The New Criterion

On a huge hill, Cragged and steep, Truth stands, and he that will
Reach her, about must, and about must go,
And what the hill’s suddenness resists, win so.

These lines from the third of John Donne’s satires, written sometime in the 1590s, express and enact rhythmically the individual’s effort to discover a spiritual home. For Donne this was a process of strenuous grappling which lasted all his life (1572– 1631). Born a Catholic, related on his mother’s side to Sir Thomas More, he saw his uncle Jasper, a Jesuit, flee into exile and his younger brother Henry die in prison on a charge of harboring a priest. Gradually, he became an Anglican, a kind of senior civil servant and in line for preferment at Court, but threw away his future by an impulsive, though loving, clandestine marriage with his employer’s ward Anne More. He lost his job and his prospects, and spent thirteen years in poverty and obscurity before being browbeaten into taking holy orders by James I. He ended as Dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral, London, one of the most celebrated preachers of his day.

John Stubbs’s new biography of Donne is the first since R. C. Bald’s of 1970.[1] Bald was a meticulous scholar, but his book was as dry as a barrel of ship’s biscuit. Stubbs writes more colorfully, with an eye for anecdote and descriptive detail. Sometimes this leads him into chattiness, or padding where our factual knowledge of Donne’s life is scanty, but he carries the reader along. His main problem is that, given his aim to present Donne as a “reformed soul,” he has hardly any chronological signposts to help him. Few of Donne’s poems can be dated with confidence, and attempts to infer a life story from them, as from Shakespeare’s sonnets, are at best conjectural. Stubbs thinks that Donne was “still a practising Roman Catholic” in 1592, though “slowly leaving [Catholicism] behind”; in 1598 “strong ambivalences remained, yet by now Donne was moving away from the Roman church.” In that same year, when he entered the service of Sir Thomas Egerton, Lord Keeper of England (in effect Lord Chancellor, and himself a convert from Catholicism), he became involved in the harassment of Catholics. Perhaps, as Stubbs concludes, by this point he “found it impossible to say just what he believed any more.” The mischievous among us would say that Anglicanism was thus a logical step.

In the critical study which has dominated the field for twenty-five years, John Carey’s John Donne: Life, Mind and Art (1981), Donne is presented as an apostate, neurotic and guilt-ridden, unable to detach himself emotionally from the Catholic faith but propelled into Anglicanism by a lust for power. Carey’s melodramatic picture, which mars a book often rich in insights, is countered by Stubbs’s cooler summary of Donne’s adaptations to the changes he had lived through. His choice had not been between liberty and tyranny, for “such a choice did not exist.” “Sooner dead than changed” had been his motto, in provocative Spanish, on an early portrait; Stubbs suggests he “found it more sensible to change than be dead.” It took some courage to defy family tradition in this way. “One of the central realizations of Donne’s life was that it was wrong and silly to will oneself towards martyrdom.” The famous pronouncement “No man is an island” gives the corollary: “It was impossible to resign from mankind.” One may accept Carey’s demonstration that Donne continued to find value in Catholic theology and iconography (so did Shakespeare, after all) without concluding that he was a hypocrite. Stubbs remarks, “The Reformed Church gave him ample room for the Catholic habits of mind and devotion his upbringing had instilled.”

That is admirably sane, but later we read with astonishment:

Many Papist practices were carried over by the Reformed religion. Yet in the old Roman Church, the Church on which Donne turned his back, the afterlife was a different prospect; all the trusting believer needed to do, to reach heaven, was to attend services, receive the sacrament, observe the holy days, feast days and times of abstinence.

That is an unbelievably crude description, amounting to a Lutheran caricature, of pre-Reformation religion, as anyone who knows Eamon Duffy’s The Stripping of the Altars—surprisingly given by Stubbs as his authority here—will immediately recognize. It can only mislead the novice reader. The same oversimplification occurs when he hears in the Holy Sonnets the voice of “a Protestant soul, stripped of the support of the old Roman Church,” as though a Catholic could not fear death and damnation as much as a Protestant! Donne knew, if Stubbs doesn’t, that it was determination to avoid damnation for heresy which took Thomas More to the block.

