BOOKS.

MR. GOSSE'S LIFE OF DONNE,

ALL those readers who are familiar with Isaak Walton's exquisite Life of Donne, and their number must be legion; all those who delight in Donne's sermons, the most passionate in English ; all those, again, who do not grudge the labour of searching among the half-smelted ore of his poems for their occasional runnings of pure gold, will turn with eagerness to these handsome volumes to see what new information upon the poet-preacher's life and character Mr. Gosse has been able to win by the patience and enthusiasm of twenty years. They will find that he has laid them under an immense debt of gratitude. Here for the first time the very numerous letters of Donne are brought together, annotated, arranged in what seems their chronological order, and made to tell their own story. It was a saying of Cardinal Newman's that letters form the only perfectly veracious biography ; they are, at any rate, of the first consequence as material for a biography, and in reprinting with such scholarly care what had never been printed since they were casually thrown together in 1651, Mr. Gone has rendered a permanent service to litera- ture. Whether the portrait he constructs by their aid will

• The Info and Letters of John .Donne, Dean of St. Paul's. Now for the Grst kerrteed and Edited by Edmund. Gosse. London : W. Heinemann. [24e.]

prove to be of equal value we take leave to doubt. The faculty that has hitherto distinguished Mr. Gosee among contemporary critics has been a remarkable power of seizing and expressing in forcible and picturesque English the characteristic qualities of an author or a period, but especially the latter. He excels in the broad historical view ; and there are not a few pages of criticism in the book before us, notably the concluding chapter,which show him at his beet.

On the other hand, he has never displayed any great power of intuition into character, and the picture he has pieced to- gether for us of the most inscrutable, as well as the most fascinating, of Jacobeans, though in many places telling, and in all worked up with ungrudging care and sympathy, is far from convincing.

The main fact about Donne's life known to everybody since Walton wrote is that an " irregular " youth was in the end succeeded by an old age of conspicuous holiness.

Walton compares the one to that of Augustine before hie conversion, the other to that of Ambrose ; but he supplies no hint of when or how the change came about ; and with all

its beauty his sketch of Donne's personality is wanting in definition. His biography was written as a preface to a volume of sermons, and so it was inevitably the last phase of

Donne's life to which he limited his view. Mr. Gosse's problem, therefore, was, by the help of Donne's letters and other writings, all of which are here carefully analysed, to illu- minate the various stages in his career, and show how one passed into another. He turns first to the 'irregular " period of youth, and to throw light upon this he investigates the amatory poems, treating them as autobiographical. Whether such a proceeding could ever be legitimate need not here be argued, but Mr. Gosse will remember Herrick's plea against such a judgment in a like case,—" Jocund his muse- was, but his life was chaste." Certainly Donne's poems have a greater air of sincerity than Herrick's, but then, as Mr. Gosse points out with so much truth, realism was a mark of Donne's style. It is, however, quite easy to show in the present case that Mr. Gosse's attempted reconstruction is a complete failure. Mr. Gosse takes the familiar lay figures of Donne's first elegy—the lover, the married woman, and the

jealous husband—and treats them as draniatis personce in a tragical adventure of the poet's own. Now although in one

other elegy there is mention of a husband, in the other eighteen there is not, while in the fourth there figures an

" hydroptic father," who as third actor in such a domestic drama is plainly inconsistent with the "jealous husband,".

since a woman cannot be at the same time both married and unmarried. The elegies are, in fact, occasional pieces, studies for the most part in amatory situations, but with no inter- connection. One of them is the celebrated "Autumnal," which we know from Walton to have been addressed to Lady Magdalen Herbert. But Mr. Gosse is resolute to make out his story, and by picking a line here and there from the elegies, and filling in with the lyrics, he makes a very un- pleasant story of it. The poet loves, goes abroad, and returns to be disenchanted. He finds his lady no longer young, and also rather silly. Where Mr. Gosse does not

quote chapter and verse for his facts it is hard to check him, but of the thirteenth elegy he gives a paraphrase. This, he says- " Is douhtlels the expression of this turn of the tide. She is still his dove-like friend,' still in profuse and burning couplets his love rages when he thinks upon her. Yet he upbraids the passion which he cannot resist, and even the lady he stilL worships :—

Was't not enough that thou dldst hazard us To paths In love so dark and dangerous. And the so arnbush'd round %Ph household rl And over all thy husband's towering eyes?'

They must part, make fewer meetings, run less risk ; ' she must go and I must mourn.'"

We may note in passing that these "towering eyes" can hardly belong to the same husband as him of the first elegy, who is laughed at as deformed and sitting swollen and snort- ing in his basket-chair. Bat leaving that, we say with confidence that any one who takes up Donne's thirteenth elegy without prepossession will find three things. First, that it is a lament by a lover over his mistress's actual departure from the place where he is ; this is the only possible sense in their own context of the words "she must go and I must mourn." Secondly, that the lady is not, as Mr. Geese has it, suffering from '4 autumnal sensuality," but is in the spring- time of life. The poet bids her-

" Be ever then yourself, and let no love Win on your health, your youth, your beauty."

Thirdly, there is no hint of disenchantment, no word of up- braiding addressed to the lady, from beginning to end of the poem. The lines quoted above by Mr. Goole are addressed not to her, but to Cupid, as their context shows:— " Yet, Love, thou'rt blinder than myself in this, To vex my dove-like friend for my amiss ; Was't not enough that thou didst dart thy fires Into our bloods., inflaming our desires ; Was% not enough, that thou didst hazard us ? " Bze.

