No More Learning

From Oxford, he passed to Cambridge,
where, Walton tells us, he studied diligently till the age of
seventeen, but, neither here nor at Oxford, endeavoured after
a degree on account of the 'averseness of his friends to some
parts of the oath that is always tendered at those times. ' Never-
theless, in 1610 he was entered in the Oxford registers as already
an M. A. of Cambridge. Of these college years, no contemporary
documentary evidence is extant.
:
i See Bang's article in Englische Studien: Acta Anglo-Lovanensia : 'John Heywood
und sein Kreis. '


## p. 199 (#221) ############################################

His Life
199
Our first scrap of such evidence dates from 1592, the year of
the first unmistakable reference to Shakespeare as a London actor
and playwright. On the 6th of May in that year, Donne was entered
at Lincoln's inn, having been already, the document testifies,
admitted at Thavies's inn. Of his life between that year and his
marriage in 1601, we have very few particulars, but these appear
to indicate a life spent in England; a life similar to that led by
many young members of the inns of court as Donne describes
them,
Of study and play made strange hermaphrodites;
a life, too, of gradually broadening activity, which led him to the
doorway of a public and political career.
In Donne's case, both the study and the play of these years
were more than ordinarily intense. The record of the latter is
songs and elegies and earliest satires, the greater number of which
were written, Donne told Jonson, before his twenty-fifth year. That
he did not neglect law entirely for poetry, we know from his own
statement, and this is corroborated by the poems themselves, in
which legal metaphors abound. But the years 1593 and 1594
were also given to a serious and careful survey of the body of
divinity as it was then controverted betwixt the Reformed and the
Roman Church. ‘About his twentieth year'Walton says, that is,
apparently, in his twenty-first, he showed, to the then dean of
Gloucester, all the works of Bellarmine, 'marked with many weighty
observations under his own hand. ' Bellarmine's Disputationes,
indeed, were not published until 1593, and Rudde, who is the
dean in question, ceased to hold that office in 1594, which gives
but a short time for the study of such an important issue. But it
is quite possible that Bellarmine's work, in which Donne found
the best defence of the Roman cause, may have fallen into his
hands at the end, not (as Walton implies) at the beginning, of
a course of theological and controversial reading. To a mind that
worked with the rapidity of Donne's, the analysis and digestion
of an elaborate argument would not prove a lengthy task. Nor
was his active adherence to the Anglican church precipitate. All
that we can say with confidence is that when he entered the service
of Sir Thomas Egerton, in 1597, he cannot have been a professed
Romanist, and, in 1601, he disclaimed indignantly 'love of a corrupt
religion. '
Donne's first approach to a public career was made by
service as a volunteer in two combined military and naval ex-
peditions. In 1595, Henry Wotton returned from a prolonged
a
a


## p. 200 (#222) ############################################

200
John Donne
residence in Germany and Italy, to become at once an adherent of
Essex, whom he had already served by his correspondence while
abroad. The letters in verse and prose which passed between
Donne and Wotton during the next few years (some of them yet
unpublished) show that the intimacy begun at Oxford was renewed
with ardour; and it is a fair conjecture, though only a conjecture,
that it was Wotton's influence which brought Donne into contact
with Essex, and induced him to join his friend as a volunteer in
the expedition to Cadiz in 1596, and to the Azores in 1597. One
of the letters referred to was written from Plymouth when the
fleet, on the second of these expeditions, was driven back by stress
of weather; and Donne's verse epistles to Christopher Brooke, a
Cambridge friend, The Storm and The Calm, describe, with
extraordinary vividness and characteristic extravagance of 'wit,'
the experiences of his voyage. They were the first of his poems,
apparently, to attract attention outside the circle of his friends.
Another verse epistle, dated 20 July 1598, to Wotton, refers to
their common adventure :
Here's no more newes than vertue,
he cries, writing ‘At Court,'
I may as well
Tell you Cales1 or St Michaels tales for newes, as tell
That vice doth heere habitually dwell.
On the second of these expeditions, Donne and Wotton were
accompanied by another young volunteer, Thomas, eldest son of
Sir Thomas Egerton, lord keeper of the great seal. By this young
man, who was among those knighted for gallantry after the
expedition, Donne was recommended to the lord keeper towards
the close of 1597, and for four years was secretary to that influential
statesman. The door which was thus opened to Donne leading
to preferment, it might be even to wealth and station, was
abruptly closed by his own rash action, a runaway marriage
with Anne More, daughter of Sir George More of Losely and
niece of the lord keeper's second wife. It may be that, in Donne's
complex nature, love was blended with ambitious hopes of securing
6
1 Modern editors have disguised the reference in these lines, by translating the
Calis' of the printed edition into ‘Calais,' and confounding St Michaels' with
the 'guarded Mount' of Cornwall. But some manuscripts read 'Cales,' and there
can be no doubt that the allusion is to the storming of Cadiz, and to the Islands
expedition,' when Essex's hope of capturing the Plate fleet was disappointed in con.
sequence of his unseasonable attack on the island of St Michael. 'I might as well
tell you what we both witnessed ? '


