Walton, or rather from the total impression which Walton leaves. What has chiefly impressed Mr. Palmer is the fact that the greater part of Herbert’s life was spent in the world, in courtly circles, in the society of the fashionable and the great; that he was ambitious for distinction and for posts of honor in the State; that he turned to the Church in his later years, when disappointment and failure, the loss of patrons and of the favor of the court, loss also of health, made his secular ambition impossible. Walton on the other hand passes lightly over these many years, in order to dwell on the short period — not quite three years — during which Herbert served as rector of Bemerton Church. In painting the “Saint of Bemerton,” in giving no heed to the thirty-six “vacillating years” spent in the service of the world, Walton has succeeded in imparting such a romantic color to Herbert that it has taken a firm hold on the popular imagination, and in Mr. Palmer’s judgment “constitutes at present the most serious obstacle to the poet’s cool assessment.”

The ancestry of Herbert is closely related to his personality. He belonged to one of the oldest and stateliest of English families, which included in its extent three earldoms, Pembroke, Carnarvon, and Powis. The Montgomery branch of the family from which Herbert sprang was of a military spirit, a race of courageous men, quarreling easily, sensitive in matters of honor, rough in dealing out justice, but trained as gentlemen, and educated according to their capacity. The religious tendency in Herbert came from his mother, also descended from a noted family. Her piety may be seen, not only in George Herbert, but in his older brother, Lord Herbert of Cherbury, although in him it takes the form of protest against traditional Orthodoxy, and he is known as the forerunner of the Deistic movement. The mother of the poet possessed beauty in high degree, together with social charm; she had intellect, passion, artistic and literary tastes. Her influence upon George Herbert was one of the most powerful factors in his development. A deep contradiction may have run in Herbert’s blood as the result of such an ancestry, reminding us of Augustine with a heathen father and a Christian mother. — the man of the world and the religious idealist struggling in him for the supremacy.

George Herbert was born in 1593, the fifth son among ten children. From his infancy he was destined by his mother for the church, and with this purpose in view he went to Cambridge, where he took his bachelor’s degree in 1612, pursuing the study of divinity in preparation for his sacred calling. But instead of proceeding at once to take orders, he continued to reside at Cambridge. He took his M. A. degree in 1616, when he was also appointed Major Fellow, an appointment soon followed by that of Prælector in Rhetoric. In 1619 he gained the post of Public Orator at Cambridge, a position he coveted, and regarded as a peculiar honor. There seems to have been at this point in his life an effort to defend his attitude, as not inconsistent with a religious vocation. His friend Sir Francis Nethersole objected that the position of Orator of the University “being civil may divert me too much from Divinity, at which, not without cause, he thinks I aim. But I have wrote him back that this dignity hath no such earthiness in it, but it may very well be joined with heaven; or if it had to others, yet to me it should not, for aught I yet know.”

Herbert held the Public Oratorship for eight years. During these years he had some ecclesiastical connection with Leighton Church, for whose restoration he solicited funds from his friends. But he was also aspiring to become a Secretary of State, and his expectation was backed by powerful friends at court. He had also won the favor of King James, who conceived a strong liking for him. He had every reason to hope for success, when in 1627 there came the great crisis in his life. The death of his patrons, loss of royal favor, the death of his mother,— a sore bereavement, — a threatened consumption, inward conflicts, — all these constitute what Mr. Palmer calls the crisis period. He now went into retirement for two years, at the end of which he suddenly married, and as suddenly, and not without some external pressure, took priest’s orders (1630), and began the short career at Bemerton, where he died in 1633 at the age of thirty-nine.

Beneath the hesitation, and through all the “vacillating years,” Mr. Palmer finds one consistent purpose, which constitutes the unity of Herbert’s career. He was a poet, and a religious poet, with a distinctive mission before as well as after he went to Bemerton, but with more prolific energy and devotion, and with a greater intensity of religious fervor in those later years. So early as 1610 he wrote two sonnets to his mother in which he declared his resolution that his “ poor abilities in poetry shall be all and ever consecrated to God’s glory.” It should be his aim to “reprove the vanity of those many Love-poems that are daily writ and consecrated to Venus and to bewail that so few are writ that look toward God and heaven.” To this aim he adhered, despite the distractions of his secular duties, although the earlier output was small, about one third of the whole number of his poems. Mr. Palmer has shown that there is no evidence of Herbert’s having turned aside to secular poetry.

From the features of Herbert’s life as thus summarized, with its contradictions, its vacillation, its crisis, and its final consecration, Mr. Palmer drew the inference that if the clue could be found the poems would be seen to correspond with the distinct phases of the poet’s experience. How the clue was obtained is told in the dissertation on “The Text and Order of the Poems,” which is invested with the romantic interest of a great discovery. To do justice to this narrative in any condensed report is impossible. It is the story of a manuscript found some thirty years ago, whose significance had not yet been recognized. When Mr. Palmer turned his attention to this so-called Williams manuscript, he became aware, by a process of reasoning clearly stated and amply justified, that it contained only those poems written by Herbert in his earlier years, before he went to Bemerton. No poems were among them giving expression to the deeper mood of the crisis through which he passed after going into retirement, nor were there any bearing evidence that the author was in holy orders, or dealing with the joys and perplexities of the Christian ministry. Other evidence tending to the same conclusion was the inferiority of the readings when compared with the published poems; also their general character, the majority being of “an average sort, more marked by Herbert’s peculiarities than by the traits which commend him to all time.” Thus the Williams manuscript became “epoch-making” in its significance, for it afforded “ the means of sorting the poetry of Herbert and of distinguishing an earlier and a later portion.” This point established, there then remained the task of studying the other poems in order to their reclassification in accordance with a self-evident method.

When Herbert entered upon his work as rector of the Church at Bemerton, he threw himself with absolute devotion into the duties it involved. Mr. Palmer has called this last stage the period of “consecration.” The change is most extraordinary, the revolution in his life complete. The secular world, the state with its opportunities and emoluments, the society of the great with its fascination, all that had once formed the object of his interest or ambition, — to these things he makes no allusion, they seem to be as dead to him, as if they had never been. The years from 1627 to 1633 were critical and momentous for the English nation, and full of the portents of disastrous revolution, but Herbert does not allude to them. He is now shut up to the sphere of God and the soul, God and the church, as if they were the only realities. Such poems as “ The Priesthood,” “Peace,” “The Pearl,” “Obedience,” “The Rose,” “An Offering,” “Praise” and “Love,” have a new meaning and additional force, as they are read in the new order of arrangement; they furnish the evidence of a compact of the soul with God.

But within the period of consecration there are distinctions calling for further subdivision. At first the poet was supremely happy in his new vocation. He idealized every feature of his high office. Although he ministered to a small flock, mainly composed of farmers or uneducated people, including many poor, he threw a halo around his office, which has made his Country Parson a classic,— the romance, as it were, of the Christian ministry. Herbert is here drawing his own portrait, as well, his high birth, his refinement and fastidiousness, his strong common sense, his knowledge of life, of men, and of books, that indefinable quality and charm of the man, which gives force and distinction to all his work. Mr. Palmer has designated this first phase of Herbert’s clerical life, “The Happy Priest.” The poems which he has placed under this heading justify the new arrangement. They are songs of praise and gratitude, indicated by the titles, “Gratefulness,” “Paradise,” “The Quip,” “Praise,” “The Invitation,” “The Banquet,” “Even-Song.” To this group belongs one of the most exquisite of all Herbert’s poems, — “The Clasping of Hands,” — which reminds one of Shakespeare’s Phænix and the Turtle, and has a certain profound philosophic and theological bearing, more valuable than any dogmatic formula.

Under the title of “Bemerton Study” are given the poems of a more reflective and leisurely character, including one of the longest, called “Providence.” But now there came still another phase of Herbert’s life, — Mr. Palmer calls it a “reaction,”—when after the first exuberance of joy and satisfaction there ensued a consciousness of irksome restrictions. Cut off from society, ministering to a small group of farm laborers, he began to feel the contrast with his earlier and larger life in the full tide of human affairs. At first he had thought and sung as if there could be no satiety in his heavenly occupation. Now the conflicts of the crisis period were renewed. Human desires, personal interests, reasserted themselves, giving rise to “stormy poems” which Mr. Palmer has brought together under the heading “Restlessness.” Again one is convinced of the justness of the grouping. Such poems as “Love Unknown,” or “The Collar” can be best understood, indeed can only be adequately appreciated, when the conditions which Mr. Palmer describes are kept in mind. To this same group belongs “The Pilgrimage,” among the best known and most admired of Herbert’s poems, where he anticipates the allegory of Bunyan, in condensed outline. All these poems of “Restlessness” have a pathetic quality, and as Mr. Palmer has remarked of them, it is not the saint, but the man who is here making the appeal. In “The Crosse” the disillusion is most apparent, where even his ecclesiastical ambition, based upon wealth and family, is lamented as having issued in failure.

It may have been that ill-health was partly the cause of the rebellious mood which incited to these intensely personal poems. The last two groups,called “Suffering” and “Death,” were written when disease was making rapid headway, and it had begun to be evident that life was drawing to a close. There is no longer rebellion, as vitality declines, but infinite pathos and submission. But however the body may have decayed, there was no diminution of poetic skill. The poem called “The Flower,” which Coleridge thought “delicious,” contains a stanza revealing Herbert’s gift of poetic imagery at its best, combined with his mastery of words and of their adaptation to their destined end and impression. To this stanza as representative of Herbert’s peculiar gift, Mr. Palmer has called special attention.

The well-known poem, “ Virtue,” —

is placed by Mr. Palmer among those written shortly before the poet’s death.

Among Herbert’s poems, there is one called “ Hope,” which may be taken as a fair specimen of the difficulties of his verse, with its conceits, its condensation and ellipses of thought, where spontaneity and reality seem to be overshadowed by ingenuity. And yet beneath these outward signs there runs the sad intensity of passion. The poem is here given, with Mr. Palmer’s interpretation, as an illustration of his power in making Herbert intelligible: —

HOPE

Mr. Palmer connects the poem with the contradictions of love, a constant subject with Herbert. His lines might have been called “The Weariness of Hope,” “To Love I gave my time, prayers and tears. Serving Love long and get-

ting small return, I remind him of time passing, prayers offered, tears shed. Still he gives only hopes, visions, immature fruit. I despair. Translating into abstract terms Herbert’s imagery of things, the sequence of his thought might be represented thus,” —

Mr. Palmer’s work is likely to encounter some adverse criticism. That his rearrangement of the poems in chronological order will be justified and in the main adopted there can be no doubt. This is one of his most important contributions to the enrichment of literature. But in going further, and in dropping the general title of “The Church,” under which name the poems of Herbert have come down to us from his own day, and probably with his approval, though this is not certain, he will be thought by many to have gone too far. There is a significance in this title to which Mr. Palmer may not have done full justice. He has restricted it to a certain number of the poems where Herbert celebrates Anglican usages; but even accepting his principle of restriction, there are many poems quite as much entitled to a place under “The Church” which he has not included. “Even-Song” and “The British Church,” not to mention others, may well have been placed among the poems inspired by Anglican piety.

Again, Mr. Palmer’s effort to rescue Herbert from the exclusive appropriation of High Anglicanism will be met by demurrers. On the whole, and from an a priori point of view, as it may be called, Herbert’s contemporaries, the High Churchmen of the day, including Izaak Walton, probably did not err in claiming him as their own. In the ecclesiastical sphere there is an instinct in these things which is sure and well nigh infallible. Mr. Palmer is right in tracing a certain Puritan affiliation in Herbert, but this does not make him any the less a representative of High Anglicanism. There is a type of Anglican High Churchmanship, which is secular in its tone, and which, as in the Caroline Age, sought to strengthen the Church by an alliance with the crown. But there is another type, taking an ascetic view of life, disowning the State or seeking strength by separation from the State, and claiming to be superior to all civil relationships. This latter type, which became so prevalent in the last century, in consequence of the Oxford movement, found its precursor in Ferrar of Little Gidding and in George Herbert, his intimate friend. Such kindred spirits in the seventeenth century might have recognized Keble in the nineteenth as having a common ideal. For the essence of this latter kind of High Churchmanship is identical with the spirit of Puritanism. Augustine and Hildebrand, Calvin and Knox, Newman, Pusey, and Liddon are at one in the dualism they assert between God and the world, in the view that religion consists in renunciation, rather than in consecration, of the world.

