Thomas Humphry Ward, ed. The English Poets. 1880–1918.rnVol. II. The Seventeenth Century: Ben Jonson to Dryden
Sandys, Herbert, Crashaw, VaughanCritical Introduction by George Augustus Simcox
[George Sandys (1578–1644). Set out for the East 1616. Published translation of Ovid 1626; the Psalms 1636; other paraphrases 1638 and 1641.]
[George Herbert (1593–1633). He was Public Orator at Cambridge from 1619 to 1627, and was Rector of Bemerton in Wiltshire in 1631. His poems were first published 1633.]
[Richard Crashaw (c. 1613–1649). Expelled from Cambridge 1644; became a Roman Catholic. Published Steps to the Altar 1646, and died canon of Loretto.]
[Henry Vaughan (1621–1695). Published Secular Poems 1646; Olor Iscanus 1651; Silex Scintillans, part 1, 1650, part 2, 1656; Thalia Rediviva 1678.]
The sacred poetry of Sandys was the dignified amusement of the evening of a successful life, whose morn had been spent in eastern travel and in colonial enterprise, without a trace of the internal struggles which form the staple of the poetry of Herbert. The Temple is the enigmatical history of a difficult resignation; it is full of the author’s baffled ambition and his distress, now at the want of a sphere for his energies, now at the fluctuations of spirit, the ebb and flow of intellectual activity, natural to a temperament as frail as it was eager. There is something a little feverish and disproportioned in his passionate heart-searchings. The facts of the case lie in a nutshell. Herbert was a younger son of a large family; he lost his father early, and his mother, a devout, tender, imperious woman, decided, partly out of piety and partly out of distrust of his power to make his own way in the world, that he should be provided for in the Church. When he was twenty-six he was appointed Public Orator at Cambridge, and hoped to make this position a stepping-stone to employment at court. After eight years his patrons and his mother were dead, and he made up his mind to settle down with a wife on the living of Bemerton, where he died after a short but memorable incumbency of three years. The flower of his poetry seems to belong to the two years of acute crisis which preceded his installation at Bemerton or to the Indian summer of content when he imagined that his failure as a courtier was a prelude to his success in the higher character of a country parson. The well-known poem on Sunday, which he sang to his lute so near the end, and the quaint poem on the ideal priest, which we extract, may date from Bemerton. The Quip and The Collar may date from the years of crisis. Still, much, like the poems on Employment, of which we insert a specimen, dates from the years of hopeful ambition. There are no traces of consecration or defeat in the Church Porch, where Herbert, like a precocious Polonius, frames a rule of life for himself and other pious courtiers. Herbert, who had thought much of national destiny, and decided that religion and true prosperity were to take flight for America, considered that England was ‘full of sin, but most of sloth.’
The plain truth is, that after the defeat of the Spanish Armada, the submission of the chieftains of Ulster, and the tardy pacification of the Netherlands, the English gentry were for the first time since the Field of the Cloth of Gold without a rational object of public concern. Poets were left for the first time to feed idly on their own fancies and feelings: that all kinds of enterprise were feasible, as Herbert repeatedly urged, was of little avail in the absence of motive power. The excitement without impulse which characterises Herbert is the explanation of the old criticism that he has ‘enthusiasm without sublimity.’ He was, it may be, too fastidious to have succeeded in the best of times. The ascetic temper shows early—
The intellectual interest is decidedly stronger in him than in two writers who in a sense belong to his school. Crashaw looks up to him as Faber looked up to Keble. Vaughan was still more strongly and directly influenced by him. Crashaw cannot be said to imitate Herbert, he only is encouraged by the example of a distinguished Cambridge man who had achieved a court and academical reputation as a sacred poet; Vaughan on the contrary is converted by Herbert, and, as we shall see, imitates him copiously. Either of them is perhaps more musically pious by nature than Herbert: at their best either excels him: Vaughan’s clear intensity and Crashaw’s glowing impetuosity alike make the laboured crabbed ingenuity of Herbert seem tame. And yet Herbert has always kept a larger place as a poet in the eyes of the public than Crashaw or Vaughan: he owes much of course to Walton’s charming life, much to his own Country Parson, but after all The Temple is a book in a sense that Steps to the Temple or Silex Scintillans are not. The Williams MS. proves that Herbert corrected himself more severely in MS. than Vaughan in print, for the only change on the second edition of Silex Scintillans is the removal of a few crude naïvetés from one poem. Even Herbert tolerates much in style and metre that we wish away. Crashaw is smoother because more fluent, but Herbert’s poems have always a plan and substance, which those of his successors often lack. Crashaw is full of diffuseness and repetition; in the Wishes for his Mistress he puts in every fantastic way possible the hope that she will not paint; often the variations are so insignificant that he can hardly have read the poem through before sending it to press. As Pope observed, he wrote like a gentleman for his own amusement, and he wrote most at his ease when he was paraphrasing. Marino is his master, while Herbert is his patron and example; but though Marino was the Coryphaeus of that literature of conceits which travelled over Europe, his poem on the Massacre of the Innocents is continually surpassed by Crashaw, who always introduces a fancy when Marino is content for a moment to be plain.
