Donne's position among English poets, regarded from the historical and
what we like to call scientific point of view, has been defined
with learning and discrimination by Mr. Courthope in his _History of
English Poetry_. As a phenomenon of curious interest for the student
of the history of thought and literary fashions, there it is. Mr.
Courthope is far too well-informed and judicious a critic to explain
Donne's subtle thought and erudite conceits by a reference to 'Marini
and his followers'. Gongora and Du Bartas are alike passed over in
silence. What we are shown is the connexion of 'metaphysical wit' with
the complex and far-reaching changes in men's conception of Nature
which make the seventeenth century perhaps the greatest epoch in human
thought since human thinking began.
The only thing that such a criticism leaves unexplained and undefined
is the interest which Donne's poetry still has for us, not as an
historical phenomenon, but as poetry. Literary history has for the
historian a quite distinct interest from that which it possesses for
the student and lover of literature. For the historian it is a
matter of positive interest to connect Donne's wit with the general
disintegration of mediaeval thought, to recognize the influence on
the Elizabethan drama of the doctrines of Machiavelli, or to find in
Pope's achievement in poetry a counterpart to Walpole's in politics.
For the lover of literature none of these facts has any positive
interest whatsoever. Donne's wit attracts or repels him equally
whatever be its source; Tamburlaine and Iago lose none of their
interest for us though we know nothing of Machiavelli; Pope's poetry
is not a whit more or less poetical by being a strange by-product of
the Whig spirit in English life. For the lover of literature, literary
history has an indirect value. He studies history that he may discount
it. What he relishes in a poet of the past is exactly the same
essential qualities as he enjoys in a poet of his own day--life and
passion and art. But between us and every poet or thinker of the past
hangs a thinner or thicker veil of outworn fashions and conventions.
The same life has clothed itself in different garbs; the same passions
have spoken in different images; the same art has adapted itself to
different circumstances. To the historian these old clothes are in
themselves a subject of interest. His enjoyment of Shakespeare is
heightened by finding the explanation of Falstaff's hose, Pistol's
hyperboles, and the poet's neglect of the Unities. To the lover of
literature they are, until by understanding he can discount them,
a disadvantage because they invest the work of the poet with an
irrelevant air of strangeness. He studies them that he may grow
familiar with them and forget them, that he may clear and intensify
his sense of what alone has permanent value, the poet's individuality
and the art in which it is expressed.
Donne's conceits, of which so much has been made and on whose
historical significance Mr. Courthope has probably said the last word,
are just like other examples of these old clothes. The question for
literature is not whence they came, but how he used them. Is he a
poet in virtue or in spite of them, or both? Are they fit only to be
gathered into a museum of antiquated fashions such as Johnson prefixed
to his study of the last poet who wore them in quite the old way
(for Dryden, who pilfered more freely from Donne than from any of his
predecessors, cut them to a new fashion), or are they the individual
and still expressive dress of a true and great poet, commanding
admiration in their own manner and degree as freshly and enduringly as
the stiff and brocaded magnificence of Milton's no less individual, no
less artificial style?
Donne's reputation as a poet has passed through many vicissitudes in
the course of the last three centuries. With regard to his 'wit',
its range and character, erudition and ingenuity, all generations of
critics have been at one. It is as to the relation of this 'wit' to,
and its effect on, his poetry that they have been at variance. To his
contemporaries the 'wit' was identical with the poetry. Donne's 'wit'
gave him the same supremacy among poets that learning and humour and
art gave to Jonson among dramatists. To certain of his Dutch admirers
the wit of _The Flea_ seemed superhuman, and the epitaph with which
Carew closes his _Elegy_ expresses the almost universal English
opinion of the seventeenth century:
Here lies a king that ruled as he thought fit
The universal monarchy of wit;
Here lies two flamens, and both those the best,
Apollo's first, at last the true God's priest.
It may be doubted if Milton shared this opinion. He never mentions
Donne, but it was probably of him or his imitators he was thinking
when in his verses at Cambridge he spoke of
those new-fangled toys and trimmings slight
Which take our late fantastics with delight.
Certainly the growing taste for 'correctness' led after the
Restoration to a discrimination between Donne's wit and his poetry.
