Why we should read Part 5

that attracts the ordinary man and woman of to-day.

In spite of repeated incentives to listen, we turn deaf ears to sermons: towards poetry we are inclined to be perhaps too kind.

Donne is all the more important as a poet because he treats of the universal pa.s.sion of love in more phases than any other poet. He was the complete experimentalist in love, both in actual life and in his work.

He is frankly in search of bodily experiences:

"Whoever loves, if he do not propose The right true end of love, he's one that goes To sea for nothing but to make him sick."

He is brutal:

"For G.o.d's sake hold your tongue, and let me love."

He is inconstant:

"I can love any, so she be not true."

He bewails the inconstancy of women:

"Though she were true when you met her, And last till you write your letter, Yet she Will be False, ere I come, to two or three."

His pa.s.sion for sheer ugliness carries him away time after time:

"Had it been some bad smell, he would have thought That his own feet, or breath, that smell had wrought."

Or again:

"And like a bunch of ragged carrots stand The short swollen fingers of thy gouty hand."

In his _Elegies_ he tells stories of his conquests dramatically, in full detail, satirically, sensually. In _Jealousy_ we are given an exact picture of the deformed husband who,

"Swol'n and pampered with great fare, Sits down and snorts, cag'd in his basket chair"

--so that the poet and his mistress perforce have to "play in another house," away from those "towering eyes, that flamed with oily sweat of jealousy."

In _The Perfume_ we see the girl's "immortal mother, which doth lie still buried in her bed, yet will not die," who, fearing lest her daughter be swollen, embraces her and names strange meats to try her longings: we see

"The grim-eight-foot-high-iron-bound-serving-man That oft names G.o.d in oaths, and only then."

But the scent that the lover uses gives him away and so he is by her "hydroptic father catechized."

There is a good deal of frank naturalism in the elegy ent.i.tled _To his Mistress Going to Bed_, but it is healthily coa.r.s.e, though scarcely quotable even in these times, which is a pity.

"There is no penance due to innocence."

But playing as he does on all the notes of all the different sorts of love, Donne gives the impression of one who attained in the end an abiding love for one person, Anne More, his wife.

In _The Ecstasy_ we see him crying out against pa.s.sionate friends.h.i.+p:

"But O alas, so long, so far, Our bodies why do we forbear?"

and makes an unanswerable point in this verse:

"So must pure lovers' souls descend T'affections and to faculties, Which sense may reach and apprehend, Else a great Prince in prison lies.

To our bodies turn we then, that so Weak men on love reveal'd may look; Love's mysteries in souls do grow But yet the body is the book."

And in _The Anniversary_ he retracts all that he had once said about inconstancy:

"Here upon earth we are Kings, and none but we Can be such Kings, nor of such subjects be.

Who is so safe as we, where none can do Treason to us, except one of us two?

True and false fears let us refrain; Let us live n.o.bly, and live, and add again Years and years unto years, till we attain To write three-score: This is the second of our reign."

There are few lovelier lyrics than _Break of Day_:

"Stay, O sweet, and do not rise; The light that s.h.i.+nes comes from thine eyes; The day breaks not, it is my heart, Because that you and I must part.

Stay, or else my joys will die And perish in their infancy."

Or, to take a complete poem, none shows Donne in truer, finer light than _The Dream_:

"Dear love, for nothing less than thee Would I have broke this happy dream; It was a theme For reason, much too strong for fantasy.

Therefore thou waked'st me wisely; yet My dream thou brokest not, but continued'st it.

Thou art so true that thoughts of thee suffice To make dreams truths, and fables histories; Enter these arms, for since thou thought'st it best, Not to dream all my dream, let's act the rest.

As lightning, or a taper's light, Thine eyes, and not thy noise waked me; Yet I thought thee --For thou lovest truth--an angel, at first sight; But when I saw thou saw'st my heart, And knew'st my thoughts beyond an angel's art, When thou knew'st what I dreamt, when thou knew'st when Excess of joy would wake me, and earnest then, I must confess, it could not choose but be Profane, to think thee anything but thee."

There is enough nastiness, eccentricity, coa.r.s.eness, roughness and extravagance in Donne to put off many fastidious readers: but his faults lie open to the sky: his beauties are frequently hidden, but they are worth searching for.

And yet--a word of warning--let George Saintsbury give it: "No one who thinks _Don Quixote_ a merely funny book, no one who sees in Aristophanes a dirty-minded fellow with a knack of Greek versification ... need trouble himself even to attempt to like Donne."

We read Donne, then, for his fiery imagination, for his deep and subtle a.n.a.lysis, for his humanity, for his pa.s.sion, for his anti-sentimentalism, for his eager search "to find a north-west pa.s.sage of his own" in intellect and morals, for the richness and rarity of the gems with which all his work, both prose and poetry, is studded, for his modernity and freshness. We read Donne as a corrective of lazy thinking: he frees us from illusion.

IX

SUCH A BOOK AS _THE BEGGAR'S OPERA_

One imagines Nigel Playfair and Arnold Bennett suddenly starting hares over their cigars after dinner. "What shall we do next?" asks N. P.

plaintively. "Aren't there any old plays that are really good that the public knows nothing of?"

A. B. gets up wearily and turns over a Dodsley or a Nimmo. "We don't want to cut into the preserves of the Phoenix," he grumbles. "_The d.u.c.h.ess of Malfi_, _Volpone_, _All for Love_ ... do you mean that sort of thing?"

"Good G.o.d, no," replies Nigel truculently. "I meant something light--something with a 'zip' about it."

"_The Critic_ or _A Trip to Scarborough_?" queries A. B. He is getting sleepy and is rather bored.

"This is for the Lyric, Hammersmith, _our_ Lyric, not the Tooting Bec Hippodrome or the Moss Empires."