THE INGENIOUS DEAN DONNE

A Study of the Prose Works of John Donne. By Evelyn M. Simpson. (Clarendon Press. 15s. net.) Tip. Sun is lost, and th' earth and no mans wit Can well direct him where to look^ for. it.

JOHN DONNE had no praise for his fellow-Elizabethans. He was sick to death of their poetry. How could a man whose head and heart were both fiery, and always in each other's way, who was at once passionate and self-critical,

Lind anything but a treacherous insincerity in those nightingales leaning uptill a thorn, in fair ladies belied with false compare, in springtime, springtime ? . . . Their melodious, artificial- artless, sweet, easy lyrics disgusted him ; his contempt was so huge that he would not deign to mention them. He made a companion of one Elizabethan ; but that was Ben Jonson, and he at least had erudition and a brutality of manner that might pass for honesty. And if ever Jonson wrote sweetly and gracefully, he knew exactly what he was doing ; he had not taken himself in or lost himself among gentle fantasies.

There was a classical parallel for every word.

But Donne was more aristocratic than Jonson ; he followed more strenuously the dictates of his own will. If Donne wrote poetry, then it should bear no likeness to those flashes of fine thoughtlessness that were so swallowed in by the populace. He crabbed his metres, and set them rocking ; he was cynical and contorted in thought. He wrote sincerely enough ; or, rather, he bit and struggled to attain sincerity ; but that virtue is almost unattainable once a man has lost

his naivete. Doubt follows doubt ; whatever you can say, it seems, is half a lie.

" If thou beest borne to strange sights Things invisible to see,

Ride ten thousand daies and nights,

Till age snow white haires on thee, Thou, when thou retorn'st, wilt tell moo All strange wonders that befell thee,

And sweare No where Lives a woman true, and faire."

Is that a true halting place for sincerity ? We can feel its bitterness ; and more than its bitterness, we can see its cleverness. It was good to have voided so much spleen, and anyone who can write like that is sure of a place in the

heavenly choir. But Donne's enquiring and uneasy spirit could never have rested in such an attitude, or in any attitude at all. It was completeness of truth for which lie longed.

And as he so hated the flowers and shadows of poetry, so he rebelled from simple and automatic piety. He was born to religious ardours, but he was born to see religion as a heroic wrestling match. Many of his relatives had suffered for their adherence to Roman Catholicism ; and had been overjoyed by their persecutions. He had his " first breeding and conversa- tion," he tells us, " with men of a suppressed and afflicted Religion, accustomed to the despite of death, and hungry of an imagin'd Martyrdome." There was that sceptical, acute mind of his, too ; he could never hold to a belief that was in any way incoherent, that admitted special cases or exceptions. And if the best religious life forbade the exercise of any of his faculties, or of any capacity for experience, then it condemned itself. He was aware that a true service of God must be fuller, not emptier, than the life of the physical senses.

It is no wonder that in his youth he fell back from piety into cynicism and excess ; he tried the pleasures of the world in disgust at the thinness of the pleasures of heaven. It was not, even then, that his body got the better of him ; it was rather that he found no satisfaction in " goodness," that lie could not reconcile himself to adoring God with anything less than the whole of himself. his nature was not sensual ; for sensuality is lethargy, not passion ; it is unaccompanied by spiritual turmoil and ecstasy ; it is a mere pacification of the appetites. In truth, to sensual men there is no interest or value to be seen in Donne ; he appears only to be beating the air.

There were overwhelming difficulties in those years to a man like Donne, whose mind was properly philosophical, who could believe nothing irrational or superstitious. Philo- sophical religion was alien to the Renaissance ; there was little to help him, no one went by the same paths. He read assidu- ously and hungrily the work of the schoohnen, of St. Thomas Aquinas, of the Aristotelian Christians, of the early Fathers. And his place was truly amongst them ; but the gap between their time and his was too large to be bridged easily : they formed and directed his thoughts ; but, if he were to solve the problems that had shown themselves in the past century, he must go alone and fight out his own beliefs. In especial, it was difficult because of Copernicus. The earth had reached one of its peripeteias, its periods of new revelation ; and the whole of previous knowledge had to be shifted and re-

assimilated. It was one aspect of the problem which confronts us now—where are virtues and values, where is being, where

is God, when the whole of experience and knowledge proves to be relative ? It was hard to discover what the schoolmen said of the Copernican system. The very ground beneath

your feet was moving. And the Church had shut its eyes and sworn at Copernicus, had been dishonest or stupid.1 It was well enough to advise quietness and good works,' but good works without faith are void.