'The greatest wit,' Dryden calls him, 'though not the greatest poet of
our nation.' What he wanted as a poet were just the two essentials
of 'classical' poetry--smoothness of verse and dignity of expression.
This point of view is stated with clearness and piquancy in the
sentences of outrageous flattery which Dryden addressed to the Earl of
Dorset in the opening paragraphs of his delightful _Essay on Satire_:
'There is more of salt in all your verses, than I have seen in
any of the moderns, or even of the ancients; but you have
been sparing of the gall, by which means you have pleased
all readers, and offended none. Donne alone, of all our
countrymen, had your talent; but was not happy enough to
arrive at your versification; and were he translated into
numbers, and English, he would yet be wanting in the dignity
of expression. That which is the prime virtue, and chief
ornament, of Virgil, which distinguishes him from the rest
of writers, is so conspicuous in your verses, that it casts a
shadow on all your contemporaries; we cannot be seen, or
but obscurely, while you are present. You equal Donne in the
variety, multiplicity, and choice of thoughts; you excel him
in the manner and the words. I read you both with the same
admiration, but not with the same delight.
He affects the metaphysics, not only in his satires, but
in his amorous verses, where nature only should reign; and
perplexes the minds of the fair sex with nice speculations of
philosophy, when he should engage their hearts, and entertain
them with the softnesses of love. In this (if I may be
pardoned for so bold a truth) Mr. Cowley has copied him to
a fault; so great a one, in my opinion, that it throws
his Mistress infinitely below his Pindarics and his latter
compositions, which are undoubtedly the best of his poems and
the most correct.'
Dryden's estimate of Donne, as well as his application to his poetry
of the epithet 'metaphysical', was transmitted through the eighteenth
century. Johnson's famous paragraphs in the _Life of Cowley_ do little
more than echo and expand Dryden's pronouncement, with a rather vaguer
use of the word 'metaphysical'. In Dryden's application it means
correctly 'philosophical'; in Johnson's, no more than 'learned'. 'The
metaphysical poets were men of learning, and to show their learning
was their whole endeavour; but unluckily resolving to show it in
rhyme, instead of writing poetry, they only wrote verses, and very
often such verses as stood the trial of the fingers better than of
the ear.' They 'drew their conceits from recesses of learning not very
much frequented by common readers of poetry'. Waller is exempted
from being a metaphysical poet because 'he seldom fetches an amorous
sentiment from the depths of science; his thoughts are for the most
part easily understood, and his images such as the superficies of
nature readily supplies'.
Even to those critics with whom began a revived appreciation of
Donne as a poet and preacher, his 'wit' still bulks largely. It
is impossible to escape from it. 'Wonder-exciting vigour,' writes
Coleridge, 'intenseness and peculiarity, using at will the almost
boundless stores of a capacious memory, and exercised on subjects
where we have no right to expect it--this is the wit of Donne.' And
lastly De Quincey, who alone of these critics recognizes the essential
quality which may, and in his best work does, make Donne's wit the
instrument of a mind which is not only subtle and ingenious but
profoundly poetical: 'Few writers have shown a more extraordinary
compass of powers than Donne; for he combined what no other man has
ever done--the last sublimation of dialectical subtlety and address
with the most impassioned majesty. Massy diamonds compose the very
substance of his poem on the Metempsychosis, thoughts and descriptions
which have the fervent and gloomy sublimity of Ezekiel or Aeschylus,
whilst a diamond dust of rhetorical brilliancies is strewed over the
whole of his occasional verses and his prose.'
What is to-day the value and interest of this wit which has arrested
the attention of so many generations? How far does it seem to us
compatible with poetry in the full and generally accepted sense of
the word, with poetry which quickens the imagination and touches
the heart, which satisfies and delights, which is the verbal and
rhythmical medium whereby a gifted soul communicates to those who have
ears to hear the content of impassioned moments?
