is in a like dazzling and subtle vein. Those addressed to Mrs.
Herbert, notably the letter
Mad paper stay,
and the beautiful _Elegie_
No Spring, nor Summer Beauty hath such grace
As I have seen in one Autumnall face,
are less transcendental in tone but bespeak an even warmer admiration.
Indeed it is clear to any careful reader that in the poems addressed
to both these ladies there is blended with the respectful flattery of
the dependant not a little of the tone of warmer feeling permitted to
the 'servant' by Troubadour convention. And I suspect that some poems,
the tone of which is still more frankly and ardently lover-like, were
addressed to Lady Bedford and Mrs. Herbert, though they have come to
us without positive indication.
The title of the subtle, passionate, sonorous lyric _Twicknam Garden_,
Blasted with sighs, and surrounded with teares,
points to the person addressed, for Twickenham Park was the residence
of Lady Bedford from 1607 to 1618, and Donne's intimacy with her seems
to have begun in or about 1608. There can, I think, be little doubt
that it is to her, and neither to his wife nor the mistresses of his
earlier, wandering fancy, that these lines, conventional in theme
but given an amazing _timbre_ by the impulse of Donne's subtle and
passionate mind, were addressed. But if _Twicknam Garden_ was written
to Lady Bedford, so also, one is tempted to think, must have been _A
Nocturnall upon S. Lucies Day_, for Lucy was the Countess's name,
and the thought, feeling, and rhythm of the two poems are strikingly
similar.
But the _Nocturnall_ is a sincerer and profounder poem than _Twicknam
Garden_, and it is more difficult to imagine it the expression of a
conventional sentiment. Mr. Gosse, and there is no higher authority
when it comes to the interpretation of Donne's character and mind,
rightly, I think, suggests that the death of the lady addressed is
assumed, not actual, but he connects the poem with Donne's earlier and
troubled loves. 'So also in a most curious ode, the _Nocturnal_ ...,
amid fireworks of conceit, he calls his mistress dead and protests
that his hatred has grown cold at last.' But I can find no note of
bitterness, active or spent, in the song. It _might_ have been written
to Ann More. It is a highly metaphysical yet sombre and sincere
description of the emptiness of life without love. The critics have,
I think, failed somewhat to reckon with this stratum in Donne's songs,
of poems Petrarchian in convention but with a Petrarchianism coloured
by Donne's realistic temper and impatient wit. Any interpretation of
so enigmatical a poem must be conjectural, but before one denied too
positively that its subject was Lady Bedford--perhaps her illness
in 1612--one would need to answer two questions, how far could a
conventional passion inspire a strain so sincere, and what was Donne's
feeling for Lady Bedford and hers for him?
Poetry is the language of passion, but the passion which moves the
poet most constantly is the delight of making poetry, and very little
is sufficient to quicken the imagination to its congenial task.
Our soberer minds are apt to think that there must be an actual,
particular experience behind every sincere poem. But history refutes
the idea of such a simple relation between experience and art. No
poet will sing of love convincingly who has never loved, but that
experience will suffice him for many and diverse webs of song and
drama. Without pursuing the theme, it is sufficient for the moment to
recall that in the fashion of the day Spenser's sonnets were addressed
to Lady Carey, not to his wife; that it was to Idea or to Anne Goodere
that Drayton wrote so passionate a poem as
Since there's no help, come let us kiss and part;
and that we know very little of what really lies behind Shakespeare's
profound and plangent sonnets, weave what web of fancy we will.
Of Lady Bedford's feeling for Donne we know only what his letters
reveal, and that is no more than that she was his warm friend
and generous patroness. It is clear, however, from their enduring
friendship and from the tone of that correspondence that she found in
him a friend of a rarer and finer calibre than in the other poets whom
she patronized in turn, Daniel and Drayton and Jonson--some one whose
sensitive, complex, fascinating personality could hardly fail to touch
a woman's imagination and heart. Friendship between man and woman is
love in some degree. There is no need to exaggerate the situation, or
to reflect on either her loyalty or his to other claims, to recognize
that their mutual feeling was of the kind for which the Petrarchian
convention afforded a ready and recognized vehicle of expression.
And so it was, one fancies, with Mrs. Herbert. She too found in Donne
a rare and comprehending spirit, and he in her a gracious and delicate
friend. His relation to her, indeed, was probably simpler than to
Lady Bedford, their friendship more equal. The letter and the elegy
referred to already are instinct with affection and tender reverence.
