England's Antiphon, George MacDonald [ready to read books TXT] 📗

it a birth; and when thou go'st to die,
Sing like a swan, as if thou went'st to bliss.

And if thou, like a child, didst fear before,
Being in the dark where thou didst nothing see;
Now I have brought thee torch-light, fear no more;
Now when thou diest thou canst not hood-wink'd be.

And thou, my soul, which turn'st with curious eye
To view the beams of thine own form divine,
Know, that thou canst know nothing perfectly,
While thou art clouded with this flesh of mine.

Take heed of over-weening, and compare
Thy peacock's feet with thy gay peacock's train:
Study the best and highest things that are,
But of thyself an humble thought retain.

Cast down thyself, and only strive to raise
The story of thy Maker's sacred name:
Use all thy powers that blessed Power to praise,
Which gives the power to be, and use the same.

In looking back over our path from the point we have now reached, the first thought that suggests itself is-How much the reflective has supplanted the emotional! I do not mean for a moment that the earliest poems were without thought, or that the latest are without emotion; but in the former there is more of the skin, as it were-in the latter, more of the bones of worship; not that in the one the worship is but skin-deep, or that in the other the bones are dry.

To look at the change a little more closely: we find in the earliest time, feeling working on historic fact and on what was received as such, and the result simple aspiration after goodness. The next stage is good
doctrine -I use the word, as St. Paul uses it, for instruction in righteousness-chiefly by means of allegory, all attempts at analysis being made through personification of qualities. Here the general form is frequently more poetic than the matter. After this we have a period principally of imitation, sometimes good, sometimes indifferent. Next, with the Reformation and the revival of literature together, come more of art and more of philosophy, to the detriment of the lyrical expression. People cannot think and sing: they can only feel and sing. But the philosophy goes farther in this direction, even to the putting in abeyance of that from which song takes its rise,-namely, feeling itself. As to the former, amongst the verse of the period I have given, there is hardly anything to be called song but Sir Philip Sidney's Psalms, and for them we are more indebted to King David than to Sir Philip. As to the latter, even in the case of that most mournful poem of the Countess of Pembroke, it is, to quite an unhealthy degree, occupied with the attempt to work upon her own feelings by the contemplation of them, instead of with the utterance of those aroused by the contemplation of truth. In her case the metaphysics have begun to prey upon and consume the emotions. Besides, that age was essentially a dramatic age, as even its command of language, especially as shown in the pranks it plays with it, would almost indicate; and the dramatic impulse is less favourable, though not at all opposed, to lyrical utterance. In the cases of Sir Fulk Grevill and Sir John Davies, the feeling is assuredly profound; but in form and expression the philosophy has quite the upper hand.

We must not therefore suppose, however, that the cause of religious poetry has been a losing one. The last wave must sink that the next may rise, and the whole tide flow shorewards. The man must awake through all his soul, all his strength, all his mind, that he may worship God in unity, in the one harmonious utterance of his being: his heart must be united to fear his name. And for this final perfection of the individual the race must awake. At this season and that season, this power or that power must be chiefly developed in her elect; and for its sake the growth of others must for a season be delayed. But the next generation will inherit all that has gone before; and its elect, if they be themselves pure in heart, and individual, that is original, in mind, will, more or less thoroughly, embody the result, in subservience to some new development, essential in its turn to further progress. Even the fallow times, which we are so ready to call barren, must have their share in working the one needful work. They may be to the nation that which sickness so often is to the man-a time of refreshing from the Lord. A nation's life does not lie in its utterance any more than in the things which it possesses: it lies in its action. The utterance is a result, and therefore a sign, of life; but there may be life without any such sign. To do justice, to love mercy, to walk humbly with God, is the highest life of a nation as of an individual; and when the time for speech comes, it will be such life alone that causes the speech to be strong at once and harmonious. When at last there are not ten righteous men in Sodom, Sodom can neither think, act, nor say, and her destruction is at hand.

While the wave of the dramatic was sinking, the wave of the lyric was growing in force and rising in height. Especially as regards religious poetry we are as yet only approaching the lyrical jubilee. Fact and faith, self-consciousness and metaphysics, all are needful to the lyric of love. Modesty and art find their grandest, simplest labour in rightly subordinating each of those to the others. How could we have a George Herbert without metaphysics? In those poems I have just given, the way of metaphysics was prepared for him. That which overcolours one age to the injury of its harmony, will, in the next or the next, fall into its own place in the seven-chorded rainbow of truth.


