Jonson in Coote

On Ben Jonson. From The Penguin Short History of English Literature, by Stephen Coote (1993).

 ("Shakespeare and the Drama: 1500-1642", 12):

...

Shakespeare's work is never (...) openly autobiographical. Indeed, on the level of personality, England's greatest poet remains her most enigmatic. In studying the works we come no nearer to the man. Rather, Shakespeare is so wholly absorbed in his art—in the imaginative exploration of mankind through the dramatist's resources of language, action, and role-play—that what we do come to appreciate is the inexhaustible richness of human invention itself. In the noble words of Ben Jonson: 'He was not of an age, but for all time'.

 

12

The tribute paid to Shakespeare by Jonson (1572-1637) was the more generous for the rivalry he felt towards the greater man, but if Jonson awarded Shakespeare the honours of posterity, he gained for himself some of those offered by his age. He was effectively Poet Laureate (pensioned, but not titled) and, though his later years were spent in poverty, the nobility of England attended his funeral in recognition of his genius. 

Jonson—convivial, critical, the pundit of his age—remains a fine writer of lyric, a great satirist and a major figure in that classical and humanist tradition of literature which stretches from Sidney, through Milton and Dryden, to the other Johnson and Gray. That this tradition of humane, decorous, yet profoundly experienced poetry was also the standard by which to satirize his times is given dramatic form in Jonson's Poetaster (1601) where the serene values of Virgil and Horace are juxtaposed to seventeenth-century pretenders to art. 

Jonson's two surviving tragedies derive from Roman history. The first is by far the greater, though neither was a popular success. Sejanus (1603) presents the emperor Tiberius's bestial reign of terror in a Rome where, amid parasites and fearful hypocrites—people swollen to distortion with their desire for power—liberty, language and human worth are crushed in the self-destructive intricacy of machination. In Catiline (1611), Jonson shows the working of conspiracy with an even darker and self-conscious scholarship, but the play cannot be counted a dramatic success, and it is in his comedies of city life that we find Jonson's most telling portrayal of human folly. These works were profoundly influenced by classical theory. They also relate to a rich and varied native tradition which they effortlessly transcend. To this last we should briefly turn. 

The rapid expansion of population and mercantile activity in London was a leading phenomenon of the age, and theatres like the Fortune produced plays designed to please the merchant classes. The immensely prolific Thomas Heywood (?1575-c. 1641), for example, wrote The Four Prentices of London (c. 1592-1600) in which the heroes are noble yet 'of city trades they have no scorn'. In the second part of If You Know Not Me You Know Nobody (1605), praise of the great merchant Sir Thomas Gresham combines with intense patriotism. Domestic virtue and moral edification are again central to Old Fortunatus (1599) by Thomas Dekker (?1572-1632) while in the same year Dekker produced The Shoemaker's Holiday in which imaginative comic prose, romance and touching marital fidelity are allied to the eternally comfortable story of an apprentice's rise to the position of Lord Major.  

Dekker's seemingly unlikely collaboration with the tragedian Webster in Westward Ho! (1604) and Northward Ho! (1605) led him beyond the praise of 'a fine life, a velvet life, a careful life'. Others were actively to criticize citizen tastes in drama however, and the most lasting exposure of the works produced for this market is The Knight of the Burning Pestle (1607) by Francis Beaumont (1584-1616). This piece is both a kind-hearted burlesque and a clever exercise on the idea of the play within the play. Contrasts between chivalry, modern aristocratic values and merchant ideals here centre around the sympathetic figure of Rafe, the apprentice and comic knight errant.

A more bitterly satirical humour is to be found in the comedies of George Chapman (c. 1560-1634) and John Marston (1576-1634). Cynicism is a marked tone in Chapman's work in the form, while Marston's comedies are the work of a verse satirist and reveal the aggressive and twisted syntax characteristic of that genre. Jonson himself came into collision with Marston and Dekker in the so-called 'war of the theatres'. He had already completed Nashe's The Isle of Dogs (1597) and been imprisoned for sedition as a result. Shortly after finishing the first version of Every Man in His Humour (1598, revised by 1616) he duelled with a fellow actor, killed him, and only escaped the gallows through a legal technicality. In Every Man Out of His Humour (1599)—a drama of plays within plays which discusses the problems of play writing and then satirizes the nature of satire—Jonson lightly critized Marlowe in the figure of Clove. Marston himself had recently essayed an unfortunate eulogy of Jonson in his revision of the anti-theatrical diatribe Histriomastix (c. 1599), a portrait which is in fact nearer to parody.

Marston retaliated to the figure of Clove with an open caricature of Jonson in Jack Drum's Entertainment (c. 1600). He received his rebuff in Cynthia's Revels (1600), a boys' company play satirizing the follies of the court. The work is reminiscent of Lyly, and contains the exquisite lyric 'Queen and huntress, chaste and fair.' Jonson's Poetaster, written for Paul's Boys, presents caricatures of Marston and Dekker among the pretenders to art in Augustan Rome and triumphed completely over Marston's What You Will (c. 1601). Dekker was now recruited on Marston's side with his Satiromastix (1601), but Jonson himself tried to rise above the fray with Sejanus. Then—such is the abiding nature of the literary world—he collaborated with Marston and Chapman in Eastward Ho (1605), voluntarily joining his co-authors in prison when the play was considered seditious. However, in the following year, the King's Men gave a triumphantly successful performance of Jonson's Volpone, one of the great comic masterpieces of the English stage. 

All Jonson's immense energies are focused in Volpone where he deals with one of his most characteristic themes: the corruption wrought by greed on those obsessive and fantastic creatures who dupe each onther on the lunatic finges of an enterprise culture. 'This', Jonson wrote, 'is the money-get mechanic age', and Volpone's cunning scheme for getting money makes gold itself the object of a parody religion.

As a rich man without heirs, Volpone adds to his wealth through the brives offered the apparently dying man by those hoping for an advantageous mention in his will. To secure this, people will disinherit their children, pervert the law and prostitute their wives. Volpone's bedroom becomes the centre of inverted human values where money is gained without real work, innocence is all but corrupted by glittering lust, and men are reduced to the foxes, flies, vultures, ravens and crows which give them their names.

To draw his heroic caricature of materialism, Jonson turned to a wide range of sources, his classical training especially. There was nothing frigid or pedantic about this. He confined his play largely within the unities of time (twenty-four hours), place (Venice) and action (the refusal to admit material distracting from the main narrative), not because Renaissance scholars loved Aristotle had promulgated such rules as laws. He did it because these devices help concentrate the dramatic excitement. Again, Jonson did not reduce his characters to types because Terence and Plautus had done so, but because an overmastering obsession or 'humour' caricatures itself, as the anonymous writers of medieval Morality plays had been aware. If older forms helped give a framework, the foundation of Volpone is passionate observation.

As a result, Volpone himself throbs with something of his creator's vitality. He relishes his own play-acting, his frequent disguises and performances which eventually lead to his undoing and that of his parasite Mosca. As a result, the effect of the play is far from simple. The energy of corruption is infectious, and if we are pleased that the villain is exposed by means of his own designs, then the worthlessness of the Venetian authorities who clap him in irons gives justice itself as ironic final twist.

Epicœne, or The Silent Woman (1609) is again concerned with man as a social (or antisocial) animal. Morose tries to shelter himself from the world's din, declaring 'All discourses, but mine own, afflict me; they seem harsh, impertinent and irksome.' The world appears to justify his misanthropy. Morose tries to disinherit his nephew by marrying an apparently silent bride. She turns out, however, to be first a scold and then a boy in disguise. The comedy ends in separation rather than marriage, while its sexual ambiguities may be a taunt at the Puritans' objection to the portrayal of female roles in the theatre by boys. 

The Alchemist (1610) again concerns itself with distorting dreams of gold. It is constructed in brilliant conformity to the unities and, in its earthy and imaginative richness of contemporary dialogue and folly, embodies Jonson's ideal of a comedy which employs

     deeds, and language, such as men do use,

And persons, such as Comedy would choose

When she would show an image of the times,

And sport with human follies, not with crimes.

The particular follyhere is the lure of easy money: Sir Epicure Mammon's dream that through the philosopher's stone he can 'turn the age to gold'. Interestingly, it is not alchemy itself that is satirized but the attitude which sees science (which alchemy was still widely held to be) as a fulfilment of fantasy. Face, Subtle and his consort Doll Common—rogues who have employed Lovewit's house for their purpose—are adepts in manipulating vain desires in a variety of characters: Epicure Mammon himself, Abel Drugger the tobacconist, Kastril the roistering boy and the comic puritans Ananias and Tribulation Wholesome. The real transformations in The Alchemist are thus not of base metal into gold but of human folly into absurdity. When the off-stage laboratory finally blows up, fantasy explodes with it. The return of Lovewit brilliantly resolves the action but hardly restores official law and order.

