The Doctor Looks At Biography | Project Gutenberg

“His style, whether as poet or preacher, never achieved either the fresh effusive gaiety, or the assured serenity of absolute Beauty. He could not create beauty out of life; he could not even see the beauty in which the limbs of life were veiled which flamed through and over the bleak anatomy of fact, consecrating the perishable dust and redeeming it of squalor and grossness.”

It is the verdict of a judge, not of a jury and Mr. Fausset can not expect that the world of letters will receive it without protest. But he cites with skill and adroitness the evidence on which it is based, holding Donne up in the successive phases of Pagan, Pensioner and Preacher. Were he more advocate than judge he might have added Penitent, for the sake of both alliteration and fuller justice, for the death of the poetic dean was artistic to a high degree and in the last months of his life after he had preached his last sermon, “Unto the Lord belong the issues of Death,” he achieved an absolute harmony of his life in the ebb-tide. The strings of his character then vibrated with small amplitude in unison.

Donne may be a study in discord, but there is nothing of discord in the writing of Fausset. He uses Donne as a peg on which to hang his concrete thought, and his organised ideas of nature, philosophy and religion. While it is a biography it is also a series of essays in which the vagaries, character and personal appearance of his subject are used to point the moral and adorn the tale. It is never left to the reader to form his own opinion of Donne, his life or his acts; for Fausset blares facts about the motive and the soul and his trumpet gives forth no uncertain sound. Even when Donne in a verse letter to a friend states, “and with vain outward things be no more moved,” Fausset immediately states “yet excessive solitude can so affect a character like Donne’s that only a restoration of 'vain outward things’ can save it from myopia or even madness.”

It required courage to write the life of a man who furnished the material for a masterpiece of English biography. Izaak Walton’s affection for his friend transported him to immoderate commendation of the events of his career, but Mr. Gosse’s Life and Letters of John Donne is just and true. It will immortalise the personality of the poet, just as his somatic features will be perpetuated by the picture in a shroud he so studiously had made.

Fausset can not credit the picture of Donne given by the “gentle Walton” for the reason that Walton wrote on Donne in the spirit of love and admiration. Fausset writes of him neither with love nor hate, but with the scalpel always in hand, dissecting, getting beneath the surface. He is not the tender physician, he is the scientist at work in the laboratory of research with Donne as the cadaver. There is a charm, a beauty, and at times a poetic fervour of expression in the writing which reminds one of the Essay on Shelley by Francis Thompson. One can not help feeling that Donne was doomed from the first if we believe the picture painted of him with unerring hand by Fausset.

But Mr. Fausset is a student and exponent of personality and it is as such that we should estimate his work. Judged by the two studies that he has published: the one under consideration and Keats; A Study in Development, he has insight, sound psychology and a logical mind. With years he will grow more kindly and less turbulent. Meanwhile he shall have the benefit of our prayers that the happy day may hasten.

As Mr. Fausset sees him, John Donne was physically a genius; intellectually “possessed”; one who ranged almost every scale of experience, and upon each struck some note: harsh, cunning, arrogant or poignant, which reverberates down the roof of time; a poet who was at times near a monster, full-blooded, cynical and gross; a thinker, curious, ingenious and mathematical; a seer brooding morbidly over the dark flux of things; a saint aspiring to the celestial harmony. He served the flesh with the same ardour with which he sought the ideal. He was a sensualist and a thinker, a poet and a priest, a pagan and a Christian. More than any contemporary he reflected the three aspects of life which met in confused association in seventeenth century England: Mediævalism, the Renaissance and the Reformation. The physical, intellectual and spiritual elements each in turn dominated his personality. The purpose of his life was to bring this trinity of forces into harmony and by so doing discover a new and deeper unity in the Universe itself. It is Mr. Fausset’s belief that he did not succeed in this purpose but the tortured history of such a genius lays bare the potentialities of humanity and of civilisation. His life was one long battle with death: the death of physical grossness and mental conceit, of worldly ambition and spiritual complacence. He had explored the secret of the senses and the subtleties of the mind. And so, psychologist and sensualist as he was, he was competent in the later days of his spirituality to report adequately of the soul. He related poetry to religion, and religion to truth, and he showed us how to relate ourselves to God. His life teaches us that spiritual satisfaction is unworthy of the name, if it be achieved at the sacrifice of intellectual honesty and that religious experience is the prize of perpetual conflict. Such is the man that Mr. Fausset has composited from the creations of Walton, Gosse, Chambers and Grierson.

