When Izaak Walton presented his Life of Mr. George Herbert as a ‘Free-will-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 of Herbert 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 poor Neighbours.’² More, they had been ‘blest with men of remarkable 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 of it’ (p 260). Two paragraphs later Walton records the destruction of the maternal home, ‘an excellent Structure, 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 posterity’ (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 Spalden in the County of Huntington, and the greatest part of the Parish Church was fallen down, and that of it which 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 it; and he, by his own, and the contribution of many of his Kindred, and other noble Friends, undertook the Re-edification of it; and made it so much his whole business, that he became restless, till he saw it finisht as it now stands.

(p 278)

When Herbert later receives the benefit of the parsonage of Bemerton and moves there, he again faces a ruined church. Once more, he proceeds to repair the church quickly (pp 291-3). When Herbert had finished, moreover, Walton testifies that he engraved the following verses upon the chimney:

To my Successor.
If thou chance for to find
A new House to thy mind,
And built without thy Cost:
          Be good to the Poor,
          As God gives thee store,
And then my Labour's not lost.

(p 293)

Such verses subtly identify the Anglican reparations with charity itself, just as the Puritan devastations had been barbaric assaults on all hospitality and generosity.⁴ Such careful contrasts indicate how carefully Walton manipulated his structure to provide an apology and interpretation for Anglicanism.

Walton intensified this contrast of faiths by also introducing into the Life a proper Puritan antagonist for his saint—Andrew Melville, ‘a Minister of the Scotch Church and Rector of St. Andrews’ (p 271). In the Life's final shape Walton's sense of the fundamentally antithetical characters of Anglicanism and Puritanism crystallizes in the opposition of their priests, an antagonism probably of little moment to the real Herbert, but invested with exceptional symbolic importance for Walton himself.⁵ Walton's craftsmanship appears in the meticulously patterned antitheses which make Melville the complete inversion of Herbert's moral and intellectual spirit.⁶ Both are clergymen, and both, Walton stresses, are learned. Both are even poets, but there similarities end. Melville ‘inclin'd to Satyrical Poetry’ (p 271), destructive verse, not verse such as Herbert's, designed to comfort and restore the soul. Melville's poetry, furthermore, was directed against the very institution and rituals which Herbert's The Temple strove to explain (p 271). One instance among many can show how subtly Walton manoeuvres here. Throughout the Life Walton scatters observations which associate Herbert with the altar. He is even buried ‘under the Altar’ (p 321).⁷ How deft, then, that the only mite of Melville's poetic talents Walton permits us to savour is a puerile epigram based upon a pun on the Latin word for altar:

Causa tibi mecum est communis, Carceris, Ara-
          Bella; tibi causa est, Araque sacri mihi.(8)

Such frivolous play pointedly contrasts with Herbert's profound veneration for ‘serving at the Altar of Jesus my Master’ (p 290).

Walton even expands such oppositions to include character, for Melville's mode of action is sharply contrasted to Herbert's gestures and behaviour as well. Herbert is constantly self-effacing and meek. Melville, on the other hand, is continually abrasive. Instead of Herbert's ‘sweet humility,’ he wields an ‘unruly wit’ and displays ‘ungovern'd passions’ (pp 271-2), even before the king, behaviour which finally lands him in the Tower. And it is when Melville is in the Tower that Walton avenges himself on the destroyers. He refuses to let Melville share in the spiritual peace and contentment possessed by his Anglicans. Instead he makes the Presbyterian's normal state anger, a condition inimitably caught in the observation that Melville was ‘committed prisoner to the Tower of London: where he remained very angry for three years’ (p 272). Virtually every detail in the sketch of Melville is thus calculated to illuminate the larger structure.