Before coming to close quarters with this difficult and debated
question one may in the first place insist that there is in Donne's
verse a great deal which, whether it be poetry in the full sense
of the word or not, is arresting and of worth both historically
and intrinsically. Whatever we may think of Donne's poetry, it is
impossible not to recognize the extraordinary interest of his mind and
character. In an age of great and fascinating men he is not the least
so. The immortal and transcendent genius of Shakespeare leaves Donne,
as every other contemporary, lost in the shadows and cross-lights of
an age that is no longer ours, but from which Shakespeare emerges
into the clear sunlight. Of Bacon's mind, 'deep and slow, exhausting
thought,' and divining as none other the direction in which the road
led through the débris of outworn learning to a renovated science and
a new philosophy, Donne could not boast. Alike in his poetry and in
his soberest prose, treatise or sermon, Donne's mind seems to want the
high seriousness which comes from a conviction that truth is, and
is to be found. A spirit of scepticism and paradox plays through and
disturbs almost everything he wrote, except at moments when an intense
mood of feeling, whether love or devotion, begets faith, and silences
the sceptical and destructive wit by the power of vision rather than
of intellectual conviction. Poles apart as the two poets seem at a
first glance to lie in feeling and in art, there is yet something of
Tennyson in the conflict which wages perpetually in Donne's poetry
between feeling and intellect.
But short of the highest gifts of serene imagination or serene wisdom
Donne's mind has every power it well could, wit, insight, imagination;
and these move in such a strange medium of feeling and learning,
mediaeval, renaissance and modern, that every imprint becomes of
interest. To do full justice to that interest one's study of
Donne must include his prose as well as his verse, his paradoxical
_Pseudomartyr_, and equally paradoxical, more strangely mooded
_Biathanatos_, the intense and subtle eloquence of his sermons,
the tormented passion and wit of his devotions, and the gaiety
and melancholy, wit and wisdom, of his letters. But most of these
qualities have left their mark on his poetry, and given it interests
over and above its worth simply as poetry.
One quality of his verse, which has been somewhat overlooked by
critics intent upon the definition and sources of metaphysical wit, is
wit in our sense of the word, wit like the wit of Swift and Sheridan.
The habit in which this wit masquerades is doubtless old-fashioned. It
is not always the worse for that, for the wit of the Elizabethans
is delightfully blended with fancy and feeling. There is a little
of Jaques in all of them. But if fanciful and at times even boyish,
Donne's wit is still amusing, the quickest and most fertile wit of the
century till we come to the author of _Hudibras_.
It is not in the _Satyres_ that this wit is to us most obvious.
Nothing grows so soon out of date as contemporary satire. Even the
brilliance and polish of Pope's satire--and Pope's art is nowhere more
perfect than in _The Dunciad_ and the _Imitations of Horace_--cannot
interest us in Lord Hervey, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and
the forgotten poets of an unpoetic age. How then should we be
interested in Elizabeth's fantastic 'Presence', the streets of
sixteenth-century London, and the knavery of pursuivants, presented
with a satiric art which is wonderfully vivid and caustic but still
tentative,--over-emphatic, rough in style and verse, though with a
roughness which is obviously a studied and in a measure successful
effect. The verses upon _Coryats Crudities_ are in their way a
masterpiece of insult veiled as compliment, but it is a rather boyish
and barbarous way.
It is in the lighter of his love verses that Donne's laughable wit is
most obvious and most agile. Whatever one may think of the choice of
subject, and the flame of a young man's lust that burns undisguised
in some of the _Elegies_, it is impossible to ignore the dazzling wit
which neither flags nor falters from the first line to the last. And
in the more graceful and fanciful, the less heated _Songs and Sonets_,
the same wit, gay and insolent, disports itself in a philosophy of
love which must not be taken altogether seriously. Donne at least,
as we shall see, outgrew it. His attitude is very much that of
Shakespeare in the early comedies. But the Petrarchian love, which
Shakespeare treats with light and charming irony, the vows and tears
of Romeo and Proteus, Donne openly scoffs. He is one of Shakespeare's
young men as these were in the flesh and the Inns of Court, and he
tells us frankly what in their youthful cynicism (which is often even
more of a pose than their idealism) they think of love, and constancy,
and women.
Of all miracles, Donne cries, a constant woman is the greatest, of all
strange sights the strangest:
If thou findst one, let mee know,
Such a Pilgrimage were sweet;
Yet doe not, I would not goe,
Though at next doore wee might meet,
Though shee were true, when you met her,
And last, till you write your letter,
Yet shee
Will bee
False, ere I come, to two, or three.
