METAPHYSICALS AND BAROQUE
9
at moments, as ill-bred as Caravaggio sometimes was, and as insolent.
But Donne was more mercurial and versatile than Caravaggio. He
was as competent a master of psychological vocabulary as Frans Hals
or Rembrandt. Donne watched intensely his adjustment to the mo–
ment. Nothing was stable; the world flickered as he saw it through
a sensibility that could not be stabilized for twenty lines. The arbitrary
constructions of Rembrandt or El Greco were repeated in the almost
impudently irregular course of
The Extasie,
or any of the verses in
which he exposed his relation to women. Donne's every observation
was wilfully foreshortened by his perplexed egoism. Nowhere in
English verse are the momentary and poignant so recklessly mani–
pulated as in Donne, who delighted in the audacities of the natural–
istic and "disturbed" baroque.
The hard actualism of Donne's metaphors is particularly signi–
ficant; and his characteristically baroque intrusion of the material,
especially the incongruous, was transmitted throughout the seven–
teenth century in painting, architecture, and sculpture. Compare the
counter-reformation effigies of saints in which not only anatomical
detail but even the handling of stuffs contribute their bizarre "effect"
with the amazing profusion of freakish imagery in George Herbert
and writers of "emblems." Even Herrick retained the sharp details
of flowers. The Cavalier and Restoration wits continued to trifle with
the flesh in such a way as to mock the very sentiment they professed.
And there was the notorious actualism of Cleveland:
I like not tears in tune, nor will I prize
His artificial grief that scans his eyes.
Mine weep down pious beads, but why should I
Confine them to the Muses' rosary?
I am no poet here; my pen's the spout,
Where the rain water of my eyes run out.
'
This baroque "realism," in fragile and lively form, was gradually
modified into the delicate extravagance of the rococo. This engaging
rococo detail was already apparent in Lovelace's verses on Elinda's
glove:
Thou snow}' farme with thy five tenements!
Tell thy white mistris here was one
That call'd to pay his dayly rents
...
The same "witty" paradox was
in
Watteau-the hard little Flemish
remarks that he would not obliterate from his most idyllic scenes-