How emotionally effective Walton made his opposition is only evident at the end. The comments on Melville are compressed into a short sketch, and the reader forgets him in the course of Walton's portrait of Herbert's growing sanctity. But Walton does not. He returns to his antagonist at the close with a pungency calculated to recall every negative feature of the Scot. He notes that Herbert lived and died a saint, ‘unspotted of the World, full of Alms-deeds, full of Humility’ (p 319), and he quotes Shirley's noble lines on religious death: ‘the religious actions of the just, / Smell sweet in death, and blossom in the dust.’ Then he adds: ‘I have but this to say more of him: That if Andrew Melvin dyed before him, then George Herbert dyed without an enemy’ (p 319). The abrupt opposition of love and hate, venom and beauty, summarizes the entire structure of the Life.⁹

II

Walton's manipulation of the Puritans through a structure of antithesis reveals his main artistic impulses and clarifies his themes. But his exceptional mastery of the form of his biography can be seen still more strikingly in the Life's elaborate ‘correspondent structure.’¹⁰ At the centre of the Life comes a remarkable paragraph where Walton suddenly abandons his narrative and intrudes personally:

I have now Brought him to the Parsonage of Bemerton and to the thirty sixth Year of his Age, and must stop here, and bespeak the Reader to prepare for an almost incredible story, of the great sanctity of the short remainder of his holy life; a life so full of Charity, Humility, and all Christian vertues, that it deserves the eloquence of St. Chrysostom to commend and declare it!

(p 288)

Whatever other functions this paragraph performs, structurally it cleaves the biography neatly in two, and Walton employed this watershed to shape his material.

The ‘correspondent structure’ of the Life of Herbert rests upon a great number of carefully matched events, situations, and details between the two halves of the work. Walton ordered the Life, for example, so that Herbert restores a ruined church in each half, and in each case he emphasized Herbert's restless dedication and the fact that he restored them solely at his own expense (pp 278-9, 293). The framing of the biography with parallel tales of Puritan carnage is another manifestation of the same structure. Since dozens of such parallels exist from side to side of the central paragraph and since a discussion of them all would be tediously repetitive, I shall use two major sets of parallels to demonstrate the main patterns of Walton's organization.

The most extensive set of parallels within Walton's ‘correspondent structure’ stems from his creation of balanced ‘holy Friendships’ between John Donne and Lady Herbert in the first half, and between Herbert and Nicholas Ferrar in the second. Walton's intent here was to amplify his portrait of the saintly Herbert with sketches of minor saints, thus elevating the quality of Herbert's environment. He carefully established the credentials of these saints. Donne's great piety he assumed, for he had suggested it exhaustively in his earlier life, where he freely compared Donne to half a dozen major religious figures.¹¹ Donne had, in turn, made Walton's own scheme easier by likening Magdalen to the saint of her name in a poem Walton deliberately quoted in full so we can fully imagine her great devoutness. This was still not sufficient for Walton. For him this friendship evoked the singular associations of the church Fathers: ‘that of St. Chrysostoms to his dear and vertuous Olimpias; whom, in his Letters, he calls his Saint: Or, an Amity indeed more like that of St. Hierom to his Paula; whose affection to her was such, that he turn'd Poet in his old Age’ (p 265). For the companion of Herbert in the second half, meanwhile, Walton discovered a friend who had ‘got the reputation of being call'd Saint Nicholas, at the age of six years’ (p 309). So refined was the friendship of Herbert and Ferrar, in fact, that it was ‘long maintain'd without any interview but only by loving and endearing Letters’ (p 312). Walton's saints present us, then, with extraordinarily pure associations, with models of behaviour evoking the age of the primitive church.

In describing these friendships Walton coordinated the details as meticulously as he did those between Herbert and Melville. Walton noted with Donne and Lady Herbert that theirs ‘was not an Amity that polluted their Souls; but an Amity made up of a chain of suitable inclinations and vertues’ (p 265). This becomes the very context for the friendship of Herbert and Ferrar. The two had, Walton observed, a ‘slight acquaintance’ at Cambridge, but he divorced that sharply from the ‘new holy friendship’ which arose from ‘the general report of their sanctity,’ a perfect matching of ‘suitable inclinations and vertues’ (p 312). The story of Charles V and John Valdesso which immediately follows his portrait of the forming of the Herbert-Ferrar association solidifies this structure by presenting still another devout friendship which evinced a parallel mysterious movement towards shared inclinations.

