III. ELIZABETHAN TIMES

_General Influences, and Prologue to 1579._--The history of letters in

England from More's _Utopia_ (1516), the first Platonic vision, to

Milton's _Samson Agonistes_ (1671), the latest classic tragedy, is one

and continuous. That is the period of the English Renaissance, in the

wider sense, and it covers all and more of the literature loosely called

"Elizabethan." With all its complexity and subdivisions, it has as real

a unity as the age of Pericles, or that of Petrarch and Boccaccio, or

the period in Germany that includes both Lessing and Heine. It is

peculiar in length of span, in variety of power, and in wealth of

production, though its master-works on the greater scale are relatively

few. It is distinct, while never quite cut off, from the middle age

preceding, and also from the classical or "Augustan" age that followed.

The coming of Dryden denoted a new phase; but it was still a phase of

the Renaissance; and the break that declared itself about 1660 counts as

nothing beside the break with the middle ages; for this implied the

whole change in art, thought and temper, which re-created the European

mind. It is true that many filaments unite Renaissance and middle ages,

not only in the religious and purely intellectual region, but in that of

art. The matter of Geoffrey of Monmouth, the tales of Arthur and of

Troilus, the old fairy folklore of the South, the topic of the _Falls of

Princes_, lived on; and so did the characteristic medieval form,

allegory and many of the old metres of the 14th century. But then these

things were transformed, often out of knowledge. Shakespeare's use of

the histories of Macbeth, Lear and Troilus, and Spenser's of the

allegoric romance, are examples. And when the gifts of the middle ages

are not transformed, as in the _Mirror for Magistrates_, they strike us

as survivals from a lost world.

So vital a change took long in the working. The English Renaissance of

letters only came into full flower during the last twenty years of the

16th century, later than in any Southern land; but it was all the richer

for delay, and would have missed many a life-giving element could it

have been driven forward sooner. If the actual process of genius is

beyond analysis, we can still notice the subjects which genius receives,

or chooses, to work upon, and also the vesture which it chooses for

them; and we can watch some of the forces that long retard but in the

end fertilize these workings of genius.

General forces.

What, then, in England, were these forces? Two of them lie outside

letters, namely, the political settlement, culminating in the later

reign of Elizabeth, and the religious settlement, whereby the Anglican

Church grew out of the English Reformation. A third force lay within the

sphere of the Renaissance itself, in the narrower meaning of the term.

It was culture--the prefatory work of culture and education, which at

once prepared and put off the flowering of pure genius. "Elizabethan"

literature took its complexion from the circumstance that all these

three forces were in operation at once. The Church began to be fully

articulate, just when the national feeling was at its highest, and the

tides of classical and immigrant culture were strongest. Spenser's

_Faerie Queene_, Hooker's _Ecclesiastical Polity_ and Shakespeare's

_Henry V._ came in the same decade (1590-1600). But these three forces,

political, religious and educational, were of very different duration

and value. The enthusiasm of 1590-1600 was already dying down in the

years 1600-1610, when the great tragedies were written; and soon a

wholly new set of political forces began to tell on art. The religious

inspiration was mainly confined to certain important channels; and

literature as a whole, from first to last, was far more secular than

religious. But Renaissance culture, in its ramifications and

consequences, tells all the time and over the whole field, from 1500 to

1660. It is this culture which really binds together the long and varied

chronicle. Before passing to narrative, a short review of each of these

elements is required.

Politics.

Down to 1579 the Tudor rule was hardly a direct inspiration to authors.

The reign of Henry VII. was first duly told by Bacon, and that of Henry

VIII. staged by Shakespeare and Fletcher, in the time of James I. Sir

Thomas More found in Roper, and Wolsey in Cavendish, sound biographers,

who are nearly the earliest in the language. The later years of Henry

VIII. were full of episodes too tragically picturesque for safe handling

in the lifetime of his children. The next two reigns were engrossed with

the religious war; and the first twenty years of Elizabeth, if they laid

the bases of an age of peace, well-being, and national self-confidence

that was to prove a teeming soil for letters, were themselves poor in

themes for patriotic art. The abortive treason of the northern earls was

echoed only in a ringing ballad. But the voyagers, freebooters, and

explorers reported their experiences, as a duty, not for fame; and

these, though not till the golden age, were edited by Hakluyt, and

fledged the poetic fancies that took wing from the "Indian Peru" to the

"still-vext Bermoothes." Yet, in default of any true historian, the

queen's wise delays and diplomacies that upheld the English power, and

her refusal to launch on a Protestant or a national war until occasion

compelled and the country was ready, were subjects as uninspiring to

poets as the burning questions of the royal marriage or the royal title.

But by 1580 the nation was filled with the sense of Elizabeth's success

and greatness and of its own prosperity. No shorter struggle and no less

achievement could have nursed the insolent, jubilant patriotism of the

years that followed; a feeling that for good reasons was peculiar to

England among the nations, and created the peculiar forms of the

chronicle play and poem. These were borrowed neither from antiquity nor

from abroad, and were never afterwards revived. The same exultation

found its way into the current forms of ode and pastoral, of masque and

allegory, and into many a dedication and interlude of prose. It was so

strong as to outlive the age that gave it warrant. The passion for

England, the passion of England for herself, animates the bulk of

Drayton's _Poly-Olbion_, which was finished so late as 1622. But the

public issues were then changing, the temper was darker; and the civil

struggle was to speak less in poetry than in the prose of political

theory and ecclesiastical argument, until its after-explosion came in

the verse of Milton.

Religious change.

The English Reformation, so long political rather than doctrinal or

imaginative, cost much writing on all sides; but no book like Calvin's

_Institution_ is its trophy, at once defining the religious change for

millions of later men and marking a term of departure in the national

prose. Still, the debating weapons, the axes and billhooks, of

vernacular English were sharpened--somewhat jaggedly--in the pamphlet

battles that dwarfed the original energies of Sir Thomas More and evoked

those of Tyndale and his friends. The powers of the same style were

proved for descriptive economy by Starkey's Dialogue between Pole and

Lupset, and for religious appeal by the blunt sound rhetoric and

forthright jests in the sermons of Latimer (died 1555). Foxe's reports

of the martyrs are the type of early Protestant English (1563); but the

reforming divines seldom became real men of letters even when their

Puritanism, or discontent with the final Anglican settlement and its

temper, began to announce itself. Their spirit, however, comes out in

many a corner of poetry, in Gascoigne's _Steel Glass_ as in Spenser's

_Shepherd's Calendar_; and the English Reformation lived partly on its

pre-natal memories of Langland as well as of Wycliffe. The fruit of the

struggle, though retarded, was ample. Carrying on the work of Fisher and

Cranmer, the new church became the nursing mother of English prose, and

trained it more than any single influence,--trained it so well, for the

purposes of sacred learning, translation and oratory, and also as a

medium of poetic feeling, that in these activities England came to rival

France. How late any religious writer of true rank arose may be seen by

the lapse of over half a century between Henry VIII.'s Act of Supremacy

and Hooker's treatise. But after Hooker the chain of eloquent divines

was unbroken for a hundred years.

Classical culture.

Renaissance culture had many stages and was fed from many streams. At

the outset of the century, in the wake of Erasmus, under the teaching of

Colet and his friends, there spread a sounder knowledge of the Greek and

Latin tongues, of the classic texts, and so of the ancient life and

mind. This period of humanism in the stricter sense was far less

brilliant than in Italy and France. No very great scholar or savant

arose in Britain for a long time; but neo-Latin literature, the

satellite of scholarship, shone brightly in George Buchanan. But

scholarship was created and secured; and in at least one, rather

solitary, work of power, the _Utopia_ (which remained in Latin till

1551), the fundamental process was begun which appropriates the Greek

mind, not only for purposes of schooling, but as a source of new and

independent thinking. In and after the middle of the century the

classics were again put forward by Cheke, by Wilson in his _Art of

Rhetoric_ (1553), and by Ascham in his letters and in his _Schoolmaster_

(1570), as the true staple of humane education, and the pattern for a

simple yet lettered English. The literature of translations from the

classics, in prose and verse, increased; and these works, at first

plain, business-like, and uninspired, slowly rose in style and power,

and at last, like the translations from modern tongues, were written by

a series of masters of English, who thus introduced Plutarch and Tacitus

to poets and historians. This labour of mediation was encouraged by the

rapid expansion and reform of the two universities, of which almost

every great master except Shakespeare was a member; and even Shakespeare

had ample Latin for his purpose.

Italy and France.

The direct impact of the classics on "Elizabethan" literature, whether

through such translations or the originals, would take long to describe.

But their indirect impact is far stronger, though in result the two are

hard to discern. This is another point that distinguishes the English

Renaissance from the Italian or the French, and makes it more complex.

The knowledge of the thought, art and enthusiasms of Rome and Athens

constantly came round through Italy or France, tinted and charged in the

passage with something characteristic of those countries. The early

playwrights read Seneca in Latin and English, but also the foreign

Senecan tragedies. Spenser, when starting on his pastorals, studied the

Sicilians, but also Sannazaro and Marot. Shakespeare saw heroic

antiquity through Plutarch, but also, surely, through Montaigne's

reading of antiquity. Few of the poets can have distinguished the

original fountain of Plato from the canalized supply of the Italian

Neoplatonists. The influence, however, of Cicero on the Anglican pulpit

was immediate as well as constant; and so was that of the conciser Roman

masters, Sallust and Tacitus, on Ben Jonson and on Bacon. Such scattered

examples only intimate the existence of two great chapters of English

literary history,--the effects of the classics and the effects of Italy.

The bibliography of 16th-century translations from the Italian in the

fields of political and moral speculation, poetry, fiction and the

drama, is so large as itself to tell part of the story. The genius of

Italy served the genius of England in three distinctive ways. It

inspired the recovery, with new modulations, of a lost music and a lost

prosody. It modelled many of the chief poetic forms, which soon were

developed out of recognition; such were tragedy, allegory, song,

pastoral and sonnet. Thirdly, it disclosed some of the master-thoughts

upon government and conduct formed both by the old and the new

Mediterranean world. Machiavelli, the student of ancient Rome and modern

Italy, riveted the creed of Bacon. It might be said that never has any

modern people so influenced another in an equal space of time--and

letters, here as ever, are only the voice, the symbol, of a whole life

and culture--if we forgot the sway of French in the later 17th and 18th

centuries. And the power of French was alive also in the 16th. The track

of Marot, of Ronsard and the Pleiad and Desportes, of Rabelais and

Calvin and Montaigne, is found in England. Journeymen like Boisteau and

Belleforest handed on immortal tales. The influence is noteworthy of

Spanish mannerists, above all of Guevara upon sententious prose, and of

the novelists and humorists, headed by Cervantes, upon the drama. German

legend is found not only in Marlowe's _Faustus_, but in the by-ways of

play and story. It will be long before the rich and coloured tangle of

these threads has been completely unravelled with due tact and science.

The presence of one strand may here be mentioned, which appears in

unexpected spots.

Philosophy.

As in Greece, and as in the day of Coleridge and Shelley, the fabric of

poetry and prose is shot through with philosophical ideas; a further

distinction from other literatures like the Spanish of the golden age or

the French of 1830. But these were not so much the ideas of the new

physical science and of Bacon as of the ethical and metaphysical

ferment. The wave of free talk in the circles of Marlowe, Greville and

Raleigh ripples through their writings. Though the direct influence of

Giordano Bruno on English writers is probably limited to a reminiscence

in the _Faerie Queene_ (Book vii.), he was well acquainted with Sidney

and Greville, argued for the Copernican theory at Greville's house,

lectured on the soul at Oxford, and published his epoch-marking Italian

dialogues during his two years' stay (1583-1585) in London. The debates

in the earlier schools of Italy on the nature and tenure of the soul are

heard in the _Nosce Teipsum_ (1599) of Sir John Davies; a stoicism, "of

the schools" as well as "of the blood," animates Cassius and also the

French heroes of Chapman; and if the earlier drama is sown with Seneca's

old maxims on sin and destiny, the later drama, at least in Shakespeare,

is penetrated with the freer reading of life and conduct suggested by

Montaigne. Platonism--with its _vox angelica_ sometimes a little

hoarse--is present from the youthful _Hymns_ of Spenser to the last

followers of Donne; sometimes drawn from Plato, it is oftener the

Christianized doctrine codified by Ficino or Pico. It must be noted that

this play of philosophic thought only becomes marked after 1580, when

the preparatory tunings of English literature are over.

We may now quickly review the period down to 1580, in the departments of

prose, verse and drama. It was a time which left few memorials of form.

Prose to 1580.

Early modern English prose, as a medium of art, was of slow growth. For

long there was alternate strife and union (ending in marriage) between

the Latin, or more rhetorical, and the ancestral elements of the

language, and this was true both of diction and of construction. We need

to begin with the talk of actual life, as we find it in the hands of the

more naif writers, in its idiom and gusto and unshapen power, to see how

style gradually declared itself. In state letters and reports, in the

recorded words of Elizabeth and Mary of Scotland and public men, in

travels and memoirs, in Latimer, in the rude early versions of Cicero

and Boethius, in the more unstudied speech of Ascham or Leland, the

material lies. At the other extreme there are the English liturgy (1549,

1552, 1559, with the final fusion of Anglican and Puritan eloquence),

and the sermons of Fisher and Cranmer,--nearly the first examples of a

sinuous, musical and Ciceronian cadence. A noble pattern for

saga-narrative and lyrical prose was achieved in the successive versions

(1526-1540-1568) of the Hebrew and Greek Scriptures, where a native

simple diction of short and melodious clauses are prescribed by the

matter itself. Prose, in fact, down to Shakespeare's time, was largely

the work of the churchmen and translators, aided by the chroniclers.

About the mid-century the stories, as well as the books of conduct and

maxim, drawn from Italy and France, begin to thicken. Perverted symmetry

of style is found in euphuistic hacks like Pettie. Painter's _Palace of

Pleasure_ (1566) provided the plots of Bandello and others for the

dramatists. Hoby's version (1561) of Castiglione's _Courtier_, with its

command of elate and subtle English, is the most notable imported book

between Berners's _Froissart_ (1523-1525) and North's _Plutarch_ (1579).

Ascham's _Schoolmaster_ is the most typical English book of Renaissance

culture, in its narrower sense, since _Utopia_. Holinshed's _Chronicle_

(1577-1587) and the work of Halle, if pre-critical, were all the fitter

to minister to Shakespeare.

Verse to 1580.

The lyric impulse was fledged anew at the court of Henry VIII. The short

lines and harping burdens of Sir Thomas Wyatt's songs show the revival,

not only of a love-poetry more plangent than anything in English since

Chaucer, but also of the long-deadened sense of metre. In Wyatt's

sonnets, octaves, terzines and other Italian measures, we can watch the

painful triumphant struggles of this noble old master out of the slough

of formlessness in which verse had been left by Skelton. Wyatt's primary

deed was his gradual rediscovery of the iambic decasyllabic line duly

accented--the line that had been first discovered by Chaucer for

England; and next came its building into sonnet and stanza. Wyatt (d.

1542) ended with perfect formal accuracy; he has the honours of victory;

and Henry Howard, earl of Surrey (d. 1547), a younger-hearted and more

gracious but a lighter poet, carried on his labour, and caught some of

Chaucer's as well as the Italian tunes. The blank verse of his two

translated _Aeneids_, like all that written previous to Peele, gave

little inkling of the latencies of the measure which was to become the

cardinal one of English poetry. It was already the vogue in Italy for

translations from the classics; and we may think of Surrey importing it

like an uncut jewel and barely conscious of its value. His original

poems, like those of Wyatt, waited for print till the eve of

Elizabeth's reign, when they appeared, with those of followers like

Grimoald, in Tottel's _Miscellany_ (1557), the first of many such

garlands, and the outward proof of the poetical revival dating twenty

years earlier. But this was a false dawn. Only one poem of authentic

power, Sackville's _Induction_ (1563) to that dreary patriotic venture,

_A Mirror for Magistrates_, was published for twenty years. In spirit

medieval, this picture of the gates of hell and of the kings in bale

achieves a new melody and a new intensity, and makes the coming of

Spenser far less incredible. But poetry was long starved by the very

ideal that nursed it--that of the all-sided, all-accomplished "courtier"

or cavalier, to whom verse-making was but one of all the accomplishments

that he must perfect, like fencing, or courting, or equestrian skill.

Wyatt and Surrey, Sackville and Sidney (and we may add Hamlet, a true

Elizabethan) are of this type. One of the first competent professional

writers was George Gascoigne, whose remarks on metric, and whose blank

verse satire, _The Steel Glass_ (1576), save the years between Sackville

and Spenser. Otherwise the gap is filled by painful rhymesters with rare

flashes, such as Googe, Churchyard and Turberville.

Drama to 1580.

The English Renaissance drama, both comic and tragic, illustrates on the

largest scale the characteristic power of the antique at this period--at

first to reproduce itself in imitation, and then to generate something

utterly different from itself, something that throws the antique to the

winds. Out of the Morality, a sermon upon the certainty of death or the

temptations of the soul, acted by personified qualities and supernatural

creatures, had grown up, in the reign of Henry VII., the Interlude, a

dialogue spoken by representative types or trades, who faintly recalled

those in Chaucer's _Prologue_. These forms, which may be termed

medieval, continued long and blended; sometimes heated, as in

_Respublica_, with doctrine, and usually lightened by the comic play of

a "Vice" or incarnation of sinister roguery. John Heywood was the chief

maker of the pure interludes, and Bishop Bale of the Protestant medleys;

his _King Johan_, a reformer's partisan tract in verse, contains the

germs of the chronicle play. In the drama down to 1580 the native talent

is sparse enough, but the historical interest is high. Out of a seeming

welter of forms, the structure, the metres and the species that Kyd and

Marlowe found slowly emerged. Comedy was first delivered from the

interlude, and fashioned in essence as we know it, by the schoolmasters.

Drawing on Plautus, they constructed duly-knitted plots, divided into

acts and scenes and full of homely native fun, for their pupils to

present. In _Thersites_ (written 1537), the oldest of these pieces, and

in Udall's _Ralph Roister Doister_ (1552 at latest), the best known of

them, the characters are lively, and indeed are almost individuals. In

others, like _Misogonus_ (written 1560), the abstract element and

improving purpose remain, and the source is partly neo-Latin comedy,

native or foreign. Romance crept in: serious comedy, with its brilliant

future, the comedy of high sentiment and averted dangers mingled still

with farce, was shadowed forth in _Damon and Pithias_ and in the curious

play _Common Conditions_; while the domestic comedy of intrigue dawned

in Gascoigne's _Supposes_, adapted from Ariosto. Thus were displaced the

ranker rustic fun of _Gammer Gurton's Needle_ (written c. 1559) and

other labours of "rhyming mother-wits." But there was no style, no talk,

no satisfactory metre. The verse of comedy waited for Greene, and its

prose for Lyly. Structure, without style, was also the main achievement

of the early tragedies. The Latin plays of Buchanan, sometimes biblical

in topic, rest, as to their form, upon Euripides. But early English

tragedy was shapen after the Senecan plays of Italy and after Seneca

himself, all of whose dramas were translated by 1581. _Gorboduc, or

Ferrex and Porrex_, acted about 1561, and written by Sackville and

Norton, and Hughes' _Misfortunes of Arthur_ (acted 1588), are not so

much plays as wraiths of plays, with their chain of slaughters and

revenges, their two-dimensional personages, and their lifeless maxims

which fail to sweeten the bloodshot atmosphere. The Senecan form was not

barren in itself, as its sequel in France was to show: it was only

barren for England. After Marlowe it was driven to the study, and was

still written (possibly under the impulse of Mary countess of

Pembroke), by Daniel and Greville, with much reminiscence of the French

Senecans. But it left its trail on the real drama. It set the pattern of

a high tragical action, often motived by revenge, swayed by large ideas

of fate and retribution, and told in blank metre; and it bequeathed,

besides many moral sentences, such minor points of mechanism as the

Ghost, the Chorus and the inserted play. There were many hybrid forms

like _Gismond of Salern_, based on foreign story, alloyed with the mere

personifications of the Morality, and yet contriving, as in the case of

_Promos and Cassandra_ (the foundation of _Measure for Measure_), to

interest Shakespeare. Thus the drama by 1580 had some of its carpentry,

though not yet a true style or versification. These were only to be won

by escape from the classic tutelage. The ruder chronicle play also

began, and the reigns of John and Henry V. amongst others were put upon

the stage.

Spenser.

_Verse from Spenser to Donne_.--Sir Philip Sidney almost shares with

Edmund Spenser the honours of announcing the new verse, for part of his

_Astrophel and Stella_ was written, if not known in unpublished form,

about 1580-1581, and contains ten times the passion and poetry of _The

Shepherd's Calendar_ (1579). This work, of which only a few passages

have the seal of Spenser's coming power, was justly acclaimed for its

novelty of experiment in many styles, pastoral, satiric and triumphal,

and in many measures: though it was criticized for its "rustic" and

archaic diction--a "no language" that was to have more influence upon

poetry than any of the real dialects of England. Spenser's desire to

write high tragedy, avowed in his _October_, was not to be granted; his

nine comedies are lost; and he became the chief non-dramatic poet of his

time and country. Both the plaintive pessimism of Petrarch and du

Bellay, with their favourite method of emblem, and the Platonic theory

of the spiritual love and its heavenly begetting sank into him; and the

_Hymns To Love_ and _To Beauty_ are possibly his earliest verses of

sustained perfection and exaltation. These two strains of feeling

Spenser never lost and never harmonized; the first of them recurs in his

_Complaints_ of 1591, above all in _The Ruins of Time_, the second in

his _Amoretti_ (1595) and _Colin Clout_ and _Epithalamion_, which are

autobiographical. These and a hundred other threads are woven into _The

Faerie Queene_, an unfinished allegorical epic in honour of moral

goodness, of which three books came out in 1590 and three more in 1596,

while the fragment _Of Constancy_ (so-called) is first found in the

posthumous folio of 1609. This poem is the fullest reflex, outside the

drama, of the soul and aspirations of the time. For its scenery and

mechanism the _Orlando Furioso_ of Ariosto furnishes the framework. In

both poems tales of knightly adventure intertwine unconfused; in both

the slaying of monsters, the capture of strong places, and the release

of the innocent, hindered by wizard and sorcerer, or aided by magic

sword and horn and mirror, constitute the quest; and in both warriors,

ladies, dwarfs, dragons and figures from old mythology jostle dreamily

together. To all this pomp Spenser strove to give a moral and often also

a political meaning. Ariosto was not a _vates sacer_; and so Spenser

took Tasso's theme of the holy war waged for the Sepulchre, and expanded

it into a war between good and evil, as he saw them in the world;

between chastity and lust, loyalty and detraction, England and Spain,

England and Rome, Elizabeth and usurpers, Irish governor and Irish

rebel, right and wrong. The title-virtues of his six extant books he

affects to take from Aristotle; but Holiness, Temperance, Chastity,

Justice, Friendship and Courtesy form a medley of medieval, puritanical

and Greek ideals.

