No More Learning

The third
stands by itself, being a grave and eloquent plea for the serious
pursuit of religious truth, as opposed to capricious or indolent
acquiescence, on the one hand, and contemptuous indifference
on the other. The lines which are quoted above in illustration
of Donne’s verse, and, indeed, the whole poem, were probably


## p. 208 (#230) ############################################

208
John Donne
in Dryden's mind when he wrote his first plea for the careful
quest of religious truth, and concluded that,
'tis the safest way
To learn what unsuspected ancients say.
These three satires are ascribed in a note on one manuscript
collection to the year 1593. Whether this be strictly correct or
not, they seem to reflect what we may take to have been the
mind of Donne during his early years in London, at the inns of
court, when he was familiar with the life of the town, but not
yet an habitué of the court, and in a state of intellectual detach-
ment as regards religion, with a lingering prejudice in favour of
the faith of his fathers. The last two satires were written in 1597,
or the years immediately following, when Donne was in the
service of the lord keeper, and they bear the mark of the budding
statesman. The first is a long and somewhat over-elaborated
satire on the fashions and follies of court-life at the end of queen
Elizabeth's reign. The picture of the bore was doubtless sug-
gested by Horace's Ibam forte via sacra, but, like all Donne's types,
is drawn from the life, and with the same amplification of detail
and satiric point which are to be found in Pope's renderings
from Horace. The last of Donne's genuine satires is a descant
on the familiar theme of Spenser's laments, the miseries of
suitors.
Donne's satires were very popular, and, to judge from the
extant copies or fragments of copies, as well as from contemporary
allusions, appear to have circulated more freely than the songs and
elegies, which were doubtless confined so far as possible, like the
Paradoxes and BIAOANATOE, to the circle of the poet's private
friends. A Roman Catholic controversialist, replying to Pseudo-
Martyr, expresses his regret that Donne has passed beyond his
old occupation of making Satires, wherein he hath some talent and
may play the fool without controll. Such a writer, had he known
them, could hardly have failed to make polemical use of the more
daring and outrageous Elegies and those songs which strike a
similar note. But, though less widely known, the Songs and
Sonets and the Elegies contain the most intimate and vivid
record of his inner soul in these ardent years, as the religious
sonnets and hymns do of his later life. And the influence of
these on English poetry was deeper, and, despite the temporary
eclipse of metaphysical poetry, more enduring, than that of his
pungent satires, or of his witty but often laboured and extravagant
eulogies in verse letter and funeral elegy.


## p. 209 (#231) ############################################

a
Songs and Elegies
209
Of the Songs and Sonets, not one is a sonnet in the regular
sense of the word. Neither in form nor spirit was Donne a
Petrarchian poet. Some were written to previously existing airs;
all, probably, with a more or less definite musical intention. The
greater number of them would seem to have been preserved and
may be found in the first section of Chambers's edition. He has
rightly excluded the song, ‘Dear Love, continue nice and chaste,'
which was included in the edition of 1635, but was written by
Sir John Roe. A fresh editor would have to exclude, also, the
song 'Soul's joy now I am gone' and the Dialogue beginning 'If
her disdain least change in you can move, which, if the collective
evidence of MSS be worth anything, were written by the earl of
Pembroke, collaborating, in the last, with Sir Benjamin Ruddier.
The Burley MS contains a few songs, as well as longer pieces which,
from their accompanying indubitable poems and letters of Donne,
are, presumably, given as his. None of them is specially character-
istic or adds anything of great intrinsic value. It has been not
unusual, since its first publication as by Donne in The Grove
(1721), to ascribe to him the charming song 'Absence, hear thou my
protestation. But, in Drummond's copy of a collection of verses
made by Donne himself, of which only a few are his own com-
position, this particular song is ascribed to J. H. , i. t. (as another
MS proves), John Hoskins. The touch is a shade lighter, the feeling
a shade less intense, than in Donne's most characteristic work.
Of the Elegies, the canon is more difficult to ascertain exactly.
Some of the most audacious, but not least characteristic, were
excluded by the first editor, but crept into subsequent issues.
Of the twenty given in Chambers’s edition, all are Donne's, with
the possible exception of the twelfth, 'Come, Fates, I fear you not’;
and to these should be added that entitled Love's War, in the
appendix, which was first printed by Sir John Simeon. But the
sixteenth, 'To make the doubt clear that no woman 's true,' was
included in Ben Jonson's posthumous Underwoods, and it is not
impossible that the three which there accompany it are also
Donne's. As Swinburne has pointed out, they are more in his
style than in that of Jonson. On the other hand, no MS collection
of Donne's poems includes them, whereas their companion appears
in more than one.
It is not difficult to distinguish three strains in Donne's
love poetry, including both the powerful and enigmatical elegies
and the strange and fascinating songs. The one prevails in
all the elegies (except the famous Autumnal dedicated to
14
6
E. L. IV.
CH. II.


## p. 210 (#232) ############################################

210
John Donne
Mrs Herbert, and the seventeenth, the subject of which may
have been his wife) and in the larger number of the lyrical
pieces, in songs like 'Go and catch a falling star,' 'Send home my
long stray'd eyes to me,' or such lyrics as Woman's Constancy,
The Indifferent, Aire and Angels, The Dreame, The Apparition,
and many others. This is the most distinctive strain in Donne's
early poetry, and that which contrasts it markedly with the
love poetry of his contemporaries, the sonneteers. There is no
echo of Petrarch's woes in Donne's passionate and insolent,
rapturous and angry, songs and elegies. The love which he
portrays is not the impassioned yet intellectual idealism of Dante,
nor the refined and adoring sentiment of Petrarch, nor the epi-
curean but courtly love of Ronsard, nor the passionate, chivalrous
gallantry of Sidney. It is the love of the Latin lyrists and elegiasts,
a feeling which is half rapture and half rage, for one who is never
conceived of for a moment as standing to the poet in the ideal
relationship of Beatrice to Dante or of Laura to Petrarch. Das
ewig Weibliche zieht uns hinan is not Donne's sentiment in these
poems, but rather
Hope not mind in women; at their best
Sweetness and wit, they're but mummy possest.
But if Donne's sentiment is derived rather from Latin than from
Italian and courtly poetry, it was reinforced by his experience,
and it is expressed with a wit and erudition that are all his own.
And, in reading some, both of the elegies and the songs, one must
not forget to make full allowance for the poet's inexhaustible and
astounding wit and fancy. 'I did best,' he said later, 'when I had
‘
least truth for my subject. ' Realistic, Donne's love poetry may
be; it is not safe to accept it as a history of his experiences.
The Elegies are the fullest record of Donne's more cynical
frame of mind and the conflicting moods which it generated.
Some, and not the least brilliant in wit and execution, are frankly
sensual, the model of poems such as Carew's The Rapture; others,
fiercely, almost brutally, cynical and satirical; others, as The
Chain and The Perfume, more simply witty; a few, as The Picture,
strike a purer note. A strain of impassioned paradox runs through
them; they are charged with wit; the verse, though harsh at times,
has more of the couplet cadence than the satires; the phrasing is
full of startling felicities :
I taught my silks their rustlings to forbear,
Even my oppress'd shoes dumb and silent were;


## p. 211 (#233) ############################################

Love Poetry
2II
and there are not wanting passages of pure and beautiful poetry:
I will not look upon the quickening sun
But straight her beauty to my sense shall run;
The air shall note her soft, the fire most pure,
Waters suggest her clear, and the earth sure.
This turbid, passionate yet cynical, vein is not the only one in
Donne's love poetry. Two others are readily distinguishable, and
include some of his finest lyrics. In one, which is probably the
latest, as that described is the earliest, Donne returns a little
towards the sonneteers, especially the more Platonising among
them. Poems like Twickenham Garden, The Funerall, The
Blossom, The Primrose, were probably addressed neither to the
mistresses of his youth, nor to the wife of his later years, but
to the high-born lady friends, Mrs Herbert and the countess of
Bedford, for whom he composed the ingenious and erudite com-
pliments of his verse letters. Towards them, he adopts the
hopeless and adoring pose of Petrarchian flirtation (of Spenser
towards lady Carew or Drayton towards mistress Anne Goodere)
and, in high Platonic vein, boasts that,
Difference of sex no more we knew
Than our guardian angels do;
Coming and going we
Perchance might kiss, but not between those meals;
Our hands ne'er touched the seals
Which nature, injured by late law, sets free;
These miracles we did; but now alas!
All measure and all language I should pass,
Should I tell what a miracle she was.
Less artificial than this last strain, purer than the first, and
simpler, though not less intense, than either, is the feeling of those
lyrics which, in all probability, were addressed to his wife. To this
class belongs the exquisite song:
|
Sweetest Love, I do not go
For weariness of thee,
Nor in hope the world can show
A fitter love for me.
In the same vein, and on the same theme, are the Valediction: of
Weeping:
O more than moon,
Draw not up seas to drown me in thy sphere;
Weep me not dead in thine arms, but forbear
To teach the sea what it may do too soon;
14-2


## p. 212 (#234) ############################################

2 I 2
John Donne
and the more famous Valediction: forbidding Mourning, with its
characteristic, fantastical yet felicitous, conceit of the compasses :
Such wilt thou be to me who must,
Like the other foot, obliquely run;
Thy firmness makes my circle just,
And makes me end where I begun.
The seventeenth elegy, 'By our first strange and fatal inter-
view, may belong to the same group, and so, one would con-,
jecture, do The Canonization, 'For Godsake hold your tongue
and let me love' and The Anniversary. In these, at any rate,
Donne expresses a purer and more elevated strain of the same
feeling as animates The Dream, The Sun-Rising and The Break
of Day; and one not a whit less remote from the tenor of
Petrarchian poetry. At first sight, there is not much in common
between the erudite, dialectical Donne and the peasant-poet
Burns, yet it is of Burns one is reminded rather than of the
average Elizabethan by the truth and intensity with which Donne
sings, in a more ingenious and closely woven strain than the
Scottish poet's, the joy of mutual and contented love;
All other things to their destruction draw,
Only our love hath no decay;
This no to-morrow hath nor yesterday,
Running it never runs from us away,
But truly keeps his first, last, everlasting day.
Of the shadow of this joy, the pain of parting, Donne writes
also with the intensity, if never with the simplicity, of Burns. The
piercing simplicity of
Had we never loved sae kindly
was impossible to Donne's temperament, in which feeling and
intellect were inextricably blended, but the passion of The Ex-
piration is the same in kind and in degree, however elaborately
and quaintly it may be phrased :
So, so, break off this last lamenting kiss,
Which sucks two souls, and vapours both away.
Turn thou ghost that way, and let me turn this,
And let ourselves benight our happiest day;
We ask'd none leave to love, nor will we owe
Any so cheap a death as saying 'Go. '
The Ecstacy blends, and strives to reconcile, the material and the
spiritual elements of his realistic and his Platonic strains. But,
subtly and highly wrought as that poem is, its reconciliation is
more metaphysical than satisfying. It is in the simpler poems


## p. 213 (#235) ############################################

:
6
His Wit'
213
from which quotations have been given that the diverse elements
find their most natural and perfect union.
If Donne's sincere and intense, though sometimes perverse and
petulant, moods are a protest against the languid conventionality
of Petrarchian sentiment, his celebrated 'wit' is no less a cor-
rective to the lazy thinking of the sonneteers, their fashioning
and refashioning of the same outworn conceits.
The Muses' garden, with pedantic weeds
O'er-spread, was purged by thee: the lazy seeds
Of servile imitation thrown away,
And fresh invention planted.
This is Carew's estimate of what Donne achieved for English
poetry. He would say what he felt and would say it in imagery
of his own fashioning. He owes, probably, no more to Marino
or Gongora than to Petrarch. Metaphysical wit,' like secentismo
or 'Gongorism' is, doubtless, a symptom of the decadence of re-
nascence poetry which, with all its beauty and freshness, carried
seeds of decay in its bosom from the beginning. But the form
which this dissolution took in the poetry of Donne is the expression
of a unique and intense individuality ; a complex, imaginative
temperament; a swift and subtle intellect; a mind stored with
the minutiae of medieval theology, science and jurisprudence.
The result is often bizarre, at times even repulsive. When
the fashion in wit had changed, Addison and Johnson could not
see anything in Donne's poetry but far-sought ingenuity and
extravagant hyperbole. His poetry has never, or never for long,
the harmonious simplicity of perfect beauty; but, at its best, it
has both sincerity and strength, and these are also constituents
of beauty.
The intensity of Donne's feeling and the swiftness of his thought
are reflected in his verse. It would not be true to say that there
is nothing of the harshness of the satires in the elegies and songs.
In riming couplets, Donne was always endeavouring after a full-
ness of thought, a freedom and swiftness of movement, which
were not to be attained at once without some harshness of tran-
sition and displacement of accent, though a steady movement
towards a greater degree of ease and balance can be traced from
the Satyres and Elegies to the Anniversaries and later Funerall
Elegies. Even in the lyrics, there are harsh lines. In verse, as
in figure, Donne is careless of the minor beauties. But it is in
his lyrics that he has achieved his most felicitous effects, and
succeeded in making the stanza, long or short, simple or elaborate,


