endless distinctions generally cause the composition to He begins a poem called Love's Deity

end nowhere.

thus :

I long to talk with some old lover's ghost,
Who died before the God of Love was born.

The object of the discourse is to be the mystery why love should be forced from one lover where there is no return from the other. This is a subject of universal interest, and the poet, on the assumption that Love, after being made into a deity, has abused his power, conducts a striking thought, by means of an appropriate image, to an intelligible conclusion:

O were we wakened by this tyranny

To ungod this child again, it could not be

I should love her who loves not me.

But such straightforward logic would not have suited the super-subtle character of Donne's intellect; and he proceeds to invert his reasoning, and to close his poem with a stanza of pure paradox, leaving the mind without that sense of repose which art requires :--

Rebel and atheist, why murmur I,

As though I felt the worst that love could do?
Love may make me leave loving, or might try
A deeper plague, to make her love me too;
Which, since she loves before, I'm loth to see.
Falsehood is worse than hate; and that must be,
If she whom I love should love me.

Where he thinks simply the reader perceives that his thoughts are really common enough. He begins a Verse Letter to Sir H. Goodyere on his favourite subject of the necessity of change:

Who makes the last a pattern for next year,

Turns no new leaf, but still the same thing reads;
Seen things he sees again, heard things doth hear,
And makes his life but like a pair of beads.

This has the simplicity and directness of Sir John Davies in his Nosce Teipsum. But we soon come to a quatrain in which the poet is anxious to show his wit :

To be a stranger hath that benefit,

We can beginnings, but not habits choke.
Go-whither? hence. You get, if you forget;

New faults, till they prescribe to us, are smoke.

We certainly do not get anything by the mere negative act of forgetting; and nobody could gather from the last line that the meaning was, "new faults, till they become our masters, are merely smoke." Eagerness for novelty and paradox leads the poet to obscurity of expression; and the reader is justly incensed when he finds that the labour required to arrive at the meaning, hidden behind involved syntax and unmeasured verse, has been expended in vain. Ben Jonson does not express this feeling too strongly when he says, "That Done for not keeping of accent deserved hanging." It is superfluous to justify this verdict by examples. The reader, in the numerous extracts I have given from Donne's poems, will have observed for himself how deliberately he seeks to attract attention to the extravagance of his thought, by the difficulty of his grammatical constructions, and by the dislocation of his accents.

All these things must be taken into account in deciding the place to be assigned to this acute and powerful intellect in the history of English poetry. Donne's qualities were essentially those of his age. His influence on his contemporaries and on the generation that succeeded him was great. They had all been educated under the same scholastic conditions as himself; they were all in touch with his theological starting-point, and set a value on the subtlety of his metaphysical distinctions. In Dryden's time, when the prestige of "wit," still represented by the genius of Cowley, was weakening before the poetical school which aimed first at correctness of expression, men continued to speak with reverence of Donne's genius. But as the philosophy of Bacon, Newton, and Locke gradually established itself, the traditions of the schoolmen fell into discredit, so that, in the days of Johnson and Burke, the practice of the metaphysical wits had come to be regarded in the light of an obsolete curiosity. The

revival of mediæval sentiment, which has coloured English taste during the last three generations, has naturally awakened fresh interest in the poems of Donne, and there is perhaps in our own day a tendency to exaggerate his merits. "If Donne," writes a learned and judicious critic, "cannot receive the praise due to the accomplished poetical artist, he has that not perhaps higher, but certainly rarer, of the inspired poetical creator."1 Poetical creation implies that organic conception of Nature, and that insight into universal human emotions, which make the classical poets of the world-Homer and Dante, and Chaucer and Milton; and to this universality of thought, as I have endeavoured to show, Donne has no claim. Nor can he be reckoned among the poets who, by their sense of harmony and proportion, have helped to carry forward the refinement of our language from one social stage to another. The praise which Johnson bestows upon his learning adds little to his fame, for the science contained in his verse is mostly derived from those encyclopædic sources of knowledge which, even in his own time, were being recognised as the fountains of "Vulgar Error." On the other hand, to those who see in poetry a mirror of the national life, and who desire to amplify and enrich their own imagination by a sympathetic study of the spiritual existence of their ancestors, the work of Donne will always be profoundly interesting. No more lively or characteristic representative can be found of the thought of an age when the traditions of the ancient faith met in full encounter with the forces of the new philosophy. The shock of that collision is far from having spent its effect, even in our own day; and he who examines historically the movements of imagination will find in Donne's subtle analysis and refined paradoxes much that helps to throw light on the contradictions of human nature.

1 Professor Saintsbury, Preface to Poems of John Donne. E. K. Chambers.

Edited by

CHAPTER IX

SCHOOLS OF POETICAL "WIT" UNDER ELIZABETH AND JAMES I.

COURT WIT: THE SCHOOL OF TRANSITION FROM ROMANTIC TO CLASSICAL EUPHUISM: THOMAS CAMPION; SIR HENRY WOTTON; BEN JONSON; WILLIAM DRUMMOND; SIR JOHN BEAUMONT.

THE aim of the courtier, as such, was to form a "witty" way of conceiving Nature, and a peculiar dialect for expressing his conceptions, which might distinguish his caste from the vulgarity of the world outside the Court. This may be properly described by the word "Euphuism." From the days of Lyly, who was the first to make a systematic study of courtly English style, the discordia concors of wit had been produced by the mixture of two opposing elements the fashions of chivalry, and the modes of diction peculiar to the Latin orators. The result of the fusion may be seen in the style of Euphues, Arcadia, and, to some slight extent, of The Faery Queen. In all these works the "romantic" element prevails over the "classical"; and the predominance of romance is also marked during Elizabeth's reign by the assiduous cultivation of the Petrarcan love sonnet, the Italian concetti, or the Spanish pastoral love story-styles always closely associated in late books of chivalry-as well as by the studied revival of old English words and grammatical inflections.

In the reign of James I. the course of taste changed. The classical element began to supersede the romantic. The sonnet by degrees fell into disuse, and the courtly

poet tried to show the choiceness of his "wit" not so much by curiosity in the selection of words, or by the mechanical balance of sentences, as by what Dryden calls "turns," that is, by combinations of terse phrases and rhythmical effects, strictly imitated in the English from classical originals. From the Italian and Spanish poets men turned to Ovid's elegiacs, the odes and epistles of Horace, and the epigrams of Martial; they even sought for material among the Greek sophists and epigrammatists of the Alexandrian era.

The climax of the earlier Euphuistic style was probably reached in Thomas Campion, who was also the first to unite the old manner with a deliberate imitation of classical models. Nothing is certainly known of the date of his birth or of his parentage; very little of the events of his life. He was apparently educated at Cambridge; and if he is identical with the person of the same name who was admitted a member of Gray's Inn in 1586, he was probably born not earlier than 1560. In 1593 he is addressed by Peele in his Honour of the Garter as an eminent Euphuist :

Thou

That richly clothest conceit with well-made words; and in 1601 he confirmed the justice of this praise by publishing his first Book of Airs, containing a number of songs, accompanied with music composed partly by himself, and partly by his friend, Philip Rosseter. The character of the book, indicating the union of native and classical ideals of Euphuistic harmony, appears in the prefatory address "To the Reader," in the course of which Campion says:

The lyric poets among the Greeks and Latins were first inventors of airs, tying themselves strictly to the number and value of their syllables: of which sort you shall find here only one song in Sapphic verse; the rest are after the fashion of the time, ear-pleasing rhymes, without art.

How much he then despised the "fashion," and what he thought to be the true principle of "art" in English