Witness our Colin, whom though all the Graces And all the learned and all the shepherd's throng; Poorly-poor man-he lived; poorly-poor man-he died.1 1 Purple Island, canto i. st. 19. CHAPTER VIII SCHOOLS OF POETICAL "WIT" UNDER ELIZABETH AND JAMES I. THE SCHOOL OF METAPHYSICAL WIT: JOHN DONNE BEYOND the sphere of theological allegory, in which the traditions of the schools were still preserved, lay the region of pure thought; and here the contradiction between medieval and modern ideas furnished ample materials for the exercise of "wit.” Assailed at once by the forces of the new faith, the new science, and the growing spirit of civic liberty, the ancient fabric of Catholicism and Feudalism fell more and more into ruin, but the innovating philosophy was yet far from having established a system of order and authority. The reasoning of Copernicus and Galileo shook men's belief in the truth of the Ptolemaic astronomy: the discoveries of Columbus extended their ideas of the terrestrial globe : the study of Greek and Hebrew literature in the original disturbed the symmetrical methods of scholastic logic: the investigations of the Arabian chemists produced havoc in the realm of encyclopædic science. Still, the old learning had rooted itself too firmly in the convictions of society to be easily abandoned, and the first effect of the collision between the opposing principles was to propagate a feeling of philosophic doubt. In the sphere of reason a new kind of Pyrrhonism sprang up, which expressed itself in Montaigne's motto, Que sçay je? and this disposition of mind naturally exerted another kind of influence on the men of creative imagination. In active life the con fusion of the times was the opportunity of the buccaneer and the soldier of fortune, who hoped to advance themselves by their swords; and like these, many poets, in their ideal representations of Nature, seized upon the rich materials of the old and ruined philosophy to decorate the structures which they built out of their lawless fancy. On such foundations rose the school of metaphysical wit, of which the earliest and most remarkable example is furnished in the poetry of John Donne. The external facts in the life of this poet offer useful landmarks for the interpretation of his genius. He was born about 1573, the son of a London merchant, whose wife was a daughter of John Heywood, the epigrammatist. In his eleventh year he was entered at Hart Hall, Oxford, whence he was removed before he was fourteen to Cambridge, a proof of great precocity of intellect, even in an age when men's academical education began much earlier than at present. In neither university did he take a degree, perhaps because his family was of the Roman Catholic faith. From Cambridge he was removed to Lincoln's Inn, and by the death of his father became master of his fortune. This he seems to have rapidly dissipated, and after some years of loose living, he joined Essex in the expedition to Cadiz in 1596, and again in the voyage to the Azores, during which he wrote his two poems entitled The Storm and The Calm. From the latter we gather the causes which prompted him to his adventures:: A rotten state, and hope of gain, Of honour and fair death, out-pushed me first. On his return to England he entered the household of Sir Thomas Egerton, the Chancellor, afterwards Lord Ellesmere, where he met Anne More-daughter of Sir George More, Lieutenant of the Tower, and niece of 1 Mr. Edmund Gosse, in his Life and Letters of Donne (1899), has furnished an excellent and exhaustive biography of this singular man. The Lady Egerton-whom he secretly married in 1601. marriage gave great offence to the lady's father, who procured that Donne, with two of his friends, Samuel and Christopher Brooke, who had helped him, should be thrown into prison. After remaining there for a short time he was reconciled to Sir George, and being reunited to his wife, lived with her for a while at Peckham and Mitcham, and then entered the household of Sir Robert Drury. He accompanied Sir Robert on an embassy to Paris, where he wrote his Anatomy of the World, in praise of his patron's daughter, Elizabeth Drury, who died in 1610, in her fifteenth year. In 1615, at the express desire of James I., but after long hesitation on his own part, he took orders, was appointed by the King to be his chaplain, and was made D.D. by the University of Cambridge. Two years later he lost his wife, to whom he was devotedly attached, and who seems to have been the first steadying influence in his life. Lincoln's Inn appointed him preacher in 1617, and in the same year he accompanied Lord Hay on his embassy to Germany. Being appointed Dean of St. Paul's in 1621, he passed ten years of broken health and domestic solitude till his death, which occurred on 31st March 1631. His mind during the latter part of his life seems to have been occupied with the steady contemplation of his end, in conformity with the advice which he gives to the reader in the second anniversary poem of his Anatomy of the World : Think that they shroud thee up, and think from hence In his last illness he caused himself to be wrapped in his shroud and laid in his coffin, and in that guise to be painted; his effigy thus portrayed is preserved among the archives of St. Paul's Cathedral. The character of Donne's poetry reflects very exactly the changes in his life and opinions. Most of his compositions in verse are said to have been written while he was still a young man. To this class belong his Satires, his Songs and Sonnets, his Elegies, and The Progress of the Soul. A graver and more philosophic period follows, in which were produced most of the Verse Epistles, his Epicedes and Obsequies, and The Anatomy of the World; while the Divine Poems and the paraphrase of the Lamentations of Jeremiah are the work of the time when he was about to be, or had been, ordained. Ben Jonson said to Drummond, speaking of The Progress of the Soul: “Of this he (Donne) never wrote but one sheet, and now, since he was made Doctor, repenteth highly, and seeketh to destroy all his poems." The thing is probable enough. Donne was educated as a Roman Catholic. His love-poems are those of a man who has assimilated, with thorough appreciation, all the learning and intellectual methods of the schoolmen-their fine distinctions, their subtle refinement, their metaphysical renderings of the text of Scripture. We know that, at some uncertain date, he abandoned the Roman Catholic faith, but his scholastic education had grounded in his mind a doctrine which, to the close of his life, continued to lie at the root of all his convictions, and to give form and colour to his poetical style, namely, the belief in the indestructible character of the soul. He constantly alludes to the old theory of the schoolmen respecting the triple nature of the soul, as in the lines : We first have souls of growth and sense; and those, Were swallowed into it, and have no name.1 In the middle period of his life, when his opinions were becoming more settled and religious, he writes of this individual soul: Our soul, whose country's heaven, and God her father, Into this world, corruption's sink, is sent; Yet so much in her travel she doth gather, That she returns home wiser than she went.? This mixture of strong religious instinct and philosophic scepticism appears in its simplest form in his 1 Verse Letter to the Countess of Bedford. 2 Verse Letter to Sir H. Goodyere. |