But is it true that we desire to find her? Donne's answer is _Woman's
Constancy_:
Now thou hast lov'd me one whole day,
To-morrow when thou leav'st what wilt thou say?
She will, like Proteus in the _Two Gentlemen of Verona_, have no
dearth of sophistries--but why elaborate them?
Vain lunatique, against these scapes I could
Dispute, and conquer, if I would,
Which I abstaine to doe,
For by to-morrow, I may think so too.
Why ask for constancy when change is the life and law of love?
I can love both fair and brown;
Her whom abundance melts, and her whom want betrays;
Her who loves loneness best, and her who masks and plays.
. . . . . . .
I can love her and her, and you and you,
I can love any so she be not true.
It is not often that the reckless and wilful gaiety of youth masking
as cynicism has been expressed with such ebullient wit as in these
and companion songs. And when he adopts for a time the pose of the
faithful lover bewailing the cruelty of his mistress the sarcastic wit
is no less fertile. It would be difficult to find in the language a
more sustained succession of witty surprises than _The Will_. Others
were to catch these notes from Donne, and Suckling later flutes them
gaily in his lighter fashion, never with the same fullness of wit and
fancy, never with the same ardour of passion divinable through the
audacious extravagances.
But to amuse was by no means the sole aim of Donne's 'wit'; gay humour
touched with fancy and feeling is not its only quality. Donne's 'wit'
has many strands, his humour many moods, and before considering how
these are woven together into an effect that is entirely poetical,
we may note one or two of the soberer strands which run through his
_Letters_, _Epicedes_, and similar poems--descriptive, reflective, and
complimentary.
Not much of Donne's poetry is given to description. Of the feeling
for nature of the Elizabethans, their pastoral and ideal pictures of
meadow and wood and stream, which delighted the heart of Izaak Walton,
there is nothing in Donne. A greater contrast than that between
Marlowe's _Come live with me_ and Donne's imitation _The Baite_ it
would be hard to conceive. But in _The Storme_ and _The Calme_ Donne
used his wit to achieve an effect of realism which was something new
in English poetry, and was not reproduced till Swift wrote _The City
Shower_. From the first lines, which describe how
The South and West winds join'd, and as they blew,
Waves like a rolling trench before them threw,
to the close of _The Storme_ the noise of the contending elements is
deafening:
Thousands our noises were, yet we 'mongst all
Could none by his right name, but thunder call:
Lightning was all our light, and it rain'd more
Than if the Sunne had drunke the sea before.
. . . . . . . . .
Hearing hath deaf'd our sailors, and if they
Knew how to hear, there's none knowes what to say:
Compared to these stormes, death is but a qualme,
Hell somewhat lightsome, and the Bermuda calme.
The sense of tropical heat and calm in the companion poem is hardly
less oppressive, and, if the whole is not quite so happy as the
first, it contains two lines whose vivid and unexpected felicity is
as delightful to-day as when Ben Jonson recited them to Drummond at
Hawthornden:
No use of lanthorns; and in one place lay
Feathers and dust, to-day and yesterday.
Donne's letters generally fall into two groups. The first comprises
those addressed to his fellow-students at Cambridge and the Inns of
Court, the Woodwards, Brookes, and others, or to his maturer and more
fashionable companions in the quest of favour and employment at Court,
Wotton, and Goodyere, and Lord Herbert of Cherbury. To the other
belong the complimentary and elegant epistles in which he delighted
and perhaps bewildered his noble lady friends and patronesses with
erudite and transcendental flattery.
