THE REPUTATION OF JOHN DONNE AS METRIST

I

The reputation of John Donne as metrist has undergone many vicissitudes. When, for instance, Ben Jonson, the earliest recorded critic of Donne's style, confided to his host, Drummond of Hawthornden, that John Donne, although "the first poet in the world for some things", still "for not keeping of accent, deserved hanging", he probably had little idea that posterity would be coupling his own name with that of Donne for the same sort of fault. Yet, a hundred and sixty years later, another great English 'classicist', Dr. Samuel Johnson, in his famous discussion of the so-called 'Metaphysical Poets', was to attribute one element of the Metaphysical style to the examples of Donne and of Jonson, "whose manner resembled that of of Donne more in the ruggedness of his lines than in the cast of his sentiments". In the same year, moreover, the Reverend Vicesimus Knox, with all the crabbed dogmatism of many critics in his profession, predicted that the neglect of the "graces of composition" by Donne, Jonson, and their imitator, Cowley, would result in their being hidden away "on the upper shelf of some dusty and deserted library". (Ben Jonson had also prophesied that Donne, "for not being understood, would perish".) But something went wrong with their expectations, and one can imagine the expressions of astonishment on their faces if they had been privileged to look into the future at such statements as the following, written one hundred and fortythree years later still; that is, in 1921: "Donne's verse has a powerful and haunting harmony of its own. . . .; and the felicities of verse are as frequent and startling as those of phrasing.

What is the explanation of these contradictions? Have we moderns a special revelation in matters which have been concealed for centuries? Have the gods suddenly endowed the readers and critics of the last few decades with new rhythmical and poetical senses? Perhaps the answer to the last two questions may be "Yes"; but in any case it is exceedingly interest

ing (and even instructive) to follow the course of Donne's reputation as a metrist from his day down to our own, and to see, if possible, why at the present time there has been such a revival of appreciation for his poetry on this particular score, among many another.

II

Very curiously, Donne's metrical peculiarities seem to have troubled no one between the time of Jonson and Dryden. Perhaps Jacobean and Caroline ears were better attuned than those of the Restoration to the rhythms in which men like Mr. Grierson' find such individual harmonies; or, on the other hand, as practically all the Neo-Classicists believed, the early seventeenthcentury ear may itself have been quite deaf to any beauty of 'numbers'. At any rate, Dryden's fault-finding (in 1668 and later) with Donne's "rough cadence", despite the poet's wit and learning, found a ready reception among the literary publicsoon to praise extravagantly the 'smoothness' of Edmund Waller-and appeared again in Milton's nephew, Edward Phillips, in 1675. And the tradition has persisted from then continuously to the twentieth century. Only of late has it showed signs of weakening.

The explanation of this attitude is simple and easily understandable, but also rather surprising. The Neo-Classicists concentrated their attention on those poems of Donne which best agreed in subject-matter with the spirit and taste of their own later age. In other words, just as the earlier part of the century had appreciated Donne best as the Dean of St. Paul's and as an eloquent and considerate preacher (who spoke with an hour-glass at his elbow), so the Neo-Classicists read him as one of the first English satirists. Dryden's comments, however, were made upon Donne's versification in only one type of his poetry-his satires, which are unquestionably the most apparently rough and irregular of all his work; and for two hundred years or so the majority of readers based their verdict concerning Donne's rhythm on the same satires.

'The quotation at the end of the first paragraph is from his recent anthology, Metaphysical Poetry, p. xxiii.

The most conspicuous illustration of this attitude toward Donne was, of course, the self-styled 'versification' of three of the satires by Pope and Parnell. The popular approval of Pope's work (Parnell's being seldom even mentioned) is sufficient evidence of the public's opinion of Donne's metrics. There were few who did not hold that Pope had vastly improved the 'numbers', although many, like Johnson, spoke of the "imbecility" of his work as a whole. Among the supporters of Pope's 'versification' were numbered men of all types: Bishop Warburton, Pope's executor; Vicesimus Knox once more; both of the Warton brothers, whose ears remained Neo-Classic in spite of the scattering Romantic symptoms in their heads; the writers of the New and General Biographical Dictionary, one of the numerous compendia of predigested knowledge for which the eighteenth century showed so much fondness; "W. G.", a friend of the lame Scotch printer, Andrew Shirrefs; George Ellis, editor of one of the most popular of the anthologies of older English poetry at the end of the century; W. L. Bowles, editor of Pope's works, and object of Wordsworth's poetic admiration; and so on. These men and many others seemed to know Donne's satires only-or at least mainly-through Pope's weakened paraphrase.

