The Legend of Jack Donne the Libertine

THE LEGEND OF JACK DONNE THE LIBERTINE s. ERNEST SPROTT THE modern world, acquainted but narrowly with religious experience and uncomfortable at the conjunction of powerful reason with passion, sees in Jack Donne of London a "wild gallant " (Smith and Grierson), who during "some years of loose living" (Courthope) contracted at least one "criminal liaison" (Gosse) and "indulged in at least two more amorous adventures" (Fausset), until when he was thirty "the feaverish rounds of dissipation" (Moloney) were brought to an end by the .''accident'' (Grierson) of his marriage for love with a pure and faithful girl wife.1 The evidence on which this estimate is based is literary and historical. His poetry, having for many years circulated in manuscript , after his death was collected by friends and published; modern criticism has on the whole tended to agree with Grierson that "there can be no doubt that actual experiences do lie behind these poems."2 In addition, descriptions drawn and judgments made of the man by his own age are extant still, to which the general response is probably not unfairly represented by Helen C. White's statement: Donne's "own verdict on his youthful license and what his contemporaries said of his life fully bear out the conclusion drawn from the poems themselves~"3 But in a hunt of this sort, rather than pursue the quarry by the autobiographical tracks he left darkened in the woods of poesy, it is wiser in the first instance to ask directions from observers who saw him in flight. In this essay the suggestion is made that the Reverend Doctor's references to the sins of his youth are not to be accepted quite literally; that what his con· temporaries said of his early life does not support the cleric's judgment; and that while .we are free to walk in more paths than one, a track should be followed which leads in the direction 1J. C. Smith and H. J, C. Grierson, A Critical History of English Po~try (New York, 1946), 107; W. J. Courthope, A History of English Poetry (London, 1903), III, 148; E. Gosse, The. Life and Letters of fohn Donne (New York, 1899), I, 75; H. L'A. Fausset, John Donne: A Study in Discord (London, 1924), 84; M. F. Moloney, fohn Donne: His Flight from Mediaevalism (Urbana, Ill., 1944), 23; H. J. C. Grierson, The Poems of John Donne (Oxford, 1912), II, xxxv. 2Grierson, Poems of Donne, II, xli. 3H. C. White, The Metaphysical Poets (New York, 1936), 102. 335 33(1 THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY indicated by the observers, the "love-song weeds, and Satyrique thornes" being passed but glancingly by. I Donne's personality was not that of the witty talker, the glittering social star, and the reckless playboy. He indulged a habit of introspection which turned easily to morbidity and hypochondria ; he wrote solitary in a room full of books;4 his poems demand to be pondered upon, his letters are dull and sententious and stray into sermons in subject and cadence.5 With rehearsal his wit flashed, but never his rapier. Having but "a very faint hold upon vitality,''6 he was fain to conserve his animal forces with intellectual prowess; he consumed books of science, but never stayed to stuff a hen with snow to observe refrigeration. Sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought, he was no master of his fate; as his fortunes rose and fell so did his spirits; his life is a tale of indecision and prevarication-"! can do nothing constantly ."7 Everything he did he sought time to think about, before or after, and some things he thought about he never did, otherwise the author of Biathanatos had committed suicide before writing. His so-called unification of passion with reason is often the recollection of the former by the latter in tranquillity. He did not think with his finger-tips; he fingered experience ·with intellect. Is it likely that such a man as this would actively bestir him· self to contract immoral liaisons and to send versified recitals in the first and second persons to the partners involved? The proposal will awa~en immediate protest...