John Donne was born in London in 1573 and died there in 1631. His life was a stormy one, tempestuous in youth, squally in maturity, blusterous in old age. Calm overtook him but a few weeks before his death. He was a neurotic individual and his neural disequilibrium is testified by his portraits and by his conduct. A portrait of him made at the age of nineteen shows a brow slightly receding and narrowing at the temples, prominent eyes, gigantic nose coarsely flattened at the base, thick lips and pointed chin. His resistance to emotional influences was defective and he reacted strongly to inner as well as to outer influences. From boyhood there was lack of equanimity in the development of the psychic personality although his intellect made him always a conspicuous figure and he “pursued mathematics, law or theology with the same tenacious passion as an ephemeral liaison.” He was combative, satirical, arrogant, Sybaritic, Dionysiac. The sap did not ascend his tree of life gently or harmoniously; it gushed upward, often geyser-like, drenching conventions and submerging morality. He insisted upon licence to do as he pleased and clamoured for freedom and promiscuity, especially in love.

He, like St. Paul, believed that woman is the glory of the man and was created for him, and he had a contempt for women’s vaunted constancy.

But he was soon to encounter one who was not polyandrous. Anne Moore, in a period of sixteen years, bore him twelve children. He was about thirty years old when he married her. The literary fecundity of his third decade is represented by Songs and Sonnets and Elegies. Mr. Fausset is probably correct in his claim that the poetry of Donne’s early maturity was, like Goethe’s, a reflection and refraction of his loves. Donne’s contention was that sex neither can be nor should be transcended and the Elegies are his earnest of it.

But his moral nature was awakening even before he met Anne and he began to question:

The manner in which he broke with the nameless lady whose husband was a deformed man and was stationary all day in a basket-chair, affords Mr. Fausset an opportunity to discharge some verbal pyrotechnics, and to disgorge some righteous wrath. “So, at last, he turned upon the poor woman, whom so short a time before he had bent to his purpose with a militant ardour and a shameless licence. The cold and cruel cynicism, the elemental spite of his last farewell to one who must at least have given as much as she received, has no parallel in our literature. In truth, no one is so ruthlessly vindictive, so callous to every claim of sentiment and generosity as the moralist new risen from the ashes of the brute.” He then quotes “The Apparition” in which Donne taunts her as “feign’d vestal” and threatens one day to square accounts with her. It was not a pretty letter but Mr. Fausset is likely a very chivalric man and “brute” is scarcely justified.

Donne married in haste but never repented, probably because Anne never questioned her husband or tried to improve him.

The first years of their married life were lean. Parental blessing was slow in coming, and slower still was paternal allowance. But they both came and soon after conversion. “Anne Moore served as the bridge which Donne, at least as the lover, climbed from the abyss to the cheerful daylight and even to a homely eminence.” As the fruit of his passion for his mistresses had been disgusted cynicism, that of his devotion to his wife was ecstatic platonism, which now became reflected in his poetry.

Mr. Fausset takes us through the fourth decade of his life, documenting the transformation that took place in his soul from cynicism to platonism, from realist to mystic, from Catholicism to Protestantism, by quotations from his poetry, by pen pictures of his friends, particularly Mrs. Herbert who was “an idyllic retreat of sanity and piety and sympathy in a sultry world” and by descriptions of his reactions to illness, “illness the sword of God.” His religious conversion was the important thing and these are the words that Mr. Fausset uses to describe its onset:

“The young Dionysus, who had broken from the restraints of Rome, seeking his way back to some primal ecstasy, which conventions seemed at best to adulterate, was now attempting to translate his ecstasy into ideas. He had turned at first to those tortured saints of the Dark Ages in whom sensuality and science melted into mysticism, and then to the pure but tenuous conceptions of Plato. But not for him were those enchanted bridals of the soul with God, of the mind with Beauty, in which the body passed away in flame or in smoke. There was too much of the satyr in his seership, and of the casuist in his mysticism. His branches might strain up heavenward but they never forgot their native earth. His only hope was to subdue his lawlessness to logic, until the two, blended together in a rational whole, achieved an equilibrium between mind and body as he had already discovered for his passions.”

