THE AUTHOR OF "JOHN INGLESANT " AND GEORGE HERBERT.*

Ix was a happy idea that suggested the author of John Ingle- sane as the sponsor of this little reprint of George Herbert's Temple. Whatever opinion may be held in regard to the political and religious views shadowed forth in that strange book, John Ingleeant, it is impossible to question the literary research, keen interest, and delicate taste that have been brought to bear on its composition. The author who has given us, in his picture of Little Giddings, so graceful a delineation of the ascetic life softened and robbed of its ugliness by the presence of true culture, would seem peculiarly fitted to say the few words necessary to put a nineteenth-century reader in tone with the severe beauty of George Herbert's poetry. The style of Mr. Shorthouse's dainty little pre- face is, we should say, nearly perfect in its kind. We glance through it in that condition of emotional thought, and leave it with that sense almost of greediness to be at the author, which at once tells us that a criticism is the expression of genuine thought and feeling in the critic. From the delicate bit of word-painting with which it opens to the closing paragraph, there is one clear thought running through the whole. Mr. Shorthouse strikes one and the same note, in his description of "an Easter morning, such as even an English spring can some- times afford," with its associations of "village altars decked with flowers, in the chill, sweet, morning air of country places," and in the closing words of his preface, where to inculcate the "true refinement of worship" is pronounced to be the peculiar mission of the Church of England. While fully appreciating Mr. Shorthouse's harmonious picture of Herbert's life and work, we find ourselves asking the question, Does he not pitch the key a thought too low ? We are sure that whether the more earnest adherents of the Church would not accept his defini- tion of her mission, and we are doubtful whether the minds that really set most store by the "sweet singer of the Temple" would acquiesce in the judgment that "the peculiar mission of Herbert and his fellows was that they showed the English people what a fine gentleman, who was also a Christian and a Churchman, might be." That Mr. Shorthouse has given delicate expression to what is undoubtedly a charac- teristic of Anglicanism and its poets, we do not deny, but that he has set his finger on its highest characteristic, or even upon that which differentiates the English Church from Romauism on the one hand, and the various forms of Dissent on the other, we should be sorry to think. It is not as "fine gentleman" con- The Templa. By Mr. George Herbert. A New Edition, with Introductory Emmy by J,R, Sheratons°, Loudon ; T. F. linwin.

descending to Christianity, that one would wish to think of the author of Izaak Walton's favourite lines:— .

" Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright," Tlio bridal of the earth and sky," &c.

Still less can we submit to have our poet referred generally to a class of "select natures," to whom, "when, wearied by sensual pleasure, they turned to look for some other sustenance, religion offered itself." Such a description is as emphatically untrue of Herbert, as it is true of his contemporary Donne ; and to class the two poets together, implies a somewhat external and super- ficial appreciation of their respective merits. It is here that the weak point of Mr. Shorthouse's criticism seems to us to lie ; and it is a point upon which his whole theory rests. He appears— we may be wrong—but to us he appears to be elevating taste to the position of arbiter on religious questions. To our ears, he seems to be giving a subtle re-echo to the enthetic doctrine that the good and the true are identical with that which is in good-taste,—at least, we find it hard to distin- guish between this doctrine and that which makes "exquisite refinement" the " note " of the true Church.

It is remarkable that, of the seven quotations made by Mr. Shorthouse, though admirably adapted to his argument, not one presents Herbert at his highest, or within many degrees of it, Mr. Shorthouse, for example, quotes the verse :— " Whereas my birth and spirit rather took The way that takes the town, Thou didst betray me to a lingering book, And wrap me in a gown,"

where we should rather have quoted the noble lines at the close of the poem on the creation of man :—

"Let him be rich and weary, that at least, If goodness lead him not, yet weariness May toss him to my breast."

There is much the same line of thought in both, but how im-

measurably finer the feeling, and, Tani pctsen, the expression in the latter!

What, thenr we take exception to in Mr. Shorthouse's essay is a tendency to lay an exaggerated stress upon the value of

"that exquisite refinement which is the peculiar gift and office of the Church," and to form a proportionally limited estimate of her poets. Such a trait as this of mere delicacy and refine- ment, however admirable in itself, cannot constitute the note of any sacred poetry that is worthy of the name. We do not deny that such men as George Herbert may, in a sense, be said to have "set the tone of the Church of England," if by this we mean that the whole character of the Anglican Ritual bears the impress of that struggle to reconcile spiritual fervour and spontaneity with the formal beauties of Catholicism,—of that longing after a comprehensive mean which is almost in- variably present in the cultivated 'and artistic mind. But Mr. Shorthouse goes a good deal farther than this, when he asserts that it was Herbert's particular mission to preach the happy mean between " ihe fopperies of Romanism " on the one hand, and "the slovenly attire of Dissent" on the other ; that the note of the man's life is to be found in such quotations as the verse Mr. Shorthouse takes from the poem entitled, "The British Church :"—

"A fine aspect in fit array,

Neither too mean nor yet too gay, Shows who is best.

