setting out bravely in his cockle-shell on the oceans of knowledge and
experience. He travels, though he knows not why he travels. He loves,
though he knows not why he loves. He must escape from that "hydroptic
immoderate" thirst of experience by yielding to it. One fancies that
it was in this spirit that he joined the expedition of Essex to Cadiz
in 1596 and afterwards sailed to the Azores. Or partly in this spirit,
for he himself leads one to think that his love-affairs may have had
something to do with it. In the second of those prematurely realistic
descriptions of storm and calm relating to the Azores voyage, he writes:
Whether a rotten state, and hope of gain,
Or to disuse me from the queasy pain
Of being belov'd, and loving, or the thirst
Of honour, or fair death, out pusht me first.
In these lines we get a glimpse of the Donne that has attracted most
interest in recent years--the Donne who experienced more variously
than any other poet of his time "the queasy pain of being beloved and
loving." Donne was curious of adventures of many kinds, but in nothing
more than in love. As a youth he leaves the impression of having been
an Odysseus of love, a man of many wiles and many travels. He was a
virile neurotic, comparable in some points to Baudelaire, who was a
sensualist of the mind even more than of the body. His sensibilities
were different as well as less of a piece, but he had something of
Baudelaire's taste for hideous and shocking aspects of lust. One is not
surprised to find among his poems that "heroical epistle of Sappho to
Philaenis," in which he makes himself the casuist of forbidden things.
His studies of sensuality, however, are for the most part normal,
even in their grossness. There was in him more of the Yahoo than of
the decadent. There was an excremental element in his genius as in
the genius of that other gloomy dean, Jonathan Swift. Donne and Swift
were alike satirists born under Saturn. They laughed more frequently
from disillusion than from happiness. Donne, it must be admitted,
turned his disillusion to charming as well as hideous uses. _Go and
Catch a Falling Star_ is but one of a series of delightful lyrics in
disparagement of women. In several of the _Elegies_, however, he throws
away his lute and comes to the satirist's more prosaic business. He
writes frankly as a man in search of bodily experiences:
Whoever loves, if he do not propose
The right true end of love, he's one that goes
To sea for nothing but to make him sick.
In _Love's Progress_ he lets his fancy dwell on the detailed geography
of a woman's body, with the sick imagination of a schoolboy, till the
beautiful seems almost beastly. In _The Anagram_ and _The Comparison_
he plays the Yahoo at the expense of all women by the similes he uses
in insulting two of them. In _The Perfume_ he relates the story of an
intrigue with a girl whose father discovered his presence in the house
as a result of his using scent. Donne's jest about it is suggestive of
his uncontrollable passion for ugliness:
Had it been some bad smell, he would have thought
That his own feet, or breath, that smell had brought.
It may be contended that in _The Perfume_ he was describing an
imaginary experience, and indeed we have his own words on record: "I
did best when I had least truth for my subjects." But even if we did
not accept Mr. Gosse's common-sense explanation of these words, we
should feel that the details of the story have a vividness that springs
straight from reality. It is difficult to believe that Donne had not
actually lived in terror of the gigantic manservant who was set to spy
on the lovers.
But the most interesting of all the sensual intrigues of Donne, from
the point of view of biography, especially since Mr. Gosse gave it such
commanding significance in that _Life of John Donne_ in which he made
a living man out of a mummy, is that of which we have the story in
_Jealousy_ and _His Parting from Her_. It is another story of furtive
and forbidden love. Its theme is an intrigue carried on under a
Husband's towering eyes,
That flamed with oily sweat of jealousy.
A characteristic touch of grimness is added to the story by making the
husband a deformed man. Donne, however, merely laughs at his deformity,
as he bids the lady laugh at the jealousy that reduces her to tears:
O give him many thanks, he is courteous,
That in suspecting kindly warneth us.
We must not, as we used, flout openly,
In scoffing riddles, his deformity;
Nor at his board together being set,
With words nor touch, scarce looks adulterate.
And he proposes that, now that the husband seems to have discovered
them they shall henceforth carry on their intrigue at some distance
from where
He, swol'n and pampered with great fare,
Sits down and snorts, cag'd in his basket chair.
It is an extraordinary story, if it is true. It throws a scarcely less
extraordinary light on the nature of Donne's mind, if he invented it.
At the same time, I do not think the events it relates played the
important part which Mr. Gosse assigns to them in Donne's spiritual
biography. It is impossible to read Mr. Gosse's two volumes without
getting the impression that "the deplorable but eventful liaison," as
he calls it, was the most fruitful occurrence in Donne's life as a
poet. He discovers traces of it in one great poem after another--even
in the _Nocturnal upon St. Lucy's Day_, which is commonly supposed to
relate to the Countess of Bedford, and in _The Funeral_, the theme of
which Professor Grierson takes to be the mother of George Herbert. I
confess that the oftener I read the poetry of Donne the more firmly
I become convinced that, far from being primarily the poet of desire
gratified and satiated, he is essentially the poet of frustrated love.
