The fragment has some of the sombre power which De Quincey attributes to it, but on the whole one must confess it is a failure. The 'wit' of Donne did not apparently include invention, for many of the episodes seem pointless as well as disgusting, and indeed in no poem is the least attractive side of Donne's mind so clearly revealed, that aspect of his wit which to some readers is more repellent, more fatal to his claim to be a poet, than too subtle ingenuity or misplaced erudition—the vein of sheer ugliness which runs through his work, presenting details that seem merely and wantonly repulsive. The same vein is apparent in the work of Chapman, of Jonson, and even in places of Spenser, and the imagery of Hamlet and the tragedies owes some of its dramatic vividness and power to the same quality. The ugly has its place in art, and it would not be difficult to find it in every phase of Renaissance art, marked like the beautiful in that art by the same evidence of power. Decadence brought with it not ugliness but prettiness.
The reflective, philosophic, somewhat melancholy strain of the poems I have been touching on reappears in the letters addressed to noble ladies. Here, however, it is softened, less sardonic in tone, while it blends with or gives place to another strain, that of absurd and extravagant but fanciful and subtle compliment. Donne cannot write to a lady without his heart and fancy taking wing in their own passionate and erudite fashion. Scholastic theology is made the instrument of courtly compliment and pious flirtation. He blends in the same disturbing fashion as in some of the songs and elegies that depreciation of woman in general, which he owes less to classical poetry than to his over-acquaintance with the Fathers, with an adoration of her charms in the individual which passes into the transcendental. He tells the Countess of Huntingdon that active goodness in a woman is a miracle; but it is clear that she and the Countess of Bedford and Mrs. Herbert and Lady Carey and the Countess of Salisbury are all examples of such miracle—ladies whose beauty itself is virtue, while their virtues are a mystery revealable only to the initiated.
The highest place is held by Lady Bedford and Mrs. Herbert. Nothing could surpass the strain of intellectual and etherealized compliment in which he addresses the Countess. If lines like the following are not pure poetry, they haunt some quaint borderland of poetry to which the polished felicities of Pope's compliments are a stranger. If not pure fancy, they are not mere ingenuity, being too intellectual and argumentative for the one, too winged and ardent for the other:
Should I say I liv'd darker then were true,
Your radiation can all clouds subdue;
But one, 'tis best light to contemplate you.
You, for whose body God made better clay,
Or tooke Soules stuffe such as shall late decay,
Or such as needs small change at the last day.