John Donne: The Critical Heritage

Volume II

A.J. Smith

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• eBook ISBN: 9781134905133
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Contains writings about John Donne from 1873 to 1923, including Henry Morley, Edmund Gosse, W.F. Collier, Rudyard Kipling, Charles Eliot Norton, Henry Augustin Beers, Thomas Hardy, W.B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and many others.
Together these works present a record of how, from the nineteenth century onwards, critics viewed Donne, and how he became part of today's literary canon.

1.
Henry Morley

1873

Professor Henry Morley (1822–94), of University College London, gave a brief account of Donne in a general outline of English literature (A First Sketch of English Literature (1873), 1896, pp. 527–9).

[Most of Morley’s sketch inaccurately summarizes Donne’s life and career. His few critical observations are perfunctorily patronizing. An Anatomy of the World (first published in 1625, he says) generally offers a specimen of artificial diction, though it also]

contains by rare chance one conceit rising in thought and expression to the higher level of Elizabethan poetry.

[He quotes lines 226–47 of The Second Anniversary.]

[Donne’s ‘lighter poems’ display the ‘unreality of a style that sacrifices sense to ingenuity’, ‘The Flea’ is]

an ingenious piece, of which the sense is, so far as it has any, that a woman’s honour is not worth a flea.

[Donne himself]

was unquestionably a man with much religious earnestness, but he was also a poet who delighted men of fashion.

2.
Rosaline Orme Masson

1876

Rosaline Orme, wife of David Masson, shared her husband’s interest in Scottish history, publishing a Short History of Scotland as well as a book on Edinburgh, and biographical sketches of eminent Scots. They also both published books on English literature. In an anthology of poetic Selections from Chaucer to Herrick, Mrs Masson allotted some eight pages to Donne, introducing a set of extracts from poems with a brief general account of the poet (Three Centuries of English Poetry, 1876, pp. 338–46).

[Mrs Masson acknowledges Grosart’s edition of Donne’s poems (which Professor David Masson fulsomely lauds in his General Preface to her anthology) but displays a somewhat fanciful notion of the circumstances of the poems themselves. Thus she discerningly singles out Donne’s three longest poems but then writes of them as if they constitute a single series which presents a spiritual progress. The easy irreverence of the Metempsychosis, a poem ‘so marvellously clever and so completely anti-Christian in its doctrine and mood’, gives way under the pressure of personal grief to the piously reflective mood of The First Anniversary, Donne’s ‘song of sorrow’; then The Second Anniversary records the poet’s painful emergence from ‘fresh and poignant sorrow’ into ‘the joy of religious faith’. She judges that]

The Second Progress is the most sustained and elevated of all Donne’s poems, as the first Progress is the most bright and subtle.

[She is evidently in two minds about Donne. She quotes De Quincey on Donne’s extraordinary combination of sublime dialectical subtlety with impassioned majesty, only to draw back at once from De Quincey’s judgement]

The epithets ‘majesty’ and ‘sublimity’ appear to us altogether out of place in a criticism of Donne. On any level below these no praise can be too extensive to be true; but in naming these qualities De Quincey has only reminded us of exactly what is wanting in Donne’s poetry and in the man.

[Her selection of Donne’s verse is idiosyncratic. She gives two extracts from Satire 3 (lines 5–32 and 72–84); a series of extracts from Satire 4 (lines 1–8, 17–44, 49–51, 61–70a, 71–80), which she chooses to make up a picture of The Court Toady, Holy Sonnet 10, ‘Death, Be Not Proud’; ‘Woman’s Constancy’ (interestingly retitled ‘A Woman’s Constancy’); a series of extracts from the Metempsychosis (lines 171–90, 301–40, 451–68); and lines 173–213 of The Second Anniversary.]

3.
William Minto

1880

Professor W.Minto (1845–93) of the University of Aberdeen contributed a substantial appraisal of Donne to a leading review. He had formerly published a book on Characteristics of English Poets from Chaucer to Shirley (1874; second edition 1885), with the aim of setting out ‘the characters, personal and artistic, of the poets dealt with’, but, although he included BenJonson, he made no mention of Donne. (‘John Donne’, Nineteenth Century, 7 (1880), 846–63.)

[Minto ponders the continuing neglect of Donne’s poetry:]

it is strange that a man who in such an age was numbered among the masters of literature should have received so little honour from posterity.

Neglect, indeed, is not the only indignity that the poetry of Dr Donne has suffered. It was stamped with emphatic condemnation by the great critical authority of the eighteenth century. Dr Johnson recognised Donne as a master and the founder of a school, but it was a school with which he had no sympathy. He nicknamed Donne and his followers ‘the metaphysical poets’, and he culled from their works a variety of specimens to prove that the characteristics of the school were unnatural and far-fetched conceits, ‘enormous and disgusting hyperboles’, ‘violent and unnatural fictions’, ‘slight and trifling sentiments’. At the same time he did not deny that there was something to be said in their favour.