He is often described by the historians of literature as the poet who
finally broke down the tradition of Platonic love. I believe that,
so far is this from being the case, he is the supreme example of a
Platonic lover among the English poets. He was usually Platonic under
protest, but at other times exultantly so. Whether he finally overcame
the more consistent Platonism of his mistress by the impassioned logic
of _The Ecstasy_ we have no means of knowing. If he did, it would be
difficult to resist the conclusion that the lady who wished to continue
to be his passionate friend and to ignore the physical side of love
was Anne More, whom he afterwards married. If not, we may look for
her where we will, whether in Magdalen Herbert (already a young widow
who had borne ten children when he first met her) or in the Countess
of Bedford or in another. The name is not important, and one is not
concerned to know it, especially when one remembers Donne's alarming
curse on:
Whoever guesses, thinks, or dreams he knows
Who is my mistress.
One sort of readers will go on speculating, hoping to discover real
people in the shadows, as they speculate about Swift's Stella and
Vanessa, and his relations to them. It is enough for us to feel,
however, that these poems railing at or glorying in Platonic love
are no mere goldsmith's compliments, like the rhymed letters to Mrs.
Herbert and Lady Bedford. Miracles of this sort are not wrought save
by the heart. We do not find in them the underground and sardonic
element that appears in so much of Donne's merely amorous work. We no
longer picture him as a sort of Vulcan hammering out the poetry of
base love, raucous, powerful, mocking. He becomes in them a child of
Apollo, as far as his temperament will allow him. He makes music of so
grave and stately a beauty that one begins to wonder at all the critics
who have found fault with his rhythms--from Ben Jonson, who said that
"for not keeping accent, Donne deserved hanging," down to Coleridge,
who declared that his "muse on dromedary trots," and described him as
"rhyme's sturdy cripple." Coleridge's quatrain on Donne is, without
doubt, an unequalled masterpiece of epigrammatic criticism. But Donne
rode no dromedary. In his greatest poems he rides Pegasus like a
master, even if he does rather weigh the poor beast down by carrying an
encyclopædia in his saddle-bags.
Not only does Donne remain a learned man on his Pegasus, however: he
also remains a humorist, a serious fantastic. Humour and passion pursue
each other through the labyrinth of his being, as we find in those two
beautiful poems, _The Relic_ and _The Funeral_, addressed to the lady
who had given him a bracelet of her hair. In the former he foretells
what will happen if ever his grave is broken up and his skeleton
discovered with
A bracelet of bright hair about the bone.
People will fancy, he declares, that the bracelet is a device of lovers
To make their souls at the last busy day
Meet at the grave and make a little stay.
Bone and bracelet will be worshipped as relics--the relics of a
Magdalen and her lover. He conjectures with a quiet smile:
All women shall adore us, and some men.
He warns his worshippers, however, that the facts are far different
from what they imagine, and tells the miracle-seekers what in reality
were "the miracles we harmless lovers wrought":
First we loved well and faithfully,
Yet knew not what we lov'd, nor why;
Difference of sex no more we knew
Than our guardian angels do;
Coming and going, we
Perchance might kiss, but not between those meals;
Our hands ne'er touch'd the seals,
Which nature, injur'd by late law, sets free:
These miracles we did; but now, alas!
All measure, and all language, I should pass,
Should I tell what a miracle she was.
In _The Funeral_ he returns to the same theme:
Whoever comes to shroud me do not harm
Nor question much
That subtle wreath of hair that crowns my arm;
The mystery, the sign you must not touch,
For 'tis my outward soul.
In this poem, however, he finds less consolation than before in the too
miraculous nobleness of their love:
Whate'er she meant by it, bury it with me,
For since I am
Love's martyr, it might breed idolatry,
If into other hands these relics came;
As 'twas humility
To afford to it all that a soul can do,
So, 'tis some bravery,
That, since you would have none of me, I bury some of you.
In _The Blossom_, he is in a still more earthly mood, and declares
that, if his mistress remains obdurate, he will return to London, where
he will find a mistress:
As glad to have my body as my mind.
_The Primrose_ is another appeal for a less intellectual love:
Should she
Be more than woman, she would get above
All thought of sex, and think to move
My heart to study her, and not to love.
