Introduction: New Learning and New Ignorance

Introduction: New Learning and New Ignorance

The rough outline of our literary history in the sixteenth century is not very difficult to grasp. At the beginning we find a literature still medieval in form and spirit. In Scotland it shows the highest level of technical brilliance: in England it has for many years been dull, feeble, and incompetent. As the century proceeds, new influences arise: changes in our knowledge of antiquity, new poetry from Italy and France, new theology, new movements in philosophy or science. As these increase, though not necessarily because of them, the Scotch literature is almost completely destroyed. In England the characteristic disease of late medieval poetry, its metrical disorder, is healed: but replaced, for the most part, by a lifeless and laboured regularity to which some ears might prefer the vagaries of Lydgate. There is hardly any sign of a new inspiration. Except for the songs of Wyatt, whose deepest roots are medieval, and the prose of the Prayer Book, which is mostly translation, authors seem to have forgotten the lessons which had been mastered in the Middle Ages and learned little in their stead. Their prose is clumsy, monotonous, garrulous; their verse either astonishingly tame and cold or, if it attempts to rise, the coarsest fustian. In both mediums we come to dread a certain ruthless emphasis; bludgeon-work. Nothing is light, or tender, or fresh. All the authors write like elderly men. The mid-century is an earnest, heavy-handed, commonplace age: a drab age. Then, in the last quarter of the century, the unpredictable happens. With startling suddenness we ascend. Fantasy, conceit, paradox, colour, incantation return. Youth returns. The fine frenzies of ideal love and ideal war are readmitted. Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare, Hooker—even, in a way, Lyly—display what is almost a new culture: that culture which was to last through most of the seventeenth century and to enrich the very meanings of the words England and Aristocracy. Nothing in the earlier history of our period would have enabled the sharpest observer to foresee this transformation.

Some have believed, or assumed, that it resulted from what seemed at the time to be a resurrection, rejuvenescence, or renascentia—the recovery of Greek and the substitution of Augustan for medieval Latin. It is, of course, true that the rich vernacular literature of the eighties used the fruits of that event, as it used the Middle Ages and everything else it could lay its hands on. It is also true that many movements of thought which affected our literature would have been impossible without the recovery of Greek. But if there is any closer connexion than that between the renascentia and the late sixteenth-century efflorescence of English literature, I must confess that it has escaped me. The more we look into the question, the harder we shall find it to believe that humanism had any power of encouraging, or any wish to encourage, the literature that actually arose. And it may be as well to confess immediately that I have no alternative ‘explanation’ to offer. I do not claim to know why there were many men of genius at that time. The Elizabethans themselves would have attributed it to Constellation. I must be content with trying to sketch some of the intellectual and imaginative conditions under which they wrote.

It comes naturally to a modern to suppose that the new astronomy made a profound impression on men’s minds; but when we look into the literary texts we find it rarely mentioned. The idea that it produced a shock comparable to that which Darwin gave to the Victorians or Freud to our own age is certainly mistaken. Nor are the reasons hard to find. In the first place it must be remembered that the De Revolutionibus (1543) of Copernicus put forward only a theory: verification, at the hands of Kepler and Galileo, came only at the end of our period, and general acceptance later still. And secondly, humanism, dominant in mid-sixteenth-century England, tended to be on the whole indifferent, if not hostile, to science. It is an English humanist, a classical pedant, who in Bruno’s Cena delle Cenere (1584) still thinks that Copernicus can be dismissed with an airy gibe from the Adagia of Erasmus. Even where the new theory was accepted, the change which it produced was not of such emotional or imaginative importance as is sometimes supposed. For ages men had believed the earth to be a sphere. For ages, as we see in Vincent of Beauvais or Dante or ‘John Mandeville’, men had realized that movement towards the centre of the earth from whatever direction was downward movement. For ages men had known, and poets had emphasized, the truth that earth, in relation to the universe, is infinitesimally small: to be treated, said Ptolemy, as a mathematical point (Almagest, I. V). Nor was it generally felt that earth, or Man, would lose dignity by being shifted from the cosmic centre. The central position had not implied pre-eminence. On the contrary, it had implied, as Montaigne says (Essais, II, xii), ‘the worst and deadest part of the universe’, ‘the lowest story of the house’, the point at which all the light, heat, and movement descending from the nobler spheres finally died out into darkness, coldness, and passivity. The position which was locally central was dynamically marginal: the rim of being, farthest from the hub. Hence, when any excitement was shown at the new theory, it might be exhilaration. The divine Cusanus (1401–64), who was an early believer (for his own, metaphysical, reasons) in earth’s movement, rejoiced in 1440 to find that she also is ‘a noble star’ with her own light, heat, and influence (De Docta Ignorantia, II. xii).

What proved important (and that slowly) about the new astronomy was not the mere alteration in our map of space but the methodological revolution which verified it. This is not sufficiently described as a change from dogmatism to empiricism. Mere empiricists like Telesius or Bacon achieved nothing. What was fruitful in the thought of the new scientists was the bold use of mathematics in the construction of hypotheses, tested not by observation simply but by controlled observation of phenomena that could be precisely measured. On the practical side it was this that delivered Nature into our hands. And on our thoughts and emotions (which concern a literary historian more) it was destined to have profound effects. By reducing Nature to her mathematical elements it substituted a mechanical for a genial or animistic conception of the universe. The world was emptied, first of her indwelling spirits, then of her occult sympathies and antipathies, finally of her colours, smells, and tastes. (Kepler at the beginning of his career explained the motion of the planets by their animae motrices; before he died, he explained it mechanically.) The result was dualism rather than materialism. The mind, on whose ideal constructions the whole method depended, stood over against its object in ever sharper dissimilarity. Man with his new powers became rich like Midas but all that he touched had gone dead and cold. This process, slowly working, ensured during the next century the loss of the old mythical imagination: the conceit, and later the personified abstraction, takes its place. Later still, as a desperate attempt to bridge a gulf which begins to be found intolerable, we have the Nature poetry of the Romantics.

But it must be very clearly understood that these consequences were not felt nor foreseen in the sixteenth century. Behind all the literature studied in this volume lies the older conception of Nature. Davies’s Orchestra gives us the right picture of the Elizabethan or Henrican universe; tingling with anthropomorphic life, dancing, ceremonial, a festival not a machine. It is very important to grasp this at the outset. If we do not, we shall constantly misread our poets by taking for highly conceited metaphor expressions which are still hardly metaphorical at all. The ‘prophetic soul of the wide world’ is not a mere personification: it is the veritable anima mundi. The ‘teeming earth’ can almost literally be ‘pinch’d’ with a kind of colic, as in Henry IV, Part I, for is she not a huge animal breathing out per montium crateres ceu os et nares? (Fromondus, Meteor, IV. iv). Even when hills are praised for not despising lowly plains we have still hardly reached the realm of metaphor pure and simple; the natural and civil hierarchies were felt to be—somehow or other—continuous. There is, of course, in sixteenth-century poetry, as in most poetry, a use of the pathetic fallacy; but it is less than a modern reader is likely at first to suppose.

Historians of science or philosophy, and especially if they hold some theory of progress, are naturally interested in seizing those elements of sixteenth-century thought which were later to alter Man’s whole picture of reality. Those other elements which were destined to disappear they tend to treat as mere ‘survivals’ from some earlier and darker age. The literary historian, on the other hand, is concerned not with those ideas in his period which have since proved fruitful, but with those which seemed important at the time. He must even try to forget his knowledge of what comes after, and see the egg as if he did not know it was going to become a bird. From his point of view it is misleading to call the animistic or genial cosmology of the sixteenth century a ‘survival’. For one thing, that word hardly does justice to the fact that it seems to be rather more lively and emphatic at this time than it had been before. For another, it carries the dangerous suggestion that this cosmology was now something alien and intrusive, no longer characteristic of the age. It teaches us to divide the men of that period into two camps, the conservatively superstitious and the progressive or enlightened: even, possibly, to suppose that they would have agreed with our dichotomy. In reality it would leave nearly every one of them a border-line case. The groupings of which they were conscious were quite different from those which our modern conceptions of superstition or enlightenment would impose on them.

Pico della Mirandola (1463–94) attacked astrology. This would seem to be a good reason for placing him among the enlightened. But then Pico also defends both the reality and the lawfulness of magic. It is true that, when attacked, he will distinguish magia from goeteia and describe the former in terms which make it sound as innocent as chemistry, being an art which ‘doth not so much worke wonders as obeyeth Nature in her working of the same’ (Apology). But he is being disingenuous. Look back at his Conclusiones Magicae (especially 15, 19, 22, and 24) and you will find the magical ideal expressed in its sharpest contrast to the scientific.

Pomponatius (1462–1524) is a determinist who attributes all religions to the operation of cosmic laws: including Christianity which, he thinks, has nearly had its day (De Naturalium Effectuum Causis, pp. 251–86). This may be called enlightenment if you wish. But the reason why Pomponatius thinks in this way is that he is an astrologer: the determinism he believes in is that of Constellation.

This conflict between the magician and the astrologer seems very surprising to those who want to impose our modern grouping on the men of the past; for by our grouping magic and astrology go together as ‘superstitions’. But the moment we drop our grouping (which is from the historical point of view irrelevant and accidental) and try to see these two arts as they appeared to their exponents, the thing becomes perfectly simple. Magic and astrology, though of course often mixed in practice, are in tendency opposed. The magician asserts human omnipotence; the astrologer, human impotence. The common emotion (whether of repulsion or whimsical curiosity) which unites them in our minds is modern: something on the lens of the glass we look through, not something in the historical object. The thorough-going astrologer is a determinist. He holds the creed (in William James’s words) of the ‘tough-minded’. He shatters the illusions and despises the exciting hopes of the magician. Those temperaments that are attracted by modern forms of determinism in our own day would have been attracted by astrological determinism in the sixteenth century.

Telesius (1509–88) opens his De Rerum Natura with an attack on those ‘who trusted ouer much in their owne witte and forgat to looke vpon the things themselues’ (Prooemium). He means chiefly Aristotle, of whose physics and cosmology he is a stern critic. All knowledge, he insists, must be grounded in the senses. Even the human soul, whatever we accept about her from the Christian faith, as actually known to us is corporea quadantenus (V. xl). It is a passage to delight an historian of progress: here, surely, is the road to enlightenment beginning. But in Campanella (1568–1639), who develops the sensationalism of Telesius, the road takes a most unexpected turn. In his De Rerum Sensu et Magia he maintains that the senses are more certain than any intellectual knowledge (II. xxx). But then, striving after monism, he argues that sense, which we share with the brutes, cannot have come ex nihilo. It must unite us with the whole universe. We must conclude that ‘the elements and all things’ are sentient. But if so, it must be possible to awake their sleeping sense (sopitus sensus) by magia divina. If we and Nature are all one, there must be some nearer way of controlling her than by mechanics; some direct way, ‘as when one man commandeth another who is in his power’ (IV. ii).

This last example, in which we see new empiricism leading to a new conception of magic, should make it clear how inadequate the term ‘medieval survival’ is for all that we count superstitious in the sixteenth century. We might reasonably call eighteenth-century magic, if there is any, a ‘survival’ from the seventeenth century: but to talk in that way about the sixteenth is to antedate the real change and to misconceive the period we are studying. A vigorous efflorescence of forbidden or phantasmal arts is not an anomaly in that period, but one of its characteristic traits: quite as characteristic as exploration, Ciceronianism, or the birth of secular drama. Nor did they appear simply as the prolongation of a movement whose impulse was derived from the medieval past. On the contrary, they appeared to themselves to be striking new roots, to be having, like Latinity, their own renascentia. They are in fact the extreme exemplification of a common tendency, or a common mood, which can be traced in many other departments of sixteenth-century life.