Great labour, directed by great ability, is never wholly lost; if they frequently threw away their wit upon false conceits, they likewise sometimes struck out unexpected truth; if their conceits were far-fetched, they were often worth the carriage…. If their greatness seldom elevates, their acuteness often surprises; if the imagination is not always gratified, at least the powers of reflection and comparison are employed; and in the mass of materials which ingenious absurdity has thrown together, genuine wit and useful knowledge may be sometimes found buried perhaps in grossness of expression, but useful to those who know their value; and such as, when they are expanded to perspicuity and polished to elegance, may give lustre to works which have more propriety, though less copiousness, of sentiment.

Such was Dr Johnson’s opinion of the works which his great namesake in the Elizabethan time pronounced to be ‘examples,’ and did his best to rival; they were worth digging into as mines, but their art was detestable. A very different opinion was formed by the great critics at the beginning of this century: but, unhappily for Donne’s general reputation, for one person that reads De Quincey’s essay on Rhetoric or Coleridge’s priceless fragments of criticism, twenty read Johnson’s Lives of the Poets. M.Taine, in his rapid survey of English literature, has unhesitatingly adopted Johnson’s condemnation, and developed it into an historical theory. The poetry of Donne and his imitators M.Taine marks as a sign of the decadence of the grand inspiration that produced the literature of the Elizabethan period. The flood of great thoughts and great passions had spent itself; the mighty men of genius, through whom the heroic spirit had spoken, were succeeded by a feebler race, who, instead of giving free vent to fire that was burning in their hearts, strained and tortured their intellects in the devising of pretty compliments, and sought to outdo the natural language of over-powering passion by cold and artificial hyperbole. M.Taine admits that there is something of the energy and thrill of the original inspiration in Donne, but he does not admit that there is enough to exempt him from the sweeping censure passed by Johnson upon the school which he founded.

Critics, like travellers, too often see only what they look for. The truth is that the prettiness and pedantic affectation which M.Taine assumed to be marks of decadence were as common in Elizabethan literature before it reached its grand period as they were after. The poetry of the Elizabethan time may be divided roughly into two kinds, the poetry of the Court and the poetry of the stage. The poets cannot be so classified, because most of them attempted both kinds; but there were two classes of audience who had to be moved and delighted by essentially different means. It is in the poetry of the stage that we find the rushing abundance of impassioned feeling and sublime thought, divine and demoniac emotion, simple freshness of sentiment. The poetry of the Court demanded more veiled and intricate forms of utterance. But it is a mistake to represent the one style as a degradation of the other, the prettiness and affectation of the courtly poetry as a sign of the exhaustion of the inspiration which produced the grand style of the stage. Literature must always be conditioned by its readers, and if we take prettiness and affectation as marks of decadence, we must be driven to the conclusion that the grand style of the Elizabethan period decayed before it came into existence. The works of the most earnest of the love poets before Shakespeare reached his meridian were saturated with violent and unnatural fictions, trifling and far-fetched conceits. Sir Philip Sidney, in common with the more robust intellects of the time, rebelled against the prevailing foppery, and exhorted himself to ‘look in his heart and write’. But he could not escape the infection of what he despised, and to a later generation his sonnets bear as much evidence of ambition to show his wit as of urgent necessity to pour out the feelings of his heart. We know from Love’s Labour Lost [sic] what Shakespeare thought of the reigning mode. The King of Navarre and his lords make love at first in the very height of the fashion, and bandy wit with their mistresses; but when they get the worst of the gay encounter, they abjure—

Taffeta phrases, silken terms precise, Three-piled hyperboles, spruce affectation, Figures pedantical,

and vow henceforth to conduct their wooing ‘in russet yeas and honest kersey noes’. But Shakespeare, the universal, was not entirely wrapt up in the grand passions; and there was plenty of three-piled hyperbole and pedantical figures in his ‘sugared sonnets among his private friends’.

In love, as in religion, there are three Churches, the High Church, the Low Church, and the Broad Church. Love was worshipped in the Elizabethan age with elaborate rites and ceremonies. The poets were all extreme Ritualists. Here and there we come across notes of impatience under the burden of minute formalities, vows to have done with them as tedious fopperies, and to revert to ‘the russet yeas and honest kersey noes’. But the tide of fashion was too strong, and the rebels who had solemnly repudiated one ritual, soon found themselves racking their brains to devise another. There was no keener satirist of the erotic commonplaces of his youth than John Donne; but his indignation was not against the style, but against the commonplace abuse of it, against the barren versifier

who beggarly doth chaw Others’ wits’ fruits, and in his ravenous maw Rankly digested, doth those ...