If we turn back to _The Undertaking_, however, we find Donne boasting
once more of the miraculous purity of a love which it would be useless
to communicate to other men, since, there being no other mistress to
love in the same kind, they "would love but as before." Hence he will
keep the tale a secret:
If, as I have, you also do,
Virtue attir'd in woman see,
And dare love that, and say so too,
And forget the He and She;
And if this love, though placed so,
From profane men you hide,
Which will no faith on this bestow,
Or, if they do, deride:
Then you have done a braver thing
Than all the Worthies did;
And a braver thence will spring,
Which is, to keep that hid.
It seems to me, in view of this remarkable series of poems, that it
is useless to look in Donne for a single consistent attitude to love.
His poems take us round the entire compass of love as the work of no
other English poet--not even, perhaps, Browning's--does. He was by
destiny the complete experimentalist in love in English literature. He
passed through phase after phase of the love of the body only, phase
after phase of the love of the soul only, and ended as the poet of the
perfect marriage. In his youth he was a gay--but was he ever really
gay?--free-lover, who sang jestingly:
How happy were our sires in ancient times,
Who held plurality of loves no crime!
By the time he writes _The Ecstasy_ the victim of the body has become
the protesting victim of the soul. He cries out against a love that is
merely an ecstatic friendship:
But O alas, so long, so far,
Our bodies why do we forbear?
He pleads for the recognition of the body, contending that it is not
the enemy but the companion of the soul:
Soul into the soul may flow
Though it to body first repair.
The realistic philosophy of love has never been set forth with greater
intellectual vehemence:
So must pure lovers' souls descend
T' affections and to faculties,
Which sense may reach and apprehend,
Else a great Prince in prison lies.
To our bodies turn we then, that so
Weak men on love reveal'd may look;
Love's mysteries in souls do grow
But yet the body is the book.
I, for one, find it impossible to believe that all this passionate
verse--verse in which we find the quintessence of Donne's genius--was a
mere utterance of abstract thoughts into the wind. Donne, as has been
pointed out, was more than most writers a poet of personal experience.
His greatest poetry was born of struggle and conflict in the obscure
depths of the soul as surely as was the religion of St. Paul. I doubt
if, in the history of his genius, any event ever happened of equal
importance to his meeting with the lady who first set going in his
brain that fevered dialogue between the body and the soul. Had he been
less of a frustrated lover, less of a martyr, in whom love's
Art did express
A quintessence even from nothingness,
From dull privations and lean emptiness,
much of his greatest poetry, it seems to me, would never have been
written.
One cannot, unfortunately, write the history of the progress of Donne's
genius save by inference and guessing. His poems were not, with some
unimportant exceptions, published in his lifetime. He did not arrange
them in chronological or in any sort of order. His poem on the flea
that has bitten both him and his inamorata comes after the triumphant
_Anniversary_, and but a page or two before the _Nocturnal upon St.
Lucy's Day_. Hence there is no means of telling how far we are indebted
to the Platonism of one woman, how much to his marriage with another,
for the enrichment of his genius. Such a poem as _The Canonisation_ can
be interpreted either in a Platonic sense or as a poem written to Anne
More, who was to bring him both imprisonment and the liberty of love.
It is, in either case, written in defence of his love against some who
censured him for it:
For God's sake, hold your tongue, and let me love.
In the last verses of the poem Donne proclaims that his love cannot be
measured by the standards of the vulgar:
We can die by it, if not live by love,
And if unfit for tombs or hearse
Our legend be, it will be fit for verse;
And, if no piece of chronicle we prove,
We'll build in sonnets pretty rooms;
As well a well-wrought urn becomes
The greatest ashes as half-acre tombs,
And by these hymns all shall approve
Us canonis'd by love:
And thus invoke us: "You whom reverend love
Made one another's hermitage;
You to whom love was peace, that now is rage;
Who did the whole world's soul contract and drove
Into the glasses of your eyes
(So made such mirrors, and such spies,
That they did all to you epitomise),
Countries, towns, courts. Beg from above
A pattern of your love!"
According to Walton, it was to his wife that Donne addressed the
beautiful verses beginning:
Sweetest love, I do not go
For weariness of thee;
as well as the series of _Valedictions_. Of many of the other
love-poems, however, we can measure the intensity but not guess the
occasion. All that we can say with confidence when we have read them is
that, after we have followed one tributary on another leading down to
the ultimate Thames of his genius, we know that his progress as a lover
was a progress from infidelity to fidelity, from wandering amorousness
to deep and enduring passion. The image that is finally stamped on his
greatest work is not that of a roving adulterer, but of a monotheist
of love. It is true that there is enough Don-Juanism in the poems to
have led even Sir Thomas Browne to think of Donne's verse rather as a
confession of his sins than as a golden book of love.
