George Herbert’s French Connections: Of Books and Brothers

Abstract

George Herbert’s French Connections:Of Books and Brothers Anne-Marie Miller-Blaise Places in George Herbert’s poetry are seldom named, are seldom specific. If anything, they are most often domestic, inner spaces, sometimes no larger than a box. A chair, a board, a cup, often constitute the whole scenery for certain of his poems. A rose, an herb, a simple tree, are sufficient details to paint the setting in which to stage “the spiritual conflicts that have passed between God and [the poet’s] soul.”1 On reading The Temple one is struck by the absence of any proclaimed rooting in historically or socially recognizable settings, a fact that is unsurprising for lyric poetry of the time, yet which can be set against the contemporary growing fashion for country home poems, for instance, in the first decades of the seventeenth century. No mention is made of any specific country seat, college, church, or chapel, despite the running architectural metaphor. Locations verge on the abstract while scarcely becoming allegorical, as testified by the recurrent use (thirty-eight times, according to the Herbert concordance) of the polysemous and indefinite term “place,” meant to designate at once location and position in a social or natural order.2 Yet, however unspecified, Herbert’s locations retain a quaint, nearly tangible feel. In the face of social and spiritual estrangement the poet is looking for a “home” or, as in “The Crosse,” “some place, where [he] might sing, / And serve” God (ll. 4-5).3 The evident domesticity of Herbert’s world in The Temple is charged with social, theological, and aesthetic significance. It echoes his more practical preference for the familiar in the Country Parson, whether in matters of doctrine or medicine: Home-bred medicines are both more easie for the Parsons purse, and more familiar for all mens bodyes. … As for spices, he doth not onely prefer home-bred things before them, but [End Page 48] condemns them for vanities. … Accordingly, for salves, his wife seeks not the city, but preferrs her garden and fields before all outlandish gums. (pp. 261-62) The author’s suspicion towards foreignness is multi-layered. In the same way as “home-bred“herbs are more apt to cure the body, the British Church will serve as a better salve for souls than the Churches of Rome or Geneva for, he states, “Outlandish looks may not compare” (“The British Church,” l. 10). On a poetic level, Herbert accordingly adopts what has often been referred to as his “plain style,” a musical language favoring the simple, monosyllabic words of the English tongue and its vocalic glides. He commends it over more sophisticated languages for its ability to humbly bring together “in one word” (“The Sonne,” l. 11) the true significance of the Incarnation thanks to the homonyms “sun” and “son”: “Let forrain nations of their language boast … / I like our language … / How neatly doe we give one onely name / To parents issue and the sunnes bright starre!” (ll. 1, 3, 5-6). And yet, a closer look at Herbert’s writings shows how foreign places and foreign words find their way into his very domestic Temple, a temple erected not that far off some of the routes that were used for the early modern European book trade through Antwerp and Paris. The purpose of this paper will be to look at Herbert’s perception of one foreign location in particular, France and its capital, Paris, a geographic location he had not visited, to which he alludes only a few times.4 Yet it is a location which incidentally poses the question of social place, and to which Herbert was indirectly linked through his brothers Edward and Henry. George Herbert’s few comments in poetry and prose about France seem at first to bespeak a paradoxical attitude, poised between a rejection of alien sophistication and courtliness and an appraisal of foreign ingeniousness. I would like to suggest that the author’s ambivalent attitude towards France betrays in fact his strong sense of belonging to a European space of textual circulation – Paris standing as one of its important centers – as well as his conviction that Continental texts are to be...