CHAPTER 4. JACOBEAN AND CAROLINE LYRISTS THE METAPHYSICAL POETS: Donne, Cleveland-THE EARLIER CAVALIERS: Carew, THE ELEVATION OF POETRY During the last few years of the 16th century so many "base companions," as Giles Fletcher calls them,1 had learned to write, that lyrical poetry had become suspect. The sonneteer was no longer a pilgrim in the narrow path of chivalric sentiment, but a creature like Amoretto in the Return from Parnassus, an adorer of Ovid, who sleeps with Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis under his pillow, and writes "fly-blown sonnets of his mistress, and her loving pretty creatures her monkey and her puppet." To rescue poetry from the hands of such pretenders, and to restore to it its high seriousness, became the main object of the early 17th century. The most important work in this connection was done by Ben Jonson and his followers, but there were two other attempts to solve the problem. The first produced the writers whom Johnson, following Pope, called "Metaphysical." Accepting the Platonic definition of the poet as an interpreter of divine mysteries, and drawing thence the corollary that the muse might become the handmaid of natural philosophy, these writers tried to ennoble poetry by applying it to the phenomena of science. 2 For instructions in the Mysteries of Nature [says Reynolds]3 we must, if we will follow Plato's advice, inquire of those who lived nearest to the time of the Gods; meaning the old Ethnics, among whom the best masters were certainly most, if not all of them, poets. The modern poet, therefore, if he was to vie with the ancients, must endeavour after the same learning. Poetry was no longer to be " a pretty toy" to win a mistress, but an arduous quest undertaken for a higher satisfaction. It is an exceeding rapture of delight [says Chapman] in the deep search of knowledge, that maketh men manfully indure the extremes incident to that Herculean labour: from flints must the Gorgonean fount be smitten. The style, to be worthy of the subject, must be cryptic and difficult. Reynolds emphatically denies that the ancients " spoke their meaning as plain as they could," and Chapman drew from the fact a rule for modern practice. Obscurity in affectation of words and indigested conceits [he says] is pedantical and childish; but where it shroudeth itself in the heart of his subject, uttered with fitness of figure and expressive epithets, with that darkness will I still labour to be shadowed. Charms made • Mythomystes (1633). 1 Preface to Licia (1593). 2 Life of Cowley. • Dedication to the Shadow of Night (1594). of unlearned characters are not consecrate by the Muses, which are divine artists, but by Euippe's daughters, that challenged them with mere nature [and were therefore] turned into pyes. In short, poetry, while retaining the note of inspiration, was to convey a sense of intellectual effort. The result of this theory is to be found in the elaborate subtleties of Donne and the abrupt "strong lines" of Cleveland. The second attempt to restore poetry was made by religious writers. Still holding to the Platonic conception of the poet, they claimed that the mysteries which he interprets could only be the mysteries of the Christian faith. Christ himself [says Southwell] by making a hymn the conclusion of his last supper, and a prologue to the first pageant of his passion, gave his Spouse a method to imitate, as in the office of the Church it appeareth; and to all men a pattern to know the true use of this measured and footed style. Like the "Metaphysical " poets these writers felt that a change of style was necessary. So the pious Sylvester cries: O furnish me with an unvulgar style, That by this I may wean our wanton Ile Hence Herbert and Crashaw, who shared this aspiration, often wrote in a style as consciously elaborate as that of the Metaphysical experimenters. But they never cultivated obscurity, and they never tried to convey a sense of effort. It was not until Benlowes wrote his Theophila that the religious inspiration was contaminated with "Metaphysical" theory. " Between these two groups the earlier Cavaliers led a precarious existence. Admirers of Ben Jonson for the most part, but too careless, independent, or unscholarly to master the principles of his art, they were easily influenced by the Metaphysical" and religious writers. They are connected with the one group by Carew's imitation of Donne, and with the other by Herrick's attempt to write religious poetry. They may