Stubbs’s treatment of Donne’s literary inheritance and achievement is also variable. He never discusses a poem in its entirety, and some of his judgments are questionable: “The Autumnal” is more than simply “a rather hurtful bit of work,” and it seems perverse to write off “Twickenham Garden” as “one of the weaker poems in his early style of a weary but willing lover.” “There are virtually no contemporary poets who can be said to have influenced him,” Stubbs writes, before suggesting, unconvincingly, the “rough, snaggy rhythms” of Wyatt. Surely the major presence in Donne’s background is Shakespeare, whose early plays he is likely to have seen. He was a noted theater-goer in his youth at the Inns of Court—much later, in a sermon, he spoke of seeing comedies specifically—he knew Ben Jonson personally, and he became father-in-law to the actor Edward Alleyn who created the great Marlovian roles, Tamburlaine and Faustus. Only Shakespeare can parallel the variety and distinctiveness of the voices Donne created (something Browning admired and imitated). Moreover, Shakespeare wrote, in “The Phoenix and Turtle,” a poem more strictly and austerely metaphysical, if we must use that rather unhelpful term, than any of Donne’s. Stubbs rightly says that “the relationship between Donne and the speakers of his poems is something like that which dramatists have with their characters,” yet elsewhere he reads the poems as straightforward autobiography.

The modern critical tradition about Donne was inaugurated by T. S. Eliot in his essay “The Metaphysical Poets” of 1921, modified ten years later by “Donne in Our Time.” On both occasions Donne was created in Eliot’s own image, first as a radical modernist, a sort of Jacobean Laforgue, second as an orthodox churchman and “no sceptic.” Eliot’s later position influenced Helen Gardner’s pietistic editions of Donne and was fiercely attacked by William Empson in a sequence of challenging essays. All this Stubbs ignores, as he ignores the strengths and weaknesses of Samuel Johnson’s remarks on the Metaphysicals in his essay on Cowley, and the brilliant marginalia of Coleridge (also ignored by Eliot, though not by Carey). Coleridge annihilates the objections of Johnson—and indeed of Ben Jonson, who denounced Donne for “not keeping of accent,” in other words, failing to observe the rules of meter. Johnson had conceded that “to write on their [the Metaphysical poets’] plan, it was at least necessary to read and think.” “In poems where the writer thinks, and expects the reader to do so,” Coleridge retorted, “the sense must be understood in order to ascertain the metre.” Furthermore, Coleridge anticipates, and answers in advance, all the post-Eliot agonizing about Donne’s religious sincerity:

He was an orthodox Christian only because he could have been an infidel more easily; and therefore willed to be a Christian: and he was a Protestant, because it enabled him to lash about to the right and the left, and without a motive, to say better things for the Papists than they could say for themselves.

It was a matter of tactics, and attempts to distinguish the “sincere” from the “ironical” often look anachronistic as well as naive; the implied understanding of irony is too exclusively negative. Of course, Donne’s speakers can on occasion be sneering and misogynistic, but there are other possibilities. Stubbs overlooks Wilbur Sanders’s brilliant but neglected John Donne’s Poetry (1971). Sanders defines irony as “the acceptance of human experience as essentially communal and open to common interpretation … a willingness to have one’s feelings observed from many other viewpoints besides one’s own.” To want the widest perspective is the reverse of blasé. Stubbs does recognize that “love poetry” is an inadequate description of the range of the Songs and Sonets, and that in a few of them Donne can “record or imagine a love without nervousness,” akin to “a moment of sunrise,” “a point of trust at which he found that if one loved and was loved enough, it was actually impossible to cheat or be cheated on.” At such moments the language of religion comes naturally to Donne; many critics have felt there is less spiritual depth in his formal religious poems than in his secular ones—indeed, one sometimes wonders how meaningful that distinction is.