Outlandish looks may not compare, For all they either painted are, Or also undressed." Were we to venture a judgment as to the most marked trait of Herbert's poetry, we should say that it consisted rather in the piercing force and passionate fervour of 'isolated verses, scattered through poems in themselves somewhat over-garnished with the quaint conceits and quips of the refined courtier and man of letters. To us it has always seemed that, if much of the rich- ness of fancy and expression, much also of what is weak, in these poems is traceable to the courtly breeding of the poet. The whimsical badinage, the propensity to pun and employ extravagant metaphor,jar more than once somewhat harshly with his subject. With regard to those sudden bursts of splendour of thought and feeling to which we have referred, they seem to us to be, in almost every instance, coincident with those "lines of great felicity and melody of rhythm" which Mr. Shorthouse mentions as occurring here and there amid inferior workman- ship, and the occurrence of which he oddly designates the

" result of chance." Take, for instance, two verses from the poem entitled, "'['he Glance :"—

"When first thy sweet and gracious eye Vouchsafed, e'en in the midst of youth and night, To look upon me, who before did lie Weltering in sin, I felt a sugar'd, strange delight, Passing all cordials made by any art, Bedew, embalm, and overrun my heart, And take it in.

Since that time, many a bitter storm My soul hath felt, e'en able to destroy, Had the malicious and ill-meaning harm His swing and sway.

But still thy sweet, original joy Sprung from thine eye did work within my soul, And surging griefs, when they grew bold, control, And got the day."

In the concluding lines of these stanzas, we have a good example of that felicity of melody and rhythm which Mr. Short- house refers to. But so far from there being any element of contingencyin their occurrence, the lines, "But still thy sweet original joy," &c., seem to us to mark precisely the period of

highest exaltation of thought and feeling in the poet. It is not in the thought of his faith's enthusiastic dawn, nor in the long- ing after a life beyond the grave (though both find expression in this poem), but it is in the thought of his faith as a saving power in the stress and struggle of daily life, that his feeling becomes most vivid and his expression most perfect. After all, the sacred poet in every age, from Job onwards, is nothing, if he is not the mouthpiece of the combatants,—of the weary and

heavy-laden, to whom "the true refinement of worship" is a matter of but slight significance.

But we must not ask too much of Mr. Shorthouse. If he does not seem quite to rise to the height of Herbert's poetry, there are both delicate discernment and suggestiveness in his judgments. His summary of the character of Herbert's poetry, when viewed from a strictly literary stand-point, is terse and much to the point. Its characteristics are, be sari, "strength of purpose and reality of insight, combined with quaintness and carelessness of expression." This we should be inclined to amplify, by adding that the insight is essentially ethical and spiritual rather than intellectual, and that where the insight is keenest, the careless, and at times even turbid, flow of his verse becomes at once perfectly pure and harmonious. For instances of this spiritual insight, couched in expression that is almost perfect, no lover of Herbert's poetry will be at a loss. The first instances that occur to us are the sonnet on Sin, and the well- known verse from the "Church Porch," beginning with the line, "Pitch thy behaviour low, thy projects high." Perhaps, to the general reader Mr. Shorthouse's later utterances will be most interesting, as affording a clue to the interpretation of his first work. We must confess that, to the present writer, "John Inglesant" had been a complete enigma ; he had not been able to give any clear account to himself of the nature or motives of that ideal character, previous to- reading the preface to The Temple. But the enigma is at once solved, if we take him as a type of what Mr. Shorthouse de- nominates "exquisite refinement." Here Mr. Shorthouse seems (if we may be allowed an expression so wanting in refinement) to have let the cat out of the beg. If such an ideal be admitted, we are no longer left in a state of puzzle and bewilder- ment by the fact that John Inglesant seems no more to take up the Royal cause from any belief in its righteousness, than he ulti- mately decides to be a" Church-of-England" man from any feel- ing of the greater intriusic value of her doctrine. We can only suppose that John's decision is arrived at by a process of eclecti- cism, by the exercise of his good-taste in discriminating between the" religious fopperies of Romanism," on the one band, and the "slovenly attire of Dissent," on the other. We know that this puts very roughly and coarsely what Mr. Shorthouse expresses with great delicacy and subtlety. We are painfully conscious of occupying the unenviable position of that utter Philistine the King of Clubs, (whose vulgar doctrine of chance, by- the-bye, is, perhaps, preferable to that ancient heathen doctrine of the subservience of Deity itself to destiny and

of intellect to law, which all the subtlety of the King of Diamonds cannot quite transcend. And why is the King of Hearts allowed no voice?) We confess to have received both pleasure and profit from Mr. Shorthouse's delineation of the manner in which a character is moulded and opinions are formed, by the pressure of the religious and social atmosphere in which the individual finds himself ; nay, we acknowledge our gratitude for occasional, deeper glimpses into that strange mental labora- tory which is the scene of the over-recurring action and reaction of the spirit audits environment, and where, while we wonder at the transmuting power of spirit as it works upon the plastic character of its surroundings, in a moment the relative positions are reversed, and we see our deepest convictions rather moulded by than moulding the forms in which they seek to embody themselves. But, while we admit to the full our -debt to Mr. Shorthouse, we venture to differ from him, so far as to think that the fountain-head of George Herbert's inspiration was a deeper and a purer one than any mere theory of via media in matters theological. We closed .John IngWant with the doubt on our lips whether the hero ever had a genuine and deep feeling or belief, in his life ; we can scarcely read many poems of George Herbert's, without being almost startled by some musical cry of passionate sympathy with the pathetic truths of Christianity.