George Herbert and John Ruskin

Abstract

When a disciple of John Ruskin, W. H. Mallock, portrayed his master under the sobriquet "Mr. Herbert" in a work entitled The New Republic, he chose a name as close to Ruskin's heart as anyone could have, for Mallock presented him under the name of a man whom Ruskin revered as one of his greatest teachers, the poet George Herbert.' The keenness of Mallock's choice has largely gone unnoticed by students of both Ruskin and Herbert. Repeatedly, Ruskin paid tribute to Herbert and often quoted from his works, especially "The Church-porch," upon which he drew fourteen times. He also quoted or commented upon a dozen of Herbert's lyrics. Yet, curiously enough, not until J. C.A. Rathmell's undocumented but defensible assertion that revised interest in the poetry of the Metaphysicals can be "traced in its embryonic stages through the early admiration of Ruskin and Hopkins for Herbert" did a modern critic suggest how deeply Herbert's work was woven into the fabric of Ruskin's life and thought.2 Herbert's thoughts indeed were vital thread in Ruskin's thinking and writing. Ruskin moreoverclaimed, none too convincingly, that Herbert's style influenced his, and Ruskin did some of his earliest criticism of literary subjects by commenting on Herbert and Bunyan.