UN. CHAPTER X LAST YEARS AS A LAYMAN 1612-1615 We have now to traverse a period in the life of Donne which was transitional, and in its nature unsatisfactory. Of these years nothing was known to Walton, and we can understand that Donne would not speak much of them, or even, perhaps, recollect their existence. Yet they were of extreme importance in his career; they formed the bridge between his old life and his new. He seemed in the course of them to be further than ever from taking orders in the Church of England; from the majority of his writings of this period, whether public or private, the possible divine seems to be rigorously excluded; and yet circumstances were so closing around him as to make his ultimate destination an inevitable one. He was in his fortieth year when he returned from the Low Countries, and although his gifts and charms were acknowledged in a widening circle of friends, there was a curious fatality by which a professional use of them was always frustrated. He was ambitious, he was eager to be independent, he was justly confident in his marvellous powers, and yet at the age of forty, Donne, perhaps the most brilliantly equipped mind in his Majesty's dominions, was nobody and nothing still. His financial position, however, though precarious, must at this time have been more than easy. He was still, it is to be supposed, being paid that liberal quarterly allowance from Sir George More which Sir Francis Wooley had lived just long enough to secure him. He was still freely entertained in apartments within Drury House, under the 3 charge of a Lady Bartlet, doubtless the widow of his friend Sir Thomas Bartlet, in the service of Sir Robert Drury. The mode in which this Lady Bartlet is repeatedly mentioned gives the impression that she superintended the wants of the household, thus relieving Mrs. Donne, whose weak constitution would be sufficiently bowed down by the weight of her army of children. We find that Donne is constantly travelling; he is now at Bath, now at Windsor, now in the Isle of Wight. He is waited on by a French man-servant of his own. He moves, with none of the old sense of embarrassment, among people of wealth and ostentatious expenditure. All this means comfort, and even luxury; and we may put wholly aside the impression that Donne, in these latest years of his life as a layman, was in want of any of the agreeable concomitants of fortune. Yet he knew that it all rested on the most fragile basis. His apartments might be sumptuous, but his tenure of them depended on the whim of Sir Robert Drury; his wife's allowance might be liberal, but it depended on the very uncertain fortunes of a fashionable and reckless old spendthrift. If the present was comfortable, the future must have filled the mind of Donne with alarm. The deaths of two persons might at any moment throw him penniless on the street, and consequently his one obsession was how to obtain a place at court or some species of "preferment.” The letters which we shall presently print give melancholy testimony to the degree in which this anxiety coloured his life at this time, and excluded higher considerations. We find him gay and sociable in his own chosen company, where his wit took fire, and where he became the centre of a circle of vivacity and joy; but from these happy seasons at the feet of Lady Bedford, or surrounded by the graceful and brilliant little court which she gathered in the mazes of her garden at Twickenham, Donne would return intensely dejected to the wife dragged down by a multitude of children, and to the dependent existence in a wing of Drury House. It may be well to take this opportunity of recording the elements of Donne's family. When he came back from Brussels in the autumn of 1612 his wife met him with seven children. Of these Constance, the eldest, was but nine years old; John, his father's future editor, was eight; George was seven, Francis five, Lucy four; Bridget was not yet three, and Mary was in her second year. Always ailing and depressed, though sublimely tender and loyal, Mrs. Donne was, as it were, crushed beneath this army of irresponsible babies, to whom indeed she was presently to succumb. The family seems, however, to have got through the remainder of 1612 and the early part of 1613 with tolerable success; but in July 1613 Donne was stricken by serious illness, and 1614 was one of the darkest years of their existence. The poet was attacked again and again by a combination of gastric and rheumatic disorders, and was threatened later on with blindness. Mrs. Donne's health gave way still further, after the birth of yet another son, Nicholas, who was baptized at St. Clement Danes on the 3rd of August 1613. Sickness fell upon the children one after another; on the 18th of May 1614 Mary was buried at St. Clement Danes, and Francis on the 10th of November following. Nicholas is mentioned no more, and probably died in the course