Even finer details exist. For instance, in both cases Walton introduces one of the parties of the friendship quite early, but then refuses to discuss them, promising instead to ‘give a true account in a seasonable place’ (pp 261, 280). He then creates a witty fiction of ‘owing the Reader an account,’ a ‘debt’ he pays upon introducing the biography of the second party at that point in Herbert's life where he can develop the most parallels to Herbert himself (pp 263, 307-9). The actions of his saints are coordinated as well. Walton notes, for example, a letter from Donne to Magdalen Herbert in which Donne offers her a collection of sacred poems with the comment, ‘I commit the inclosed Holy Hymns and Sonnets (which for the matter, not the workmanship, have yet escap'd the fire) to your judgment, and to your protection, too, if you think them worthy of it’ (p 266). This gracious offer has its parallel in one of Herbert's last deeds, his gift to Ferrar of The Temple, and accompanied with a similar comment: ‘if he can think it may turn to the advantage of any dejected poor Soul,’ Herbert tells a messenger, ‘let it be made publick: if not, let him burn it’ (p 314). Walton even provided parallel destinies for his sets of saints. After quoting one of Herbert's songs, Walton commented: ‘Thus he sang on Earth such Hymns and Anthems, as the Angels and he, and Mr. Farrer, now sing in Heaven’ (p 317). He had curiously refrained from bestowing this shared activity upon Herbert and his wife Jane, reserving it instead for Herbert and Ferrar. Whatever the ironic implications, by so doing he decisively bound together the balanced holy friendships, for he earlier noted of Donne's own hymns to Lady Herbert: ‘These Hymns are now lost to us; but doubtless they were such, as they two now sing in Heaven’ (p 267).

An equally important set of parallels emerges when we study the design behind Walton's development of Magdalen Herbert. As Novarr has pointed out, Walton arranged the first half of the Life to encompass Herbert's entire secular career. At its close Herbert has abandoned all courtly ambitions and has also relinquished his university position. At that dramatic moment his mother, the presiding spirit of his formative years, also passes away. Her role was crucial. Walton had particularly observed Herbert's habitual submission to her. When Herbert chafed at Cambridge routine, for example, fearing for his health, ‘his Mother would by no means allow him to leave the University, or to travel; and though he inclin'd very much to both, yet he would by no means satisfy his own desires at so dear a rate, as to prove an undutiful Son to so affectionate a Mother; but did always submit to her wisdom’ (p 275). Much later, we discover that after his ordination Herbert had not wished to keep his position as university orator, ‘yet, in conformity to her [Magdalen's] will, he kept his Orators place, till after her death; and then presently declin'd it’ (p 285). Whatever a Freudian might make of this, Herbert's submission to his mother obviously symbolized for Walton his ultimate submission to his spiritual mother, the Church of England. In the second half of the Life, in fact, Walton employs this metaphor several times, confirming the centrality of the early mother-son relationship to the vision of the whole work. In the sketch of Ferrar, for instance, Walton tells us that Ferrar ‘return'd from his Travels as he went, eminent for his obedience to his Mother, the Church of England’ (p 309). When Herbert lies on his deathbed, Walton weaves the metaphor into Herbert's reply to Duncon's inquiry about prayers to be read: ‘O Sir, the Prayers of my Mother, the Church of England, no other Prayers are equal to them!’ (p 308). Only once does Walton present Herbert resisting his earthly mother's will; but the tensions on that unique occasion mark Herbert's shift to the higher parent. When Herbert resolved to rebuild Layton Ecclesia, his mother objected strenuously, subjecting Herbert to a stiff interview. Herbert refrained from replying immediately, asking for time to compose his thoughts. ‘At his return the next Day, when he had first desired her blessing, and she given it him, his next request was, “That she would at the Age of Thirty three Years, allow him to become an undutiful Son: for he had made a Vow to God, that if he were able, he would Re-build that Church”’ (p 279). Only for God could Herbert (like Christ) forsake his deference to the wishes of his generous parent.

The holy friendships and the two Mothers indicate how carefully Walton organized the details of his narrative for formal balance. Yet the patterns have thematic thrust as well. The ‘sacred amities’ define the ethos of sainthood, especially the mutual care and love saints share. When the adult Herbert forms his attachment with Ferrar, in fact, he symbolically validates his sainthood, so closely does that relationship follow Walton's portrait of Donne and Magdalen Herbert. The design of the two mothers, on the other hand, is intended to reinforce the meaning of submission and humility within religious life, Herbert's earthly mother leading her son to the behaviour most needful for his spiritual growth. And in all cases, the patterns of these relationships are juxtaposed with Puritan patterns, the Anglican communion of saints posited against Melville's spiritual isolation, their humility and self-effacement against his arrogant pride. Many of the numerous balanced patterns reveal similar significant thematic content.¹²

