No use of lanthorns; and in one place lay
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onne's letters generally fall into two groups. The first comprisesthose addressed to his fellow-students at Cambridge and the Inns ofCourt, the Woodwards, Brookes, and others, or to his maturer and morefashionable companions in the quest of favour and employment at Court,Wotton, and Goodyere, and Lord Herbert of Cherbury. To the otherbelong the complimentary and elegant epistles in which he delightedand perhaps bewildered his noble lady friends and patronesses witherudite and transcendental flattery. In the first class, and the same is true of some of the _Satyres_,notably the third, and of the satirical _Progresse of the Soule_,especially at the beginning and the end, the reflective, moralizingstrain predominates. Donne's 'wit' becomes the instrument of acriticism of life, grave or satiric, melancholy or stoical. DespiteMatthew Arnold's definition, verse of this kind seldom is poetry inthe full sense of the word; but, as Stevenson says in speaking of hisown Scotch verses, talk not song. The first of English poets was amaster of the art. Neither Horace nor Martial, whom Stevenson cites,is a more delightful talker in verse than Geoffrey Chaucer, and thearchaism of his style seems only to lend the additional charm of alisp to his babble. Since Donne's day English poetry has been richin such verse talkers--Butler and Dryden, Pope and Swift, Cowper andBurns, Byron and Shelley, Browning and Landor. It did not come easy tothe Elizabethans, whose natural accent was song. Donne's chief rivalswere Daniel and Jonson, and I venture to think that he excels themboth in the clear and pointed yet easy and conversational developmentof his thought, in the play of wit and wisdom, and, despite thepedantic cast of Elizabethan erudite moralizing, in the power toleave on the reader the impression of a potent and yet a winningpersonality. We seem to get nearer to the man himself in Donne'sletters to Goodyere and Wotton than in Daniel's weighty, but alsoheavy, moralizing epistles to the Countess of Cumberland or Sir ThomasEgerton; and the personality whose voice sounds so distinct and humanin our ear is a more attractive one than the harsh, censorious, burlybut a little blustering Jonson of the epistles on country life andgenerous givers. Donne's style is less clumsy, his verse less stiff.His wit brings to a clear point whatever he has to say, while fromhis verse as from his prose letters there disengages itself a verydistinct sense of what it was in the man, underlying his brilliantintellect, his almost superhuman cleverness, which won for him thedevotion of friends like Wotton and Goodyere and Walton and King, theadmiration of a stranger like Huyghens, who heard him talk as well aspreach:--a serious and melancholy, a generous and chivalrous spirit. However, keepe the lively tast you holdOf God, love him as now, but feare him more,And in your afternoones thinke what you toldAnd promis'd him, at morning prayer before. Let falshood like a discord anger you,Else be not froward. But why doe I touchThings, of which none is in your practise new,And Tables, or fruit-trenchers teach as much; But thus I make you keepe your promise Sir,Riding I had you, though you still staid there,And in these thoughts, although you never stirre,You came with mee to Micham, and are here. So he writes to Goodyere, but the letter to Wotton going Ambassador toVenice is Donne's masterpiece in this simpler style, and it seems tome that neither Daniel nor Jonson nor Drayton ever catches this noteat once sensitive and courtly. To find a like courtliness we must goto Wotton; witness the reply to Donne's earlier epistle which I haveprinted in the notes. But neither Wotton nor any other of the courtlypoets in Hannah's collection adds to this dignity so poignant apersonal accent. This personal interest is very marked in the two satires which areconnected by tone and temper with the letters, the third of theearly, classical _Satyres_ and the opening and closing stanzas ofthe _Progresse of the Soule_. Each is a vivid picture of the innerworkings of Donne's soul at a critical period in his life. The firstwas doubtless written at the moment that he was passing from the Romanto the Anglican Church. It is one of the earliest and most thoughtfulappeals for toleration, for the candid scrutiny of religiousdifferences, which was written perhaps in any country--one of themost striking symptoms of the new eddies produced in the stream ofreligious feeling by the meeting currents of the Reformation and theCounter-Reformation. It was a difficult