Rome suffocated him and Protestantism seemed a pallid, political compromise, but thanks to frequent prayers, to use his own words, he effected the transition. Donne succeeded in generating the spiritual from the struggle of the rational with the natural, and by so doing Mr. Fausset believes he waged a battle of human consciousness two hundred years in advance of his time.

The turn of the tide in Donne’s worldly affairs dated from 1610 when he wrote a poem, “The Funeral Elegy,” commemorative of the charms and potentialities of a girl whose death had resulted from a box on the ear administered by her adoring father. It was a shot in the dark on the part of Dr. Donne but he “got” his man. Sir Robert Drury provided him a home for three years, then took him abroad. These were years of spiritual growth, emotional equilibrium and physical exhilaration. Soon after his return he took Holy Orders and after much manœuvring, King James, before whom he preached his first sermon, capitulated. His worldly fortunes were assured. It now only remained to make his heavenly ones.

Mr. Fausset indulges in one of his frequent rhetorical rhapsodies in describing Donne’s first appearance under the stole:

“The figure who mounted the pulpit in these early days of his ministry was not the spectral divine, the emaciated, almost sardonic mystic, who was later to hypnotise his audience by the reverberations of his eloquence, the intensities of his imagination, and the sepulchral tones of his voice. He was a man, despite the ravages of ill-health, still in his prime, his beard indeed touched with grey, but his face and carriage retaining that air of buccaneering insolence, almost of dignified roguery, which we have remarked in the young man. Arrayed in vestments and uplifted by the sense of an august occasion, his appearance must have been singularly striking, suggesting indeed some challenging John the Baptist or one of Dürer’s swarthy evangelists. At the same time he did not forget the courtier in the priest. There was a 'sacred flattery’ in his address, which if it 'beguiled men to amend,’ also gratified their vanity. His learning was beyond dispute, but the crabbed style of his correspondence, no less than the angular conceits of his poetry, could scarcely have prepared his friends for the miracle of eloquence which he was speedily to achieve, pungent, rhythmical, varied, and, even in its passages of scholastic argument, strangely sinuous and compelling.”

It is Donne’s spiritual life that his latest biographer finds worthy of unstinted praise, and it is perhaps for that reason that Part Four of his book entitled The Preacher will be found least interesting by the general reader.

Although his friend Izaak Walton wrote: “Donne’s marriage was the remarkable error of his life,” it is difficult to believe him. Anne put out the fire of his concupiscence though it cost her her life, and from its ashes his soul arose. After her death, he withdrew from the world and “in this retiredness,” Walton writes, “which was often from the sight of his dearest friends, he became crucified to the world and all those vanities, those imaginary pleasures that are daily acted on that ruthless stage; and they were as perfectly crucified to him. Now his soul was elemented of nothing but sadness; now grief took so full possession of his heart as to leave no place for joy; if it did, it was a joy to be alone, where, like a pelican in the wilderness, he might bemoan himself without witness or restraint, and pour forth his passions like Job in the days of his affliction.” It was through an agony of remorse that Donne strove for harmony of body and mind. He preached to others to express and reassure himself. Mr. Fausset believes that his exhortation “was not the flower of any abstract love of humanity,” but of intense personal preoccupation.

Preaching did not provide an adequate vent for his emotions so again he turned to poetry which, in keeping with his spiritual integration, he now cast in sonnet form. In these sonnets, Donne was primarily absorbed in asserting his emancipation from worldly values, and lamenting past sin. Mr. Fausset sees him “wooing his God with both the fervour and the self-disgust with which he had before addressed his mistresses”; even the erotic imagery recurs. His religion had become a personal passion and a personal hazard to which theology was no more than a prop. Of the many judgments his interpreter has passed upon him, this is the fairest.

