No More Learning

But there was one poet who meditated on the same problem as Donne, who
felt like him the power and greatness of love, and like him could
not accept a doctrine of love which seemed to exclude or depreciate
marriage. In 1640, just before his marriage, as rash in its way as
Donne's but less happy in the issue, Milton, defending his character
against accusations of immorality, traced the development of his
thought about love. The passage, in _An Apology against a Pamphlet
called 'A Modest Confutation'_, &c. , has been taken as having a
reference to the _Paradise Lost_. But Milton rather seems at the time
to have been meditating a work like the _Vita Nuova_ or a romance like
that of Tasso in which love was to be a motive as well as religion,
for the whole theme of his thought is love, true love and its
mysterious link with chastity, of which, however, 'marriage is no
defilement'. In the arrogance of his youthful purity Milton would
doubtless have looked with scorn or loathing on the _Elegies_ and the
more careless of Donne's songs. But perhaps pride is a greater enemy
of love than such faults of sense as Donne in his passionate youth was
guilty of, and from which Dante by his own evidence was not exempt.
Whatever be the cause--pride, and the disappointment of his marriage,
and political polemic--Milton never wrote any English love-poetry,
except it be the one sonnet on the death of the wife who might have
opened the sealed wells of his heart; and some want of the experience
which love brought to Dante has dimmed the splendour of the great poem
in which he undertook to justify the ways of God to men. Donne is not
a Milton, but he sounded some notes which touch the soul and quicken
the intellect in a way that Milton's magnificent and intense but
somewhat hard and objective art fails to achieve.

That the simpler and purer, the more ideal and tender of Donne's
love-poems were the expression of his love for Ann More cannot of
course be proved in the case of each individual poem, for all Donne's
verses have come to us (with a few unimportant exceptions) undated
and unarranged. But the general thesis, that it was a great experience
which purified and elevated Donne's poetry, receives a striking
confirmation from the better-known history of his devotional poetry.
Here too wit, often tortured wit, fancy, and the heat which Donne's
wit was always able to generate, would have been all his verse had to
show but for the great sorrow which struck him down in 1617 and gave
to his subsequent sonnets and hymns a sincerer and profounder note,
his imagery a more magnificent quality, his rhythms a more sonorous
music.

Donne was not by nature a devotional poet in the same way and to the
same degree as Giles Fletcher or Herbert or Crashaw. It was a sound
enough instinct which, despite his religious upbringing and his wide
and serious interest in theological questions, made him hesitate to
cross the threshold of the ministry and induced him to seek rather for
some such public service as fell to the lot of his friend Wotton. It
was not, I think, the transition from the Roman to the Anglican Church
which was the obstacle.
I have tried to describe what seems to me to
have been the path of enlightenment which opened the way for him to
a change which on every ground of prudence and ambition was desirable
and natural. But to conform, and even to take a part as a free-lance
in theological controversy was one thing, to enter the ministry
another. When this was pressed upon him by Morton or by the King it
brought him into conflict with something deeper and more fundamental
than theological doctrines, namely, a temperament which was rather
that of the Renaissance than that either of Puritan England or of the
Counter-Reformation, whether in Catholic countries or in the Anglican
Church--the temperament of Raleigh and Bacon rather than of Milton or
Herbert or Crashaw.

The simple way of describing Donne's difficulty is Walton's, according
to whom Donne shrank from entering the ministry for fear the notorious
irregularities of his early years should bring discredit on the sacred
calling. But there was more in Donne's life than a youth of pleasure,
an old age of prayers. It is not the case that all which was best and
most serious in Donne's nature led him towards Holy Orders. In his
earliest satires and even in his 'love-song weeds' there is evidence
enough of an earnest, candid soul underneath the extravagances of
wit and youthful sensuality. Donne's mind was naturally serious and
religious; it was not naturally devout or ascetic, but worldly and
ambitious. But to enter the ministry was, for Donne and for all
the serious minds of his age, to enter a profession for which the
essential qualifications were a devotional and an ascetic life.
The country clergy of the Anglican Church were often careless and
scandalous livers before Laud took in hand the discipline of the
Church; but her bishops and most eminent divines, though they might
be courtly and sycophantic, were with few exceptions men of devout and
ascetic life. When Donne finally crossed the Rubicon, convinced that
from the King no promotion was to be hoped for in any other line of
life, it was rather with the deliberate resolution that he would make
his life a model of devotion and ascetic self-denial than as one drawn
by an irresistible attraction or impelled by a controlling sense of
duty to such a life. Donne was no St. Augustine whose transition from
libertinism to saintliness came entirely from within. The noblest
feature of Donne's earlier clerical life was the steadfast spirit in
which he set himself to realize the highest ideals of the calling
he had chosen, and the candour with which he accepted the contrast
between his present position and his earlier life, leaving to
whosoever wished to judge while he followed the path of duty and
penitence.

But such a spirit will not easily produce great devotional poetry.
There are qualities in the religious poetry of simpler and purer souls
to which Donne seldom or never attains.