## p. 201 (#223) ############################################

His Residence Abroad
201
his position and strengthening his claims on Sir Thomas Egerton.
If so, he was grievously disappointed. At the instance of Sir George
More, he and his friends Christopher and Samuel Brooke, who
assisted at the marriage, were thrown into prison ; and, although
Donne was soon released, and his father-in-law by degrees and
perforce reconciled to the marriage, the poet's hopes of prefer-
ment were blasted by his dismissal from the service of the lord
keeper.
This sketch of Donne's earlier years would be incomplete
without a reference to the problem of his residence abroad, a
residence the effect of which on his work is palpable. Through
Walton, we have Donne's own authority for the statement that
he visited Italy with the intention of proceeding to the east to
view the Holy Sepulchre; that, prevented from doing so, he passed
over into Spain; that he 'made many useful observations of those
countries, their laws and manner of government, and returned
perfect in their languages. ' Walton assigns this episode to the
years following the Islands expedition’; but this is manifestly
erroneous, for, during these years, Donne was actively employed
as Egerton's secretary. It is almost equally difficult to find a place
for it in the years from 1592 to 1596, when he was studying law,
theology and life in London. It is noteworthy that the earliest
portrait of Donne, dated 1591, shows him in military dress and
bears a Spanish motto. Again, in one of the three earlier satires,
which Harleian MS 5110 assigns to 1593, Donne describes his
library as already lined with
Giddie fantastique poets of each land,
and, long afterwards, he declared that it contained more Spanish
authors than of any other nation, and that in any profession from
the mistress of my youth, Poetry, to the wife of mine age, Divinity. '
The books in a man's library would not, today, be a safe index
to his travels, but, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,
it was not usual for a young man to have a considerable collection
of foreign books, unless, like Drummond and Milton, he had himself
brought them home.
It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the time which Donne
spent abroad must have been in the last years of his earlier
education, when he was still a Catholic and under Catholic
direction. If this were so, it would explain his silence about
the exact circumstances of a voyage probably undertaken without
the permission of the government, and, possibly, with the intention