III

Walton's use of the two mothers reveals a further dimension of his shaping of the Life of Herbert: its Platonic progression. The movement from lower to higher, earthly to spiritual, between the two halves is expressed in other ways as well, most interestingly in his ingenious development of the common seventeenth-century trope of ‘learning and virtue.’ The commendation of a man for learning and piety is common throughout the Renaissance. Walton found the phrase in Camden, and the letters from his clerical friends are full of the phrase.¹³ The importance of the phrase to religious men of Walton's time, however, can hardly be overestimated, for it designated a type of spiritual perfection. Both elements were essential. Walton freely adopted the paradigm in all his biographies, but only in the Life of Herbert did he transform that ethical trope into a rhetorical structure, for each of the halves is dominated by one of these concepts. Herbert's progression from one to the other signals his spiritual flowering.

The account of Herbert's life before Bemerton concentrates tightly upon his learning and the arena of learning in which he grew. The words ‘learned’ and ‘learning,’ in fact, appear seventeen times in the first half, but only six times in the second. ‘Wisdom’ appears half a dozen times before the key central paragraph, but not once thereafter. The facts Walton stresses and the manner in which he colours events reveal his purposes even more clearly. Within the first three pages we are informed that the Herbert family ‘hath been blest with men of remarkable wisdom’ (p 260); we have accounts of one brother's ‘great learning and reason’ and another's ‘diligent wisdom’ as Master of the Revels; and we receive a promise of ‘a true account in a seasonable place’ of their mother's ‘wisdom and vertue’ (p 261). Later Walton notes that Herbert became ‘perfect in the learned Languages’ (p 263), that Lady Herbert moved to Cambridge to afford her son Edward ‘advantages of Learning’ (p 263), and that at Oxford, where she moved next, she ‘gain'd her an acquaintance and friendship with most of any eminent worth or learning’ in the area (p 264). When Walton wished to shift from Herbert's education to an account of his mother's activities, he pushed Herbert off to Cambridge with the whimsical stroke, ‘we will leave him in his Study’ (p 263), a gesture wholly intended to suggest Herbert's ceaseless quest for knowledge. A few pages later, the motif becomes poetic: ‘and, as he grew older, so he grew in learning’ (p 269).

Each of the major incidents Walton selected to develop in the first section of the Life also refers in some fashion to Herbert's learning. He stresses Herbert's acknowledgment of a gift to the university by King James in a clever letter ‘writ in such excellent Latin’ that James immediately inquires after the author, whereupon (according to Walton) one of Herbert's kinsmen informs the king that he himself ‘lov'd him more for his learning and vertue, than for that he was of his name and family’ (p 271). James admires ‘the Orators learning and wisdom’ on a later occasion as well, ‘much above his age or wit’ (p 273). Walton also shows Herbert making the acquaintance of the ‘learned Dr. Andrews’ and even of the great Francis Bacon, whom he introduces tellingly as ‘the great Secretary of Nature, and all Learning’ (p 273).¹⁴ The sole incident Walton offers to substantiate the friendship of Herbert and Andrews centres on ‘a long Letter written in Greek; which Letter was so remarkable for the language, and reason of it, that after reading it, the Bishop put it into his bosom, and did often shew it to many Scholars, both of this, and forreign Nations’ (p 273). To the reader already accustomed to Walton's dualities in the Life, the tidy inclusion of two exceptional letters documenting Herbert's learning, one in Latin to the king, one in Greek to the greatest bishop, hardly seems fortuitous. What is of greater interest is the control Walton demonstrates through his rhetorical pointing.

The second half of the biography explodes with a rhetoric of piety. That Walton created this effect can be gauged by studying his placement of such words as ‘holy,’ ‘pious,’ ‘piety,’ ‘blessed,’ and ‘saint.’ Walton uses the word ‘holy’ fourteen times in the Life, but only three times before bringing Herbert to Bemerton. Likewise, the terms ‘pious’ and ‘piety’ appear three times before Walton's intrusion to announce an ‘almost incredible story,’ but eleven times thereafter. And although Walton does conjure up St Chrysostom and St Jerome in describing the relationship between Donne and Lady Herbert and even includes two references to Lady Herbert as Mary Magdalen, these allusions shrink in significance before the troops of saints he introduces into the second part. And as in the first section Walton's method consists of selecting incidents which constantly reflect on Herbert's learning, so in the second half he focuses on anecdotes and events which portray Herbert's exceptional piety.

