as a
great thirdsman, called themselves "sons" of Ben Jonson, and so in a way
they were; but they were even more sons of Donne. That great writer's
burning passion, his strange and labyrinthine conceits, the union in him of
spiritual and sensual fire, influenced the idiosyncrasies of each as hardly
any other writer's influence has done in other times; while his technical
shortcomings had unquestionably a fatal effect on the weaker members of the
school. But there is also noticeable in them a separate and hardly
definable influence which circumscribes their class even more distinctly.
They were, as I take it, the last set of poets anywhere in Europe to
exhibit, in that most fertile department of poetry which seeks its
inspiration in the love of man for woman, the frank expression of physical
affection united with the spirit of chivalry, tempered by the consciousness
of the fading of all natural delights, and foreshadowed by that
intellectual introspection which has since developed itself in such great
measure--some think out of all measure--in poetry. In the best of them
there is no cynicism at all. Herrick and Carew are only sorry that the
amatory fashion of this world passeth; they do not in the least undervalue
it while it lasts, or sneer at it when it is gone. There is, at least to my
thinking, little coarseness in them (I must perpetually except Herrick's
epigrams), though there is, according to modern standards, a great deal of
very plain speaking. They have as much frank enjoyment of physical
pleasures as any classic or any mediaevalist; but they have what no classic
except Catullus and perhaps Sappho had,--the fine rapture, the passing but
transforming madness which brings merely physical passion _sub specie
aeternitatis_; and they have in addition a faint preliminary touch of that
analytic and self-questioning spirit which refines even further upon the
chivalric rapture and the classical-renaissance mysticism of the shadow of
death, but which since their time has eaten up the simpler and franker
moods of passion itself. With them, as a necessary consequence, the
physical is (to anticipate a famous word of which more presently) always
blended with the metaphysical. It is curious that, as one result of the
change of manner, this should have even been made a reproach to them--that
the ecstasy of their ecstasies should apparently have become not an excuse
but an additional crime. Yet if any grave and precise person wi