George Herbert and The Temple

Some books are written for the world and reach it by the writer's appetite for the world. Others are written privately, against the grain of a life, and reach the world only because a dying man, having argued with God for twenty years on small sheets of folded paper, hands the bundle to a friend at the foot of the bed and says: read these, and if they help any wounded soul, print them; if not, burn them. The author has spent his strength settling his own quarrel. Whether the quarrel becomes a book is no longer his to decide.

THE FIFTH SON OF MONTGOMERY

George Herbert, fifth son of Sir Richard Herbert of Montgomery and Magdalen Newport, was born at Black Hall on the third of April 1593, a junior branch of the great Pembroke house. Westminster taught him Latin; Trinity College Cambridge taught him Greek, Hebrew, and the management of a room. By 1620 he was Public Orator of the University, the voice in which Cambridge addressed kings; by 1624 he sat in Parliament for Montgomery. King James favoured him. His cousin William Herbert, third Earl of Pembroke, favoured him. The court lay open. Then James died, the patrons thinned, and the path that had been laid for a courtier closed quietly behind him. He spent five years on the question of what to do instead. The question, on the evidence of the small sheets he kept in a cupboard, was put to him by God and answered, line by line, in verse.

THE PARISH AT BEMERTON

In April 1630 Pembroke presented him to the living of Bemerton, two miles west of Salisbury, a parish of perhaps three hundred souls along the Nadder. He was ordained priest in September. He married Jane Danvers the year before. He rebuilt the rectory at his own charge; he walked the lane to Salisbury twice a week to sing the psalms at the cathedral; he catechised the ploughmen's children on Sundays in plain words. He wrote, in prose, a manual for himself on what a country parson owed his people, and titled it so. In the cupboard at the foot of the bed in the upper room, between two boards, lay the loose sheets of about a hundred and fifty short poems, some begun at Cambridge, most finished here, none shown to anyone but Jane, and Jane not all of them. The consumption that had shadowed him since youth took hold in the cold December of 1632. By February it was settled in him.

THE AFTERNOON OF THE TWENTIETH

It is a quarter past two on the afternoon of the twentieth of February 1633. The south casement of the upper bedroom takes the late winter light at a low angle and lays it across the coverlet. The Nadder is high with the thaw. Jane has sent to London for Edmund Duncon, a London priest and a friend, who has ridden down through the week and now stands at the bedside. Herbert is forty. The fever is steady. He has asked for his lute earlier in the morning and tuned it and sung one of his own verses, and set it down. The cupboard at the foot of the bed has not been opened in his sickness; the sheets inside it are in the order he left them in autumn, when he could still sit at the small table by the window.

A SECOND OF TIME IN A SICK-ROOM

He considers the cupboard. The poems are not for him; they were the form in which the question of orders was put down and worked through, and the question is now answered, and the working has no further use to the worker. He could ask Jane to burn them after; that would be the cleanest course, and the course a man of his station and his caution might be expected to take, for the sheets contain quarrels with God plainly set down, complaints, refusals, the small hard bargains of a soul not yet broken to its yoke. To print such things is to lay one's interior open on a stall in Paul's Churchyard for any shoemaker to thumb. And yet, he thinks, a dejected poor soul somewhere, in some other parish, in some other February, might find in these sheets the very picture of his own conflict, and be the less alone for it; and if that is so, the sheets are not his to burn. Nicholas Ferrar, at Little Gidding in Huntingdonshire, prays in this same form. Nicholas will read them as a brother reads a brother. Nicholas, if he thinks them of no use, will burn them; that is the right of the reader he is choosing. The decision is to give the decision away. He says to Duncon, as Izaak Walton would record within two decades in his Life of Mr George Herbert: Sir, I pray you, deliver this little book to my dear brother Ferrar, and tell him he shall find in it a picture of the many spiritual conflicts that have passed betwixt God and my soul, before I could subject mine to the will of Jesus my Master, in whose service I have now found perfect freedom. Desire him to read it; and then, if he can think it may turn to the advantage of any dejected poor soul, let it be made public; if not, let him burn it; for I and it are less than the least of God's mercies. Duncon takes the bundle in both hands.

LITTLE GIDDING, THE SEVENTH OF MARCH

Herbert died on the third of March, eleven days after the bundle left the room, and was buried under the chancel of the parish church at Bemerton. Duncon rode north with the sheets wrapped in oiled cloth against the weather. At Little Gidding, the small community of the Ferrar family, founded in 1626 in the disused church there, kept the canonical hours and bound bibles by hand. Nicholas Ferrar, who had known Herbert at Cambridge and corresponded with him on the keeping of a religious life within the world, took the bundle into his study on the evening of the sixth and read through the night of the seventh of March, by his own letter to his sister Susanna. He found, in the small sheets, The Altar set out in the shape of an altar, and Easter Wings set out in the shape of wings, and Love (III) with its quiet hospitality at the end, and The Collar with its rebellion broken by a single called name. He decided before morning to print.

CAMBRIDGE, OCTOBER 1633

The manuscript went to Thomas Buck and Roger Daniel at the Cambridge University Press, who set it in a small octavo under the title The Temple: Sacred Poems and Private Ejaculations. The first edition of a thousand copies was off the press in October and sold through by the end of December. A second edition followed in 1633 itself, a third in 1634, ten further editions before the Civil Wars closed the presses. The pocket-octavo of 1641 went to King Charles I, who, by Walton's account, carried it through his imprisonment at Hampton Court and Carisbrooke; the copy survives in the Royal Collection with the king's underlinings on The Sacrifice and on Love (III). Richard Crashaw answered it with Steps to the Temple. Henry Vaughan read it in a Welsh sickbed and dated his own conversion to the reading. The Country Parson, the prose manual, was edited from Herbert's papers by Barnabas Oley and printed in 1652. The book has not been out of print in any decade since.

THE CUPBOARD AND THE WORLD

The great refusals are easy to name and easy to honour. The great surrenders are harder, because they look, from the outside, like nothing: a man in a bed in Wiltshire hands a bundle of papers to a friend and chooses not to choose what shall become of them. The work of twenty years is placed in another man's hands with the explicit permission to burn it. Almost no one does this. Almost everyone, having written, wishes to be read; having suffered to write, wishes the suffering acknowledged; having quarrelled with God on paper, wishes the quarrel preserved in print as a record of having quarrelled. Herbert, on the twentieth of February 1633, in a sick-room at Bemerton, gave the record away to be used or destroyed, and in giving it away gave it the only condition under which it could become the foundational book of Anglican devotional poetry: the condition of having been written for no audience at all. The manuscript Duncon carried north sits today in the Bodleian Library at Oxford, in the hand he left it in. The rectory at Bemerton still stands, a private house along the lane; the small church across from it is open to visitors on weekdays, with a plain stone under the chancel.