and dangerous process through which Donne waspassing, this conversion from the Church of his fathers to conformitywith the Church of England as by law established. It would be asabsurd, in the face of a poem like this and of all that we know ofDonne's subsequent life, to call it a conversion in the full sense ofthe term, a changed conviction, as to dub it an apostasy promptedby purely political considerations. Yet doubtless the latterpredominated. The position of a Catholic in the reign of Elizabethwas that of a man cut off rigorously from the main life of the nation,with every avenue of honourable ambition closed to him. He had to livethe starved, suspected life of a recusant or to seek service under aforeign power. Some of the most pathetic documents in Strype's _Annalsof the Reformation_ are those in which we hear the cry of young men ofsecure station and means driven by conscientious conviction to abandonhome and country. It is possible that before 1592 Donne himself hadbeen sent abroad by relatives with a view to his entering a seminaryor the service of a foreign power. His mother spent a great part ofher life abroad, and his own relatives were among those who sufferedmost severely under Walsingham's persecution. 'I had', Donne says, 'myfirst breeding and conversation with men of suppressed and afflictedReligion, accustomed to the despite of death, and hungry of animagined Martyrdome.' To a young man of ambition, and as yet certainlywith no bent to devotion or martyrdom, it was only common sense toconform if he might. From this dilemma Donne escaped, not by any opportune change ofconviction, or by any insincere profession, but by the way ofintellectual emancipation. He looks round in this satire and sees thatwhichever be the true Church it is not by any painful quest of truth,and through the attainment of conviction, that most people haveaccepted the Church to which they may belong. Circumstances andwhim have had more to do with their choice than reason and seriousconviction. Yet it is only by search that truth is to be found: On a huge hillCragged, and steep, Truth stands, and hee that willReach her, about must, and about must goe;And what the hills suddenes resists win so.Yet strive so, that before age, deaths twilight,Thy Soule rest, for none can work in that night. It was not often in the sixteenth or seventeenth century that acompletely emancipated and critical attitude on religious, notphilosophical, questions was expressed with such entire frankness andseriousness. From this position, Walton would have us believe, Donneadvanced through the study of Bellarmine and other controversialiststo a convinced acceptance of Anglican doctrine. The evidence points toa rather different conclusion on Donne's part. He came to think thatall the Churches were 'virtual beams of one sun', 'connatural piecesof one circle', a position from which the next step was to theconclusion that for an Englishman the Anglican Church was the rightchoice (Cujus regio, ejus religio); but Donne had not reached thisconclusion when he wrote the _Satyre_, and doubtless did not till hehad satisfied himself that the Church of England offered a reasonable_via media_. But changes of creed made on purely intellectual grounds,and prompted by practical motives, are not unattended with danger toa man's moral and spiritual life. Donne had doubtless outwardlyconformed before he entered Egerton's service in 1598, but longafterwards, when he is already in Orders, he utters a cry whichbetrays how real the dilemma still was: Show me, deare Christ, thy spouse, so bright and clear; and the first result of his 'conversion' was apparently to deepen thesceptical vein in his mind. Scepticism and melancholy, bitter and sardonic, are certainly thedominant notes in the sombre fragment of satire _The Progresse of theSoule_, which he composed in 1601, when he was Sir Thomas Egerton'ssecretary, four months before his marriage and six months after thedeath of the Earl of Essex. There can be little doubt, as I haveventured to suggest elsewhere, that it was the latter event whichprovoked this strange and sombre explosion of spleen, a satire of thesame order as the _Tale of a Tub_ or the _Vision of Judgment_. Theaccount of the poem which Jonson gave to Drummond does not seem to bequite accurate, though it was probably derived from Donne himself. Itwas, one suspects from several circumstances, a little Donne's way inlater years to disguise the footprints of his earlier indiscretions.According to this tradition the final _habitat_ of the soul which'inanimated' the apple
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