The Works of Donne John Donne : Complete Poetry and
Selected Prose. Edited by John Hayward. (Nonesuch Press. 8s. 6d.) THERE is some difficulty in discovering why, just in our
own age, Donne has so thoroughly come into his own. His atmosphere is in no way like ours. He was violent, and very sure in his violence. He never hesitated ; he plunged into belief and he plunged into cynicism. There is no lack of ease, no self-distrust, on the surface of his work. We gather the torment of his heart rather because he lies so bravely than because he makes a point of showing it. But it is more in the fashion, nowadays, to wear the face of the Wandering Jew in order to conceal a complacent mind.
We like doubting, and Donne hated it.
None the less, in the past twenty years he has been estab- lished as the most luminous poet of the second rank in the whole of our literature—the greatest poet in the world, as Ben Jonson called him, " for some things." Scarcely a poet from the time of Rupert Brooke to our newest modernists has been uninfluenced by him ; and some poets have fed on his inspiration more than on any other writer's. In his own time he had an esoteric fame. His poems circulated in manuscript. There was something disdainful in his nature and he cared only for the few. The Metaphysicals who followed him were his children. In the Augustan age he sank from view. Coleridge and De Quincey wrote of him with admiration, but could not pull him back into prominence. The Victorians were never provoked into enthusiasm. It is now, and only now, that he takes on a commanding stature and becomes everybody's poet.
Taine wrote of him, in the nineteenth century :—
" Twenty times while reading him we rub our brow, and ask with astonishment, how a man could so have tormented and con- torted himself, strained his style, refined on his refinement, hit upon such absurd comparisons."
He is no longer so puzzling to us ; we have a taste for that
oddness. There is nothing in our language which has so barefaced and colossal a triviality as his Paradoxes and Problems. They are the acme of undergraduate wit. They
are purely indefensible. But even here we can admire the courage of a man who could be so preposterous, and know it, and enjoy himself in the absolute waste of his talents. There are two qualities in especial which mark out Donne from his fellow-poets. The first is his pride ; astonishing pride with no touch of vanity in it. And the second goes with his pride ; it is his consciousness of the figure he was making of himself. There is never a hint of unguarded, undigested, involuntary truth in his works. Although he confesses himself, he never reveals himself. He is never weak. We can suppose him to have had his tender moments :
they do not appear. And yet, for the great fiction of himself that he built up in prose and verse, he could mobilize alt his passion and fire. Every resource of his mind was drawn into service ; and John Donne, Dean Donne, Jack Donne are all part of his creation. In the end he remains himself invisible : he could say to us as challengingly as he said to his Cod:— "When Thou halt done, Thou bast not Donne, For I have more."
His chief ability was to express his meaning by an over- statement so grotesque that it would not be taken seriously ; yet so illustrative that it would shadow out, or recall, a genuine experience. Even at his simplest he employs this manner :—
" For the first twenty yeares since yesterday
I scarce believ'd thou eould'st be gone away . . ."
Added to this is his affronting lack of reserve, which gives him the appearance of telling everything about himself. In this " terrible crudeness " (as Taine called it) he goes only as far as he chooses. He builds up the picture of a masculine bitterness, roughness, freedom, and force ; and then he stays. We might not unreasonably say that he uses ties to convey the truth, and truths merely to augment the persuasiveness of his art.
Perhaps there is something in this out-and-out character of his that our own age needs. The picture he made of himself fills a place in our fantasy : we ourselves should like to be as decisive, as self-contained, and as forceful. Much of his work centres round the problem of belief and he might, therefore, seem to speak familiarly to a generation which considers itself " in transition." But Dean Donne is sceptical by main force and believes by main force : a triumph of which men are not now very capable. It is probable that he conies to his own merely because he is, so typically, what we are not The Nonesuch Press has published, in a portable and -attractive form, the complete poetical works of Donne ; and given also four hundred pages of his prose. The edition puts the seal upon Donne's reputation. In the best sense it is a " popular edition." There are few notes ; the text has been carefully prepared by Mr. John Hayward ; there is an admir- ably large amount of Donne in an admirably small compass. The proof-reading is not quite impeccable, but we cannot complain of so generous a production. No doubt the spirit of Donne will work still more profoundly into the fabric of
Previous page