## p. 214 (#236) ############################################

214
John Donne
1
the harmonious echo of that intimate wedding of passion and
argument which is the essential quality of the 'metaphysical'
lyric. If we owe to the influence of Donne in English poetry
some deplorable aberrations of taste, we owe to it, also, both the
splendid cadences, the elan, of the finest seventeenth century lyrics
from Jonson and Carew to Marvell and Rochester and, at a
lower imaginative level, the blend of passion and argument in
Dryden's ringing verse rhetoric.
During the last year of his residence in the household of Sir
Thomas Egerton, Donne began the composition of a longer and
more elaborate satirical poem than anything he had yet attempted,
a poem the personal and historical significance of which has
received somewhat scant attention from his biographers. The
Progresse of the Soule. Infinitati Sacrum. 16 Augusti 1601.
Metempsycosis. Poema Satyricon was published for the first
time in 1633, but manuscript copies of the poem, by itself
and in collections of Donne's poems, are extant. That he never
contemplated publication is clear from the fact that he adopted
the same title, The Progresse of the Soule, for the very different
Anniversaries on the death of Elizabeth Drury.
Starting from the Pythagorean doctrine of metempsychosis, it
was Donne's intention, in this poem, to trace the migrations of the
soul of that apple which Eve plucked, conducting it, when it reached
the human plane, through the bodies of all the great heretics. It
was to have rested at last, Jonson told Drummond, in the body
of Calvin; but the grave and dignified stanzas with which the
poem opens show clearly that queen Elizabeth herself was to have
closed the line of heretics whose descent was traced to the soul
of Cain, or of Cain's wife:
This soul to whom Luther and Mahomet were
Prisons of flesh; this soul which oft did tear,
And mend the wracks of the Empire and late Rome,
And lived when every great change did come.
Writing to Sir Thomas Egerton in the following February,
Donne disclaims all love of a corrupt religion. Yet, during
the preceding year, he had been busy on an elaborate satire,
delineating, from a Catholic standpoint, the descent and history
of the great heretics from Arius and Mahomet to Calvin and
Elizabeth. There can be little doubt that the mood of mind
which found expression in this sombre poem was occasioned by
the execution of Essex in the preceding February. Nothing, for
a time, so clouded Elizabeth's popularity as the death of her rash


## p. 215 (#237) ############################################

The Progresse of the Soule
215
favourite. Up to the time of the outbreak, Egerton himself had
been reckoned of Essex's party; and Wotton, through whom
Donne had first, probably, been brought within the circle of
Essex's influence, was one of those who went into exile after the
earl's death.
It would have been interesting to read Donne's history of
heresy, and characters of Mahomet and Luther, great, bad men
as he apparently intended to delineate them; but the poem never
got so far. After tracing through some tedious, not to say dis-
gusting, episodes the life of the soul in vegetable and animal form,
Donne leaves it just arrived in Themech,
Sister and wife to Cain, Cain that first did plough.
The mood in which the poem was conceived had passed, or the
poet felt his inventive power unequal to the task, and he closed
the second canto abruptly with a stanza of more than Byronic
scepticism and scorn:
Whoe'ere thou beest that readest this sullen writ,
Which just so much courts thee as thou dost it,
Let me arrest thy thoughts; wonder with me
Why ploughing, building, ruling and the rest,
Or most of those arts whence our lives are blest,
By cursed Cains race invented be,
And bless'd Seth vex'd us with astronomy.
There's nothing simply good nor ill alone;
Of every quality comparison
The only measure is, and judge opinion.
The more normal and courtly moods of Donne's mind in these
central years of his life are reflected in the Letters and Funerall
Elegies. Of the former, the earliest, probably, were The Storm
and The Calm, whose vivid and witty realism first set Donne's
'name afloat. ' When Jonson visited Edinburgh, he entertained
Drummond by reciting the witty paradoxes of The Chain and the
vivid descriptions of The Calm:
No use of lanthorns: and in one place lay
Feathers and dust, today and yesterday.
The two epistles to Sir Henry Wotton beginning 'Sir, more than
kisses letters mingle souls' and the above mentioned ‘Here's
no more news than virtue,' were, probably, both written in the
same year, 1598. An interesting and characteristic reply to the
first by Wotton is preserved in one or two manuscripts, but has
never been published. The Burley MS contains another to
Wotton in Hibernia belligeranti, written, therefore, in 1599. That


## p. 216 (#238) ############################################

216
John Donne
on Wotton's appointment as ambassador to Venice was composed
five years later. To Goodere and to the Woodwards and Brookes,
he wrote quite a number, in the same last years of the six-
teenth century, not all of which are yet published. Those to
more noble patrons, generally ladies, were the work of Donne's
years of suitorship. He seems to have written none after he took
orders. The long letter to the countess of Huntingdon, begin-
ning 'That unripe side of earth, that heavy clime' is assigned to
Sir Walter Aston in two manuscripts; and the three short letters,
to Ben Jonson and to Sir Thomas Roe, first printed in 1635, are
pretty certainly not Donne's at all but Sir John Roe's.
The moral reflections in these letters are elevated, and are
developed with characteristic ingenuity. The brilliance with which
a train of metaphysical compliments is elaborated in such a letter
as that to the countess of Bedford beginning ‘Madam-you have
refined me' is dazzling. But neither Donne's art nor taste-to say
nothing of his character—is seen to best advantage in the abstract,
extravagant and frigid conceits of these epistles and of such
elegies as those on prince Henry and lord Harington. The strain
of eulogy to which Donne suffers himself to rise in these last
passes all limits of decency and reverence. To two feelings, Donne
was profoundly susceptible, and he has expressed both with
wonderful eloquence in verse and prose. He has all the renascence
sense of the pomp and the horror of death, the leveller of all
earthly distinctions; and he can rise, like Sir Thomas Browne.
to a rapt appreciation of the Christian vision of death as the
portal to a better life. But his expression of both moods, when)
he is writing to order, is apt to degenerate into an accumulation of
'gross and disgusting hyperboles. ' In an elegy on Mrs Bulstred,
which is divided into two separately printed poems, Death I recant
and Death be not proud, these moods are combined in a sonorous
and dignified strain? .
But the finest of Donne's funeral elegies is the second of the
Anniversaries, which he composed on the death of Elizabeth
Drury. The extravagance of his praise, indeed, offended even
Jacobean readers, and the poem was declared by Jonson to be
'profane and full of blasphemies. It is clear, however, that
Donne intended Elizabeth Drury to be taken as a symbol of
1 In a manuscript collection made between 1619 and 1623, the two are given as
one continuous poem. Further evidence, however, points to the conclusion that the
two are distinct poems, the second, which replies to the first, being not by Donne
but, possibly, by the countess of Bedford.