Donne’s theological studies had made him intensely aware of the transitional temper of the time: the Reformation was pushing Catholicism to the margins, alchemy was being discredited by the rise of empirical science, monarchical government was under question. Where, amidst such flux, was permanence to be found? The great love-poems, such as “The Good Morrow,” “The Sun Rising,” “The Canonization,” “A Nocturnal upon St. Lucy’s Day,” and “The Ecstasy,” exalt the lovers into monarchs—indeed, into deities of an alternative universe given coherence by their relationship. Empson saw this, but concluded that Donne was courting charges of blasphemy. Not necessarily; it is a bold, neo-Platonic application of the doctrines of the Trinity (the two lovers and their love itself) and the Incarnation (divine love rooted in the human body). The seeds were there in the medieval courtly love conventions. Sex—a word which Donne first used in its modern sense in “The Ecstasy”—is an expression of transcendent union, each partner being simultaneously a microcosm of the world, and the world of the other: “so to one neutral thing both sexes fit.”

But there is a catch: “to vex me, contraries meet in one.” The oneness of the two individuals is at the same time an admission that they are two; Dualism threatens the Platonic vision, and Donne, as Carey points out, was temperamentally no Dualist, returning obsessively to the image of the circle. In Christian terms these contradictions become, in a literal way, the Cross. (Donne’s poem with that title is a nimble assembly of the cruciform symbols omnipresent in daily life.) In secular terms the lovers’ unity balances out the contrary impulses both in themselves and in the world; it is, in the extraordinary phrase of “The Ecstasy,” a “dialogue of one.” It is about power, but not always the brutally exploitative power of Carey’s reading; the lovers are monarchs who accept each other’s rule, and can become secular saints, patterns of devotion, “canonized for love.” When this is threatened, as in “Twickenham Garden” or the “Valediction of Weeping,” chaos may come again.

All of this is gathered up in “The Ecstasy,” whose title evokes a quality of religious wonder as well as of sexual fulfilment. The lovers’ bodies are in suspended animation: “Pictures in our eyes to get [beget]/ Was all our propagation. Our souls … hung ’twixt her and me.” The end of their love is “not sex” because their creativity, like their communication, has a purely spiritual aspect:

When love, with one another so
Interinanimates two souls,
That abler soul, which thence doth flow,
Defects of loneliness controls.

“Interinanimates”—in which the love both gives life to the soul of the beloved, and makes it non-animate—is a stroke of genius, but even that pales beside this astounding observation about the bodies of lovers: “They are ours, though they are not we.” Has anyone ever managed to say more in eight monosyllables? Sexual attraction is a means to an end, the end being the completion of each person through the willing offer of the other. D. H. Lawrence would have applauded this (we remember the great phrase about Tom Brangwen in The Rainbow: “he knew he did not belong to himself”), and a version of it underlies the Christian doctrine of the Atonement; Christ is the lover who offers himself for his creatures and invites their self-offering in return. Love of any kind is incarnational: “Love’s mysteries in souls do grow,/ But yet the body is his book.” When, at the end, the speaker urges, “To our bodies turn we then,” some have heard the tone of a smart seducer, as in Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress.” That seems to me a crass misreading of what Donne imagines.

In line with his policy of using the poems as “background,” Stubbs has no extended treatment of this masterpiece, which is even belittled by Sanders in a rare lapse of judgment. Interestingly, it was the only poem by Donne for which Ezra Pound felt any admiration—he did not share Eliot’s enthusiasm, which reminds us that there was more than one Modernism. I do not feel Stubbs can plead that he is a biographer and not a critic (though that’s true enough, alas); a reader new to Donne surely needs to be shown what he can do, what his concerns are, how the various parts of his life and personality coalesce. The repeated refusal to read closely is a central weakness of Stubbs’s book.