While we are barraged with the rhetoric of sanctity, Walton establishes the superiority of piety by making Herbert publicly abjure the learning he so earnestly pursued earlier. Both the main references to learning in the second section demonstrate this clearly. In a conversation between Herbert and a clerical friend Walton has Herbert urge the clergy to ‘live unblameably’ and ‘to express a visible humility and charity in their lives,’ ‘for 'tis not learning, but this, this only’ that might cure ‘the wickedness and growing Atheism of our Age’ (pp 304-5). Walton uses Herbert's first sermon at Bemerton to record the same shift. He testifies that Herbert ‘deliver'd his Sermon after a most florid manner; both with great learning and eloquence,’ but says that at the close of the sermon Herbert informed his congregation that ‘That should not be his constant way of Preaching, for, since Almighty God does not intend to lead men to heaven by hard Questions, he would not therefore fill their heads with unnecessary Notions; but that for their sakes, his language and his expressions should be more plain and practical in his future Sermons’ (p 295).

In this rejection of learning and in Walton's development of Herbert's methods and achievements as a preacher we also discover further traces of Walton's formal balance. The two halves of Herbert's spiritual career as envisioned by Walton—the learned Herbert and the pious Herbert—become symbolized in terms of Herbert the public speaker. Herbert's actions as a learned university orator are balanced by his work as a humble preacher. His personal progression from one half of the biography to the other is thus as tightly shaped as his shift from his earthly to his spiritual mother. The shift from the florid language of learning to the ‘powerful eloquence’ of pious humility charts the essential values of the biography.

IV

The most original creative dimension of the Life of Herbert, however, has little to do with balance; instead it lies in Walton's personal response to Herbert and is the feature of the biography which best reveals the integration of his art and belief. For Walton, Herbert's life itself communicated profound beauty. Such a reaction is not confined to the Life of Herbert. A like vision inspired such remarks as ‘Here was seen the purity of the Protestant faith in its own primitive lustre and native loveliness’ in the Life of Wotton (p 215) and the comment that the ‘Heroick Acts, and Noble Employments’ of the Wotton family ‘have adorned themselves and this Nation’ (pp 93-4). But Walton's sense of the loveliness of human behaviour finds its most sustained and exalted expression in his portrait of Herbert. For him the life of Herbert embodied the very essence of beauty, and he responds to that beauty in his narrative by striving to suggest a sensuous sublimity within a holy life. He achieves this by making his Anglicans simultaneously objects of beauty, creators of beauty, and intense experiencers of it.

From the outset Walton affirms a comeliness in Herbert's actions. As a boy ‘the beauties of his pretty behavior and wit, shin'd and became so eminent and lovely in this his innocent age, that he seem'd to be marked out for piety, and to become the care of Heaven’ (p 262). Walton has Herbert as a man openly consecrate himself to the task of ‘making Humility lovely in the eyes of all men’ (p 277), and he guides us to sense that mission fulfilled after Herbert's conference with an old woman at Bemerton, when he confides, ‘Thus worthy, and (like David's blessed man) thus lowly, was Mr. George Herbert in his own eyes: and thus lovely in the eyes of others’ (p 292). Such a perception of the beauty and grace of Herbert's humility inspired as well that original stroke at the close of the biography where Herbert ‘did with so sweet a humility as seem'd to exalt him, bow down to Mr. Duncon’ (p 314).

Walton's sense of the beauty of his Anglicans especially influenced his depiction of their restorations. They are not only restoring England, but consciously beautifying it. Layton Ecclesia, says Walton, is ‘for the decency and the beauty, I am assur'd, … the most remarkable Parish-Church, that this Nation affords’ (p 278), and he dwells on the particular beauties of the repaired church—that is ‘wainscoated, as to be exceeded by none’ and is ‘a costly Mosaick’ (p 278).¹⁵ Walton likewise insists that Herbert ‘hasted to … beautifie the Chappel’ at Bemerton and made sure that it was ‘decently adorn'd’ (pp 292-3). Ferrar, in a matched action, similarly takes care that his parish church is ‘repair'd and adorn'd’ (p 310).

