Izaak Walton in his short life of Donne has painted a figure of almost
seraphic beauty. When Donne was but a boy, he declares, it was said that
the age had brought forth another Pico della Mirandola. As a young man in
his twenties, he was a prince among lovers, who by his secret marriage
with his patron's niece--"for love," says Walton, "is a flattering
mischief"--purchased at first only the ruin of his hopes and a term in
prison. Finally, we have the later Donne in the pulpit of St. Paul's
represented, in a beautiful adaptation of one of his own images, as
"always preaching to himself, like an angel from a cloud, though in none;
carrying some, as St. Paul was, to Heaven in holy raptures, and enticing
others by a sacred art and courtship to amend their lives." The picture is
all of noble charm. Walton speaks in one place of "his winning
behaviour--which, when it would entice, had a strange kind of elegant
irresistible art." There are no harsh phrases even in the references to
those irregularities of Donne's youth, by which he had wasted the fortune
of £3,000--equal, I believe, to more than £30,000 of our money--bequeathed
to him by his father, the ironmonger. "Mr. Donne's estate," writes Walton
gently, referring to his penury at the time of his marriage, "was the
greatest part spent in many and chargeable travels, books, and dear-bought
experience." It is true that he quotes Donne's own confession of the
irregularities of his early life. But he counts them of no significance.
He also utters a sober reproof of Donne's secret marriage as "the
remarkable error of his life." But how little he condemned it in his heart
is clear when he goes on to tell us that God blessed Donne and his wife
"with so mutual and cordial affections, as in the midst of their
sufferings made their bread of sorrow taste more pleasantly than the
banquets of dull and low-spirited people." It was not for Walton to go in
search of small blemishes in him whom he regarded as the wonder of the
world--him whose grave, mournful friends "strewed ... with an abundance of
curious and costly flowers," as Alexander the Great strewed the grave of
"the famous Achilles." In that grave there was buried for Walton a whole
age magnificent with wit, passion, adventure, piety and beauty. More than
that, the burial of Donne was for him the burial of an inimitable
Christian. He mourns over "that body, which once was a Temple of the Holy
Ghost, and is now become a small quantity of Christian dust," and, as he
mourns, he breaks off with the fervent prophecy, "But I shall see it
reanimated." That is his valediction. If Donne is esteemed three hundred
years after his death less as a great Christian than as a great pagan,
this is because we now look for him in his writings rather than in his
biography, in his poetry rather than in his prose, and in his _Songs and
Sonnets_ and _Elegies_ rather than in his _Divine Poems_. We find, in some
of these, abundant evidence of the existence of a dark angel at odds with
the good angel of Walton's raptures. Donne suffered in his youth all the
temptations of Faust. His thirst was not for salvation but for
experience--experience of the intellect and experience of sensation. He
has left it on record in one of his letters that he was a victim at one
period of "the worst voluptuousness, an hydroptic, immoderate desire of
human learning and languages." Faust in his cell can hardly have been a
more insatiate student than Donne. "In the most unsettled days of his
youth," Walton tells us, "his bed was not able to detain him beyond the
hour of four in the morning; and it was no common business that drew him
out of his chamber till past ten; all which time was employed in study;
though he took great liberty after it." His thoroughness of study may be
judged from the fact that "he left the resultance of 1,400 authors, most
of them abridged and analyzed with his own hand." But we need not go
beyond his poems for proof of the wilderness of learning that he had made
his own. He was versed in medicine and the law as well as in theology. He
subdued astronomy, physiology, and geography to the needs of poetry. Nine
Muses were not enough for him, even though they included Urania. He called
in to their aid Galen and Copernicus. He did not go to the hills and the
springs for his images, but to the laboratory and the library, and in the
library the books that he consulted to the greatest effect were the works
of men of science and learning, not of the great poets with whom London
may almost be said to have been peopled during his lifetime. I do not
think his verse or correspondence contains a single reference to
Shakespeare, whose contemporary he was, being born only nine years later.
The only great Elizabethan poet whom he seems to have regarded with
interest and even friendship was Ben Jonson. Jonson's Catholicism may have
been a link between them. But, more important than that, Jonson was, like
Donne himself, an inflamed pedant. For each of them learning was the
necessary robe of genius. Jonson, it is true, was a pedant of the
classics, Donne of the speculative sciences; but both of them alike ate to
a surfeit of the fruit of the tree of knowledge. It was, I think, because
Donne was to so great a degree a pagan of the Renaissance, loving the
proud things of the intellect more than the treasures of the humble, that
he found it easy to abandon the Catholicism of his family for
Protestantism. He undoubtedly became in later life a convinced and
passionate Christian of the Protestant faith, but at the time when he
first changed his religion he had none of the fanaticism of the pious
convert. He wrote in an early satire as a man whom the intellect had
liberated from dogma-worship. Nor did he ever lose this rationalist
tolerance. "You know," he once wrote to a friend, "I have never imprisoned
the word religion.... They" (the churches) "are all virtual beams of one
sun." Few converts in those days of the wars of religion wrote with such
wise reason of the creeds as did Donne in the lines:
To adore or scorn an image, or protest,
May all be bad; doubt wisely; in strange way
To stand inquiring right, is not to stray;
To sleep or run wrong is. On a huge hill,
Cragged and steep, Truth stands, and he that will
Reach her, about must and about must go;
And what the hill's suddenness resists win so.
This surely was the heresy of an inquisitive mind, not the mood of a
theologian. It betrays a tolerance springing from ardent doubt, not from
ardent faith.
It is all in keeping with one's impression of the young Donne as a man
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 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:
The grim eight-foot-high iron-bound serving-man
That oft names God in oaths, and only then;
He that to bar the first gate doth as wide
As the great Rhodian Colossus stride,
Which, if in hell no other pains there were,
Makes me fear hell, because he must be there.
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 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.