Donne became a priest reluctantly in 1615, realizing there was no other way out of his poverty and the need to provide for his family (his wife had twelve children, the birth of the last effectively killing her with exhaustion). His rise was rapid; after only six years he was Dean of St. Paul’s—the old patchwork medieval cathedral, not the current monstrosity by Wren. He may have obtained the post through the influence of King James’s favorite, the Duke of Buckingham, whose patronage he assiduously courted. Stubbs beautifully evokes the atmosphere of the crumbling old St. Paul’s, and Donne’s labors to govern and maintain it. Donne did not find it easy being a clergyman, although Stubbs is misleading to contrast him with George Herbert, who he airily assures us “could genuinely get on with God” and “was reconciled to all the things that Donne found temperamentally difficult.” In fact Herbert was every bit as proud as Donne, and found it no easer to submit to the Divine will. (Carey, more usefully, contrasts Donne with Traherne.) Many of Donne’s religious poems, including the “Holy Sonnets,” which express a strain of sometimes hysterical doubt and fear which anticipates the worst of Hopkins, seem to pre-date his ordination. R. C. Bald contended plausibly that the death of Donne’s wife deepened his sense of vocation, and of the emotional as distinct from the cerebral element in religion. One has to acknowledge a frigid quality in much of his devotional poetry, which thaws in the three late poems he called hymns: “To Christ, at the Author’s Last Going into Germany,” “To God the Father,” and “To God my God in my Sickness.” I would also single out “Good Friday 1613, Riding Westward” as a fine achievement. It begins from the point at which “The Ecstasy” left off—“Let Man’s soul be a Sphere, and then, in this,/ The Intelligence that moves, Devotion is”—but finds the human soul’s coherence in worship rather than physical love. Going westward (away from the Resurrection, symbolically), Donne turns his back on Christ, but only “to receive/ Corrections.” There’s a flicker of masochism there, sometimes glimpsed in Donne’s religious poems. The “Hymn to God the Father,” as Stubbs says, “stands out for its calmness,” though there’s still a tickling vanity about the puns on his own name (“When thou hast done, thou hast not done,/ For, I have more”).

The best of Donne’s religious writing is safely buried where nobody nowadays will read it: in the ten volumes of his collected sermons. These were mammoth affairs, the longest two and a half hours but many not much shorter; they were preached extempore or from skeletal notes only, the versions we have being written up afterwards. The only one generally printed in full in modern anthologies is the last, “Death’s Duel,” which he rose from his deathbed to deliver. The sermons are seductively easy to excerpt, shot through as they are with epigrams and startling images, but really they need to be read as wholes. The fragmentariness of Stubbs’s treatment, weaving quotations in with scant regard for the circumstances of the sermon (calendar feast, text, congregation), is clear when we read Peter McCullough’s essay in a recent collection which valuably complements Stubbs’s book, The Cambridge Companion to John Donne, edited by Aschah Guibbory (2006). McCullough takes us sensitively through a complete sermon to show how the rules of construction and rhetoric work.

It seems incredible that even the most sophisticated congregation could absorb, by hearing alone, the elaborately periodic sentences, the astounding gyrations and convolutions of argument which marked Donne’s discourses, but they did. He loved to dwell on the Last Things—Death, Judgment, Heaven, and Hell—not out of morbidity but out of a sober (and very Catholic) awareness of the need to prepare for a holy end. His own preparations were notoriously elaborate and exhibitionist: the last portrait of him, for which he dressed up in his shroud, was placed opposite his bed for him to meditate upon daily. The marble bust of the portrait remains in St. Paul’s as the only survivor of the Great Fire of London. Stubbs wonders how Donne would have reacted to the Civil War. Luckily he was spared the sight of his own Deanery being used as a prison, or of Cromwell’s men’s horses exercising in the nave of his cathedral. He was by then, one hopes, in that realm he had unforgettably imagined, “where there shall be no darkness nor dazzling, but one equal light; no noise nor silence, but one equal music … no ends nor beginnings, but one equal Eternity.”

Notes
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1. Donne: The Reformed Soul, by John Stubbs; Viking Penguin, 565 pages, £25. Go back to the text.