Walton's portrayal of beauty, however, considerably exceeds these designs. More intriguing is his attempt to arrange the Life so that it consistently builds to subtle aesthetic climaxes, such as the moment when Herbert resolves to consecrate his talent to God. Again, Walton offers us a Herbert poem which concludes:

Why should I Womens eyes for Chrystal take?
Such poor invention burns in their low mind
          Whose fire is wild, and doth not upward go
          To praise, and, on thee Lord, some Ink bestow.
Open the bones, and you shall nothing find
          In the best face but filth; when Lord, in thee
          The beauty lies, in the discovery.

(p 269)

Faith thus becomes wholly aesthetic. Equally charged is his celebration of the Anglican service, where we can feel Walton moved by the event he is describing and quietly entering to voice his own vision:

and then they join together in the following Collects, and he assur'd them, that when there is such mutual love, and such joint prayers offer'd for each other, then the holy Angels look down from Heaven, and are ready to carry such charitable desires to God Almighty; and he as ready to receive them; and that a Christian Congregation calling thus upon God, with one heart, and one voice, and in one reverend and humble posture, look as beautifully as Jerusalem, that is at peace with itself.¹⁶

(p 298)

Even Walton's description of the friendship of Donne and Magdalen Herbert is aesthetically oriented, for we are led to see it in terms of Donne's appreciation of ‘the Beauties of her body, and mind,’ an admiration caught inimitably by the opening of Donne's ‘The Autumnall’: ‘No Spring nor Summer-Beauty, has such grace / As I have seen in an Autumnall face’ (p 265). The extended portrait of Herbert's death itself moves to a majestic aesthetic climax when Walton's saint stirs to sing of divine time:

                    The Sundays of Mans life,
Thredded together on times string,
Make Bracelets to adorn the Wife
Of the eternal glorious King.

(p 317)

Even the abstract process of time thus becomes a shape of beauty for the saint. It is through touches like these that the lives of the Anglicans throughout the Life of Herbert are constantly blessed with epiphanies of beauty.

Walton's introduction of sensuous detail to render the inner being of his saint provides an even more imaginative illustration of how creatively he responded to the aesthetics of sainthood. He paraphrases Herbert's The Odour to express the character of devout meditation: ‘he seems to rejoyce in the thoughts of that word Jesus, and say that the adding these words my Master to it, and the often repetition of them, seem'd to perfume his mind, and leave an oriental fragrancy in his very breath’ (p 290). For a similar end, after a spontaneously generous action, Walton has Herbert declare that ‘the thought of what he had done, would prove Musick to him at Midnight; and that the omission of it, would have upbraided and made discord in his Conscience’ (p 305). The same belief in the inner music of sanctity influenced Walton's inclusion of Ferrar's praise for the ‘harmony of holy passions’ within The Temple (p 315). But no passage discloses this dimension of the biography so well as the lines by John Shirley which close the work, lines brilliantly selected to intensify our aesthetic appreciation of the grace of Herbert's death.

—All must to their cold Graves;
But the religious actions of the just,
Smell sweet in death, and blossom in the dust.

The unique effect of the Life of Herbert rests largely upon such realized moments as these.¹⁷

V

Walton offers us a symbol for his work in his Introduction. Musing on the genesis of the Life, he says that he happened once on the story of Mary Magdalen, and he noted particularly her special ‘testimony’ from Christ, ‘that her Alabaster box of precious oyntment poured on his head and feet, and that Spikenard, and those Spices that were by her dedicated to embalm and preserve his sacred body from putrefaction, should so far preserve her own memory, that these demonstrations of her sanctified love, and of her officious, and generous gratitude, should be recorded and mentioned wheresoever his Gospel should be read’ (p 259). Magdalen's ‘Box of precious oyntment’ perfectly encompasses the dimensions of his work as well. Like the box, so his Life is a work of art created to preserve a worthy memory, containing rich perfume. That symbol also serves to designate the unique place the Life holds in his canon. Of Walton's two great biographies, the first—the Life of Donne—captures our attention through the passionate life it records; the second—the Life of Herbert—engages us through Walton's artistry. Within that Life he employed many of his old motifs, but with an inventiveness not found in the earliest efforts and without the polemical acerbity manifested in the Life of Sanderson. The Life of Herbert is a superbly ordered work, a masterpiece of unobtrusive intelligence, a biography that presents a rare vision of the devout life not only as a life of piety and charity, but also as one of singular loveliness and experienced beauty. ‘The Lord will beautify the meek with salvation’ declares one of Walton's favourite Psalms. Walton beautifies the meek through art.