Spenser's moral sentiments, often ethereally noble, might well be

contrasted, and that not always to their credit, with those more secular

and naturalistic ones that rule in Shakespeare or in Bernardino Telesio

and Giordano Bruno. But _The Faerie Queene_ lives by its poetry; and its

poetry lives independently of its creed. The idealized figures of

Elizabeth, who is the Faerie Queene, and of the "magnificent" Prince

Arthur, fail to bind the adventures together, and after two books the

poem breaks down in structure. And indeed all through it relies on

episode and pageant, on its prevailing and insuppressible loveliness of

scene and tint, of phrasing and of melody, beside which the inner

meaning is often an interruption. Spenser is not to be tired; in and out

of his tapestry, with its "glooming light much like a shade," pace his

figures on horseback, or in durance, with their clear and pictorial

allegoric trappings; and they go either singly, or in his favourite

masques or pageants, suggested by emblematical painting or civic

procession. He is often duly praised for his lingering and liquid

melodies and his gracious images, or blamed for their langour; but his

ground-tone is a sombre melancholy--unlike that of Jaques--and his

deepest quality as a writer is perhaps his angry power. Few of his forty

and more thousand lines are unpoetical; in certainty of style amongst

English poets who have written profusely, he has no equals but Chaucer,

Milton and Shelley. His "artificial" diction, drawn from middle English,

from dialect or from false analogy, has always the intention and nearly

always the effect of beauty; we soon feel that its absence would be

unnatural, and it has taken its rank among the habitual and exquisite

implements of English poetry. This equality of noble form is Spenser's

strength, as dilution and diffusion of phrase, and a certain monotonous

slowness of _tempo_, are beyond doubt his weaknesses. His chief

technical invention, the nine-line stanza (_ababbcbcC_) was developed

not from the Italian octave (_abababcc_), but by adding an alexandrine

to the eight-line stave (_ababbcbc_) of Chaucer's _Monk's Tale_. It is

naturally articulated twice--at the fifth line, where the turn of

repeated rhyme inevitably charms, and at the ninth, which runs now to a

crashing climax, now to a pensive and sighing close. In rhyming,

Spenser, if not always accurate, is one of the most natural and

resourceful of poets. His power over the heroic couplet or quatrain is

shown in his fable, _Mother Hubbard's Tale_, and in his curious verse

memoir, _Colin Clout_; both of which are medleys of satire and flattery.

With formal tasks so various and so hard, it is wonderful how effortless

the style of Spenser remains. His _Muiopotmos_ is the lightest-handed of

mock-heroics. No writer of his day except Marlowe was so faithful to the

law of beauty.

Spenserians.

The mantle of Spenser fell, somewhat in shreds, upon poets of many

schools until the Restoration. As though in thanks to his master Tasso,

he lent to Edward Fairfax, the best translator of the _Jerusalem

Delivered_ (_Godfrey of Bulloigne_, 1600), some of his own ease and

intricate melody. Harington, the witty translator of Ariosto (1591) and

spoilt child of the court, owed less to Spenser. The allegorical

colouring was nobly caught, if sometimes barbarized, in the _Christ's

Victory and Triumph_ of the younger Giles Fletcher (1610), and Spenser's

emblematic style was strained, even cracked, by Phineas Fletcher in _The

Purple Island_ (1633), an aspiring fable, gorgeous in places, of the

human body and faculties. Both of these brethren clipped and marred the

stanza, but they form a link between Spenser and their student Milton.

The allegoric form, long-winded and broken-backed, survived late in

Henry More's and Joseph Beaumont's verse disquisitions on the soul.

Spenser's pastoral and allusive manner was allowed by Drayton in his

_Shepherd's Garland_ (1593), and differently by William Browne in

_Britannia's Pastorals_ (1613-1616), and by William Basse; while his

more honeyed descriptions took on a mawkish taste in the anonymous

_Britain's Ida_ and similar poems. His golden Platonic style was

buoyantly echoed in _Orchestra_ (1596), Sir John Davies' poem on the

dancing spheres. He is continually traceable in 17th-century verse,

blending with the alien currents of Ben Jonson and of Donne. He was

edited and imitated in the age of Thomson, in the age of William Morris,

and constantly between.

Drayton and Daniel.

The typical Elizabethan poet is Michael Drayton; who followed Spenser in

pastoral, Daniel, Sidney, Spenser and Shakespeare in sonnet, Daniel

again in chronicle and legend, and Marlowe in mythological story, and

who yet remained himself. His _Endimion and Phoebe_ in passages stands

near _Hero and Leander_; his _England's Heroical Epistles_ (1597) are in

ringing rhetorical couplets; his _Odes_ (1606), like the _Ballad of

Agincourt_ and the _Virginian Voyage_, forestall and equal Cowper's or

Campbell's; his _Nymphidia_ (1627) was the most popular of burlesque

fairy poems; and his pastorals are full of graces and felicities. The

work of Drayton that is least read and most often mentioned is his

_Poly-Olbion_ (1612-1622), a vast and pious effort, now and then nobly

repaid, to versify the scenery, legend, customs and particularities of

every English county. The more recluse and pensive habit of Samuel

Daniel chills his long chronicle poems; but with Chapman he is the

clearest voice of Stoicism in Elizabethan letters; and his harmonious

nature is perfectly expressed in a style of happy, even excellence, free

alike from "fine madness" and from strain. Sonnet and epistle are his

favoured forms, and in his _Musophilus_ (1599) as well as in his

admirable prose _Defence of Rhyme_ (1602), he truly prophesies the hopes

and glories of that _illustre vulgare_, the literary speech of England.

All this patriotic and historic verse, like the earlier and ruder

_Albion's England_ (1586) of William Warner, or Fitzgeoffrey's poem upon

Drake, or the outbursts of Spenser, was written during or inspired by

the last twenty years of the queen's reign; and the same is true of

Shakespeare's and most of the other history plays, which duly eclipsed

the formal, rusty-gray chronicle poem of the type of the _Mirror for

Magistrates_, though editions (1559-1610) of the latter were long

repeated. Patriotic verse outside the theatre, however, full of zeal,

started at a disadvantage compared with love-sonnet, song, or mythic

narrative, because it had no models before it in other lands, and

remained therefore the more shapeless.

Sonnets.

The English love-sonnet, brought in by Wyatt and rifest between 1590 and

1600, was revived as a purely studious imitation by Watson in his

_Hekatompathia_ (1582), a string of translations in one of the

exceptional measures that were freely entitled "sonnets." But from the

first, in the hands of Sidney, whose _Astrophel and Stella_ (1591) was

written, as remarked above, about 1581, the sonnet was ever ready to

pulse into feeling, and to flash into unborrowed beauty, embodying

sometimes dramatic fancy and often living experience. These three fibres

of imitation, imagination and confession are intertwisted beyond

severance in many of the cycles, and now one, now another is uppermost.

Incaution might read a personal diary into Thomas Lodge's _Phillis_

(1593), which is often a translation from Ronsard. Literal judges have

announced that Shakespeare's _Sonnets_ are but his mode of taking

exercise. But there is poetry in "God's plenty" almost everywhere; and

few of the series fail of lovely lines or phrasing or even of perfect

sonnets. This holds of Henry Constable's _Diana_ (1592), of the

_Parthenophil and Parthenophe_ of Barnabe Barnes (1593), inebriate with

poetry, and of the stray minor groups, _Alcilia, Licia, Caelia_; while

the _Caelica_ of Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke, in irregular form, is full

of metaphysical passion struggling to be delivered. _Astrophel and

Stella_, Drayton's _Idea_ (1594-1619), Spenser's _Amoretti_ and

Shakespeare's _Sonnets_ (printed 1609) are addressed to definite and

probably to known persons, and are charged with true poetic rage,

ecstatic or plaintive, desperate or solemn, if they are also

intermingled with the mere word-play that mocks or beguiles the ebb of

feeling, or with the purely plastic work that is done for solace. In

most of these series, as in Daniel's paler but exquisitely-wrought

_Delia_ (1591-1592), the form is that of the three separate quatrains

with the closing couplet for emotional and melodic climax; a scheme

slowly but defiantly evolved, through traceable gradations, from that

stricter one of Italy, which Drummond and Milton revived, and where the

crisis properly coincides with the change from octave to sestet.

Mythic poems.

The amorous mythologic tale in verse derives immediately from

contemporary Italy, but in the beginning from Ovid, whose

_Metamorphoses_, familiar in Golding's old version (1555-1557),

furnished descriptions, decorations and many tales, while his _Heroides_

gave Chaucer and Boccaccio a model for the self-anatomy of tragic or

plaintive sentiment. Within ten years, between 1588 and 1598, during the

early sonnet-vogue, appeared Lodge's _Scillaes Metamorphosis_,

Shakespeare's _Venus and Adonis_ and _Rape of Lucrece_, Marlowe's _Hero

and Leander_ and Drayton's _Endimion and Phoebe_. Shakespeare owed

something to Lodge, and Drayton to Marlowe. All these points describe a

love-situation at length, and save in one instance they describe it from

without. The exception is Marlowe, who achieves a more than Sicilian

perfection; he says everything, and is equal to everything that he has

to say. In _Venus and Adonis_ the poet is enamoured less of love than of

the tones and poses of lovers and of the beauty and gallant motion of

animals, while in The _Rape of Lucrece_ he is intent on the gradations

of lust, shame and indignation, in which he has a spectator's interest.

Virtuosity, or the delight of the executant in his own brilliant

cunning, is the mark of most of these pieces.

Lyric.

If we go to the lyrics, the versified mythic tales and the sonnets of

Elizabethan times for the kind of feeling that Moliere's Alceste loved

and that Burns and Shelley poured into song, we shall often come away

disappointed, and think the old poetry heartless. But it is not

heartless, any more than it is always impassioned or personal; it is

decorative. The feeling is often that of the craftsman; it is not of the

singer who spends his vital essence in song and commands an answering

thrill so long as his native language is alive or understood. The arts

that deal with ivories or enamelling or silver suggest themselves while

we watch the delighted tinting and chasing, the sense for gesture and

grouping (in _Venus and Adonis_), or the delicate beating out of rhyme

in a madrigal, or the designing of a single motive, or two contrasted

motives, within the panel of the sonnet. And soon it is evident how

passion and emotion readily become plastic matter too, whether they be

drawn from books or observation or self-scrutiny. This is above all the

case in the sonnet; but it is found in the lyric as well. The result is

a wonderful fertility of lyrical pattern, a wonderfully diffused power

of lyrical execution, never to recur at any later time of English

literature. Wyatt had to recover the very form of such verse from

oblivion, and this he did in the school of translation and adaptation.

Not only the decasyllabic, but the lyric, in short lines had almost died

out of memory, and Wyatt brought it back. From his day to Spenser's

there is not much lyric that is noteworthy, though in Gascoigne and

others the impulse is seen. The introduction of Italian music, with its

favourite metrical schemes, such as the madrigal, powerfully schooled

and coloured lyric: in especial, the caressing double ending, regular in

Italian but heavier in English, became common. The Italian poems were

often translated in their own measure, line by line, and the musical

setting retained. Their tunes, or other tunes, were then coupled with

new and original poems; and both appeared together in the song-books of

Dowland the lutanist, of Jones and Byrd (1588), and in chief (1601-1619)

of Thomas Campion. The words of Campion's songs are not only supremely

musical in the wider sense, but are chosen for their singing quality.

Misled awhile by the heresy that rhyme was wrong, he was yet a master of

lovely rhyming, as well as of a lyrical style of great range, gaily or

gravely happy. But, as with most of his fellows, singing is rather his

calling than his consolation. The lyrics that are sprinkled in plays and

romances are the finest of this period, and perhaps, in their kind, of

any period. Shakespeare is the greatest in this province also; but the

power of infallible and unforgettable song is often granted to slighter,

gentler playwrights like Greene and Dekker, while it is denied to men of

weightier build and sterner purpose like Chapman and Jonson. The songs

of Jonson are indeed at their best of absolute and antique finish; but

the irrevocable dew of night or dawn seldom lies upon them as it lies on

the songs of Webster or of Fletcher. The best lyrics in the plays are

dramatic; they must be read in their own setting. While the action

stops, they seize and dally with the dominant emotion of the scene, and

yet relieve it. The songs of Lodge and Breton, of Drayton and Daniel, of

Oxford and Raleigh, and the fervid brief flights of the Jesuit

Southwell, show the omnipresence of the vital gift, whether among

professional writers of the journalistic type, or among poets whose gift

was not primarily song, or among men of action and quality or men of

religion, who only wrote when they were stirred. Lullaby and valentine

and compliment, and love-plaint ranging from gallantry to desperation,

are all there: and the Fortunate Hour, which visits commonly only a few

men in a generation, and those but now and then in their lives, is never

far off. But the master of melody, Spenser, left no songs, apart from

his two insuperable wedding odes. And religious lyric is rarer before

the reign of James. Much of the best lyric is saved for us by the

various Miscellanies, _A Handful of Pleasant Delights_ (1584), the

_Phoenix Nest_ (1593) and Davison's _Poetical Rhapsody_ (1602); while

other such collections, like _England's Helicon_ (1600), were chiefly

garlands of verse that was already in print.

There is plenty of satiric anger and raillery in the spirit of the time,

but the most genuine part of it is drawn off into drama. Except for

stray passages in Spenser, Drayton and others, formal satire, though

profuse, was a literary unreal thing, a pose in the manner of Persius or

Juvenal, and tiresome in expression. In this kind only Donne triumphed.

The attempts of Lodge and Hall and Marston and John Davies of Hereford

and Guilpin and Wither are for the most part simply weariful in

different ways, and satire waited for Dryden and his age. The attempt,

however, persisted throughout. Wyatt was the first and last who

succeeded in the genial, natural Horatian style.

Metaphysical or fantastic schools.

_Verse from Donne to Milton_.--As the age of Elizabeth receded, some

changes came slowly over non-dramatic verse. In Jonson, as in John Donne

(1573-1631), one of the greater poets of the nation, and in many writers

after Donne, may be traced a kind of Counter-Renaissance, or revulsion

against the natural man and his claims to pleasure--a revulsion from

which regret for pleasure lost is seldom far. Poetry becomes more

ascetic and mystical, and this feeling takes shelter alike in the

Anglican and in the Roman faith. George Herbert (_The Temple_, 1633),

the most popular, quaint and pious of the school, but the least

poetical; Crashaw, with his one ecstatic vision (_The Flaming Heart_)

and occasional golden stanzas; Henry Vaughan, who wrote from 1646 to

1678, with his mystical landscape and magical cadences; and Thomas

Traherne, his fellow-dreamer, are the best known of the religious

Fantastics. But, earlier than most of these are Lord Herbert of

Cherbury, and Habington with his _Castara_ (1634), who show the same

temper, if a fitful power and felicity. Such writers form the devouter

section of the famous "metaphysical" or "fantastic" school, which

includes, besides Donne its founder, pure amorists like Carew (whose

touch on certain rhythms has no fellow), young academic followers like

Cartwright and Cleveland (in whom survives the vein of satire that also

marks the school), and Abraham Cowley, who wrote from 1633 to 1678, and

was perhaps the most acceptable living poet about the middle of the

century. In his _Life of Cowley_ Johnson tramples on the "metaphysical"

poets and their vices, and he is generally right in detail. The shock of

cold quaintness, which every one of them continually administers, is

fatal. Johnson only erred in ignoring all their virtues and all their

historical importance.

In Donne poetry became deeply intellectualized, and in temper

disquisitive and introspective. The poet's emotion is played with in a

cat-and-mouse fashion, and he torments it subtly. Donne's passion is so

real, if so unheard-of, and his brain so finely-dividing, that he can

make almost any image, even the remotest, even the commonest, poetical.

His satires, his _Valentine_, his _Litany_, and his lyric or odic pieces

in general, have an insolent and sudden daring which is warranted by

deep-seated power and is only equalled by a few of those tragedians who

are his nearest of kin. The recurring contrast of "wit" or intelligence,

and "will" or desire, their struggle, their mutual illumination, their

fusion as into some third and undiscovered element of human nature, are

but one idiosyncrasy of Donne's intricate soul, whose general progress,

so far as his dateless poems permit of its discovery, seems to have been

from a paganism that is unashamed but crossed with gusts of compunction,

to a mystical and otherwordly temper alloyed with covetous regrets. The

_Anatomy of the World_ and other ambitious pieces have the same quality

amid their outrageous strangeness. In Donne and his successors the

merely ingenious and ransacking intellect often came to overbalance

truth and passion; and hence arose conceits and abstract verbiage, and

the difficulty of finding a perfect poem, however brief, despite the

omnipresence of the poetic gift. The "fantastic" school, if it contains

some of the rarest sallies and passages in English, is one of the least

satisfactory. Its faults only exaggerate those of Sidney, Greville and

Shakespeare, who often misuse homely or technical metaphor; and English

verse shared, by coincidence not by borrowing, and with variations of

its own, in the general strain and torture of style that was besetting

so many poets of the Latin countries. Yet these poets well earn the name

of metaphysical, not for their philosophic phrasing, but for the

shuttle-flight of their fancy to and fro between the things of earth and

the realities of spirit that lie beyond the screen of the flesh.

Rhythm.

Between Spenser and Milton many measures of lyrical and other poetry

were modified. Donne's frequent use of roughly-accentual, almost

tuneless lines is unexplained and was not often followed. Rhythm in

general came to be studied more for its own sake, and the study was

rewarded. The lovely cordial music of Carew's amorous iambics, or of

Wither's trochees, or of Crashaw's odes, or of Marvell's octo-syllables,

has never been regained. The formal ode set in, sometimes regularly

"Pindaric" in strophe-grouping, sometimes irregularly "Pindaric" as in

Cowley's experiments. Above all, the heroic couplet, of the isolated,

balanced, rhetorical order, such as Spenser, Drayton, Fairfax and

Sylvester, the translator (1590-1606) of Du Bartas, had often used,

began to be a regular instrument of verse, and that for special purposes

which soon became lastingly associated with it. The flatteries of Edmund

Waller and the Ovidian translations of Sandys dispute the priority for

smoothness and finish, though the fame was Waller's for two generations;

but Denham's overestimated _Cooper's Hill_ (1642), Cowley's _Davideis_

(1656), and even Ogilby's _Aeneid_ made the path plainer for Dryden, the

first sovereign of the rhetorical couplet which throve as blank verse

declined. Sonnet and madrigal were the favoured measures of William

Drummond of Hawthornden, a real and exquisite poet of the studio, who

shows the general drift of verse towards sequestered and religious

feeling. Drummond's _Poems_ of 1616 and _Flowers of Zion_ (1623) are

full of Petrarch and Plato as well as of Christian resignation, and he

kept alive the artistry of phrasing and versification in a time of

indiscipline and conflicting forms. William Browne has been named as a

Spenserian, but his _Britannia's_ Pastorals (1613-1616), with their

slowly-rippling and overflowing couplets which influenced Keats, were a

medley of a novel kind. George Wither may equally rank among the lighter

followers of Spenser, the easy masters of lyrical narrative, and the

devotional poets. But his _Shepherd's Hunting_ and other pieces in his

volume of 1622 contain lovely landscapes, partly English and partly

artificial, and stand far above his pious works, and still further above

the dreary satires which he lived to continue after the Restoration.

Herrick.

The long poem.

Of poets yet unmentioned, Robert Herrick is the chief, with his two

thousand lyrics and epigrams, gathered in _Hesperides_ and _Noble

Numbers_ (1648). His power of song and sureness of cadence are not

excelled within his range of topic, which includes flowers and

maidens--whom he treats as creatures of the same race--and the swift

decay of both their beauties, and secular regret over this decay and his

own mortality and the transience of amorous pleasure, and the virtues of

his friends, and country sports and lore, and religious compunction for

his own paganism. The _Hesperides_ are pure Renaissance work, in natural

sympathy with the Roman elegiac writings and with the Pseudo-Anacreon.

Cowley is best where he is nearest Herrick, and his posy of short lyrics

outlives his "epic and Pindaric art." There are many writers who last by

virtue of one or two poems; Suckling by his adept playfulness, Lovelace

and Montrose by a few gallant stanzas, and many a nameless poet by many

a consummate cadence. It is the age of sudden flights and brief

perfections. All the farther out of reach, yet never wholly despaired of

or unattempted in England, was the "long poem," heroical and noble, the

"phantom epic," that shadow of the ancient masterpieces, which had

striven to life in Italy and France. Davenant's _Gondibert_ (1651),

Cowley's _Davideis_ and Chamberlayne's _Pharonnida_ (1659) attest the

effort which Milton in 1658 resumed with triumph. These works have

between them all the vices possible to epic verse, dulness and flatness,

faintness and quaintness and incoherence. But there is some poetry in

each of them, and in _Pharonnida_ there is far more than enough poetry

to save it.

Milton.

Few writers have found a flawless style of their own so early in life as

John Milton (1608-1674). His youthful pieces show some signs of Spenser

and the Caroline fantastics; but soon his vast poetical reading ran

clear and lay at the service of his talent. His vision and phrasing of

natural things were already original in the _Nativity Ode_, written when

he was twenty; and, there also, his versification was already that of a

master, of a renovator. The pensive and figured beauty of _L'Allegro_

and _Il Penseroso_, two contrasted emblematic panels, the high innocent

Platonism and golden blank verse of the _Comus_ (1634); the birth of

long-sleeping power in the _Lycidas_ (1637), with its unapproached

contrivance both in evolution and detail, where the precious essences of

earlier myth and pastoral seem to be distilled for an offering in honour

of the tombless friend;--the newness, the promise, the sureness of it

all amid the current schools! The historian finds in these poems, with

their echoes of Plato and Sannazzaro, of Geoffrey of Monmouth and St

John, the richest and most perfect instance of the studious, decorative

Renaissance style, and is not surprised to find Milton's scholars a

century later in the age of Gray. The critic, while feeling that the

strictly lyrical, spontaneous element is absent, is all the more baffled

by the skill and enduring charm. The sonnets were written before or

during Milton's long immersion (1637-1658) in prose and warfare, and

show the same gifts. They are not cast in the traditional form of

love-cycle, but are occasional poems; in metre they revert, not always

strictly but once or twice in full perfection, to the Italian scheme;

and they recall not Petrarch but the spiritual elegies or patriot

exaltations of Dante or Guidiccioni.

Milton also had a medieval side to his brain, as the _History of

Britain_ shows. The heroic theme, which he had resolved from his youth

up to celebrate, at last, after many hesitations, proved to be the fall

of man. This, for one of his creed and for the audience he desired, was

the greatest theme of all. Its scene was the Ptolemaic universe with the

Christian heaven and hell inserted. The time, indicated by retrospect

and prophecy, was the whole of that portion of eternity, from the

creation of Christ to the doomsday, of which the history was sacredly

revealed. The subject and the general span of the action went back to

the popular mystery play; and Milton at first planned out _Paradise

Lost_ as such a play, with certain elements of classic tragedy embodied.

But according to the current theory the epic, not the drama, was the

noblest form of verse; and, feeling where his power lay, he adopted the

epic. The subject, therefore, was partly medieval, partly

Protestant,--for Milton was a true Protestant in having a variant of

doctrine shared by no other mortal. But the ordering and presentment,

with their overture, their interpolated episodes or narratives, their

journeys between Olympus, Earth and hell, invocations, set similes,

battles and divine thunderbolts, are those of the classical epic. Had

Milton shared the free thought as well as the scholarship of the

Renaissance, the poem could never have existed. With all his range of

soul and skill, he had a narrower speculative brain than any poet of

equal gift; and this was well for his great and peculiar task. But

whatever Milton may fail to be, his heroic writing is the permanent and

absolute expression of something that in the English stock is

inveterate--the Promethean self-possession of the mind in defeat, its

right to solitude there, its claim to judge and deny the victor. This is

the spirit of his devils, beside whom his divinities, his unfallen

angels (Abdiel excepted), and even his human couple with their radiance

and beauty of line, all seem shadowy. The discord between Milton's

doctrine and his sympathies in _Paradise Lost_ (1667) has never escaped

notice. The discord between his doctrine and his culture comes out in

_Paradise Regained_ (1671), when he has at once to reprobate and

glorify Athens, the "mother of arts." In this afterthought to the

earlier epic the action is slight, the Enemy has lost spirit, and the

Christ is something of a pedagogue. But there is a new charm in its

even, grey desert tint, sprinkled with illuminations of gold and luxury.

