18 MARCH 1938, Page 36

THE DOGMATIC AND MYSTICAL THEOLOGY OF JOHN DONNE By Itrait

Husain

This is a useful anthology rather than a critical study. Mr. Husain has not so much thrown " a new light " on Donne as furnished the tinder and faggots for some such future illumination. By deft and frequent quotation from the sermons, his book (S.P.C.K., 7s. 6d.) establishes the truth, though not perhaps the relevance, of his thesis that " Donne's defence of the Anglican Church was as sincere as that of other contemporary divines like Hooker and Andrewes." Consistency, whether dogmatic or other- wise, is always a frivolous test for a poet's sincerity. It is particularly irre- levant as applied to Donne, partly because like Sir Thomas Browne's " great Amphibian" he could accept the co-existence of wildly dissimilar beliefs on different planes in his mind ; but chiefly because the dogma in his sermons (like the metaphysics in his lyrics) may have been the vehicle but was never the thing conveyed. To treat it as such is to see Hamlet without the Prince— the- Prince being - Donne's imaginative curiosity playing about his own tortuous relations with his God or the women he loved. In the sermons as much as the poetry, these two and other seem- ingly disparate experiences are con- stantly fused and although there is no room for elaboration in a book of this scope Mr. Husain does not forget, any more than Donne forgot, how

" the admiring her my mind did whett To seeke thee, God."