Lives by Izaak Walton

First published:The Life of John Donne, 1640; The Life of Sir Henry Wotton, 1651; The Life of Mr. Richard Hooker, 1665; The Life of Mr. George Herbert, 1670; The Life of Dr. Robert Sanderson, 1678

Type of work: Biography

Principal Personages:

• John Donne, famous poet and preacher, Dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral
• Sir Henry Wotton, an English nobleman, diplomat, and educator
• Richard Hooker, noted clergyman and theologian
• George Herbert, metaphysical poet and parish priest, a member of one of the highest-ranking families of his time
• Robert Sanderson, Bishop of Lincoln, an Anglican clergyman during the mid-seventeenth century

Critical Evaluation

Izaak Walton lived through most of the turbulent years of the seventeenth century, but he remained at heart an Elizabethan, and it is from this perspective that he wrote his fine biographies, lives of outstanding clergymen and scholars of his day: John Donne, Sir Henry Wotton, Richard Hooker, George Herbert, and Robert Sanderson. The works appeared over a period of almost forty years, but the stable philosophy of their author gives them many points of similarity.

While Walton’s subjects were unquestionably men of vastly different personalities, his own character casts an almost saintly light over all of them; emotional struggles, temptation, and personal vices play almost no part in their lives as Walton interpreted them. His accounts are not psychological studies; he is interested rather in painting portraits of virtuous men. His studies are really descendants of the saints’ lives that formed the majority of early English biographies. He pays tribute in each of his works to the virtues of devoutness, humility, charitableness, and learning.

Walton’s biographies have much in common in their construction, as well as in the presentation of the characters of the main figures. The author inevitably begins with a discussion of the family background of his subject, then comments on his early education. He treats the mature career of each man partly through a summary of his activities, partly through anecdotes that illustrate special personality traits or talents. Walton knew most of the men whose lives he recounts, and he occasionally reproduces his own conversations with them. He also quotes letters, poems, and even wills as evidence of characteristics of his subjects.

Walton’s style is relatively personal; he often speaks in the first person, and he does not hesitate to make known his own views on the political or religious questions he happens to be discussing. In spite of this personal quality, the style itself is relatively formal and balanced, typical of the prose of his day. His vocabulary is dignified, but natural, closer to that of Dryden than to that of the more imaginative writers of Jacobean prose.

The Life of John Donne is the most famous of the five; in it Walton concentrates upon the later years of the great poet and preacher, almost ignoring the youthful works that suggest Donne’s streak of wit and cynicism. He is especially interested in recounting the poet’s theological development and his long struggle to consider himself worthy to be ordained to the priesthood. Walton also devotes considerable attention to Donne’s marriage, the problems it created in his early career and the economic difficulties he and his family endured for years, along with the joys it brought him. A number of Donne’s poems to his wife are quoted to show the depth of his feeling for her.

Walton shows in these works a conviction that the manner of a man’s death reveals the essence of his character. He was himself present at Donne’s deathbed, and he records with admiration Donne’s devotion and concern for his parishioners—of whom Walton was one—his family, and his friends.

Sir Henry Wotton was the only layman among Walton’s subjects. He grew up during the latter part of the reign of Elizabeth I, became a close friend of the Earl of Essex, and prudently chose the time of Essex’s ultimately fatal conflict with the queen to travel extensively on the Continent. He made his political fortune, according to Walton, when he overheard, on his travels in Italy, a plot against Elizabeth’s successor, James VI of Scotland, and went to this monarch in disguise to warn him. When James became King of England, Wotton was given a number of important diplomatic positions, notably the ambassadorship to the Venetian states. He ended his career as provost of Eton College, where his biographer pictures him at his own studies, patronizing the arts, and giving special encouragement to the most promising of his students.

Walton characterizes Wotton as an urbane, hospitable man, a “great enemy to wrangling disputes of religion,” and a lover of the arts. The two men were good friends, and it was with Wotton’s encouragement that Walton began collecting material for the life of Donne.

Richard Hooker, who did much to shape the development of the Church of England with his LAWS OF ECCLESIASTICAL POLITY, is portrayed as a painfully shy, retiring man who had little but his virtuousness in common with the sophisticated Wotton. There is wry humor combined with deep sympathy in Walton’s description of his marriage, at the instigation of his landlady—who convinced him that it was his duty to have a wife—to the woman’s own daughter, a totally unsuitable mate who seems to have made the good clergyman’s life miserable. Hooker’s patient resignation in this situation and Walton’s description of his friends’ protective attitude toward him illuminate further his truly saintly humility and self-effacement.

Walton makes Hooker intensely human in his shyness, but he also stresses his great intellectual gifts and his contribution to his age, devoting a sizeable portion of the biography to the Calvinist-Anglican theological dispute between one Walter Travers and Hooker. He cites those points which he felt made Hooker’s arguments irrefutable, revealing his own Anglican sympathies.

This biography, too, concludes with a sympathetic picture of the subject’s last days. Hooker’s primary concern was for his book, and he struggled against illness to bring it as near completion as possible. He, like Walton’s other subjects, died at peace with God and man, resigned to his end and conscious both of his own failings and of God’s power to forgive them.

Walton devotes an unusual amount of attention to the family of George Herbert, commenting at special length on his mother, Magdalen, who was one of the most remarkable women of her century, the friend and patroness of many distinguished men, among them John Donne. The first part of the account of Herbert’s own life is the story of worldly and academic success; the poet rose to be the orator of Cambridge University and won high praise from James I. For Walton, however, the most important part of Herbert’s life was the brief time at its end when he served as rector of the country parish of Bemerton, laying aside his intellectual emphasis and his worldly ambition to devote himself to caring for the most fundamental needs of his parishioners and to preaching as simply and clearly as possible the basic tenets of the Christian religion. Walton tells of Herbert’s setting out on foot for a musical program in Salisbury and arriving covered with mud; he had stopped on the way to aid a farmer whose donkey had fallen under the weight of his load. The incident shows how far Herbert had moved from the concerns of his early days.

Here, as in several of the other works, Walton shows his own religious principles as he praises the standards Herbert followed in working with his congregation, explaining to them the significance of the various parts of the worship of the church. The biographer was aware of the failure of most of the priests of his day to meet the needs of their congregations. They preached on obscure theological points when their people needed simple advice and warm clothing. In spite of his aristocratic, wealthy background, Herbert was able to meet the wants of his parishioners with great sensitivity.

Walton concludes with a last tribute to the young poet, who died just as he was beginning to settle into his parish: “Thus he lived, and thus he died like a saint, unspotted of the world, full of alms-deeds, full of humility, and all the examples of a virtuous life.”

The Life of Dr. Robert Sanderson, last of the biographies, written when Walton was reaching old age, covers the period of the Civil Wars and reveals the author’s scorn for all the actions of Cromwell’s government. Dr. Sanderson, made Bishop of Lincoln on the Restoration of Charles II, suffered the typical harassment of the Anglican priest who refused to adopt the doctrines of the Puritan Parliament. He, too, conforms to Walton’s notions of the ideal parish priest, and several stories of his concern for the personal problems of his congregation are discussed.

Sanderson’s intellectual gifts brought him to the attention of Archbishop Laud, and he was for a time made chaplain at court, where he was one of the most articulate defenders of the Church of England. Walton relates a private conversation he had with Sanderson after the war, when the Bishop defended the Anglican liturgy, which he had modified as little as possible after he was returned to his small country parish during the Commonwealth.

Sanderson, like Hooker, was able to move happily in either the learned society of the universities or in the company of village parishioners, and his will reveals a similar humility. Though he had, in his last years, been given worldly stature as Bishop of Lincoln, he requested that his burial be as simple and unpretentious as possible; the desire for personal aggrandizement never played a part in his career as Walton presents it.

Walton’s studies may lack the psychological depth of some modern biographies, but these works are well-drawn portraits. Walton’s fluent prose style, his gift for choosing telling anecdotes to reveal character, and his subtle sense of humor all contribute to the appeal his biographies have had for more than two hundred years.