A Puritan is again humiliated in Jonson' prose comedy Bartholomew Fair (1614). Zeal-of-the-Land Busy, a hypocritical creature of appetite, ends up in the stocks. The dramatic re-creation of a real fair allowed Jonson to celebrate de all-licensed, topsy-turvy world of mardi gras with great diversity of action and a matching richness of dialogue. The simple-minded Cokes is robbed, while Justice Adam Overdo, out to spy on 'enormities', also winds up in the stocks. Nonetheless, when he ends the play by inviting all to dine with him, the foolish Cokes insists they be accompanied by the puppet show which has already offered one of the best episodes in the play. The fari itself—its vitality memorably embodied in Ursula, the Pig-woman—is Jonson's image of raucuous humanity, variously hypocritical, simple, vengeful and forgiving.

The plays for the commercial theatre Jonson wrote in the later stages of his career — The Devil Is an Ass (1616), The Staple of News (1626), The New Inn (1629) and The Magnetic Lady (1632) — were harshly if not wholly inaccurately described by Dryden as his 'dotages.' A fascinating and very different aspect of Jonson's dramatic art however is revealed in the series of masques he wrote as Twelfth Night entertainments for the court of James I (1605-25). Here we see an élite drama dealing explicitly with contemporary theories of political power.

Jonson had already designed the lavish and arcane symbolism of the Scottish king's triumphal entry to his new capital, and the masques extend his exploration of James's notion of the divine right of kings: the belief that James was accountable to God alone, that his position partook of divinity and that he was endowed with supernatural wisdom. In The Golden Age Restor'd (1615), we see how classical larning, music, poetry, dance and the lavish sets of Inigo Jones (1573-1652) present James as Jove, the benevolent guide of the nation's fate. Whn the Iron Age is routed in a conventional anti-masque, Astraea or Justice heralds the return of the Golden Age. Through the Neoplatonic philosophy that underpins the Jonsonian masque, the dancing courtiers come to symbolize the completeness, harmony and peace attained by the dramatic enactment of the divine king's decrees.

The Jonsonian masque was an élite celebration of a political and cultural ideal. For many, however, these sumptuous illusions disguised a more troubled reality. Though the court encouraged the highest cultural sophistication, its moral tone was low and corruption and factionalism were rife. James's assertion of divine right gave a dangerous edge to the royal prerogative, while his reckless expenditure led to increading debt in a period of economic uncertainty and bad harvests. Further, while the king (an enthusiastic amateur theologian) failed to satisfy moderate Puritan demands for church reform, his rash creation of new titles (partly as an attempt to raise money) exacerbated a deep sense of status insecurity in a society where ancient notions of hierarchy were being eroded by the power of money and capital. This uncertainty is reflected in the work of a number of Jacobean comic writers.

The 'city' comedies of Thomas Middleton (?1580-1627), for example, combine the idiom of London life and its pace with deft plotting and realistic satire. Middleton is consistently ironic about the rabidly acquisitive London of his time. Merchants, usurers, idle aristocrats and an extravagant gentry are all exposed in a world where it is increasingly the cleverest rather than the most virtuous who succeed. In A Trick to Catch the Old One (1605), surface cleverness works alongside deeper moral concerns with something of the force of the exempla in contemporary Puritan sermons. A Mad World, my Masters (1605) represents the marriage of a whore to a dupe, while in A Chaste Maid in Cheapside (1611) sex is traded for money as the appetites and restless folly of city life controls the gulls and cheats who populate it. Philip Massinger (1583-1640) borrowed the plot of A Trick to Catch the Old One in A New Way to Pay Old Debts (1621), turning it to different and Jonsonian purposes in the humiliation of the great comic figure of Sir Giles Overreach, the loan shark. Overreach is the focus of Massinger's violent and deeply conservative satire of a corrupt Jacobean world, a world where titles are sold to the nouveaux riches and, as traditional social ties collapse, so madness looms.

....

 

("From Donne to Dryden", 2):

The courtiers addressed by Donne in many of his sermons were also the recipients of verses by Ben Jonson (1572-1637), and it is a measure of Jonson's stature that, in addition to being one of the leading playwrights of the age, he was also its most influential court poet.

Drawing extensively on the classics and Renaissance theorists, Jonson's non-dramatic poetry elaborates the ideals and criticizes the shortcomings of those involved in his vision of a cultured, socially responsible life of 'manners, arms and arts'. In these works, Jonson thus aspired to a seventeenth-century version of the urbane and moral gentleman of Latin literature: sociable yet self-contained, grave but unpedantic, a man in whom the virtues of the golden mean have been refeined in the fires of art and personal integrity. Jonson thereby presents himself as an arbiter of civil virtue, an English Horace.

In the prose of his Timber, or Discoveries (1640-41), and often through extensive and unacknowledged paraphrase of Vives and other scholars, Jonson showed how the classical basis of his poetry was rooted in nature, exercise, imitation, study and art. The classical rhetoricians were the masters of his particular practice. Their works were to be used only as guides however, not as commanders. What Jonson was seeking was to relate an awareness of his own time to the timeless values of the past, and to do so in a distinctive idiom. To achieve this, he perfected the rhetoric of the middle voice in which he declared: 'the language is plain, and pleasing; even without stopping, round without swelling; all well tuned, composed, elegant, and accurate'. 

These qualities can be seen in Jonson's Epigrams, 'the ripest of my studies'. In pieces such as 'Inviting a Friend to Supper', the courteous social tone, tinged with fantasy, is modulated through reminiscences of Martial to create the ideal of a shared and civilized enjoyment of good food, good talk and good books. A sense of self-knowledge and self-respect, of constancy tempered by experience, is the subject of 'An Epistle Answering to One that Asked to Be Sealed of the Tribe of Ben', an informal group that numbered some of the finest intellects of the age.

A shared sense of high values is also clear in Jonson's praise of other literary and artistic men, though this was something that did not always come naturally to him. The torrential release of pent-up irritation in 'An Expostulation with Inigo Jones' vividly suggests Jonson's envy of a rival's success at court and his refusal to believe that this great architect and scene designer's skills ranked with his own poetic arts. Jonson's tribute to William Camden, his master at Westminster, achieves a moving reverence. When Jonson writes of Shakespeare however, in a poem printed in the First Folio, his lines are among the most generous of the age.

Jonson's epitaphs to his children temper contradictory feelings of grief and Christian acceptance through an art that seems to belie the emotions that sustain it. In Jonson's two odes to himself, his deep feeling for the integrity of that art is asserted against the allegedly gimcrack tastes of his age. In his few religious pieces, such art also expresses a sinner's measured awareness of his own iniquity.

A contemporary is supposed to have declared that Jonson 'never writes of love, or, if he does, does it not naturally'. This is hard but not wholly unfair. 'My Picture Left in Scotland' has a delicate, honest pathos, and Jonson was capable of both the shrewd cynicism of 'That Women Are but Men's Shadows' as well as the artifice and high compliment 'Drink to me only with thine eyes'. In 'See the chariot at hand here of Love', such artifice creates its own exotic sense of wonder:

Have you seen but a bright lily grow,

    Before rude hand hath touch'd it?

Ha' you mark'd but the fall o'the snow

    Before the soil hath smutch'd it?

Ha' you felt the wool o'the beaver?

    Or swan's down ever?

Or have smelt o'the bud of the brier?

    Or the nard in the fire?

Or have tasted the bag of the bee?

O so white! O so soft! O so sweet is she!

                                (nard: ambergris)

It is as the poet of the civilized aristocratic community however that Jonson is at his best, the mutual and by no means automatic respect of patron and poet serving to create a Roman ideal of behaviour, an aristocracy of mind as much as birth. Consequently, Jonson was a fine writer of eulogies. These, as in the excellent 'To Sir Robert Wroth', are often tempered by a moral concern for the corruptions of the city and court, a feeling for the virtues of country existence and a piety in which the classical ideal of the good life blends easily with a restrained Christian faith. Bravery, patriotism and friendship—the aristocratic life of action—are celebrated in the Pindaric ode to Cary and Morrison, but it is a tribute to the breadth of Jonson's classicism that he could also celebrate the scatological and mock-heroic exuberance of 'On the Famous Voyage'. 

Such poems to the aristocracy suggest the great importance of patronage to the creative life of the age. When Jonson wrote in praise of his patroness the Countess of Bedford, for example, a new image of woman emerged, one that was aristocratic, liberal and educated, and allowed her to move on an equal and graceful footing with men. In 'A Farewell for a Gentlewoman', this is tempered by a stoic, Christian rejection of worldliness. In one of Jonson's finest achievements, the 'Elegy on Lady Jane Paulet', such faith creates a genuine sense of exultation.