But it was Donne's conscience more than his intellect that cleared away his difficulties. He had an intuition of religion that outran his mind ; an appetite for heaven that: was bound to bring him to saintliness, even if he failed in apologetics. It was not Donne who incorporated the Coper-

nican system into theology ; and the young man who wrote those impassioned and witty poems, those undergraduate exercises in prose, would have laughed at the Dean who'

wrote holy sonnets, preached impassioned and witty sermons, and lived as a model of sanctity to all beholders. But this obedience to the heart and treachery to the head was made

more easy, less inconsistent, by many aids. It was only a'

small central item of doubt that Donne left unresolved: The older he grew, the richer became his concept of divinity,

the fuller became the exercise of his faculties in the divine'

life ; the nearer he came, indeed, to that sincerity which,' had been the object of his search. He could not allow himself

the greatest freedom of intelligence ; but in abandoning, doubt he attained what was worth much more, the subjugation and control of his passion, spiritual ecstasy, the profundities. of religious emotion. His myopia to the world of actuality, was very slight ; and what compensations he had in the ideal world !

Another circumstance helped to establish him in the Church, and quelled the uneasy upheavals of his scepticism. From, his youth he had always before his imagination the catastrophe of Death ; he had dwelt upon it morbidly, in revulsion and in love. Suicide had always a seductive charm for him,' the charm of the incredible and final and terrible. He felt,' we might say, a horror intellectualis lethi. Yet that feeling of his, too, was realler and sounder than the current: Elizabethan magniloquence. With many of them Death' was a first choice as a rhetorical subject—but it was the Death that comes to all men—the " eloquent, just, and mighty' Death "—and it was only by an exercise in correspondences that they discovered, as in a syllogism, that Death was, their own fate, too. Even so, it seemed to them queer and interesting, and food for thought, that they themselves must, die : they were not overconcerned by it : Death pointed an excellent moral and made lugubrious verses—that was about' all. But it was his own death that Donne saw before him,- and Death the abstract in his private Day of Doom. It was

his own corpse he saw rotting and full of worms, his own call before the Almighty that he heard. And if he puffed up the figure of Death till it occupied heaven and earth, till it filled his whole imagination, if it were partly this indecent terror of Death that made him reform his life and live ascetically, Puritanically, yet it gave him the more to conquer before he could be at peace in life. He commissioned a portrait of himself to be painted, eyes shut, cheeks hollow, the winding sheet about his head. His sermons are full of the " vilification of man " in the grave. So much the more credit is his, then, that in the hour of death he had conquered the fear of death.

" He lay fifteene dayes earnestly expecting his hourely change. And in the last houre of his last day (as his body melted away, and vapoured into spirit) his sonic having (I verily beleeve) some revelation of the Beatifical Vision, he said, I were miserable, if I might not die."

In his monograph, Mr. Fausset has hacked Donne about to make him fit into the framework, Sinner to Saint ; he has exaggerated and misstated the discordancy in Donne's soul. Still, he gives us a vigorous and dramatic life of somebody, and illustrates his life with excellent quotations from Donne's works. Though Dr. Evelyn Simpson is less of an artist in words, and indeed less of an artist in criticism, she is trustworthy and valuable. It happens, too, that she possesses more insight than Mr. Fausset into the fundamental duty of a critic. " It is difficult," she says, almost as though she were reproving Mr. Fausset, " to be satisfied with any view of Donne's character which, while admitting the contra- dictions in his nature, makes no attempt to resolve theme And a close study of his works, prose as well as poetry, makes it clear that his was no case of dual personality." She has studied Donne more widely and more closely than Mr. Fausset ; she has a greater sanity, a more open mind. Her book corrects the errors of Sir Edmund Gosse, and contains a collection of letters and a sermon, now published for the first time.

ALAN PORTER.