## p. 217 (#239) ############################################

Funerall Elegies
217
Christian and womanly virtue. He may have known something of
the Tuscan poets' metaphysic of love, for Donne is one of the few
poets of the day who had read 'Dant. ' It cannot be said that he
'
succeeded in investing his subject with the ideal atmosphere in
which Beatrice moves. The First Anniversary is little more than
a tissue of frigid, metaphysical hyperboles, relieved by occasional
felicities, as the famous
Doth not a Teneriffe or higher hill
Rise so high like a rock, that one might think
The floating moon would shipwreck there and sink?
The Second, however, is not only richer in such occasional jewels
but is a finer poem. With the eulogy, which is itself managed with
no small art, if in a vein of extravagance jarring to our taste,
the poet has interwoven a meditatio mortis, developed with the
serried eloquence, the intense, dull glow of feeling and the sonorous
cadences which we find again in the prose of the sermons.
Of Donne's religious verses other than the funeral elegies, the
earliest, On the Annunciation and Passion falling in the same
year, was written, according to the title given in more than one
manuscript, in 1608. The Litany was composed in the same year
as Pseudo-Martyr; and it is interesting to note that, though the
Trinity is followed, in Catholic sequence, by the Virgin, the Angels,
the patriarchs and so forth, there is no invocation of any of these,
but only commemoration. The two sequences of sonnets, La
Corona and Holy Sonnets, belong, the first to 1608—9, the second
to the years of his ministry. One of the latter, first published by
Gosse from the Westminster MS, refers to the recent death of his
wife in 1617; and The Lamentations of Jeremy would appear to
be a task which he set himself at the same juncture. The hymns
To Christ, at the Authors last going into Germany, To God, my
God in my Sickness and To God the Father were written in 1619,
1623—4 and either the same date or 1631.
There is a striking difference of theme and spirit between the
'love-song weeds and satiric thorns' of Donne's brilliant and
daring youth and the hymns and sonnets of his closing years ; but
the fundamental resemblance is closer. All that Donne wrote,
whether in verse or prose, is of a piece. The same intense and
subtle spirit which, in the songs and elegies, analysed the experiences
of passion is at work in the latter on a different experience. To be
didactic is never the first intention of Donne's religious poems, but,
rather, to express himself, to analyse and lay bare his own moods
of agitation, of aspiration and of humiliation in the quest of God,


## p. 218 (#240) ############################################

218
John Donne
and the surrender of his soul to Him. The same erudite and
surprising imagery, the same passionate, reasoning strain, meets
us in both.
Is the Pacific sea my home? Or are
The Eastern riches ? Is Jerusalem ?
Anyan, and Magellan, and Gibraltar,
All straits (and none but straits) are ways to them,
Whether where Japhet dwelt, or Ham, or Shem.
The poet who, in the sincerities of a sick bed confession, can spin
such ingenious webs for his thought is one of those who, like
Baudelaire, are 'naturally artificial; for them simplicity would be
affectation. ' And as Donne is the first of the ‘metaphysical' love
poets, he is, likewise, the first of the introspective, Anglican, religious
poets of the seventeenth century. Elizabethan, and a good deal of
Jacobean, religious poetry is didactic in tone and intention, and,
when not, like Southwell's, Romanist, is protestant and Calvinist but
not distinctively Anglican. With Donne, appears for the first time
in poetry a passionate attachment to those Catholic elements in
Anglicanism which, repressed and neglected, had never entirely
disappeared; and, from Donne, Herbert and his disciples inherited
the intensely personal and introspective tone to which the didactic
is subordinated, which makes a lyric in The Temple, even if it be a
sermon, also, and primarily, a confession or a prayer; a tone which
reached its highest lyrical level in the ecstatic outpourings of
Crashaw.
Donne's earliest prose writings were, probably, the Paradoxes
and Problems which he circulated privately among his friends.
The Burley MS contains a selection from them, sent to Sir Henry
Wotton with an apologetic letter, in which Donne pleads that they
were made 'rather to deceive time than her daughter truth, having
this advantage to escape from being called ill things that they are
nothings,' but, at the same time, adjures Wotton 'that no copy
shall be taken, for any respect, of these or any other my composi-
tions sent to you. ' It was Donne's son who first issued them in 1633,
printed so carelessly as, at times, to be unintelligible. Like every-
thing that Donne wrote, they are brilliant, witty and daring, but, on
the whole, represent the more perverse and unpleasant side of his
genius. His other prose works are: a tract on the Jesuits, very similar
in tone and temper to Paradoxes, entitled Ignatius his Conclave:
or, His Inthronisation in a late Election in Hell, which was
published anonymously, the Latin version about 1610, the English in
1611; the serious and business like Pseudo-Martyr, issued with
6


## p. 219 (#241) ############################################

Prose Works
219
the author's name in 1610; BIAOANATOS A Declaration of that
Paradoxe or Thesis that Self-Homicide is not so Naturally Sinne
that it may never be otherwise; the Devotions upon Emergent
Occasions, and Several Steps in my Sickness, digested into
Meditations, Expostulations and Prayers, published in 1624; the
Essays in Divinity, printed by his son in 1651; and the sermons.
All Donne's minor or occasional writings, except the rather
perfunctory Essays in Divinity, partake of the nature of para-
doxes more or less elaborately developed. Even Pseudo-Martyr
irritated the Roman Catholic controversialist who replied to it by
its 'fantastic conceits. Of them all, the most interesting, because
bearing the deepest impress of the author's individuality, his
strange moods, his subtle reasoning, his clear good sense, is
BIA ANATOE. It is not rightly described as a defence of suicide,
.
but is what the title indicates, a serious and thoughtful discussion
of a fine point in casuistry. Seeing that a man may rightly, com-
mendably, even as a duty, do many things which promote or
hasten his death, may he ever rightly, and as his bounden duty,
consummate that process——may he ever, as Christ did upon the
cross (to this Donne recurs more than once in the sermons), of
his own free will render up his life to God?
But Donne’s fame as a prose writer rests not on these occasional
and paradoxical pieces, but on his sermons. His reputation as a
preacher was, probably, wider than as a poet, and both contributed
to his most distinctive and generally admitted title to fame as the
greatest wit of his age, in the fullest sense of the word. Of
the many sermons he preached, at Whitehall, at St Paul's as
prebendary and dean, at Lincoln's inn, at St Dunstan's church, at
noblemen's houses, on embassies and other special occasions, some
five were issued in his lifetime; and, after his death, three large
folios were published by his son containing eighty (1640), fifty
(1649) and twenty-five (1660/1) sermons respectively. Some are
still in manuscript.
In Donne's sermons, all the qualities of his poems are present
in a different medium; the swift and subtle reasoning; the powert
a
ful yet often quaint imagery; the intense feeling; and, lastly, the
wonderful music of the style, which is inseparable from the music
of the thought. The general character of the sermon in the seven
teenth century was such as to evoke all Donne's strength, and to
intensify some of his weaknesses. The minute analysis of the text
with a view to educing from it what the preacher believed to be
the doctrine it taught or the practical lessons it inculcated, by


