Like Season'd Timber: New Essays on George Herbert (review)

BOOK REVIEWS83 Edmund Millerand Robert Di Yanni, ed., LikeSeason'd Timber: New Essays on George Herbert. Seventeenth Century Texts and Studies, ed. Anthony Low. Vol. 1. New York: Peter Lang, 1987. xiv + 396 pp. $55.95. by Donald M. Friedman Like Season'd Timber proposes to break free from what have been dominant topics and modes of discourse since the first of several revivals of critical interest in Herbert in the 1950s. Rather than add to the ever-expanding list of "new readings of familiar texts," almost exclusively of "the lyric poetry," the editors have gathered essays both from wellestablished critics and from lesser-known scholars whose engagements with Herbert are fairly specialized, or who come to the poet from fields and directions relatively tangential. Their purpose is to "explore a series of interrelated contexts," and to approach Herbert's canon from unfamiliar or unexpected perspectives. What distinguishes the collection is the project of several essays to contest and revise opinions about contextual matters that have become so well established as to seem unshakable. Some of these revisionist essays base their arguments on newly-discovered evidence; but most grow out of close and thoughtful re-examination of canonical materials. To be shown that what we have long known may not be the fact, or that other ways of knowing the apparent facts are plausible and may even compel agreement: this is the source of excitement and challenge in the volume, which in other respects suffers from the almost-inevitable fate of such collections — the appearance of randomness, or the blinkered feel of special-interest scholarship. The authors belong to a wide variety of critical schools, and none of the essays is so heavily marked by critical methodology or ideology as to suggest any specific trend (or trendiness, for that matter), or any obtrusive polemic intent on the part of the editors. Rather, they are intent on the study of a clearly delimited subject of interest, energy and illumination coming from either novelty or force of argument. In the opening essay, for example, the late Amy M. Charles traces the history of the relationship between Herbert and Nicholas Ferrar, in an attempt to show that it was more extensive than 84BOOK REVIEWS Walton's account would suggest. Part of her purpose is to continue her sharp scrutiny of Walton's techniques and reliability, in this instance his dependence on Barnabas Oley for information about Herbert's life. But she also emphasizes the connections between Herbert and Ferrar through their families' interests in the Virginia Company, and in their acquaintance with John Williams, a Cambridge proctor who later became Archbishop of York. Although Charles advances plausible explanations for the absence of letters to Herbert in the Ferrar correspondence, much of her argument consists in comparisons between the daily life and practiced beliefs of the community at Little Gidding and at Bemerton. Finally, the persuasiveness of her revision of the familiar myth made current by Walton rests on her sense of the spiritual sympathies of the two men, rather than on new historical facts. Similar procedures shape George Hold's article on the brotherly relations of Edward and George Herbert. The personal and intellectual contrasts between the two are patent and well-known, and Lord Herbert's characterization of his brother's priestly reputation as "little less than sainted" may surely be open to more than one reading. Held goes further than this, to suggest jealousies as well as financial disputes; but in pointing to the absence of correspondence, to the poet's apparent refusal to comment on De Ventate, and to Edward's omitting to write an elegy for his brother, Held, like Charles, builds his case mainly on reasonable speculation: "possibly" and "most likely" figure frequently in their arguments. Helen Wilcox's treatment of Herbert's musicality — in all its senses — provides a clear and informed summary of Renaissance theories of music and points convincingly to evidences of Herbert's grasp of them, as in his uses of rhyme and counterpoint . Her remarks on specific contemporary musical contexts suffer, perhaps, from being too compressed; but she outlines the general movement ofthe period toward the preeminence of the declamatory air with sureness...