No More Learning

That which is the prime virtue, and chief
ornament, of Virgil, which distinguishes him from the rest
of writers, is so conspicuous in your verses, that it casts a
shadow on all your contemporaries; we cannot be seen, or
but obscurely, while you are present. You equal Donne in the
variety, multiplicity, and choice of thoughts; you excel him
in the manner and the words. I read you both with the same
admiration, but not with the same delight.

He affects the metaphysics, not only in his satires, but
in his amorous verses, where nature only should reign; and
perplexes the minds of the fair sex with nice speculations of
philosophy, when he should engage their hearts, and entertain
them with the softnesses of love. In this (if I may be
pardoned for so bold a truth) Mr. Cowley has copied him to
a fault; so great a one, in my opinion, that it throws
his Mistress infinitely below his Pindarics and his latter
compositions, which are undoubtedly the best of his poems and
the most correct. '

Dryden's estimate of Donne, as well as his application to his poetry
of the epithet 'metaphysical', was transmitted through the eighteenth
century. Johnson's famous paragraphs in the _Life of Cowley_ do little
more than echo and expand Dryden's pronouncement, with a rather vaguer
use of the word 'metaphysical'. In Dryden's application it means
correctly 'philosophical'; in Johnson's, no more than 'learned'. 'The
metaphysical poets were men of learning, and to show their learning
was their whole endeavour; but unluckily resolving to show it in
rhyme, instead of writing poetry, they only wrote verses, and very
often such verses as stood the trial of the fingers better than of
the ear. ' They 'drew their conceits from recesses of learning not very
much frequented by common readers of poetry'. Waller is exempted
from being a metaphysical poet because 'he seldom fetches an amorous
sentiment from the depths of science; his thoughts are for the most
part easily understood, and his images such as the superficies of
nature readily supplies'.

Even to those critics with whom began a revived appreciation of
Donne as a poet and preacher, his 'wit' still bulks largely. It
is impossible to escape from it. 'Wonder-exciting vigour,' writes
Coleridge, 'intenseness and peculiarity, using at will the almost
boundless stores of a capacious memory, and exercised on subjects
where we have no right to expect it--this is the wit of Donne.
' And
lastly De Quincey, who alone of these critics recognizes the essential
quality which may, and in his best work does, make Donne's wit the
instrument of a mind which is not only subtle and ingenious but
profoundly poetical: 'Few writers have shown a more extraordinary
compass of powers than Donne; for he combined what no other man has
ever done--the last sublimation of dialectical subtlety and address
with the most impassioned majesty. Massy diamonds compose the very
substance of his poem on the Metempsychosis, thoughts and descriptions
which have the fervent and gloomy sublimity of Ezekiel or Aeschylus,
whilst a diamond dust of rhetorical brilliancies is strewed over the
whole of his occasional verses and his prose. '

What is to-day the value and interest of this wit which has arrested
the attention of so many generations? How far does it seem to us
compatible with poetry in the full and generally accepted sense of
the word, with poetry which quickens the imagination and touches
the heart, which satisfies and delights, which is the verbal and
rhythmical medium whereby a gifted soul communicates to those who have
ears to hear the content of impassioned moments?

Before coming to close quarters with this difficult and debated
question one may in the first place insist that there is in Donne's
verse a great deal which, whether it be poetry in the full sense
of the word or not, is arresting and of worth both historically
and intrinsically. Whatever we may think of Donne's poetry, it is
impossible not to recognize the extraordinary interest of his mind and
character. In an age of great and fascinating men he is not the least
so. The immortal and transcendent genius of Shakespeare leaves Donne,
as every other contemporary, lost in the shadows and cross-lights of
an age that is no longer ours, but from which Shakespeare emerges
into the clear sunlight. Of Bacon's mind, 'deep and slow, exhausting
thought,' and divining as none other the direction in which the road
led through the debris of outworn learning to a renovated science and
a new philosophy, Donne could not boast. Alike in his poetry and in
his soberest prose, treatise or sermon, Donne's mind seems to want the
high seriousness which comes from a conviction that truth is, and
is to be found. A spirit of scepticism and paradox plays through and
disturbs almost everything he wrote, except at moments when an intense
mood of feeling, whether love or devotion, begets faith, and silences
the sceptical and destructive wit by the power of vision rather than
of intellectual conviction. Poles apart as the two poets seem at a
first glance to lie in feeling and in art, there is yet something of
Tennyson in the conflict which wages perpetually in Donne's poetry
between feeling and intellect.

But short of the highest gifts of serene imagination or serene wisdom
Donne's mind has every power it well could, wit, insight, imagination;
and these move in such a strange medium of feeling and learning,
mediaeval, renaissance and modern, that every imprint becomes of
interest. To do full justice to that interest one's study of
Donne must include his prose as well as his verse, his paradoxical
_Pseudomartyr_, and equally paradoxical, more strangely mooded
_Biathanatos_, the intense and subtle eloquence of his sermons,
the tormented passion and wit of his devotions, and the gaiety
and melancholy, wit and wisdom, of his letters. But most of these
qualities have left their mark on his poetry, and given it interests
over and above its worth simply as poetry.

One quality of his verse, which has been somewhat overlooked by
critics intent upon the definition and sources of metaphysical wit, is
wit in our sense of the word, wit like the wit of Swift and Sheridan.