## p. 220 (#242) ############################################

220
John Donne
legitimate inference, by far-fetched analogy, or by quaint metaphor,
was a task for which Donne’s intellect, imagination and wide range
of multifarious learning were well adapted. The fathers, the
schoolmen and 'our great protestant divines' (notably Calvin, to
whom, in subtlety of exposition, he reckons even Augustine second)
are his guides in the interpretation and application of his text;
and, for purposes of illustration, his range is much wider-classical
poets, history sacred and secular, saints' legendaries, popular
Spanish devotional writers, Jesuit controversialists and casuists,
natural science, the discoveries of voyagers and, of course, the
whole range of Scripture, canonical and apocryphal. It is
strange to find, at times, a conceit or allusion which had done
service in the love poems reappearing in the texture of a pious and
exalted meditation. In the sermons, as in the poems (where it
has led to occasional corruptions of the text), he uses words that,
if not obsolete, were growing rare-bezar,' 'defaulk,' 'triacle,
'lation'-but, more often, he coins or adopts already coined
‘inkhorn' terms-omnisufficiency,' 'nullifidians,' 'longanimity,'
'exinanition. '
Breadth and unity of treatment in seventeenth century oratory
are apt to be sacrificed to the minute elaboration of each head,
and their ingenious, rather than luminous and convincing, inter-
connection. But Donne's ingenuity is inexhaustible, and, through
every subtlety and bizarre interpretation, the hearer was (and,
even today, the reader is) carried forward by the weight and
force of the preacher's fervid reasoning. Much of the Scriptural
exegesis is fanciful or out of date. The controversial exposure
of what were held to be Roman corruptions and separatist
heresies has an interest mainly for the historian. In Donne's
scholastic, ultra-logical treatment, the rigid skeleton of seven-
teenth century theology is, at times, presented in all its stern-
ness and unattractiveness. From the extremest deductions, he
is saved by the moderation which was the key-note of his
church, and by his own good sense and deep sympathy with
human nature. But Donne is most eloquent when, escaping from
dogmatic minutiae and controversial 'points,' he appeals directly
to the heart and conscience. A reader may care little for the
details of seventeenth century theology and yet enjoy without
qualification Donne's fervid and original thinking, and the figura-
tive richness, and splendid harmonies of his prose in passages of
argument, of exhortation and of exalted meditation. It is Donne
the poet who transcends every disadvantage of theme and method,


## p. 221 (#243) ############################################

Sermons and Letters
221
and an outworn fashion in wit and learning. There are sentences
in the sermons which, in beauty of imagery and cadence, are not
surpassed by anything he wrote in verse, or by any prose of the
century from Hooker's to Sir Thomas Browne’s:
а
The sonl that is accustomed to direct herself to God upon every occasion;
that, as a flower at sun-rising, conceives a sense of God in every beam of his,
and spreads and dilates itself towards him in a thankfulness in every small
blessing that he sheds upon her; that soul that as a flower at the sun's
declining contracts, and gathers in, and shuts up herself, as though she had
received a blow, whensoever she hears her Saviour wounded by an oath, or
blasphemy, or execration; that soul who, whatsoever string be strucken in her,
base or treble, her high or her low estate, is ever tun'd towards God, that
soul prays sometimes when it does not know that it prays.
The passage on occasional mercies (LXXX. 2); the peroration of the
sermon on 'a better resurrection' (Lxxx. 22); the meditations on
death, as the leveller of earthly distinctions, or the portal to a
better life; the description of the death of rapture and ecstasy'
(LXXX. 27) are other passages which illustrate the unique quality,
the weight, fervour and wealth, of Donne's eloquence.
Donne's letters to his friends and patrons were as much
admired in and after his life-time as everything else he wrote. A
few of them were issued in the first editions of the poems; a larger
collection, carelessly edited and in no order, was published by his
son in 1651; the interesting letters written to Sir George More and
Sir Thomas Egerton were first published in Kempe's Losely Manu-
scripts; the Burley MS contains one or two of an earlier date. Thus,
they cover, though much more lightly at some parts than at others,
the whole of his life from the Cadiz expedition to the year of his
death. Like his poems, they paint the brilliant and insolent young
man; the erudite and witty, but troubled and melancholy, suitor
for court favour and office; the ascetic and fervent saint and
preacher. And this is their chief interest. For some time, Donne
.
held the position, almost, of the English épistolier, collections of the
'choicest conceits' being made, in common-place books, from his
letters as well as his poems. But they were not well fitted to
teach, like Balzac's, the beauty of a balanced and orderly prose,
though they far surpass the latter in wit, wisdom and erudition.
Their chief interest is the man whom they reveal, the characteris-
tically renascence 'melancholy temperament,' now deep in despond-
ence and meditating on the problem of suicide, now, in his own
words, kindling squibs about himself and flying into sportfulness;
elaborating erudite compliments, or talking to Goodere with the


## p. 222 (#244) ############################################

222
John Donne
utmost simplicity and good feeling; worldly and time-serving, noble
and devout—all these things, and all with equal sincerity.
The relation of Donne to Elizabethan poetry might, with some
justice, be compared with that of Michael Angelo to earlier Floren-
tine sculpture, admitting that, both as man and artist, he falls far
short of the great Italian. Just as the grace and harmony of earlier
sculpture were dissolved by the intense individuality of an artist
intent only on the expression in marble of his own emotions, so
the clear beauty, the rich ornament, the diffuse harmonies of
Elizabethan courtly poetry, as we can study them in The Faerie
Queene, Hero and Leander, Venus and Adonis, Astrophel and
Stella or Englands Helicon, disappear in the songs and satires
and elegies of a poet who will not accept Elizabethan conventions,
or do homage to Elizabethan models, Italian and French; but puts
out to discover a north-west passage of his own, determined to
make his poetry the vivid reflection of his own intense, subtle,
perverse moods, his paradoxical reasonings and curious learning,
his sceptical philosophy of love and life. It cannot be said of
Donne, as of Milton, that everything, even what is evil, turns to
beauty in his hands. Beauty, with him, is never the paramount
consideration. If beauty comes to Donne, it comes as to the
alchemist who
glorifies his pregnant pot,
If by the way to him befall
Some odoriferous thing, or medicinal.
From the flow of impassioned, paradoxical argument, there will
suddenly flower an image or a line of the rarest and most
entrancing beauty. But the tenor of his poetry is witty, passion-
ate, weighty and moving ; never, for long, simply beautiful; not
infrequently bizarre; at times even repellent.
And so, just as Michael Angelo was a bad model for those who
came after him and had not his strength and originality, Donne,
more than any other single individual, is responsible for the worst
aberrations of seventeenth century poetry, especially in eulogy
and elegy. The 'metaphysical' lyrists learned most from him-the
conquering, insolent tone of their love songs and their splendid
cadences. In happy conceit and movement, they sometimes
excelled him, though it is only in an occasional lyric by Marvell or
Rochester that one detects the same weight of passion behind the
fantastic conceit and paradoxical reasoning. But it is in the
complimentary verses and the funeral elegies of the early and
middle century (as well as in some of the religious poetry and in


