Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/387

Rh of style which issued in classicism; while in England, the peculiarly intellectual and erudite character of Donne's "metaphysical wit" is a symptom of the theological and scholastic direction given to English thought and learning by the trend of the second great force in the history and literature of the period—namely, religious polemic.

The other literary kind in which the free artistic spirit of the Renaissance survives is the drama. The tale of the modern drama, opened by Professor Saintsbury in the Earlier Renaissance, taken up by Mr Hannay's chapters on Spanish and Elizabethan literature in the Later Renaissance, is continued here by an account of the English drama under James and Charles, and of the dramatic experiment in Holland, and by a chapter on French drama introductory to that which follows in Professor Elton's Augustan Ages. Of the three dramas dealt with here, that which retains most of the free artistic spirit of the Renaissance is the English, and the reason is not difficult to discover. The French drama, though it sprang from the same roots as the English, developed later, and when the rigid influence of classicism was in the ascendant. The serious drama of Holland, on the other hand, never emancipated itself sufficiently from the didactic spirit of the sixteenth century Morality and the Latin school drama. It has been sometimes argued that the decay of the English drama was due to the withdrawal from the theatre of the serious middle classes. The example of the Dutch drama is a useful reminder that a drama which did enjoy the full approval of serious and