To her Donne sent some of his earliest religious sonnets, with a
sonnet on her beautiful name. And to her also it would seem that at
some period in the history of their friendship, the beginning of which
is very difficult to date, he wrote songs in the tone of hopeless,
impatient passion, of Petrarch writing to Laura, and others which
celebrate their mutual affection as a love that rose superior to
earthly and physical passion. The clue here is the title prefixed to
that strange poem _The Primrose, being at Montgomery Castle upon the
hill on which it is situate_. It is true that the title is found
for the first time in the edition of 1635 and is in none of the
manuscripts. But it is easier to explain the occasional suppression
of a revealing title than to conceive a motive for inventing such
a gloss. The poem is doubtless, as Mr. Gosse says, 'a mystical
celebration of the beauty, dignity and intelligence of Magdalen
Herbert'--a celebration, however, which takes the form (as it might
with Petrarch) of a reproach, a reproach which Donne's passionate
temper and caustic wit seem even to touch with scorn. He appears to
hint to Mrs. Herbert that to wish to be more than a woman, to claim
worship in place of love, is to be a worse monster than a coquette:
Since there must reside
Falshood in woman, I could more abide
She were by Art, than Nature falsifi'd.
Woman needs no advantages to arbitrate the fate of man.
In exactly the same mood as _The Primrose_ is _The Blossome_, possibly
written in the same place and on the same day, for the poet is
preparing to return to London. _The Dampe_ is in an even more scornful
tone, and one hesitates to connect it with Mrs. Herbert. But all these
poems recur so repeatedly together in the manuscripts as to suggest
that they have a common origin. And with them go the beautiful poems
_The Funerall_ and _The Relique_. In the former the cruelty of
the lady has killed her lover, but in the second the tone changes
entirely, the relation between Donne and Mrs. Herbert (note the lines
Thou shalt be a Mary _Magdalen_ and I
A something else thereby)
has ceased to be Petrarchian and become Platonic, their love a thing
pure and of the spirit, but none the less passionate for that:
First, we lov'd well and faithfully,
Yet knew not what wee lov'd, nor why,
Difference of sex no more wee knew,
Then our Guardian Angells doe;
Comming and going, wee
Perchance might kisse, but not between those meales;
Our hands ne'r toucht the seales,
Which nature, injur'd by late law, sets free:
These miracles wee did; but now alas,
All measure, and all language, I should passe,
Should I tell what a miracle shee was.
Such were the notes that a poet in the seventeenth century might still
sing to a high-born lady his patroness and his friend. No one who
knows the fashion of the day will read into them more than they were
intended to convey. No one who knows human nature will read them as
merely frigid and conventional compliments. Any uncertainty one may
feel about the subject arises not from their being love-poems, but
from the difficulty which Donne has in adjusting himself to the
Petrarchian convention, the tendency of his passionate heart and
satiric wit to break through the prescribed tone of worship and
complaint.
Without some touch of passion, some vibration of the heart, Donne is
only too apt to accumulate 'monstrous and disgusting hyperboles'. This
is very obvious in the _Epicedes_--his complimentary laments for the
young Lord Harington, Miss Boulstred, Lady Markham, Elizabeth Drury
and the Marquis of Hamilton, poems in which it is difficult to find a
line that moves. Indeed, seventeenth-century elegies are not as a rule
pathetic. A poem in the simple, piercing strain and the Wordsworthian
plainness of style of the Dutch poet Vondel's lament for his little
daughter is hardly to be found in English. An occasional epitaph like
Browne's
May! be thou never grac'd with birds that sing,
Nor Flora's pride!
In thee all flowers and roses spring,
Mine only died,
comes near it, but in general seventeenth-century elegy is apt to
spend itself on three not easily reconcilable themes--extravagant
eulogy of the dead, which is the characteristically Renaissance
strain, the Mediaeval meditation on death and its horrors, the more
simply Christian mood of hope rising at times to the rapt vision of
a higher life. In the pastoral elegy, such as _Lycidas_, the poet
was able to escape from a too literal treatment of the first into a
sequence of charming conventions. The second was alien to Milton's
thought, and with his genius for turning everything to beauty Milton
extracts from the reference to the circumstances of King's death the
only touch of pathos in the poem:
Ay me! whilst thee the shores and sounding Seas
Wash far away, where ere thy bones are hurld,
and some of his loveliest allusions:
Where the great vision of the guarded Mount
Looks towards _Namancos_ and _Bayona's_ hold;
Look homeward Angel now, and melt with ruth.
And, O ye _Dolphins_, waft the hapless youth.
In the metaphysical elegy as cultivated by Donne, Beaumont, and others
there was no escape from extravagant eulogy and sorrow by way of
pastoral convention and mythological embroidery, and this class of
poetry includes some of the worst verses ever written. In Donne all
three of the strains referred to are present, but only in the third
does he achieve what can be truly called poetry. In the elegies on
Lord Harington and Miss Boulstred and Lady Markham it is difficult to
say which is more repellent--the images in which the poet sets forth
the vanity of human life and the humiliations of death or the frigid
and blasphemous hyperboles in which the virtues of the dead are
eulogized.
