No More Learning

But two things had come over this idealist and courtly love-poetry by
the end of the sixteenth century. It had become a literary artifice, a
refining upon outworn and extravagant conceits, losing itself at
times in the fantastic and absurd. A more important fact was that this
poetry had begun to absorb a new warmth and spirit, not from Petrarch
and mediaeval chivalry, but from classical love-poetry with its
simpler, less metaphysical strain, its equally intense but more
realistic description of passion, its radically different conception
of the relation between the lovers and of the influence of love in a
man's life. The courtly, idealistic strain was crossed by an Epicurean
and sensuous one that tends to treat with scorn the worship of woman,
and echoes again and again the Pagan cry, never heard in Dante or
Petrarch, of the fleetingness of beauty and love:

Vivamus, mea Lesbia, atque amemus!
Soles occidere et redire possunt:
Nobis quum semel occidit brevis lux
Nox est perpetua una dormienda.

Vivez si m'en croyez, n'attendez a demain;
Cueillez des aujourd'hui les roses de la vie.

Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea,
But sad mortality o'er-sways their power,
How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea
Whose action is no stronger than a flower?

Now if we turn from Elizabethan love-poetry to the _Songs and Sonets_
and the _Elegies_ of Donne, we find at once two distinguishing
features. In the first place his poetry is in one respect less
classical than theirs. There is far less in it of the superficial
evidence of classical learning with which the poetry of the
'University Wits' abounds, pastoral and mythological imagery. The
texture of his poetry is more mediaeval than theirs in as far as it is
more dialectical, though a dialectical evolution is not infrequent
in the Elizabethan sonnet, and the imagery is less picturesque, more
scientific, philosophic, realistic, and homely. The place of the

goodly exiled train
Of gods and goddesses

is taken by images drawn from all the sciences of the day, from the
definitions and distinctions of the Schoolmen, from the travels and
speculations of the new age, and (as in Shakespeare's tragedies or
Browning's poems) from the experiences of everyday life. Maps and sea
discoveries, latitude and longitude, the phoenix and the mandrake's
root, the Scholastic theories of Angelic bodies and Angelic knowledge,
Alchemy and Astrology, legal contracts and _non obstantes_, 'late
schoolboys and sour prentices,' 'the king's real and his stamped
face'--these are the kind of images, erudite, fanciful, and homely,
which give to Donne's poems a texture so different at a first glance
from the florid and diffuse Elizabethan poetry, whether romantic epic,
mythological idyll, sonnet, or song; while by their presence and
their abundance they distinguish it equally (as Mr. Gosse has
justly insisted) from the studiously moderate and plain style of
'well-languaged Daniel'.

But if the imagery of Donne's poetry be less classical than that of
Marlowe or the younger Shakespeare there is no poet the spirit of
whose love-poetry is so classical, so penetrated with the sensual,
realistic, scornful tone of the Latin lyric and elegiac poets.
If one
reads rapidly through the three books of Ovid's _Amores_, and then
in the same continuous rapid fashion the _Songs_ and the _Elegies_ of
Donne, one will note striking differences of style and treatment.
Ovid develops his theme simply and concretely, Donne dialectically and
abstractly. There is little of the ease and grace of Ovid's verses in
the rough and vehement lines of Donne's _Elegies_. Compare the song,

Busie old foole, unruly Sunne,

with the famous thirteenth Elegy of the first book,

Iam super oceanum venit a seniore marito,
Flava pruinoso quae vehit axe diem.

Ovid passes from one natural and simple thought to another, from one
aspect of dawn to another equally objective. Donne just touches one or
two of the same features, borrowing them doubtless from Ovid, but the
greater part of the song is devoted to the subtle and extravagant, if
you like, but not the less passionate development of the thought that
for him the woman he loves is the whole world.

But if the difference between Donne's metaphysical conceits and Ovid's
naturalness and simplicity is palpable it is not less clear that the
emotions which they express, with some important exceptions to which I
shall recur, are identical. The love which is the main burden of their
song is something very different from the ideal passion of Dante or of
Petrarch, of Sidney or Spenser. It is a more sensual passion. The same
tone of witty depravity runs through the work of the two poets. There
is in Donne a purer strain which, we shall see directly, is of the
greatest importance, but such a rapid reader as I am contemplating
might be forgiven if for the moment he overlooked it, and declared
that the modern poet was as sensual and depraved as the ancient, that
there was little to choose between the social morality reflected in
the Elizabethan and in the Augustan poet.

And yet even in these more cynical and sensual poems a careful reader
will soon detect a difference between Donne and Ovid. He will begin
to suspect that the English poet is imitating the Roman, and that
the depravity is in part a reflected depravity. In revolt from one
convention the young poet is cultivating another, a cynicism and
sensuality which is just as little to be taken _au pied de la
lettre_ as the idealizing worship, the anguish and adoration of the
sonneteers. There is, as has been said already, a gaiety in the poems
elaborating the thesis that love is a perpetual flux, fickleness the
law of its being, which warns us against taking them too seriously;
and even those _Elegies_ which seem to our taste most reprehensible
are aerated by a wit which makes us almost forget their indecency. In
the last resort there is all the difference in the world between the
untroubled, heartless sensuality of the Roman poet and the gay wit,
the paradoxical and passionate audacities and sensualities of the
young Elizabethan law-student impatient of an unreal convention, and
eager to startle and delight his fellow students by the fertility and
audacity of his wit.