Page:Catholic Encyclopedia, volume 5.djvu/530

ENGLAND the civil war they would have ceased of themselves for want of good plays. Not only had the technical skill in versification, dialogue, and plot decayed, but the moral tone had so much degenerated that most of the hard charges brought against the drama by the Puritans at this time seem well justified.

When we turn to Elizabethan prose we find it a much inferior and less practiced form of art than verse. No standard of good prose towards which writers might aim was recognized, and the masterpieces of the Elizabethan age are few. Hooker's "Ecclesiastical Polity" has rightly, by its weighty argument and its grave eloquence, won a place among classics. Lyly in his two volumes of "Euphues" was the first, perhaps, to treat prose as equally worthy with poetry of artistic elaboration, and his book, a medley of story-telling and moralizing, often most excellent as well as interesting in its ethical musing, instituted a fashion of speech and writing from which for some years few writers stood aloof.

Sir Philip Sidney's "Arcadia", a long pastoral romance of sentiment, however, broke the spell and in its turn created a vogue. The novels of this time follow the "Euphues" or the "Arcadia" in most examples, but there is also a third type in the work of Nash, the novel of wild and reckless adventure, which was afterwards to become famous in the greater work of Smollett. Criticism of poetry, history, often in the form of chronicles, geography, and adventure, such as in Hakluyt's collection of "Voyages", together with innumerable translations from classical and modern authors, were some of the matters treated in prose. In the novel, as in the drama, the foreign influences, especially those of Spain and Italy, are easy to trace. Though not of the first order of art, the Elizabethan prose is yet most attractive, for it reflects the varied interests and the complex character of the strange and wonderful time of the sixteenth century, and it exhibits in their early stages certain forms of literature, such as criticism and the novel, which were afterwards to develop into orders of the first importance. It is scarcely needful to say that Catholics, of necessity, in this epoch, for them, of disaster and persecution, took little part in the great output of literature.

From one point of view the history of English poetry would seem to be a record of action and reaction, of a struggle between one type of poetry and another, between that in which the matter delivered is all important, and that where correctness of form is the chief end at which the poets aim—between, in fact, the romantic and the classical schools. This general trend may be most clearly seen in the work of the crowd of secondary poets in any age, but the few who excel will be found to combine and reconcile in themselves, more or less, the opposing elements, though, naturally, both small and great poets will exhibit some individual bias, however slight, towards one type of work or another. This statement is practically true of the seventeenth century. In the very heart of the romantic poetry of the immediate successors of the Elizabethans, there arose, in the early years of the century, a few young men who began to write verse of another kind altogether, whose work was not developed to its full meaning, however, until Dryden took it up. Meanwhile, one matchless poet, John Milton, living through the greater part of the century, went his own way ("his soul was like a star and dwelt apart"), taking little notice of prevailing types or subject-matter, fusing romantic and classical elements into one superb kind of work that we can find no name for but "Miltonic".

Before looking in any detail at seventeenth-century verse, it is well to glance at the general character of the age. It is a contrast to that which had preceded it. The Elizabethan time had been exuberant almost to intoxication, rejoicing in the great range of possibilities for human life that new knowledge, exploration, and learning seemed to open out before it. But over this mood at the end of the century there passed a change. Questioning succeeded the brilliant joy in things as they had appeared; self-consciousness followed the almost impersonal delight in life; the very foundations of religion, politics, and social life were called up for investigation. There had in reality always been a good deal of unrest beneath the surface, even after the settlement of these matters attempted and apparently in part accomplished by Elizabeth. Now the unrest increased, and a sceptical spirit, light or sad, according to the author's temperament, pervades much of the most capable writing. At the same time there are religious writers who express both in prose and verse the best spirit of the Anglican Church when under the sway of Archbishop Laud, and now there rises also to its full height the great Puritan movement (already, however, split up into a growing number of sects), strongly and narrowly affirmative of certain views concerning Divine and human things, passing oftener than not into intolerance and wild fanaticism. Milton, on the whole, represents this movement at its best, though its weaknesses may be discovered, especially in his prose work, even in him.

At the beginning of the reign of James I we find the group of poets whose inspiration was Spenser, amongst whom the chief are the two Fletchers, William Browne, and George Wither. All have a sweetness and fullness in their work which links them to the Elizabethans. Passing on to the reign of Charles I, we are struck by a more widely spread order of poets, men who, at their best, are all more or less touched by the desire to find behind material objects an imaginative idea, "the search for the after-sense", and who in trying to express that which they thought they found used an overabundance of imagery, sometimes beautiful, but often pedantic and fantastic to the point of absurdity. To these Dr. Johnson gave the name of "metaphysical", and to see them at their worst one should look at his quotations from them in his "Life of Cowley". The movement was not confined to England; Italy, France, and Spain had felt it earlier. John Donne (whose verse belongs in date to the reign of Elizabeth) is reckoned as the founder of this school in England. Herrick and the amorists known as "Cavalier Lyrists" form one group in it, and Crashaw, Herbert, and Vaughan, religious poets, together with Herrick, are the only ones whose work has secured immortality. Crashaw, a fervent Catholic convert, whose religious verses are often very beautiful, shows in a marked degree the great strength and the great weakness of this school. Professor Saintsbury, the most discerning critic of this poetical group, has said that if Crashaw "could but have kept himself at