Even the _Second Anniversary_, the greatest of Donne's epicedes, is
marred throughout by these faults. There is no stranger poem in
the English language in its combination of excellences and faults,
splendid audacities and execrable extravagances. 'Fervour of
inspiration, depth and force and glow of thought and emotion and
expression'--it has something of all these high qualities which
Swinburne claimed; but the fervour is in great part misdirected, the
emotion only half sincere, the thought more subtle than profound,
the expression heated indeed but with a heat which only in passages
kindles to the glow of poetry.
Such are the passages in which the poet contemplates the joys of
heaven. There is nothing more instinct with beautiful feeling in
_Lycidas_ than some of the lines of Apocalyptic imagery at the close:
There entertain him all the Saints above,
In solemn troops, and sweet Societies
That sing, and singing in their glory move,
And wipe the tears for ever from his eyes.
But in spiritual sense, in passionate awareness of the transcendent,
there are lines in Donne's poem that seem to me superior to
anything in Milton if not in purity of Christian feeling, yet in the
passionate, mystical sense of the infinite as something other than
the finite, something which no suggestion of illimitable extent and
superhuman power can ever in any degree communicate.
Think then my soule that death is but a Groome,
Which brings a Taper to the outward roome,
Whence thou spiest first a little glimmering light,
And after brings it nearer to thy sight:
For such approaches does heaven make in death.
. . . . . . .
Up, up my drowsie Soule, where thy new eare
Shall in the Angels songs no discord heere, &c.
In passages like these there is an earnest of the highest note of
spiritual eloquence that Donne was to attain to in his sermons and
last hymns.
Another aspect of Donne's poetry in the _Anniversaries_, of his
_contemptus mundi_ and ecstatic vision, connects them more closely
with Tennyson's _In Memoriam_ than Milton's _Lycidas_. Like Tennyson,
Donne is much concerned with the progress of science, the revolution
which was going on in men's knowledge of the universe, and its
disintegrating effect on accepted beliefs. To him the new astronomy is
as bewildering in its displacement of the earth and disturbance of a
concentric universe as the new geology was to be to Tennyson with the
vistas which it opened into the infinities of time, the origin and the
destiny of man:
The new philosophy calls all in doubt,
The Element of fire is quite put out;
The Sun is lost, and th' earth, and no mans wit
Can well direct him where to look for it.
And freely men confesse that this world's spent,
When in the Planets, and the Firmament
They seeke so many new; they see that this
Is crumbled out againe to his Atomies.
On Tennyson the effect of a similar dislocation of thought, the
revelation of a Nature which seemed to bring to death and bring to
life through endless ages, careless alike of individual and type, was
religious doubt tending to despair:
O life as futile, then, as frail!
. . . . .
What hope of answer, or redress?
Behind the veil, behind the veil.
On Donne the effect was quite the opposite. It was not of religion he
doubted but of science, of human knowledge with its uncertainties, its
shifting theories, its concern about the unimportant:
Poore soule, in this thy flesh what dost thou know?
Thou know'st thy selfe so little, as thou know'st not,
How thou didst die, nor how thou wast begot.
. . . . . . . . .
Have not all soules thought
For many ages, that our body is wrought
Of Ayre, and Fire, and other Elements?
And now they thinke of new ingredients;
And one Soule thinkes one, and another way
Another thinkes, and 'tis an even lay.
. . . . . . . . .
Wee see in Authors, too stiffe to recant,
A hundred controversies of an Ant;
And yet one watches, starves, freeses, and sweats,
To know but Catechismes and Alphabets
Of unconcerning things, matters of fact;
How others on our stage their parts did Act;
What _Cæsar_ did, yea, and what _Cicero_ said.
With this welter of shifting theories and worthless facts he contrasts
the vision of which religious faith is the earnest here:
In this low forme, poore soule, what wilt thou doe?
When wilt thou shake off this Pedantery,
Of being taught by sense, and Fantasie?
Thou look'st through spectacles; small things seeme great
Below; But up unto the watch-towre get,
And see all things despoyl'd of fallacies:
Thou shalt not peepe through lattices of eyes,
Nor heare through Labyrinths of eares, nor learne
By circuit, or collections, to discerne.
In heaven thou straight know'st all concerning it,
And what concernes it not, shalt straight forget.
