The Parson Fictionalized: A Reprise

Even the most avid Herbertian would not ordinarily consider the cleric of Bemerton a figure apt to capture the American popular imagination. Lacking the dramatic tension of Jack-the-Rake/Donne-the-Divine's reputed polarities, Herbert might seem an especially unlikely choice to appeal to an audience of periodical fiction. Yet in 1910, Harper's Monthly Magazine published Marjorie Bowen's " 'Holy Mr. Herbert,' " a short story featuring the humble poet-priest. Now almost a hundred years after its first appearance and over fifty years since its author's death, the story appears in a considerably different venue for a much different audience as it is reprinted for the readers of the George Herbert Journal.

Marjorie Bowen was one of the many pseudonyms used by Margaret Gabrielle Vere Campbell Long (1886-1952).¹ A prolific British writer who churned out volumes of historical novels and mysteries, she also wrote biographies, essays, short stories, and plays. Edward Wagenknecht has described her as "one of the most gifted and amazingly fertile storytellers that our time has known."² Long wrote at least 170 books: 67 novels as Marjorie Bowen; 23 novels and 7 plays as George Preedy; 15 novels as Joseph Shearing; and other works as Robert Paye, John Winch, Evelyn Winch, E.M. Winch, and Bertha Winch. Her first novel, The Viper of Milan (1906), was published when she was just twenty-one and was probably written when she was a teen-ager.³ Her short stories regularly appeared in British and American popular journals, including Pearson's, The London Magazine, Collier's, Harper's, and The Woman's Home Companion. A number of her works were adapted to film in Britain and America.

Self-educated, Long used her work to escape from poverty and an unstable home life. Financially and emotionally burdened by a bohemian mother and a dependent sister, she turned to writing both as a livelihood and as an outlet. Although her mother refused to send her to school, she taught her to read. Long then educated herself, borrowing from the bookshelves of her landladies and the libraries near her various residences, including the British Museum. Often she could not afford pencil and paper to take notes but had to commit material to memory. She not only explored history, literature, and myth but also taught herself French, Italian, and Latin. In the midst of the poverty and frustration of her life, she found satisfaction in her studies and writing, especially in writing material in which "history was to be transformed into fiction and men and women of the past given some kind of life."⁴

Under the name of Marjorie Bowen, she plucked George Herbert from the seventeenth-century past and gave him life within this fiction. Her characterization of Herbert in this story seems to owe much to Izaak Walton. To Walton we may attribute the depiction of Herbert's sanctity, his love of nature, his courtly manner, and his commitment to clerical duties. Bowen's title – with its quotations marks – acknowledges her allusion to Walton's appellation in The Compleat Angler as well as his depiction of the saintly minister in his Life of Herbert. That she knew the latter work is clear. In the penultimate paragraph of her autobiographical The Debate Continues, she comments on the significance "Herbert's lovely phrase, 'music at midnight,' " has for her.⁵ The phrase she admires, however, comes from no Herbertian poetry or prose; rather its source is an anecdote in Walton: Herbert was walking from Bemerton to Salisbury one evening when he stopped to help a man unload a horse that had fallen under its burden. When he gets to Salisbury late and soiled, his musical friends question him. When they find out what he has been doing, they remark that he has "disparaged himself by so dirty an employment." Herbert responds that "the thought of what he had done would prove music to him at midnight; and that the omission of it would have upbraided and made discord in his conscience." He asserts that he would not "willingly pass one day of my life without...