No More Learning

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. The natural love of God which
overflows the pages of the great mystics, which dilates the heart
and the verses of a poet like the Dutchman Vondel, the ardour and
tenderness of Crashaw, the chaste, pure piety and penitence of
Herbert, the love from which devotion and ascetic self-denial come
unbidden--to these Donne never attained. The high and passionate joy
of _The Anniversary_ is not heard in his sonnets or hymns. Effort is
the note which predominates--the effort to realize the majesty of God,
the heinousness of sin, the terrors of Hell, the mercy of Christ.
Some of the very worst traits in Donne's mind are brought out in
his religious writing. _The Essays on Divinity_ are an extraordinary
revelation of his accumulations of useless Scholastic erudition, and
his capacity to perform feats of ingenious deduction from traditional
and accepted premises. To compare these freakish deductions from the
theory of verbal inspiration with the luminous sense of the _Tractatus
Theologico-Politicus_ is to realize how much rationalism was doing
in the course of the century for the emancipation and healing of the
human intellect. Some of the poems, and those the earliest written,
before Donne had actually taken Orders, are not much more than
exercises in these theological subtleties, poems such as that _On
the Annunciation and Passion falling in the same year_ (1608), _The
Litany_ (1610), _Good-Friday_ (1613), and _The Cross_ (_c. _ 1615)
are characteristic examples of Donne's intense and imaginative wit
employed on traditional topics of Catholic devotion to which no
change of Church ever made him indifferent. Donne never ignored in his
sermons the gulf that separated the Anglican from the Roman Church, or
the link that bound her to the Protestant Churches of the Continent.
'Our great protestant divines' are one of his courts of appeal,
and included Luther and Calvin of whom he never speaks but with the
deepest respect.