It will seem to some readers hardly fair to compare a poem like _In
Memoriam_, which, if in places the staple of its feeling and thought
wears a little thin, is entirely serious throughout, with poems which
have so much the character of an intellectual _tour de force_ as
Donne's _Anniversaries_, but it is easy to be unjust to the sincerity
of Donne in these poems. Their extravagant eulogy did not argue any
insincerity to Sir Robert and Lady Drury. It was in the manner of the
time, and doubtless seemed to them as natural an expression of grief
as the elaborate marble and alabaster tomb which they erected to the
memory of their daughter. The _Second Anniversarie_ was written in
France when Donne was resident there with the Drurys. And it was
on this occasion that Donne had the vision of his absent wife which
Walton has related so graphically. The spiritual sense in Donne was
as real a thing as the restless and unruly wit, or the sensual,
passionate temperament. The main thesis of the poem, the comparative
worthlessness of this life, the transcendence of the spiritual, was
as sincere in Donne's case as was in Tennyson the conviction of the
futility of life if death closes all. It was to be the theme of the
finest passages in his eloquent sermons, the burden of all that
is most truly religious in the verse and prose of a passionate,
intellectual, self-tormenting soul to whom the pure ecstasy of love of
a Vondel, the tender raptures of a Crashaw, the chastened piety of a
Herbert, the mystical perceptions of a Vaughan could never be quite
congenial.
I have dwelt at some length on those aspects of Donne's 'wit' which
are of interest and value even to a reader who may feel doubtful as to
the beauty and interest of his poetry as such, because they too
have been obscured by the criticism which with Dr. Johnson and Mr.
Courthope represents his wit as a monster of misapplied ingenuity, his
interest as historical and historical only. Apart from poetry there is
in Donne's 'wit' a great deal that is still fresh and vivid, wit as we
understand wit; satire pungent and vivid; reflection on religion
and on life, rugged at times in form but never really unmusical as
Jonson's verse is unmusical, and, despite frequent carelessness,
singularly lucid and felicitous in expression; elegant compliment,
extravagant and grotesque at times but often subtle and piquant;
and in the _Anniversaries_, amid much that is both puerile and
extravagant, a loftier strain of impassioned reflection and vision. It
is not of course that these things are not, or may not be constituents
of poetry, made poetic by their handling. To me it seems that in Donne
they generally are. It is the poet in Donne which flavours them all,
touching his wit with fancy, his reflection with imagination, his
vision with passion. But if we wish to estimate the poet simply in
Donne, we must examine his love-poetry and his religious poetry. It is
here that every one who cares for his unique and arresting genius will
admit that he must stand or fall as a great poet.
For it is here that we find the full effect of what De Quincey points
to as Donne's peculiarity, the combination of dialectical subtlety
with weight and force of passion. Objections to admit the poetic worth
and interest of Donne's love-poetry come from two sides--from those
who are indisposed to admit that passion, and especially the
passion of love, can ever speak so ingeniously (this was the
eighteenth-century criticism); and from those, and these are his more
modern critics, who deny that Donne is a great poet because with rare
exceptions, exceptions rather of occasional lines and phrases than of
whole poems, his songs and elegies lack beauty. Can poetry be at once
passionate and ingenious, sincere in feeling and witty,--packed with
thought, and that subtle and abstract thought, Scholastic dialectic?
Can love-poetry speak a language which is impassioned and expressive
but lacks beauty, is quite different from the language of Dante
and Petrarch, the loveliest language that lovers ever spoke, or the
picturesque hyperboles of _Romeo and Juliet_? Must not the imagery and
the cadences of love poetry reflect 'l'infinita, ineffabile bellezza'
which is its inspiration?
The first criticism is put very clearly by Steele, who goes so far as
to exemplify what the style of love-poetry should be; and certainly
it is something entirely different from that of _The Extasie_ or the
_Nocturnall upon S. Lucies Day_. Nothing could illustrate better the
'return to nature' of our Augustan literature than Steele's words:
'I will suppose an author to be really possessed with the
passion which he writes upon and then we shall see how he
would acquit himself. This I take to be the safest way to form
a judgement upon him: since if he be not truly moved, he
must at least work up his imagination as near as possible
to resemble reality. I choose to instance in love, which is
observed to have produced the most finished performances in
this kind. A lover will be full of sincerity, that he may be
believed by his mistress; he will therefore think simply; he
will express himself perspicuously, that he may not perplex
her; he will therefore write unaffectedly. Deep reflections
are made by a head undisturbed; and points of wit and fancy
are the work of a heart at ease; these two dangers then into
which poets are apt to run, are effectually removed out of the
lover's way. The selecting proper circumstances, and placing
them in agreeable lights, are the finest secrets of all
poetry; but the recollection of little circumstances is the
lover's sole meditation, and relating them pleasantly, the
business of his life. Accordingly we find that the most
celebrated authors of this rank excel in love-verses. Out of
ten thousand instances I shall name one which I think the most
delicate and tender I ever saw.
To myself I sigh often, without knowing why;
And when absent from Phyllis methinks I could die.
A man who hath ever been in love will be touched by the
reading of these lines; and everyone who now feels that
passion, actually feels that they are true.'
It is not possible to find so distinct a statement of the other view
to which I have referred, but I could imagine it coming from Mr.