To the modern reader, on the contrary, it will seem that there is
as much divinity in the best of the love-poems as in the best of
the religious ones. Donne's last word as a secular poet may well be
regarded as having been uttered in that great poem in celebration of
lasting love, _The Anniversary_, which closes with so majestic a sweep:
Here upon earth we are kings, and none but we
Can be such kings, nor of such subjects be.
Who is so safe as we, where none can do
Treason to us, except one of us two?
True and false fears let us refrain;
Let us love nobly, and live, and add again
Years and years unto years, till we attain
To write three-score: this is the second of our reign
Donne's conversion as a lover was obviously as complete and
revolutionary as his conversion in religion.
It is said, indeed, to have led to his conversion to passionate
religion. When his marriage with Sir George More's sixteen-year-old
daughter brought him at first only imprisonment and poverty, he summed
up the sorrows of the situation in the famous line--a line which has
some additional interest as suggesting the correct pronunciation of his
name:
John Donne; Anne Donne; Undone.
His married life, however, in spite of a succession of miseries due
to ill-health, debt, and thwarted ambition, seems to have been happy
beyond prophecy; and when at the end of sixteen years his wife died in
childbed, after having borne him twelve children, a religious crisis
resulted that turned his conventional churchmanship into sanctity. His
original change from Catholicism to Protestantism has been already
mentioned. Most of the authorities are agreed, however, that this was a
conversion in a formal rather than in a spiritual sense. Even when he
took Holy Orders in 1615, at the age of forty-two, he appears to have
done so less in answer to any impulse to a religious life from within
than because, with the downfall of Somerset, all hope of advancement
through his legal attainments was brought to an end. Undoubtedly, as
far back as 1612, he had thought of entering the Church. But at the
same period we find him making use of his legal knowledge in order to
help the infamous Countess of Essex to secure the annulment of her
first marriage, and at the end of 1613 he is writing an epithalamium
for the murderers of Sir Thomas Overbury. It is a curious fact that
three great poets--Donne, Ben Jonson, and Campion--appear, though
innocently enough, in the story of that sordid crime. Donne's temper
at the time is still clearly that of a man of the world. His jest at
the expense of Sir Walter Raleigh, then in the Tower, is the jest of
an ungenerous worldling. Even after his admission into the Church he
reveals himself as ungenerously morose when the Countess of Bedford, in
trouble about her own extravagances, can afford him no more than £30 to
pay his debts. The truth is, to be forty and a failure is an affliction
that might sour even a healthy nature. The effect on a man of Donne's
ambitious and melancholy temperament, together with the memory of his
dissipated health and his dissipated fortune, and the spectacle of a
long family in constant process of increase, must have been disastrous.
To such a man poverty and neglected merit are a prison, as they were
to Swift. One thinks of each of them as a lion in a cage, ever growing
less and less patient of his bars. Shakespeare and Shelley had in them
some volatile element that could, one feels, have escaped through
the bars and sung above the ground. Donne and Swift were morbid men
suffering from claustrophobia. They were pent and imprisoned spirits,
hating the walls that seemed to threaten to close in on them and crush
them. In his poems and letters Donne is haunted especially by three
images--the hospital, the prison, and the grave. Disease, I think,
preyed on his mind even more terrifyingly than warped ambition. "Put
all the miseries that man is subject to together," he exclaims in one
of the passages in that luxuriant anthology that Mr. Logan Pearsall
Smith has made from the _Sermons_[25]; "sickness is more than all....
In poverty I lack but other things; in banishment I lack but other
men; but in sickness I lack myself." Walton declares that it was from
consumption that Donne suffered; but he had probably the seeds of many
diseases. In some of his letters he dwells miserably on the symptoms
of his illnesses. At one time, his sickness "hath so much of a cramp
that it wrests the sinews, so much of a tetane that it withdraws and
pulls the mouth, and so much of the gout ... that it is not like to
be cured ... I shall," he adds, "be in this world, like a porter in a
great house, but seldomest abroad; I shall have many things to make me
weary, and yet not get leave to be gone." Even after his conversion he
felt drawn to a morbid insistence on the details of his ill-health.
Those amazing records which he wrote while lying ill in bed in October,
1623, give us a realistic study of a sickbed and its circumstances,
the gloom of which is hardly even lightened by his odd account of
the disappearance of his sense of taste: "My taste is not gone away,
but gone up to sit at David's table; my stomach is not gone, but
gone upwards toward the Supper of the Lamb." "I am mine own ghost,"
he cries, "and rather affright my beholders than interest them....
Miserable and inhuman fortune, when I must practise my lying in the
grave by lying still."
[25] _Donne's Sermons._ Selected Passages, with an Essay.
By Logan Pearsall Smith. Clarendon Press. 6_s._ net.