Art and Structure in Walton’s Life of Mr. George Herbert

CLAYTON D. LEIN Art and Structure in Walton's Life ofMr. George Herbert When Izaak Walton presented his Life of Mr. George Herbert as a 'Freewill -offering,' he provided a clue to its character. The other biographies, he would have us believe, he had been compelled to write, some to honour the obligations of friendship, others to comply with the entreaties of men he respected and revered. All the early biographies were thus biographies of duty. But here was one of inner compulsion, a 'free-will offering' in the full sense of the term - an unsolicited giving to the church. And for this offering Walton mustered all his art, as if to demonstrate what biography in his hands could now achieve. He still worried about truth and fidelity to fact; but no longer did he worry about his 'artless pen.' When he wrote the Life of Herbert he knew he was a craftsman. As a result, the final version of this Life, so natural in presentation , has a subtlety of artistic manipulation far exceeding any of his earlier efforts. To appreciate its perfection, however, we need to unravel its strands, for the special quality of the biography springs from the deft interweaving of the life pattern of George Herbert with the personal vision of Izaak Walton on the nature of holy living.1 I In the Life ofHerbert Walton solved an artistic problem which had vexed him from the outset of his biographical career - the problem of structure; and nothing discloses his intense artistic impulse in writing the Life so clearly as his elaborate structural control through extensive parallelism and antithesis. Perhaps the quickest demonstration of this comes from studying Walton's treatment of the Puritans. The Life of Herbert commences with an attack on the Puritans through a description of the demolition in the 'late Rebellion' of the Herbert family home. That family, according to Walton, had 'a plentiful Estate, and hearts as liberal to poorNeighbours.'2 More, they had been 'blestwith men ofremarkable wisdom, and a willingness to serve their Country, and indeed, to do good to all Mankind.' Yet during the Civil War that generous family saw its home 'laid level with that earth that was too good to bury those Wretches that were the cause ofit' (p 260). Two paragraphs later Walton records the destruction of the maternal home, 'an excellent Structure, UTQ, Volume XLVI, Number 2 , Winter 1976/7 WALTON's Life of Herbert 163 where their Ancestors have long liv'd, and been memorable for their Hospitality' (p 261). The colouring of Walton's phrases makes the Puritans not only ravagers, but enemies to all liberality. He reintroduces that theme at the close of the biography, in a coda relating the remainder of Jane Herbert's life. He informs us there that Mrs Herbert had intended to publish many of her husband's 'private writings,' but that 'they, and Highnam house, were burnt together, by the late Rebels, and so lost to posterihj' (p 221). Walton's central portrait of a great Anglican is thus framed with parallel scenes of Puritan carnage.3 In striking contrast to this Puritan carnage Walton presents his Anglicans as builders, creators, and preservers, a theme too consistently rendered to be unconscious. The seminal informing idea within the Life of Herbert, in fact, is a vision of the loveliness, creativity, and exalted sensuousness of Anglican piety, a state of being clarified by the onslaught of a wholly aggressive and rapacious Puritanism. Walton's portrait of Herbert himself demonstrates how he fashioned the motif. The key act in the early portion of the biography is the restoration of Layton Ecclesia: This Layton Ecclesia, is a Village near to Spa/den in the County of Huntington, and thegreatest partofthe Parish Church was fallen down, and that of itwhich stood, was so decayed, so little, and so useless, that the Parishioners could not meet to perform their Duty to God in publick prayer and praises; and thus it had been for almost 20 years, in which time there had been some faint endeavours for a publick Collection, to enable the Parishioners to rebuild it, but with no success, till Mr. Herbert undertook...