of the fatal year. Nothing could be more wretched than the picture which we rather divine than see of the melancholy fortune of the Donnes in 1614. We are going, however, a little too far ahead. When Donne returned with the Drurys to England in the autumn of 1612, the principal object of public interest was the success of the negotiations with the Elector Palatine and his approaching marriage with the Princess Elizabeth. Sir Robert Drury's part in all this, however, can scarcely have been even that of the fly on the wheel, although he and Donne may possibly have been in the Palatinate when the ambassadors of the Princes of the Protestant German Union made their formal request in England for the hand of the Princess, and signed the marriage contract in May 1612, a few days before the death of Salisbury. They may, moreover, have been empowered to precede the Elector Palatine as a sort of intellectual guard of honour, when he sailed over to England in September to greet his affianced bride. But it is much more probable that the vanity of Sir Robert Drury exaggerated his own importance on this occasion. Still Donne appears to have been in some way authorised to celebrate the approaching nuptials; he retained, as we know from his later expressions, much of the esteem with which the Princess had learned to regard him during the time she spent as the ward of Lord Harington. The sudden illness of the Prince of Wales, who died of typhoid fever on the 6th of November, diverted every one's thoughts and postponed the marriage of the Princess Elizabeth. This promising lad of eighteen was the most popular person in England, and his death was mourned as a national disaster. Whether Donne had known him personally is uncertain. There exists, among the papers of the Marquis of Bath, a didactic epistle in which Donne, having dedicated a book to the King, sends a copy of it to Prince Henry. This book was manifestly the Pseudo-Martyr of 1610, but there is no evidence that the Prince of Wales, whose mind by no means ran in the same channel as his father's, was attracted by this rather ponderous piece of controversial literature. Donne was somewhat behind-hand in lamenting the popular prince, but his elegy was added in 1613 to a third edition of Joshua Sylvester's Lachryma Lachrymarum, or the Spirit of Tears distilled for the untimely death of the incomparable Prince Panaretus. The "Sundry Funeral Elegies" have the air of being written in competition by a group of friends, and their authors are, indeed, mainly men whose names occur repeatedly in this narrative; besides Donne himself, we meet with Sir William Cornwallis, Sir Edward Herbert, Sir Henry Goodyer, George Gerrard, Joseph Hall, and Henry Holland. Donne's lament runs to about one hundred lines; it is the most obscure, frigid, and affected that he ever composed, and is not animated by one touch of sincere emotion. Ben Jonson told Drummond that Donne, having read Herbert's elegy, which is obscure enough, tried in his own to be still more obscure. If so, he may be congratulated on having occasionally reached in it an opacity and density which are not likely ever to be surpassed. The conceits on this occasion. are not even in themselves amusing, unless it be that which celebrates the extraordinary intelligence of the Prince by saying that when other princes angled for his wit in conversation they "Met a torpedo, and were stupified." The one personal touch in this very bad poem occurs near its close, where Donne proclaims his fealty to the Princess Elizabeth, whose passionate love for her brother had defied the doctors, and had awakened a thrill of sympathy throughout the country. Donne exclaims “O may I, since I live, but see or hear That she-intelligence which moved this sphere," and this he was presently to succeed in doing. The title of this lugubrious collection of elegies is executed in white letters on a black ground: the poems are printed within a black border, displaying figures of Death on either side; the left-hand pages are wholly black, having only the Prince's arms. An elegy on Sir William Sidney concludes the volume, which offers us a very curious example of the bad taste of the age. We have now to print certain undated letters which appear to belong to the close of 1612. It is even possible that the earliest of these was written from the Low Countries as a kind of circular missive, to ensure a general welcome in September. "To all my friends: Sir H. GOODYER.1 "SIR,-I am not weary of writing; it is the coarse but durable garment of my love; but I am weary of wanting you. I have a mind like those bodies which have hot livers and cold stomachs; or such a distemper as travelled me at Paris; a fever and dysentery: in which, that which is physic to one infirmity, nourishes the other. So I abhor nothing more than sadness, except the ordinary remedy, change of company. 1 From the Letters of 1651. # 17, p.4.2 |