By magic I do not here mean mere witchcraft—traditional, perhaps Satanistic, rites practiced by the poor, the ignorant, or the perverted. When I first approached this part of my subject I was tempted to regard the witch scare, beginning roughly, I thought, with the publication of the Malleus Maleficarum in 1497, as a useful confirmation of the view forced on me by the other evidence. Two considerations deter me from doing so now. In the first place M. Brouette (in Satan) has raised a doubt lest the witch-trials appear more numerous between certain dates only because they are better recorded. And secondly, it appears to me impossible to be sure that much witchcraft—I had almost said that any—was really going on. Most of the evidence was gossip: nearly all the confessions were made in answer to leading questions and under torture. Judges who examine in that way will infallibly find confirmation of whatever theory the prosecution was holding before the trial began. The witch scare, therefore, concerns us at the moment, if at all, not as evidence of the things practiced by the common people but as evidence of the views, and (implicitly) the whole world picture, accepted by learned and respectable people in positions of authority. And with that I drop the subject of witchcraft altogether: and I must ask the reader to dismiss from his mind Gilles de Retz, Black Mass, Hieronymus Bosch, and Mr. Crowley. My concern is with high magic: not concealed but avowed and vindicated by eloquent scholars who draw much of their strength from the New Learning. Of course in this high magic there is no Satanism and no Faustian compact. Equally, of course, critics of the high magic (like King James in his Demonology of 1597) maintained that it was all a snare and would lead you into the goetic sort in the end. Whether it was as dangerous to the soul as King James (and probably most contemporaries) thought, is not for me to judge: but there seems reasonable ground for thinking that it affected the general imagination more strongly and widely than medieval magic had done.

Only an obstinate prejudice about this period (which I will presently try to account for) could blind us to a certain change which comes over the merely literary texts as we pass from the Middle Ages to the sixteenth century. In medieval story there is, in one sense, plenty of ‘magic’. Merlin does this or that ‘by his subtilty’, Bercilak resumes his severed head. But all these passages have unmistakably the note of ‘faerie’ about them. They could arouse a practical or quasi-scientific interest in no reader’s mind. To ask how they were done would show a misunderstanding of literary kinds. And when magic occurs in the more realistic setting of the Franklin’s Tale, it is quite clearly an art of mere illusion which does not change Nature but only makes her appear changed ‘to mannes sighte’ (F. 1158), in ‘an apparence’ (1265) so that people will ‘wene and seiye’ (1267) what is not true. But in Spenser, Marlowe, Chapman, and Shakespeare the subject is treated quite differently. ‘He to his studie goes’; books are opened, terrible words pronounced, souls imperiled. The medieval author seems to write for a public to whom magic, like knight-errantry, is part of the furniture of romance: the Elizabethan, for a public who feel that it might be going on in the next street. Neglect of this has produced strange readings of the Tempest, which is in reality no fantasy (like the Midsummer Night’s Dream) and no allegory, but Shakespeare’s play on magia as Macbeth is his play on goeteia or the Merchant on usury. Shakespeare’s audience believed (and the burden of proof lies on those who say Shakespeare disbelieved) that magicians not very unlike Prospero might exist. His speech of renunciation, sometimes taken as an autobiographical confidence by the poet, was to them necessary in order that the ending might be unambiguously happy. The epilogue, cunningly written so that it suits equally the penitent magician and the actor whose part is ended, underlined the point. Nor could anyone at that date hear the soft and timely ‘I’ll drown my book’ without remembering that earlier magician who had screamed too ‘I’ll burn my books’. All the difference between fire and water is there.

This high magic can be studied in Pico, Ficino (1433–99), Paracelsus (1493–1541), Agrippa (1486–1535), or our own Dr. Dee. It can even be studied in the Philosophical Works of Henry More which appeared as late as 1662: a book to which Dr. Johnson referred Boswell. This supposedly ‘medieval survival’ in fact survived the Elizabethan type of lyric, the Elizabethan type of play, the Elizabethan type of monarchy, and the older English music. Its exponents quite clearly regard themselves not as continuing an existing movement but as reviving something that had been lost during the ignorant Middle Ages. ‘Once,’ says Agrippa, ‘by the iudgment of all olde philosophers Magick held the hyest place of honour’, but from the first days of the Church (a principio nascentis ecclesiae catholice) it has been forbidden and denounced: most unjustly, for it is ‘a hye holy learning’, sublimis sacraque disciplina (De Occulta Philosophia, Ep. Ded.). Medieval contributions to the subject he tosses aside as frivolous: authors like Roger Bacon and Arnold of the New Town wrote deliramenta and superstitiones (ibid.). What permits his own magic to be ‘high’ (I have not found the term ‘white’ till later) is the belief that there are many potent spirits besides the angels and devils of Christianity. As no one doubts (and anyway Psellus had told us) that evil spirits can be called to us by profane arts, so by proper means the mundana numina can be called: or at the very least the daemons (not demons) who are their attendants. But not, of course, the angels (supercelestes), not even the inferior sorts: only the aereals (aëreos daemones). Trismegistus is quoted in support (ibid. I. xxxix). But there seems to be another road to power which carries you farther. The Arabs say that men can rise above their corporeal and their sensitive powers and in that state receive into themselves ‘the perfection of heaven and of the diuine intelligences’, for ‘all spirits do obey perfected souls’. That way even the resuscitation of the dead may be possible (ibid. I. liii).

The points to notice here are, first, the link with Greek and the New Learning (and indeed Agrippa mentions Pliny, the Hermetica, the Orphic books, and ‘the Platonists’ among his authorities); secondly, the belief that the invisible population of the universe includes a whole crowd of beings who might almost be called theologically neutral. Both these connect the high magic with the ‘Platonic theology’ of the Florentines Pico and Ficino, which is, in a sense, the characteristic ‘philosophy’ of the time.

This Platonic theology, under the name of Platonism, is too often treated only in relation to its effect on love poetry. From that point of view its importance has possibly been overstressed. At first sight we feel that it ought to have been immensely fruitful. Centuries of courtly love had prepared a place for lofty erotic mysticism: it might be supposed that Plato’s doctrine, which in its own day had found no better soil than Greek pederasty, would now find the very soil it required. But on a deeper level this is not so. The thought of the Symposium, like all Plato’s thought, is ruthless, and the more fervid, the more ruthless. The lowest rung of his ladder is perversion; the intermediate rungs are increasing degrees of asceticism and scientific clarity; the topmost rung is mystical contemplation. A man who reaches it has, by hypothesis, left behind forever the original human object of desire and affection. Any preference for one beautiful person over others was among the earliest obstacles he overcame in his ascent. There is no possibility of adapting this scheme in its full rigor to a heterosexual love which promises fidelity and perhaps even hopes to be blessed by marriage. Hence the so-called Platonism of the love poets often amounts to little more than an admission that the lady’s soul is even more beautiful than her person and that both are images of the First Fair.

But however the value of this erotic Platonism is assessed, it was not of this that an Englishman of that period thought exclusively, or even thought first, when Platonism was mentioned. If he had, he would have been puzzled when Drayton said (Polyolbion, V. 178) that he would not ‘play the humorous Platonist’ by maintaining that Merlin’s father was an incubus daemon: for the loves of such a creature are by definition not ‘Platonic’. Drayton writes thus, as the following lines make clear, because Platonism primarily means to him the doctrine that the region between earth and moon is crowded with airy creatures who are capable of fertile unions with our own species. Platonism, in fact, is for him a system of demonology. And Drayton’s view, though incomplete, is not very far wrong.

I have called this system, as Ficino himself calls it, ‘Platonic theology’, to distinguish it from the Platonism on which lectures are given in a modern university. It is not sufficiently distinguished even by the term ‘neo-Platonism’. It is a deliberate syncretism based on the conviction that all the sages of antiquity shared a common wisdom and that this wisdom can be reconciled with Christianity. If Plato alone had been in question the Florentines would in fact have been attempting to ‘baptize’ him as Aquinas had ‘baptized’ Aristotle. But since for them Plato was merely the greatest and most eloquent of the consenting sages, since Pythagoras, the Hermetic Books, the Sibylline Books, the Orphic Books, Apuleius, Plotinus, Psellus, Iamblichus, and the Cabbala all meant the same, their task was hardly distinguishable from that of reconciling paganism, Judaism, and Christianity in general. It is significant that Ficino hazarded the suggestion that the diversity of religions might have been ordained by God as conducive to ‘a certain beauty’, decorem quendam; assuming, as such men do, that the main difference between religions is in their ritual, ritus adorationis (De Christiana Religione, iv).

Hence, paradoxically, it comes about that though the Florentine Platonists were wholly pious in intention, their work deserves the epithet pagan more than any other movement in that age. That their conscious purpose was Christian we need not doubt. Ficino, at a sign from heaven, burnt his commentary on Lucretius: he was a priest, and apparently a good one, for the last twenty-four years of his life; all his doctrines were submitted to the judgement of the Church. So, indeed, were those of Agrippa (De Occult. Phil. I. i). Yet the actual trend of Ficino’s thought is always away from the centre of Christianity. One has the suspicion that though he and Pico doubtless believed Christianity to be true, they valued it even more for being lofty, edifying, and useful. They have the air of men rallying the forces of ‘religion’ or even of ‘idealism’ in general against the danger of naturalistic philosophies that deprive man of his dignity and freedom; a danger represented for them not by the new real sciences but by astrological determinism. The title of Pico’s De Dignitate Hominis would really have served as the title for all their works. In their readiness to accept from whatever source all that seemed to them elevated, or spiritual, or even exciting, we sometimes seem to catch the first faint suggestion of what came, centuries later, to be called ‘higher thought’.

In their task of defending what they thought a spiritual cosmology they raked together all that the late pagan sources (some of which they believed to be not late but primeval) could tell them about the invisible population of the universe. They readmitted all those ‘middle spirits . . . betwixt th’ Angelical and Human kinde’, which St. Augustine is labouring to expel all through the eighth and ninth books of the De Civitate Dei. Even in the Middle Ages some tradition of them had trickled down from Apuleius into Bernardus Sylvestris and Geoffrey of Monmouth: thence into Layamon. But our unambiguous friends and foes, ministering angels and seducing devils, occupied the centre of the stage. Now the imagination is filled with spirits ‘of another sort’: the aerii homines with whom Cardan’s father conversed, Prospero’s Ariel, the amiable though intolerably tedious being whom Dr. Dee evoked—for the tragi-comical human story in his True Relation has to be picked out from reams of stuff as fatuous as is reported from any modern séance. Pico even allows the use of evil spirits when enslaved by magia and not given dominion over us by goeteia. Paracelsus is, I think, less grounded in ancient demonology. The pleasing little tract De Nymphis mainly gives a pseudo-scientific form to local and contemporary folk-lore, mostly of a very innocent sort. I am glad to know that undines desire marriage with man not only (as we all learned from De La Motte Fouqué) because they thus acquire an immortal soul, but also for the more prosaic reason that their own species suffers from a grave surplus of females. (We may notice in passing that Spenser’s Mammon, though in the canto only a personified vice, is in the versicle a Paracelsian ‘gnome’ ripening his gold by solar influence.)

This mass of mysterious but not necessarily evil spirits creates the possibility of an innocent traffic with the unseen and therefore of high magic or magia. That, at any rate, is its external and possibly accidental condition. But to grasp the real psychology of the magicians, the megalomania or (to revive a word) anthropolatry which lies at the back of the whole movement, we must look a little deeper. In this densely populated universe a very peculiar position was allotted to Man. Cassirer has traced how the time-honoured truism that Man is a microcosm who has in him a bit of everything now underwent a strange transformation. Christians had always held that a man was a composite creature, animal rationale, and that it lay in his own choice to be governed by his reason or his animality. But that choice could produce order or disorder only within the limits assigned to him by the hierarchy of being. He could become a saint but not an angel: a swinish man but not a pig. The Florentines, on the other hand, sometimes appear to think that Man can become any kind of creature he pleases. In a passage that oddly anticipates Sartre, Pico suggests that Man has no specific nature at all but creates his own nature by his acts. ‘To thee, O Adam’ are the words he puts into God’s mouth, ‘We haue giuen no certain habitation nor countenance of thine owne neither anie peculiar office, so that what habitation or countenance or office soeuer thou dost choose for thyselfe, the same thou shalt enioye and posses at thine owne proper will and election—We haue made thee neither a thing celestial nor a thing terrestrial, neither mortal nor immortal, so that being thine owne fashioner and artificer of thyselfe, thou maist make thyselfe after what likenes thou dost most affecte’ (De Dignitate, para. 3). No impassable barrier, then, cuts us off even from the highest spirits. I have already noticed that though Agrippa in one place limits the power of our ceremonial to calling up the mundana numina or even their inferior daemons, in another he hints a more direct access to ‘the perfection of heaven’. Ficino seems to think the same. We are akin not only to the aereal daemons but to the highest orders of created beings. No one, seeing us as we now appear, would suspect our almost limitless powers. But that is because souls in earthly bodies ‘are wondrously abated of their proper dignity’, longissime a sua dignitate discedunt. We have come into these bodies not by fate nor as a punishment, but of our own free will, drawn to them because we loved them. The power we now have over them we once had over all Nature. But if, now incarnate, the soul once again conquers her partiality for this individual organism, why should she not recover her original dominion over the whole created universe? And in fact such recoveries have occurred. Pythagoras and Apollonius of Tyana are cited as examples (Theologia Platonica, XIII, iv).

