Here lies two flamens, and both those the best,
Apollo's first, at last the true God's priest.
It may be doubted if Milton shared this opinion. He never mentions Donne, but it was probably of him or his imitators he was thinking when in his verses at Cambridge he spoke of
those new-fangled toys and trimmings slight
Which take our late fantastics with delight.
Certainly the growing taste for 'correctness' led after the Restoration to a discrimination between Donne's wit and his poetry. 'The greatest wit,' Dryden calls him, 'though not the greatest poet of our nation.' What he wanted as a poet were just the two essentials of 'classical' poetry—smoothness of verse and dignity of expression. This point of view is stated with clearness and piquancy in the sentences of outrageous flattery which Dryden addressed to the Earl of Dorset in the opening paragraphs of his delightful Essay on Satire:
'There is more of salt in all your verses, than I have seen in any of the moderns, or even of the ancients; but you have been sparing of the gall, by which means you have pleased all readers, and offended none. Donne alone, of all our countrymen, had your talent; but was not happy enough to arrive at your versification; and were he translated into numbers, and English, he would yet be wanting in the dignity of expression. That which is the prime virtue, and chief ornament, of Virgil, which distinguishes him from the rest of writers, is so conspicuous in your verses, that it casts a shadow on all your contemporaries; we cannot be seen, or but obscurely, while you are present. You equal Donne in the variety, multiplicity, and choice of thoughts; you excel him in the manner and the words. I read you both with the same admiration, but not with the same delight.
He affects the metaphysics, not only in his satires, but in his amorous verses, where nature only should reign; and perplexes the minds of the fair sex with nice speculations of philosophy, when he should engage their hearts, and entertain them with the softnesses of love. In this (if I may be pardoned for so bold a truth) Mr. Cowley has copied him to a fault; so great a one, in my opinion, that it throws his Mistress infinitely below his Pindarics and his latter compositions, which are undoubtedly the best of his poems and the most correct.'
Dryden's estimate of Donne, as well as his application to his poetry of the epithet 'metaphysical', was transmitted through the eighteenth century. Johnson's famous paragraphs in the Life of Cowley do little more than echo and expand Dryden's pronouncement, with a rather vaguer use of the word 'metaphysical'. In Dryden's application it means correctly 'philosophical'; in Johnson's, no more than 'learned'. 'The metaphysical poets were men of learning, and to show their learning was their whole endeavour; but unluckily resolving to show it in rhyme, instead of writing poetry, they only wrote verses, and very often such verses as stood the trial of the fingers better than of the ear.' They 'drew their conceits from recesses of learning not very much frequented by common readers of poetry'. Waller is exempted from being a metaphysical poet because 'he seldom fetches an amorous sentiment from the depths of science; his thoughts are for the most part easily understood, and his images such as the superficies of nature readily supplies'.
Even to those critics with whom began a revived appreciation of Donne as a poet and preacher, his 'wit' still bulks largely. It is impossible to escape from it. 'Wonder-exciting vigour,' writes Coleridge, 'intenseness and peculiarity, using at will the almost boundless stores of a capacious memory, and exercised on subjects where we have no right to expect it—this is the wit of Donne.' And lastly De Quincey, who alone of these critics recognizes the essential quality which may, and in his best work does, make Donne's wit the instrument of a mind which is not only subtle and ingenious but profoundly poetical: 'Few writers have shown a more extraordinary compass of powers than Donne; for he combined what no other man has ever done—the last sublimation of dialectical subtlety and address with the most impassioned majesty. Massy diamonds compose the very substance of his poem on the Metempsychosis, thoughts and descriptions which have the fervent and gloomy sublimity of Ezekiel or Aeschylus, whilst a diamond dust of rhetorical brilliancies is strewed over the whole of his occasional verses and his prose.'
What is to-day the value and interest of this wit which has arrested the attention of so many generations? How far does it seem to us compatible with poetry in the full and generally accepted sense of the word, with poetry which quickens the imagination and touches the heart, which satisfies and delights, which is the verbal and rhythmical medium whereby a gifted soul communicates to those who have ears to hear the content of impassioned moments?