It is a small point but it may be deserving of notice, that it was not the usage in Herbert’s time, nor has it been since in the Anglican Church, with some exceptions, to speak of the “priesthood” as the one technical designation of the Anglican clergy. In the Prayer Book of Herbert’s time the word “minister” is of more frequent occurrence. When Archbishop Laud, according to a doubtful tradition, arranged the Prayer Book for the Scottish Church, he omitted the words “priest” and “priesthood,” substituting “minister” or “presbyter” as their equivalent. The word “priest” had become discredited and obnoxious. It was not till the Restoration that the effort was made to rehabilitate it, and then in part for the purpose of making the Prayer Book impossible to the Puritans. Mr. Palmer’s frequent employment of the word is therefore liable to be misunderstood; it anticipates and seems to sanction the controversial usage of a later generation. Herbert himself used the word Priesthood once, as a title for a poem; he called his book on the pastoral life The Country Parson.

But these are minor criticisms which touch only the fringe of Mr. Palmer’s great achievement in giving to us the real Herbert, in revealing his place in the long literary perspective, and in vindicating his rightful claim. Herbert is henceforth no longer an enigma, lumped without consideration among the lyric poets of the seventeenth century. He takes precedence of them all. What makes him great is that he established religious lyric poetry upon a sure foundation, illustrating it so supremely as to entitle him to be called its discoverer. This is indeed a claim which will not go unchallenged. Mr. Palmer has anticipated the objections and has made the necessary qualifications of his statement. But even when due allowance is made for these, it was a bold thing to do, requiring courage as well as knowledge, to assert of Herbert that he produced a “new species of English poetry, establishing it so securely and making it so common, that we now forget that a Herbert was required for its production.” Those who are interested in this matter should read carefully the author’s introductory essay on “The type of Religious Poetry” and also the preface to the poems of the “Crisis” period where possible objections are met. There were visitors to America before Columbus discovered it. There were many workers in the field of the religious lyric before Herbert appeared. Among them in England were Southwell, Spenser, Donne, Crashaw; and if we go back to the mediæval period before the Renaissance others may be found, who uttered “the cry of the individual heart to God ” which Mr. Palmer gives as the essence of the religious lyric. There was a preparation therefore for Herbert. “In no strict sense can Herbert be said to have created it, for it is grounded in one of the most constant cravings of human nature. Yet the true discoverer is not he who first perceives a thing, but he who discerns its importance and its place in life. And this is what Herbert did. He is the first in England to bring this universal craving to adequate utterance.”