It is in 'To Penshurst' however that such concerns combined to form Jonson's supreme evocation of Christian humanism as well as a work which inaugurated the important tradition of the country-house poem. The ancestral seat of the Sidneys here becomes the focus of all aspects of the good life. Modest yet dignified, blessed by the heritage of a great poet and rich in the bounty of nature, Penshurst is the centre of a humane community where all—peasant and poet—join in Sir Robert's courteous hospitality. Rural England is remade through the classics into an image of harmony, decency and integrity, fit and able to welcome the king and so be part of a patriotic ideal. And at the basis of this public excellence lies private virtue. The lady of the house is 'noble, fruitful, chaste withal', while the children, encouraged in rectitude by the example of their parents, are pious and keen to learn the ways of aristocratic merit. Jonson's vision is thus comprehensive and humane, Christian and classical, private and public. However we may question its political implications, it remains a noble image of a civilizing ideal.

 

 Will Durant on Ben Jonson

 

—oOo—

 

 

 

Old English Literature

 

(Chapter 1 of The Penguin Short History of English Literature, by Stephen Coote).

 

 

 

OLD ENGLISH LITERATURE

 

 I

 

This is a chronicle of how men and women, for more than a thousand years, have expressed themselves in a literature of extraordinary fertility and a language of matchless resource.  

The origins of that language reach back to the remote fifth century when conquering tribes of Jutes, Saxons and Angles first brought to the country the various dialects of a Germanic tongue now called Old English. Many of the words the invaders used survive in our vocabulary today. We have no difficulty recognizing mann, wif and cild. We are familiar with the hus in which they libben or live, the mete they etan and the waeter they drincan. The bok you are reading describes a history almost as old. 

Though pronunciation has changed and modern English has freed itself of nouns that must be declined and adjectives that reflect their gender, Old English had several qualities which uniquely fitted it to survive and grow. Its users were willing to borrow words from the Latin culture of the Christian church and to absorb the Scandinavian vocabulary of later Viking raiders. Old English thus drew on European traditions, while her poets further enriches their 'wordhoard' with an imaginative range of synonyms. These last tell us a great deal about Anglo-Saxon life. In a world oss war, gold and honor, the king was the heroes' treasure keeper and 'victory lord'. His warriors were his 'shield bearers' fighting in the 'iron-clad ring.' Over the heaving 'whale's road', riding the 'water's bak', sailed the broad-bosomed longships with crews of 'Spear Danes' eager for fame. 

Such fame was a principal preoccupation of the poet or scop, seated at his chieftain's hearth and regaling the company with records of their history. Widsith, in a poem that dates perhaps from the early seventh century, offers a detailed inventory of the men who rose and fell in the great period of warrior migration a hundred years before. While presenting this panorama of the past however, Widsith also portrays himself in the timeless and masculine role of the Old English bard. His name implies that he is the widely travelled one, the man whose albeit imaginary journeys have disciplined him to received wisdom. Suffering, loneliness and the experience of good and evil have made Widsith a man apart and the singer of songs who can reveal to his audience the glory and pathos of their uncertain world. This is the world created again by the stoic author of Deor (?seventh century), and both men look to the lord of the 'mead hall' for generous gifts in return for immortalizing his fame.

The communal and oral nature of such poetry accounts for a number of its characteristic features. All of these made it easier for the bard to improvise his work and his listeners to understand it. For example, each line, divided into halves of two stressed and a varying number of unstressed syllables, is symmetrical and alliterative. Such patterns appeal directly to the ear. Vivid poetic diction and the frequent use of parallel expressions for a single idea set the verse apart from normal speech and mark it out as a special mode of discourse, a means of imagining the world. Lastly, many set-piece passages describing such events as fights or frasts are composed from verbal formulas that were clearly part of a traditional and unwritten inheritance on which all poets could draw.

Such are some of the formal characteristics of this verse, but if Old English poetry is marked by artifice it is also characterized by deep emotion. The following lines from The Battle of Maldon (993) in which a band of warriors face certain defeat suggests these qualities well:

Courage shall grow keener, clearer the will

The heart fiercer, as our force faileth

Here lies our lord levelled in the dust,

the an all marred; he shall mourn to the end

who thins to wend off from this war-play now.

Though I am white with winters I will not away,

for I think to lodge me alongside my dear one,

lay me down by my lord's right hand.

This passage conveys the ideal of warrior loyalty, the love of fame and honour embodied in the Germanic and originally pagan forms of the warrior life. It also suggests the reverence for conventional wisdom and the recognition of an uncertain and even malign universe which characterize the longst and most famous Old English poem, the epic Beowulf. 

Although composed in a Christian court in seventh- or eight-century Mercia or Northumbria, Beowulf is deeply sympathetic to the heroic tradition, to the culture of the all and that view of human activity characteristic of the pagan world of southern Scandinavia two hundred years earlier. The poem thus reflects a life of fights and feasting, of ceremony, brilliant gold and sudden darkness. Here are pride in birth and physical strength, a world of sacred obligations, feud and vengeance. Beyond this, the forces of wyrd or fate seem to control man's destiny with mysterious omnipotence, while evil itself (personified in the poem by the monstrous Grendel, his dam and the dragon) is both primordial and powerful, something to be outwitted and destroyed by cunning and physical strength. However, while Beowulf contains many scenes of vivid action, it is principally conceived as a meditation on the heroic life, a philosophic vision of warrior man in his splendour and defeat.

The opening lines, for example, portray the funeral of a great king who as a young man crossed the waters to bring glory to an ailing country, just as Beowulf himself will later do. We watch the building of Hrothgar's mighty hall at Heorot, but even as this symbol of heroic society is celebrated, so we know it is waiting for the fire that will one day destroy it. Man's highest achievements are thus set against a background of inexorable change, and man himself is subject to time, weakness and age. Hrothgar has now passed his prime, and creatures of darkness prey on his fading glory.

Grendel and his dam are embodiments of primordial evil, the outcast forces of destruction who hate the order of Heorot with satanic jealousy. Hrothgar can no longer hold them at bay, and Beowulf in his shining 'war-gear' — the young hero from across the sea — is the only figure who can counter their power. When Grendel and his mother have been slain, a period of celebration ensues. There is rejoicing in victory and Beowulf's strength. Treasure is lavished on the hero and he returns home with his fame immeasurably increased. Hrothgar's words in the mids of proud success cannot however be forgotten:

        Put away arrogance,

noble fighter! The noon of your strenght 

shall last for a while now, but in a little time 

sickness of the sword will strip it from you:

either enfolding flame or a flood's billow

or a knife-stab or the stoop of a spear

or the ugliness of age; or your eyes' brightness

lessens and grows dim. Death shall soon 

have beaten you then. O brave warrior!

This speech is the pivot of the poem. It combines a love of heroism and conventional wisdom with a view of man poised between the brightness of youthful achievement and the shadow of death. If the first half of the work is a record of glory, we now move to a more somber view.

The last section of Beowulf describes the ageing hero's defeat in his struggle against the dragon. The whole encounter is suffused with pessimism and the meanness of the man who has stolen the dragon's gold. With his spirit 'gloomy, deah-eager, wandering', Beowulf himself seems to realize there is somehting fatal in this last encounter, a corrosion of confidence that eats away at the heart of the heroic ideal. In the heat of battle, all his companions save one desert him. As the dying hero offers his kingship to his last loyal retainer, so the glory do a nation withers away. Death and exile wait for all, and heroism passes into poetic legend.

2

 

The anonymous author of Beowulf drew on traditional resources to present an all-involving view of man and the supernatural, war and peace, life and death. This helps give his work its status as a heroic elegy. Great churchmen such as Alcuin of York (735-804) however had long asked what verse fundamentally sympathetic to a pagan culture could have to do with Christian salvation. This was a serious challenge to the older tradition, and a passage from The Ecclesiastical History of the English People, written in Latin by the Venerable Bede (probably 673-735) suggests how it was resolved. 

Bede relates that when the harp was passed to the devout but unlearned Caedmon (late seventh century) he would rise from the company rather han expose his ignorance and distaste for pagan convention. One evening when this had happened and Caedmon had retreated to the cowshed, a figure appeared to him in a dream and commanded him to sing. 'What should I sing about?' the bewildered Caedmon asked. 'Sing about the creation of all things,' the figure replied. Bede says that Caedmon promply improvided the following verses:

Now we must praise the Keeper of Heaven's Kingdom,

The Maker's might, and his conception

The deed of the Father of Glory; as He of all wonders

— The Eternal Lord — established the beginning.

He first created for the children of men

Heaven as a roof, the Holy Shaper;

Then Middle Earth did Mankind's Keeper,

The Eternal Lord, afterward ordain,

The earth of men, thee Almighty Lord.

In thse nine lines Caedmon had drawn heavily on the traditional 'wordhoard', but epìthets previously reserved for pagan warriors have now been applied to the Christian God. When Caedmon was taken before St. Hild, Abbess of Whitby, she and her learned advisers were so impressed that Caedmon was made a lay brother and offered instruction in order that he might versify the whole Christian story and so teach the people.