This glance at a forgotten, but influential, philosophy will help, I hope, to get rid of the false groupings which our ex post facto judgements of ‘enlightenment’ and ‘superstition’ urge us to impose on the past. Freed from those, we can see that the new magia, far from being an anomaly in that age, falls into its place among the other dreams of power which then haunted the European mind. Most obviously it falls into place beside the thought of Bacon. His endeavour is no doubt contrasted in our minds with that of the magicians: but contrasted only in the light of the event, only because we know that science succeeded and magic failed. That event was then still uncertain. Stripping off our knowledge of it, we see at once that Bacon and the magicians have the closest possible affinity. Both seek knowledge for the sake of power (in Bacon’s words, as ‘a spouse for fruit’ not a ‘curtesan for pleasure’), both move in a grandiose dream of days when Man shall have been raised to the performance of ‘all things possible’. That means, doubtless, all things that do not involve contradiction: no higher omnipotence was claimed for God. Nor would Bacon himself deny the affinity: he thought the aim of the magicians was ‘noble’. The theory of poetry shared by Scaliger (1484–1588), Sidney, and Bacon (which I reserve for a later chapter) depends on the belief that the soul ‘is in proportion superior to the world’; and if it errs, it errs with the same megalomania. Even Machiavelli’s dream of a political power absolute, mysterious, protected by unremitting force and fraud, may be regarded as bearing the same stamp. Against the Wellsian or Shavian immensity of these aspirations the consistent astrologer (but of course most were inconsistent) came with the cold assurance that Man’s destiny did not depend on his own efforts but on stellar movements which he could never resist or placate: that the little creatures who dreamed of controlling the winds and raising the dead were in reality only the stars’ tennis-balls. If I were asked what was common to both attitudes I would hazard the guess that it is something negative. Both have abandoned an earlier doctrine of Man. That doctrine had guaranteed him, on his own rung of the hierarchical ladder, his own limited freedom and efficacy: now, both the limit and the guarantee become uncertain—perhaps Man can do everything, perhaps he can do nothing. But, once more, there is no question of two strictly defined camps. Both views can be found in the same writer. In his De Imaginibus (cap. xii) Paracelsus tells us that ‘man conteineth in himself the stars and heauen, they lie hidden in his minde . . . if we rightly knew our owne spirite no thing at all would be impossible to vs on earth’. In his Liber Paragtanum (Tract. i) he says that Man is related to the elements as the image in a mirror is related to a real object: is in fact, as we should now say, a mere epiphenomenon, and can know no more of himself or his sources than a mirror image knows.

The new geography excited much more interest than the new astronomy, especially, as was natural, among merchants and politicians: but the literary texts suggest that it did not stimulate the imagination so much as we might have expected. The aim of the explorers was mercantile: to cut out the Turk and the Venetian by finding a direct route to the east. In this the Portuguese had succeeded by circumnavigating Africa and crossing the Indian Ocean; Vasco da Gama reached Malabar in 1498. Columbus, a man of lofty mind, with missionary and scientific interests, had the original idea of acting on the age-old doctrine of the earth’s rotundity and sailing west to find the east. Lands which no one had dreamed of barred his way. Though we all know, we often forget, that the existence of America was one of the greatest disappointments in the history of Europe. Plans laid and hardships borne in the hope of reaching Cathay, merely ushered in a period during which we became to America what the Huns had been to us. Foiled of Cathay, the Spaniards fell back on exploiting the mineral wealth of the new continent. The English, coming later and denied even this, had to content themselves with colonization, which they conceived chiefly as a social sewerage stem, a vent for ‘needy people who now trouble the commonwealth’ and are ‘daily consumed with the gallows’ (Humphrey Gilbert’s Discourse, cap. 10). Of course the dream of Cathay died hard. We hoped that each new stretch of the American coast was the shore of one more island and that each new bay was the mouth of the channel that led through into the Pacific or ‘South Sea’. In comparison with that perpetually disappointed hope the delectable things we really found seemed unimportant. In Virginia there was ‘shole water wher we smelt so sweet and so strong a smell as if we had beene in the midst of some delicate garden’; a land ‘so full of grapes as the very beating and surge of the sea ouerflowed them’; a king ‘very iust of his promise’; a people ‘as manerly and ciuill as any of Europe’, most ‘gentle, louing and faithfull, voide of all guile and treason’, living ‘after the maner of the golden age’. But that was all rather beside the point; nothing but ‘a good Mine or a passage to the South Sea’ could ever ‘bring this Countrey in request to be inhabited by our nation’ (Hakluyt, vii. 298–331). Hence the desperate attempts of Pert (1517), Hore (1536), Willoughby (1553), and Frobisher (1576–8) to find either a North-West or a North-East passage. Judged in the light of later events the history of English exploration in the sixteenth century may appear to modern Americans and modern Englishmen a very Aeneid: but judged by the aims and wishes of its own time it was on the whole a record of failures and second bests. Nor was the failure relieved by any high ideal motives. Missionary designs are sometimes paraded in the prospectus of a new venture: but the actual record of early Protestantism in this field seems to be ‘blank as death’.

The poetic charm with which these voyages appear in the pages of Charles Kingsley or Professor Raleigh is partly conditioned by later romanticism and later imperialism. Wild Nature—plains without palaces and rivers without nymphs—made little appeal to men who valued travel almost wholly as a means of coming, like Ulysses, to know the cities and manners of men. And the best European consciences had still to undergo a long training before they reached the untroubled nineteenth-century acquiescence in imperialism. Go back even as far as Burke or Johnson and you will find a very different view: ‘in the same year, in a year hitherto disastrous to mankind’, America and the sea-passage to India were discovered (Taxation No Tyranny). Go back farther, to Buchanan (1506–82), and you read that the great explorer, the true discoverer of all these new lands, was Avarice (De Sphaera, I. 182 et seq.). The best European minds were ashamed of Europe’s exploits in America. Montaigne passionately asks why so noble a discovery could not have fallen to the Ancients who might have spread civility where we have spread only corruption (Essais, III. vi). Even on the utilitarian level the benefits of the whole thing were not always obvious to home-dwellers. Our merchants, observes William Harrison in 1577, now go to Cathay, Muscovy, and Tartary, ‘whence, as they saie, they bring home great commodities. But alas I see not by all their trauell that the prices are anie whit abated . . . in time past when the strange bottoms were suffered to come in we had sugar for fourpence the pound that now is worth half a crowne’ (Description of England, II. v).

We must not therefore be surprised if the wonder and glory of exploration, though sometimes expressed by Hakluyt and the voyagers themselves, was seldom the theme of imaginative writers. Something of it is felt in the Utopia, and there are casual references in Spenser, Shakespeare, Donne, and others. As the great age of the voyages receded it was perhaps more valued. I think Drayton cared more about it than Shakespeare, and Milton more than Drayton. In the sixteenth century imagination still turns more readily to ancient Greece and Rome, to Italy, Arcadia, to English history or legend. Lodge writing a romance about Arden while he sails to the Azores is typical.

There is, however, one respect in which America may have affected not only imaginative but even philosophical thought. If it did not create, it impressed on our minds more strongly, the image of the Savage, or Natural Man. A place had, of course, been prepared for him. Christians had depicted the naked Adam, Stoics, the state of Nature, poets, the reign of Saturn. But in America it might seem that you could catch glimpses of some such thing actually going on. The ‘Natural Man’ is, of course, an ambivalent image. He may be conceived as ideally innocent. From that conception descend Montaigne’s essay on cannibals, Gonzalo’s commonwealth in the Tempest, the good ‘Salvage’ in the Faerie Queene (VI. iv, v, vi), Pope’s ‘reign of God’, and the primeval classless society of the Marxists. It is one of the great myths. On the other hand, he might be conceived as brutal, sub-human: thence Caliban, the bad ‘Salvages’ of the Faerie Queene (VI. viii), the state of nature as pictured by Hobbes, and the ‘Cave Man’ of popular modern imagination. That is another great myth. The very overtones which the word ‘primitive’ now has for most speakers (it had quite different ones in the sixteenth century) are evidence of its potency; though other causes, such as evolutionary biology, have here contributed.

If the new astronomy and the new geography did not seem at the time quite so important as we should have expected, the same cannot be said of either humanism or puritanism, and to these I now turn. But I must immediately guard against a possible misunderstanding. Both words have so changed their sense that puritan now means little more than ‘rigorist’ or ‘ascetic’ and humanist little more than ‘the opposite of puritan’. The more completely we can banish these modern senses from our minds while studying the sixteenth century the better we shall understand it. By a puritan the Elizabethans meant one who wished to abolish episcopacy and remodel the Church of England on the lines which Calvin had laid down for Geneva. The puritan party were not separatists or (in the modern sense) dissenters. They usually remained in the Establishment and desired reform from within. There were therefore degrees of puritanism and it is difficult to draw a hard and fast line. I shall use the word to mean ‘advanced’ or ‘radical’ Protestantism: the marks of a puritan, in my sense, are a strong emphasis on justification by faith, an insistence on preaching as an indispensable, almost the only, means of grace, and an attitude towards bishops which varies from reluctant toleration to implacable hostility. Humanism, in the only sense I shall give to the word, is more easily defined. By a humanist I mean one who taught, or learned, or at least strongly favoured, Greek and the new kind of Latin; and by humanism, the critical principles and critical outlook which ordinarily went with these studies. Humanism is in fact the first form of classicism. It is evident that if we use the words in this way we shall not see our period in terms of a conflict between humanists and puritans. That is another false grouping: one that is much encouraged by using both the terms in their loose, modern sense. If they are used in that sense, if in fact each is defined almost by its opposition to the other, then, to be sure, the sixteenth century, or any other period, is bound to appear as a conflict between puritans and humanists. But if we give the words their older meaning we shall get quite different, and more useful, results. In reality the puritans and the humanists were quite often the same people. Even when they were not, they were united by strong common antipathies and by certain affinities of temper. ‘Humanists’ in the modern sense hardly existed. As for ‘puritans’ in the modern sense, every shade of Christian belief whatever (and there is no evidence for any considerable body of unbelievers) then had traits which would now be called ‘puritanical’. It is clear that More and Fisher had these traits in a much higher degree than most Protestants. As for paganism (unless we use this word, absurdly, to mean debauchery) the most pagan school of thought at this time was that of the Florentine Platonists whose moral teaching was severe and ascetic.

The humanists did two things, for one of which we are their endless debtors. They recovered, edited, and expounded a great many ancient texts in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. We must, indeed, remember that many Latin authors had never been lost; Virgil, Ovid, Lucan, Statius, Claudian, Boethius, and many others were as familiar to Dante and Chaucer as they were to Ronsard and Jonson. We must also remember, as modern scholars have shown, that a real knowledge of the ancients was not nearly so common among sixteenth-century authors as their writings would at first lead us to suppose. Quotations are often at second or third hand. But it remains true that we owe nearly all our Greeks, and many of our Latins, to the humanists: also, a prodigious advance in philology and textual criticism.

If this had been all, their name would have been a blessing. But they also initiated that temper and those critical principles which have since come to be called ‘classicism’. It is not unusual to make a distinction that is almost a contrast between humanism and the ‘neo-classical’ school. I believe that the difference has been very much exaggerated, under the influence of that same obstinate prejudice which I have alluded to before (and must still postpone my account of). There are, no doubt, modifications as we pass from the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century humanists to critics like Rymer and Boileau: but the neo-classics are the humanists’ lawful heirs. The worst of all neo-classical errors, that which turned Aristotle’s observations on Greek tragedy into arbitrary ‘rules’ and even foisted on him ‘rules’ for which his text furnishes no pretext at all, began not with Richelieu nor Chapelain but in 1570 with Castelvetro (Poetica d’Aristotele, IV. ii). Scaliger’s critique of Homer (Poetices, V. ii, iii) is very like Rymer’s of Shakespeare. Swift’s contempt for natural science in Laputa, Johnson’s in his critique of Milton’s educational theory, Chesterfield’s request that Stanhope should stick to useful books and avoid ‘jimcrack natural history of fossils, minerals, plants, &c.’, are all in the spirit of Vives and Erasmus. If Dryden departs from Aristotle to make ‘admiration’ the ‘delight of serious plays’, Minturno had led the way (De Poeta, II). The Poetica of Vida (1490–1566) is still a central book for Johnson and Pope. The differences between the humanists and the neo-classics have to be sought for by minute study: the similarities leap to the eye. We have no warrant for regarding our Elizabethan literature as the progeny of the one and our ‘Augustan’ as the progeny of the other. I shall notice in a later chapter the one point at which humanism, in the person of Scaliger, here following Plotinus, may have given to the Elizabethans something they could really use. Apart from that, all the facts seem consistent with the view that the great literature of the fifteen-eighties and the nineties was something which humanism, with its unities and Gorboducs and English hexameters, would have prevented if it could, but failed to prevent because the high tide of native talent was then too strong for it. Later, when we were weaker, it had its way and our pseudo-classical period set in.

The difficulty of assessing this new temper which the humanists introduced lies in the fact that our educational system descends from them and, therefore, the very terms we use embody humanistic conceptions. Unless we take care, our language will beg every question in their favour. We say, for example, that they substituted ‘classical’ for ‘medieval’ Latin. But the very idea of the ‘medieval’ is a humanistic invention. (According to Lehmann it is in 1469 that the expression media tempestas first occurs.) And what can media imply except that a thousand years of theology, metaphysics, jurisprudence, courtesy, poetry, and architecture are to be regarded as a mere gap, or chasm, or entre-acte? Such a preposterous conception can be accepted only if you swallow the whole creed of humanism at the same time. We may change our terms and say that what the humanists ousted was not ‘medieval’ Latin but ‘barbarous’ Latin. That will do very well if we take our ideas of this rejected Latinity from the Epistolae Obscurorum Virorum—that is, from an amusing humanist satire in which imaginary people use a Latin not to be found in the great medieval writers in order to say things which would be silly in any language whatever. But if, turning from the satire, we look at the facts, we shall soon ask ourselves in what sense the word barbarous can be applied to the growing, sensitive, supple language of Bede, Aquinas, the great hymns, or the Carmina Burana. And the answer will be obvious: we can call that Latin barbarous only if we choose to adopt humanistic standards and so make the humanists judges of their own cause. If we took for our criterion the implicit (as distinct from the expressed) judgement of posterity, we should arrive at a startlingly different result. The medieval philosophy is still read as philosophy, the history as history, the songs as songs: the hymns are still in use. The ‘barbarous’ books have survived in the only sense that really matters: they are used as their authors meant them to be used. It would be hard to think of one single text in humanists’ Latin, except the Utopia, of which we can say the same. Petrarch’s Latin poetry, Politian, Buchanan, even sweet Sannazarus, even Erasmus himself, are hardly ever opened except for an historical purpose. We read the humanists, in fact, only to learn about humanism; we read the ‘barbarous’ authors in order to be instructed or delighted about any theme they choose to handle. Once we cease to let the humanists’ own language beg the question, is it not clear that in this context the ‘barbarous’ is the living and the ‘classical’ the still-born?

It could hardly have been anything but still-born. It is largely to the humanists that we owe the curious conception of the ‘classical’ period in a language, the correct or normative period before which all was immature or archaic and after which all was decadent. Thus Scaliger tells us that Latin was ‘rude’ in Plautus, ‘ripe’ from Terence to Virgil, decadent in Martial and Juvenal, senile in Ausonius (Poetices, VI. i). Vives says much the same (De Tradendis Disciplinis, IV). Vida, more wildly, makes all Greek poetry after Homer a decline (Poeticorum, I. 139). When once this superstition was established it led naturally to the belief that good writing in the fifteenth or sixteenth century meant writing which aped as closely as possible that of the chosen period in the past. All real development of Latin to meet the changing needs of new talent and new subject-matter was thus precluded; with one blow of ‘his Mace petrific’ the classical spirit ended the history of the Latin tongue. This was not what the humanists intended. They had hoped to retain Latin as the living esperanto of Europe while putting back the great clock of linguistic change to the age of Cicero. From that point of view humanism is a great archaizing movement parallel to that which Latin had already undergone at the hands of authors like Apuleius and Fronto. But this time it was too thorough. They succeeded in killing the medieval Latin: but not in keeping alive the schoolroom severities of their restored Augustanism. Before they had ceased talking of a rebirth it became evident that they had really built a tomb. Fantastic pains and skill went to its building. Bembo’s friend Longolius bound himself by oath to abstain not only from every word but from every number and case of a word that could not be found in Cicero. A negative conception of excellence arose: it was better to omit a beauty than to leave in anything that might have the shadow of an offence (Scaliger, Poetices, V. ii). Men vied with one another in smelling out and condemning ‘unclassical’ words, so that the permitted language grew steadily poorer (Vives, De Causis, II). The energy of neo-Latin poets was wasted on a copying of the ancients so close as to approach forgery or conjuring. The results often please, but only as a solved puzzle pleases: we admire the ingenuity with which ancient parallels are found for modern situations, just as we admire the opposite process in Pope’s or Johnson’s imitations of Horace or Juvenal. Only rarely (for genius is sometimes unconquerable) does real poetry force its way through the doubled and trebled artifice of the masquerade; as in Sannazarus’ Quae voces? Charitum (Epigr. I. xxxvii) or his fine ode on homesickness (IV) which perhaps suggested or provoked Du Bellay’s finer sonnet.

All this was destined to have a serious, and mostly mischievous, effect on vernacular poetry. A time was coming when English poets would bring to their work habits formed by

the trade in classic niceties,

The dangerous craft of culling term and phrase

From languages that want the living voice.

School training in Latin elegiacs of the rigid Ovidian type lies behind the stopped couplet of our ‘Augustans’. Dryden significantly takes it for granted (Epistle to the Rival Ladies) that you must not do in English things which you were whipped at school for doing in Latin. But this effect was delayed and is hardly yet to be found in sixteenth-century England, though Du Bellay’s specimens of Antonomasia in the Défense et Illustration (ix) show its early stages in France. For the moment, and in our own country, what was more important was the change which humanism produced in our conception of the ancient writers themselves.

The humanists and the men of the Middle Ages both saw the ancients, of course, through the medium of their own taste and temper. We, no doubt, do the same. Until recently it has been assumed without discussion that the medieval distortion was far greater than the humanistic. This was natural, since the humanists themselves assured us that such was the case and it was from them and their heirs that we learned our Greek and Latin. But the moment we use our own eyes instead of looking through our masters’, it is almost impossible not to agree with Burckhardt that medieval poems like De Phyllide et Flora and Cum Diane Vitrea are very much closer to the spirit of ancient literature than most of the humanistic pieces that sedulously ape its form. This inevitably raises a doubt whether the humanists may not have misread the ancients as seriously in some directions as the medievals had done in others.

Such misreading was perhaps inherent in the humanistic temper; and the first step towards understanding that temper is to recognize quite clearly what it was not. It was not a surrender to the sensuousness or to the spiritual suggestions of the Greek imagination: it was not even a delight in the myths as good ‘yarns’. Myth interested these early classicists much less than it had interested Dante or Guillaume de Lorris or Chaucer. We must be careful here to distinguish humanism as it originally was from humanism in its last English phase after it had been modified by the Romantic Movement. Two quotations will make the point clear. Mackail in his Latin Literature says that even Valerius Flaccus, though a bad poet, ‘cannot wholly destroy the charm of the story of the Golden Fleece’; Vives (De Tradendis, III), speaking of Apollonius Rhodius’ Argonautica, blames it for ‘vaynnesse of matter’, argumenti levitas. The same theme which, for the later humanist, almost saves a bad poem, for his predecessor almost damns a good one. Scaliger’s attitude is the same. He scolds Homer for his ‘old wives’ tales’, nugae anicularum (Poetices, V. iii).

For the humanists the attraction of ancient literature lay in quite a different direction. It is nowhere more clearly revealed than in Vives’ praise of the Latin language. And it is perfectly fair to concentrate on his view of Latin, for no one would now deny that, despite the recovery of Greek, humanistic culture was overwhelmingly Latin. There were many reasons—the greater difficulty of Greek, the demand for Latin secretaries, orators, and official historians, the utility of Latin as an international language, and the patriotism of Italians who regarded the speech of Dante as a ‘Gothic tongue’ (Gethica lingua) and felt they were reviving their native language. But the preference for Latin had an even deeper and more temperamental root. As Vives says (De Tradendis, III): ‘It is copious by reason of the great multitude of excellent Wits that have labour’d in the manuring and augmentation thereof, and hath moreouer a sweetnesse in the sound meddled with a certeyn weighte and grauitie, not as in some tongues brutish and rusticall (ferinae et agrestis) but liuelie expressing the image of a right prudent and valiant man born and nurtured in a well order’d commonwealth.’ Gravity, prudence, the well ordered civitas; on the other hand, boorishness and rusticity—these are the clues. Whatever else humanism is, it is emphatically not a movement towards freedom and expansion. It is the impulse of men who feel themselves simple, rustic, and immature, towards sophistication, urbanity, and ripeness. In a word, it is the most complete opposite we can find to the Romantic desire for the primitive and the spontaneous. The metaphor of ‘broken fetters’ which some have used to describe the revival of learning is emotionally misleading. The desire was for order and discipline, weight, and decorum; and men rightly felt that these qualities were to be learned from the Romans rather than the Greeks. Thus Aeneas Sylvius, praising Alphonsus of Aragon, says that he is as much greater than Socrates as a Roman is graver (gravior) than a Greek (In Libros Antonii Panormitae Prooemium. Lib. I). Politian, forced to concede with Quintilian that the Latins ‘limp’ in comedy, gives the reason; gravitas Romana repugnat (Nutricia 682). ‘The Romane grauitie relucteth.’

This desire to be very ‘adult’, as we now say, had some unfortunate consequences. The qualities which the humanists admired are, of course, to be found in Latin literature, even if less exclusively and continuously than they supposed. But few qualities are less suitable for imitation. Elevation and gravity of language are admirable, or even tolerable, only when they grow from elevation and gravity of thought. To imitate them directly is to manufacture a symptom. The trouble is not that such manufacture is impossible. It is only too possible: even now any clever boy can be taught to write Ciceronian prose. The gestures and accents of magnanimity, laboriously reproduced by little men, clever, meticulous, primed with the gradus or the phrase-book, nervously avoiding what is ‘low’, make an ugly spectacle. That was how the humanists came to create a new literary quality—vulgarity. It is hard to point to any medieval work that is vulgar. When medieval literature is bad, it is bad by honest, downright incompetence: dull, prolix, or incoherent. But the varnish and stucco of some neo-Latin work, the badness which no man could incur by sheer defect of talent but only by ‘endless labour to be wrong’ is a new thing. Vida’s Christiad is the supreme example. It polishes up the lowness of the gospel story as Virgil, in Scaliger’s opinion, polished up the lowness of Homer. One changing and unmeaning glossiness spreads over every episode; Lazarus, we are told,

haud procul hinc Bethanes regna tenebat

Dives opum, clarus, genus alto a sanguine regun (I. 102),

and the room where the Last Supper was held becomes

Tectum auratum, ingens, pictisque insigne columnis (II. 5546).

The influence of such poetry was deadly. It must, no doubt, be confessed that where the grand manner of the real classics met with an answering magnanimity in the modern disciple, a greatness was produced which might not otherwise have been attainable. But instances of this are very rare. Racine and Milton are perhaps the only poets who thoroughly followed out the humanistic ideal of style and were not destroyed by it; and even in Paradise Regained we are sometimes disquietingly reminded of Vida.

Such a taste nearly disposed men to find the classics a good deal more ‘classical’ than they really are; or sometimes, with clearer insight, to blame them for not being ‘classical’ enough. This is the real ground of Scaliger’s preference for Virgil over Homer. Homer is ‘low’. In words hard to forgive he says that Andromache’s lament for Hector ‘smacketh not so moche of a noble lady as of som butterwife’, plebeiam mulierculam (Poetices, V. ii). In the same place he complains, of one of the loveliest mythical scenes in all poetry, Achilles flet apud matrem. Let Dryden translate it: ‘Achilles went roaring along the salt seashore . . . like a booby . . . complaining to his mother’ (Dedication of the Aeneis). It is, indeed, in Dryden, and especially in his translations, that we find the essential vices of humanistic taste carried to their final absurdity. Virgil writes

Quare agite, o iuvenes, tectis succedite nostris.

Douglas, working in the medieval tradition, renders it

Therefore have done, gallandis, cum on your way,

Enter within our lugeing, we you pray.

Dryden has

Enter, my noble guest, and you shall find,

If not a costly welcome, yet a kind.

Even now the humanistic or pseudo-classical virus is strong enough, I suspect, to make some think for a moment that Dryden is more Virgilian. But only for a moment. Juvenes must have sounded to a Roman reader almost exactly as gallandis did to a sixteenth-century Scot. Have done and cum on are very close to the encouraging alacrity of quare agite. And, of course, Virgil has no ‘noble guest’ and is free from the genteel mock-modesty of Dryden’s second line.

The humanists, then, brought to their reading of the ancients certain damaging preconceptions; and, as we shall see in a moment, they retained the worst of all medieval literary habits, that of allegorical interpretation. What they lost was the power, apparently common in the Middle Ages, of continuing, despite such interpretation, to respond to the central, obvious appeal of a great work. The medieval reader’s interests were often far closer than the humanists’ to those of the ancients themselves. Dante, accepting Virgil as his guide through hell and acclaiming him as the poet of that Italy for which Camilla died, had read Virgil as Virgil wished to be read. But to Stanyhurst the literal sense of the Aeneid is merely ‘a Canterbury tale’ (Epistle to the First Four Books): to Dryden the poem is a roman à clef, and ‘those who lost the prizes’ in Book V were people who ‘had disobliged the poet or were in disgrace with Augustus’ (Dedication to the Aeneis). In the same spirit Mantuan picks out of the Bucolics precisely what is least pastoral and helps to distort men’s conception of that kind for over a century. There are plentiful indications that if the medievals had known Homer they would have gone straight to the heart of his poetry as no humanist ever did. W. P. Ker in his Dark Ages remarks that the author of Waltharius has apparently read Virgil and seen in him ‘nothing but Homer’; heroic legend, sóp and sárlic. This is an inadequate but not a perverse reading of Virgil, for the ‘Homer’ is really there. It is difficult not to conclude that this poet, at second hand, came nearer to the Iliad than Chapman who found in it ‘all learning, gouernment and wisdom’ (the Zodiac, too, on Achilles’ shield) and thought its style best preserved in a hothouse full of conceits. Is not Lydgate, making his Troy-Book as an ‘historial’ thing and assuming that Homer (apart from his regrettable Greek sympathies) had worked in the same spirit, far more truly classical than Ronsard who thought that Homer had made the whole thing up voulant s’insinuer en la faveur et bonne grâce des Aeacides (Preface to Franciade, 1572)?

In the fourth chapter of Eothen Kinglake draws a contrast between a child reading Homer (in Pope’s version) and a ‘learned commentator’. The child, he says, is ‘nearer by twenty centuries to the old Greeks’ because he is ‘not grubbing for beauties but pressing the siege’. In some ways this is a parallel to the difference between the medieval and the humanistic reader. The latter never really cares about the siege: he is too interested in literature, literature conceived almost exclusively as style, and style valued chiefly as a model for imitation. This ‘literariness’ was destined to introduce a serious change in our whole attitude to great writers. The difference between Chaucer’s Hous and Pope’s Temple of Fame is evidence of it. In Pope the great poets have the place we should expect: they are present because they are famous. But in Chaucer it is not the poets but their subjects that have the fame. Statius is present to bear up the fame of Thebes, Homer to bear up the fame of Troy, and so forth. Poets are, for Chaucer, not people who receive fame but people who give it. To read Virgil sets you thinking not about Virgil but about Aeneas, Dido, and Mezentius.

Humanistic culture, as I have already said, was overwhelmingly Latin. A real understanding of humanist taste shows that this was inevitable. Greek was given abundance of ‘mouth honour’, but only the minor Greek authors (Plutarch, Heliodorus, Achilles Tatius, the Anthology) were really relished. Greek will not take the hard, high polish which was what the humanists principally cared for: it is too supple, sensitive, and intimate. You can hardly be marmoreal in Greek. The Romans—or rather selected Romans—were more congenial. It would be quite a mistake to think of the sixteenth century as a period in which we were much influenced by the spirit or form of Greek literature. Plato’s influence was one of doctrine not of form: he affected philosophers and philosophizing poets. Chapman’s Homer might almost have been written to show that the real Homer was in that age impossible for us to assimilate. The great age of Greek influence is not the sixteenth century but the nineteenth. Shelley, Landor, Browning, Tennyson, Arnold, Ruskin, and even Morris, were all, in their different ways, more receptive of the Greek spirit than any Elizabethan. No doubt they saw the Greeks with a romantic distortion of their own, but that is a trifle compared with the humanistic distortion. Much misunderstanding on this point exists at present. Whether Professor Murray’s version of Euripides is good or bad literature, I need not here decide; but to blame it simply for being romantic, on the supposition that there are no romantic passages in the original, is absurd. How can a man translate Εσπερίδων δ΄ ἐπὶ μηλόσπορον ἀκτὰν or Ικοίμαν ποτὶ Κύπρον without sounding romantic? For the truth is that a very large area of sensibility is common to the ancient, the medieval, and the romantic mind, and that humanism stands outside that area. Until the fog of classicism has lifted, the greater classics are invisible.

So far we have been considering the positive characteristics of humanism; its chief negative characteristic was a hatred of the Middle Ages. I have kept this till the last because it is this that unites the humanist with (our next subject) the puritan. As I have already noted, there was one most unfortunate exception to the humanists’ rejection of the Middle Ages. The new criticism took over from them the idea that every great poem is an allegory and an encyclopedia. Vives, who in one place protests against the method, himself allegorizes Virgil (In Allegorias Bucolicorum) as fantastically as Fulgentius had done, and Scaliger thinks that he makes Jove send down Iris as a messenger in order to teach us that the planets determine events by their influence, not by descending bodily (Poetices, III. xxv). Burckhardt quotes from Codrus Urceius the promise that Homer will teach you grammar, rhetoric, medicine, astrology, history, philosophy, strategy, cookery, and architecture. The reason which Vives gives for applying to the Bucolics the method which, in general, he had sense enough to distrust is very illuminating: ‘if naught more hidden lay beneath, the work had scarce bene worthy those three yeares that Maro laboured in perfecting the same’. This chimes with the passage quoted above in which Stanyhurst dismisses the literal story of the Aeneid as a ‘Canterbury tale’. The humanists could not really bring themselves to believe that the poet cared about the shepherds, lovers, warriors, voyages, and battles. They must be only a disguise for something more ‘adult’. Medieval readers had been equally ready to believe in a poet’s hidden wisdom: but then, perhaps because they had been taught that the multiple meanings of Scripture never abrogated the literal sense, they did not allow the hidden wisdom to obscure the fact that the text before them was ‘a noble and joyous history’. They pressed the siege, wept with the heroines, and shuddered at the monsters.

Having thus preserved from the Middle Ages what least merited preservation, the humanists rejected (with contumely) everything else. The two especial objects of their aversion were chivalrous romance and scholastic philosophy.

Ascham’s attack on the Arthurian stories is sometimes called a puritan attack; but Ascham the humanist would have made it whether he were a puritan or not. The only difference in this matter between a Roman and a Protestant humanist was that the former had to be content with calling the romances barbarous and silly while the latter could add ‘And popish too’. Both beat the same dog, but the Protestant had an extra stick. The military methods of More’s Utopians are mischievously devised to flout the chivalric code at every turn; they think it shame to win in plain battle, exult in overreaching by guile, and bribe enemy subjects to assassinate their leaders (Utopia, II. viii). Erasmus would forbid a young prince to read ‘Arthurs and Lancelots’ which ‘smacke of tyrannie and are moreouer rude (ineruditi), foolishe and anile’ (Inst. Principis Christiani, ii). Montaigne congratulates himself on an education which had made Ovid his nursery book and kept him from hearing even the names of Amadis, Huon, and such trumpery (I. xxv). Vives condemns books ‘such as are Amadis and Florisand in Spain or Lancelot and the Round Table in France, the which were made and compiled of idle followers (hominibus otiosis) and stuffed fulle of leasings’ (De Causis, II). As for women, it were better they had their eyes put out than used them for reading such stuff (De Christiana Femina, I).

So far as the common reader was concerned, the humanists’ attack on romances was not, in the sixteenth century, very successful; their attack on medieval philosophy had more serious consequences. Here again we must beware of false simplifications. We must not picture a straight fight in which humanism, with the new science as its ally, rebelled against ‘the tyranny of Aristotle’. Humanists were seldom, even by accident, allied with scientists: scientists did not always despise scholasticism; Aristotle and scholasticism are sometimes in opposition. In reality the humanists’ revolt against medieval philosophy was not a philosophical revolt. What it really was can best be gauged by the language it used. Your philosophers, says Vives (De Causis, I), are straw-splitters, makers of unnecessary difficulties, and if you call their jargon Latin, why then we must find some other name for the speech of Cicero. ‘The more filthie barbarisme they haue in their style (si quam maxime barbare spurceque loquantur) the greater theologians they doe account themselues’, says Erasmus (Moriae Encomium, cf. also Letter 64). ‘Calle ye Thomas Aquinas a doctor?’ said Johan Wessel, ‘He knew no tongue but the Latin and barely that!’ We are invited to admire the Utopians because they could never understand the Second Intentions (Utopia, II. vi). ‘Second Intentions’, says Rabelais in effect, ‘ask whether a chimaera buzzing in a void can eat them. There’d be a proper question for a schoolman’ (Pantagruel, vii). These are not the terms in which a new philosophy attacks an old one: they are, unmistakably, the terms in which at all times the merely literary man, the bellettrist, attacks philosophy itself. No humanist is now remembered as a philosopher. They jeer and do not refute. The schoolman advanced, and supported, propositions about things: the humanist replied that his words were inelegant. Of the scholastic terminology as an instrument of thought—that instrument which, according to Condorcet, has created une précision d’idées inconnue aux anciens—no reasoned criticism was usually vouchsafed. Words like realitas and identificatio were condemned not because they had no use but because Cicero had not used them. Sometimes comically enough, you can catch a humanist using such words himself and thinking to counteract this testimony to their value by branding them with a futile note of infamy: as when Scaliger writes quae nostri barbari circumstantias appellarunt ‘what those barbarous fellows have called circumstances’ (Poetices, III. ii), or Gabriel Harvey apologizes for speaking Thomae Dunsique more to place Tully in transcendentibus (Ciceronianus).

The war between the humanists and the schoolmen was not a war between ideas: it was, on the humanists’ side, a war against ideas. It is a manifestation of the humanistic tendency to make eloquence the sole test of learning; embittered (if not partly caused) by the fact that in the universities of that age the teachers of eloquence usually had less secure and lucrative posts than their enemies. As far as England is concerned, humanism, here linked with puritanism, won the victory in 1550 at Oxford. It was then that the works of the scholastics were ‘cast out of college libraries’ and ‘those most noble authors’, as Anthony Woods says, condemned for ‘barbarism, ignorance of Scripture, and much deceit’ and publicly burned, along with mathematical books, which were suspected of being ‘Popish or diabolical’ (History and Antiquities of Oxford). As a result, he adds, there was soon nothing to be heard in the University but ‘poetry, grammar, idle songs and frivolous stuff’. Bruno describes England in 1584 as a country ‘widowed of good learning in philosophy and the mathematics . . . all their doctors be doctors of grammar, full of obstinate ignorance, pedantry, presumption, and boorish inciuilitie’. It should be noted, however, that this rejection of scholasticism did not necessarily involve a rejection of Aristotle. It might mean a return to his original text ‘purged’ of Popish, Ramistic, or inelegant interpretations. Thus in 1585 bachelors and undergraduates at Oxford were ordered to lay aside ‘authors that caused dissensions and strifes in the schools’ and ‘only follow Aristotle and those that defend him’.