Serious illness thrust itself upon him soon after his promotion to the deanship of St. Paul’s. Even in those days, before “nervous breakdown” was fashionable and a euphemism for episodic mental disorder, it was attributed to overwork and emotional tension, two very rare causes of disease. But he began to be seriously ill, ill of the disease that twelve years later conditioned his death. Before Mr. Gosse published his biography of Donne, he submitted the facts of his illnesses to a London diagnostician who satisfied himself that it was malignant disease of the stomach. But in 1899 when that diagnosis was made, we knew practically nothing about the most insidious, and the most prevalent form of chronic sepsis: that which has its origin in the tonsils and teeth. With the temerity of one whose statement can not be disproven, I boldly assert that, had his tonsils been removed after the alleged attack of typhoid fever and his teeth X-rayed when he felt himself at forty-five lapsing into an infirm and valetudinarian state, he would have lived out the time allotted by the psalmist. Had he been vouchsafed these natural years of piety and preparation, he would have accomplished that synthesis of the physical and spiritual which Mr. Fausset denies him, and the world would not have had The Devotions in which Donne incorporated the features and fears of his illness. England waited three hundred years for some one to parallel his performance of clinical self-observation and then found it in the young man who under the pen name of W. N. P. Barbellion wrote a book as self-revelatory as the Confessions of Saint Augustine.

Donne came to many fertile oases in his travel through the desert of sin, to many pools of Bethesda in wading the rivers of disease. The Herbert family was the most refreshing and restoring. In George Herbert, fifteen years his junior, he saw what he would like to have been; and in Herbert’s mother, he saw his ideal of spiritual womanhood. “The Autumnal,” his poem of homage to Magdalen Herbert, embodies his idea of the platonism of the soul as distinct from that of the mind. Through it, there breathes, as Mr. Fausset says, a quiet, tender as the evening sky before it has begun to pale with premonition of night.

Donne devoted the last five years of his life to dying, and he did it with the same intensity and artistry as that with which he devoted the first five years of his maturity to living. He interpreted himself the seventeenth-century representative of him that was spoken of by the prophet Esaias and bent himself to the last atom of his strength to make straight the Lord’s paths. It is a stirring and touching narrative and Mr. Fausset has made the most of it; reading it, one is forced to agree that he has established his contention that Donne never achieved a harmonious conscience; for, even in his hours of profoundest religiosity, he was dependent in a measure upon intuition for his faith; the dread of death, and the doubt of God’s mercy were constantly recurring, even though he maintained the priestly attitude with outward calm and enviable courage. In the years of his wisdom he did his best to crucify nature and to implore grace from Him who suffered crucifixion that man might live eternally.

His whole life was a series of beaux gestes and the last the most picturesque. Standing upon an urn, with closed eyes and folded hands, shrouded as for the grave, he had his portrait painted. And of that portrait his latest biographer says:

“It was a face at once grotesque and sublime, sinister and sanctified, fiendish and devout; seared and purified, cynically ecstatic. The craftiness and arrogance of his youth were sobered into a hungry, a cadaver simper, while his mysticism seemed to glimmer through the shadowy hollows with a phosphorescent life.”

For Mr. Fausset, Donne reflects and condenses the long labour of the man to outgrow the beast and approach the divine. In his unrest we see our own reflected.

This Study in Discord puts Mr. Fausset in the class of biographers at whose head stands Mr. Lytton Strachey. The reader may be annoyed by his obvious inimicality to the realistic strain in Donne’s character; he may be wearied by the turbulence of his exposition, but he can not fail to realise that in reading this book he is companioning a man of education, imagination, sentiment and vision, though his heart sometimes dominates his head.

Throughout the biography we capture as interesting a revelation of the mind of Fausset as we do of Donne, and his desire in writing the biography is summed up in one sentence in the epilogue, “And this soul is worthy of all honour; for though defeated it never accepted a fraudulent peace.”

The reader who knows of Donne from Campbell’s British Poets will, after reading Mr. Fausset’s book, be likely to agree that “the life of Donne is more interesting than his poetry.” It is indeed, and it becomes more interesting after each biographer has had his turn at it. The last word has not yet been said but the best that has been said is the last.

Thomas Burke, a young Britisher who has familiarised readers of English with the East End of London and its motley inhabitants, who writes about unclean things in a clean way and of vicious people wholesomely, and who has rare talent for creating literary atmosphere, calls his biography The Wind and the Rain. Next to Mr. Anderson’s story it is the most captivating narrative that I have read in a long time. Scarcely are these words written before pages of the Memoirs of an Editor by Edward P. Mitchell are reflected in the mirror of memory.