It is an extraordinary story, if it is true. It throws a scarcely less extraordinary light on the nature of Donne’s mind, if he invented it. At the same time, I do not think the events it relates played the important part which Mr. Gosse assigns to them in Donne’s spiritual biography. It is impossible to read Mr. Gosse’s two volumes without getting the impression that “the deplorable but eventful liaison,” as he calls it, was the most fruitful occurrence in Donne’s life as a poet. He discovers traces of it in one great poem after another—even in the Nocturnal upon St. Lucy’s Day, which is commonly supposed to relate to the Countess of Bedford, and in The Funeral, the theme of which Professor Grierson takes to be the mother of George Herbert. I confess that the oftener I read the poetry of Donne the more firmly I become convinced that, far from being primarily the poet of desire gratified and satiated, he is essentially the poet of frustrated love. He is often described by the historians of literature as the poet who finally broke down the tradition of Platonic love. I believe that, so far is this from being the case, he is the supreme example of a Platonic lover among the English poets. He was usually Platonic under protest, but at other times exultantly so. Whether he finally overcame the more consistent Platonism of his mistress by the impassioned logic of The Ecstasy we have no means of knowing. If he did, it would be difficult to resist the conclusion that the lady who wished to continue to be his passionate friend and to ignore the physical side of love was Anne More, whom he afterwards married. If not, we may look for her where we will, whether in Magdalen Herbert (already a young widow who had borne ten children when he first met her) or in the Countess of Bedford or in another. The name is not important, and one is not concerned to know it, especially when one remembers Donne’s alarming curse on:
Whoever guesses, thinks, or dreams he knows
Who is my mistress.
One sort of readers will go on speculating, hoping to discover real people in the shadows, as they speculate about Swift’s Stella and Vanessa, and his relations to them. It is enough for us to feel, however, that these poems railing at or glorying in Platonic love are no mere goldsmith’s compliments, like the rhymed letters to Mrs. Herbert and Lady Bedford. Miracles of this sort are not wrought save by the heart. We do not find in them the underground and sardonic element that appears in so much of Donne’s merely amorous work. We no longer picture him as a sort of Vulcan hammering out the poetry of base love, raucous, powerful, mocking. He becomes in them a child Apollo, as far as his temperament will allow him. He makes music of so grave and stately a beauty that one begins to wonder at all the critics who have found fault with his rhythms—from Ben Jonson, who said that “for not keeping accent, Donne deserved hanging,” down to Coleridge, who declared that his “muse on dromedary trots,” and described him as “rhyme’s sturdy cripple.” Coleridge’s quatrain on Donne is, without doubt, an unequalled masterpiece of epigrammatic criticism. But Donne rode no dromedary. In his greatest poems he rides Pegasus like a master, even if he does rather weigh the poor beast down by carrying an encyclopædia in his saddle-bags.
Not only does Donne remain a learned man on his Pegasus, however: he also remains a humorist, a serious fantastic. Humour and passion pursue each other through the labyrinth of his being, as we find in those two beautiful poems, The Relic and The Funeral, addressed to the lady who had given him a bracelet of her hair. In the former he foretells what will happen if ever his grave is broken up and his skeleton discovered with
A bracelet of bright hair about the bone.
People will fancy, he declares, that the bracelet is a device of lovers
To make their souls at the last busy day
Meet at the grave and make a little stay.
Bone and bracelet will be worshipped as relics—the relics of a Magdalen and her lover. He conjectures with a quiet smile: