Complete Works of Virginia Woolf

by Virginia Woolf

  Thus we may infer that Donne’s relation to the Countess of Bedford was very different from any that could exist between a poet and a countess at the present time. There was something distant and ceremonious about it. To him she was “as a vertuous Prince farre off”. The greatness of her office inspired reverence apart from her personality, just as the rewards within her gift inspired humility. He was her Laureate, and his songs in her praise were rewarded by invitations to stay with her at Twickenham and by those friendly meetings with men in power which were so effective in furthering the career of an ambitious man — and Donne was highly ambitious, not indeed for the fame of a poet, but for the power of a statesman. Thus when we read that Lady Bedford was “God’s Masterpiece”, that she excelled all women in all ages, we realise that John Donne is not writing to Lucy Bedford; Poetry is saluting Rank. And this distance served to inspire reason rather than passion. Lady Bedford must have been a very clever woman, well versed in the finer shades of theology, to derive an instant or an intoxicating pleasure from the praises of her servant. Indeed, the extreme subtlety and erudition of Donne’s poems to his patrons seems to show that one effect of writing for such an audience is to exaggerate the poet’s ingenuity. What is not poetry but something tortured and difficult will prove to the patron that the poet is exerting his skill on her behalf. Then again, a learned poem can be handed round among statesmen and men of affairs to prove that the poet is no mere versifier, but capable of office and responsibility. But a change of inspiration that has killed many poets — witness Tennyson and the Idylls of the King — only stimulated another side of Donne’s many-sided nature and many-faceted brain. As we read the long poems written ostensibly in praise of Lady Bedford, or in celebration of Elizabeth Drury (An Anatomie of the World and the Progresse of the Soul), we are made to reflect how much remains for a poet to write about when the season of love is over. When May and June are passed, most poets cease to write or sing the songs of their youth out of tune. But Donne survived the perils of middle age by virtue of the acuteness and ardour of his intellect. When “the satyrique fires which urg’d me to have writt in skorne of all” were quenched, when “My muse (for I had one), because I’m cold, Divorced herself”, there still remained the power to turn upon the nature of things and dissect that. Even in the passionate days of youth Donne had been a thinking poet. He had dissected and analysed his own love. To turn from that to the anatomy of the world, from the personal to the impersonal, was the natural development of a complex nature. And the new angle to which his mind now pointed under the influence of middle age and traffic with the world, released powers that were held in check when they were directed against some particular courtier or some particular woman. Now his imagination, as if freed from impediment, goes rocketing up in flights of extravagant exaggeration. True, the rocket bursts; it scatters in a shower of minute, separate particles — curious speculations, wire-drawn comparisons, obsolete erudition; but, winged by the double pressure of mind and heart, of reason and imagination, it soars far and fast into a finer air. Working himself up by his own extravagant praise of the dead girl, he shoots on:

  We spur, we reine the starres, and in their race

  They’re diversly content t’ obey our pace.

  But keepes the earth her round proportion still?

  Doth not a Tenarif, or higher Hill

  Rise so high like a Rocke, that one might thinke

  The floating Moone would shipwracke there, and sinke?

  Seas are so deepe, that Whales being strooke to day,

  Perchance tomorrow, scarce at middle way

  Of their wish’d journies end, the bottome, die.

  And men, to sound depths, so much line untie,

  As one might justly thinke, that there would rise

  At end thereof, one of th’ Antipodies:

  Or again, Elizabeth Drury is dead and her soul has escaped:

  she stayes not in the ayre,

  To looke what Meteors there themselves prepare;

  She carries no desire to know, nor sense,

  Whether th’ ayres middle region be intense;

  For th’ Element of fire, she doth not know,

  Whether she past by such a place or no;

  She baits not at the Moone, nor cares to trie

  Whether in that new world, men live, and die.

  Venus retards her not, to’ enquire, how shee

  Can, (being one starre) Hesper, and Vesper bee;

  Hee that charm’d Argus eyes, sweet Mercury,

  Workes not on her, who now is growne all eye;

  So we penetrate into distant regions, and reach rare and remote speculations a million miles removed from the simple girl whose death fired the explosion. But to break off fragments from poems whose virtue lies in their close-knit sinews and their long-breathed strength is to diminish them. They need to be read currently rather to grasp the energy and power of the whole than to admire those separate lines which Donne suddenly strikes to illumine the stages of our long climb.

  Thus, finally, we reach the last section of the book, the Holy Sonnets and Divine Poems. Again the poetry changes with the change of circumstances and of years. The patron has gone with the need of patronage. Lady Bedford has been replaced by a Prince still more virtuous and still more remote. To Him the prosperous, the important, the famous Dean of St. Paul’s now turns. But how different is the divine poetry of this great dignitary from the divine poetry of the Herberts and the Vaughans! The memory of his sins returns to him as he writes. He has been burnt with “lust and envy”; he has followed profane loves; he has been scornful and fickle and passionate and servile and ambitious. He has attained his end; but he is weaker and worse than the horse or the bull. Now too he is lonely. “Since she whom I lov’d” is dead “My good is dead.” Now at last his mind is “wholly sett on heavenly things”. And yet how could Donne — that “little world made cunningly of elements” — be wholly set on any one thing?

  Oh, to vex me, contraryes meet in one:

  Inconstancy unnaturally hath begott

  A constant habit; that when I would not

  I change in vowes, and in devotione.

  It was impossible for the poet who had noted so curiously the flow and change of human life, and its contrasts, who was at once so inquisitive of knowledge and so sceptical —

  Doubt wisely; in strange way,

  To stand inquiring right, is not to stray;

  To sleep, or run wrong, is

  — who had owned allegiance to so many great Princes, the body, the King, the Church of England, to reach that state of wholeness and certainty which poets of purer life were able to maintain. His devotions themselves were feverish and fitful. “My devout fitts come and goe away like a fantastique Ague.” They are full of contraries and agonies. Just as his love poetry at its most sensual will suddenly reveal the desire for a transcendent unity “beyond the Hee and Shee”, and his most reverential letters to great ladies will suddenly become love poems addressed by an amorous man to a woman of flesh and blood, so these last divine poems are poems of climbing and falling, of incongruous clamours and solemnities, as if the church door opened on the uproar of the street. That perhaps is why they still excite interest and disgust, contempt and admiration. For the Dean still retained the incorrigible curiosity of his youth. The temptation to speak the truth in defiance of the world even when he had taken all that the world had to give, still worked in him. An obstinate interest in the nature of his own sensations still troubled his age and broke its repose as it had troubled his youth and made him the most vigorous of satirists and the most passionate of lovers. There was no rest, no end, no solution even at the height of fame and on the edge of the grave for a nature plaited together of such diverse strands. The famous preparations that he made, lying in his shroud, being carved for his tomb, when he felt death approach are poles asunder from the falling asleep of the tired and content. He must still cut a figure and still stand erect — a warning perhaps, a portent cert
ainly, but always consciously and conspicuously himself. That, finally, is one of the reasons why we still seek out Donne; why after three hundred years and more we still hear the sound of his voice speaking across the ages so distinctly. It may be true that when from curiosity we come to cut up and “survey each part”, we are like the doctors and “know not why” — we cannot see how so many different qualities meet together in one man. But we have only to read him, to submit to the sound of that passionate and penetrating voice, and his figure rises again across the waste of the years more erect, more imperious, more inscrutable than any of his time. Even the elements seem to have respected that identity. When the fire of London destroyed almost every other monument in St. Paul’s, it left Donne’s figure untouched, as if the flames themselves found that knot too hard to undo, that riddle too difficult to read, and that figure too entirely itself to turn to common clay.

  THE COUNTESS OF PEMBROKE’S ARCADIA

  If it is true that there are books written to escape from the present moment, and its meanness and its sordidity, it is certainly true that readers are familiar with a corresponding mood. To draw the blinds and shut the door, to muffle the noises of the street and shade the glare and flicker of its lights — that is our desire. There is then a charm even in the look of the great volumes that have sunk, like the “Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia”, as if by their own weight down to the very bottom of the shelf. We like to feel that the present is not all; that other hands have been before us, smoothing the leather until the corners are rounded and blunt, turning the pages until they are yellow and dog’s-eared. We like to summon before us the ghosts of those old readers who have read their Arcadia from this very copy — Richard Porter, reading with the splendours of the Elizabethans in his eyes; Lucy Baxter, reading in the licentious days of the Restoration; Thos. Hake, still reading, though now the eighteenth century has dawned with a distinction that shows itself in the upright elegance of his signature. Each has read differently, with the insight and the blindness of his own generation. Our reading will be equally partial. In 1930 we shall miss a great deal that was obvious to 1655; we shall see some things that the eighteenth century ignored. But let us keep up the long succession of readers; let us in our turn bring the insight and the blindness of our own generation to bear upon the “Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia”, and so pass it on to our successors.

  If we choose the Arcadia because we wish to escape, certainly the first impression of the book is that Sidney wrote it with very much the same intention: “. . . it is done only for you, only to you”, he tells his “dear lady and sister, the Countess of Pembroke”. He is not looking at what is before him here at Wilton; he is not thinking of his own troubles or of the tempestuous mood of the great Queen in London. He is absenting himself from the present and its strife. He is writing merely to amuse his sister, not for “severer eyes”. “Your dear self can best witness the manner, being done in loose sheets of Paper, most of it in your presence, the rest, by sheets sent unto you, as fast as they were done.” So, sitting at Wilton under the downs with Lady Pembroke, he gazes far away into a beautiful land which he calls Arcadia. It is a land of fair valleys and fertile pastures, where the houses are “lodges of yellow stone built in the form of a star”; where the inhabitants are either great princes or humble shepherds; where the only business is to love and to adventure; where bears and lions surprise nymphs bathing in fields red with roses; where princesses are immured in the huts of shepherds; where disguise is perpetually necessary; where the shepherd is really a prince and the woman a man; where, in short, anything may be and happen except what actually is and happens here in England in the year 1580. It is easy to see why, as Sidney handed these dream pages to his sister, he smiled, entreating her indulgence. “Read it then at your idle times, and the follies your good judgment will find in it, blame not, but laugh at.” Even for the Sidneys and the Pembrokes life was not quite like that. And yet the life that we invent, the stories we tell, as we sink back with half-shut eyes and pour forth our irresponsible dreams, have perhaps some wild beauty; some eager energy; we often reveal in them the distorted and decorated image of what we soberly and secretly desire. Thus the Arcadia, by wilfully flouting all contact with the fact, gains another reality. When Sidney hinted that his friends would like the book for its writer’s sake, he meant perhaps that they would find there something that he could say in no other form, as the shepherds singing by the river’s side will “deliver out, sometimes joys, sometimes lamentations, sometimes challengings one of the other, sometimes, under hidden forms, uttering such matters as otherwise they durst not deal with”. There may be under the disguise of the Arcadia a real man trying to speak privately about something that is close to his heart. But in the first freshness of the early pages the disguise itself is enough to enchant us. We find ourselves with shepherds in spring on those sands which “lie against the Island of Cithera”. Then, behold, something floats on the waters. It is the body of a man, and he grasps to his breast a small square coffer; and he is young and beautiful— “though he were naked, his nakedness was to him an apparel”; and his name is Musidorus; and he has lost his friend. So, warbling melodiously, the shepherds revive the youth, and row out in a bark from the haven in search of Pyrocles; and a stain appears on the sea, with sparks and smoke issuing from it. For the ship upon which the two princes Musidorus and Pyrocles were voyaging has caught fire; it floats blazing on the water with a great store of rich things round it, and many drowned bodies. “In sum, a defeat, where the conquered kept both field and spoil: a shipwrack without storm or ill footing: and a waste of fire in the midst of the water.”

  There in a little space we have some of the elements that are woven together to compose this vast tapestry. We have beauty of scene; a pictorial stillness; and something floating towards us, not violently but slowly and gently in time to the sweet warbling of the shepherds’ voices. Now and again this crystallises into a phrase that lingers and haunts the ear— “and a waste of fire in the midst of the waters”; “having in their faces a certain waiting sorrow”. Now the murmur broadens and expands into some more elaborate passage of description: “each pasture stored with sheep, feeding with sober security, while the pretty lambs with bleating oratory crav’d the dam’s comfort: here a shepherd’s boy piping, as though he should never be old: there a young shepherdess knitting, and withal singing, and it seemed that her voice comforted her hands to work, and her hands kept time to her voice-music” — a passage that reminds us of a famous description in Dorothy Osborne’s Letters.

  Beauty of scene; stateliness of movement; sweetness of sound — these are the graces that seem to reward the mind that seeks enjoyment purely for its own sake. We are drawn on down the winding paths of this impossible landscape because Sidney leads us without any end in view but sheer delight in wandering. The syllabling of the words even causes him the liveliest delight. Mere rhythm we feel as we sweep over the smooth backs of the undulating sentences intoxicates him. Words in themselves delight him. Look, he seems to cry, as he picks up the glittering handfuls, can it be true that there are such numbers of beautiful words lying about for the asking? Why not use them, lavishly and abundantly? And so he luxuriates. Lambs do not suck— “with bleating oratory [they] craved the dam’s comfort”; girls do not undress — they “take away the eclipsing of their apparel”; a tree is not reflected in a river— “it seemed she looked into it and dressed her green locks by that running river”. It is absurd; and yet there is a world of difference between writing like this with zest and wonder at the images that form upon one’s pen and the writing of later ages when the dew was off the language — witness the little tremor that stirs and agitates a sentence that a more formal age would have made coldly symmetrical: