Reviews of the Week
Donne the Outrageous
IT is time that the warm enthusiasm which swept over readers of poetry in the 'twenties when confronted with Donne, and the Metaphysicals generally, underwent more considered judgement. Not that our regard for Donne need be any less. It may, in fact, well be deeper ; but it will be based on different grounds, such grounds as Mr. Leishman offers us in this profound and well con- sidered study, to which one would wish to apply the word " brilliant " but for the slight aura of the flashy the word has come to connote. The book is a step forward from previous studies, such as those of Sir Herbert Grierson, whose magnificent edition of Donne perhaps set the ball rolling, of Mrs. Joan Bennett, and the seminal apergus of Mr. T. S. Eliot, whose provocative phrase, " the dissociation of sensibility," is now giving rise to many skirmishes in critical fields, and is thoroughly discussed in this volume..
It is impossible in a short space to give any full idea of Mr. Leishman's theme ; the title of the work will itself give some indica- tion of its direction, due attention being paid to the meaning of the word " wit." He begins with the " outrageous " Donne, the young man who, in company with Ben Jonson, was in violent reac- tion against the Petrarchan convention of idealised love, and the diction of the " sugared sonnets " ; the young man out to shock, using all the resources of a powerful and lively intellect and a deeply sensitive personality, employing speech " such as men doe use." Mr. Leishman is chary of the title " Metaphysical," preferring to call the poets of that school " scholastic" or " dialectic," characteristics evident in Donne, to which was added a strong dramatic sense, seen gain, if not quite so strongly, in Herbert. His treatment enables him o dovetail Donne, as is reasonable, into the general line of venteenth-century poets, especially as he is able to how the affinity f his subject to Jonson. It might be remarked, parenthetically, at he a little too easily makes over to Donne the disputed elegies some might wish to retain for Jonson. Such a treatment of Donne, adding the contemporary addiction extravagant (" outrageous ") paradox and punning, enables Mr. eishman to put fairly convincingly where it belongs the auto- , iographical interpretation of many of the poems, and make far ;Imre understandable and acceptable as a whole (they have always been more than acceptable in passages) the full-length addresses, such as those to. Mrs. Herbert (Thel Autumnal), to the Countesses of Bedford and Huntingdon, and the Anniversaries. The discussion of-these last is one of the most illuminating parts of this continually enlightening book. Mistress Elizabeth Drury is the mere peg for the poems to hang on, as King was to be for " Lycidas " ; for
" It is not merely on the insignificance of human knowledge and on the decay of the world that Donne meditates in these poems [they are shot all through with mediaeval conceptions] ; the great theme of the Second Anniversarie is also the great theme of Donne's Sermons—that of the insignificance of man himself when considered sub specie temparis, that of the antithesis between the world and the spirit, the transitoriness and unsatisfactoriness of all earthly enjoyments, the incommodities suffered by the soul in the.imprisoning body.'•
The unravelling of this poem, however, comes towards the end of the book.
Previously Mr. Leishman deals with such intellectually " out- rageous " poems as " The Calme," such paradoxical poems as " The Anagram," such morally " outrageous " poems as " Goe, and catche a falling starre," relating them all to the traditions from which they spring—it is to be regretted that he gives such scant space to " The Extvie "—to lead us to those poems which seem to arise from the profounder and more personal experiences which resulted from his marriage to Ann More and the disasters which followed. If some of the earlier poems were sheer playing, quite unserious, derived as often as might be from Ovid, these later ones, which reveal Donne's passionate attempt " to make one little world an everywhere." with his wife, are - an altogether different matter. Here, and in the divine poems, we meet the Donne who is of first importance to anyone for whom poetry is an essential part of life. Wet are made more acutely conscious than perhaps we were before that, as Mr. Leishman puts it, to feel Donne you have to understand him, and to understand him you have to feel him. Among other points made is that to feel Donne you have to appraise, to taste delicately, to experience, the quality of the verse itself, not only its beautiful logic, its skeletal structure, its economy of diction, but the music of the phrasing, the direct quality of emotional human speech.
Naturally, in the course of his argument, Mr.-Leishman has to adventure into generalities, and not one of the least valuable and engaging parts of this valuable and engaging book is his rebuttal of fashionable heresies, such as the " imagery " test now being so recklessly applied in some quarters, and his examination of the dangerous distortions of the phrase " dissociation of sensibility." (Mr. Eliot, like other leaders, suffers from his disciples.) He makes clear, too, as part of a general discussion, that Donne's love-poems are not addressed to ladies he may have been courting, but are analyses of the condition of being in love. He is not perplexing the fair sex with metaphysic—one of the very few phrases of Dryden's there is any need to forgive—but finding out about himself. To sum up, this is an exciting book because it is a rectifying book, obviously the product of much thought and of much sensibility, as one might expect from the translator of Rilke ; it is a book which will send anyone back to Donne with a refreshed awareness of what that great poet has to give. It is a learned book without being heavy —if sometimes a little repetitive, as though Mr. Leishman were lecturing to an audience which needed reminders—and his dis- agreements with other commentators are always urbanely conducted, and therefore the more devastating. In short it is a book to read,
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