ing more; to those who love the art of an intaglio or the delicate curves of a Grecian urn, and can admire either without stricture that it is not the Capitoline Jupiter, the best of the poetry of the reign of Charles I seems to imply no decaying school, but a height of lyric excellence combined with an exquisite workmanship which only the greatest poets of our day or of Elizabeth's have surpassed. In its general characteristics the poetry of the seventeenth century, extending onward from the accession of Charles I, is intensive rather than expansive, fanciful rather than imaginative, and increasingly restrictive in its range and appeal, until it comes at length to be the utterance of a single class of society. The period in its earlier years was too close to that of Elizabeth and James not to feel the strong pulse and - enthusiastic love of beauty which was theirs, and the great political events that made the seventeenth one of the most momentous centuries in the history of England kept men from falling too rapidly into the conventionalized conception of literature and life which came to prevail in the next century. It is precisely as we find a poet rising above these general qualities of narrow intensiveness, fantasticality of thought and expression, and class prejudice, that we recognize in him the special qualities that make him great. The æsthetic Milton, with the rich blood of the Renaissance tingling in his veins, bursts forth in the fine Ode on the Morning of Christ's Nativity and in the great poetry which followed it. In his later poetical period too, it is his lofty artistic purpose and his ethical nobility which lift Milton out of his own time and convert him into a world poet, despite a certain hardness of spirit which bitter partizanship had fostered and which could not but grow out of the warring elements of his age in a nature so grave and stern. Thus (again, a genuine love of nature unites such diverse names as those of Vaughan, Marvell, and Cotton, the last especially delighting in the sensuous enjoyment of pleasant sight and soothing sound. In Marvell is added to an artistic touch a moral rectitude that at once dignifies his poetry and gives it a distinguished place in literature; whilst Vaughan, added to a religious fervor which he shares with Herbert and Crashaw, but in differing mode, displays, in his tenderness for natural objects, a spiritual contemplativeness which every now and then flashes a revealing light upon the relation of man to the universe. Herrick, in his humaneness, in his artless delight in those small things which go so far to make up our daily life, Carew, in the sincerity of his workmanship and in his artistic propriety, rise above the temporary conventions of a single age, and become, each in his own way, poets fraught with a message to following times. II. That the poets of the reigns of James and Charles I wrote under the combined influences of Ben Jonson and Donne, and that the older influence of Spenser continued to animate poet after poet, has been repeated again and again, and may be accepted as substantially true. It seems well, under the circumstances, briefly to consider wherein these influences really consisted, less in their abstract principles than in the manner in which the ideals of each great poet manifested themselves in his work, and especially in their subsequent effects on his followers. What may be called the manner of Spenser (i.e., Spenser's way of imitating and interpreting nature artistically by means of poetic expression) may be summarized as consisting of a sensuous love of beauty combined with a power of elaborated pictorial representation, a use of classical imagery for decorative effect, a fondness for melody, a flowing sweetness, naturalness and continuousness of diction amounting to diffuseness at times, the diffuseness of a fragrant, beautiful, flowering vine. We may say of the poets that employ this manner that they are worshippers of beauty rather than students of beauty's laws; ornate in their expression of the type, dwelling on detail in thought and image lovingly elaborated and sweetly prolonged. To such artists it is no matter if a play have five acts or twenty-five, if an epic ever come to an end, or if consistency of parts exist; rapt in the joy of gentle onward motion, in the elevation of pure poetic thought, even the subject ceases to be of much import, if it but furnish the channel in which the bright, limpid liquid continues musically to flow. Besides his pastorals, Drayton Spenserized the enormous Polyolbion. The Fletchers followed with subjects theological and anatomical also allegorized after the manner of Spenser. But the poetry of none of these need concern us here: not even the beautiful later pastorals of Wither and Browne. For, Drayton aside, the last two poets are the only followers of Spenser who have achieved the unity and repression of a successful lyric; and by the accession of King Charles, Browne had ceased to write, and Wither had already straggled off into his innumerable devotional pamphlets, verse and prose, in which were much fibre and many tendrils, but little bloom. In the period with which this book is concerned the direct influence of Spenser is chiefly to be found in the earlier poetry of Milton, which, despite its remarkable originality and the traces of other influences than this, exhibits in the main the distinctive "notes of Spenserianism, restrained by a chaster taste and by a spirit profoundly imbued with the classics. As Milton is chief amongst the poets included in this book, it cannot be wide of our purpose to stop in our discussion to consider these Spenserian "notes" in his earlier poetry. Take the following: Genius. Stay, gentle swains, for, though in this disguise, This is early work of Milton and exhibits nearly every one of the "notes" mentioned above, sweetness, melody, naturalness, continuousness in metre and sense, personification : "What shallow-searching Fame hath left untold"; classical allusion: Arcady, Alpheus, Arethusa, "Fair silver-buskined Nymphs." A use of nature for decorative effect pervades the whole passage. For pictorial vividness, in which however Milton never surpassed his master, we must look to other passages. A more striking example of some of these qualities of Milton's earlier poetry will be found in the famous song from Comus, Sabrina fair (p. 38, below, vv.9–32), wherein we have almost a complete list of the ancient deities of the sea from "great Oceanus" to "fair Ligea's golden comb." Some of the allusions of this song (e.g., " the Carpathian wizard's hook")1 we may suspect were not altogether luminous to the casual reader of Milton's own day, despite his "greater 1 See note on this passage, p. 243, below. wont" in the classics. Milton's evident delight in passages such as this is made up of two elements: first, a sensuous love of musical sound, the mingled charm of sonorous classical words and their unusual effect in the contrast of their English setting; and, secondly, the scholar's satisfactionpedantic in a lesser man in lavishing his learning on his verse for Milton possessed to the full the scholar's consciousness in the practice of his art. In view of the rhetorical finish of Milton's poetry, and the high sense of constructiveness which informs his work in even its apparently most unpremeditated flights, especially in view of the carefully wrought and subtly varied cadences of his blank verse, I do not feel certain that the customary classification of Milton with the poets of the past age, rather than with his actual contemporaries, is a classification wholly to be justified. If now we turn to the poetry of Ben Jonson, more especially to his lyrical verse, the first thing that we note is a sense of form, not merely in detail and transition like the "links... bright and even " of The Faery Queen, but a sense of the entire poem in its relation to its parts. This sense involves brevity and condensity of expression, a feeling on the part of the poet that the effect may be spoiled by a word too much a feeling which no true Spenserian ever knew. There is about this poetry a sense of finish rather than of elaboration; it is less continuous than complete; more concentrated, less diffuse; chaste rather than florid; controlled, and yet not always less spontaneous; reserved, and yet not always less natural. There are other things to note in the Jonsonian manner. It retained classical allusion less for the sake of embellishment than as an atmosphere · to borrow a term from the nomenclature of art. Its drafts upon ancient mythology become allusive, and the effects produced by Horace, Catullus, or Anacreon are essayed in reproduction under |