Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/176

156 scholastic pedantry and subtlety of the controversial court of James. The temper of Donne's poetry is that of Marlowe's and Shakespeare's. It has the same emancipated ardour and exaltation. Whatever his theme—love, eulogy, or devotion—his imagination, like theirs, takes wing, so soon as it is thrown off, to the highest pitch of hyperbole. What distinguishes him from the great Elizabethans is the prevailing character of his conceits, his "metaphysical wit." To the imaginative temper of Marlowe Donne superadded the subtlety and erudition of a school-man, and brought to the expression of his intense, audacious passions imagery drawn from an intimate knowledge of mediæval theology and of the science mediæval, but beginning to grow modern, of the seventeenth century.

Johnson's term "metaphysical"—which he derived from Dryden, and by which it is clear from what he says of Waller's "wit" as well as Cowley's he meant simply learned or technical conceits, drawn not from "the superficies of nature" but from the recondite stores of learning—is both more distinctive than any other name which has been suggested—"fantastic" is very far from distinctive—and is historically interesting and accurate. "Concetti metafisici ed ideali" are, according to Fulvio Testi, the distinctive feature of Italian as opposed to classical poetry. The ultimate source of the conceits and artificialities of Renaissance love-poetry is to be found, as Mr Courthope has indicated, in the poetry of the Middle Ages, from the Troubadours onwards.