In the first class, and the same is true of some of the _Satyres_,
notably the third, and of the satirical _Progresse of the Soule_,
especially at the beginning and the end, the reflective, moralizing
strain predominates. Donne's 'wit' becomes the instrument of a
criticism of life, grave or satiric, melancholy or stoical. Despite
Matthew Arnold's definition, verse of this kind seldom is poetry in
the full sense of the word; but, as Stevenson says in speaking of his
own Scotch verses, talk not song. The first of English poets was a
master of the art. Neither Horace nor Martial, whom Stevenson cites,
is a more delightful talker in verse than Geoffrey Chaucer, and the
archaism of his style seems only to lend the additional charm of a
lisp to his babble. Since Donne's day English poetry has been rich
in such verse talkers--Butler and Dryden, Pope and Swift, Cowper and
Burns, Byron and Shelley, Browning and Landor. It did not come easy to
the Elizabethans, whose natural accent was song. Donne's chief rivals
were Daniel and Jonson, and I venture to think that he excels them
both in the clear and pointed yet easy and conversational development
of his thought, in the play of wit and wisdom, and, despite the
pedantic cast of Elizabethan erudite moralizing, in the power to
leave on the reader the impression of a potent and yet a winning
personality. We seem to get nearer to the man himself in Donne's
letters to Goodyere and Wotton than in Daniel's weighty, but also
heavy, moralizing epistles to the Countess of Cumberland or Sir Thomas
Egerton; and the personality whose voice sounds so distinct and human
in our ear is a more attractive one than the harsh, censorious, burly
but a little blustering Jonson of the epistles on country life and
generous givers. Donne's style is less clumsy, his verse less stiff.
His wit brings to a clear point whatever he has to say, while from
his verse as from his prose letters there disengages itself a very
distinct sense of what it was in the man, underlying his brilliant
intellect, his almost superhuman cleverness, which won for him the
devotion of friends like Wotton and Goodyere and Walton and King, the
admiration of a stranger like Huyghens, who heard him talk as well as
preach:--a serious and melancholy, a generous and chivalrous spirit.
However, keepe the lively tast you hold
Of God, love him as now, but feare him more,
And in your afternoones thinke what you told
And promis'd him, at morning prayer before.
Let falshood like a discord anger you,
Else be not froward. But why doe I touch
Things, of which none is in your practise new,
And Tables, or fruit-trenchers teach as much;
But thus I make you keepe your promise Sir,
Riding I had you, though you still staid there,
And in these thoughts, although you never stirre,
You came with mee to Micham, and are here.
So he writes to Goodyere, but the letter to Wotton going Ambassador to
Venice is Donne's masterpiece in this simpler style, and it seems to
me that neither Daniel nor Jonson nor Drayton ever catches this note
at once sensitive and courtly. To find a like courtliness we must go
to Wotton; witness the reply to Donne's earlier epistle which I have
printed in the notes. But neither Wotton nor any other of the courtly
poets in Hannah's collection adds to this dignity so poignant a
personal accent.
This personal interest is very marked in the two satires which are
connected by tone and temper with the letters, the third of the
early, classical _Satyres_ and the opening and closing stanzas of
the _Progresse of the Soule_. Each is a vivid picture of the inner
workings of Donne's soul at a critical period in his life. The first
was doubtless written at the moment that he was passing from the Roman
to the Anglican Church. It is one of the earliest and most thoughtful
appeals for toleration, for the candid scrutiny of religious
differences, which was written perhaps in any country--one of the
most striking symptoms of the new eddies produced in the stream of
religious feeling by the meeting currents of the Reformation and the
Counter-Reformation.
It was a difficult and dangerous process through which Donne was
passing, this conversion from the Church of his fathers to conformity
with the Church of England as by law established. It would be as
absurd, in the face of a poem like this and of all that we know of
Donne's subsequent life, to call it a conversion in the full sense of
the term, a changed conviction, as to dub it an apostasy prompted
by purely political considerations. Yet doubtless the latter
predominated. The position of a Catholic in the reign of Elizabeth
was that of a man cut off rigorously from the main life of the nation,
with every avenue of honourable ambition closed to him. He had to live
the starved, suspected life of a recusant or to seek service under a
foreign power. Some of the most pathetic documents in Strype's _Annals
of the Reformation_ are those in which we hear the cry of young men of
secure station and means driven by conscientious conviction to abandon
home and country. It is possible that before 1592 Donne himself had
been sent abroad by relatives with a view to his entering a seminary
or the service of a foreign power. His mother spent a great part of
her life abroad, and his own relatives were among those who suffered
most severely under Walsingham's persecution. 'I had', Donne says, 'my
first breeding and conversation with men of suppressed and afflicted
Religion, accustomed to the despite of death, and hungry of an
imagined Martyrdome.' To a young man of ambition, and as yet certainly
with no bent to devotion or martyrdom, it was only common sense to
conform if he might.