## p. 223 (#245) ############################################

The Influence of his Poetry
223
6
the frigid love poems of Cowley) that one sees the worst effects of
Donne's endeavour to wed passion and imagination to erudition
and reasoning.
And yet it would be a mistaken estimate of the history of
English poetry which either ignored the unique quality of Donne's
poetry or regarded its influence as purely maleficent. The influence
of both Donne and Jonson acted beneficially in counteracting
the tendency of Elizabethan poetry towards fluency and facility.
If Donne somewhat lowered the ethical and ideal tone of love
poetry, and blighted the delicate bloom of Elizabethan song, he
gave it a sincerer and more passionate quality. He made love
poetry less of a musical echo of Desportes. In his hands, English
poetry became less Italianate, more sincere, more condensed and
pregnant in thought and feeling. The greatest of seventeenth
century poets, despite his contempt for our late fantastics,' and his
affinities with the moral Spenserians and the classical Jonson, has
all Donne's intense individuality, his complete independence, in the
handling of his subjects, of the forms he adopts, even of his borrow-
ings. He has all his 'frequency and fulness ’of thought. He is not
much less averse to the display of erudition, though he managed it
more artfully, or to the interweaving of argument with poetry. But
Milton had a far less keen and restless intellect than Donne; his
central convictions were more firmly held; he was less conscious
of the elements of contradiction which they contained; his life
moved forward on simpler and more consistent lines. With powers
thus better harmonised; with a more controlling sense of beauty;
with a fuller comprehension of the science of his art,' Milton,
rather than Donne, is, in achievement, the Michael Angelo of
English poetry. Yet there are subtle qualities of vision, rare
intensities of feeling, surprising felicities of expression, in the
troubled poetry of Donne that one would not part with altogether
even for the majestic strain of his great successor.
&


## p. 224 (#246) ############################################

CHAPTER XII
THE ENGLISH PULPIT FROM FISHER TO DONNE
The reformation, like every other popular religious movement
-the crusades, lollardy, the rise of nonconformity or the methodist
revival-owed much to preachers and preaching. But it cannot
be said that, in England, any more than in Germany, preachers
originated the reformation, or that the reformation originated
popular preaching. A new day had dawned for preaching, before
Luther's influence was felt. The reproach of the neglect of
preaching, which, in spite of some exaggerations, must still rest
upon the fifteenth century in England, was already being rolled
away in the opening years of the sixteenth, and the instigation
came from orthodox quarters. For instance, in 1504, the king's
mother, the lady Margaret, countess of Richmond, doubtless upon
the advice of her confessor, John Fisher, established by charter
a preachership. The preacher was to be a resident Cambridge
fellow, with no cure of souls, and his duty was to preach once
every two years in each of twelve different parishes in the dioceses
of London, Ely and Lincoln. Fisher himself signalised his elevation
to the see of Rochester in this same year by preaching a course of
sermons upon the penitential psalms. While some of his colleagues
were seldom or never heard, bishop Fisher continued to preach
unremittingly, till old age obliged him to 'have a chair and so
to teach sitting. When he was vice-chancellor of Cambridge, he
obtained a bull, allowing the university to appoint twelve doctors
or masters to preach in all parts of the kingdom, 'notwithstanding
any ordinance or constitution to the contrary. It was Fisher,
too, who advised that the Lady Margaret's Readers should give
attention to preaching, and who urged Erasmus to write his
treatise Ecclesiastes, sive concionator Evangelicus.
The renascence, also, with the marked religious character which
it bore in England, could not fail to rouse interest in the pulpit.
If Colet could hold the attention of doctors and students, as he
expounded the Pauline epistles in an Oxford lecture-room, he


## p. 225 (#247) ############################################

The Power of the Pulpit
225
might dream of a future for expository preaching from the church
pulpit. His opportunity came in 1504, when Henry VII called
him 'to preside over the cathedral of that apostle, whose epistles
he loved so much. As Erasmus tells us, Colet set about restoring
the decayed discipline of the cathedral body of St Paul's, 'and-
what was a novelty there-began preaching at every festival in
his cathedral. ' Among the many statutory duties of the dean,
there was none obliging him to take any part in preaching.
Colet pursued his Oxford plan of delivering courses on some
connected subject, instead of taking isolated texts; and what
Colet did at St Paul's perhaps inspired another dean to do the
like at Lichfield. Ralph Collingwood, who may have known Colet
at Oxford and must certainly have known of his doings, instituted
a weekly sermon in his cathedral.
The practice of set preaching, as distinguished from the in-
formal instruction which was the duty of every parish priest, had,
therefore, received some impetus before the reformation. Yet
that movement was to affect the pulpit more profoundly than the
renascence and Catholic reformers were able to do. It was impatient
of the 'unpreaching prelates' who had not followed bishop Fisher's
lead, and it afforded the preacher an audience greedy to hear him:
the more controversial he was, the better they liked him. In an
age when men read few books and had no newspapers, the sermon
at Paul's cross or the Spital was the most exciting event of the
week. Authority, whether ecclesiastical or civil, could not afford
to ignore the power of the pulpit, and, therefore, sought to control
it by a rigorous system of licensing. At every political crisis,
general preaching was silenced and the few privileged pulpits
were closely supervised by the government. At Mary's accession,
her chaplain preached at Paul's cross with a guard of two hundred
halberdiers ; upon the very day of Mary's death, Cecil was taking
steps to ensure that the next Sunday's preacher should not ‘stir
any dispute touching the governance of the realm. The result
of this strict supervision was that, in the country at large,
the pulpit was often reduced to silence or to the dull fare of
homilies. 'A thousand pulpets in England are covered with dust,
said Bernard Gilpin in a court sermon of 1552, ‘some have not had
four sermons these fifteen or sixteen years, since friars left their
limitations, and a fewe of those were worthie the name of sermons. '
In London, however, there was throughout the century an abundance
of preaching, and it is London preaching which, almost alone,
finds any place in literature.
E. L. IV.
CH. XII.
15