Those who mentioned Donne's own satirical style directly, however, nearly always had some sharp or amusing phrase to apply. Walter Harte, who was tutor to Lord Chesterfield's son and who predicted of Donne that although "Forgotten now; yet still his fame shall last", described the satires as "maim'd and bruis'd". William Mason apostrophized "rough Donne'; and the industrious cleric and historian, Thomas Birch, spoke of Donne's "most inharmonious versification". When, in 1756, in the general introduction to his Essay on... Pope, Joseph Warton showed a slight disposition to be merciful to Donne, the Monthly Review immediately caught him up by answering with an emphatic negative his paraphrase of a late seventeenth-century dictum which questioned rhetorically whether "any man with a poetical ear ever yet read ten lines of Donne without disgust?" And thereupon (in his next edition) Warton flabbily placed Donne in the third rank of his poets instead

of the second! He did so with regret, nevertheless, for in a passage in his later edition of Pope's works (which, it will be observed, also contains an interesting juxtaposition of the names of Donne and of the man who preserved for us Jonson's traduction of Donne) he wrote:-

"If Donne had taken equal pains, he need not have left his numbers so much more rugged and disgusting, than many of his cotemporaries, especially one so exquisitely melodious as Drummond of Hawthornden."

The critics during the remainder of the eighteenth century continued in the same paths. David Hume, with his most unpoetical of souls, found in the satires "the hardest and most uncouth expression that is anywhere to be met with". George Jeffreys, discussing the use of monosyllables in poetry, stated that "verses ought . . . . not to stand stock still like doctor Donne's". James Granger, whose once popular but now forgotten illustrated Biographical History gave his age the term 'to grangerize', compared Donne's verses to the "running down of a larum"; and also, copying Dryden, told how Donne's "thoughts were much debased by his versification". In the latter opinion he was followed almost word for word by Robert Anderson, in his important Poets of Great Britain series, and by the third edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica. These works round out the Neo-Classical opinion of Donne as satirical metrist.

But the affair did not end with the eighteenth century. Every period is always provided with its reactionaries, who, if not traditionalists in one thing, are pretty certain to be so in another. The nineteenth century, in its estimate of Donne's metrics, was no exception to the generalization. Southey overindulged his by wit, asserting that-

"Donne could never have become a poet, unless Apollo taking his ears under his divine care, would have wrought as miraculous a change in their internal structure, as of old he wrought in the external of those of Midas."

Much less important men following Southey, such as John Aikin, George Cunningham, and Nathan Drake, expressed the same idea, and bridged the gap between Southey and Landor,

who summarized the verse of the satires as "Frost-bitten and Jumbaginous, gnarl'd and knotty". This judgment was affirmed by such female essayists as Mrs. K. B. Thompson, by such literary historians as Thomas Arnold (not the Thomas), by such collectors as Thomas Corser, and even-shameful though it be to confess-by editors of Donne themselves. For Norton, in the Grolier Club edition of 1895, stated frankly that he did not "impugn" Jonson's pronouncement, and called Donne's "sins in this respect. . . . unpardonable and unaccountable". Dr. Augustus Jessop had said virtually the same thing, and Leslie Stephen supported him-even going him a bit better by telling how "some strange discord in form and substance" always "sets my teeth on edge". He made the statement, moreover, in the year of enlightenment, 1900. Courthope, to be sure, was quite right when he wrote shortly afterwards that Donne's influence in harmony and proportion was not such as would "carry forward the refinement of our language from one social stage to another"; but he was looking at the matter historically.

After 1900, nevertheless, very few opinions can be found which condemn Donne unequivocally and unqualifiedly for his 'harshness'. How, then, did the change occur?

III

The recognition of Donne as a poet with a certain, if limited, rhythmical capacity sprang from the slow realization that he was the author of other poems than satires. Just as the latest contemporary development in Donne's reputation has been the perception of his qualities as a metrical artist and technician, so, in accordance with its own new tendencies, the nineteenth century 'discovered' Donne as a lyric poet.

Two or three steps in this direction, however, had been made before 1800. The silence of Donne's contemporaries on this particular phase of the subject shows at least that they did not violently disapprove of his work. Apparently the first favorable remark of any importance, nevertheless, was made by Donne's idealistic biographer, "honest" Izaak Walton, who mentioned his "many divine sonnets, and other high, holy, and harmonious composures"; but as Walton's whole passage on Donne's poetry