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& HIS POETRY

W

E moderns, belonging to a period when men are intensely self-conscious and critical, look back at and, as it seems to us, down on the Middle Ages across a space of three centuries and a half. Gazing, we glimpse an external life almost incredibly picturesque, full of colour and abrupt deeds; but the men of that time, as regards their internal life, their intellectual and spiritual aspirations, appear as though immured in a dark fortress. For in the Middle Ages there was no appeal from authority, which was Holy Church. No man in his right mind doubted that final truth was vested in the Church, and her yoke became hard to bear, for the doctrine she imposed was largely one of repression. She preached continually the divinity of mystical religion, and condemned as evil the body with its primitive instincts, the mind with its independent questionings. Men might, and did, disobey her commands, and indulge the body or the intellect, but, because they believed the Church infallible, it was done in fear and trembling. Therefore the outlook of the age contained large elements of repression and fear. The itch of unsatisfied desires was everywhere, yet terror followed hard upon the steps of licence, whether intellectual or physical. Close on all sides stood

the walls of the fortress, holding men back from many forms of self-expression which became for that very reason increasingly desirable.

When the two great classical literatures were rediscovered the appeal of their paganism was irresistible, the walls of the fortress cracked and fell at the shout which arose from within, and Europe rushed out at the breach on the tide of the Renaissance. A vast fund of energy was released, energy which had been accumulating for generations. It was expended recklessly. These men were avid of experience, hungry for knowledge. They plunged into the pursuit of learning; they admired and imitated the classics; they burst into poetry; they experimented eagerly with life from its lowest phases upward. Much of their energy was misdirected, for it must be admitted that at this time zeal was far more prominent than discrimination. Yet in literature this movement produced great things, first in Italy, then in France, finally reaching England as the Elizabethan outburst.

So fine a frenzy could not last long. By the end of the sixteenth century in England these eager tasters of life, hunters of knowledge, worshippers of beauty, were to some extent disillusioned, and knew that some experiences were not worth having, that knowledge can become a burden, that the dazzle of loveliness is liable to blur. This realization produced dissatisfaction, and dissatisfaction is essentially a mood of criticism, which is an appeal to reason.

But a literary movement alone could not have initiated a new era in Europe, as this in fact did. Such a dominance implies the support of the whole thought of the time, and the Renaissance reached only a portion of the people, the cultivated classes. They, being more articulate, directed to some extent the thought of the rest, but unless the deepest convictions of the mass had been with them they could not have carried along their age.

In point of fact the Renaissance movement had its counterpart in the world of religion, which was by far the most important department of life. An irreparable breach appeared in the walls of medievalism when in 1517 Luther became the mouthpiece of the tendency we call the Reformation. This was in its beginning, and has been throughout its history, essentially an assertion of reason against authority.

The movement began with the rejection of certain doctrines which it did not seem reasonable to accept, and it expressed a widespread determination of the peoples to think for themselves in matters spiritual as well as temporal.

Therefore the end of the sixteenth century in England presents an arresting spectacle. In the background is a broken medievalism; in the middle distance shows the tide of the RenaisBut in the foreground wells the spring of an outlook which appeals to reason. Most of the prominent men of this period, though they

sance.

1

may have included in their mental and moral make-up something of each of these forces, were dominated by one or the other of them.

Bacon,

in his plea for experiment in science, embodies the emerging appeal to reason: Spenser is more medieval even than humanist: Sidney is a child of the Renaissance.

But apart from these there stand two figures. One is Shakespeare, here as ever the exception. He is not merely groping toward a rational outlook-he possesses it; his mind is as startlingly modern as the dress of his thought is unmistakably of the Renaissance. Yet if Shakespeare, with his great powers and consummate art, stands like a Colossus, towering above his contemporaries with his eyes fixed in calm certainty on the future, there is another figure nine years farther on, less vast but still a giant, who is Agonistes, the wrestler. For John Donne was the tortured battle-stead of the great forces of his time, and his poetry is the record of the struggle. Any attempt to study Donne's work without a full recognition of this central fact is foredoomed to failure. His early upbringing was medieval and intensely religious. From these early impressions he never shook himself free, deriving from them a deep-rooted ideal of mystical religion, and a tendency to terrorstricken repentance for sin. From the Renaissance he drew an insatiable desire for knowledge and experience, and this was reinforced by a nature definitely sensuous and sensual.

And,

finally, he was modern in his critical selfconsciousness.

We have noted that many men of Donne's generation combined in themselves these same factors, but in their case one or other of them was permanently in the ascendant. And because in his case these forces were almost equally balanced and perpetually in conflict, Donne is unique. Unique, that is, among those to whom the gods granted self-expression. When art is attacked on utilitarian grounds its upholders are often slow to bring forward one great argument -that it is to art, especially to poetry, that we owe our knowledge of the inner life of ages which are now long past. One real poet gives us more light upon the point of view of a past period than any quantity of dead facts. But it is pathetic to consider how few are those who have the gift of speech. In this first quarter of the seventeenth century which we are discussing there must have been a great number of men who, like Donne, suffered from the impossibility of attaining to unity of outlook; there must have been a few, though very few, in whom the struggle came near to the height of intensity it reached in him; yet to Donne alone was given the power of speech. Therefore he stands to us for his age, and in him we see the interpretation of one phase of it.

Donne never attained to the unity of outlook which he so desired. Even in his last years, when he was living an irreproachable, severely

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