CHAPTER VII.

DR. DONNE.


We now come to Dr. John Donne, a man of justly great respect and authority, who, born in the year 1573, the fifteenth of Queen Elizabeth, died Dean of St. Paul's in the year 1636. But, although even Ben Jonson addresses him as "the delight of Phoebus and each Muse," we are too far beyond the power of his social presence and the influence of his public utterances to feel that admiration of his poems which was so largely expressed during his lifetime. Of many of those that were written in his youth, Izaak Walton says Dr. Donne "wished that his own eyes had witnessed their funerals." Faulty as they are, however, they are not the less the work of a great and earnest man.

Bred to the law, but never having practised it, he lost his secretaryship to the Lord Chancellor Ellesmere through the revenge of Sir George More, whose daughter Donne had married in secret because of her father's opposition. Dependent thereafter for years on the generous kindness of unrelated friends, he yet for conscience' sake refused to take orders when a good living was offered him; and it was only after prolonged thought that he yielded to the importunity of King James, who was so convinced of his surpassing fitness for the church that he would speed him towards no other goal. When at length he dared hope that God might have called him to the high office, never man gave himself to its duties with more of whole-heartedness and devotion, and none have proved themselves more clean of the sacrilege of serving at the altar for the sake of the things offered thereon.

He is represented by Dr. Johnson as one of the chief examples of that school of poets called by himself the metaphysical , an epithet which, as a definition, is almost false. True it is that Donne and his followers were always ready to deal with metaphysical subjects, but it was from their mode, and not their subjects, that Dr. Johnson classed them. What this mode was we shall see presently, for I shall be justified in setting forth its strangeness, even absurdity, by the fact that Dr. Donne was the dear friend of George Herbert, and had much to do with the formation of his poetic habits. Just twenty years older than Herbert, and the valued and intimate friend of his mother, Donne was in precisely that relation of age and circumstance to influence the other in the highest degree.

The central thought of Dr. Donne is nearly sure to be just: the subordinate thoughts by means of which he unfolds it are often grotesque, and so wildly associated as to remind one of the lawlessness of a dream, wherein mere suggestion without choice or fitness rules the sequence. As some of the writers of whom I have last spoken would play with words, Dr. Donne would sport with ideas, and with the visual images or embodiments of them. Certainly in his case much knowledge reveals itself in the association of his ideas, and great facility in the management and utterance of them. True likewise, he says nothing unrelated to the main idea of the poem; but not the less certainly does the whole resemble the speech of a child of active imagination, to whom judgment as to the character of his suggestions is impossible, his taste being equally gratified with a lovely image and a brilliant absurdity: a butterfly and a shining potsherd are to him similarly desirable. Whatever wild thing starts from the thicket of thought, all is worthy game to the hunting intellect of Dr. Donne, and is followed without question of tone, keeping, or harmony. In his play with words, Sir Philip Sidney kept good heed that even that should serve the end in view; in his play with ideas, Dr. John Donne, so far from serving the end, sometimes obscures it almost hopelessly: the hart escapes while he follows the squirrels and weasels and bats. It is not surprising that, their author being so inartistic with regard to their object, his verses themselves should be harsh and unmusical beyond the worst that one would imagine fit to be called verse. He enjoys the unenviable distinction of having no rival in ruggedness of metric movement and associated sounds. This is clearly the result of indifference; an indifference, however, which grows very strange to us when we find that he can write a lovely verse and even an exquisite stanza.

Greatly for its own sake, partly for the sake of illustration, I quote a poem containing at once his best and his worst, the result being such an incongruity that we wonder whether it might not be called his best and his worst, because we cannot determine which. He calls it Hymn to God, my God, in my Sickness . The first stanza is worthy of George Herbert in his best mood.

Since I am coming to that holy room,
Where with the choir of saints for evermore
I shall be made thy music, as I come
I tune the instrument here at the door,
And what I must do then, think here before.

To recognize its beauty, leaving aside the depth and truth of the phrase, "Where I shall be made thy music," we must recall the custom of those days to