In the field of philosophy humanism must be regarded, quite frankly, as a Philistine movement: even an obscurantist movement. In that sense the New Learning created the New Ignorance. Perhaps every new learning makes room for itself by creating a new ignorance. In our own age we have seen the sciences beating back the humanities as humanism once beat back metaphysics. Man’s power of attention seems to be limited; one nail drives out another.

In the passages from which I have already quoted, Anthony Wood tells us that the burning of the books in 1550 was carried out ‘to the sorrow of many as well of the Protestant as of the other party’. This warns us against another falsely simple grouping to which we might be tempted. Men of the Old Religion, if they were humanists, might despise scholasticism; men of the New, if they were philosophers, might revere it. Thus we find Hooker strongly impregnated with Thomism, and More and Erasmus among the mockers of the schoolmen.

I am unwilling to end this short account of the humanists on a note of condemnation. Despite the immense harm they did, despite their narrowness, their boasting, and their ferocity—for it is a strange delusion that represents them as gentle, amiable, and (in that sense) ‘humane’—our debt to them can never be cancelled. If we must now judge that, in the very act of discovering some classics, they introduced a subtle falsity of approach to them from which we took centuries to recover, yet we so judge only from a reading of texts which the humanists themselves first gave us. If their manners were often like those of giants, so were their labours.

Puritanism, as I have defined it, splits off from general Protestantism in the second half of the sixteenth century. Stow traces the word puritan to about the year 1567. Originally coined by certain Anabaptists to describe themselves, it came to be used as a hostile term (though they sometimes accepted it) for those Protestants who believed that the Elizabethan Church was insufficiently reformed and wished to make her more like the Protestant churches on the continent; especially like that of Geneva. The puritans were so called because they claimed to be purists or purifiers in ecclesiastical polity: not because they laid more emphasis than other Christians on ‘purity’ in the sense of chastity. Their quarrel with the Church of England was at first rather ecclesiastical than theological. In Hooker Anglicanism is, indeed, already beginning to be marked off from other species of Protestantism by its greater respect for human reason and for tradition. But the specifically Anglican faith defined itself less rapidly and neatly than the puritan and chiefly under the pressure of puritan attacks. Neither can be understood apart from the original Protestant experience in which both were rooted, though puritanism more exclusively. To that experience I must now turn. The very word experience perhaps makes clear the angle at which I approach it. Some social or economic historians treat the Reformation solely from the point of view of their own disciplines, regarding its spiritual and even its intellectual side as mere epiphenomena; perhaps as ‘rationalizations’ by which men explained to themselves behaviour whose real causes were of quite a different kind. Fortunately there is no need to discuss the correctness of this view: for even if it were wholly correct it would not much concern the historian of literature. His business is with the past not as it ‘really’ was (whatever ‘really’ may mean in such a context) but with the past as it seemed to be to those who lived in it: for of course men felt and thought and wrote about what seemed to be happening to them. The economic or social historian’s ‘appearances’ may be the literary historian’s ‘facts’. We want, above all, to know what it felt like to be an early Protestant.

One thing is certain. It felt very unlike being a ‘puritan’ such as we meet in nineteenth-century fiction. Dickens’s Mrs. Clennam, trying to expiate her early sin by a long life of voluntary gloom, was doing exactly what the first Protestants would have forbidden her to do. They would have thought her whole conception of expiation papistical. On the Protestant view one could not, and by God’s mercy need not, expiate one’s sins. Theologically, Protestantism was either a recovery, or a development, or an exaggeration (it is not for the literary historian to say which) of Pauline theology. Hence in Buchanan’s Franciscanus ad Fratres the Friars’ prophylactic against it is to keep clear of the ‘old man from Tarsus’ (Tarsensis fuge scripta senis). In the mind of a Tyndale or Luther, as in the mind of St. Paul himself, this theology was by no means an intellectual construction made in the interests of speculative thought. It springs directly out of a highly specialized religious experience; and all its affirmations, when separated from that context, become meaningless or else mean the opposite of what was intended. Propositions originally framed with the sole purpose of praising the Divine compassion as boundless, hardly credible, and utterly gratuitous, build up, when extrapolated and systematized, into something that sounds not unlike devil-worship. The experience is that of catastrophic conversion. The man who has passed through it feels like one who has waked from nightmare into ecstasy. Like an accepted lover, he feels that he has done nothing, and never could have done anything, to deserve such astonishing happiness. Never again can he ‘crow from the dunghill of desert’. All the initiative has been on God’s side; all has been free, unbounded grace. And all will continue to be free, unbounded grace. His own puny and ridiculous efforts would be as helpless to retain the joy as they would have been to achieve it in the first place. Fortunately they need not. Bliss is not for sale, cannot be earned. ‘Works’ have no ‘merit’, though of course faith, inevitably, even unconsciously, flows out into works of love at once. He is not saved because he does works of love: he does works of love because he is saved. It is faith alone that has saved him: faith bestowed by sheer gift. From this buoyant humility, this farewell to the self with all its good resolutions, anxiety, scruples, and motive-scratchings, all the Protestant doctrines originally sprang.

For it must be clearly understood that they were at first doctrines not of terror but of joy and hope: indeed, more than hope, fruition, for as Tyndale says, the converted man is already tasting eternal life. The doctrine of predestination, says the XVIIth Article, is ‘full of sweet, pleasant and unspeakable comfort to godly persons’. But what of ungodly persons? Inside the original experience no such question arises. There are no generalizations. We are not building a system. When we begin to do so, very troublesome problems and very dark solutions will appear. But these horrors, so familiar to the modern reader (and especially to the modern reader of fiction), are only by-products of the new theology. They are astonishingly absent from the thought of the first Protestants. Relief and buoyancy are the characteristic notes. In a single sentence of the Tischreden Luther tosses the question aside forever. Do you doubt whether you are elected to salvation? Then say your prayers, man, and you may conclude that you are. It is as easy as that.

It follows that nearly every association which now clings to the word puritan has to be eliminated when we are thinking of the early Protestants. Whatever they were, they were not sour, gloomy, or severe; nor did their enemies bring any such charge at them. On the contrary, Harpsfield (in his Life of More) describes their doctrines as ‘easie, short, pleasant lessons’ which lulled their unwary victim in ‘so sweete a sleepe as he was euer after loth to wake from it’. For More, a Protestant was one ‘dronke of the new must of lewd lightnes of minde and vayne gladnesse of harte’ (Dialogue, III. ii). Luther, he said, had made converts precisely because ‘he spiced al the poison’ with ‘libertee’ (ibid. III. vii). Protestantism was not too grim, but too glad, to be true; ‘I could for my part be verie wel content that sin and pain all were as shortlye gone as Tyndale telleth us’ (Confutation). Protestants are not ascetics but sensualists. They will not fast (Dialogue, IV. i). They teach and use ‘more sensual and licentious liuing then euer did Makomet’ (ibid. IV. ix). And it is certainly true that in their own writings we find a strong bias against asceticism. Even when we pass on from the first Protestants to Calvin himself we should find an explicit rejection of ‘that vnciuile and froward philosophy’ which ‘alloweth vs in no vse of the creatures saue that which is needful, and going about (as it were in enuie) to take from vs the lawful enioyment of God’s blessings, yet can neuer speede vnless it should stoppe vp all a man’s senses and make him a verie block’. When God created food, ‘He intended not only the supplying of our necessities but delight and merriment’ (hilaritas). Clothes serve not only for need but also for ‘comelinesse and honesty’; herbs, trees, and fruits ‘beside their manifold commodity’, for ‘goodlinesse, brauery, and sweete smelling sauour’. A comparison of the whole passage (Institutio, III. x. 2) with, say, the sermons of Fisher, will correct many misapprehensions. When Newman in his Letter to X Y professed an ‘abstract belief in the latent sensuality of Protestantism’, he was, in my opinion, dreadfully mistaken; but at least, like More and Harpsfield, he was making the right mistake, the mistake that is worth discussing. The popular modern view of the matter does not reach that level. To be sure, there are standards by which the early Protestants could be called ‘puritanical’; they held adultery, fornication, and perversion for deadly sins. But then so did the Pope. If that is puritanism, all Christendom was then puritanical together. So far as there was any difference about sexual morality, the Old Religion was the more austere. The exaltation of virginity is a Roman, that of marriage, a Protestant, trait.

Another false impression is that Protestantism discouraged, or even forbade, the giving of alms: and it is countenanced by the close connexion which a great scholar has seen between the New Religion and the ‘New Economics’. But in the earliest period of English Protestantism, if there is any such connexion, it is entirely hidden from the Protestants themselves. Outcries against new forms of economic cruelty come equally from both sides. I shall show in a later chapter that the social ethics of Tyndale were thoroughly medieval and almost indistinguishable from those of More. When we come on to Calvin, the situation is admittedly different, and we find a real attempt to re-interpret Christian ethics in relation to a society which is no longer medieval. It must, however, be remembered that Calvin’s sanction of moderate usury failed to win the approval of many Protestant divines. On the duty of alms-giving, and even on the subtle corruptions of alms-giving, few men have written better than Calvin himself. The limit of giving is to be the limit of our ability to give. We must not consider ourselves free to refuse because those who ask us are undeserving, ‘for Scripture here cometh to our aide with this excellent reason, that we respect not what men merit of themselues but looke only vpon God’s image which they bear’. We must guard against that subtle insolence which often poisons the gift. Even ‘a merry countenance and courteous wordes’ accompanying it are not enough. A Christian must not give ‘as though he would binde his brother vnto him by the benefit’. When I use my hands to heal some other part of my body I lay the body under no obligation to the hands: and since we are all members of one another, we similarly lay no obligation on the poor when we relieve them (Institutio, III. vii. 6, 7).

It was, of course, maintained that giving alms had no ‘merit’. You could not thus purchase salvation nor gain a bargaining power against God. The same was true of chastity or martyrdom. But this doctrine no more excused you from giving alms than it excused you for committing adultery or turning apostate under persecution. I am speaking so far of the doctrine as it was intended by its first exponents. How such teaching might be travestied by their critics or misapplied by their own baser adherents is another matter. We shall not be surprised to find that both abuses took place. The Pauline doctrine, on St. Paul’s own showing, seems to have suffered in the same way. What might possibly come of the doctrine, and what was certainly believed to come of it, may be gathered from the literary texts. The denial of ‘merit’ interests a surprising number of Shakespearian characters. ‘See, see, my beauty will be saved by Merit! O heresy’, says the princess in Love’s Labour’s Lost. If men were to be saved by merit, what hole in hell were hot enough for Gadshill? (Henry IV, Part I). King John sneers at the ‘corrupted pardon’ which can be bought by the ‘Merit of vile gold’ (III. i. 164). But it was not exactly on theological grounds that this matter interested the poets. Two further quotations show its real bearing. Spenser writes of Envy:

He hated all good workes and vertuous deeds,

And him no lesse that any like did vse;

And who with gratious bread the hungry feeds,

His almes for want of faith he doth accuse.

(F.Q. I. iv. 32.)

And in As You Like It Corin tells us that his churlish employer (significantly a sheep farmer)

little recks to find the way to heaven

By doing deeds of hospitality (II. iv. 80),

is, in fact, wholly free from the heresy of trusting to works. The real reason why any reference to faith and works (or merit) is sure of a response in the theatre is that this topic touches men’s pockets: one of the seats of laughter. The best works are those of charity. Hence he who cries up merit (a mendicant friar or the Pope himself for instance) is probably going to ask for money: that is the sort of thing King John has in mind. And he who cries up faith (a close-fisted landlord, perhaps) is probably going to refuse money: that is Corin’s point of view. Shakespeare uses either jibe impartially.

The process whereby ‘faith and works’ become a stock gag in the commercial theatre is characteristic of that whole tragic farce which we call the history of the Reformation. The theological questions really at issue have no significance except on a certain level, a high level, of the spiritual life; they could have been fruitfully debated only between mature and saintly disputants in close privacy and at boundless leisure. Under those conditions formulae might possibly have been found which did justice to the Protestant—I had almost said the Pauline—assertions without compromising other elements of the Christian faith. In fact, however, these questions were raised at a moment when they immediately became embittered and entangled with a whole complex of matters theologically irrelevant, and therefore attracted the fatal attention both of government and the mob. When once this had happened, Europe’s chance to come through unscathed was lost. It was as if men were set to conduct a metaphysical argument at a fair, in competition or (worse still) forced collaboration with the cheapjacks and the round-abouts, under the eyes of an armed and vigilant police force who frequently changed sides. Each party increasingly misunderstood the other and triumphed in refuting positions which their opponents did not hold: Protestants misrepresenting Romans as Pelagians or Romans misrepresenting Protestants as Antinomians.

Thus in Germany the new theology led into a quarrel about indulgences and thence into a quarrel about the nature of the Church. Whether it need have done so if Leo X had not wanted money, or if Tetzel (backed by the great house of Fugger) had not applied to the indulgences grotesquely profane and vulgar methods of salesmanship, may be doubted. In England, Henry VIII, wanting Anne Boleyn and therefore wanting his previous marriage annulled, quarrels with the Pope; caring nothing for Protestant doctrine but accidentally creating a situation in which Protestantism, sometimes exploited and sometimes repressed by government, can become important in England. Not till the reign of Edward VI was there a seriously Protestant government. It went too far for the people and provoked a strong reaction. Mary availed herself of that reaction but grossly misjudged what it would bear. Then came the accession of Elizabeth, the new settlement, and the return of Protestant refugees from the Continent.

During this series of ecclesiastical revolutions and counter-revolutions England as a whole somehow changed her religion. ‘The general acquiescence’ in this process has been described by Sir Maurice Powicke as ‘one of the most mysterious things in our history’. Of course acquiescence is here a very relative term. There were resistances and rebellions; on both sides there were heroic martyrs, cruel persecutors, prudent time-servers. If literary texts reflect little of this, their silence can be explained by the well-grounded fears of authors and their printers. But when all allowances have been made, some may still think that the great change was carried through with less upheaval than we should have expected. I do not believe this is to be explained by the hypothesis that most sixteenth-century Englishmen had no religion at all and therefore trotted to and fro unconcernedly at the bidding of government. It is hard to believe that a people so indifferent as that under Henry could have become so religious, in a sense, as we find it to have been under Elizabeth. I have said ‘in a sense’ because this ubiquitous piety was clearly, in Johnson’s phrase, ‘not very theological’. It is, indeed, best seen in the writers who are not dealing with religion; in Tusser, the chroniclers, Shakespeare, or Hakluyt’s voyagers. In all these we find the assumption, unemphasized because it is unquestioned, that every event, every natural fact, and every institution, is rooted in the supernatural. Every change of wind at sea, every change of dynasty at home, all prosperity and all adversity, is unhesitatingly referred to God. The writers do not argue about it; they know. It is probable that the actual religion of most Englishmen in the earlier part of the century was of a similar kind. If so, its centre did not lie where the controversial divines teach us to look. It is significant that changes in ritual seem to have provoked more opposition than changes in doctrine. English instead of Latin at the altar made church a different kind of place and was therefore resented. A marriageable clergy changed the pattern of village life and was also resented. Such things could offend thousands to whom the question of the ecclesiastical Supremacy might appear a far-off quarrel among one’s betters. Elizabeth’s own willingness to go much farther in doctrinal change than in changes of order may, after all, have been grounded not on deep policy but on a temperament which she shared with most of her people.

We must, at all events, take care not to assume that a sixteenth-century man who lived through these changes had necessarily felt himself, at any stage, confronted with the clear issue which would face a modern in the same circumstances. A modern, ordered to profess or recant a religious belief under pain of death, knows that he is being tempted and that government which so tempts him is a government of villains. But this background was lacking when the period of religious revolution began. No man claimed for himself or allowed to another the right of believing as he chose. All parties inherited from the Middle Ages the assumption that Christian man could live only in a theocratic polity which had both the right and the duty of enforcing true religion by persecution. Those who resisted its authority did so not because they thought it was right to impose doctrines but because they thought it was imposing the wrong ones. Those who were burned as heretics were often (and, on their premises, logically) eager to burn others on the same charge. When Calvin led the attack on Servetus which ended in his being burnt at Geneva, he was acting on accepted medieval principles. A man’s beliefs, like his actions, were to be ruled by his Betters. What began in Henry VIII’s time was not an encroachment by these Betters on a sphere hitherto free, but a quarrel among the Betters themselves. And all Betters, whether secular or spiritual, had an authority of divine origin: disobedience was sin as well as crime. What we should now call ‘Church’ and ‘State’ were (by our standards) deeply confused. Even western Christendom as a whole had never achieved an agreed definition of the relations between pope and emperor; Henry’s England, as it split off, inevitably retained the dual nature of the parent mass. Thus Henry’s claim to the Supreme Headship of the English Church first came before the ordinary layman in a very curious form. Up till 1534 you could be burnt by your mayor or sheriff on the findings of an ecclesiastical court: by the act of that year your burning required the king’s writ as well. It is rather hard to demand that even the pious layman should have leaped to arms in defence of his right to be burnt without royal permission. He was, in any case, well used to quarrels between his masters. They had always been at it, Pope against anti-Pope, Papalists against imperialists, clergy against laity (semper clericis infesti, as Convocation noted in 1487), secular clergy against friars, English clergy against interference by foreigners from Italy. The common man might have—I think he had—a conscience and a religion; a conscience much burdened by his own unchastity, profanity, or deficiency in alms-giving, and a religion deeply concerned with the state of the crops and the possibility of making a good end when his time came. But the great controversies were too hard for him. And he was not directly faced either with pope or king; squire and parson, parents and neighbours, an itinerant preacher on one or the other side, were the immediate factors in his problem. We may well believe that such a man, though baptized in the Old Religion and dying in the New, did not feel that he had, in any clear sense, either committed apostasy or undergone a conversion. He had only tried to do what he was told in a world where doing what he was told had been, according to all his Betters, the thing mainly demanded of him.

It is, of course, true that even in the sixteenth century some individuals deplored persecution. Erasmus, writing to George of Saxony in 1524, pronounced it ‘very harsh’ (non aequum) ‘that anie error be punished with the fire vnlesse there bee ioyned to it sedition or som other fact that the lawes do vse to punish with death’. This, it will be seen, is only a plea for mercy, not for religious liberty. The Frenchman Bellus (or Castellion) in his De Haereticis (1554) and the Italian Acontius in his Strategemata Satanae (1564) go farther. But the work of Bellus remained unpublished till 1612, and Acontius most unfortunately bases his position on the view that fewer opinions than we suppose are certainly erroneous, and fewer errors than we suppose certainly damnable. Such an argument is useless because it leaves untouched those who believe they are suppressing real, and really damnable, errors: and these, after all, are the people most likely to persecute. It is also dangerous, because it tends to confirm them in their suspicion that every tolerationist is a skeptic in disguise. Far stronger were certain isolated voices in the English House of Commons; one Atkinson, who in 1562 argued against the imposition of the Oath of Supremacy that ‘if any were rebellious before, now will his heart be more rebellious for that he is forced to perjury’, or Aglionby, who in 1571 declared the ‘conscience of man’ to be ‘eternal, invisible, and not in the power of the greatest monarchy of the world in any limits to be straitened, in any bounds to be contained, nor with any policy of man if once decayed, to be again raised’. Best of all, since they find a religious ground for not enforcing religion, are the words of Robert Browne; to compel religion ‘belongeth not’ to the magistrate, for ‘the Lords people is of the willing sort, they shall come into Zion and enquire the way into Ierusalem not by force or compulsion but with their faces turned thitherward’ (A Book which sheweth, etc., 1582). With Browne we may class the anonymous author of the beautiful Temporis Filia Veritas (1589) who would tolerate all ‘so they loue God and desyer to liue vnder obedience to the king’, because ‘the trueth itself’ cannot be formulated by flesh and blood but is ‘the louely lyfe or being of God’. But the chief importance of such utterances is to remind us, after all our talk of ‘periods’, that in every age nearly every conceivable opinion is held by somebody: ‘there have always’, says Sir Maurice Powicke, ‘been civilized men.’ The exceptions must not be allowed to obscure the general picture. Throughout the sixteenth century the great mass of those who seemed at the time to be sane, normal, practical men, ignored the few who spoke for liberty. The Church of Rome and the new churches retained the principle of theocracy. Jewel makes it a point in favour of the Church of England that she persecutes; Cardinal Allen makes it a point against her that she does not. Martyrs on both sides would have been horrified if they had thought that their sufferings were going to encourage freedom of conscience. Search in the most capacious mind of that age for any echo of Browne’s wisdom and you will hear only the thin gaggle of Sir Andrew, ‘I had as lief be a Brownist as a politician’.

With the accession of Elizabeth English Protestantism enters on a new phase. The refugees who had fled to the Continent from Mary’s persecution now began to return. They returned to an England embittered by that persecution, and their own minds had in exile been not only embittered but, as they thought, clarified. Opinion is now increasingly dominated by thorough, consistent, continental ideas, hostile to English compromise and haziness. Many surrendered to, all were influenced by, the dazzling figure of Calvin. It ought to be easier for us than for the nineteenth century to understand his attraction. He was a man born to be the idol of revolutionary intellectuals; an unhesitating doctrinaire, ruthless and efficient in putting his doctrine into practice. Though bred as a lawyer, he found time before he was thirty to produce the first text of the Institutio (1536) and never made any serious modification of its theory. By 1537 he was already at Geneva and the citizens were being paraded before him in bodies of ten to swear to a system of doctrine. Sumptuary legislation and the banishment of the dissentient Caroli made it plain that here was the man of the new order who really meant business. He was driven out of Geneva but returned to new triumphs in 1540, successfully maintaining his theocracy both against civil magistrates who wished to govern a little more, and private citizens who wished to be governed a good deal less, than Calvin would permit. The banishment of Bolsec (1551) and the burning of Servetus (1553) were among its achievements. The moral severity of his rule laid the foundations of the meaning which the word ‘puritan’ has since acquired. But this severity did not mean that his theology was, in the last resort, more ascetic than that of Rome. It sprang from his refusal to allow the Roman distinction between the life of ‘religion’ and the life of the world, between the Counsels and the Commandments. Calvin’s picture of the fully Christian life was less hostile to pleasure and to the body than Fisher’s; but then Calvin demanded that every man should be made to live the fully Christian life. In academic jargon, he lowered the honours standard and abolished the pass degree.

Modern parallels are always to some extent misleading. Yet, for a moment only, and to guard against worse misconceptions, it may be useful to compare the influence of Calvin on that age with the influence of Marx on our own; or even of Marx and Lenin in one, for Calvin had both expounded the new system in theory and set it going in practice. This will at least serve to eliminate the absurd idea that Elizabethan Calvinists were somehow grotesque, elderly people, standing outside the main forward current of life. In their own day they were, of course, the very latest thing. Unless we can imagine the freshness, the audacity, and (soon) the fashionableness of Calvinism, we shall get our whole picture wrong. It was the creed of progressives, even of revolutionaries. It appealed strongly to those tempers that would have been Marxist in the nineteen-thirties. The fierce young don, the learned lady, the courtier with intellectual leanings, were likely to be Calvinists. When hard rocks of Predestination outcrop in the flowery soil of the Arcadia or the Faerie Queene, we are apt to think them anomalous, but we are wrong. The Calvinism is as modish as the shepherds and goddesses. The wicked Bishop in Diotrephes complains that at the universities ‘puritans start up every day’. Cartwright had got all the fellows of St. John’s out of their surplices before he was thirty, Travers wrote his Explicatio when he was twenty-six, Penry and John Udall were twenty-eight when the one brought out his Treatise to the Queen and the other his Diotrephes. Youth is the taunt commonly brought against the puritan leaders by their opponents: youth and cocksureness. As we recognize the type we begin, perhaps, to wonder less that such a work as the Institutio should have been so eagerly welcomed. In it Calvin goes on from the original Protestant experience to build a system, to extrapolate, to raise all the dark questions and give without flinching the dark answers. It is, however, a masterpiece of literary form; and we may suspect that those who read it with most approval were troubled by the fate of predestined vessels of wrath just about as much as young Marxists in our own age are troubled by the approaching liquidation of the bourgeoisie. Had the word ‘sentimentality’ been known to them, Elizabethan Calvinists would certainly have used it of any who attacked the Institutio as morally repulsive.