## p. 226 (#248) ############################################

226 The English Pulpit from Fisher to Donne
From Fisher to Donne, almost all great preachers preached
without book. William Perkins, in his Art of Prophesying, first
published in 1592, can still speak of 'the received custom for
preachers to speak by heart (memoriter) before the people. ' To
print a sermon gave it a second life, but it commonly entailed
all the pangs of a new birth. Donne speaks of his spending eight
hours over writing out a sermon which he had already preached.
It was at the lady Margaret's request that Fisher's Penitential
Psalms, and his sermon preached at king Henry's lying in state
were printed. Appropriately enough, the patroness of Wynkyn
de Worde helped to establish the custom of committing sermons
to print. The prejudice against publishing theological writings of
any pretension in English had diminished since Pecock's day, but
,
was not to disappear till Hooker's great work made a precedent.
Even sermons originally delivered in English, like bishop Longland's
Tres Conciones, were translated into Latin for publication. For
another half century, divines would have to experiment with the
English language before they found it a more natural medium
for theological thought than the traditional Latin, with its stock
of technical terms. It is, therefore, a real gain to English
literature that Fisher did not count it below his dignity to issue
some treatises in the vernacular, while he continued to use Latin
for his larger efforts.
Fisher's literary skill is visible in his many comparisons and
imageries. At times, they are homely and almost humorous,
as when he recommends that men should become as familiar with
death as with these grete mastyves that be tyed in chaynes,'
which 'unto suche as often vysyte theym be more gentyll and
easy. At times, the comparisons are far fetched and over elabo-
rated, as when he compares the Crucified to a parchment which
is stretched and set up to dry; the scourging has left ruled lines
across, and the five wounds are illuminated capitals. The actual
technique of sentence construction still causes him some difficulty.
Long sentences do not always come out straight. The paragraph
is neglected, and, owing to defective punctuation, sentences
are sometimes wrongly divided, and the connection in thought
between one sentence and another is obscured. Again, he cannot
be acquitted of overworking the words 'so' and 'such,' till they
give a feminine tenderness to his writings. Defects of this rudi-
mentary type are least frequent in the two funeral sermons upon
Henry VII and his mother. Here, Fisher is at his best, and
displays a noble and sonorous rhetoric with all the charms of
6
6


## p. 227 (#249) ############################################

Fisher's Sense of Style 227
rhythm and cadence. It is impossible to doubt that, even better
,
than Malory, he knew what he was doing and delighted in it.
Perhaps to him first among English prose-writers it was given
to have a conscious pleasure in style. Here is something more
than the naïve charm of the old-world story-teller; here is the
practised hand of the artist. It is no chance that arranged the
order of words in the inventory of the dead king's treasures ;
al his goodly houses so rychely dekte and appareyled, his walles and galaryes
of grete pleasure, his gardyns large and wyde with knottes curyously wrought,
his orcheyards set with vines and trees moost dilicate.
And in his description of the weeping of the countess of Richmond's
household at her death, Fisher makes as varied and skilful use of
inversion, as any writer has ever made. Her most loyal ad er
could wish the lady Margaret no fitter commemoration than the
sculpture of Torrigiano, the prose of Fisher and the founts of
Wynkyn de Worde.
In formal arrangement, as in subject-matter, Fisher belongs to
the old school of preachers. Colet already suggests the type of
the future. In his fondness for critical exposition of the Scriptures,
he is more modern than Fisher with his allegorical interpretations;
in his unsparing exposure of abuses, he sets the tone to later
preachers. Colet has not Latimer's liveliness, but he has the
same courage and directness. The man who could preach humility
to Wolsey at his installation as cardinal, and the injustice of war
to Henry VIII and his soldiers, just setting out for the French
campaign, had, at any rate, the first essential of the preacher,
conviction. His very earnestness is so conspicuous that it has
led some critics to think that it alone gave power to his preaching.
But there was probably more art in his method than has been
commonly allowed. According to Erasmus, Colet had been long
preparing himself for preaching, especially by reading the English
poets : ‘by the study of their writings he perfected his style. '
Some grace of expression might reasonably be expected from the
man who could write the ‘lytelle proheme' to the grammar-book.
The convocation sermon of 1512, which is the only complete
specimen of Colet's preaching, was delivered, according to custom,
in Latin, but there appeared almost at once an English translation,
which has been assigned with some confidence to Colet himself.
Its theme-the reform of moral abuses in the church-does not
lend itself to imaginative or poetical treatment, but Colet shows
that he quite understands how to secure variety by an inversion,
and to use an effective refrain. His final appeal to his hearers,
15-2


## p. 228 (#250) ############################################

228 The English Pulpit from Fisher to Donne
that they shall not let this convocation depart in vain, like many
of its predecessors, is dignified and yet touched with feeling. Few
sermons of the sixteenth century are more famous or have had
a more interesting history. Thomas Smith, university librarian at
Cambridge, reprinted it at the Restoration with an eye to his own
times, and added notes and extracts from Andrewes and Hammond.
Further reprints followed in 1701 and 1708. Burnet thought of
prefacing his History of the Reformation by a reprint of the
sermon, “as a piece that might serve to open the scene. ' No
doubt, the theme, in all these cases, counted for more than any
literary charm, but a merely bald and uninspired scrmon could
never have enjoyed so long a life.
When Colet died, Erasmus lamented 'in the public interest the
loss of so unique a preacher. ' At the court, Colet had already
before his death made way for John Longland, dean of Salisbury,
afterwards bishop of Lincoln and chancellor of Oxford university.
Sir Thomas More spoke of him as a second Colet, if I may sum
up his praises in a single word. ' He had considerable reputation
as a preacher, but it hardly outlived his day, or the day of the
unreformed faith, and his printed sermons have long been very
scarce. His sermons at court were delivered in English, but they
were rendered into Latin before publication. The only works
printed in English were two Good Friday sermons preached before
the court in 1536 and 1538. There is much which recalls Fisher in
their style. It is evident that Longland, too, takes pleasure
in his English writing, and can make skilful use of repetition,
cumulative effects, interrogations and strings of sounding words.
Where are your taberettes, your drunslades and dowcymets? where are your
vialles, your rebeckes, your shakebushes; and your sweet softe pleasaunt
pypes ?
Nor can he resist the charm of alliteration, when he speaks of
Christ's 'mooste pityous paynefull Passyon' and commends his
hearers' 'submysse softe and sobre mournynge voyces. ' Some-
times, he falls a victim to such a jangling trio as 'multiloquie,
stultiloquie, scurrilytye. ' But, if Longland has much in common
with Fisher, he also anticipates Hugh Latimer in his raciness, his
use of colloquial terms and his spirited indictment of the fashions
in dress. Who, he asks, are they who mourn and lament in this
tabernacle of the body? The jolye huffaas and ruſſelers of this
wolde ? the yonge galandes of the courte ? . . . noo, noo, noo. ' Why,
they study to make this body better in shape than God made it,
‘now with this fashon of apparel, now with that; now with this
6