Robert Bridges, or (since I have no authority to quote Mr. Bridges in
this connexion) from an admirer of his beautiful poetry. Mr. Bridges'
love-poetry is far indeed from the vapid naturalness which Steele
commended in _The Guardian_. It is as instinct with thought, and
subtle thought, as Donne's own poetry; but the final effect of his
poetry is beauty, emotion recollected in tranquillity, and recollected
especially in order to fix its delicate beauty in appropriate and
musical words:
Awake, my heart, to be loved, awake, awake!
The darkness silvers away, the morn doth break,
It leaps in the sky: unrisen lustres slake
The o'ertaken moon. Awake, O heart, awake!
She too that loveth awaketh and hopes for thee;
Her eyes already have sped the shades that flee,
Already they watch the path thy feet shall take:
Awake, O heart, to be loved, awake, awake!
And if thou tarry from her,--if this could be,--
She cometh herself, O heart, to be loved, to thee;
For thee would unashamed herself forsake:
Awake to be loved, my heart, awake, awake!
Awake, the land is scattered with light, and see,
Uncanopied sleep is flying from field and tree:
And blossoming boughs of April in laughter shake;
Awake, O heart, to be loved, awake, awake!
Lo all things wake and tarry and look for thee:
She looketh and saith, 'O sun, now bring him to me.
Come more adored, O adored, for his coming's sake,
And awake my heart to be loved: awake, awake!'
Donne has written nothing at once so subtle and so pure and lovely
as this, nothing the end and aim of which is so entirely to leave an
untroubled impression of beauty.
But it is not true either that the thought and imagery of love-poetry
must be of the simple, obvious kind which Steele supposes, that any
display of dialectical subtlety, any scintillation of wit, must be
fatal to the impression of sincerity and feeling, or on the other hand
that love is always a beautiful emotion naturally expressing itself in
delicate and beautiful language. To some natures love comes as above
all things a force quickening the mind, intensifying its purely
intellectual energy, opening new vistas of thought abstract and
subtle, making the soul 'intensely, wondrously alive'. Of such were
Donne and Browning. A love-poem like 'Come into the garden, Maud'
suspends thought and fills the mind with a succession of picturesque
and voluptuous images in harmony with the dominant mood. A poem such
as _The Anniversarie_ or _The Extasie_, _The Last Ride Together_ or
_Too Late_, is a record of intense, rapid thinking, expressed in the
simplest, most appropriate language--and it is a no whit less natural
utterance of passion. Even the abstractness of the thought, on
which Mr. Courthope lays so much stress in speaking of Donne and the
'metaphysicals' generally, is no necessary implication of want of
feeling. It has been said of St. Augustine 'that his most profound
thoughts regarding the first and last things arose out of prayer ...
concentration of his whole being in prayer led to the most abstract
observation'. So it may be with love-poetry--so it was with Dante in
the _Vita Nuova_, and so, on a lower scale, and allowing for the time
that the passion is a more earthly and sensual one, the thought more
capricious and unruly, with Donne. The _Nocturnall upon S. Lucies
Day_ is not less passionate because that passion finds expression in
abstract and subtle thought. Nor is it true that all love-poetry is
beautiful. Of none of the four poems I have mentioned in the last
paragraph is pure beauty, beauty such as is the note of Mr. Bridges'
song, the distinctive quality. It is rather vivid realism:
And alive I shall keep and long, you will see!
I knew a man, was kicked like a dog
From gutter to cesspool; what cared he
So long as he picked from the filth his prog?
He saw youth, beauty and genius die,
And jollily lived to his hundredth year.
But I will live otherwise: none of such life!
At once I begin as I mean to end.
But this sacrifice of beauty to dramatic vividness is a characteristic
of passionate poetry. Beauty is not precisely the quality we should
predicate of the burning lines of Sappho translated by Catullus:
lingua sed torpet, tenuis sub artus
flamma demanat, sonitu suopte
tintinant aures geminae, teguntur
lumina nocte.
Beauty is the quality of poetry which records an ideal passion
recollected in tranquillity, rather than of poetry either dramatic or
lyric which utters the very movement and moment of passion itself.
