Herrick

The Poetical Works of Robert Herrick. With a Preface by Humbert Wolfe and Decorations by Albert Rutherston. (In 4 vols. The Cresset Press. £4 44.) IT is a really beautiful edition of Herrick that the Cresset Press has sent us. Perhaps the four volumes seem too weighty for so slender a poet. Southey—who was one of the first to show a true appreciation of Herrick—thought that only a score of his poems deserved preservation. We, more omni- vorous, find the delight of clear English in almost all he wrote, and should never be contented with an incomplete edition. Moreover, the four volumes are handsome and pleasant to read ; the type is of a reasonable size and the paper of a decent thickness.

There is a preface—a very odd and ingenious preface—by Mr. Humbert Wolfe. There was a difficult problem facing him. He holds quite sternly that a poet's life has next to nothing to do with his works, and a reader would be much better advised to read straight ahead without any introduction. At the same time, Mr. Wolfe has taken on the job of being Herrick's introducer and must contrive, some way or other, to fulfil his function. He invents, therefore, an American interlocutor, who extorts from his unwilling mind the infor- mation he would so much more gladly deny us.

It is a subtle method of extricating himself from the position. The easiest path, surely, would have been to leave the work to someone who could undertake it with a clear conscience. Then, however, we should have been cheated of a great delight : we should never have seen Mr. Wolfe's valiant attempt to struggle from his strait waistcoat. There is one complaint which can be urged against the preface. Mr. Wolfe's ingenuity stands more between the reader and Herrick's own work than any more sober and self-effacing introduction could possibly have stood : we cannot fail to be conscious that we are reading about Mr. Humbert Wolfe, with Herrick a bad second.

Is this a fault ? As we have said, Mr. Humbert Wolfe's gymnastics afford us a great delight. Even where he is most rhetorical, there is pleasure to be gained in his exercises :—

" Do we accuse the moon for not possessing the red reasonable glory of the sun, and do we therefore deny her title to ride among the stars ? We ask only of her that she be cool, and white, and lend to our solid landscape of earth her pale lunatic charm."

It would be hard to find a more lighthearted and agreeable piece of nonsense ; or one more full of echoes and masterly skill in literary cadences.

As for Herrick himself, Mr. Wolfe is not quite sure that it would increase the discrimination of our praise if we knew whether he had himself experienced the pains and joys of love at first hand. In fact, he seems to regard the question as indifferent : it is of importance only that he wrote of love so gracefully and so well. Here, perhaps, we can refine on Mr. Wolfe's issue. It would certainly be a mark of discrimination if we could feel behind Herrick's poems what his own interior life had been ; and feel it in such clarity that we could hit upon the very facts of his biography. Indeed, the facts of a poet's life may come as an acid test of the interpretation we place on his works. The poems themselves, truly enough, are our chief concern. The biography opens inward from the poems : the poems are not mere accidents of the biography. It would be foolish, however, to deny ourselves so objective a test of our insight.

At the end of the Hesperides, Herrick asserted of himself :-

" To this Book's end this last line he'd have placed, Jocund his Muse was ; but his Life was chaste."

He speaks elsewhere more categorically still ; and we are left to wonder whether this, too, is literary fancy, as much as his love poems, or whether he speaks the truth

I could never love indeed ;

Never see my own heart bleed : Never crucify my life :

Or for Widow, Maid, or Wife . . •

But have hitherto lived free, As the air that circles me : And kept credit with my heart, Neither broke i'th whole, or part."

The conviction forces itself upon us, however, even as we read his avowals of admiration, that he kept himself reserved from all passions that could destroy his gentle and playful attitude to the world. In his nature poems, too, there is more clean and charming sentiment than depth of feeling.. He never allowed himself to endanger his poise : and, indeed, his own chief virtue is his preservation of a gaiety, tenderness and detachment which must have put severe limits to his experi- ence. We cannot imagine that Herrick's own heart. had suffered peculiar torments ; but we can well believe that he kept himself safe by warning himself against the consequences of self-abandonment. He writes, gnomically :—

" He who has suffered Ship-wrack fears to sail Upon the Seas, though with a gentle gale."

If our interpretation is true, Herrick himself feared the Seas with such intensity that he kept safe ashore through the whole of his life.

This limitation gave him the childlike and innocent quality which he displays even when he is most offensive to our taste. He held himself, with great determination, to what is little and bright and dancing : he burst out by contrast into the most pointless and infantile coarseness : but by his self- restriction he achieved a perfection in his own vein which no other poet has equalled.