Here are one or two specimens from those collected by Wilmott and Grosart:—
Vaughan only began to be a poet when Crashaw’s career was over; and he did not continue to be a poet to any purpose long. Everything he wrote before or after the two parts of Silex Scintillans might be spared. He is a mystic, as Herbert is an ascetic and Crashaw a devotee. Herbert’s temptation is the world, Vaughan’s temptation is the flesh; the special service that Herbert does him is to lift his mind from profane love to sacred. He is quite pathetic in the preface to Silex Scintillans about his early loose love-poetry. He suppressed the worst of it, and adjures his reader to leave the sufficiently harmless collection which escaped him unread. When he was seven and twenty years older (he would not have thought wiser) he collected some more of his love verses equally innocent and rather insignificant. Amoret and Etesia are less interesting than Saccharissa and Althea and Castara. Perhaps Etesia’s name implies that she was good to love for a year and no longer. The long interval of twenty-two years between the second part of Silex Scintillans and Thalia Rediviva, is filled mainly by little translations of works of edification and a few original prayers. The prayers are rather too like sermons, and the title Silex Scintillans implies that his heart was a stone from which sparks might be struck now and then. He is as full as Herbert of the fluctuations of his own feelings, and as ready to interpret any failure of power as a judgment, as ready too to lecture upon his spiritual experience for the instruction of his reader. In both the lesson is the same, that external disappointments are good for the inner life. For Vaughan too rebelled against his circumstances: after Oxford and a riotous holiday in London, it was dull to settle down at Brecknock: the world had not promised so much to him as to Herbert, but it performed even less. The Mutiny reminds us of The Collar, as Rules and Maxims remind us of The Church Porch. The Tempest recalls Providence, and in Sundays the coincidence is even closer: again, The ‘Queer,’ as we should now say The Riddle, is obviously suggested by The Quip. Even the complaint that men inflame themselves with a scarf or glove is borrowed from Herbert, who knew the world better than Vaughan, and gives pointed counsel and criticism, where Vaughan grumbles at the poverty of poets or the weight of a cloak. On the other hand, he knows nature much better. Herbert has no feeling for anything but the sweetness of flowers and sunshine, Vaughan feels the awe of the freshness of morning among the Welsh mountains. It is in morning walks that he meets God; early rising is the one original recommendation in Rules and Maxims. The sanctity and insight of childhood are more to him than even to Wordsworth. Many religious writers speak of this life as an exile, Vaughan carries the metaphor through: we are exiles not only from the home we seek but from the home we have left. He even suspects the stars may have something to do with the uncompensated misfortune of birth into a world of time and sense. His twin brother Thomas studied alchemy not as a means to the transmutation of metals, but as a key to the hidden unity of nature. In his own translations Henry Vaughan uses Neoplatonists quite as familiarly as Jesuits. His prose is rich and musical; his few Latin poems mostly insignificant, more pointless than Herbert’s and quite without the airy grace of Crashaw’s Bubble, of which Mr. Grosart has made a very pretty English poem. His translations from Ovid and Juvenal are rough and cumbrous; he writes decasyllabics very badly compared not only with Sandys but with Crashaw, whose description of a Religious House contains one line, ‘Obedient slumbers that can wake and weep,’ worthy of Pope. His translations in octosyllabics from Casimir and Boethius are excellent, especially the poem on the Golden Age from Boethius.