Donne's love-poetry is a very complex phenomenon, but the two dominant
strains in it are just these: the strain of dialectic, subtle play
of argument and wit, erudite and fantastic; and the strain of vivid
realism, the record of a passion which is not ideal nor conventional,
neither recollected in tranquillity nor a pure product of literary
fashion, but love as an actual, immediate experience in all its
moods, gay and angry, scornful and rapturous with joy, touched with
tenderness and darkened with sorrow--though these last two moods,
the commonest in love-poetry, are with Donne the rarest. The first of
these strains comes to Donne from the Middle Ages, the dialectic of
the Schools, which passed into mediaeval love-poetry almost from
its inception; the second is the expression of the new temper of the
Renaissance as Donne had assimilated it in Latin countries. Donne uses
the method, the dialectic of the mediaeval love-poets, the poets
of the _dolce stil nuovo_, Guinicelli, Cavalcanti, Dante, and their
successors, the intellectual, argumentative evolution of their
_canzoni_, but he uses it to express a temper of mind and a conception
of love which are at the opposite pole from their lofty idealism. The
result, however, is not so entirely disintegrating as Mr. Courthope
seems to think: 'This fine Platonic edifice is ruthlessly demolished
in the poetry of Donne. To him love, in its infinite variety and
inconsistency, represented the principle of perpetual flux in
nature.'[1] The truth is rather that, owing to the fullness of Donne's
experience as a lover, the accident that made of the earlier libertine
a devoted lover and husband, and from the play of his restless and
subtle mind on the phenomenon of love conceived and realized in this
less ideal fashion, there emerged in his poetry the suggestion of
a new philosophy of love which, if less transcendental than that
of Dante, rests on a juster, because a less dualistic and ascetic,
conception of the nature of the love of man and woman.
The fundamental weakness of the mediaeval doctrine of love, despite
its refining influence and its exaltation of woman, was that it
proved unable to justify love ethically against the claims of the
counter-ideal of asceticism. Taking its rise in a relationship which
excluded the thought of marriage as the end and justification of love,
which presumed in theory that the relation of the 'servant' to his
lady must always be one of reverent and unrewarded service, this
poetry found itself involved from the beginning in a dualism from
which there was no escape. On the one hand the love of woman is the
great ennobler of the human heart, the influence which elicits its
latent virtue as the sun converts clay to gold and precious stones. On
the other hand, love is a passion which in the end is to be repented
of in sackcloth and ashes. Lancelot is the knight whom love has made
perfect in all the virtues of manhood and chivalry; but the vision of
the Holy Grail is not for him, but for the virgin and stainless Sir
Galahad.
In the high philosophy of the Tuscan poets of the 'sweet new style'
that dualism was apparently transcended, but it was by making love
identical with religion, by emptying it of earthly passion, making
woman an Angel, a pure Intelligence, love of whom is the first
awakening of the love of God. 'For Dante and the poets of the learned
school love and virtue were one and the same thing; love _was_
religion, the lady beloved the way to heaven, symbol of philosophy and
finally of theology.'[2] The culminating moment in Dante's love for
Beatrice arrives when he has overcome even the desire that she should
return his salutation and he finds his full beatitude in 'those words
that do praise my lady'. The love that begins in the _Vita Nuova_ is
completed in the _Paradiso_.
The dualism thus in appearance transcended by Dante reappears sharply
and distinctly in Petrarch. 'Petrarch', says Gaspary, 'adores not the
idea but the person of his lady; he feels that in his affections there
is an earthly element, he cannot separate it from the desire of the
senses; this is the earthly tegument which draws us down. If not as,
according to the ascetic doctrine, sin, if he could not be ashamed of
his passion, yet he could repent of it as a vain and frivolous thing,
regret his wasted hopes and griefs.'[3] Laura is for Petrarch the
flower of all perfection herself and the source of every virtue in her
lover. Yet his love for Laura is a long and weary aberration of
the soul from her true goal, which is the love of God. This is the
contradiction from which flow some of the most lyrical strains in
Petrarch's poetry, as the fine canzone 'I'vo pensando', where he
cries:
E sento ad ora ad or venirmi in core
Un leggiadro disdegno, aspro e severo,
Ch'ogni occulto pensero
Tira in mezzo la fronte, ov' altri 'l vede;
Che mortal cosa amar con tanta fede,
Quanta a Dio sol per debito convensi,
Più si disdice a chi più pregio brama.
Elizabethan love-poetry is descended from Petrarch by way of Cardinal
Bembo and the French poets of the _Pléiade_, notably Ronsard
and Desportes. Of all the Elizabethan sonneteers the most finely
Petrarchian are Sidney and Spenser, especially the former. For Sidney,
Stella is the school of virtue and nobility. He too writes at times in
the impatient strain of Petrarch:
But ah! Desire still cries, give me some food.
And in the end both Sidney and Spenser turn from earthly to heavenly
love:
Leave me, O love, which reachest but to dust,
And thou, my mind, aspire to higher things:
Grow rich in that which never taketh rust,
Whatever fades but fading pleasure brings.
And so Spenser:
Many lewd lays (Ah! woe is me the more)
In praise of that mad fit, which fools call love,
I have in the heat of youth made heretofore;
That in light wits affection loose did move,
But all these follies now I do reprove.