For Bede, concerned above all to show the operation of the divine in English history, Caedmon's discovery of his vocation was an act of God. What his account more certainly shows is how an important cultural problem was exposed and then solved by a creative intuition, an imaginative leap we may well choose to call inspired. In Caedmon's 'Creation-Hymn', two apparently contradictory cultures were reconciled and Old English poetry was joined to the great tradition of European Christianity. An enormous artistic advance had been made, and scholars sometimes refer to this as the Caedmonian revolution. What is less often recognized is the role played in this process by St. Hild. A woman of commanding personality, and respected as such by Bede, the intelligence and foresight with which she used the important place offered her by her society require that she too be seen as a central figure in the making of English literature. 

Though Bede goes on to describe how Caedmon versified a wide range of biblical events, modern scholars suggest that the remaining eighth-century Christian poems in Old English are the work of Caedmon's followers. One such poet is known by name. The verse of Cynewulf (late eight or ninth century) lies firmly within contemporary patterns of Christian devotion and scholarship, motifs to which the poet in such works as Elene brings both his culture's natural regard for able women and an often skiful use of the formulas of Germanic heroic verse. These last were also used by the anonymous author of Genesis who delighted in describing God and the angesl in terms of a warlod and his warriors, while heaven itself becomes an image of the earthly mead hall.

In Exodus, the flight of the Israelites and the crossing of the Red Sea are again imagined in terms of epic poetry, but to these effects the poet adds traditions of scriptural interpretation learned from the church fathers. Beneath the adventure there lies a serious spiritual purpose. Just as the Israelites are shown gaining the Promised Land, so Christians may enter the kingdom of God. Events in the Old Testament thus prefigure those in the New and teach all men of their salvation. This method of allegorical interpretation was to be of great importance to writers for many centuries to come, and they applied it not just to the Old and New Testaments. The whole world could be seen as an image of spiritual truth. In The Whale, for example, the great beast represents the Devil who lies in wait for unwary men, swallows them and drags them down to the depths of hell. Even wholly imaginary animlas could be made to serve religious instruction. In The Phoenix, the fabulous bird, leaving its earthly paradise to die and be reborn, becomes an image of Christ's passion and resurrection. 

Such works suggest how the church and its poets believed the true function of art was not simply to release feeling but to teach others and enhance devotion. A poem might give pleasure but it should also do something spiritually useful. It should help its hearer to pray and to assist in the most important duty of life—the pursuit of salvation. It is against such a background that we should read the masterpiece of Old English devotional verse, The Dream of the Rood (c. 700).

Rood is Old English for a cross, and this most famous symbol of the Christian faith appears in the narrator's dream encrusted with gold and reaching out over the whole world. At once bleeding and glorious, the cross is an image of shame and redemption—a uniquely powerful fusion of Anglo-Saxon culture with New Testament love. Christ is portrayed as the young warrior standing to embrace death and victory,  while the cross itself takes on the burden of his suffering. When it speaks to the narrator of Christ's eager sacrifice and its own humiliation, the poet's skilful handling of words and emotion—his rhetoric—makes us feel we are present at the Passion itself:

I was reared up, a rood.

    I raised the great King

liege lord of the heavens,

    dared not lean from the true.

They drove me through with dark nails:

    on me are the deep wounds manifest,

wide-mouthed hate-dents.

    I durst not harm any of them.

How they mocked at us both!

    I was all moist with blood

sprung from the Man's side

    after He sent forth His soul.

 

As the poet of The Dream of the Rood obliges us to relive the agony of the Crucifixion, so his art stirs our pity and gratitude. We become ever more conscious of human sin. At the close of the work, when the poet's vision has faded, he offers a final and moving image of himself as devout Christian alone on the worthless earth and longing to be reunited with the cross in heaven.

The heroism, sense of transitoriness and ardour for salvation that characterize The Dream of the Rood are also seen in some of the Elegies, that mighty handful of poems gathered in the Exeter Book, one of four manuscripts dating from about the year 1000 in which the greater part of Old English verse is preserved. The names by which these eighth-century poems have come to be known are The Wanderer, The Seafarer, The Ruin, The Wife's Lament, The Huisbands's Message and Wulf and Eadwacer. Each concerns loss and isolation, and coldly through the greatest of them blows a salt-edged wind and a knowledge of the heaving wastes of the sea. These build to a sense of universal desolation. 

A wise man may grasp how ghastly it shall be

when all this world's wealth standeth waste,

even as now, in many places, over the earth

walls stand, wind-beaten,

hung with hoar-frost; ruined habitations.

Such pessimism remains profoundly moving, but as we come to know more intimately the rhetorical image of themselves that these poets fashioned, so we can also begin to see how the narrators of The Wanderer and The Seafarer were deeply responsive to the Christian view of existence as this was formulated towards the much feared end of the first millennium. Aware of the anger of God towards the sinful soul, these poets present exemplary Christian images of themselves as strangers and sojourners in a corrupt and corrupting world.The author of The Seafarer in particular suggests that the true image of the righteous man is of a traveller or pilgrim on his way thorugh the snares of mortal life to the eternal and heavenly Jerusalem. Such an image not only underlies some of the finest Old English poetry, but was to be developed by many of the greates writers of the Middle Ages.

3

It is recorded that Alfred the Great (reigned 871-901) was keenly interested in Old English verse, but Alfred's literary concerns are principally associated with the revival of written prose and hence that crucial cultural achievement: the preservation of a body of advanced thought on which others could draw to describe their world. Books—rare, valuable and open to only the tiny minority of the literate—were now to take on their vital role as the repositories of what is known. 

In Alfred's Wessex, the writing of such books was an urgent matter. Repeated Viking raids, cutting ever deeper into the kingdoms of England, had resulted in the sacking of churches and the burning of libraries. The centres of knowledge were being destroyed. When Alfred had finally forced the Vikings into retreat, he realized that to build his kingdom afresh he would have to develop its language and revive the learning once preserved by churchmen such as Bede. Literacy was clearly essential to this, but since Latin (for centuries the international medium of scholarship) had fallen into decay over most of England, the native tongue would have to serve. Its use in government and the law, in church matters and education, would stretch the resources of Old English to their limit and be a powerful force for national unity. 

When peace was at last assured, Alfred wrote to the bishops saying that it seemed best to him, provided it did so to them, that they now 'turn into the language we all understand certain books most necessary for all men to know'. To revive the tradition of knowledgte, Alfred would, with the help of scholars from England and abroad, translate the wisdom of the Latin and Christian classics into the language of his time. These translations include the Dialogues of St Gregory (trans. c. 880), one of the most influential fathers of the church. The fact that Alfred chose to translate this collection of saints' lives suggests he was determined to create for his people—such young men at least as could be spared from the army or the production of food—a literature of exemplary Christian conduct. Alfred's version of Gregory's Pastoral Care further shows how he wanted to place his own rule and that of his senior administrators on a firm intellectual basis, for Pastoral Care describes the moral and spiritual qualities required of those who have the government of others.

To provide his subjects with a sense of historical continuity, Alfred had an edited translation of Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People prepared. This work tells, with a critical concern for accuracy unique in its time, the history of England subsequent to the arrival fo St. Augustine of Canterbury as a missionary in 597. This event had helped establish the Roman Church as the focus of the country's European culture, and Bede's illustration of the then common belief that history is a moral pattern shaped by the hand of God would be a fundamental notion influencing writers for centuries to come. Finally, two further translations by Alfred himself reveal his more personal concerns. His version of the first fifty of the Psalms expresses the emotional side of his piety, while his work on Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy (the book which, more than any other, handed down the classical inheritance of reason to the Middle Ages) shows Alfred's interest in developing a language for abstract and critical thought. 

Alfred's revival of literacy was sustained by many others. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (c. 871-1154), for example, is a laconic record of contemporary national events and thus an important source of information for Alfred's and subsequent reigns. It survived the Norman Conquest, and entries in the version from Peterborough (one of the seven centres at which the Chronicle was kept) continue into the harrowingly described reign of King Stephen (1135-54). While the narrative rarely rises to the level of literary interest, what is chiefly remarkable about the work is its very simplicity at a time when Latin authors in England and abroad were striving for elaborate rhetorical effect.

Conscious artifice and a concern with style and fluency were clearly of interest among later writers of Old English prose. This is particularly true of those associated with the Benedictine revival which took place during the reing of King Edgar (959-75). In this prolific period, during which many of the manuscripts in which Old English verse survives were written, the learning fostered by Alfred was placed on a firm foundation after the troubles that succeeded his reign.