## p. 202 (#224) ############################################

202
John Donne
on the part of his guardians that he should enter a seminary,
despite the law of 1585, or take service under a foreign ruler?
With more light on this point, we might be able to see in the
singularly emancipated moral tone of Donne's mind and its
complete openness on religious questions during the early years
in London something of a reaction in his nature against a
bent which others would have imposed upon it. Lastly, an early
date fits best the evidence in the poems of foreign influence, which
is not to be found specially in Donne's 'wit,' but in the spirit
of Italian literature and life reflected in the frank sensuality of
some, the virulent satire of others, of his elegies and songs. The
spirit of the renascence in Latin countries, and a wide acquaintance
with Spanish casuists and other religious writers, are the most
palpable indications of foreign influence in Donne's work. His
direct indebtedness to any particular poet, Italian or Spanish, has
not been established. Of all Elizabethan poets, he is, for good or
evil, the most independent.
From 1601 to 1615, Donne's life was one of dependence on,
and humiliating adulation of, actual or possible patrons. He
lived at Pyrford on the charity of his wife's cousin Francis
Wooley; at Mitcham or in the Strand, on his wife's allowance from
her father; at the town house of Sir Robert Drury, whose patronage
he had gained by writing on the death of Elizabeth Drury, a girl
of sixteen whom he had never seen, the most elaborate and exalted
of his Funerall Elegies. He twice went abroad, on the second
.
occasion accompanying Sir Robert Drury to France and Spa. He
assisted Thomas Morton, afterwards dean of Gloucester and
bishop of Durham, in his controversies with Roman Catholics, for,
though by no means yet a devoted adherent of the Anglican church,
he heartily detested the Jesuits. He wrote courtly letters in verse
and prose to the countess of Bedford and other great ladies, or
elegies on the death of their friends and relatives. He found one
patron in the person of lord Hay, later earl of Doncaster, and
he courted another in the king's favourite, Robert Carr, earl of
Somerset, for whose marriage with the divorced countess of Essex
he wrote a splendid epithalamium. Of his writings of this period,
some are in the brilliant, but often coarse, satiric vein of his earlier
satires and satiric elegies ; one, BIAOANATOE, is an erudite, subtle
and strangely mooded excursus into the field of casuistry; and
1 Donne's mother seems to have lived abroad most of her life. In 1602, Donne
mentions service abroad in a way that shows it had been presented to his mind as a
possibility: 'From seeking preferments abroad my love and conscience restrains me. "


## p. 203 (#225) ############################################

His Later Life
203
one, Pseudo-Martyr, published in 1610, is a more restrained and
official contribution to the controversies of the day, a defence of
the oath of allegiance, Donne's first public appearance on the
Anglican side, in which, however, he does not wander far from the
single point at issue, and writes, not to convert Catholics, but to
persuade them that they may take the oath.
Such were Donne's 'steps to the altar. As early as 1607,
Morton, on being appointed dean of Gloucester, had urged upon
his collaborator the advisability of taking orders. But Donne did
not feel that the author of the popular and widely circulated
Satyres and Elegies, the Paradoxes and Problems and The
Progresse of the Soule, could become a 'priest to the temple’
without some scandal to the friends and admirers of the brilliant
and irregular 'Jack Donne,' not yet quite buried in the sage and
serious husband and father, the controversialist and the courtly
friend of Mrs Herbert and lady Bedford. Ignatius his Conclave was
written about this very year, the witty verses prefixed to Coryats
Crudities in 1611, and he was yet to write the Epithalamium
for Somerset. It is easier to respect, than to wonder at, such
a decision, whether in 1607 or 1610. Moreover, it is doubtful, as
Gosse has insisted, if, in his heart of hearts, Donne, by 1607 or 1610,
was a convinced Anglican. As late as 1617, when he had been
nearly three years in orders, he could write:
Show me, dear Christ, Thy Spouse so bright and clear.
What? Is it she who on the other shore
Goes richly painted? or who robb’d and tore
Laments and mourns in Germany and here?
Sleeps she a thousand, then peeps up one year?
This is not the language of one who is walking in the Via Media
with the intellectually untroubled confidence of Herbert.
When Donne at length became a priest in Anglican orders,
it was as one convinced that, for him, every other path to prefer-
ment was closed, not to be opened even by the influence of
Somerset. The king had resolved that Donne should enter the
church, and, on 25 January 1615, he was ordained by bishop King
of London. The period of privation and suitorship was over. In
1616, he became divinity reader at Lincoln's inn, where many
of his sermons were preached. In 1619 and 1620, he was in
Germany as chaplain to his friend the earl of Doncaster, and
preached before the unfortunate queen of Bohemia one of the
noblest and most illuminating of his sermons. In 1621, king James
appointed him dean of St Paul's, where his fame as a preacher


## p. 204 (#226) ############################################

204
John Donne
a
>
attracted large audiences and rose to its height about the beginning
of Charles's reign. For a moment, he fell under suspicion with the
suspicious and imperious Laud. But the cloud soon passed and,
had Donne lived, he would have been made a bishop. But,
often ailing, he was stricken down at his daughter's house in the
late summer of 1630. The strange and characteristic monument
which still stands in St Paul's was prepared by his own directions
while he lay ill. Some of the most intense and striking of his
hymns were written at the same time. Once, he rose from his bed
to preach the sermon entitled Death's Duel. Six weeks later, on
31 March 1631, he died.
However blended the motives may have been which carried
Donne into holy orders, he gave to the ministry a single-hearted
and strenuous devotion. Whatever doubts may, at times, have
agitated his secret thoughts, or found expression in an unpublished
sonnet, they left no reflection in his sermons. He adopted and
defended the doctrines of the church of England, and the policy in
church and state of her rulers, in their entirety and without demur.
His was a nature in which the will commanded, but was always able
to enlist in the service of its final choice a swift and subtle intellect,
an intense and vivid imagination and a vast store of varied
erudition. And, while he made amends for his Catholic up-
bringing, and for a middle period of mental detachment, by the
orthodoxy of his Anglicanism, the memory of the licence of his
earlier life and wit was forgotten in his later asceticism and in
the spiritual exaltation of the Sermons, the Devotions and the
Divine Poems.
Reference is made elsewhere to Donne as a preacher! Here,
we are concerned with him as poet and prose artist. The history
of his poems is involved in the difficulties and obscurities of his
biography. Only three were published in his life time, The
Anatomy of the World (1611, 1612); the satirical lines Upon
Mr Thomas Coryat's Crudities (1611); and the Elegie on Prince
Henry (1613). In 1614, when about to cross the Rubicon, Donne
thought of hurriedly collecting and publishing his poems before
the doing so could be deemed an actual scandal to his office. He
had, apparently, no autograph copies, at least of many of them,
but was driven to apply to his friends, and especially to Sir Henry
Goodere, the Warwickshire friend to whom the larger number
of his letters are addressed. This made me ask to borrow that
old book of you. The edition in question never appeared, but
1 See chap. XI.


## p. 205 (#227) ############################################

History of his Poems
205
when, in 1633, the first collection was issued posthumously, the
source was very probably this same old book' (though Goodere
had died before Donne), for, along with the poems, were printed
eight letters addressed to Goodere and one to the common friend
of Goodere and Donne, the countess of Bedford. In this edition,
the poems were arranged in a rather chaotic sequence of groups.
The volume opened with The Progresse of the Soule and closed
with the paraphrased Lamentations of Jeremy and the Satyres,
the latter edited with a good many cautious dashes. There are
obvious errors in the printing, but the text of such poems as this
edition contains is more correct than in any subsequent one. In
1635, a second edition was issued, in which many fresh poems were
added, and the grouping of the poems was carried out more
systematically, the arrangement being adopted which has been
generally adhered to since, and is useful for reference-Songs and
Sonets, Epigrams, Elegies, Epithalamiums, Satyres, Letters to
Severall Personages, Funerall Elegies, The Progresse of the Soule,
Divine Poems. The editions which followed that of 1635 added
individual poems from various sources, sometimes rightly, some-
times wrongly; and made alterations from time to time in the
text, conjecturally, or with the help of MS copies, which are
sometimes emendations, more often further corruptions. Modern
editors have followed in their wake, printing more carefully,
correcting many errors, but creating not a few fresh ones. The
canon of Donne's poems is far from being settled. Modern editions
contain poems which are demonstrably not his, while there are
genuine poems still unpublished. The text of many of his finest
poems is disfigured by errors and misprints.
The order of the groups in the edition of 1635 corresponds,,
roughly, to the order of composition. Donne's earliest works were
love songs or sonnets (using the word in the wider, freer sense
of the Elizabethans) and elegies (after the manner of the Latin
poets), through many of which runs a vein of pungent and personal
satire, and regular verse satires. Of these last, the editions since
1669 contain seven. We have, however, the explicit testimony
of Sir William Drummond that Donne wrote only five. It is clear,
from MSS such as Harleian 5110 and others which have survived
in whole or in part, that the first five, or some of them, were
copied and circulated by themselves. These alone were included
in the edition of 1633. The so-called sixth, which was added in
1635, if it be Donne's, is much more in the manner of the satirical
elegies than of the regular satires; while the seventh, addressed