In _Samson Agonistes_ (1671) the ethical treatment as well as the

machinery is Sophoclean, and the theology not wholly Christian. But the

fault of Samson is forgotten in his suffering, which is Milton's own;

and thus a cross-current of sympathy is set up, which may not be much in

keeping with the story, but revives the somewhat exhausted interest and

heightens a few passages into a bare and inaccessible grandeur.

The essential solitude of Milton's energies is best seen in his later

style and versification. When he resumed poetry about 1658, he had

nothing around him to help him as an artist in heroic language. The most

recent memories of the drama were also the worst; the forms of Cowley

and Davenant, the would-be epic poets, were impossible. Spenser's manner

was too even and fluid as a rule for such a purpose, and his power was

of an alien kind. Thus Milton went back, doubtless full of Greek and

Latin memories, to Marlowe, Shakespeare and others among the greater

dramatists (including John Ford); and their tragic diction and measure

are the half-hidden bases of his own. The product, however, is unlike

anything except the imitations of itself. The incongruous elements of

the _Paradise Lost_ and its divided sympathies are cemented, at least

superficially, by its style, perhaps the surest for dignity, character

and beauty that any Germanic language has yet developed. If dull and

pedantic over certain stretches, it is usually infallible. It is many

styles in one, and Time has laid no hand on it. In these three later

poems its variety can be seen. It is perfect in personal invocation and

appeal; in the complex but unfigured rhetoric of the speeches; in

narrative of all kinds; for the inlaying work of simile or scenery or

pageant, where the quick, pure impressions of Milton's youth and

prime--possibly kept fresher by his blindness--are felt through the

sometimes conventional setting; and for soliloquy and choric speech of a

might unapproachable since Dante. To these calls his blank verse

responds at every point. It is the seal of Milton's artistry, as of his

self-confidence, for it greatly extends, for the epical purpose, all the

known powers and liberties of the metre; and yet, as has often been

shown, it does so not spasmodically but within fixed technical laws or

rather habits. Latterly, the underlying metrical _ictus_ is at times

hard to detect. But Milton remains by far the surest and greatest

instrumentalist, outside the drama, on the English unrhymed line. He

would, however, have scorned to be judged on his form alone. His soul

and temper are not merely unique in force. Their historic and

representative character ensure attention, so long as the oppositions of

soul and temper in the England of Milton's time remain, as they still

are, the deepest in the national life. He is sometimes said to harmonize

the Renaissance and the Puritan spirit; but he does not do this, for

nothing can do it. The Puritan spirit is the deep thing in Milton; all

his culture only gives immortal form to its expression. The critics have

instinctively felt that this is true; and that is why their political

and religious prepossessions have nearly always coloured, and perhaps

must colour, every judgment passed upon him. Not otherwise can he be

taken seriously, until historians are without public passions and

convictions, or the strife between the hierarch and the Protestant is

quenched in English civilization.

Drama.

_Drama, 1580-1642_.--We must now go back to the drama, which lies behind

Milton, and is the most individual product of all English Literature.

The nascent drama of genius can be found in the "University wits," who

flourished between 1580 and 1595, and the chief of whom are Lyly, Kyd,

Peele, Greene and Marlowe. John Lyly is the first practitioner in

prose--of shapely comic plot and pointed talk--the artificial but actual

talk of courtly masquers who rally one another with a bright and barren

finish that is second nature. _Campaspe_, _Sapho and Phao_, _Midas_, and

Lyly's other comedies, mostly written from 1580 to 1591, are frail

vessels, often filled with compliment, mythological allegory, or topical

satire, and enamelled with pastoral interlude and flower-like song. The

work of Thomas Kyd, especially _The Spanish Tragedy_ (written c. 1585),

was the most violent effort to put new wine into the old Senecan

bottles, and he probably wrote the lost pre-Shakespearian _Hamlet_. He

transmitted to the later drama that subject of pious but ruinous

revenge, which is used by Chapman, Marston, Webster and many others; and

his chief play was translated and long acted in Germany. Kyd's want of

modulation is complete, but he commands a substantial skill of dramatic

mechanism, and he has more than the feeling for power, just as Peele and

Greene have more than the feeling for luxury or grace. To the expression

of luxury Peele's often stately blank verse is well fitted, and it is by

far the most correct and musical before Marlowe's, as his _Arraignment

of Paris_ (1584) and his _David and Bethsabe_ attest. Greene did

something to create the blank verse of gentle comedy, and to introduce

the tone of idyll and chivalry, in his _Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay_

(1594). Otherwise these writers, with Nashe and Lodge, fall into the

wake of Marlowe.

Marlowe.

_Tamburlaine_, in two parts (part i. c. 1587), _The Life and Death of

Doctor Faustus_, _The Jew of Malta_, _Edward II._ (the first chronicle

play of genius), and the incomplete poem _Hero and Leander_ are

Christopher Marlowe's title-deeds (1564-1593). He established tragedy,

and inspired its master, and created for it an adequate diction and

versification. His command of vibrant and heroic recitative should not

obscure his power, in his greater passages, describing the descent of

Helen, the passing of Mortimer, and the union of Hero and Leander, to

attain a kind of Greek transparency and perfection. The thirst for ideal

beauty, for endless empire, and for prohibited knowledge, no poet has

better expressed, and in this respect Giordano Bruno is nearest him in

his own time. This thirst is his own; his great cartoon-figures,

gigantic rather than heroic, proclaim it for him: their type recurs

through the drama, from Richard III. to Dryden's orotund heroes; but in

_Faustus_ and in _Edward II._ they become real, almost human beings. His

constructive gift is less developed in proportion, though Goethe praised

the planning-out of _Faustus_. The glory and influence of Marlowe on the

side of form rest largely on his meteoric blank lines, which are varied

not a little, and nobly harmonized into periods, and resonant with names

to the point of splendid extravagance; and their sound is heard in

Milton, whom he taught how to express the grief and despair of demons

dissatisfied with their kingdom. Shakespeare did not excel Marlowe in

Marlowe's own excellences, though he humanized Marlowe's Jew, launched

his own blank verse on the tide of Marlowe's oratory, and modulated, in

_Richard II._, his master's type of chronicle tragedy.

Shakespeare.

1590-1595.

As the middle ages receded, the known life of man upon this earth became

of sovereign interest, and of this interest the drama is the freest

artistic expression. If Marlowe is the voice of the impulse to explore,

the plays of Shakespeare are the amplest freight brought home by any

voyager. Shakespeare is not only the greatest but the earliest English

dramatist who took humanity for his province. But this he did not do

from the beginning. He was at first subdued to what he worked in; and

though the dry pedantic tragedy was shattered and could not touch him,

the gore and rant, the impure though genuine force of Kyd do not seem at

first to have repelled him; if, as is likely, he had a hand in _Titus

Andronicus_. He probably served with Marlowe and others of the school at

various stages in the composition of the three chronicle dramas finally

entitled _Henry VI_. But besides the high-superlative style that is

common to them all, there runs through them the rhymed rhetoric with

which Shakespeare dallied for some time, as well as the softer

flute-notes and deeper undersong that foretell his later blank verse. In

_Richard III._, though it is built on the scheme and charged with the

style of Marlowe, Shakespeare first showed the intensity of his original

power. But after a few years he swept out of Marlowe's orbit into his

own vaster and unreturning curve. In _King John_ the lyrical, epical,

satirical and pathetic chords are all present, if they are scarcely

harmonized. Meantime, Lyly and Greene having displaced the uncouther

comedy, Shakespeare learned all they had to teach, and shaped the comedy

of poetic, chivalrous fancy and good-tempered high spirits, which showed

him the way of escape from his own rhetoric, and enabled him to perfect

his youthful, noble and gentle blank verse. This attained its utmost

fineness in _Richard II._, and its full cordiality and beauty in the

other plays that consummate this period--_A Midsummer Night's Dream_,

_The Merchant of Venice_, and one romantic tragedy, _Romeo and Juliet_.

Behind them lay the earlier and fainter romances, with their chivalry

and gaiety, _The Comedy of Errors_, _Love's Labour's Lost_ and _The Two

Gentlemen of Verona_. Throughout these years blank verse contended with

rhyme, which Shakespeare after a while abandoned save for special

purposes, as though he had exhausted its honey. The Italian Renaissance

is felt in the scenery and setting of these plays. The _novella_

furnishes the story, which passes in a city of the Southern type, with

its absolute ruler, its fantastic by-laws on which the plot nominally

turns, and its mixture of real life and marvel. The personages, at first

fainter of feature and symmetrically paired, soon assume sharper

outline: Richard II. and Shylock, Portia and Juliet, and Juliet's Nurse

and Bottom are created. The _novella_ has left the earth and taken

wings: the spirit is now that of youth and Fancy (or love brooding among

the shallows) with interludes of "fierce vexation," or of tragedy, or of

kindly farce. And there is a visionary element, felt in the musings of

Theseus upon the nature of poetry of the dream-faculty itself; an

element which is new, like the use made of fairy folklore, in the poetry

of England.

1596-1600.

Tragedy is absent in the succeeding histories (1597-1599), and the

comedies of wit and romance (1599-1600), in which Shakespeare perfected

his style for stately, pensive or boisterous themes. Falstaff, the most

popular as he is the wittiest of all imaginable comic persons,

dominates, as to their prose or lower world, the two parts of _Henry

IV._, and its interlude or offshoot, _The Merry Wives of Windsor_. The

play that celebrates Henry V. is less a drama than a pageant,

diversified with mighty orations and cheerful humours, and filled with

the love of Shakespeare for England. Here the most indigenous form of

art invented by the English Renaissance reaches its climax. The

Histories are peopled chiefly by men and warriors, of whom Hotspur,

"dying in his excellence and flower," is perhaps more attractive than

Henry of Agincourt. But in the "middle comedies," _As You Like It_,

_Much Ado_, and _Twelfth Night_, the warriors are home at court, where

women rule the scene and deserve to rule it; for their wit now gives the

note; and Shakespeare's prose, the medium of their talk, has a finer

grace and humour than ever before, euphuism lying well in subjection

behind it.

1601-1608.

Mankind and this world have never been so sharply sifted or so sternly

consoled, since Lucretius, as in Shakespeare's tragedies. The energy

which created them evades, like that of the sun, our estimate. But they

were not out of relation to their time, the first few years of the reign

of James, with its conspiracies, its Somerset and Overbury horrors, its

enigmatic and sombre figures like Raleigh, and its revulsion from

Elizabethan buoyancy. In the same decade were written the chief

tragedies of Jonson, Chapman, Dekker, Marston, Tourneur; and _The White

Devil_, and _A Yorkshire Tragedy_, and _The Maid's Tragedy_, and _A

Woman Killed with Kindness_. But, in spite of Shakespeare's affinities

with these authors at many points, _Hamlet_, _Macbeth_, _Lear_,

_Othello_, with the three Roman plays (written at intervals and not

together), and the two quasi-antique plays _Troilus and Cressida_, and

_Timon of Athens_, form a body of drama apart from anything else in the

world. They reveal a new tragic philosophy, a new poetic style, a new

dramatic technique and a new world of characters. In one way above all

Shakespeare stands apart; he not only appropriates the ancient pattern

of heroism, of right living and right dying, revealed by North's

Plutarch; others did this also; but the intellectual movement of the

time, though by no means fully reflected, is reflected in his tragedies

far more than elsewhere. The new and troublous thoughts on man and

conduct that were penetrating the general mind, the freedom and play of

vision that Montaigne above all had stimulated, here find their fullest

scope; and Florio's translation (1603) of Montaigne's Essays, coming out

between the first and the second versions of Shakespeare's _Hamlet_,

counted probably for more than any other book. The _Sonnets_ (published

1609) are also full of far-wandering thoughts on truth and beauty and on

good and evil. The story they reveal may be ranked with the situations

of the stranger dramas like _Troilus_ and _Measure for Measure_. But

whether or no it is a true story, and the Sonnets in the main a

confession, they would be at the very worst a perfect dramatic record of

a great poet's suffering and friendship.