The importance of Benedictine monasteries as institutions for preserving scholarship can hardly be overemphasized. The value placed on learning by St Benedict himself (the founder of Western monasticism) resulted in the making of digests or florilegia of the classical writers and theologians. These traditions of literacy were then passed on by an educational system based on the trivium or the skills of Latin grammar, rhetoric (the techniques of shaping language into persuasive and effective forms) and logic, the rational ordering of ideas. Such are the foundations of medieval and later scholarship. They were brought to bear on Old English by the ecclesiastical requirement to preach in the native tongue. For many centuries the sermon, educating people in what were held to be their spiritual, social and political duties, was an important force in preserving and developing the language. A quantity of alliterative prose sermons survives from the tenth century. Some of these, forcibly decrying the evils of the age, see further Viking raids as a divine punishment foretelling the end of the world.

It is the particular mark of Old English prose in this last great period however that it proved itself capable of dealing with almost any subject, be it history, romantic adventure such as we find in the translation Apollonius of Tyre (c. 1050), righteous indignation or the subtleties of theological argument. The lucid, powerful homilies of Aelfric (d. 1020) and Wulfstan (d. 1023) reveal a complete mastery of the medium and show how fifty years before the Norman Conquest southern England especially had, along with a remarkable body of poetic achievement, the most advanced prose literature of any region in Europe.

Anglo-Saxon Prose

—oOo—

 

Macpherson, Chatterton, Gray, Crabbe, Cowper, Smart

From The Penguin Short History of English Literature, by Stephen Coote.

Scots literary critics such as Hugh Blair (1718-1800) were now concerned with the working of the creative imagination, while Blair himself had also been impresssed with the Fragmentsw of Ancient Poetry Collected in the Highlands of Scotland and translated from the Gaelic or Erse Language (1760) by James Macpherson (1736-96). Blair had just been appointed Regius Professor of Rhetoric at the University of Edinburgh—essentially the first professor of English literature—and he was a scholar of formidable range. Though he was living in a great age of contemporary Gaelic poetry, Blair seems to have been interested less in this than in the lure held by Macpherson's volume which appeared to suggest that some of his fragments of Gaelic poetry belonged to an epic describing the ancient wars of Fingal. In 1762, Macpherson, who clearly had some knowledge of the Gaelic ballads, obligingly produced his Fingal, an Ancient Epic Poem, in Six Books: together with several other poems, composed by Ossian the son of Fingal, Translated from the Gaelic Language.

Macpherson's poem was a learned forgery or pastiche that took Europe by storm. Here, it was widely believed, was a new Homer, a bard who had emerged from a primitive society with an epic that was both tender and sublime. Genuine publications such as Percy's Five Pieces of Runic Poetry (1763) and Evan Evans's Specimens of the Poetry of the Ancient Welsh Bards (1764) went largely unread while the public surrendered to more heady pleasures. 'Weep on the rocks of roaring winds, O maid of Inistore! Bend thy fair head over the waves, thou lovelier than the ghost of the hills, —when it moves, in a sun beam, at noon, over the silence of Morven! He is fallen! thy youth is low! pale beneath the sword of Cuthullin!"

Another literary forgery also created an imagined past. Between 1768 and 1770, Thomas Chatterton (1752-70) imagined a medieval version of his native Bristol centred on the monk Thomas Rowley and his circle. Seven years after Chatterton's suicide, the great Chaucerian scholar Thomas Tyrwitt edited the poems, and controversy raged about their authenticity. Though there are clear traces of eighteenth-century sentiment in poems such as 'An Excelente Balade of Charitie' (and many of the discerning immediately saw through them) the pathos of Chatterton's early death was, for later generations, to provide an image of the dreaming artist crushed by a heedless society. Further, Chatterton's metrical experiments were to influence Coleridge and Scott, just as the novel play on vowels and consonants in the 'Mynstrelles Songe' from Aella: A Tragycal Enterlude was to beguile Keats.

Many traits in the verse of this period are brought together in the work of one of the finest poets of the late eighteenth century: Thomas Gray (1716-71). While on the Grand Tour with Horace Walpole (1717-97)—that central figure in contemporary taste—Gray had crossed the mighty valley of the Grande Chartreuse and been suitably impressed by the sublime. When Gray and Walpole had parted, Gray returned to the scene alone and was moved to write his Latin 'Alcaic Ode'. Here an intense response to the sublime is joined to the private sensibility of the learned poet in retreat. this is a central feature in some of Gray's finest work, and was to be deepened by a pressing awareness of human anguish. This last is particularly clear in three poems Gray wrote in 1742 after his friend West's early death: the 'Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College', the 'Ode to Adversity' and the 'Sonnet on the Death of Richard West'.

The Eton College ode is prefaced by a Greek epigraph that may be translated: 'I am a man, a sufficient cause for being unhappy.' It is this learned, suffering voice of experience which describes the innocent pardise of a boyhood like Gray's own, setting it amid Gothic beauty and balancing its heedless joy against personifications of anguish suggestive of the tragic sublime and a conventional moral wisdom as old as Sophocles. In the 'Ode to Adversity', the Greek tragedians are again an inspiration, while the language, as in the 'Ode to Spring', i tis consciously learned and artificial.

The 'Ode to Spring' especially reveals a tissue of borrowing from Milton and others, and suggests that Gray's poetry requires not only an alert sensibility but what, amid the many concerns discussed in his correspondence (and, with Horace Walpole, Gray was one of the masters of the eighteenth-century letter), the poet called 'a long acquaintance with the good writers ancient and modern'. In Gray's poetry, the learned and literary imagination, spurred by allusion, rises to revelation of the sublime. This required a heighened diction. 'The language of the age is never the language of poetry', Gray declared, but at is best—as in the 'Sonnet on the Death of Mr. Richard West'—such artifice is not pursued to the point of frigid mannerism. Here, the terse expression of 'lonely anguish' is so intense that it sunders the poet from the familiar concepts of his art. The desolation is thereby all the more acute.

Gray was capable of burlesquing his learned manner as he shows in his 'Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat, Drowned in a Tub of Gold Fishes'. In the 'Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard' (1751) however he created a work which, in Dr. Johnson's words, 'abounds with images which find a mirror in every mind, and with sentiments to which every bosom returns an echo'. The 'Elegy' remains one of the best loved of English poems. The melancholy meditation in the Gothic churchyard is uttered by an intense sensibility that rounds the subtle play of vowel sounds into seemingly timeless description. The felicitous melancholy (so superior to Young's strained labourings) is then contrasted to luminous images of life and love which make existence itself—however evanescent and hard done by—all the more precious. From this contrast arise those lines especially praised by Dr. Johnson for their originality and univeral pathos:

For who to dumb Forgetfulness a prey

This pleasing anxious being e'er resigned,

Left the warm precincts of the cheerful day,

Nor cast one longing lingering look behind? 

Such awareness is the right even of the virtuous poor, but its throbbing intensity is the particular province of the poet. The concluding section of the 'Elegy' presents Gray's first full image of his conception of the poet as the familiar of nature and the frenzy of inspiration, the victim of inevitable death and the representative of unworldly integrity. 

In 'The Progress of Poesy' (written 1751-4, published 1757), Gray revealed his conventional belief (expressed by Thomson among others) that truly inspired poetry is a life-enhancing source of peace and joy intimately connected with political liberty—with 'the unconquerable Mind and Freedom's holy flame'. As the ode develops, so Gray Shows how Poesy, retreating to Rome after the collapse of ancient Greek democracy, eventually alighted in England to inspire Shakespeare, Milton and Dryden. Gray consciously places himself in the tradition, cruelly aware of a dwindling order of merit yet satirically contracting his own integrity to the enfeebled and corrupting power of 'the Great' of his day.

In 'The Bard: A Pindaric Ode' (1757), this equation of inspired poetry with a free nation becomes Gray's principal subject. His central figure of the Druid was not a fortuitous choice, for the Druids were seen as patriot poet-priests and spokesmen of a 'Gothic liberty'. These were themes readily joined to the contemporary interest in the ancient resources of the northern European tradition. Gray himself—as part of a never completed history of English poetry—translated a number of Scandinavian fragments, suggesting their association with the sublime byh calling such pieces as 'The Descent of Odin' and 'The Fatal Sisters' (1757) odes. A visit to Scotland had rekindled his awareness of the natural sublme, while he was inspired to complete 'The Bard' by the visit of a blind Welsh harper to Cambridge where Gray had spent the greater part of his life in scholarly retreat.

'The Bard' fuses these interests in one magnificent set piece based on the now disproved idea that, although Edward I supposedly slaughtered the Welsh bards in 1283, their works, as Gray wrote in his notebooks, 'still remain, the Language (tho' decaying) still lives, and the art of their versification is known and practised to this day among them'. It was an art also practised by Gray himself in the internal rhymes of the Bard's speech as, having prophesied theruin of Edward's house and the revival of poetry with the coming of the Welsh Tudors, the last of the priestly line hurls himself from his precipice to the freedom of death:

'... Enough for me: with joy I see
the different doom our fates assign.
Be thine despair and sceptered care;
To triumph, and to die are mine.'
He spoke, and headlong from the mountain's height
Deep in the roaring tide he plunged to endless night.