From this dilemma Donne escaped, not by any opportune change of
conviction, or by any insincere profession, but by the way of
intellectual emancipation. He looks round in this satire and sees that
whichever be the true Church it is not by any painful quest of truth,
and through the attainment of conviction, that most people have
accepted the Church to which they may belong. Circumstances and
whim have had more to do with their choice than reason and serious
conviction. Yet it is only by search that truth is to be found:
On a huge hill
Cragged, and steep, Truth stands, and hee that will
Reach her, about must, and about must goe;
And what the hills suddenes resists win so.
Yet strive so, that before age, deaths twilight,
Thy Soule rest, for none can work in that night.
It was not often in the sixteenth or seventeenth century that a
completely emancipated and critical attitude on religious, not
philosophical, questions was expressed with such entire frankness and
seriousness. From this position, Walton would have us believe, Donne
advanced through the study of Bellarmine and other controversialists
to a convinced acceptance of Anglican doctrine. The evidence points to
a rather different conclusion on Donne's part. He came to think that
all the Churches were 'virtual beams of one sun', 'connatural pieces
of one circle', a position from which the next step was to the
conclusion that for an Englishman the Anglican Church was the right
choice (Cujus regio, ejus religio); but Donne had not reached this
conclusion when he wrote the _Satyre_, and doubtless did not till he
had satisfied himself that the Church of England offered a reasonable
_via media_. But changes of creed made on purely intellectual grounds,
and prompted by practical motives, are not unattended with danger to
a man's moral and spiritual life. Donne had doubtless outwardly
conformed before he entered Egerton's service in 1598, but long
afterwards, when he is already in Orders, he utters a cry which
betrays how real the dilemma still was:
Show me, deare Christ, thy spouse, so bright and clear;
and the first result of his 'conversion' was apparently to deepen the
sceptical vein in his mind.
Scepticism and melancholy, bitter and sardonic, are certainly the
dominant notes in the sombre fragment of satire _The Progresse of the
Soule_, which he composed in 1601, when he was Sir Thomas Egerton's
secretary, four months before his marriage and six months after the
death of the Earl of Essex. There can be little doubt, as I have
ventured to suggest elsewhere, that it was the latter event which
provoked this strange and sombre explosion of spleen, a satire of the
same order as the _Tale of a Tub_ or the _Vision of Judgment_. The
account of the poem which Jonson gave to Drummond does not seem to be
quite accurate, though it was probably derived from Donne himself. It
was, one suspects from several circumstances, a little Donne's way in
later years to disguise the footprints of his earlier indiscretions.
According to this tradition the final _habitat_ of the soul which
'inanimated' the apple
Whose mortal taste
Brought death into the world and all our woe,
was to be John Calvin. The tradition is interesting as marking how far
Donne was in 1601 from his later orthodox Protestantism, for Calvin is
never mentioned but with respect in the _Sermons_. A few months
later he wrote to Egerton disclaiming warmly all 'love of a corrupt
religion'. But, though sceptical in tone, the poem is written from a
Catholic standpoint; its theme is the progress of the soul of heresy.
And, as the seventh stanza clearly indicates, the great heretic in
whom the line closed was to be not Calvin but Queen Elizabeth:
the great soule which here among us now
Doth dwell, and moves that hand, and tongue, and brow
Which, as the Moone the sea, moves us.
Donne can hardly have thought of publishing such a poem, or
circulating it in the Queen's lifetime. It was an expression of the
mood which begot the 'black and envious slanders breath'd against
Diana for her divine justice on Actaeon' to which Jonson refers in
_Cynthia's Revels_ the same year. That some copies were circulated in
manuscript later is probably due to the reaction which brought
into favour at James's Court the Earl of Southampton and the former
adherents of Essex generally.
The tone, moreover, of the stanza quoted above suggests that it was
no vulgar libel on Elizabeth which Donne contemplated. Elizabeth, the
cruel persecutor of his Catholic kinsfolk, now stained with the blood
of her favourite, appeared to him somewhat as she did to Pope Sixtus,
a heretic but a great woman. He felt to her as Burke did to the 'whole
race of Guises, Condés and Colignis'--'the hand that like a destroying
angel smote the country communicated to it the force and energy under
which it suffered.' In a mood of bitter admiration, of sceptical and
sardonic wonder, he contemplates the great bad souls who had troubled
the world and served it too, for the idea on which the poem was to
rest is the disconcerting reflection that we owe many good things to
heretics and bad men:
Who ere thou beest that read'st this sullen Writ,
Which just so much courts thee, as thou dost it,
Let me arrest thy thoughts; wonder with mee,
Why plowing, building, ruling and the rest,
Or most of those arts, whence our lives are blest,
By cursed _Cains_ race invented be,
And blest _Seth_ vext us with Astronomie.
Ther's nothing simply good, nor ill alone,
Of every quality comparison,
The onely measure is, and judge, opinion.
It would have been interesting to read Donne's history of the great
souls that troubled and yet quickened the world from Cain to Arius and
from Mahomet to Elizabeth, but unfortunately Donne never got beyond
the introduction, a couple of cantos which describe the progress of
the soul while it is still passing through the vegetable and animal
planes, the motive of which, so far as it can be disentangled, is to
describe the pre-human education of a woman's soul:
keeping some quality
Of every past shape, she knew treachery,
Rapine, deceit, and lust, and ills enow
To be a woman.
The fragment has some of the sombre power which De Quincey attributes
to it, but on the whole one must confess it is a failure. The 'wit' of
Donne did not apparently include invention, for many of the episodes
seem pointless as well as disgusting, and indeed in no poem is the
least attractive side of Donne's mind so clearly revealed, that aspect
of his wit which to some readers is more repellent, more fatal to
his claim to be a poet, than too subtle ingenuity or misplaced
erudition--the vein of sheer ugliness which runs through his work,
presenting details that seem merely and wantonly repulsive. The same
vein is apparent in the work of Chapman, of Jonson, and even in places
of Spenser, and the imagery of _Hamlet_ and the tragedies owes some of
its dramatic vividness and power to the same quality. The ugly has its
place in art, and it would not be difficult to find it in every phase
of Renaissance art, marked like the beautiful in that art by the
same evidence of power. Decadence brought with it not ugliness but
prettiness.
The reflective, philosophic, somewhat melancholy strain of the poems
I have been touching on reappears in the letters addressed to noble
ladies. Here, however, it is softened, less sardonic in tone, while
it blends with or gives place to another strain, that of absurd and
extravagant but fanciful and subtle compliment. Donne cannot write to
a lady without his heart and fancy taking wing in their own passionate
and erudite fashion. Scholastic theology is made the instrument
of courtly compliment and pious flirtation. He blends in the
same disturbing fashion as in some of the songs and elegies that
depreciation of woman in general, which he owes less to classical
poetry than to his over-acquaintance with the Fathers, with an
adoration of her charms in the individual which passes into the
transcendental. He tells the Countess of Huntingdon that active
goodness in a woman is a miracle; but it is clear that she and the
Countess of Bedford and Mrs. Herbert and Lady Carey and the Countess
of Salisbury are all examples of such miracle--ladies whose beauty
itself is virtue, while their virtues are a mystery revealable only to
the initiated.
The highest place is held by Lady Bedford and Mrs. Herbert. Nothing
could surpass the strain of intellectual and etherealized compliment
in which he addresses the Countess. If lines like the following are
not pure poetry, they haunt some quaint borderland of poetry to which
the polished felicities of Pope's compliments are a stranger. If not
pure fancy, they are not mere ingenuity, being too intellectual and
argumentative for the one, too winged and ardent for the other:
Should I say I liv'd darker then were true,
Your radiation can all clouds subdue;
But one, 'tis best light to contemplate you.
You, for whose body God made better clay,
Or tooke Soules stuffe such as shall late decay,
Or such as needs small change at the last day.
This, as an Amber drop enwraps a Bee,
Covering discovers your quicke Soule; that we
May in your through-shine front your hearts thoughts see.
You teach (though wee learne not) a thing unknowne
To our late times, the use of specular stone,
Through which all things within without were shown.
Of such were Temples; so and such you are;
_Beeing_ and _seeming_ is your equall care,
And _vertues_ whole _summe_ is but _know_ and _dare_.
The long poem dedicated to the same lady's beauty,