Fausset can not credit the picture of Donne given by the “gentle Walton” for the reason that Walton wrote on Donne in the spirit of love and admiration. Fausset writes of him neither with love nor hate, but with the scalpel always in hand, dissecting, getting beneath the surface. He is not the tender physician, he is the scientist at work in the laboratory of research with Donne as the cadaver. There is a charm, a beauty, and at times a poetic fervour of expression in the writing which reminds one of the Essay on Shelley by Francis Thompson. One can not help feeling that Donne was doomed from the first if we believe the picture painted of him with unerring hand by Fausset.
But Mr. Fausset is a student and exponent of personality and it is as such that we should estimate his work. Judged by the two studies that he has published: the one under consideration and Keats; A Study in Development, he has insight, sound psychology and a logical mind. With years he will grow more kindly and less turbulent. Meanwhile he shall have the benefit of our prayers that the happy day may hasten.
As Mr. Fausset sees him, John Donne was physically a genius; intellectually “possessed”; one who ranged almost every scale of experience, and upon each struck some note: harsh, cunning, arrogant or poignant, which reverberates down the roof of time; a poet who was at times near a monster, full-blooded, cynical and gross; a thinker, curious, ingenious and mathematical; a seer brooding morbidly over the dark flux of things; a saint aspiring to the celestial harmony. He served the flesh with the same ardour with which he sought the ideal. He was a sensualist and a thinker, a poet and a priest, a pagan and a Christian. More than any contemporary he reflected the three aspects of life which met in confused association in seventeenth century England: Mediævalism, the Renaissance and the Reformation. The physical, intellectual and spiritual elements each in turn dominated his personality. The purpose of his life was to bring this trinity of forces into harmony and by so doing discover a new and deeper unity in the Universe itself. It is Mr. Fausset’s belief that he did not succeed in this purpose but the tortured history of such a genius lays bare the potentialities of humanity and of civilisation. His life was one long battle with death: the death of physical grossness and mental conceit, of worldly ambition and spiritual complacence. He had explored the secret of the senses and the subtleties of the mind. And so, psychologist and sensualist as he was, he was competent in the later days of his spirituality to report adequately of the soul. He related poetry to religion, and religion to truth, and he showed us how to relate ourselves to God. His life teaches us that spiritual satisfaction is unworthy of the name, if it be achieved at the sacrifice of intellectual honesty and that religious experience is the prize of perpetual conflict. Such is the man that Mr. Fausset has composited from the creations of Walton, Gosse, Chambers and Grierson.
John Donne was born in London in 1573 and died there in 1631. His life was a stormy one, tempestuous in youth, squally in maturity, blusterous in old age. Calm overtook him but a few weeks before his death. He was a neurotic individual and his neural disequilibrium is testified by his portraits and by his conduct. A portrait of him made at the age of nineteen shows a brow slightly receding and narrowing at the temples, prominent eyes, gigantic nose coarsely flattened at the base, thick lips and pointed chin. His resistance to emotional influences was defective and he reacted strongly to inner as well as to outer influences. From boyhood there was lack of equanimity in the development of the psychic personality although his intellect made him always a conspicuous figure and he “pursued mathematics, law or theology with the same tenacious passion as an ephemeral liaison.” He was combative, satirical, arrogant, Sybaritic, Dionysiac. The sap did not ascend his tree of life gently or harmoniously; it gushed upward, often geyser-like, drenching conventions and submerging morality. He insisted upon licence to do as he pleased and clamoured for freedom and promiscuity, especially in love.
“Who ever loves, if he do not propose
The right true end of love, he’s one that goes
To sea for nothing but to make him sick.”
He, like St. Paul, believed that woman is the glory of the man and was created for him, and he had a contempt for women’s vaunted constancy.
“Foxes, and goats—all beasts—change when they please.
Shall woman, more hot, wily, wild than these,
Be bound to one man...?”
But he was soon to encounter one who was not polyandrous. Anne Moore, in a period of sixteen years, bore him twelve children. He was about thirty years old when he married her. The literary fecundity of his third decade is represented by Songs and Sonnets and Elegies. Mr. Fausset is probably correct in his claim that the poetry of Donne’s early maturity was, like Goethe’s, a reflection and refraction of his loves. Donne’s contention was that sex neither can be nor should be transcended and the Elegies are his earnest of it.
But his moral nature was awakening even before he met Anne and he began to question:
“Why should our clay
Over our spirits so much sway
To tie us to that way?”