Prophecy and the sublime, poetry, freedom and the imaginative resources of history are here joined in one powerful image. 'I felt myself the Bard,' Gray declared, and through his widely influential metaphor he could say things he couldnever utter in his own person.

A number of Gray's poems such as 'The Candidate' (1764), written against the corrupt Earl of Sandwich's election to the Hight Stewardship of Cambridge University, show the force of his satirical venom. This incident was also the subject of a similarly entitled poem by the prolific Charles Churchill (1732-64), a political radical who is perhaps best known for his Rosciad (1761), a satire on the acting profession. Other satirists such as Christopher Anstey (1724-1805) in his New Bath Guide (1766), a collection of verse letters which uses the anacreontic metre of Gray's 'The Candidate', took satire in the direction of light verse.

An altogether more profound vein of moral commentary is to be found in the work of George Crabbe (1754-1832), a poet who, in his long career, was admired by figures as diverse as Jane Austen and Byron. The Village (1783), with its depiction of poverty in the bleak Suffolk coast, marks Crabbe's out as an original poetic sensibility, the work of a man who used the conventions of the heroic couplet show his local world. 'As Truth will have it, but as Bards will not'. Crabbe's gift of observation led him to describe the lives neither of the rich nor of pastoral poverty but of the 'middling classes'. This was a new realm for poetry where, Crabbe believed,

more originality, more variety of fortune, will be met with because, on the one hand, they do not live in the eye of the world, and, therefore, are not kept in awe by the dread of observation and indecorum; neither, on the other hand, are they debarred by their want of means from the cultivation of mind and the pursuits of wealth and ambition, which are necessarily to the development of character displayed in the variety of situations to which this class is liable.

The Parish Register  (1803) is a series of sketches of village manners, but it is 'Peter Grimes' from The Borough (1810) that shows Crabbe's ability to unite psychological drama with description and unobtrusive moral suggestion. Drunken sadism, the exploitation of children and their deaths while in Grimes's hideous employ lead to his psychological exile and spiritual collapse. Crabbe's presentation of this state through landscape description is powerful, profound and precise:

There anchoring, Peter chose from man to hide,
There hang his head, and view the lazy tide
In its hot slimy channel slowly glide;
Where the small eels that left the deeper way
From the warm shore, within the shallows play;
Where gaping mussels, left upon the mud,
Slope their slow passage to the fallen flood;—
Here dull and hopeless he'd lie down and trace
How sidelong crabs had scrawled their crooked race;
Or sadly listen to the tuneless cry
Of fishing gull or clanging golden-eye . . . 

Another considerable poet began his career with satire before being obliged by periods of spiritual despair into some of the most profound areas of eighteenth-century religious poetry. In 1782, William Cowper (1731-1800) published his Table-Talk. Cowper's satirirst figure is specifically Christian in the values by which he measures a corrupt society. Rather more successful however is The Task (1785). This is a poem covering a miscellany of subjects and modes from Miltonic parody and mock-georgic, through fresh natural description (often moralized, as it is again in 'Yardley Oak' and 'The Poplar-Field'), to social comment on the local poor and the abuses of the slave trade. We are throughout aware of Cowper's Christian humanitarianism, an awareness sometimes heightened by the spiritual reflections of Cowper the 'stricken deer', a man living in precious domestic cheerfulness and peeping out at the world 'through loopholes of retreat'.

Cowper himself wrote that The Task was not composed 'to serve occasions of poetic pomp', and its combination of detailed domesticity and nervous personal revelation (characteristics found again in his sometimes sprightly letters) is also seen in a more moving form in the couplets of 'On the Receipt of my Mother's Picture Out at Norfolk' (1790, published 1798). This combination of detailed local description and personal reflection was to influence a later generation of poets—Coleridge especially—but it is neither here nor in his comic mock ballad 'The Diverting History of John Gilpin' that Cowper's finest powers lay. His spiritual melacholia made him an excellent poet of religious experience. He collaborated with John Newton (1725-1807) in the Olney Hymns (1779), for example, Cowper himself writing two of the best known: 'God moves in a mysterious way' and the more personal 'Oh for a closer walk with God'.

Both these works reveal a faith longed for and finally won through a surrender to divine mercy, but it is as the poet of religious despair—of the anguished voice convinced of the soul's damnation—that Cowper is seen at his most powerful and experimental. The Sapphic stanzas of 'Hatred and vengeance'—often known as 'Lines Written during a Period of Insanity'—grate on the ear with the terror of a man 'fed with judgement, in a fleshly tomb'. The most fearful of these works however is 'The Castaway'. Based on an incident in Richard Walter's Voyage round the World . . . by George Anson (1748), Cowper's nightmare picture of death by drowning is given a terrible personal application in the final stanzas: 

No voice divine the storm allayed,
    No light propitious shone,
When, snatched from all effective aid,
    We perished, each alone:
But I beneath a rougher sea,
And whelmed in deeper gulphs than he.

The scholarly investigarion of past literature which inspired so many poets was also to affect one of the greatest and most original of eighteenth-century hymn writers: Christopher Smart (1722-71). Smart knew the lectures delivered by Robert Lowth (1710-87) at Oxford on the sacred peotry of the Hebrews and was familiar with Lowth's investigation of the parallelism in the Psalms especially. In the last decade of his life, after writing much conventional work and while restrained in a lunatic asylum for religious mania, Smar wrote A Song to David (1763) and Jubilate Agno or 'Rejoice in the Lamb' (1759-63, published 1939). Both poems rhapsodically praise the wisdom of God in the creation.

Cowper's despair and Smart's exaltation are far removed from the blandness of much eighteenth-century Anglicanism. Dissent, too, had become moribund, and the spiritual vacuum was filled by a new voice: 'I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt that I did trust in Christ, Christ alone for salvation, and an assurance was given me that he had taken my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death.' These are the words of John Wesley (1703-91), whose Journal (1739) records his spiritual trials, his fervent open-air preaching and his highly influential brand of emotive Puritanism stripped of radical politics. Methodism, originally designed as a spiritual exercise within the Anglican Church, was intensely moral, socially conservative and thrift-conscious, yet emotional to the point of hysteria, anti-intellectual and even philistine in its attitudes. It was to become, nonetheless, a force of profound social cohesion, especially among those of the middle and working classes to whom other institutions remained closed. 

Wesley himself combined the theological force of a Luther with the administrative genius of a Calvin, and along with his innumerable wermons, he and his brother Charles (1707-88) were the authors of some 3,000 hymns. These include 'Love divine, all loves excelling' and 'Hail the day that sees him rise'. Along with a wealth of other Nonconformist work, the hymns of the later eighteenth century reveal the exceptional influence of popular verse in creating social and religious attitudes.

Blake, William

—oOo—

Some notes on John Donne

(from The Penguin Short History of English Literature, by Stephen Coote; 1993; "From Donne to Dryden", I)

While playwrights of the early seventeenth century were fashioning language into a supreme theatrical medium, other poets were submitting lyric, satire and elegy to a searching re-examination. The most brilliant of these figures was John Donne (1572-1631).

Donne's was a life of passionate intellectual and personal drama. Reared as a Roman Catholic in a protestant nation state, aware of being part of a group often summoned to suffering and martyrdom, Donne called the basis of his creed in doubt and read and questioned his way towards a hard-won, restless Anglicanism. Yet the man who annotated nearly fifteen hundred works of theology and argument was not a mere bookish recluse. Donne was a soldier of fortune, the author of perhaps the finest collection of love lyrics in the language and a man whose naked ambition and sheer recklessness traped him at servile hopes of court patronage. From these he was finally called to the deanery of St Paul's and emerged as one of the most popular preachers and mighty poets of Christian salvation.

Donne's early prose Paradoxes (published 1633) give an indication of the manner of his thought. When he argues that 'a wise man is known by much laughing' or proves 'the gifts of the body are better than those of the mind', Donne was writing in a long-established rhetorical tradition. The plenitude of his inventiveness however suggests a skeptical fascination with the workings of reason as these are revealed through the display of wit.

Wit as ingenuity — the creation of far-fetched arguments or conceits — was a prized rhetorical achievement, and Donne's skill earned him the highest praise from his contemporaries. For later critics such as Dryden and Dr Johnson however, men working in different modes of literary decorum, such effects supposedly revealed a lack of taste which earned Donne and his followers the misleading name of 'metaphysical'. They were accused of linking together recondite ideas, and so failing to achieve the central and classical voice of broad human experience. It took later generations of critics, first Coleridge and then T. S. Eliot, to rediscover in Donne's poetry the thought of a complex and very masculine brain, one which dwelt on the nature of its own perceptions and, by bringing a passionately critical intellect to bear on the traditions of rhetoric, revealed its force through the quality of its wit.

