designs, penning satiric dramas on his fellow-craftsmen, and pouring scorn upon nature. The loathed stage And the more loathsome age, Where pride and impudence in faction knit Jonson was a moralist and a philosopher, conveying through the medium of his comedy the results of mature studies and of patient inquiries into human The end of poetry, in his opinion, was to inform men in the best reason of living;' and he wrote systematically, deducing characters from fixed conceptions of specific attributes, building up plots with all the massive machinery of learning and potent intellectual materials at his command. Unlike the poets of Imaginative Comedy, he adhered to scenes of common human experience; and, deviating from the traditions of the school he had adopted, he portrayed unusual and exaggerated eccentricities (Volpone' and 'The Alchemist), instead of the broader and more general aspects of humanity. Therefore the name of Humour, which recurs so often in his work, may be taken as the keynote to his conception of character. XIV. Criticism has to separate the transient from the permanent; to attempt at least to estimate the true relations of the subject which it treats. Therefore, in this preliminary survey of Elizabethan Drama, we are led to ask some questions of more general import than those which have as yet concerned us. What were PERMANENT VALUE OF THE DRAMA. 69 the causes of its eminent success? Why did it sink so soon into oblivion? What formative influence has it exercised over our literature and over that of other nations-the modern German and the recent French, for instance? What place shall we assign to it among the lastingly important products of the human genius? In other words: Were these plays, the majority of which seem to most of us so dull and dead now, at any time endowed with life and power over men? Did they educate the English people, and help to make this nation what it is? These are the weightiest questions belonging to the subject; more grave than the settling of dates or dubious readings; less easy to resolve than inquiries into the antiquities of theatres. To some of them I gave a partial answer when I tried to show how our Drama embodied the spirit of the sixteenth century in England; for if it did this, as undoubtedly it did, then upon this account alone we have to place it on the list of world-important products. Epics that condense successive epochs for us in monumental poems, Dramas that present the spirit of past periods in a series of lively shadow-pictures, will always rank among the most valuable and permanently interesting achievements of literature. But it is not enough to feel certain that the playwrights worked in close dependence on the spirit of their age, and gave its thoughts and passions utterance. It is not enough to demonstrate their value for students bent on seizing points of local colour, or for historians engaged in penetrating the past workings of the human mind. We want, further, to estimate their capacity for expressing, their influence in forming, national character. In order to do this, we must resume some points already partly entertained. XV. Three things may never be forgotten in the criticism of our Drama. First, it grew up beneath the patronage of the whole nation; the public to which these playwrights appealed was the English people, from Elizabeth upon the throne down to the lowest ragamuffin of the streets; in the same wooden theatres met lords and ladies, citizens and prentices, common porters and working men, soldiers, sailors, pickpockets, and country folk. Secondly, the English during the period of its development exhibited no aptitude in any marked degree for any other of the arts. Thirdly, it was hampered in its freedom neither by the scholastic pedantry of literary men, nor by the political or ecclesiastical restraints of Government. These points are so important that I shall enlarge upon each separately. XVI. The Drama, more than any other form of art, requires a national public. Unless it live in sympathy with the whole people at a certain moment of intensified vitality, it cannot flourish or become more than a merely literary product. That complete sympathy between the playwrights and the nation which existed in England, was wanting in Italy, France, and Spain. Italy had no common sense of nationality, no centre of THREE MAIN POINTS. 71 national existence. Each little state worked for its own interests, maintained its own traditions and its own political diplomacy. Among them all, no single Athens, with indubitable intellectual pre-eminence, arose to make a focus for Italian arts and sciences. Florence more nearly fulfilled this part than any other town of the peninsula. But Florence was not an imperial city, like Athens in the age of Pericles; and Florence had no power to create for Italy that public which is necessary to the full perfection of the Drama. A strong national spirit animated France and Spain. These two countries, next to England, produced the finest dramatic literatures of modern times. Yet in Spain the galling fetters of Court etiquette and of ecclesiastical intolerance checked the evolution of the popular genius; while in France, between the poet and the people intervened academies and aristocracy. It is not worth our while to speak of Germany. At the close of the last century some German poets strove to found a theatre. But Goethe complained bitterly that the nation had no central point, no brain, no heart, to which he could appeal.1 XVII. While the artistic energies of Italy were principally employed in giving figurative form to ideas, England had no native or imported art. Architecture had just ceased to exist as an original growth in our island. 1 For further development of this theme, see the essay on 'Euripides ' in my Studies of Greek Poets, and the chapter on 'Italian Drama' in my Renaissance in Italy, vol. v. Instead of seeking plastic expression for their perception of the beautiful, our artists studied poetical form. They laboured to present an image to the mind, and knew not how to captivate the senses. Holbein, our only great naturalised painter, produced little else but portraits. Torrigiano, a second-rate sculptor, visited these barbarous shores to make his fortune, and decamped again. No foreign masters settled here and founded schools; for the fairest promise could not lure a Florentine beyond Paris; England was to men of Southern race what Siberia is to us, and Paris like S. Petersburg. Thus the power of the English intellect was driven in upon itself for nutriment. Poets had to find the world of beauty in their thoughts, in the study of mankind, in dreams of the imagination. This gave a human depth and rich intensity to their dramatic writing. It encouraged the playwrights to penetrate the deepest and the subtlest labyrinths of passion, and forced them to express themselves through language, for want of any other medium. But it also impressed a certain homeliness, a well-marked stamp of insularity, upon their work. A contemporary critic compares the genius' of the English race with French openness of mind and flexibility of intelligence,' defining genius for his purpose as mainly an affair of energy.' The literature of the Elizabethan age, he tells us, is a literature of genius,' complaining of the poverty of its results, and pointing to the power and fecundity of the French literature of intelligence' in the 'great century' of the Grand Monarque. We may welcome the wholesome |