Shepherd of the Fold

William Cowper, who knew Herbert’s poems well and found them a source of religious comfort, yet believed them to be ‘Gothic and uncouth.’ Our own age perhaps tends rather to regard them as neat, plain and puritan; for the spiritual life of a seventeenth-century country parson seems to possess an order and singleness of devotion not now accessible to us when society is unstable and most values ambiguous. This, however, is a false simplification which history imposes; and Mr Summers’s balanced study of Herbert’s life and work presents them in their true complexity.

Herbert’s apparent serenity as a shepherd of the fold was won at the cost of conflict, self-denial and rigorous self-examination. He was a man of strong natural ambition, attracted to the life of the Court and acutely disappointed by his lack of preferment in that sphere. He enjoyed greatly the pleasures of music and civilised society. In the deepest sense he was required to make a virtue of necessity: ‘I now look back upon my aspiring thoughts, and think myself more happy than if I had attained what then I so ambitiously thirstedpage 245 for. And I can now behold the Court with an impartial Eye, and see plainly, that it is made up of Fraud, and Titles, and Flattery, and many other such empty, imaginary painted Pleasures . . . but in God and His Service, is a fulness of all joy and pleasure and no satiety . . .’.

There is a faint savour of sour grapes in this otherwise admirable statement. Mr Summers chronicles the gradual subjection by Herbert of all his activities and wishes within the compass of his priestly duties and his growth in humility. He learnt plainness of writing from the plainness of speech needed for a sermon to countrymen. It is interesting to speculate what George Herbert would have been as a Court poet. In a country parish he found a different and more lasting excellence.

1955 (118)