Such wit is often allied to worldly cynicism in Donne's Elegies and Satires, works which pay tribute to the classics by revolutionising them. The Elegies, for example, frequently surpass their Ovidian model in the sceptical analysis of base human motive, in the sheer versatility of 'The Autumnal' and, above all, in the sensual, colloquial force, the vividly re-enacted drama, of 'His Picture' and 'To his Mistress Going to Bed'. In this last work, a new style of love poetry comes to maturity as Donne re-creates the appearance of passionately articulate self-awareness:

License my roving hands, and let them go
Before, behind, between, above, below.
O my America, my new found land,
My kingdom, safeliest when with one man manned,
My mine of precious sones, my empery,
How blest am I in this discovering thee! 
To enter in these bonds, is to be free;
Then where my hand is set, my seal shall be.

empery: empire

This passage is one of the great achivements of seventeenth-century erotic wit, a combination of passion and artifice that seems to re-create the wonder and excitement of sexual arousal itself. The woman is a virgin continent to be explored for her hidden wealth and 'manned'. Such puns, as in Shakespeare's Sonnets, lead to profound emotional insights. In the last line, for example, the poet in bed, naked and erect, envisages his body as a seal which, in the act of love, will validate the union of the lovers themselves. This appearance of a dramatised self — a central feature in all Donne's work — is conveyed here through a language at once knotty, colloquial and capable of supreme sensuousness. Donne's 'strong lines', as contemporaries called them, can thus be seen as a liberating force of criticism which swept away nymphs and goddesses, pining Petrarchan lovers and a melliflousness of tone that all too easily sank to servile imitation.

In the Satires, Donne was concerned to develop what some contemporaries thought they had discovered in Latin satire: the harsh tones of classical moral outrage. In Joseph Hall's Virgidemiarum (1597) and his rival John Marston's Scourge of Villanie (1598), for example, we hear the 'savage indignation' of Juvenal and what was believed to be the dense syntax of Persius. These are re-created through the 'persona' or assumed personality of the intellectually superior malcontent. Though Donne could also clothe a moral type in the foolish fashions of the day, he had an alert sense of the relative foolishness of all human activity, whether this be the teeming life of the streets and court or his own scholarship. With 'Satire III', such scepticism becomes a matter of intense personal seriousness, for this is the work to which Donne criticized the aberrations of all Christian sects in his search for 'true religion'. The tough syntax of the poem is not a literary affectation but the voice of a great intellect in turmoil:

To adore, or scorn an image, or protest,
May all be bad; doubt wisely, in strange way
To sand inquiring right, is not to stray;
To sleep, or run wrong is. On a huge hill,
Cragged, and steep, Truth stands, and he that will
Reachher, about must, and about must go;
And what the hill's suddenness resists, win so:
Yet strive so, that before age, death's twilight,
Thy soul rest, for none can work in that night,
To will, implies delay, therefore do now.

Donne's wit is here the medium of his radical play of mind. It is the discourse of a restlessly argumentative intellect which dramatizes aspects of a complex and obsessive intelligence. Clearly, this is not the verse of Sidney's 'right popular philosopher' proceeding through formal logic and ornament to settled verities.  An acutely questioning self-awareness has intervened to make Donne's the poetry of a highly civilized small group such as that gathered round the great literary patron Lucy, Countess of Bedford (d. 1627), a coterie that was sufficiently daring to question convention in pursuit of the fresh and tougher truths of experience. It was also a group sufficiently small to subsiste on the passing of manuscripts. The greater part of Donne's poems were published posthumously by his son. They are thus the records of a poetic revolution wrought among the few.

Such qualities can be seen again in the love lyrics that make up Donne's Songs an Sonnets. These were probably written over some twenty years. None can be readily dated, and few if any should be given a precise biographical significance. Each however concentrates with a unique rhetoric the colloquial force and erotic passion of the other early works, while the testing, inclusive reference of their wit invariably dramatizes aspects of relationship. These may be cynical, sensuous, mystically celebratory, or give voice to a mournful sense of loss.

Donne's cynical lyrics vary between the flippancy of 'Go, and catch a falling star' and the more intricate worldly satire of 'Love's Alchemy' and the 'Farewell to love' with its ironic and closely observed analysis of the demystification of desire in post-coital enervation. Persuasions to love itself sometimes attain the outrageous casuistry of 'The Flea'. Here, a girl's loss of honour in surrendering her virginity is compared to the loss of blood suffered in a flea bite which, since the flea has bitten the poet too, mixes the blood of both man and woman in its shell, even as the lover's bed will join their bodies.

In 'The Ecstasy', by contrast, Donne discussed with witty yet passionate rigour the deepest relation between shared spiritual love and the natural needs of the body. United, these offer that rapture which is the subject of 'The Dream' and 'The Good Morrow'. These poems are among the great celebrations of intimacy in English literature. It is perhaps in 'The Sun Rising' however that Donne's combination of stanza form and speech rhythm, observation of the world and celebration of the idea that the lovers in their bed are the world, is most wittily yet profoundly expressed. The tradition of the aubade, or the lover's lament for the coming of dawn, is there transformed as the poet seeks to persuade the sun to irradiate a triumphant and mutual passion:

Thy beams, so reverend, and strong
Why shouldst thou think?
I could eclipse and cloud them with a wink,
But that I would not lose her sight so long:
     If her eyes have not blinded thine,
     Look, and tomorrow late, tell me, 
  Whether both th'Indias of spice and mine
  Be where thou left'st them, or lie here with me.
Ask for those kings whom thou saws'st yesterday,
And thou shalt hear, All here in one bed lay.

both th'Indias: the East and West Indies.

Such deep erotic satisfaction is also the subject of 'The Anniversary', 'Love's Growth' and 'The Canonization'. In these works we again see Donne as one of the supreme analysts of passion fulfilled, a man drawing on the notions of scholasticism for conceits that convey a sense of wonder all the more mireculous for the sceptical intellect that apprehends it.

Such learned references in Donne's poetry were drawn from a memory stocked with the arcana and commonplaces of science and theology, and were then juxtaposed to sharply immediate perception. By a transforming paradox, this meeting of opposites frquently 'interanimates' both, and from this flows a new awareness of the complexity of experience. In poems such as 'The Canonization', for example, the doctrine of the intercession of saints suggests how rare yet powerful is a mutual human relationship. In 'Air and Angels', adapting Aquinas's belief that God permits the heavenly hosts assume a body of condensed air in order to appear to men, Donne shows a lover's progress between a too acute sensuousness and a too ethereal idealism:

   Every thy hair for love to work upon
Is much too much, some fitter must be sought:
   For, nor in nothing, nor in things
Extreme, and scatt'ring bright, can love inhere;
   Then as an angel, face, and wings
Of air, not pure as it, yet pure doth wear,
   So thy love may be my love's sphere;
        Just such disparity 
As is 'twixt air and angels' purity,
'Twixt women's love, and men's will ever be.

Love itself is here irradiated with a sense of the divine. But if Donne's is a voice of celebration, he is occasionally a great poet of love's defeat. We see this particularly in 'Twicknam Garden' and, above all, in one of his finest works, 'A Noctural upon S. Lucy's Day, Being the Shortest Day'. Here the desolation of a love occluded by death offers a sense of universal loss, the nothingness of the bereaved and learned self as it seeks a greater darkness in which to prepare for spiritual truth:

Since she enjoys her long night's festival,
Let me preparare towards her, and let me call
This hour her vigil, and her eve, since this
Both the year's, and the day's deep midnight is.

With the death of the beloved, the poet becomes an eremite devoted to the holy service of his departed saint.

Although such poems seem to touch an unworldly ardour, Donne was in fact very much concerned with the world at this stage of his careeer. Hence his writing of verse letters, obsequies and occasional pieces to aristocratic figures. These can sometimes seem mannered and over-ingeniously flattering when compared to his major and more popular work. Nonetheless, while it is right to see some of these verses as the poet's labours as he drudged for patronage — a necessary task in a society where advancement lay in the gift of the great — it is also important not to miss their discussion of attitudes crucial to Donne's maturing thought.

Amid the compliment and professions of friendship, for example, we are offered glimpses of a corrupt and perilous world of relative values, disillusion and vulnerability, the futility and spite of fallen man. In 'The Storm' and 'The Calm' — perhaps the most stimulating of Donne's Epistles — he also debunked the heroic pretensions of the military adventures in which he followed Essex and Ralegh. What in Hakluyt might be a chronicle of national endeavour, here becomes a re-creation of diminishingly painful experience raised to an almost surreal intensity by prodigious wit.