Notes

1. Every study of Walton is indebted to Donald Stauffer, English Biography Before 1700 (Cambridge, Mass. 1930), pp 91-120; David Novarr, The Making of Walton's Lives (Ithaca, NY 1958); and John Butt, ‘Izaak Walton's Methods in Biography,’ Essays and Studies, 19 (1933), 67-84, and Biography in the Hands of Walton, Johnson, and Boswell (Los Angeles 1966), pp 1-18. None of these studies, however, considers the artistic patterns I examine here.

2. The Lives of John Donne, Sir Henry Wotton, Richard Hooker, George Herbert, and Robert Sanderson (London 1927), p 260. Unless otherwise stated, all citations and page references to the Lives are to this edition.

3. The parallelism was even stronger in the original version of the Life, where Walton balanced both of the earlier destructive events with two final ones—the loss of Herbert's papers and the destruction of Lord Herbert of Cherbury's library: ‘but they [Herbert's private writings] and Higham house, were burnt together, by the late Rebels; and by them was also burnt or destroyed a choice Library, which Mr. Herbert had fastned with Chains, in a fit room in Mountgomery Castle, being by him dedicated to the succeeding Herberts, that should become the owners of it’ (The Life of Mr. George Herbert [London 1670], p 119). In 1674 Walton dropped the remarks on the library entirely, perhaps, as John J. Daniell suggested, because by then he had received news that the library had been saved through the efforts of the vicar of Cherbury, Edward Lewis (The Life of George Herbert of Bemerton [London 1902], pp 308-10).

4. Walton's inclusion of these verses on the chimney remains troublesome, for no such verses have been discovered at Bemerton (Novarr, p 336, n 100). My purpose here, however, is to evaluate not their authenticity, but their function in the structure of the biography.

5. Walton's portrait of Herbert, as critics have long recognized, is highly slanted and fails to present a good many secular dimensions of Herbert's life, especially during his years at Cambridge. For a critique of Walton and a study of some missing dimensions, see Joseph H. Summers, George Herbert: His Religion and Art (1954; rpt Cambridge, Mass. 1960), pp 28-48. For a more exact account of the Melville-Herbert opposition, see Summers, pp 55-7, and Novarr, esp pp 345-7, 355-7.

6. The centrality of Andrew Melville to Walton's design (Walton calls him Melvin, perhaps following Fuller) can be seen by the consistent stress laid upon him in all versions of the Life (see Novarr, pp 345-7, for some discussion of various changes). Walton's original portrait of Melville, which appeared in all versions of the Life prior to the final one of 1675, actually offers considerably more information about Melville's career than his final sketch, but it develops the opposition more heavy-handedly. A study of the differences between the two versions, however, reveals much about Walton's evolving symbolic technique.

7. For references to Herbert and the altar, see pp 268, 277, 289, 290, 293, and 321. Herbert's burial holds more importance than critics have realized. It too is problematic, since no evidence exists that Herbert was buried under the altar at all. Aubrey, whose uncle Thomas Danvers attended Herbert's funeral, wrote: ‘He lyes in the Chancell, under no large, nor yet very good, marble grave-stone, without any Inscription’ (Aubrey's Brief Lives, ed Oliver Lawson Dick [Ann Arbor, Mich.: Ann Arbor Paperbacks 1962], p 137). But the detail's function becomes clearer when we realize that saints were traditionally buried beneath the altar (see Patrick Cowley, Thomas Ken, 1637-1711, Bishop of Bath and Wells [Westminster 1961], p 30n). Even the final stroke of the biography thus illustrates how consciously Walton worked to recall in Herbert the pattern of the ‘primitive saints.’

8. John Butt's notes in Vivian De Sola Pinto, ed, English Biography in the Seventeenth Century (London 1951) brought this aspect of the epigram to my attention.

9. Walton's mounting awareness of the full antithetical qualities of Melville probably finds its best documentation in this passage. Novarr notes that in 1670 Walton had written of Herbert before his marriage that ‘both then and at his death, he was said to have no Enemy’ (Making, p 357). But in the revisions of 1674 and 1675 he deleted the original passage but strengthened the idea by recasting it in the form quoted in the text. In 1674, however, he put the idea in the appendix, phrased as a question. The declarative cast of the version of 1675 brilliantly solidifies the antagonism so heavily developed in that version, brutally juxtaposing an implacable Puritan hatred with an Anglican life devoted to love.

