No More Learning

Courthope is far too well-informed and judicious a critic to explain
Donne's subtle thought and erudite conceits by a reference to 'Marini
and his followers'. Gongora and Du Bartas are alike passed over in
silence. What we are shown is the connexion of 'metaphysical wit' with
the complex and far-reaching changes in men's conception of Nature
which make the seventeenth century perhaps the greatest epoch in human
thought since human thinking began.

The only thing that such a criticism leaves unexplained and undefined
is the interest which Donne's poetry still has for us, not as an
historical phenomenon, but as poetry. Literary history has for the
historian a quite distinct interest from that which it possesses for
the student and lover of literature. For the historian it is a
matter of positive interest to connect Donne's wit with the general
disintegration of mediaeval thought, to recognize the influence on
the Elizabethan drama of the doctrines of Machiavelli, or to find in
Pope's achievement in poetry a counterpart to Walpole's in politics.
For the lover of literature none of these facts has any positive
interest whatsoever. Donne's wit attracts or repels him equally
whatever be its source; Tamburlaine and Iago lose none of their
interest for us though we know nothing of Machiavelli; Pope's poetry
is not a whit more or less poetical by being a strange by-product of
the Whig spirit in English life. For the lover of literature, literary
history has an indirect value. He studies history that he may discount
it. What he relishes in a poet of the past is exactly the same
essential qualities as he enjoys in a poet of his own day--life and
passion and art. But between us and every poet or thinker of the past
hangs a thinner or thicker veil of outworn fashions and conventions.
The same life has clothed itself in different garbs; the same passions
have spoken in different images; the same art has adapted itself to
different circumstances. To the historian these old clothes are in
themselves a subject of interest. His enjoyment of Shakespeare is
heightened by finding the explanation of Falstaff's hose, Pistol's
hyperboles, and the poet's neglect of the Unities.
To the lover of
literature they are, until by understanding he can discount them,
a disadvantage because they invest the work of the poet with an
irrelevant air of strangeness. He studies them that he may grow
familiar with them and forget them, that he may clear and intensify
his sense of what alone has permanent value, the poet's individuality
and the art in which it is expressed.

Donne's conceits, of which so much has been made and on whose
historical significance Mr. Courthope has probably said the last word,
are just like other examples of these old clothes. The question for
literature is not whence they came, but how he used them. Is he a
poet in virtue or in spite of them, or both? Are they fit only to be
gathered into a museum of antiquated fashions such as Johnson prefixed
to his study of the last poet who wore them in quite the old way
(for Dryden, who pilfered more freely from Donne than from any of his
predecessors, cut them to a new fashion), or are they the individual
and still expressive dress of a true and great poet, commanding
admiration in their own manner and degree as freshly and enduringly as
the stiff and brocaded magnificence of Milton's no less individual, no
less artificial style?

Donne's reputation as a poet has passed through many vicissitudes in
the course of the last three centuries. With regard to his 'wit',
its range and character, erudition and ingenuity, all generations of
critics have been at one. It is as to the relation of this 'wit' to,
and its effect on, his poetry that they have been at variance. To his
contemporaries the 'wit' was identical with the poetry. Donne's 'wit'
gave him the same supremacy among poets that learning and humour and
art gave to Jonson among dramatists. To certain of his Dutch admirers
the wit of _The Flea_ seemed superhuman, and the epitaph with which
Carew closes his _Elegy_ expresses the almost universal English
opinion of the seventeenth century:

Here lies a king that ruled as he thought fit
The universal monarchy of wit;
Here lies two flamens, and both those the best,
Apollo's first, at last the true God's priest.

It may be doubted if Milton shared this opinion. He never mentions
Donne, but it was probably of him or his imitators he was thinking
when in his verses at Cambridge he spoke of

those new-fangled toys and trimmings slight
Which take our late fantastics with delight.

Certainly the growing taste for 'correctness' led after the
Restoration to a discrimination between Donne's wit and his poetry.