Heart-Work: George Herbert and the Protestant Ethic (review)

Abstract

Cristina Malcolmson, Heart- Work: George Herbert and the Protestant Ethic. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999. 297 pp. $45. by Michael Schoenfeldt In this fine book, Cristina Malcolmson offers the fullest account we have of the complex networks of clientage in which George Herbert was enmeshed, and of the manifold ways that these networks may have affected his poetry. In seven chapters, she explores a wide range of social, cultural, religious, and literary contexts for reading Herbert's poetry. It is a signal strength of Malcolmson's approach that religious matters are neither subordinate to nor detached from social concerns. Throughout the book Malcolmson proves herself alert to the shifting nuances of early seventeenth-century English history, carefully charting the ways that factions and fortunes alter from month to month in this volatile period. She demonstrates convincingly that the political prosperity of the Herbert family, including George, was tied to the courtly favor enjoyed by William Herbert, third earl of Pembroke. Malcolmson, moreover, argues that the year 1623, when Pembroke's primary competition for royal favor, the Catholic and antagonistic Lord Buckingham, became a duke, proved a watershed moment for Pembroke and his clients. After Buckingham's promotion, "Pembroke's clients received significantly fewer positions" (p. 19). Malcolmson's precise account of the competitive vagaries of courtly favor gives us a better way of understanding George Herbert's apparent loss of royal favor in 1623 than the story we have been telling, which stresses his anti-war oration before the pacific King James as the primary cause. Corollary to Malcolmson's argument about the importance of clientage to Herbert's literary career is her analysis of Herbert's development of the largely Protestant idea of vocation. Malcolmson argues that the "doctrine of vocation is the fundamental principle shaping The Temple and The Country Parson" (p. 5). The question of vocation certainly is a central concern for Herbert, and Malcolmson is right to focus on it, but I felt that at times the doctrine was being asked to explain away rather than to explain Herbert's often-expressed tension between the need for strenuous human devotional effort and the fear that such effort only pollutes the devotional artifact. Malcolmson imagines a Herbert originally dedicated to "the work of gentility" who "later turned away from pursuit of upper-class success" for the "character of holiness" (p. 10). This is not that different from the Book Reviews109 trenchant if tendentious conversion narrative first related by Izaak Walton thirty-seven years after Herbert's death. Malcolmson, though, is at her best when discussing "Heartwork " (the phrase is from Richard Baxter), that volatile mix of devotion and business that was for Herbert the essence of the religious life. Chapters 1 and 2 are devoted respectively to The Country Parson and to Herbert's verse as coterie productions. Malcolmson argues that The Country Parson, Herbert's manual of conduct for rural clergy, was "written to reformulate the terms of social identity as exempt from the system of status" (p. 28), and offers an illuminating reading of the work amid the literary genre of the Theophrastian character. She argues in her second chapter that Herbert's sacred parodies emerged in a specific social context: the Herbert family coterie, in which poetry was a social ritual continuous with "evenings of entertainment and the exchange of verses" (p. 67). "A Parodie," "The Posie," and the two youthful sonnets Herbert sent to his mother emerge with added resonance in this social context. Chapters 3, 4, and 5 deal specifically with Herbert's revisions to The Temple, and attempt to develop an autobiographical narrative that would explain them. I found these chapters fascinating and provocative , even when I disagreed with the biographical assumptions on which they were based. Comparing the earlier Williams manuscript with the revised and expanded Bodleian manuscript, Malcolmson argues that "The revised Temple tries to purify itself of a 'selfnesse' associated pejoratively with high status and profit-seeking" (p. 98). She asserts that the Williams manuscript represents the state of Herbert's thought through 1627, and that the Bodleian manuscript represents post-1627 revisions. I found the grounds for this argument, though, unconvincing: the presence ofverbal links (heretofore unnoticed...