## p. 229 (#251) ############################################

Latimer's Sermons
229
cutte and that garde. I cannot descrybe the thynge, nor I will
doo. ' The very serving-man must spend upon one pair of hose
as much as his half year's wages. It is farre wyde and out of the
nocke. ' If an orthodox bishop could preach before the king on
a Good Friday in this free strain, the way is already prepared for
Latimer's 'merry toys' eleven years later.
No complete sermons of Latimer's Cambridge days have sur-
vived. In the Sermons on the Card we have only the tenor
and effect of certain sermons made by Master Latimer in Cambridge
about the year of our Lord 1529. ' They are justly famous for
their originality and promise and for their outspoken denunciation.
But they do not compare, at least in the form in which they have
come down to us, with the sermons which he delivered before
king Edward VI twenty years later. Of the intervening period,
there remain only two sermons : a short one preached at the time
of the insurrection of the north, and the convocation sermon
delivered in 1536, just after he had become bishop of Worcester.
The latter shows a great advance on the Card sermons, and, in
consideration of the occasion, was probably composed with greater
care than any other sermon which we have. It contains the fine
contrast between dead images, covered with gold and clad with
silk garments, and 'Christ's faithful and lively images. . . an hungred,
a-thirst, a-cold. The rest of Latimer's surviving sermons, thirty-
eight in number, those upon which his true fame depends, belong
to his old age. In them, he describes himself as 'thoroughe age,
boethe weake in body and oblivious. Yet this 'sore brused man,'
as if to make up for the years of enforced idleness, since the Six
Articles had driven him out of active ministry, devoted the remain-
ing years entirely to the pulpit; he was happier there than in the
bishop's throne, and 'he continued all Kyng Edwardes tyme,
preaching for the most part every Sunday two Sermons. ' He was
a preacher first and last, and he achieved such popular success as
came to no other English preacher till Whitefield and Wesley.
Here, at least, was a ploughman who set forward his plough, and
ploughed manfully with all his strength.
It is characteristic of his entire absorption in his pulpit work
that even the business publishing his sermons does not seem to
have concerned him directly. Latimer's sermons have a place
in literature, but few books have had a less literary origin. These
free and easy discourses, good talking rather than set speeches,
have been written down by other hands, probably without revision
by their author. We recognise unmistakably the ready speech


## p. 230 (#252) ############################################

230
The English Pulpit from Fisher to Donne
>
9
of a debater, who can turn interruptions or unforeseen accidents
to account. 'I came hither to day from Lambeth in a whirry,'
and what the wherryman said serves for an argument. If, in the
course of a sermon, which he has threatened to continue for three
or four hours, his hearers grow impatient and try to cough him
down, he can make a joke of it at their expense. He goes
backward and forward with his subject, and does not hesitate
to be discursive ('I will tell you now a pretty story of a friar
to refresh you withal'), or to say a good thing while he can
remember it; ‘peradventure it myght come here after in better
place, but yet I wyll take it, whiles it commeth to my mind. '
Even when he has worked up to a formal peroration, and ended
with a text, he breaks in with ‘There was another suit, and I had
almost forgotten it. ' There are repetitions, sometimes of great
length, which must have been tedious even to hear. If he is
pleased with a word, he will work it to death ; in a Good Friday
sermon he uses the word ‘ugsome' eight times. He can be plain,
even to coarseness. Martin Marprelate might take a lesson from
him in calling names: 'those flattering clawbacks,' 'pot-gospellers,'
'these bladder-puffed up wily men,' 'flibberjibs,' 'upskips,' 'ye
brain-sick fools, ye hoddy-pecks, ye doddy-pols, ye huddes. ' The
Pharisees are represented as saying to Christ, ‘Master, we know
that thou art Tom Truth. The Father did not intervene to save
the Son but 'suffred him to bite upon the brydle a whyle. ' No
word or illustration is too homely for him to use. Latimer needed
to have no thought for the dignity of literature or the conventions
of reverence. He was not writing a book, but trying to keep the
,
attention of a boy of eleven and a crowd of idle courtiers. Latimer
the preacher cared for ‘no great curiousness, no great clerkliness,
no great affectation of words, nor of painted eloquence’; he
aimed only at ‘a nipping sermon, a rough sermon, and a sharp
biting sermon. '
These conditions were hardly favourable to the production
of literature, but Latimer did valuable service in testing the
possibilities of the language. None of his predecessors ever
carried the art of story-telling to a higher point. He can take
the most familiar narrative in the Bible and retell it with pointed
allusions to current events. During the weeks that Latimer
preached first before Edward VI, the lord high admiral, lord
Seymour of Sudeley, lay in the Tower under sentence of death.
Latimer hated the man and did not spare him. His hearers must
have recognised in an instant what was his purpose when he


## p. 231 (#253) ############################################

Latimer as a Preacher
231
>
began telling the story of Adonijah, 'a man full of ambition,
desirous of honour, always climbing, climbing. ' This stout-
stomached child'had Joab to help him,'a by-walker, that would
not walk the king's highway. ' And so he went on climbing till,
after David's death, he aspired to marry queen Abishag. The
story, as told by Latimer, fills several pages, and yet the interest
is throughout intense and dramatic, without ever a direct mention
of Seymour and queen Catherine Parr.
Latimer reveals very little of the poetry and imaginative feeling
which are conspicuous in Fisher's writing. There is seldom any
illustration from nature, or any flights of what can be called
eloquence. The personification which he makes of Faith—'a
noble duchess with her gentleman usher going before her, and
a train after her'-is not a characteristic feature of his style ; but
he is seemingly pleased with it, and uses it again a few weeks
later to the same audience. The allegories which had been the
stock-in-trade of earlier preachers he explicitly rejects; if he
wants illustration, he draws from his experience of the market-
place and the court. He prefers the wherryman's 'good natural
reason' to the arguments of the whole college of cardinals. Ever
since his conversation with little Bilney, he 'forsook the school-
doctors and such fooleries. At the end of his great Lenten course,
he claims that he has walked 'in the brode filde of scripture and
used my libertie. ' He has no taste for theological subtleties ;
'as for curiouse braynes nothinge can content them. ' There is
some rough sledge-hammer controversy with papists and ana-
baptists, but his real bent is towards practical questions; and
that is one reason why he continues to interest readers of a
later day. No one today stands where Latimer did in doctrinal
theology but bribery is still bribery. One cannot imagine a more
telling point in a discourse on bribery than when the preacher
said, 'He that took the silver basin and ewer for a bribe, thinketh
that it will never come out; but he may now know that
I know it'
It is his passionate desire to right social wrongs which gives
Latimer his highest claim to be called a great preacher. He is
never belabouring sin in the abstract but accurately diagnoses
and fearlessly exposes the injustices of his time. The decay of
discipline and reverence, and the wholesale spirit of greed, which
accompanied the breaking up of the old order, are faithfully
dealt with by the prophet of the new order. The lay landlords
who have supplanted monastic landowners he calls step-lords ;
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## p. 232 (#254) ############################################

232 The English Pulpit from Fisher to Donne
6
rent-raising, enclosures, idleness, covetousness and all the other
faults of the rich are denounced to their faces : 'be you never
so great lords and ladies,' the preacher will rub you on the gall.