Table of contents

• THE CRITICAL HERITAGE SERIES
• General Editor’s Preface
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Note on the text
• Introduction
• 1. Henry Morley
• 2. Rosaline Orme Masson
• 3. William Minto
• 4. John Henry Shorthouse
• 5. Alice King
• 6. David Masson
• 7. John Churton Collins
• 8. A.H.Welsh
• 9. Edmund Gosse
• 10. T.J.Backus
• 11. George Edward Bateman Saintsbury
• 12. Jakob von Schipper
• 13. Margaret Woods
• 14. Edward Dowden
• 15. W.F.Collier
• 16. Edmund Gosse
• 17. Gamaliel Bradford
• 18. Rudyard Kipling
• 19. Edmund Gosse
• 20. Edmund Gosse
• 21. Sir Edmund Kerchever Chambers
• 22. Charles Eliot Norton
• 23. Felix E.Schelling
• 24. Clyde Bowman Furst
• 25. George Edward Bateman Saintsbury
• 26. Oswald Crawfurd
• 27. Anon., Dial
• 28. Lionel Johnson
• 29. Thomas Bird Mosher
• 30. Frederick Ives Carpenter
• 31. Augustus Jessopp
• 32. Anon., Academy
• 33. Anon., Quarterly Review
• 34. Francis Thompson
• 35. Henry Augustin Beers
• 36. David Hannay
• 37. George Edward Bateman Saintsbury
• 38. Felix Schelling
• 39. Edmund Gosse
• 40. Anon., Athenaeum
• 41. Richard Garnett
• 42. Sir Leslie Stephen
• 43. Arthur Symons
• 44. Francis Thompson
• 45. Henry Augustin Beers
• 46. Anon., Academy
• 47. Reuben Post Halleck
• 48. Anon., Nation
• 49. Anon., Church Quarterly Review
• 50. H.M.Sanders
• 51. J.W.Chadwick
• 52. Anon., Quarterly Review
• 53. Clarence Griffin Child
• 54. Thomas Hardy
• 55. Anon., Chambers’ Cyclopaedia of English Literature
• 56. Anon., Quarterly Review
• 57. Henry Charles Beeching
• 58. William Vaughn Moody and Robert Morss Lovett
• 59. Rudolf Richter
• 60. Thomas Seccombe and John W. Allen
• 61. A.H.Garstang
• 62. Richard Garnett
• 63. William John Courthope
• 64. John Smith Harrison
• 65. August Wilhelm Trost
• 66. Barrett Wendell
• 67. Stephen Lucius Gwynn
• 68. Frank Lusk Babbott
• 69. Charles Eliot Norton
• 70. Anon., Dial
• 71. Geoffrey Langdon Keynes
• 72. Henry Marvin Belden
• 73. Martin Grove Brumbaugh
• 74. Charles Crawford
• 75. Wightman Fletcher Melton
• 76. Herbert John Clifford Grierson
• 77. Caroline Spurgeon
• 78. George Edward Bateman Saintsbury
• 79. Alfred Horatio Upham
• 80. George Charles Moore Smith
• 81. Thomas Hardy
• 82. Herbert John Clifford Grierson
• 83. Janet Spens
• 84. Phoebe Anne Beale Sheavyn
• 85. William Macdonald Sinclair
• 86. Felix E.Schelling
• 87. Edward Thomas
• 88. Edward Thomas
• 89. Herbert John Clifford Grierson
• 90. William Butler Yeats
• 91. Edward Bliss Reed
• 92. Andrew Lang
• 93. Evelyn Mary Simpson (née Spearing)
• 94. Anon., Nation
• 95. Felix E.Schelling
• 96. George Charles Moore Smith
• 97. Rupert Brooke
• 98. Walter de la Mare
• 99. Anon., Spectator
• 100. Ernest Percival Rhys
• 101. Horace Ainsworth Eaton
• 102. Sir Sidney Colvin
• 103. Sir Edmund Kercherver Chambers
• 104. Robert Seymour Bridges
• 105. Geoffrey Langdon Keynes
• 106. David Macleane
• 107. Ezra Pound
• 108. Philipp Aronstein
• 109. Sir William Watson
• 110. Mary Paton Ramsay
• 111. George Jackson
• 112. François Joseph Picavet
• 113. Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch
• 114. Philipp Aronstein
• 115. Aldous Huxley
• 116. William Butler Yeats
• 117. Percy Herbert Osmond
• 118. Logan Pearsall Smith
• 119. Robert Seymour Bridges
• 120. John Livingston Lowes
• 121. Thomas Stearns Eliot
• 122. Raymond Macdonald Alden
• 123. John Cann Bailey
• 124. Robert Wilson Lynd
• 125. Philipp Aronstein
• 126. Louise Imogen Guiney
• 127. Thomas Stearns Eliot
• 128. Herbert John Clifford Grierson
• 129. Thomas Stearns Eliot
• 130. George Edward Bateman Saintsbury/Thomas Stearns Eliot
• 131. Edmund Gosse
• 132. Stuart Petre Brodie Mais
• 133. John Sampson
• 134. Elbert Nevius Sebring Thompson
• 135. Arthur Hobart Nethercot
• 136. Arthur Hobart Nethercot
• 137. William Butler Yeats
• 138. Robert Seymour Bridges
• 139. Thomas Stearns Eliot
• APPENDIX A. Publication of Donne’s poems since 1922
• Appendix B. Poems by Donne known to have been set to music since 1872
• Appendix C: Select Bibliography
• Index
• THE CRITICAL HERITAGE SERIES