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UNTILL THE BOOK GROW TO A COMPLEAT PASTORALL”: RE-READING THE COUNTRY PARSON RONALD W. COOLEY University of Saskatchewan M ajor critical studies of Herbert tend to treat The Country Parson not as a book in its own right, but as a comfortably didactic synopsis of the poet’s beliefs, an illuminating gloss on the more challenging poetry of The Temple.1 By appealing to The Country Parson for solutions to the interpretative problems posed by the poems, readers implicitly assert that the prose treatise is the univocal discourse of the “real” George Herbert, who stands behind the competing sensibilities we find in The Temple.2 Ironically, the text so authorized is impoverished in the process, stripped ofits own complexity and ambiguity. On the other hand, if we read The Country Parson rigorously, as a text with its own agenda and conditions of production, we discover that it is as variously textured and as changeable as “The Collar” or “Miserie” or “Jordan” (II). Herbert’s book is a web of oppositions and dualities, held in precarious suspension by the exemplary country parson of the title and the cautious authorial voice. Biographical criticism of Herbert has tended to make this kind of reading difficult until quite recently. One of the central concerns of Amy Charles’s scholarship is to debunk the “Waltonian heresy” (Introduction xvii), the version of Herbert’s life based on the Pauline and Augustinian pattern of conversion, and on the example of Donne: the young man of high birth, fond of fine clothes and knowing the ways of the world, after a brief and unrewarding fling at secular life, manages to submit his will and high spirits and to become as saintly as Walton’s Donne[,] ... an anticipation of gentle Jesus meek and mild. (Introduction xviii) According to this paradigm the Temple poems are, in the words Walton attributes to Herbert, “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” (286), and The Country Parson is proof of the resolution of those struggles and of Herbert’s final submission. Critics and biographers before Charles have largely followed and elaborated this model of the poet’s development. George Herbert Palmer divides Herbert’s literary life into an intense period E n g l ish St u d ie s in C a n a d a , x v iii, 3, September 1992 of artistic productivity and personal crisis (1627-30), followed by the period of “consecration” (1630-33) (34). The effect of more recent research has been to place the beginnings of this crisis considerably earlier, perhaps as early as 1613-14 (Charles, Life 87 n63), and to suggest aprocess considerably longer and less dramatic than the model conversions undergone by Herbert’s illustrious predecessors. Charles’s evidence does, however, support the conventional assumption that The Country Parson would have been written, or at least completed, at Bemerton between 1630 and 1632 (the date attached to the authorial preface). And, despite her attacks on the “Waltonian heresy,” Charles’s vision of The Country Parson is essentially Waltonian. She sees the prose treatise expressing the values of the saintly parson Herbert, and praises its author’s “working knowledge of human nature, . . . good sense, forthright diction, and economical phrasing” (Life 158; see also Bottrall 80). Ironically, these are precisely the terms in which readers praised The Temple before the modern revolution in Herbert criticism. What is missing from such a view is a sense of the literariness of the text. Edmund Miller points out that The Country Parson is “with the exception of ‘The Church Militant’ the only volume of Herbert’s that does not make extensive use of a first-person voice” (220). For Miller this is a sign of the book’s coldness and lack of personal intensity. I would suggest, however, that this apparent coldness, far from uniform throughout the book, is part of a larger strategy. The predominance of the third-person voice serves not to distance the prose text from the poems, but to link them, making explicit what...
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