therefore be placed in an intermediate position, as furnishing a link between the two. THE METAPHYSICAL POETS JOHN DONNE (1573-1631), the son of Roman Catholic parents, connected through his mother's family with Sir Thomas More and with John Heywood, the dramatist, was entered at Hart Hall in 1584, and at Lincoln's Inn in 1590. His first four Satires were written about 1594. In the next year he sailed with Essex against the Spaniards, and in 1597 went on "The Islands Voyage," incidents of which he commemorated in The Storm and The Calm. In 1601 he married clandestinely Anne More, niece of Sir Thomas Egerton, in whose household Donne now held the position of private 1 Preface to St. Peter's Complaint. secretary. For this he was dismissed, imprisoned for a time, and reduced to great distress. In 1607 Dr. Morton, Bishop of Durham, urged him to take orders in the Church. But Donne had not yet given up all hope of a place at court or in the civil service. Biathanatos, a defence of suicide, appeared in the next year. In 1610 he made a bid for Royal patronage with Pseudomartyr (a contribution to the "disputes that concerned the Oath of Supremacy and Allegiance"), Ignatius his Conclave (1611), a scurrilous attack on the Jesuits, an Elegy on Prince Henry (1612), and an Epithalamium for the marriage of the Princess Elizabeth (1613). In this year, to gain the goodwill of the Earl of Somerset, James's favourite, who wished to marry the Countess of Essex, Donne took a desperate course. He used his legal knowledge to support the suit of nullity which the lady brought against her husband; and when the suit was successful, actually wrote an Epithalamium for her marriage to Somerset. Donne had staked everything on a single throw, and in winning he had lost. When Somerset, to fulfil his obligations, urged James to make Donne clerk of the Council, the royal purpose was discovered to be fixed. "Mr. Donne is a learned man," said the king, "and will prove a powerful preacher; and my desire is to prefer him that way, and in that way I will deny you nothing for him." John Donne. (S. Kensington Museum.) James had his flashes of insight, and on this occasion he did a wise thing. For Donne's hesitation to take orders had been due not so much to a stricken conscience as to an excessive subtlety in his method of self-examination. The shock of the king's ultimatum revealed him to himself. He was ordained in 1615, became the royal chaplain, and in 1616 was given the living of Keyston in Huntingdonshire. On the death of his wife in 1617 he betook himself for a time "to a most retired and solitary life," from which he ultimately emerged to be one of the greatest English preachers and a religious poet of great power. He was made Dean of St. Paul's in 1621, and enjoyed the living of St. Dunstan's in the West from 1624 to his death. in 1631. Izaak Walton's charming Life of Donne presents a one-sided view of his character, because the two men only became acquainted in 1628. Donne's secular poems, the best of which, according to Ben Jonson, were written before he was twenty-five, and of which in later life he "repented hugely," preserve a side of his character which Walton never knew. They were collected and published by his son in 1633 Poetry. The inductive method advocated by Descartes and Bacon in the spheres of philosophy and science was first applied by Donne to the problems of love. Throwing aside the chivalric love doctrine, which had become at best a piece of fantastic learning and at worst a dishonest pose, he set himself to discover the laws of the heart by scrutinizing the emotions themselves.If we o'erlick our love," he says in the 19th Elegy, And force it new strange shapes to take, It is this quasi-scientific attitude to the problem, this determination to find what is natural, that separates him from contemporary poets. The glib Platonism of Elizabeth's court disgusted him (Satire I.), and in his sullen humour he liked to think that the royal virgin herself, so often addressed in terms of blasphemous adulation by breathless poetasters, had more in common than was generally supposed with a wolf, a fish, a gull, and a little cock sparrow. The subsequent discovery that she was, as a matter of fact, most closely related to the anthropoid apes, must not be allowed to obscure the serious value of Donne's surmise. He had not discovered Darwinism, but he had discovered the feminine interest. "Every woman is a science," he says in the fourth Paradox, “for he that plods