But two things had come over this idealist and courtly love-poetry by
the end of the sixteenth century. It had become a literary artifice, a
refining upon outworn and extravagant conceits, losing itself at
times in the fantastic and absurd. A more important fact was that this
poetry had begun to absorb a new warmth and spirit, not from Petrarch
and mediaeval chivalry, but from classical love-poetry with its
simpler, less metaphysical strain, its equally intense but more
realistic description of passion, its radically different conception
of the relation between the lovers and of the influence of love in a
man's life. The courtly, idealistic strain was crossed by an Epicurean
and sensuous one that tends to treat with scorn the worship of woman,
and echoes again and again the Pagan cry, never heard in Dante or
Petrarch, of the fleetingness of beauty and love:
Vivamus, mea Lesbia, atque amemus!
Soles occidere et redire possunt:
Nobis quum semel occidit brevis lux
Nox est perpetua una dormienda.
Vivez si m'en croyez, n'attendez à demain;
Cueillez dès aujourd'hui les roses de la vie.
Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea,
But sad mortality o'er-sways their power,
How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea
Whose action is no stronger than a flower?
Now if we turn from Elizabethan love-poetry to the _Songs and Sonets_
and the _Elegies_ of Donne, we find at once two distinguishing
features. In the first place his poetry is in one respect less
classical than theirs. There is far less in it of the superficial
evidence of classical learning with which the poetry of the
'University Wits' abounds, pastoral and mythological imagery. The
texture of his poetry is more mediaeval than theirs in as far as it is
more dialectical, though a dialectical evolution is not infrequent
in the Elizabethan sonnet, and the imagery is less picturesque, more
scientific, philosophic, realistic, and homely. The place of the
goodly exiled train
Of gods and goddesses
is taken by images drawn from all the sciences of the day, from the
definitions and distinctions of the Schoolmen, from the travels and
speculations of the new age, and (as in Shakespeare's tragedies or
Browning's poems) from the experiences of everyday life. Maps and sea
discoveries, latitude and longitude, the phoenix and the mandrake's
root, the Scholastic theories of Angelic bodies and Angelic knowledge,
Alchemy and Astrology, legal contracts and _non obstantes_, 'late
schoolboys and sour prentices,' 'the king's real and his stamped
face'--these are the kind of images, erudite, fanciful, and homely,
which give to Donne's poems a texture so different at a first glance
from the florid and diffuse Elizabethan poetry, whether romantic epic,
mythological idyll, sonnet, or song; while by their presence and
their abundance they distinguish it equally (as Mr. Gosse has
justly insisted) from the studiously moderate and plain style of
'well-languaged Daniel'.
But if the imagery of Donne's poetry be less classical than that of
Marlowe or the younger Shakespeare there is no poet the spirit of
whose love-poetry is so classical, so penetrated with the sensual,
realistic, scornful tone of the Latin lyric and elegiac poets. If one
reads rapidly through the three books of Ovid's _Amores_, and then
in the same continuous rapid fashion the _Songs_ and the _Elegies_ of
Donne, one will note striking differences of style and treatment.
Ovid develops his theme simply and concretely, Donne dialectically and
abstractly. There is little of the ease and grace of Ovid's verses in
the rough and vehement lines of Donne's _Elegies_. Compare the song,
Busie old foole, unruly Sunne,
with the famous thirteenth Elegy of the first book,
Iam super oceanum venit a seniore marito,
Flava pruinoso quae vehit axe diem.
Ovid passes from one natural and simple thought to another, from one
aspect of dawn to another equally objective. Donne just touches one or
two of the same features, borrowing them doubtless from Ovid, but the
greater part of the song is devoted to the subtle and extravagant, if
you like, but not the less passionate development of the thought that
for him the woman he loves is the whole world.
But if the difference between Donne's metaphysical conceits and Ovid's
naturalness and simplicity is palpable it is not less clear that the
emotions which they express, with some important exceptions to which I
shall recur, are identical. The love which is the main burden of their
song is something very different from the ideal passion of Dante or of
Petrarch, of Sidney or Spenser. It is a more sensual passion. The same
tone of witty depravity runs through the work of the two poets. There
is in Donne a purer strain which, we shall see directly, is of the
greatest importance, but such a rapid reader as I am contemplating
might be forgiven if for the moment he overlooked it, and declared
that the modern poet was as sensual and depraved as the ancient, that
there was little to choose between the social morality reflected in
the Elizabethan and in the Augustan poet.
