I confess this seems to me a
somewhat
exaggerated statement.
John Donne
[Sidenote: _Italian. _]
Like Milton, Donne had doubtless read the Italian romances. One
reference to Angelica and an incident in the _Orlando Furioso_
occur in the _Satyres_, and from the same source as well as from an
unpublished letter we learn that he had read Dante. Aretino is the
only other Italian to whom he makes explicit reference.
[Sidenote: _French. _]
One of Regnier's satires opens in a manner resembling the fourth of
Donne's, and in a letter written from France apparently in 1612 he
refers to 'a book of French Satires', which Mr. Gosse conjectures to
be Regnier's. The resemblance may be accidental, for Donne's _Satyres_
were written before the publication of Regnier's (1608, 1613), and
Donne makes no explicit mention of him or any other French poet.
We learn, however, from his letters that he had read Montaigne and
Rabelais; and it is improbable that he did not share the general
interest of his contemporaries in the poetry of the _Pleiade_. The
one poet to whom recent criticism has pointed as the inspiration
of Donne's metaphysical verse is the Protestant poet Du Bartas. Mr.
Alfred Horatio Upham (_The French Influence in English Literature. _
New York, 1908), and following him Sir Sidney Lee (_The French
Renaissance in England. _ Oxford, 1910), have insisted strongly on the
importance of this influence. The latter goes so far as to say that
'Donne clothed elegies, eclogues, divine poems, epicedes, obsequies,
satires, in a garb barely distinguishable from the style of Du Bartas
and Sylvester', and that the metaphysical style in English poetry is a
heritage from Du Bartas.
I confess this seems to me a somewhat exaggerated statement. When
I turn from Donne's passionate and subtle songs and elegies to
Sylvester's hum-drum and yet 'conceited' work, I find their styles
eminently distinguishable. Mr. Upham indeed allows that Donne's
genius makes 'vital and impressive' what in the original is 'vapid
and commonplace'. He pleads for no more than an 'element of French
suggestion'.
Of the most characteristic features of Du Bartas's rhetoric, his
affected antitheses, his studied alliterative effects, and especially
his double-epithets 'aime-carnage', 'charme-souci', 'blesse-honneur',
Sylvester's 'forbidden-Bit-lost-glory', 'the Act-simply-pure', &c. ,
Mr. Upham admits that Donne makes sparing use. Donne uses a fair
number of compounds but the majority of these are nouns and verbs. Of
the epithets only one or two are of the sentence-compressing
character which the French poet cultivated. The most like is
'full-on-both-side-written rolls'. The real link between Du Bartas and
Donne is that they are metaphysical poets. Following Lucretius, whom
he often translates, the Frenchman set himself to give a scientific
account of the creation of the universe as outlined in _Genesis_. He
describes with the utmost minuteness of detail, and necessarily uses
similes better fitted to elucidate and illustrate than to give poetic
pleasure, drawn from the most everyday sources as well as arts and
sciences. It was part of the programme of the _Pleiade_ thus to annex
the vocabulary of learning and the crafts. Now Donne may have read Du
Bartas in the original, or he may have seen some parts of Sylvester's
translation (it did not appear till 1598), as it was in preparation,
though to a Catholic, as Donne was, the poem would not have the
attraction it had for Protestant poets in England, Holland, and
Germany.