It may throw additional light on Herbert’s place in literature if we condense into a momentary glance the history of the religious lyrical element as it appears in the long range of the Christian centuries. Augustine was the first to give it expression in the Confessions. In the matter of form he was not a poet, but at heart he was, and his book is a treatise in poetic prose, where the intensely personal longing finds fullest expression. Before him there was nothing like it, and after him there was nothing till we reach the Divina Commedia. It seems strange, almost unaccountable, but in the first three centuries of the Christian era, in the Græco-Roman world, the personal note is almost entirely absent, or if it were sounded it is so faint as scarcely to be heard. If it may be explained, it is on the ground that the Psalter and the Christian Liturgies supplied the need in however impersonal a way. But to a vast extent the need, it must be presumed, was not acutely felt. Dante broke the long silence; the movement to God and the vision of God are the process and the culmination of his poem. Dante was the precursor of the modern age, as also the fulfillment of the age that was passing away. In his devotion to Beatrice he has fused in harmony the yearning for the human as well as the Divine love. But it was Petrarch, his successor, who made the great departure in concentrating his soul on human love; when for the first time in Christian history, in the words of Quinet, “un grand homme enferme avec éclat sa pensée dans un object qui n’est pas Dieu.” Laura occupies the place which hitherto the Church had held. Petrarch was a student of Augustine’s Confessions; he realized the extent of his departure and its significance, as in his book, De Contemptu Mundi Vel Secretum, where he finally allows himself to be convinced by Augustine’s argument of the grave error which was initiating a movement it would be henceforth impossible to suppress. The deification of human love was a tendency in literature from that time onward, taking each of the coun - tries in Europe in turn as they became fitted for its reception. England’s turn came with the Renaissance in the later years of Elizabeth. Shakespeare and the poets who followed him domesticated Petrarch’s love sonnet. Every poet tried his hand at the human love lyric. There are said to be some two thousand in all of these songs. Herbert sought to reverse the tide, by the lyric celebrating religious or divine love. Others, too, there were who shared his feeling, but he devoted his life to this end. He enriched it with his own ingenuity, precision, and candor, freeing it from sensuous morbidity, taking lessons in art and style from the love-poets as he initiated the reaction against their theme. What Augustine did for the old world of the Græco-Roman Empire, Herbert has done in his measure for the modern day. A distance of twelve centuries separates them, but they clasp hands across the infinite gulf. There are other things which convey satisfaction to the religious cry for God, — the Thoughts of Marcus Aurelius and the Imitation, two books which, however diverse, have the same essential spirit. Great men like Boethius, or Anselm, or Martin Luther, have their affinity with this mood of the soul. But taking in the long range of history Herbert is more closely akin to Augustine. Among the books which he possessed and valued were the writings of St. Augustine. It may well be that he gained inspiration from the Confessions.

Among the points that stand out prominently in Mr. Palmer’s treatment of Herbert’s life is the long hesitancy before he gave up a secular career and entered the direct service of the Church. It may be an apology for Herbert that his delay is not without a profound spiritual significance, that the transition was to be accompanied by loss as well as gain. The type of piety begotten in the Anglican Church in the age of the Reformation appears like an effort to harmonize the contradiction, generated by the Renaissance, between the rival claims of the human and the divine, the world that now is and that which is to come. The ideal of the Middle Ages had been the renunciation of the human in order to attain the divine. The Renaissance had brought in an opposing ideal, which in its extreme forms appeared as the renunciation of the divine in order to perfect the human. The new principle which animated the Anglican reformers and underlies their modification of the old religion was consecration, not renunciation,—the consecration of the human to a divine end. Luther also had seen that here lay the great contradiction to be overcome; he too had asserted that there was no such sharp separation between the secular and the religious life as the mediæval church had posited; he had maintained that the shoemaker at his last, or the blacksmith at his forge might serve God in faithfulness to duty as well as by prayer. So far as intrinsic merit was concerned, the act of humble secular service and the aspiration for holiness as in prayer were one. George Herbert, in one of his earlier poems, had given utterance to this doctrine of the gospel of the secular life, more adequately and in more inspired and beautiful form than has ever been done before or since. It may be that his exquisite poem“ The Elixer ’’was written at the time when he was seeking the Public Oratorship, when he was commending its dignity as not incompatible with Heaven:—

But when the attempt to consecrate the human, to divinize the State by its union with the Church, fails or threatens to end in failure, when the divine is in danger of being sacrificed, there is no other way than to revert again to the ascetic principle, to renounce a world whose consecration it seems vain to attempt. This is the essence of Puritanism as contrasted with the ideal it supplanted. Herbert may have felt the impending revolution in advance, from the time when he went to Cambridge, where Puritanism found its stronghold. He was turning his back on things he had once devoutly believed to be good and true, when the final decision was reached to assume the cure of souls at Bemerton. But his earlier ideal may still have been the higher. To it the world looks forward as the ultimate goal.

The existence of these divergent ideals, the conflict between them and the transition from one to the other, underlies this modern and illuminative interpretation of the Life and Poems of George Herbert. In retelling the story of the life, and setting aside picturesque fiction which has obscured it; in reënforcing the mission of that life by the chronological arrangement of the poems, Professor Palmer’s work corresponds with the title he has chosen for it. Apart from other merits, and they are many and great, here lies its highest value. The result accomplished is nothing less than giving to the world a new poet and making his message real.