And he denied that he had formerly protested
“Change is the nursery
Of music, joy, life and eternity.”
The manner in which he broke with the nameless lady whose husband was a deformed man and was stationary all day in a basket-chair, affords Mr. Fausset an opportunity to discharge some verbal pyrotechnics, and to disgorge some righteous wrath. “So, at last, he turned upon the poor woman, whom so short a time before he had bent to his purpose with a militant ardour and a shameless licence. The cold and cruel cynicism, the elemental spite of his last farewell to one who must at least have given as much as she received, has no parallel in our literature. In truth, no one is so ruthlessly vindictive, so callous to every claim of sentiment and generosity as the moralist new risen from the ashes of the brute.” He then quotes “The Apparition” in which Donne taunts her as “feign’d vestal” and threatens one day to square accounts with her. It was not a pretty letter but Mr. Fausset is likely a very chivalric man and “brute” is scarcely justified.
Donne married in haste but never repented, probably because Anne never questioned her husband or tried to improve him.
The first years of their married life were lean. Parental blessing was slow in coming, and slower still was paternal allowance. But they both came and soon after conversion. “Anne Moore served as the bridge which Donne, at least as the lover, climbed from the abyss to the cheerful daylight and even to a homely eminence.” As the fruit of his passion for his mistresses had been disgusted cynicism, that of his devotion to his wife was ecstatic platonism, which now became reflected in his poetry.
Mr. Fausset takes us through the fourth decade of his life, documenting the transformation that took place in his soul from cynicism to platonism, from realist to mystic, from Catholicism to Protestantism, by quotations from his poetry, by pen pictures of his friends, particularly Mrs. Herbert who was “an idyllic retreat of sanity and piety and sympathy in a sultry world” and by descriptions of his reactions to illness, “illness the sword of God.” His religious conversion was the important thing and these are the words that Mr. Fausset uses to describe its onset:
“The young Dionysus, who had broken from the restraints of Rome, seeking his way back to some primal ecstasy, which conventions seemed at best to adulterate, was now attempting to translate his ecstasy into ideas. He had turned at first to those tortured saints of the Dark Ages in whom sensuality and science melted into mysticism, and then to the pure but tenuous conceptions of Plato. But not for him were those enchanted bridals of the soul with God, of the mind with Beauty, in which the body passed away in flame or in smoke. There was too much of the satyr in his seership, and of the casuist in his mysticism. His branches might strain up heavenward but they never forgot their native earth. His only hope was to subdue his lawlessness to logic, until the two, blended together in a rational whole, achieved an equilibrium between mind and body as he had already discovered for his passions.”
Rome suffocated him and Protestantism seemed a pallid, political compromise, but thanks to frequent prayers, to use his own words, he effected the transition. Donne succeeded in generating the spiritual from the struggle of the rational with the natural, and by so doing Mr. Fausset believes he waged a battle of human consciousness two hundred years in advance of his time.
The turn of the tide in Donne’s worldly affairs dated from 1610 when he wrote a poem, “The Funeral Elegy,” commemorative of the charms and potentialities of a girl whose death had resulted from a box on the ear administered by her adoring father. It was a shot in the dark on the part of Dr. Donne but he “got” his man. Sir Robert Drury provided him a home for three years, then took him abroad. These were years of spiritual growth, emotional equilibrium and physical exhilaration. Soon after his return he took Holy Orders and after much manœuvring, King James, before whom he preached his first sermon, capitulated. His worldly fortunes were assured. It now only remained to make his heavenly ones.
Mr. Fausset indulges in one of his frequent rhetorical rhapsodies in describing Donne’s first appearance under the stole: