words"; (5) that he needs translation "into numbers and English "; and (6) that he affects the metaphysics in his amorous verse, where nature only should reign. Here it was then that Dr. Johnson obtained the suggestion of linking the names of Donne and Cowley and the specific dictum which he extended to all their work; here it was that he found the word "metaphysical," which he liberally enlarged by inference to include most of the poets of the reigns of James I and his son who differed in manner from Dryden and Waller. From the same passage Pope and Parnell derived the idea of translating "into numbers and English" the satires of Donne; and the only thing which the critics of the next age omitted was the "variety, multiplicity, and choice of thoughts," which even the master of the rival school, who had read though he had not studied Donne, could not deny him. This is not the place in which to follow subsequent criticism of "the metaphysical poets." It is based almost wholly on Dr. Johnson's dictum, and involves the same sweeping generalizations of undoubtedly salient defects into typical qualities and the same want of a reference of these defects to their real sources.1 Other terms have been used to express the obliquity of thought—if I may so employ the word — which is peculiar to Donne and his school. Such is the adjective 'fantastic,' from the excessive play of images of the fancy which these poets permit themselves. This is less happy than Dryden's 'metaphysical,' to which a real value attaches in that it singles out the unquestioned fondness of these writers for 'conceits' drawn from the sciences and from speculative 1 In another place (the Dedication to Eleonora, ed. Scott-Saintsbury, XI, 123) Dryden designated Donne "the greatest wit, though not the best poet of our nation." Here again Johnson found a cue for his famous discussion of wit, which follows the last paragraph of the passage quoted above. philosophy. De Quincey proposed the word 'rhetorical,' with a characteristic refinement restricting its meaning to the sense in which "rhetoric lays the principal stress on the management of thoughts and only a secondary one upon the ornaments of style."1 This has the merit of recognizing the dialectical address and the constructive design and ingenuity which were Donne's and Carew's, though by no means equally Cowley's. When all has been said, we must recognize that none of these terms fully explains the complex conditions of the lyric of this age. Special characteristics aside, there is no more distinctive mark of the poetry of this age than the all but universal practice of conceit.' By Jonson and Bacon this word was employed for the thing conceived, the thought, the image. It was likewise employed, however, in the signification, more current later, of a thought far-fetched and ingenious rather than natural and obvious. That the 'conceit' in this latter sense was no stranger to the verse and prose of the reign of Elizabeth is attested by innumerable examples from the days of Sidney to those of Donne.2 Thus Gascoigne, with a more vivid consciousness of the persistence of hackneyed poetical figure than is usual amongst minor poets, declares: "If I should undertake to wryte in prayse of a gentlewoman, I would neither praise hir christal eye, nor hir cherrie lippe, etc. For these things are trita et obvia. But I would either find some supernaturall cause whereby my penne might walke in the superlative 1 Historical Essays, American ed. 1856, II, 228, 229. 2 Murray (Dictionary, s.v.) quotes Puttenham (ed. Arber, p. 20) for an early use of this word: "Others of a more fine and pleasaunt head . . . in short poemes uttered prettie merry conceits, and these men were called Epigrammatists." Sidney (according to Dr. C. G. Child) is the earliest English poet to exhibit the conceit as a distinctive feature of style. degree, or else I would . . . make a strange discourse of some intollerable passion, or finde occasion to pleade by the example of some historie, or discover my disquiet in shadows per Allegoriam, or use the covertest meane that I could to avoyde the uncomely customes of common writers." "1 That this species of wit became more and more popular as the reign of James advanced is explained by the general decline from imagination to fancy which marks the trend of the whole age, and which came in time to ascribe a false dignity and importance to keenness and readiness in the discovery of accidental and even trivial similarities in things unlike. The gradations of the word 'wit' range from ingenium, insight, mental power, to the snap of the toy cracker denominated a pun. Wit may consist in the thought and the wisdom thereof or in the merest accident of sound or form. The genuine Caroline conceit' is mostly in the fibre of the thought, and, unlike the antithetical wit of the next age, is, as a rule, unaided by structural or rhetorical device. Thus Cowley says of those who carved the wooden images for the temple of Jerusalem: [They] carve the trunks and breathing shapes bestow, and Clieveland asks, apropos of the possibility of a bee's stinging his mistress: What wasp would prove Ravaillac to my queen of love? 3 1 With the foreign sources of the Elizabethan and Jacobean conceit we cannot be here concerned. See on this subject the forthcoming monograph of Dr. Clarence G. Child on The Seventeenth Century Conceit, shortly to appear in the Publications of the Modern Language Association of America. 2 The Davideis, ii. 528, 529. 3 Clievelandi Vindiciae, ed. 1677, p. 4. On the other hand, the balanced form of wit appears in Dryden's words of Doeg: A double noose thou on thy neck dost pull For writing treason and for writing dull.1 Of like nature is the diamond cross on the bosom of Pope's Belinda, Which Jews might kiss, and infidels adore.2 Even where epigrammatic point is not demanded, ideas so shape themselves: By music minds an equal temper know Either form of wit may flash a revealing light and rise from the range of fancy, which plays with similitudes because they are pleasing, to the domain of the imagination, which adds the sanction and dignity of truth. That form of wit which depends more on thought and less on the accident of expression is more likely to become imaginative and revealing. To deny, however, that form enters essentially into all successful art is to fall into vagary. The illustrations above are all dependent upon fancy; Cowley's is ingenious, Clieveland's forced, Dryden's and Pope's epigrammatic, Pope's last commonplace, unnecessary, and redundant. Vaughan's famed figure of the first stanza of The World, which can never be too often quoted, is an 1 Absalom and Achitophel, Part II, 496. 2 Rape of the Lock, canto ii. 8 Pope, Ode on Saint Cecilia's Day. instance of a 'conceit' dilated by its dignity to imaginative sublimity and power: I saw Eternity the other night Like a ring of pure and endless light, All calm as it was bright; And round beneath it, Time in hours, days, years Driven by the spheres, Like a vast shadow moved, in which the world And all her train were hurled.1 It is an error to regard the Caroline conceit as wholly referable to Donne's irresponsible use of figure. It is neither so limited and abstract in the range of phenomena chosen for figurative illustration, so unconcerned with the recognition of the outward world, nor so completely referable to the intellectualization of emotion. Let us take a typical passage of Donne : But, O, alas! so long, so far Our bodies why do we forbear? Nor are dross to us but alloy. On man heaven's influence works not so, But that it first imprints the air; For soul into the soul may flow Though it to body first repair.2 This passage is subtle, almost dialectic. A keen, sinuous, reasoning mind is playing with its powers. Except for the implied personification of the body regarded apart from the soul, the language is free from figure; there is no confusion 1 See the whole poem, below, p. 145. 2 The Ecstasy, ed. 1650, p. 43. |