Last period.

Shakespeare's last period, that of his tragi-comedies, begins about 1608

with his contributions to _Pericles, Prince of Tyre_. For unknown

reasons he was moved, about the time of his retirement home, to record,

as though in justice to the world, the happy turns by which tragic

disaster is at times averted. _Pericles_, _The Winter's Tale_,

_Cymbeline_, and _The Tempest_ all move, after a series of crimes,

calumnies, or estrangements, to some final scene of enthralling beauty,

where the lost reappear and love is recovered; as though after all the

faint and desperate last partings--of Lear and Cordelia, of Hamlet and

Horatio--which Shakespeare had imagined, he must make retrieval with the

picture of young and happy creatures whose life renews hope even in the

experienced. To this end he chose the loose action and free atmosphere

of the _roman d'aventure_, which had already been adapted by Beaumont

and Fletcher, who may herein have furnished Shakespeare with novel and

successful theatrical effects, and who certainly in turn studied his

handiwork. In _The Tempest_ this tragi-comic scheme is fitted to the

tales brought by explorers of far isles, wild men, strange gods and airy

music. Even if it be true that in Prospero's words the poet bids

farewell to his magic, he took part later nevertheless in the

composition of _Henry VIII._; and not improbably also in _The Two Noble

Kinsmen_. His share in two early pieces, _Arden of Feversham_ (1592) and

_Edward III._, has been urged, never established, and of many other

dramas he was once idly accused.

Shakespeare's throne rests on the foundation of three equal and master

faculties. One is that of expression and versification; the next is the

invention and presentation of human character in action; the third is

the theatrical faculty. The writing of Dante may seem to us more

steadily great and perfect, when we remember Shakespeare's conceits, his

experiments, his haste and impatience in his long wrestle with tragic

language, his not infrequent sheer infelicities. But Dante is always

himself, he had not to find words for hundreds of imaginary persons.

Balzac, again, may have created and exhibited as many types of mankind,

but except in soul he is not a poet. Shakespeare is a supreme if not

infallible poet; his verse, often of an antique simplicity or of a rich,

harmonious, romantic perfection, is at other times strained and

shattered with what it tries to express, and attains beauty only through

discord. He is also many persons in one; in his _Sonnets_ he is even, it

may be thought, himself. But he had furthermore to study a personality

not of his own fancying--with something in it of Caliban, of Dogberry

and of Cleopatra--that of the audience in a playhouse. He belongs

distinctly to the poets like Jonson and Massinger who are true to their

art as practical dramatists, not to the poets like Chapman whose works

chance to be in the form of plays. Shakespeare's mastery of this art is

approved now by every nation. But apart from the skill that makes him

eternally actable--the skill of raising, straining and relieving the

suspense, and bringing it to such an ending as the theatre will

tolerate--he played upon every chord in his own hearers. He frankly

enlisted Jew-hatred, Pope-hatred and France-hatred; he flattered the

queen, and celebrated the Union, and stormed the house with his

_fanfare_ over the national soldier, Henry of Agincourt, and glorified

England, as in _Cymbeline_, to the last. But in deeper ways he is the

chief of playwrights. Unlike another master, Ibsen, he nearly always

tells us, without emphasis, by the words and behaviour of his

characters, which of them we are to love and hate, and when we are to

love and when to hate those whom we can neither love nor hate wholly.

Yet he is not to be bribed, and deals to his characters something of the

same injustice or rough justice that is found in real life. His loyalty

to life, as well as to the stage, puts the crown on his felicity and his

fertility, and raises him to his solitude of dramatic greatness.

Jonson.

Shakespeare's method could not be imparted, and despite reverberations

in Beaumont, Fletcher, Webster and others he left no school. But his

friend Ben Jonson, his nearest equal in vigour of brain, though not in

poetical intuition, was the greatest of dramatic influences down to the

shutting of the theatres in 1642, and his comedies found fresh disciples

even after 1660. He had "the devouring eye and the portraying hand"; he

could master and order the contents of a mighty if somewhat burdensome

memory into an organic drama, whether the matter lay in Roman historians

or before his eyes in the London streets. He had an armoury of doctrine,

drawn from the _Poetics_ and Horace, which moulded his creative

practice. This was also partly founded on a revulsion against the plays

around him, with their loose build and moral improbabilities. But in

spite of his photographic and constructive power, his vision is too

seldom free and genial; it is that of the satirist who thinks that his

office is to improve mankind by derisively representing it. And he does

this by beginning with the "humour," or abstract idiosyncrasy or

quality, and clothing it with accurately minute costume and gesture, so

that it may pass for a man; and indeed the result is as real as many a

man, and in his best-tempered and youthful comedy, _Every Man in his

Humour_ (acted 1598), it is very like life. In Jonson's monumental

pieces, _Volpone or the Fox_ (acted 1605) and _The Alchemist_ (acted

1610), our laughter is arrested by the lowering and portentous

atmosphere, or is loud and hard, startled by the enormous skill and

energy displayed. Nor are the joy and relief of poetical comedy given

for an instant by _The Silent Woman_, _Bartholomew Fair_ (acted 1614),

or _The Staple of News_, still less by topical plays like _Cynthia's

Revels_, though their unfailing farce and rampant fun are less charged

with contempt. The erudite tragedies, _Sejanus_ (acted 1603) and

_Catiline_, chiefly live by passages of high forensic power. Jonson's

finer elegies, eulogies and lyrics, which are many, and his fragmentary

_Sad Shepherd_, show that he also had a free and lovely talent, often

smothered by doctrine and temper; and his verse, usually strong but full

of knots and snags, becomes flowing and graciously finished. His prose

is of the best, especially in his _Discoveries_, a series of ethical

essays and critical maxims; its prevalently brief and emphatic rhythms

suggesting those of Hobbes, and even, though less easy and civil and

various, those of Dryden. The "sons" of Jonson, Randolph and Browne,

Shadwell and Wilson, were heirs rather to his riot of "humours," his

learned method and satiric aim, than to his larger style, his

architectural power, or his relieving graces.

Romantic drama.

As a whole, the romantic drama (so to entitle the remaining bulk of

plays down to 1642) is a vast stifled jungle, full of wild life and

song, with strange growths and heady perfumes, with glades of sunshine

and recesses of poisoned darkness; it is not a cleared forest, where

single and splendid trees grow to shapely perfection. It has "poetry

enough for anything"; passionate situations, and their eloquence; and a

number, doubtless small considering its mass, of living and memorable

personages. Moral keeping and constructive mastery are rarer still; and

too seldom through a whole drama do we see human life and hear its

voices, arranged and orchestrated by the artist. But it can be truly

said in defence that while structure without poetry is void (as it

tended at times to be in Ben Jonson), poetry without structure is still

poetry, and that the romantic drama is like nothing else in this world

for variety of accent and unexpectedness of beauty. We must read it

through, as Charles Lamb did, to do it justice. The diffusion of its

characteristic excellences is surprising. Of its extant plays it is

hardly safe to leave one unopened, if we are searchers for whatsoever is

lovely or admirable. The reasons for the lack of steadfast power and

artistic conscience lay partly in the conditions of the stage.

Playwrights usually wrote rapidly for bread, and sold their rights. The

performances of each play were few. There was no authors' copyright, and

dramas were made to be seen and heard, not to be read. There was no

articulate dramatic criticism, except such as we find casually in

Shakespeare, and in the practice and theory of Jonson, who was deaf or

hostile to some of the chief virtues of the romantic playwrights.

Chapman.

The wealth of dramatic production is so great that only a broad

classification is here offered. George Chapman stands apart, nearest to

the greatest in high austerity of sentiment and in the gracious gravity

of his romantic love-comedies. But the crude melodrama of his tragedies

is void of true theatrical skill. His quasi-historical French tragedies

on Bussy d'Ambois and Biron and Chabot best show his gift and also his

insufferable interrupting quaintness. His versions of Homer (1598-1624),

honoured alike by Jonson and by Keats, are the greatest verse

translations of the time, and the real work of Chapman's life. Their

virtues are only partially Homer's, but the general epic nobility and

the majesty of single lines, which in length are the near equivalent of

the hexameter, redeem the want of Homer's limpidity and continuity and

the translator's imperfect knowledge of Greek. A vein of satiric

ruggedness unites Jonson and Chapman with Marston and Hall, the

professors of an artificial and disgusting invective; and the same

strain spoils Marston's plays, and obscures his genuine command of the

language of feverish and bitter sentiment. With these writers satire and

contempt of the world lie at the root both of their comedy and tragedy.

Dekker and Heywood.

Middleton and Webster.

Beaumont and Fletcher.

Massinger.

The Many.

It is otherwise with most of the romantic dramatists, who may be

provisionally grouped as follows. (_a_) Thomas Dekker and Thomas Heywood

are writers-of-all-work, the former profuse of tracts and pamphlets, the

latter of treatises and compilations. They are both unrhetorical and

void of pose, and divide themselves between the artless comedy of

bustling, lively, English humours and pathetic, unheroic tragedy. But

Dekker has splendid and poetical dreams, in _Old Fortunatus_ (1600) and

_The Honest Whore_, both of luxury and of tenderness; while Heywood, as

in his _English Traveller_ and _Woman killed with Kindness_ (acted

1603), excels in pictures of actual, chivalrous English gentlemen and

their generosities. The fertility and volubility of these writers, and

their modest carelessness of fame, account for many of their

imperfections. With them may be named the large crowd of professional

journeymen, who did not want for power, but wrote usually in partnership

together, like Munday, Chettle and Drayton, or supplied, like William

Rowley, underplots of rough, lively comedy or tragedy. (_b_) Amongst

dramatists of primarily tragic and sombre temper, who in their best

scenes recall the creator of Angelo, Iago and Timon, must be named

Thomas Middleton (1570?-1627), John Webster, and Cyril Tourneur.

Middleton has great but scattered force, and his verse has the grip and

ring of the best period without a sign of the decadence. He is strong in

high comedy, like _The Old Law_, that turns on some exquisite point of

honour--"the moral sense of our ancestors"; in comedy that is merely

graphic and vigorous; and in detached sketches of lowering wickedness

and lust, like those in _The Changeling_ and _Women beware Women_. He

and Webster each created one unforgettable desperado, de Flores in _The

Changeling_ and Bosola in _The Duchess of Malfi_ (whose "pity," when it

came, was "nothing akin to him"). In Webster's other principal play,

_Vittoria Corombona, or the White Devil_ (produced about 1616), the

title-character is not less magnificent in defiant crime than Goneril or

Lady Macbeth. The style of Webster, for all his mechanical horrors,

distils the essences of pity and terror, of wrath and scorn, and is

profoundly poetical; and his point of view seems to be blank fatalism,

without Shakespeare's ever-arching rainbow of moral sympathy. Cyril

Tourneur, in _The Revenger's Tragedy_, is even more of a poet than

Webster; he can find the phrase for half-insane wrath and nightmare

brooding, but his chaos of impieties revolts the artistic judgment.

These specialists, when all is said, are great men in their dark

province, (_c_) The playwrights who may be broadly called romantic, of

whom Beaumont, Fletcher and Massinger are the chief, while they share in

the same sombre vein, have a wider range and move more in the daylight.

The three just named left a very large body of drama, tragic, comic and

tragi-comic, in which their several shares can partly be discerned by

metrical or other tests. Beaumont (d. 1616) is nearest the prime, with

his vein of Cervantesque mockery and his pure, beautifully-broken and

cadenced verse, which is seen in his contributions to Philaster and _The

Maid's Tragedy_. Fletcher (d. 1625) brings us closest to the actual

gaieties and humours of Jacobean life; he has a profuse comic gift and

the rare instinct for natural dialogue. His verse, with its flood of

vehement and expansive rhetoric, heard at its best in plays like

_Bonduca_, cannot cheat us into the illusion that it is truly dramatic;

but it overflows with beauty, like his silvery but monotonous

versification with its endecasyllabics arrested at the end. In Fletcher

the decadence of form and feeling palpably begins. His personages often

face about at critical instants and bely their natures by sudden

revulsions. Wanton and cheap characters invite not only dramatic but

personal sympathy, as though the author knew no better. There is too

much fine writing about a chastity which is complacent rather than

instinctive, and satisfied with its formal resistances and technical

escapes; so that we are far from Shakespeare's heroines. These faults

are present also in Philip Massinger (d. 1640), who offers in

substantial recompense, not like Beaumont and Fletcher treasures of

incessant vivacious episode and poetry and lyric interlude, but an often

splendid and usually solid constructive skill, and a steady eloquence

which is like a high table-land without summits. _A New Way to Pay Old

Debts_ (1632) is the most enduring popular comedy of the time outside

Shakespeare's, and one of the best. Massinger's interweaving of

impersonal or political conceptions, as in _The Bondman_ and _The Roman

Actor_, is often a triumph of arrangement; and though he wrote in the

reign of Charles, he is saved by many noble qualities from being merely

an artist of the decline, (_d_) A mass of plays, of which the authorship

is unknown, uncertain or attached to a mere name, baffle classification.

There are domestic tragedies, such as _Arden of Feversham_; scions of

the vindictive drama, like _The Second Maiden's Tragedy_; historic or

half-historic tragedies like _Nero_. There are chronicle histories, of

which the last and one of the best is Ford's _Perkin Warbeck_, and

melodramas of adventure such as Thomas Heywood poured forth. There are

realistic citizen comedies akin to _The Merry Wives_, like Porter's

refreshing _Two Angry Women of Abingdon_; there are Jonsonian comedies,

vernacular farces, light intrigue-pieces like Field's and many more. Few

of these, regarded as wholes, come near to perfection; few fail of some

sally or scene that proves once more the unmatched diffusion of the

dramatic or poetic instinct. (_e_) Outside the regular drama there are

many varieties: academic plays, like _The Return from Parnassus_ and

_Lingua_, which are still mirthful; many pastoral plays or

entertainments in the Italian style, like _The Faithful Shepherdess_;

versified character-sketches, of which Day's _Parliament of Bees_, with

its Theocritean grace and point, is the happiest; many masques and

shows, often lyrically and scenically lovely, of which kind Jonson is

the master, and Milton, in his _Comus_, the transfigurer; Senecan dramas

made only to be read, like Daniel's and Fulke Greville's; and Latin

comedies, like _Ignoramus_. All these species are only now being fully

grouped, sifted and edited by scholars, but a number of the six or seven

hundred dramas of the time remain unreprinted.

Ford and Shirley.

There remain two writers, John Ford and James Shirley, who kept the

higher tradition alive till the Puritan ordinance crushed the theatre in

1642. Ford is another specialist, of grave, sinister and concentrated

power (reflected in his verse and diction), to whom no topic, the incest

of Annabella in _'Tis Pity She's a Whore_, or the high crazed heroism of

Calantha in _The Broken Heart_, is beyond the pale, if only he can

dominate it; as indeed he does, without complicity, standing above his

subject. Shirley, a fertile writer, has the general characteristic

gifts, in a somewhat dilute but noble form, of the more romantic

playwrights, and claims honour as the last of them.

_Prose from 1579 to 1660._--With all the unevenness of poetry, the sense

of style, of a standard, is everywhere; felicity is never far off. Prose

also is full of genius, but it is more disfigured than verse by

aberration and wasted power. A central, classic, durable, adaptive prose

had been attained by Machiavelli, and by Amyot and Calvin, before 1550.

In England it was only to become distinct after 1660. Vocabulary,

sentence-structure, paragraph, idiom and rhythm were in a state of

unchartered freedom, and the history of their crystallization is not yet

written. But in more than compensation there is a company of prose

masters, from Florio and Hooker to Milton and Clarendon, not one of whom

clearly or fully anticipates the modern style, and who claim all the

closer study that their special virtues have been for ever lost. They

seem farther away from us than the poets around them. The verse of

Shakespeare is near to us, for its tradition has persisted; his prose,

the most natural and noble of his age, is far away, for its tradition

has not persisted. One reason of this difference is that English prose

tried to do more work than that of France and Italy; it tried the work

of poetry; and it often did that better than it did the normal work of

prose. This overflow of the imaginative spirit gave power and elasticity

to prose, but made its task of finding equilibrium the harder. Moreover,

prose in England was for long a natural growth, never much affected by

critical or academic canons as in France; and when it did submit to

canons, the result was often merely manner. The tendons and sinews of

the language, still in its adolescent power and bewilderment, were long

unset; that is, the parts of speech--noun and verb, epithet and

adverb--were in freer interchange than at any period afterwards. The

build, length and cadence of a complex sentence were habitually

elaborate; and yet they were disorganized, so that only the ear of a

master could regulate them. The law of taste and measure, perhaps

through some national disability, was long unperceived. Prose, in fact,

could never be sure of doing the day's work in the right fashion. The

cross-currents of pedantry in the midst of simplicity, the distrust of

clear plain brevity, which was apt to be affected when it came, the

mimicries of foreign fashions, and the quaintness and cumbrousness of so

much average writing, make it easier to classify Renaissance prose by

its interests than by its styles.

The novel.

Lyly and euphuism.

The Elizabethan novel was always unhappily mannered, and is therefore

dead. It fed the drama, which devoured it. The tales of Boccaccio,

Bandello, Cinthio, Margaret of Navarre, and others were purveyed, as

remarked above, in the forgotten treasuries of Painter, Pettie, Fenton

and Whetstone, and many of these works or their originals filled a shelf

in the playwrights' libraries. The first of famous English novels,

Lyly's _Euphues_ (1578), and its sequel _Euphues and his England_, are

documents of form. They are commended by a certain dapper shrewdness of

observation and an almost witty priggery, not by any real beauty or deep

feeling. Euphuism, of which Lyly was only the patentee, not the

inventor, strikes partly back to the Spaniard Guevara, and was a model

for some years to many followers like Lodge and Greene. It did not

merely provide Falstaff with a pattern for mock-moral diction and

vegetable similes. It genuinely helped to organize the English sentence,

complex or co-ordinate, and the talk of Portia and Rosalind shows what

could be made of it. By the arch-euphuists, clauses and clusters of

clauses were paired for parallel or contrast, with the beat of emphatic

alliteration on the corresponding parts of speech in each constituent

clause. This was a useful discipline for prose in its period of groping.

Sidney's incomposite and unfinished _Arcadia_, written 1580-1581,

despite its painful forced antitheses, is sprinkled with lovely rhythms,

with pleasing formal landscapes, and even with impassioned sentiment and

situation, through which the writer's eager and fretted spirit shines.

Both these stories, like those of Greene and Lodge, show by their

somewhat affected, edited delineation of life and their courtly tone

that they were meant in chief for the eyes of ladies, who were excluded

alike from the stage and from its audience. Nashe's drastic and

photographic tale of masculine life, _Jack Wilton, or The Unfortunate

Traveller_, stands almost alone, but some of the gap is filled by the

contemporary pamphlets, sometimes vivid, often full of fierce or maudlin

declamation, of Nashe himself--by far the most powerful of the

group--and of Greene, Dekker and Nicholas Breton. Thus the English novel

was a minor passing form; the leisurely and amorous romance went on in

the next century, owing largely to French influence and example.

Criticism.

In criticism, England may almost be counted with the minor Latin

countries. Sidney, in his _Defence of Poesy_ (1595, written about 1580),

and Jonson, in his _Discoveries_, offer a well-inspired and lofty

restatement of the current answers to the current questions, but could

give no account of the actual creative writing of the time. To defend

the "truth" of poetry--which was identified with all inventive writing

and not only with verse--poetry was saddled with the work of science and

instruction. To defend its character it was treated as a delightful but

deliberate bait to good behaviour, a theory at best only true of

allegory and didactic verse. The real relation of tragedy to spiritual

things, which is admittedly shown, however hard its definition, in

Shakespeare's plays, no critic for centuries tried to fathom. One of the

chief quarrels turned on metric. A few lines that Sidney and Campion

wrote on what they thought the system of Latin quantity are really

musical. This theory, already raised by Ascham, made a stir, at first in

the group of Harvey, Sidney, Dyer and Spenser, called the "Areopagus,"

an informal attempt to copy the Italian academies; and it was revived on

the brink of the reign of James. But Daniel's firm and eloquent _Defence

of Rhyming_ (1602) was not needed to persuade the poets to continue

rhyming in syllabic verse. The stricter view of the nature and

classification of poetry, and of the dramatic unity of action, is

concisely given, partly by Jonson, partly by Bacon in his _Advancement

of Learning_ and _De Augmentis_; and Jonson, besides passing his famed

judgments on Shakespeare and Bacon, enriched our critical vocabulary

from the Roman rhetoricians. Scholastic and sensible manuals, like

Webbe's _Discourse of Poetry_ and the _Art of English Poesy_ (1589)

ascribed to Puttenham, come in the rear.

Translators.

The translators count for more than the critics; the line of their great

achievements from Berners' _Froissart_ (1523-1525) to Urquhart's

_Rabelais_ (1653) is never broken long; and though their lives are often

obscure, their number witnesses to that far-spread diffusion of the

talent for English prose, which the wealth of English poetry is apt to

hide. The typical craftsman in this field, Philemon Holland, translated

Livy, Pliny, Suetonius, Plutarch's _Morals_ and Camden's _Britannia_,

and his fount of English is of the amplest and purest. North, in his

translation, made from Amyot's classic French, of Plutarch's _Lives_

(1579), disclosed one of the master-works of old example; Florio, in

Montaigne's _Essays_ (1603), the charter of the new freedom of mental

exploration; and Shelton, in _Don Quixote_ (1612), the chief tragi-comic

creation of continental prose. These versions, if by no means accurate

in the letter, were adequate in point of soul and style to their great

originals; and the English dress of Tacitus (1591), Apuleius,

Heliodorus, Commines, _Celestina_ and many others, is so good and often

so sumptuous a fabric, that no single class of prose authors, from the

time of More to that of Dryden, excels the prose translators, unless it

be the Anglican preachers. Their matter is given to them, and with it a

certain standard of form, so that their natural strength and richness of

phrase are controlled without being deadened. But the want of such

control is seen in the many pamphleteers, who are the journalists of the

time, and are often also playwrights or tale-tellers, divines or

politicians. The writings, for instance, of the hectic, satiric and

graphic Thomas Nashe, run at one extreme into fiction, and at the other

into the virulent rag-sheets of the Marprelate controversy, which is of

historical and social but not of artistic note, being only a fragment

of that vast mass of disputatious literature, which now seems grotesque,

excitable or dull.

Hooker.

Richard Hooker's _Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity_ (1594-1597), an

accepted defence of the Anglican position against Geneva and Rome, is

the first theological work of note in the English tongue, and the first

of note since Wycliffe written by an Englishman. It is a plea for reason

as one of the safe and lawful guides to the faith; but it also speaks

with admirable temper and large feeling to the ceremonial and aesthetic

sense. The First Book, the scaffolding of the treatise, discusses the

nature of law at large; but Hooker hardly has pure speculative power,

and the language had not yet learnt to move easily in abstract trains of

thought. In its elaboration of clause and period, in its delicate

resonant eloquence, Hooker's style is Ciceronian; but his inversions and

mazes of subordinate sentence somewhat rack the genius of English. Later

divines like Jeremy Taylor had to disintegrate, since they could not

wield, this admirable but over-complex eloquence. The sermons

(1621-1631) of Donne have the mingled strangeness and intimacy of his

verse, and their subtle flame, imaginative tenacity, and hold upon the

springs of awe make them unique. Though without artificial symmetry,

their sentences are intricately harmonized, in strong contrast to such

pellet-like clauses as those of the learned Lancelot Andrewes, who was

Donne's younger contemporary and the subject of Milton's Latin epitaph.

Bacon.

With Francis Bacon (1561-1626) English philosophy began its unbroken

course and took its long-delayed rank in Europe. His prose, of which he

is the first high and various master in English, was shaped and coloured

by his bent as orator and pleader, by his immixture in affairs, by his

speculative brain, and by his use and estimate of Latin. In his

conscious craftsmanship, his intellectual confidence and curiosity, his

divining faith in the future of science, and his resolve to follow the

leadings of nature and experience unswervingly; in his habit of storing

and using up his experience, and in his wide wordly insight,

crystallized in maxim, he suggests a kind of Goethe, without the poetic

hand or the capacity for love and lofty suffering. He saw all nature in

a map, and wished to understand and control her by outwitting the

"idols," or inherent paralysing frailties of the human judgment. He

planned but could not finish a great cycle of books in order to realize

this conception. The _De Augmentis Scientiarum_ (1623) expanded from the

English _Advancement of Knowledge_ (1605) draws the map; the _Novum

Organum_ (1620) sets out the errors of scholasticism and the methods of

inductive logic; the _New Atlantis_ sketches an ideally equipped and

moralized scientific community. Bacon shared with the great minds of his

century the notion that Latin would outlast any vernacular tongue, and

committed his chief scientific writings to a Latin which is alive and

splendid and his own, and which also disciplined and ennobled his

English. The _Essays_ (1597, 1612, 1625) are his lifelong, gradually

accumulated diary of his opinions on human life and business. These

famous compositions are often sadly mechanical. They are chippings and

basketings of maxims and quotations, and of anecdotes, often classical,

put together inductively, or rather by "simple enumeration" of the pros

and cons. Still they are the honest notes of a practical observer and

statesman, disenchanted--why not?--with mankind, concerned with cause

and effect rather than with right and wrong, wanting the finer faith and

insight into men and women, but full of reality, touched with

melancholy, and redeeming some arid, small and pretentious counsels by

many that are large and wise. Though sometimes betraying the workshop,

Bacon's style, at its best, is infallibly expressive; like Milton's

angels, it is "dilated or condensed" according to its purposes. In youth

and age alike, Bacon commanded the most opposite patterns and extremes

of prose--the curt maxim, balanced in antithesis or triplet, or standing

solitary; the sumptuous, satisfying and brocaded period; the movements

of exposition, oratory, pleading and narrative. The _History of Henry

VII._ (1622), written after his fall from office, is in form as well as

insight and mastery of material the one historical classic in English

before Clarendon. Bacon's musical sense for the value and placing of

splendid words and proper names resembles Marlowe's. But the master of

mid-Renaissance prose is Shakespeare; with him it becomes the voice of

finer and more impassioned spirits than Bacon's--the voice of Rosalind

and Hamlet. And the eulogist of both men, Ben Jonson, must be named in

their company for his senatorial weight and dignity of ethical counsel

and critical maxim.

Hobbes.

Funereal prose.

As the Stuart rule declined and fell, prose became enriched from five

chief sources: from philosophy, whether formal or unmethodical; from

theology and preaching and political dispute; from the poetical

contemplation of death; from the observation of men and manners; and

from antiquarian scholarship and history. As in France, where the first

three of these kinds of writings flourished, it was a time rather of

individual great writers than of any admitted pattern or common ideal of

prose form, although in France this pattern was always clearlier

defined. The mental energy, meditative depth, and throbbing brilliant

colour of the English drama passed with its decay over into prose. But

Latin was still often the supplanter: the treatise of Lord Herbert of

Cherbury, _De Veritate_, of note in the early history of Deism, and much

of the writing of the ambidextrous Thomas Hobbes, are in Latin. In this

way Latin disciplined English once more, though it often tempted men of

genius away from English. _The Leviathan_ (1651) with its companion

books on _Human Nature_ and _Liberty_, and Hobbes' explosive dialogue on

the civil wars, _Behemoth_ (1679), have the bitter concision of Tacitus

and the clearness of a half-relief in bronze. Hobbes' speculations on

the human animal, the social contract, the absolute power of the

sovereign, and the subservience owed to the sovereign by the Church or

"Kingdom of Darkness," enraged all parties, and left their track on the

thought and controversial literature of the century. With Ben Jonson and

the jurist Selden (whose English can be judged from his _Table Talk_),

Hobbes anticipates the brief and clear sentence-structure of the next

age, though not its social ease and amenity of form. But his grandeur is

not that of a poet, and the poetical prose is the most distinctive kind

of this period. It is eloquent above all on death and the vanity of

human affairs; its solemn tenor prolongs the reflections of Claudio, of

Fletcher's Philaster, or of Spenser's Despair. It is exemplified in

Bacon's Essay _Of Death_, in the anonymous descant on the same subject

wrongly once ascribed to him, in Donne's plea for suicide, in Raleigh's

_History of the World_, in Drummond's _Cypress Grove_ (1623), in Jeremy

Taylor's sermons and _Holy Dying_ (1651), and in Sir Thomas Browne's

_Urn-Burial_ (1658) and _Letter to a Friend_. Its usual vesture is a

long purple period, freely Latinized, though Browne equally commands the

form of solemn and monumental epigram. He is also free from the

dejection that wraps round the other writers on the subject, and a holy

quaintness and gusto relieve his ruminations. The _Religio Medici_

(1642), quintessentially learned, wise and splendid, is the fullest

memorial of his power. Amongst modern prose writers, De Quincey is his

only true rival in musical sensibility to words.

Jeremy Taylor.

Burton.

Jeremy Taylor, the last great English casuist and schoolman, and one of

the first pleaders for religious tolerance (in his _Liberty of

Prophesying_, 1647), is above all a preacher; tender, intricate,

copious, inexhaustible in image and picturesque quotation. From the

classics, from the East, from the animal world, from the life of men and

children, his illustrations flow, without end or measure. He is a master

of the lingering cadence, which soars upward and onward on its coupled

clauses, as on balanced iridescent wings, and is found long after in his

scholar Ruskin. Imaginative force of another kind pervades Robert

Burton's _Anatomy of Melancholy_ (1621), where the humorous medium

refracts and colours every ray of the recluse's far-travelled spirit.

The mass of Latin citation, woven, not quilted, into Burton's style, is

another proof of the vitality of the cosmopolitan language. Burton and

Browne owe much to the pre-critical learning of their time, which yields

up such precious savours to their fancy, that we may be thankful for the

delay of more precise science and scholarship. Fancy, too, of a

suddener and wittier sort, preserves some of the ample labours of Thomas

Fuller, which are scattered over the years 1631-1662; and the _Lives_

and _Compleat Angler_ (1653) of Izaak Walton are unspoilt, happy or

pious pieces of idyllic prose. No adequate note on the secular or sacred

learning of the time can here be given; on Camden, with his vast

erudition, historical, antiquarian and comparatively critical

(_Britannia_, in Latin, 1586); or on Ussher, with his patristic and

chronological learning, one of the many _savants_ of the Anglican

church. Other divines of the same camp pleaded, in a plainer style than

Taylor, for freedom of personal judgment and against the multiplying of

"vitals in religion"; the chief were Chillingworth, one of the closest

of English apologists, in his _Religion of Protestants_ (1638), and John

Hales of Eton. The Platonists, or rather Plotinists, of Cambridge, who

form a curious digression in the history of modern philosophy, produced

two writers, John Smith and Henry More, of an exalted and esoteric

prose, more directly inspired by Greece than any other of the time; and

their champion of erudition, Cudworth, in his _True Intellectual

System_, gave some form to their doctrine.

Clarendon.

Milton's prose.

Above the vast body of pamphlets and disputatious writing that form the

historian's material stands Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon's _History of

the Rebellion_, printed in 1702-1704, thirty years after his death.

Historical writing hitherto, but for Bacon's _Henry VII._, had been

tentative though profuse. Raleigh's vast disquisition upon all things,

_The History of the World_ (1614), survives by passages and poetic

splendours; gallantly written second-hand works like Knolles's _History of

the Turks_, and the rhetorical _History of the Long Parliament_ by May,

had failed to give England rank with France and Italy. Clarendon's book,

one of the greatest of memoirs and most vivid of portrait-galleries,

spiritually unappreciative of the other side, but full of a subtle

discrimination of character and political motive, brings its author into

line with Retz and Saint-Simon, the watchers and recorders and sometimes

the makers of contemporary history. Clarendon's _Life_, above all the

picture of Falkland and his friends, is a personal record of the

delightful sort in which England was thus far infertile. He is the last

old master of prose, using and sustaining the long, sinuous sentence,

unworkable in weaker hands. He is the last, for Milton's polemic prose,

hurled from the opposite camp, was written between 1643 and 1660. Whether

reviling bishops or royal privilege or indissoluble monogamy, or recalling

his own youth and aims; or claiming liberty for print in _Areopagitica_

(1644); in his demonic defiances, or angelic calls to arms, or his animal

eruptions of spite and hatred, Milton leaves us with a sense of the motive

energies that were to be transformed into _Paradise Lost_ and _Samson_.

His sentences are ungainly and often inharmonious, but often irresistible;

he rigidly withstood the tendencies of form, in prose as in verse, that

Dryden was to represent, and thus was true to his own literary dynasty.

The Authorized Version.

A special outlying position belongs to the Authorized Version (1611) of

the Bible, the late fruit of the long toil that had begun with

Tyndale's, and, on the side of style, with the Wycliffite translations.

More scholarly than all the preceding versions which it utilized, it won

its incomparable form, not so much because of the "grand style that was

in the air," which would have been the worst of models, as because the

style had been already tested and ennobled by generations of

translators. Its effect on poetry and letters was for some time far

smaller than its effect on the national life at large, but it was the

greatest translation--being of a whole literature, or rather of two

literatures--in an age of great translations.

Some other kinds of writing soften the transition to Restoration prose.

The vast catalogue of Characters numbers hundreds of titles. Deriving

from Theophrastus, who was edited by Casaubon in 1592, they are yet

another Renaissance form that England shared with France. But in English

hands, failing a La Bruyere--in Hall's, in Overbury's, even in those of

the gay and skilful Earle (_Microcosmographie_, 1628)--the Character is

a mere list of the attributes and oddities of a type or calling. It is

to the Jonsonian drama of humours what the Pensee, or detached remark,

practised by Bishop Hall and later by Butler and Halifax, is to the

Essay. These works tended long to be commonplace or didactic, as the

popular _Resolves_ of Owen Feltham shows. Cowley was the first essayist

to come down from the desk and talk as to his equals in easy phrases of

middle length. A time of dissension was not the best for this kind of

peaceful, detached writing. The letters of James Howell, the

autobiography of Lord Herbert of Cherbury, and the memoirs of Kenelm

Digby belong rather to the older and more mannered than to the more

modern form, though Howell's English is in the plainer and quicker

movement.