George Herbert: Sacred and Profane (review)

116Book Reviews Helen Wilcox and Richard Todd, ed. George Herbert: Sacred and Profane. Amsterdam: VU Univ. Press, 1995. 211 pp. $30.00 paper. by Daniel W. Doerksen Helen Wilcox and Richard Todd have edited a good collection of essays, based on papers read at a conference held in Groningen, Holland, in 1993 to commemorate the four-hundredth anniversary of George Herbert's birth. (A larger companion volume, published simultaneously, Sacred and Profane: Secular and Devotional Interplay in Early Modern British Literature, collects non-Herbert essays from the same conference.) The "profane" in the title might raise questions, since this poet is unremittingly sacred. But in "Aaron" he himself admits to the "Profaneness in his head," and the editors claim that "the mingling of sacred and profane" is "fundamental" in Herbert, and "part of that approachable quality that marks these lyrics out even among other religious texts" (p. vii). The alternative term "secular" helps clarify the sense of "profane" intended, but even so some of these essays (by Di Cesare, Cummings, Young, and Wilcher) seem to address only the sacred. Although arranged in four groups, these essays are actually of two main kinds: those dealing with context (the introduction, groups one and four), and those (the rest) concerned primarily with aspects of Herbert's art, especially his use of language. There is something to learn from each of these contributions, but (as usual) one must also read critically. In his introduction, Todd appropriately addresses the English historical context and tries to evaluate some "isms." He is one of the growing number of Herbert scholars who read recent historical writings documentingwhat Herbert's Church ofEngland was actually like. (By contrast, Di Cesare's essay immediately thereafter unaccountably "rescinds from documents" [p. 19] and instead offers "speculations" [p. 17].) Accordingly, Todd knows that "Anglican" is an anachronistic term for Herbert's time, and that there was then no simple Anglican-Puritan split (p. xiv). He values some of Lewalski and Strier's work, but imprecisely refers to the latter (who unlike Schoenfeldt does a rather traditional kind of historical scholarship) as a New Historicist. Also he attributes to Lewalski and Strier more of a blinkered rejection of the medieval than I have noticed. To recognize that Herbert is Protestant (as even R.V. Young does in his Book Reviews117 piece on analogy) should of course not exclude medieval, CounterReformation , or classical influences. Mario Di Cesare makes a fresh contribution to Herbert scholarship by calling attention to work by Aidan Kavanagh suggesting that liturgy is characterized by surprise and restlessness, the opposite of what most people would think. But isn't routine one of the basic features of liturgy? To some readers this piece will seem like an ingenious and daring but not necessarily convincing attempt to recapture territory from those who have been demonstrating the relevance to Herbert of Protestant theological writings, by redefining liturgy to equal that which we value in Herbert. One may readily agree with Di Cesare that "Affliction" (I) is not about rejecting liturgy (p. 16), but is it about liturgy at all, or about personal (if also representative) experience? Elizabeth Clarke offers perceptive comments on the availability of both classical forms and rhetoric and suspicion of them in Herbert's Protestant ethos, and connects the poet's self-deprecating motto with the "first and fatal stage of baptism." She raises the question, "Did Herbert really believe that the poems of The Temple were poor?" (p. 28). However, she seems unduly cynical in associating justification by faith with "double-think," and perhaps also in implying that by downplaying the value of his poetry "Herbert has hit on the perfect formula with which to validate a Christian poetry against the criticism due to humanist rhetoric" (pp. 29, 30; my emphasis). One can view askance Walton and Oley's hagiographymaking ; but Herbert's cited statement does not say he and his works are worthless, only that they seem small compared to God's mercies. The parallel and contrast of "Grief" to a de Billy sonnet (p. 29) is excellent, but Clarke incorrectly attributes to Amy Charles a dating of Herbert's chief poems by the mid-1620s (n. 4, 31; cf...