Born of a Roman Catholic family, Donne was on his mothers side related to the martyr Sir Thomas More. Some years at Oxford and Cambridge were followed by the study of law, by a period of worldly and amorous adventure in London, by foreign service, and by a marriage—injudicious from the practical viewpoint—with the highborn niece of his employer, Sir Thomas Egerton. Donne's career prospects darkened and for a decade the young couple endured discouragement and poverty. At forty-two, after much serious reflection, Donne forsook the family faith and took orders in the Anglican church. He rose until he became Dean of St. PauPs in London, and the most famous preacher of his time. The daring young spark of the earlier love poems was now a God-tormented man, assailed by visions of death and the indignities of illness. He rejected "the mistress of my youth, Poetry" in favor of "the wife of mine age, Divinity." His obsession with mortality grew with the years. Today you may visit the crypt in St. PauPs and see Donne's statue, sculpted during his lifetime, wrapped in a winding sheet. As his last hour neared he contemplated from his bedside a painting of himself in a shroud, his eyes closed as if death had already touched him.
Donne's Devotions and Sermons are quite unlike conven- tional religious literature. They are works of art, combining an
almost frightening spiritual intensity with cunning elaboration of rhythm and metaphor. The Devotions are addressed to himself. The sermons were delivered before large audiences, often before the king. No Sunday pieties, they were designed delib- erately to work upon the emotions. They can still do so, with their art if not their doctrine.
Donne's poetry is at once highly sensuous (often highly sensual), uncompromisingly intellectual, and startlingly per- sonal. By the use of metaphor, sometimes complex, sometimes brutally direct, Donne merges sense and intellect in a manner to which our own taste seems keenly receptive. At his worst his figures of speech are the ingenious conceits that annoyed the forthright Dr. Johnson [59]. At his best they seem identical with the thought itself.
His love poetry bypasses not only ali the Elizabethan con- ventions, but ali the standard sentiments that had been the sta- ple of erotic verse up to his day. "For God's sake hold your tongue, and let me love." A man who begins a poem that way is imitating no one. He is not writing exercises. He is a real man speaking, and his voice is in the room. Donne can be shocking, outrageous, tender, learned, colloquial, fantastic, passionate, reverent, despairing; and sometimes he is several of these in a single love poem. It is his awareness of the complexity of emo- tion that recommends him to our unsimple time. And what is true of his love poetry is also true of his devotional verse, which often seems to have an erotic tinge: It is the work of the whole man, including the physical man. Two often-quoted lines condense a great deal of John Donne:
Love's mysteries in souls do grow,
But yet the body is his book.
We may, very roughly, liken Donne's poetry to El Greco's painting. As El Greco distorts line, so Donne distorts language, not out of any lust for experiment, but to achieve calculated effects of emphasis, intensity, and directness obtainable in no other way. Just as El Greco's colors at first seem harsh and unnatural, so Donne's rhythms are broken, rough, the agitated reflection of emotions themselves broken and rough. The spiri- tual pain and tension that we feel in El Greco we feel also in Donne. His faith was not serene; it was shadowed with anxi- eties, perplexities, contradictions that seem to anticipate the climate of our own sorely beset time.
Donne produced much writing of interest mainly to the scholar. For the beginning reader, who may be familiar with only a few anthology pieces, I might suggest: the Songs and Sonnets, the Elegies, the First and Second Anniversaries, the Holy Sonnets, the Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, and perhaps a few of the Sermons. At first this "angel speaking out of a cloud" may seem far-fetched and needlessly difficult. But, behind his odd metaphors (often drawn from the trades and sciences) and his seeming extravagances of style lie sound reasons. Careful reading will soon make these reasons apparent, and his personal idiom will become less and less alien as it becomes more and more fascinating.
C.F.
41
ANONYMOUS
published 1618
The Plum in the Golden Vase (Chin PHng Mei)
The Chin PHng Mei \Jin ping mei] is a famously, even scan- dalously, erotic novel. It has been banned in China for much of the time since its publication in the early seventeenth century, though that has seldom stopped it from being circulated sur- reptitiously. Its reputation as a "dirty book" has assured it a stormy career in the West as well; for many years the only widely available translation had ali of the sexy parts in Latin, shrouded, as the translator explained (borrowing a phrase from Samuel Johnson), "in the decent obscurity of a learned lan- guage." (There was a time when the existence of similar pas- sages in the works of Ovid and other Classical authors spurred schoolboys on to feats of Latin erudition that they seldom matched in the classroom.)
If the Chin P mg Mei were only an erotic novel, though, it would not be of ali that much interest; the sexually explicit passages are far tamer than one will find in any commonplace bodice-ripper in our own time. What makes this a great novel, indeed a classic of world literature, is that it is a brilliant social satire and critique, a devastating portrayal of sixteenth-century China in the grip of decadence, cynicism, and excess. David Roy, the most recent and best translator of the Chin P mg Mei, likens the book to Dickens's Bleak House [77] in the power of its indictment of a whole society. (The events of the novel are set in the period 1122-1127, the waning years of the Northern Sung Dynasty, but that was simply protective coloration for the anonymous author; readers in the time the book was written would have recognized the society it describes as their own.)
The novel depicts life in the household of Hsi-men Chmg [Ximen Qing], a merchant in a provincial city of China: his business dealings, his amorous intrigues, his ill-gotten gains, and finally his death, the disintegration of his household, and the thwarting of his schemes. The novel, in 100 chapters, is enormously long and dense, with numerous plot twists and narrative byways; it has been compared to the works of Joyce [110] and Nabokov [122]. But whatever the book's complexity Hsi-men Cfring remains its focai figure, and he is one of the most marvelous scoundrels in ali of world literature. He is sexually insatiable, and this lust is symbolic of his more general greed for money, power, and pleasure. His six wives and con- cubines are not merely companions and playthings: One joins his household after he conspires with her to poison her hus- band; another is the seduced former wife of his neighbor and sworn brother. Just as he stops at nothing in assembling his harem, so he is contemptuous of ordinary morality in his business dealings; his philosophy of life is to grab what he can when he can, and devil take the hindmost.
The concept of a charming literary villain is not so shock- ing to us nowadays, but to a traditional Confucian Chinese readership Hsi-men Ch'ing was not merely titillating, he was profoundly threatening. Two of the founding principies of Confucian morality are that human nature is by nature good, and that social order proceeds from the benevolent influence of the ruler radiating throughout the realm (see Mencius [14]). The author of the Chin P mg Mei—and it is no wonder that he took pains to preserve his anonymity—is telling his readers that human nature is, on the contrary, immoral and opportunistic, and that in contemporary society there is no sign of transforming, benevolent virtue diffusing outwards from the throne. In its own time, then, the Chin P mg Mei was a work of social criticism verging on sedition. Today that impact has become somewhat blunted, but the fascinating tale of greed, folly and retribution remains for us to enjoy. We will also notice that in its psychologically authentic characters, its multilayered plot, and its focus on the affairs of a single wealthy household, this novel points directly ahead to Dream of the Red Chamber [56], the greatest of ali works of traditional Chinese fiction.