Such techniques are further developed in those most bizarre works The Progress of the Soul and the two Anniversaries (1611-12). These last were written to commemorate the death of Elizabeth Drury, a girl Donne had never seen, and were then printed by her influential father. Donne was later to regret this publicity both as a stain on his gentleman's amateur status and because these essays in extreme hyperbole were persistently misunderstood. What Donne was here concerned to achieve however was a contrast between the powers of Christian innocence imagined in his ideal of Elizabeth Drury and the decay of a corrupt, fallen world. The issue was thus between faith and virtue on the one hand and the toils of worlliness on the other. It is an old theme, but one examined here in the glare of new problems, in particular that scepticism which was to transform the intellectual life of the century.

At its most fundamental, the scepticism with which Donne had already approached literay convention challenged the ordered world inherited from Aquinas and the scholastics. It declared that ultimate truth cannot be approached by reason alone since, in a notion given classic formulation by Montaigne in The Apology for Raymond Sebond (c. 1576), reason works only on sense data and cannot be definitively checked. The central questions that sprang from this dilemma were whether and how one may know God — in other words, is belief a matter of faith or reason? — and whether and how one may gain a knowledge of the physical world — in other words, is fact only opinion or can some enquiries be verified?

In the Anniversaries, Donne set his face against the empirical investigation of nature that was soon to prove if not the final answer to these questions then at least their most powerful reply. He suggests that to let oneself be 'taught by sense, and Fantasy' is only to pile up useless and pedantic confusion. If the new astronomy of Galileo and Copernicus shows that the universe is not the regular, serene construct of the scholastics, then that is not a stimulus to inventing new theories, but proof that the physical world is irremediably corrupt. If the links in the great chain of being are broken, then matters are worse than ever we thought:

    new philosophy calls all in doubt,
The element of fire is quite put out;
The sun is lost, and th'earth, and no mans wit
Can well direct him where to look for it.
And freely men confess that this world's spent,
When in the planets, and the firmament 
They seek so many new; they see that this 
Is crumbled out again to his atomies.
'Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone.

 Donne's answer to this predicament was 'fideism': not sharper telescopes but intenser prayer, not knowledge but virtue, not science but faith. When the soul, shot like a bullet from a rusted gun, courses through the celestial spheres, Donne shows it does not stop to question their movement but hurtles to the seat of all knowledge — the bosom of God. Meanwhile, with the removal of such inspiring virtue as Elizabeth's Drury's, the rest of mankind is left to stagger on in a dark, decaying world lit only by the ghostly memory of the heroine's worth. The intellect at its most extended can only expose its own fallacies, and we must finally admit that the mysteries of Christ 'are not to be chawed by reason, but to be swallowed by faith'. 

This last quotation comes from Donne the preacher. The sermons are the greatest of his prose works, but were preceded by a number of pieces which show Donne involved in both the personal quest for religious experience and the worldly pursuit of profitable employment. His Pseudo-Martyr  (1610) and Biathanatos — a work unpublished in his lifetime — suggest the problems this entailed. Pseudo-Martyr, for example, was designed to appeal to James I by suggesting that Roman Catholics went against the rule of nature when they refused to swear to the king's supremacy in church matters and so laide themselves open to the death penalty. As with Ignatius his Conclave (1611), the work relishes a convert's scabrous anti-Catholic satire. In the labyrinthine and sceptical paradoxes of Biathanatos, on the other hand, Donne argued for the morality of suicide with an involvement rooted in acute personal experience. 

And it is the obsession with death and the last things that characterizes Donne's mature religious works. The Devotion on Emergent Occasions (published 1624) were written when Donne's doctors had declared him too ill to read, let alone compose. The afflicted body houses a soaring mind however. Donne's emotions range over the fear of solitude and physical disintegration, the relation between sickness and sin, sin and death. The entire universe is raided for images because man himself —John Donne— is an image of the universe, an epitome, a microcosm. It is this belief that underlies the most famous passage in Donne's prose:

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy frieds, or of thine own were; any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

The moment of union is perceived but, as is appropriate for a sick-bed meditation, is perceived in the instant of its dissolution.

It is for his sermons that Donne is best known as a writer of religious prose. In the Jacobean period especially, occupied by preachers of great distinction, the pulpit gained extraordinary influence as a focus of spiritual thought and the dissemination of ideas. Led by the king, the court itself relished the finesse of religioius analysis, and connoisseurs of style and content memorized sermons and took notes on a form of literature that was both popular and learned. Donne's contributions should not be seen in isolation.

Many preachers, particularly those of a Puritan persuasion, argued for an unornamented clarity of style. Others dressed spiritual matters in the garment of learning. While Thomas Adams (c. 1583- ante 1660) combined both in a manner that is often theatrical and powerfully directed to the abuses of the time, Lancelot Andrewes (1555-1626) brought his immense erudition in fifteen languages to passages of Scripture, each word and syllable of which he believed to be divinely inspired. As a result, each word and syllable is examined with the pious ardour of a philologist revealing the depths of the Word of God.

With Andrewes, human drama is often conveyed through a tiny yet telling comment in parenthesis. With Donne it moves to the centre of the stage. The immediate impact of the man, of course, is irrecoverably lost, but his devout biographer Izaak Walton (1593-1683) described Donne 'preaching to himself like an angel from a cloud' and appealing to the conscience of others 'with a most particular grace and an unexpressable addition of comeliness'.

The literary style of Donne's sermons is partly a distinctive reworking of its many sources. For example, Donne could exploit rhetorical patterning with the startling virtuosity of the sermon preached to the Earl of Carlisle in c. 1622 where he describes the agony of being 'secluded eternally, eternally, eternally from the sight of God'. From Seneca, Tacitus, and their Renaissance editor Justus Lipsius however Donne and many others derived an anti-Ciceronian style. This was carefully contrived with a dramatic, irregular immediacy to express a concern with personal experience rather than settled certainties. Sermons such as Death's Duel (published 1632) however suggest that of all the influence on Donne's sermon style the Geneva and Authorized versions of the Bible — the parallelism of the Psalms, the visionary urgency of the Prophets and the evangelical fervour of St Paul especially — were the most telling. Nonetheless, when all the influences have been traced, what finally impresses is the compelling sense of Donne's unique spiritual sensibility, the range and drama of a religious intellect for which every aspect of the world could be a metaphor of the soul's experience.

As part of this technique, the sermons frequently juxtapose macabre effects with the tremblingly numinous, decay with resurrection. On the one hand is the conviction that 'Between that excremental jelly that any body is made of at first, and that jelly which thy body dissolves to at last, there is not so noisome, so putrid a thing in nature.' In contrast is the image of the redeemed soul springing up in heaven like a lily from the red soil of its first creation. Between these experiences come the life of prayer and temptation, the imagining of the last things and, finally, an awareness of mercy.

This was not lightly won, and Donne's religious poetry dramatizes his spiritual conflict with great power and formal mastery. However, since distinctions in the psychology of faith are not always as easy to discern as those in Donne's love lyrics, it is important to emphasize the variety in his religious poetry. The sonnets in 'La Corona', for example, draw on the church's traditions of oral prayer to fashion a devout and accomplished celebration of the mysteries of faith that was to some extent influenced by Roman Catholic practices. 'The Litany', by contrast, while not perhaps a wholly successful poem, is an attempt to express the modest, sober delight in daily piety which is a great achievement of seventeenth-century Anglicanism, and one which finds its truest expression in the work of George Herbert and Thomas Ken (1637-1711). The personal realization of such ideas was terrifying — 'those are my best days, when I shake with fear' — and it forms the true spiritual centre of Donne's alternately defiant and submissive drama of sin and judgement. Around this centres the fear of physical decay. Sonnets such as 'Oh my black Soul!', 'At the round earth's imagin'd corners' and 'Death be not proud' contain doomsday in their small compass.

In 'Good Friday, riding westwards' Donne investigated the paradoxes of Christian faith with intensely dramatic wit, but it is in the 'Hymn to God my God, in my Sickness' and a 'Hymn to God the Father' that his relish of paradox and the strong speech rhythms of personal drama merge most tellingly with theology and faith. In these poems we watch Donne's advance towards the unity of the human and divine. In the first hymn, Donne's body is again a microcosm, a little world hurrying to decay. Yet, in its pain, it also imitates Christ's Passion and so may eventually rise like him to paradise. Finally, at the close of the second hymn, Donne hovers on the edge of death in a state at once confessional, wittily serious and almost ready to accept the extinction of his turbulent personality:

I have a sin of fear, that when I have spun
    My last thread, I shall perish on the shore;
But swear by thy self, that at my death thy son
    Shall shine as he shines now, and heretofore;
        And, having done that, thou hadst done,
            I fear no more.

In the end, Donne's own name — that very personal token of self — becomes something to offer in with to God and so a means of surrendering the human to the divine.

Simon Schama's John Donne

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