Page:The New International Encyclopædia 1st ed. v. 07.djvu/129

* ENGLISH LITERATURE. 107 ENGLISH LITERATURE. Prance and Italy on diplomatic missions. Their matter was not so significant as their manner; their great, service was the enriching of English poetry by the importation of foreign tonus to relieve the monotonj into which it had fallen. In Surrey it owes its most powerful and eharac teristic form, blank verse, and the sonnet, adapt- ed by his happy intuition to the form in which Shakespeare uses il. Yet although they ami Sackville showed taste and judgment in the use of their chosen tools, there was as yet little promise of the glorious efflorescence that was to follow. Lyly's refined and elegant artificiality, which has enriched the language with a new word, and Sidney's charming work, which rises at times to a dignity above that of the experi- ments of a highly cultivated amateur, are not enough to turn the scale. Yet, before we pass on to consider the drama in this period (for its earlier history, see Drama; Mystery; Miracle-Play ; Morality), there is one name which must be set, in the non-dramatic literature of the time, in a position comparable only with Shakespeare's, and one work which more fully than any other in English sums up the manifold effects of the Renaissance. Let Spenser be, as Lamb called him, the poet's poet; grant that he will never take hold of the great popular mass, of whose common life he is so wholly careless; he is yet one of the immortals, and it is to a world beyond space and time that he intro- duces us in The Fin rii- Queene. A Puritan by conviction, though fortunately a Puritan born before his party thought it necessary to war upon everything that was beautiful, he has a moral purpose in his writing, and an allegory lies in wait for us as we wander through his enchanted land. We may elude it, however, and merely note that the moral seriousness which lies at the root of the poem differentiates Spenser entirely from his Italian model, Ariosto, to whom he owes so much in form. But his style is richer and more elaborate than his master's; he builds up, on the suggestion of the Italian vllma rima, the more complex and effective stanza which goes by his name. His childlike delight in the world of sense, which, with all the marvelous resources of his imagery and his music, he strives to make us share, is touched at times by that note of melancholy so common and so significant in the Renaissance writers who stop to think of the shortness and uncertainty of that human life on which they concentrate their highest powers. Among the other poets of the time. Chapman must have a word of commendation, if only for his great translation of Homer, in which, for the Hind, he employed what is probably the most successful metre in English — the swinging 'four- teener' of the old ballads. The causes for the phenomenal, one may say unparalleled, outburst of great literature which distinguishes the age of Elizabeth are many and varied. It was not only that the sunlight of the Renaissance, whose rays had been long in reach- ing England, now shone in all its radiance there; nor that the invention of printing had made it possible to circulate books by the thousand, and mised the gains of authors to a point where they tempted new men into the field: nor that the personality of the Queen, exalted by the hyper- boles of poets, formed a focus for their enthusi- asm, while her gracious patronage of every art encouraged them to do their best. There was Vol. VII.— a. also the lite a/el death struggle with Spain, which called out. all that «;ts highest and noblest in the lii-arts of patriotic Englishmen at the same ti that domestic controversies sharpened their wits to do their best for the side they had espoused. There was the rise of tin- new middle class to increase the number of both authors and reai And the discoveries of strange, half-fabulous hinds beyond the seas seemed a lit. pendant In the conquest of whole ne,, provinces of thought, ami spurred men- minds on to explore the furthest lis of the knowable and the thinkable. The drama, whose very nature appealed to that age of stir and vigorous action, was naturally the form that expressed its spirit best, aside from i In- lad thai a century of printing had not yet made reading the daily habit of every man. iel since the drama was to in- the characteristic lit- erary form of the period, .1 was most fortunate that it escaped the snares set for it by some of its earliest, formal practitioners in England. With the enthusiasm of Renaissance scholars for the work of the ancients, they insisted that the English drama should be modeled strictly upon its Roman predecessor; Seneca was to he the standard of tragedy, and Terence, who had pre- served a sort of charmed life all through I In- Dark Ages, of comedy. The academic school of playwrights strove hard to enforce this model upon all their fellows, aided by Sir Philip Sid- ney's vigorous blows in his Defence of Poesie. The effort was not without its good results in the direction of imposing care for structure and checking too loose imagination; but that it failed was an inestimable advantage to the growth of the literature which is our pride. Marlowe and Shakespeare, the young Davids of the day, tried the armor of Saul before they went out to tin- battle, then wisely laid it off'. Across the Chan- nel, Malherbe and other literary dictators were able to enforce their canons, with the result that French classical tragedy, stately and finished as it is, has never been a living thing, able to thrill and dominate the nation, because it has always been alien from the nation's life. Sackville and Norton, with their Gorboduc, are enshrined in a special place of honor by historians of literary development; the first English tragedy is a noteworthy event. But to Marlowe belongs a much more significant mention. It is he who first showed the way to the construction of a true English drama, first exemplified a unity more potent than the artificial conventions of classicism — that which centres around the devel- opment of one mighty character and his deeds. It was he who, though the iambic pentameter was not new to English verse, is yet really the creator of the 'mighty line' which became recognized as the regular medium for serious drama, and in Milton's skillful hands became even mightier and more perfect. He, like his own Faustus, "sums up for us the Renaissance passion for life, sleep- less in its search, and daring in its grasp after the infinite in power, in knowledge, and in pleasure." and the career which ended so miser- ably in a tavern brawl, after less than thirty years, was yet full of splendid achievement. The place of Shakespeare in a survey of this kind must be in exact disproportion to his abso- lute greatness. Precisely because of the lower- ing command of that greatness, because "he was not of an age, but for all time," he has less to do with the general development of thought and