We do not think, then, that Mr. Gone by his elaborate in- vestigation of the love poems has succeeded in adding any- thing to our knowledge of the first stages of Dame's life. That there were " irregularities " in it Donne has himself confessed; but what exactly the irregularities were it is now impossible, and we should have thought, undesirable, to investigate.

Mr. Gosse takes the second period of Donne's life to have been simply one of waiting upon Fortune, who showed no iiaste to befriend him, while he devoted himself to theology, in which he had a strong intellectual interest, without much practical interest in religion. Here, again, we do not think that Mr. Goose's reading of the riddle will altogether com- mend itself to those who study after him the documents he has so laboriously brought together. In terms Mr. Gone admits over and over again that Donne's character was highly

3mplex; yet he nevertheless reduces it to that of a remark- ably clever man of the world, eager to get on, and not over scrupulous as to the means of advancement, who at last, through the shock caused by his wife's death two years after he took orders, becomes converted and a saint.

In favour of Mr. Gosse's theory it may be admitted that 'Walton lays stress upon Donne's " retiredness " after his wife's death, in which he says "he became crucified to the world." And no doubt such a blow, falling upon a religious nature, was not without its spiritual effect. On the other hand, Mr. Gone himself allows, when he is making a point against Walton (II., 95), that in Anne Donne's funeral sermon we see him, "after shutting himself up in his house until the bitterness of his anguish was over, putting his bereave- ment behind him, and resuming with stately impassibility .his priestly task." We must not forget, too, that the clerical office was at that time so highly esteemed by those who esteemed it at all, that to pass from the lay to the clerical habit symbolised an equally emphatic change in the whole outside fashion of a man's life; and in a person of Donne's enthusiasm and sincerity there would certainly be a deter- mination to throw himself into his new profession with all the zeal of which he was capable. Such a phenomenon is noticeable in the somewhat parallel case of George Herbert. It is, therefore, far nuire likely that the "conversion" of which Mr. Gone speaks should have taken place when Donne was ordained in 1615 than two years later; and we do not see, after many careful readings of the beautiful passage at the beginning of chap. 12, that Mr. Gosse gives any reason for his belief that Donne took orders before he was ' converted." We suspect his reason must be that the son- nets seem to him the most religious of the poems, and that he has been able to fix the date of one of the sonnets by a reference to the death of Mrs. Donne. But to assume that all the sonnets belong to the same year is to repeat the mistake of seeking for inter-relation among poems which are merely occasional and disconnected. Walton tells us that a3 early as 1607 Donne sent some "holy hymns and sonnets" to George Herbert's mother. But, further, Mr. Gosse's hypothesis of a "conversion" so late as 1617, or even 1615, compels him to disbelieve the reason Donne himself gave for declining to take orders in 1607, when pressed to do so by Dr. Morton, with whom he had collaborated in the Roman controversy. According to the story given by Morton himself to Walton, Donne had said :—" Some irregularities of my life have been so visible to some men that though I have, I thank God, made my peace with Him by penitential resolutions against them, and by the assistance of His grace banished them my affec- tions; yet this, which God knows to be so, is not so visible to men as to free me from their censures, and, it may be, that sacred calling from a dishonour." On this Mr. Gosse

remarks : "I think that Morton has, very innocently and naturally, modified the real objections made by the poet to his proposition." And he adds : "It is absurd to think that [penitence, and a genuine sorrow for faults of instinct] kept such a stalwart will as that of Donne hovering on the brink of holy orders" (L, 161). It seems to IllEr that a theory which obliges its author to censure as absurd so deliberate and intelligible a statement as that of Morton can hardly commend itself. It is fair to Mr. Goose to notice that he has perhaps been led to put Donne's conversion so late, not only by his theory as to the date of the sonnets, but by the very unsatis- factory relations which, following in Dr. Jessopp's footsteps, he has shown to have existed about 1613 between Donne and the not very reputable Carr, whom James made Earl of Rochester. Walton tells the story of Rochester's having summoned Donne to Theobald's promising him the gift of the Clerkship to the Council, but leaves it to be inferred that this was an isolated and unsolicited act of generosity. But Donne's letters show that he had put himself at Rochester's service and was "living on his bread"; and in return for this protection he was called upon to help the favourite in his attempt to pro- cure the Countess of Essex's divorce, and when the attempt was successful to write the epithalamium for Carr's marriage with her. It is, however, a sufficient answer to this to point out, first, that Donne did not know as much about Carr and Lady Essex as we know ; and, secondly, that there is a letter, in Mr. Gosse's collection, addressed as late as 1621, to Villiers, who succeeded Carr as favourite, which seems to us now every bit as servile as those written to Carr. And in esti- mating both we have to bear in mind that in those days the Sovereign was the fountain of honour, in fact as well as in name, and that the favourite for the time being had the foun- tain under his absolute control. It may be remembered that Bacon in his essays lays down rules for a favourite's behaviour as though the office had come to be considered a legitimate part of the Constitution.

We hope that Mr. Gosse, when the time comes to revise his book for a further edition, will reconsider his theory of Donne's conversion, and also omit the unfortunate pages about his early love affairs. The book is so brilliantly written that it must find, as it deserves, a multitude of readers, and we should like it to contain nothing which ought to stand in the way of its success. We have noticed a few inconsistencies here and there, one of which we will mention. Mr. Gone claims the Spanish motto on the frame of the 1591 portrait as showing that as early as his eighteenth year Donne had already developed his taste for proverbial tags of Spanish; but on the same frame is a coat-of-arms, whereas Mr. Gosse speaks of his bearing arms "when he was Dean of St. Paul's" with the implication that he had no right to them. If the motto belongs to the early date, so must the shield ; and it is noticeable that it bears the cadency mark of the eldest son.