And yet even in these more cynical and sensual poems a careful reader
will soon detect a difference between Donne and Ovid. He will begin
to suspect that the English poet is imitating the Roman, and that
the depravity is in part a reflected depravity. In revolt from one
convention the young poet is cultivating another, a cynicism and
sensuality which is just as little to be taken _au pied de la
lettre_ as the idealizing worship, the anguish and adoration of the
sonneteers. There is, as has been said already, a gaiety in the poems
elaborating the thesis that love is a perpetual flux, fickleness the
law of its being, which warns us against taking them too seriously;
and even those _Elegies_ which seem to our taste most reprehensible
are aerated by a wit which makes us almost forget their indecency. In
the last resort there is all the difference in the world between the
untroubled, heartless sensuality of the Roman poet and the gay wit,
the paradoxical and passionate audacities and sensualities of the
young Elizabethan law-student impatient of an unreal convention, and
eager to startle and delight his fellow students by the fertility and
audacity of his wit.
It is not of course my intention to represent Donne's love-poetry
as purely an 'evaporation' of wit, to suggest that there is in it
no reflection either of his own life as a young man or the moral
atmosphere of Elizabethan London. It would be a much less interesting
poetry if this were so. Donne has pleaded guilty to a careless and
passionate youth:
In mine Idolatry what showres of raine
Mine eyes did waste? what griefs my heart did rent?
That sufferance was my sinne; now I repent;
Cause I did suffer I must suffer pain.
From what we know of the lives of Essex, Raleigh, Southampton,
Pembroke, and others it is probable that Donne's _Elegies_ come quite
as close to the truth of life as Sidney's Petrarchianism or Spenser's
Platonism. The later cantos of _The Faerie Queene_ reflect vividly the
unchaste loves and troubled friendships of Elizabeth's Court. Whether
we can accept in its entirety the history of Donne's early amours
which Mr. Gosse has gathered from the poems or not, there can be no
doubt that actual experiences do lie behind these poems as behind
Shakespeare's sonnets. In the one case as in the other, to recognize a
literary model is not to exclude the probability of a source in actual
experience.
But however we may explain or palliate the tone of these poems it is
impossible to deny their power, the vivid and packed force with which
they portray a variously mooded passion working through a swift and
subtle brain. If there is little of the elegant and accomplished art
which Milton admired in the Latin Elegiasts while he 'deplored' their
immorality, there is more strength and sincerity both of thought and
imagination. The brutal cynicism of
Fond woman which would have thy husband die,
the witty anger of _The Apparition_, the mordant and paradoxical
wit of _The Perfume_ and _The Bracelet_, the passionate dignity and
strength of _His Picture_,
My body a sack of bones broken within,
And powders blew stains scatter'd on my skin,
the passion that rises superior to sensuality and wit, and takes wing
into a more spiritual and ideal atmosphere, of _His parting from her_,
I will not look upon the quick'ning Sun,
But straight her beauty to my sense shall run;
The ayre shall note her soft, the fire most pure;
Water suggest her clear, and the earth sure--
compare these with Ovid and the difference is apparent between an
artistic, witty voluptuary and a poet whose passionate force redeems
many errors of taste and art. Compare them with the sonnets and
mythological idylls and _Heroicall Epistles_ of the Elizabethans and
it is they, not Donne, who are revealed as witty and 'fantastic' poets
content to adorn a conventional sentiment with mythological fancies
and verbal conceits. Donne's interest is his theme, love and woman,
and he uses words not for their own sake but to communicate his
consciousness of these surprising phenomena in all their varying and
conflicting aspects. The only contemporary poems that have the same
dramatic quality are Shakespeare's sonnets and some of Drayton's later
sonnets. In Shakespeare this dramatic intensity and variety is of
course united with a rarer poetic charm. Charm is a quality which
Donne's poetry possesses in a few single lines. But to the passion
which animates these sensual, witty, troubled poems the closest
parallel is to be sought in Shakespeare's sonnets to a dark lady and
in some of the verses written by Catullus to or of Lesbia:
The expense of spirit in a waste of shame.
But neither sensual passion, nor gay and cynical wit, nor scorn
and anger, is the dominant note in Donne's love-poetry. Of the last
quality there is, despite the sardonic emphasis of some of the poems,
less than in either Shakespeare or Catullus. There is nothing in
his poetry which speaks so poignantly of an outraged heart, a love
lavished upon one who was worthless, as some of Shakespeare's sonnets
and of Catullus's poems. The finest note in Donne's love-poetry is the
note of joy, the joy of mutual and contented passion. His heart might
be subtle to plague itself; its capacity for joy is even more obvious.
Other poets have done many things which Donne could not do. They have
invested their feelings with a garb of richer and sweeter poetry. They
have felt more deeply and finely the reverence which is in the heart
of love. But it is only in the fragments of Sappho, the lyrics of
Catullus, and the songs of Burns that one will find the sheer joy
of loving and being loved expressed in the same direct and simple
language as in some of Donne's songs, only in Browning that one will
find the same simplicity of feeling combined with a like swift and
subtle dialectic.
I wonder by my troth what thou and I
Did till we loved.
For God's sake hold your tongue and let me love.
If yet I have not all thy love,
Deare, I shall never have it all.