## p. 206 (#228) ############################################

206
John Donne
6
To Sir Nicholas Smith, which was first inserted in the edition
of 1669, an edition the text of which abounds in conjectural
emendations, differs radically in style and tone from all the others,
and there can be little doubt that it is the work of Sir John Roe,
to whom it is assigned in more than one MS.
Donne's satires have features in common with the other imita-
tions of Juvenal, Persius and Horace which were produced in
the last decade of the sixteenth century, notably a heightened
emphasis of style and a corresponding vehemence and harshness
of versification. But, in verse and style and thought, Donne's
satires are superior to either Hall's 'dashing, smirking, fluent
imitations of the ancients' or Marston's tedious and tumid
absurdities. The verse of these poets is much less irregular
than Donne's. It approximates more closely to the balanced
couplet movement of Drayton's Heroicall Epistles. Hall's couplets
are neat and pointed, Marston's more irregular and enjambed.
But Donne's satiric verse shows something like a consistent
effort to eschew a couplet structure, and to give to his verse the
freedom and swiftness of movement to which, when he wrote,
even dramatic blank verse had hardly yet attained. He uses
all the devices—the main pause in the middle of the line, weak and
light endings (he even divides one word between two lines) by
which Shakespeare secured the abrupt, rapid effects of the verse
of Macbeth and the later plays:
Gracchus loves all (i. e. religions) as one, and thinks that so
As women do in divers countries go
So doth, so is Religion; and this blind-
Ness too much light breeds; but unmoved thou
Of force must one, and forc'd but one allow;
And the right? ask thy father which is she,
Let him ask his; though truth and falsehood be
Near twins yet truth a little elder is;
Be busy to seek her. Believe me this,
He's not of none, nor worst, that seeks the best.
Such verse is certainly not smooth or melodious. Yet the
effect is studied and is not inappropriate to the theme and spirit
of the poem.
Donne's verse resembles Jonson's much more
closely than either Hall's or Marston's. He had certainly classical
models in view-Martial and Persius and Horace. But imitation
alone will not account for Donne's peculiarities. Of the minor
kallwnlouata of verse, he is always a little careless; but if there
is one thing more distinctive than another of Donne's best work it
is the closeness with which the verse echoes the sense and soul


## p. 207 (#229) ############################################

His Satires
207
of the poem. And so it is in the satires. Their abrupt, harsh
verse reflects the spirit in which they are written. Horace,
quite as much as Persius, is Donne's teacher in satire; and it is
Horace he believes himself to be following in adopting a verse in
harmony with the unpoetic temper of his work:
And this unpolish'd rugged verse I chose,
As fittest for discourse and nearest prose.
The urbane spirit of Horace was not caught at once by those who,
like Donne and Jonson, believed themselves to be following in his
footsteps.
The style of Donne's satires has neither the intentional obscurity
of Hall's more ambitious imitations of Juvenal, nor the vague
bluster of Marston's onslaughts upon vice. If we allow for
corruptions of the text, one might say that Donne is never
obscure. His wit is a succession of disconcerting surprises ;
his thought original and often profound; his expression, though
condensed and harsh, is always perfectly precise. His out-of-the-
way learning, too, which supplies puzzles for modern readers, is
used with a pedantic precision, even when fantastically applied, to
which his editors have not always done justice.
In substance, Donne's satires are not only wittier than those of
his contemporaries, but weightier in their serious criticism of life,
and happier in their portrayal of manners and types. In this
respect, some of them are an interesting pendant to Jonson's
comedies. The first describes a walk through London with a
giddy ape of fashion, who is limned with a lightness and vivacity
wanting to Jonson's more laboured studies of Fastidious Brisk
and his fellows. The second, opening with a skit on the lawyer
turned poet, passes into a trenchant onslaught-obscured by
some corruptions of the text-upon the greedy and unprincipled
exacter of fines from recusant Catholics, and 'purchasour' of men's
lands :
Shortly (as the sea) he'll compass all the land;
From Scots to Wight; from Mount to Dover strand.
He is the lineal descendant of Chaucer's Man of Law, to whom all
was fee-simple in effect, drawn in more angry colours. 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


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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.
&


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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.