“The figure who mounted the pulpit in these early days of his ministry was not the spectral divine, the emaciated, almost sardonic mystic, who was later to hypnotise his audience by the reverberations of his eloquence, the intensities of his imagination, and the sepulchral tones of his voice. He was a man, despite the ravages of ill-health, still in his prime, his beard indeed touched with grey, but his face and carriage retaining that air of buccaneering insolence, almost of dignified roguery, which we have remarked in the young man. Arrayed in vestments and uplifted by the sense of an august occasion, his appearance must have been singularly striking, suggesting indeed some challenging John the Baptist or one of Dürer’s swarthy evangelists. At the same time he did not forget the courtier in the priest. There was a 'sacred flattery’ in his address, which if it 'beguiled men to amend,’ also gratified their vanity. His learning was beyond dispute, but the crabbed style of his correspondence, no less than the angular conceits of his poetry, could scarcely have prepared his friends for the miracle of eloquence which he was speedily to achieve, pungent, rhythmical, varied, and, even in its passages of scholastic argument, strangely sinuous and compelling.”
It is Donne’s spiritual life that his latest biographer finds worthy of unstinted praise, and it is perhaps for that reason that Part Four of his book entitled The Preacher will be found least interesting by the general reader.
Although his friend Izaak Walton wrote: “Donne’s marriage was the remarkable error of his life,” it is difficult to believe him. Anne put out the fire of his concupiscence though it cost her her life, and from its ashes his soul arose. After her death, he withdrew from the world and “in this retiredness,” Walton writes, “which was often from the sight of his dearest friends, he became crucified to the world and all those vanities, those imaginary pleasures that are daily acted on that ruthless stage; and they were as perfectly crucified to him. Now his soul was elemented of nothing but sadness; now grief took so full possession of his heart as to leave no place for joy; if it did, it was a joy to be alone, where, like a pelican in the wilderness, he might bemoan himself without witness or restraint, and pour forth his passions like Job in the days of his affliction.” It was through an agony of remorse that Donne strove for harmony of body and mind. He preached to others to express and reassure himself. Mr. Fausset believes that his exhortation “was not the flower of any abstract love of humanity,” but of intense personal preoccupation.
Preaching did not provide an adequate vent for his emotions so again he turned to poetry which, in keeping with his spiritual integration, he now cast in sonnet form. In these sonnets, Donne was primarily absorbed in asserting his emancipation from worldly values, and lamenting past sin. Mr. Fausset sees him “wooing his God with both the fervour and the self-disgust with which he had before addressed his mistresses”; even the erotic imagery recurs. His religion had become a personal passion and a personal hazard to which theology was no more than a prop. Of the many judgments his interpreter has passed upon him, this is the fairest.
Serious illness thrust itself upon him soon after his promotion to the deanship of St. Paul’s. Even in those days, before “nervous breakdown” was fashionable and a euphemism for episodic mental disorder, it was attributed to overwork and emotional tension, two very rare causes of disease. But he began to be seriously ill, ill of the disease that twelve years later conditioned his death. Before Mr. Gosse published his biography of Donne, he submitted the facts of his illnesses to a London diagnostician who satisfied himself that it was malignant disease of the stomach. But in 1899 when that diagnosis was made, we knew practically nothing about the most insidious, and the most prevalent form of chronic sepsis: that which has its origin in the tonsils and teeth. With the temerity of one whose statement can not be disproven, I boldly assert that, had his tonsils been removed after the alleged attack of typhoid fever and his teeth X-rayed when he felt himself at forty-five lapsing into an infirm and valetudinarian state, he would have lived out the time allotted by the psalmist. Had he been vouchsafed these natural years of piety and preparation, he would have accomplished that synthesis of the physical and spiritual which Mr. Fausset denies him, and the world would not have had The Devotions in which Donne incorporated the features and fears of his illness. England waited three hundred years for some one to parallel his performance of clinical self-observation and then found it in the young man who under the pen name of W. N. P. Barbellion wrote a book as self-revelatory as the Confessions of Saint Augustine.
Donne came to many fertile oases in his travel through the desert of sin, to many pools of Bethesda in wading the rivers of disease. The Herbert family was the most refreshing and restoring. In George Herbert, fifteen years his junior, he saw what he would like to have been; and in Herbert’s mother, he saw his ideal of spiritual womanhood. “The Autumnal,” his poem of homage to Magdalen Herbert, embodies his idea of the platonism of the soul as distinct from that of the mind. Through it, there breathes, as Mr. Fausset says, a quiet, tender as the evening sky before it has begun to pale with premonition of night.
Donne devoted the last five years of his life to dying, and he did it with the same intensity and artistry as that with which he devoted the first five years of his maturity to living. He interpreted himself the seventeenth-century representative of him that was spoken of by the prophet Esaias and bent himself to the last atom of his strength to make straight the Lord’s paths. It is a stirring and touching narrative and Mr. Fausset has made the most of it; reading it, one is forced to agree that he has established his contention that Donne never achieved a harmonious conscience; for, even in his hours of profoundest religiosity, he was dependent in a measure upon intuition for his faith; the dread of death, and the doubt of God’s mercy were constantly recurring, even though he maintained the priestly attitude with outward calm and enviable courage. In the years of his wisdom he did his best to crucify nature and to implore grace from Him who suffered crucifixion that man might live eternally.
His whole life was a series of beaux gestes and the last the most picturesque. Standing upon an urn, with closed eyes and folded hands, shrouded as for the grave, he had his portrait painted. And of that portrait his latest biographer says:
“It was a face at once grotesque and sublime, sinister and sanctified, fiendish and devout; seared and purified, cynically ecstatic. The craftiness and arrogance of his youth were sobered into a hungry, a cadaver simper, while his mysticism seemed to glimmer through the shadowy hollows with a phosphorescent life.”
For Mr. Fausset, Donne reflects and condenses the long labour of the man to outgrow the beast and approach the divine. In his unrest we see our own reflected.