upon a woman all his life long shall in the end find himself short in his knowledge of her." Such a sentence marks the change from ancient to modern sentiment, from the gallery of embalmed perfections that fill the medieval romance and the Renaissance sonnet-sequence, to Cleveland's mistress, who was "the metaphysics of her sex," to Millamant, who "makes poets as she pleases," and to the Lady Elizabeth Hastings, to love whom was a liberal education. But the effect of these novel ideas upon his poetry was not wholly good. If he recovered a note of sincerity which the sonneteers had generally missed, he lost the fine directness and temperance in which they excelled. By discarding the orthodox love doctrine he had put himself at the mercy of his impulses, and he suffered the plagues of an excommunicate. They meet but with unwholesome springs," sings the orthodox Habington, alluding to those who, like Donne, "Affirm no woman chast and fair." The charge is only too well founded. Brutal sensuality, coarse cynicism, fury, hate, despair-these are emotions no less characteristic of Donne's early poetry than mystical rapture and valiant faith. His control is often uncertain. A cynical fancy will change under his pen to a noble surmise, and a lofty speculation to a z Castara (1634). 1 See Metempsychosis (1601). 8 Cf. Donne: "Go and catch a falling star." cheap gibe-e.g., Elegy III. "Air and Angels." He seems to have written at white heat, as a means of self-revelation, following the chance connections of ideas as they surged through his capacious brain. His imagery is intellectual rather than sensuous; and it is sometimes his care for logic that leads him from his purpose. The sonnet form, if he had adopted it, would no doubt have steadied his head and hand; but he associated it too closely with the falsetto of Elizabethan chivalry to divine, with Shakespeare, that it might be adapted to more honest uses. The few sonnets that he wrote belong to his later years, when the change in his moral views, and the disuse into which the form had fallen, had robbed it for him of its vulgar associations. In his youth he preferred the looser forms (song or couplet), which left his imagination free to wander; and the result is that many a lesser man has a better idea of that unity in thought and feeling which a lyric should possess. This, however, would not have troubled him. There is nothing to show that he took the least interest in art for art's sake, and he was probably fatigued by those feasts of wit at the Mermaid. While Ben Jonson bullied him about the rhythm of his verse,' Donne probably "withdrew his thoughts," like Dr. Johnson on a similar occasion, and speculated on the rhythm of life. So long as he could follow his own thought and avoid hackneyed conceits and sing-song melody, he was content to leave his poetry harsh, and sometimes grotesque. If he had been interested in literary form he would infallibly have followed Ben Jonson in studying and, perhaps, imitating the classics, for the works of Catullus, Ovid, and Martial contain much to attract a mind sick of chivalry and Petrarch. But Donne was too much in earnest to imitate anybody. On the few occasions when he has another author's work in mind, he writes rather in allusion to his original than in imitation of it." Always he preserves his freedom and his originality. His one literary aim seems to have been to make his poetry an exact reflection of his mind, the microcosm which was itself the reflection of the whole world. He followed "nature" as faithfully as Dryden in 1674 or Wordsworth in 1798, but "nature" as conceived of by the mystical scientist; and it is because the furniture of his mind was as miscellaneous and strangely assorted as the universe of Sir Thomas Browne, that the effect of his poetry is often so bizarre. With a little more artistic consciousness (as distinct from self-consciousness) he might have been among the greatest reformers of English poesy, but he was such an opportunist in merely literary matters that he made it impossible for any one to follow him. He gave some impetus to that theory of the poetic function which may be found in Chapman's prefaces, in Reynolds's Mythomystes, and in the encomia which a later generation showered upon Cleveland; but he cannot be said to have founded a school of "Metaphysical" writing. Of the poets who tried to imitate him not one could reproduce his quality. 1 See Drummond's Conversations. 2 Cf. the Satires, The Sun Rising, The Bait. |