10. After I had completed the first draft of this study, I came upon Richard Sylvester's excellent article, ‘Cavendish's Life of Wolsey: The Artistry of a Tudor Biographer,’ SP, 57 (1960), 44-71. Sylvester has discovered in Cavendish precisely the structure I have found in Walton, though used for very different effects. He defined the structure so well that I decided to use his term: “‘correspondent structure,’ an explicit or implicit paralleling of scenes in the second part of the Life with scenes in the first part so that any individual episode may demand consideration not only in itself but also in terms of a somewhat similar passage that precedes or follows it” (p 51). Sylvester's discovery suggests both a major organizational pattern for much early biography, as well as the direct influence of Cavendish upon Walton, a topic I plan to consider in a future article. It is worth noting, too, that Cavendish resorted to this structure for artistic reasons similar to Walton's, in order to expand an exceptionally brief period of his subject's life—in Walton's case, Herbert's last three years; in Cavendish's case, Wolsey's last year alone.

11. Lives, pp 47-8, 52, 54, 57, and 80-1. For Walton's gradual intensification of Donne's saintliness see Novarr, pp 68-126.

12. For further details of Walton's correspondent structure see the parallel tributes to Herbert's literary discernment (pp 273, 312), the parallel sections noting Herbert's love of music (pp 269, 303), the efforts of acquaintances in each half to discourage him from ‘mean’ employments which receive the same reply from Herbert (pp 277, 305), the admonishments for him to be more frugal (pp 279, 306), the parallel situation of the king's loving a courtier (pp 271, 274, 312). And in light of all the parallels, it hardly seems accidental that Walton split his meagre information on Arthur Woodnot into two parts, placing a portion in each half, and that in each section (and only in these portions) he used the phrase ‘clos'd his eyes on his Death-bed’ (pp 280, 315), a trivial echo which nonetheless seems to capture the unconscious effect of Walton's glancing from part to part. This does not touch, however, another structure of dualities in the Life: the pairs of situations and details within each half, a further sophistication of the ‘correspondent structure.’ For an example of this feature, note the careful placement of the information on Donne in the Life (pp 264-7).

13. Lives, pp 97, 15-16, 422.

14. This curious phrase has been discussed by William Lyon Phelps in ‘Walton's Phrase: “The Great Secretary of Nature”,’ MLN, 18 (1903), 161, who points out that Walton probably borrowed the phrase from one of Donne's Satyres. Walton's imagination absorbed such attractive phrases throughout his career. What is important here is the way in which Walton makes the phrase serve his own imaginative purposes.

15. Walton's account of Herbert's restoration of Leighton Ecclesia has been challenged by both Novarr (p 342) and Butt (‘Methods,’ pp 75-6), who show that Walton had misinterpreted a passage in Barnabas Oley's Preface to the 1652 edition of Herbert's Remains. They are undoubtedly right; but Walton's compulsive desire to portray his Anglicans as creators of beauty explains why he misread the passage.

16. This passage reveals in its emphasis on ‘mutual love’ one of the great thematic threads of the entire biography. The ‘holy friendships,’ Herbert's marriage, his mother's relationship with her children, Herbert's friendships, and here the union of God and his church, all are totally controlled by this informing idea.

17. The relation of moral action to sense which these passages affirm is hardly unique to Walton, or even to the possibly eccentric mind of a talent like Shirley's. It appears commonly in seventeenth-century works. A convenient example can be found in Bacon's ‘Of Adversity’: ‘Certainly virtue is like precious odours, most fragrant when they are incensed or crushed: for Prosperity doth best discover vice, but Adversity doth best discover virtue’ (Selected Writings of Francis Bacon, ed Hugh G. Dick [New York 1955], p 17). Another is contained within one of Fuller's irrepressible puns, when he praised the divine Richard Field in these terms: ‘that learned divine, whose memory smelleth like a Field the Lord hath blessed’ (quoted by Anthony à Wood, Athenae Oxonienses, 4 vols [1813; rpt New York: Johnson Reprint Corporation 1967], ii, 183). The state of mind behind such remarks remains one of the least explored areas for criticism.