Burns and Shelley have equalled since,-it is impossible for any one who feels for poetry at all not to feel more than appreciation, not to feel sheer enthusiasm. Putting aside the very greatest poets of all, I hardly know any group of poetical workers who so often cause this enthusiasm as our present group. Their wonderful felicity of language, their command of those lyrical measures which seem so easy and are so difficult, the plain humanity of their motifs, dressed up as these may sometimes be with the most fantastic embroideries of erudition and conceit, their freedom from pretentiousness, from the heresy of instruction, from the parade of singing robes, even the modesty which makes them confine themselves to what are called trifles, occasional pieces, almost vers de société all these things are extraordinarily engaging. When we examine what is said against them, a great deal of it is found to be based on that most treacherous of all foundations, a hard-driven metaphor. Because they come at the end of a long and fertile period of literature, because a colder and harder kind of poetry followed them, they are said to be "decadence," "autumn," "over-ripe fruit," "sunset," and so forth. These pretty analogies have done much harm in literary history. Of the Muse it is most strictly and soberly true that "Bocca bacciata non perde ventura, anzi rinuova come fa la luna." If there is any meaning about the phrases of decadence, autumn, and the like, it is derived from the idea of approaching death and cessation. There is no death, no cessation, in literature; and the sadness and decay of certain periods is mere fiction. An autumn day would not be sad if the average human being did not (very properly) take from it a warning of the shortness of his own life. But literature is not shortlived. There was no sign of poetry dying when Shelley lived two thousand five hundred years after Sappho, when Shakespere lived as long after Homer. Periods like the periods of the Greek Anthology or of our Caroline poetry are not periods of decay, but simply periods of differThere are no periods of decay in literature so long as anything good is produced; and when nothing good is produced, ence. it is only a sign that the field is taking a healthy turn of fallow. In this time much that was good, with a quite wonderful and charming goodness, was produced. What is more, it was a goodness which had its own distinct characteristics, some of which I have endeavoured to point out, and which the true lover of poetry would be as unwilling to lose as to lose the other goodnesses of all the great periods, and of all but the greatest names in those periods. For the unapproachables, for the first Three, for Homer, for Shakespere, for Dante, I would myself (though I should be very sorry) give up all the poets we have been reviewing. I should not like to have to choose between Herrick and Milton's earlier poems; between Herrick, Carew, Crashaw, Montrose, Lovelace, and Suckling combined on the one hand, and The Faerie Queene on the other. But I certainly would give Paradise Regained for half a dozen poems of the writers just named; and for them altogether I would give all but a few passages (I would not give those) of Paradise Lost. And, as I have endeavoured (perhaps to my readers' satiety) to point out, this comparative estimate is after all a radically unsound one. We are not called upon to weigh this kind of poetry against that kind; we are only incidentally, and in an uninvidious manner, called upon to weigh this poet against that even of the same kind. The whole question is, whether each is good in his own kind, and whether the kind is a worthy and delightful one. And in regard of most of the poets just surveyed, both these questions can be answered with an unhesitating affirmative. If we had not these poets, one particular savour, one particular form, of the poetical rapture would be lacking to the poetical expert; just as if what Herrick himself calls "the brave Burgundian wine" were not, no amount of claret and champagne could replace it. For passionate sense of the good things of earth, and at the same time for mystical feeling of their insecurity, for exquisite style without the frigidity and the over-correctness which the more deliberate stylists frequently display, for a blending of Nature and art that seems as if it must have been as simply instinctive in all as it certainly was in some, the poets of the Tribe of Ben, of the Tribe of Donne, who illustrated the period before Puritanism and Republicanism combined had changed England from merriment to sadness, stand alone in letters. We have had as good since, but never the same-never any such blending of classical frankness, of mediæval simplicity and chivalry, of modern reflection and thought.1 1 Since this chapter was in type, some persons whose judgment I respect have expressed to me surprise and regret that I have not given a higher and larger place to Henry Vaughan. A higher I cannot give, because I think him, despite the extreme beauty of his thought and (more rarely) of his expression, a most imperfect poet; nor a larger, because that would involve a critical arguing out of the matter, which would be unsuitable to the plan and scale of this book. Had he oftener written as he wrote in the famous poem referred to in the text, or as in the magnificent opening of "The World "– "I saw Eternity the other night, Like a great ring of pure and endless light, there would be much more to say of him. But he is not master of the expression suitable to his noble and precious thought except in the briefest bursts-bursts compared to which even Crashaw's are sustained and methodical. His admirers claim for "The Retreat" the germ of Wordsworth's great ode, but if any one will compare the two he will hardly complain that Vaughan has too little space here. CHAPTER XI THE FOURTH DRAMATIC PERIOD Two great names remain to be noticed in the Elizabethan drama (though neither produced a play till after Elizabeth was dead), some interesting playwrights of third or fourth rate importance have to be added to them, and in a postscript we shall have to gather up the minor or anonymous work, some of it of very high excellence, of the second division of our whole subject, including plays of the second, third, and fourth periods. But with this fourth period we enter into what may really be called by comparison (remembering always what has been said in the last chapter) a period of decadence, and at its latter end it becomes very decadent indeed. Only in Ford perhaps, of our named and individual authors in this chapter, and in him very rarely, occur the flashes of sheer poetry which, as we have seen in each of the three earlier chapters on the drama, lighten the work of the Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists proper with extraordinary and lavish brilliance. Not even in Ford are to be found the whole and perfect studies of creative character which, even leaving Shakespere out of the question, are to be found earlier in plays and playwrights of all kinds and strengths, from The Maid's Tragedy and Vittoria Corombona, to The Merry Devil of Edmonton and A Cure for a Cuckold, The tragedies have Ben Jonson's labour without his force, the comedies his coarseness and lack of inspiriting life without his keen observation and incisive touch. As the taste indeed turned more and more from tragedy to comedy, we get attempts on the part of playwrights to win it back by a return to the bloody and monstrous conceptions of an earlier time, treated, however, without the redeeming features of that time, though with a little more coherence and art. Massinger's Unnatural Combat, and Ford's 'Tis Pity She's a Whore, among great plays, are examples of this: the numerous minor examples are hardly worth mentioning. But the most curious symptom of all was the gradual and, as it were, imperceptible loss of the secret of blank verse itself, which had been the instrument of the great triumphs of the stage from Marlowe to Dekker. Something of this loss of grasp may have been noticed in the looseness of Fletcher and the over-stiffness of Jonson: it is perceptible distinctly even in Ford and Massinger. But as the Restoration, or rather the silencing of the theatres by the Commonwealth approaches, it becomes more and more evident until we reach the chaotic and hideous jumble of downright prose and verse that is neither prose nor verse, noticeable even in the early plays of Dryden, and chargeable no doubt with the twenty years' return of the English drama to the comparative barbarism of the couplet. This apparent loss of ear and rhythmsense has been commented on already in reference to Lovelace, Suckling (himself a dramatist), and others of the minor Caroline poets; but it is far more noticeable in drama, and resulted in the production, by some of the playwrights of the transition period between Charles I. and Charles II., of some of the most amorphous botches in the way of style that disfigure English literature. With the earliest and best work of Philip Massinger, however, we are at any rate chronologically still at a distance from the lamentable close of a great period. He was born in 1583, being the son of Arthur Massinger, a "servant" (pretty certainly in the gentle sense of service) to the Pembroke family. In 1602 he was entered at St. Alban's Hall in Oxford: he is supposed to have left the university about 1609, and may have begun writing plays |