Of course not all Calvinists were puritans. Nor am I suggesting that the great fighting puritans who risked ruin and torture in their attack on the bishops were merely conforming to a fashion. We must distinguish a hard core of puritans and a much wider circle of those who were, at varying levels, affected by Calvinism. But a certain severity (however seriously we may take it) was diffused even through that wider circle, in the sense that denunciation of vice became part of the stock-in-trade of fashionable and even frivolous writers. Perhaps nothing in our period is so surprising to a modern as the readiness with which a Lyly, a Nashe, or even a Greene, will at any moment launch out into moral diatribe of the most uncompromising ferocity. All our lifetime the current has been setting towards licence. In Elizabeth’s reign it was the opposite. Nothing seems to have been more saleable, more comme il faut, than the censorious. We are overwhelmed by floods of morality from very young, very ignorant, and not very moral men. The glib harshness is to us a little repulsive: but it won applause then as easily as attacks on Victorianism, romanticism, or nostalgia have won it in our own century. The gentleness and candor of Shakespeare’s mind has impressed all his readers. But it impresses us still more the more we study the general tone of sixteenth-century literature. He is gloriously anomalous.

The puritan party, properly so called, insisted on Calvin’s system of church government as well as on his general theology. They themselves would not have admitted a distinction between the two. They taught that a system—as they called it, a platfourme—of church government could be found in the New Testament and was binding on all believers till the end of the world. To a modern reader, examining the texts on which they based this theory, it appears one of the strangest mirages which have ever deceived the human mind: only explicable, if at all, by the strong enchantment of the master’s exploits at Geneva. They demanded that such a ‘godly discipline’ should be instantly set up in England. In Scotland Knox was prepared to establish it by armed revolution. The English puritans were at first milder: but Udall in his Demonstration (1588) is already saying that, since peaceful methods have failed, ‘if it come in by that meanes which wil make all your heartes ake, blame yourselues’.

The psychology of the puritan proper is not so easily determined as that of the merely Calvinist fringe: just as, in our own age, we know pretty well what sorts of people will be fashionably Leftist, but not who will be real Communists. In all deep conviction there is something that cuts across the ordinary divisions of age, sex, class, and culture. One kind of puritan, drawn by the hostile pen of Lodge in Wit’s Misery (1596), is recognizable enough: a ‘malecontent’, lately returned from abroad, hating his own country and always muttering that ‘good Wits’ get better ‘entertainment’ on the Continent. But there were many other types: saints, no doubt, and cranks, a rag-tag and bobtail of mere anticlericals, but also ‘great friends’, wealthy landowners, and even courtiers.

The position of these ‘great friends’ is somewhat ambiguous. There seems to be little doubt about the fact. Elizabeth, addressing Whitgift in 1583, attributed the disorders of the Church partly to ‘the power of some noblemen’. Leicester, Walsingham, Huntingdon, and Norfolk all seem to have had puritan sympathies. Even more significantly, Martin Marprelate in his Epistle (1588) scolds Whitgift for refusing a request made to him by the Earl of Warwick and adds an unmistakable hint that the nobility will not stand such independent bishops much longer. The critics of the puritans accounted for their ‘great vpholders’ by a very cynical hypothesis. ‘English Pasquil’ in his Returne (1589) says that these upholders are men ‘as readie’ as Martin himself ‘to rob the Church’. Thomas Cooper in his Admonition (also 1589) says that ‘an infinit number of Epicures and Atheistes’ share the puritans’ hatred for bishops because bishops ‘staye from them that spoyle and praye which now for a fewe yeeres with great hope they haue gaped after’. The charge is not unplausible. No one had forgotten how profitable the spoliation of the monasteries had been to some eminent laymen: if the revenues of the bishops were similarly taken from them, might there not be similar pickings? Of course such a charge was certain to be made whether it was true or not; but then the very reason why it was certain to be made was that it has some probability. Fortunately a literary historian need come to no conclusion on such a point. It is perhaps worth noting that Kirkrapine (Faerie Queene, I. iii. 16 et seq.) is probably an allegory of the puritan conceived as a church-robber. Like Martin, he works in darkness. Like the puritans, he strips ‘churches of their ornaments’. When Kirkrapine ‘spoild the Priests of their habiliments’ he was doing what the puritans wanted to do in their controversy against the surplice. ‘The holy Saints’ whom he stripped ‘of their rich vestiments’ cannot be robed images of saints, which would have been an abomination to Spenser. They are either the same as ‘the priests’ or else some section of the clergy especially revered by the poet whether for their personal character or for their episcopal office. Kirkrapine’s partnership with Abessa allegorizes the charge, made also in An Almond for a Parrot (1590), that Puritanism, by disturbing the Protestant Church in England, was really playing into the hands of the common enemy. Throughout these controversies between Anglican and puritan, naturally enough, each accused the other of being the Pope’s best friend.

What has been said above about the intellectual character of puritanism is quite consistent with the fact that an extreme puritan could reach a position which left hardly any room for secular learning or human reason. It is a paradox which meets us more than once in the history of thought; intellectual extremists are sometimes led to distrust of intellect. But in its earlier stages puritanism went well enough with rigid logic and with humanism. Humanist and puritan both felt themselves to be in the vanguard, both hated the Middle Ages, and both demanded a ‘clean sweep’. The same youthful intransigence characterized both. The eagerness to smell out and condemn vestiges of popery in the Church and the eagerness to smell out and condemn vestiges of ‘barbarism’ in one’s neighbour’s Latin had, psychologically, much in common.

Both these movements were militant and obtrusive, inclined rather to emphasize than to belittle their own novelty. The change in political thought—or at least in political sentiment—which was beginning in the sixteenth century was stealthier. It has left its mark on some purely literary texts. In Malory Sir Mador says to Arthur, ‘Though ye be our king in that degree, yet ye are but a knight as we are’ (XVIII. iv). The slaying of a bad king like Mark excites nobody’s disapproval (XIX. xi). Lancelot spares Arthur in battle, not because he is a king simply, but because he is ‘that most noble king that made me knight’ (XX. xiii). In Jacobean drama we find a very different tone. Amintor, on learning that the man who has injured him is the king, says that that very name ‘wipes away all thoughts revengefull’, and has in it a terror which paralyzes mortal arms (Maid’s Tragedy, II. i). Camillo cannot find in all history a single instance of a man who has struck an anointed king ‘and flourished after’ (Winter’s Tale, I. ii. 358). No doubt allowance should be made for court patronage in these dramatic examples, and for the French origin in Malory. But there is no question that in these quotations we hear the echo of a very important change in men’s attitude to the royal power. The doctrine of Divine Right has risen above the horizon. During the following century it will reach its full blaze of paradox in Filmer’s Patriarchia, Hobbes’s Leviathan, and Bossuet’s Politique tirée de l’Escriture Sainte.

It would, however, be easy to exaggerate the adherence to this doctrine in sixteenth-century England. Emphasis on the sacred authority of the ‘Prince’ does not necessarily mean that the Crown is being exalted against Parliament or the Common Law. ‘Prince’ could often be translated ‘government’ or ‘State’. It would also be easy to miss the true and permanent significance of what was happening if we overstressed its connexion with one particular form of government, the monarchical. That connexion (as Hobbes knew) was temporary and largely accidental. The Divine Right of Kings is best understood as the first form of something which has continued to affect our lives ever since—the modern theory of sovereignty. It is often called Austinian, but might just as well be called Johnsonian, for it is very clearly stated in Taxation No Tyranny; ‘all government is ultimately and essentially absolute’. On this view, total freedom to make what laws it pleases, superiority to law because it is the source of law, is the characteristic of every state; of democratic states no less than of monarchical. That doctrine has proved so popular that it now seems to many a mere tautology. We conceive with difficulty that it was ever new because we imagine with difficulty how political life can ever have gone on without it. We take it for granted that the highest power in the State, whether that power is a despot or a democratically elected assembly, will be wholly free to legislate and incessantly engaged in legislation.

It seems, however, quite certain that many ages (not barbarous) believed nothing of the sort. Aristotle (Politics, 1282^b) explicitly ruled that the highest power should hardly legislate at all. Its function was to administer a pre-existing law. Any legislation there was should be directed to supplementing and particularizing that law where its necessary generality failed to meet some concrete situation. The main outlines of the law must be preserved. It creates, and is not created by, the State. I do not know that Aristotle ever tells us where this original and immutable law came from; but, whether derived from our ancestors or from a philosophical constitution-maker, it must be accepted by the State as a datum. There is no sovereign in the Johnsonian sense. Roman practice and Roman jurisprudence took a very different view, but the Middle Ages (at first unconsciously) reverted to Aristotle. Two factors worked against the emergence of a theory of sovereignty. One was the actual dominance of custom in medieval communities. ‘England’, says Bracton, ‘uses unwritten law and custom’ (De Legibus, I. i)—speaking truly about England, though wrongly thinking that this was peculiar to her. A. J. Carlyle quotes coronation oaths (not English) in which the king swears to keep les ancienes costumes. Pleas are to be decided selonc les costumes: custom is to be determined either by the previous decision of a court, or, significantly, by the fact that no one can remember when it was not so. This law or custom is the real sovereign. ‘The King is under the Law for it is the Law that maketh him a King’ (Bracton, I. viii). It is true that Bracton often exalts the power of the king, but he is thinking of it as an executive power. The other factor was the doctrine of Natural Law. God, as we know from Scripture (Rom. i. 15), has written the law of just and reasonable behaviour in the human heart. The civil law of this or that community is derived from the natural ‘by way of particular determination’ (Aquinas, Summa Theol. 1. 2^ae. XCV. iv). If it is not, if it contains anything contrary to Natural Law, then it is unjust and we are not, in principle, obliged to obey it (ibid. 2^a. 2^ae. LX. V). Sedition is, of course, a sin; but then the perturbatio of a tyrant (defined, from Aristotle, as one who rules in his own interest) is not sedition, for his rule is unjust (ibid. 2^a. 2^ae XLII. ii). Thus for Aquinas, as for Bracton, political power (whether assigned to king, barons, or the people) is never free and never originates. Its business is to enforce something that is already there, something given in the divine reason or in the existing custom. By its fidelity in reproducing that model it is to be judged. If it tries to be original, to produce new wrongs and rights in independence of the archetype, it becomes unjust and forfeits its claim to obedience.

It would be quite impossible here to suggest the causes, or even to trace the process, of the change which introduced the concept of sovereignty. Wycliffe, a pioneer of the new theory, was exceptional in his own age. The years 1445 and 1446 are important: in the first the Cortes of Olmedo announced that it was contrary to divine law to touch the Lord’s Anointed, and the second saw the publication of Aeneas Sylvius’ De Ortu Imperii Romani in which he declares the emperor to be legibus solutus. Nor can I here deal with works which attacked the novelty. Its naturalization in England may be seen in Tyndale’s Obedience of a Christian Man (1528), where we are told that ‘The King is in this world without lawe and may at his owne lust do right and wrong and shall give accounts to God only.’ It is true that this quotation gives (by itself) a false impression of Tyndale’s character and of that strange treatise in which he flings such appalling power to Henry VIII almost scornfully, like a bone to a dog; but it is a fair illustration of Tyndale’s political theory. The First Book of Homilies (1547) substantially agrees with him: rebellion is in all circumstances sinful.

We must not suppose that the medieval conception of Natural Law vanished overnight. On the contrary, as not infrequently happens to systems of thought, it reached its fullest and most beautiful expression when the tide of history had turned against it. In the first book of Hooker we find that God Himself, though the author, is also the voluntary subject, of law. ‘They err who think that of the will of God to do this or that there is no reason besides his will’ (I. i. 5). God does nothing except in pursuance of that ‘constant Order and Law’ of goodness which He has appointed to Himself. Nowhere outside the minds of devils and bad men is there a sic volo, sic jubeo. The universe itself is a constitutional monarchy. The Almighty Himself repudiates the sort of sovereignty that Tyndale thinks fit for Henry VIII. Only one further step was left to be taken, and Grotius took it in the De Jure Belli ac Pacis (1625). There he asserts that the Law of Nature, actually derived from God, would be equally binding even if we supposed that no God existed. It is another way of saying that good would still be good if stripped of all power. It is the extreme opposite of the Calvinist view which comes near to saying that omnipotence must be worshipped even if it is evil, that power is venerable when stripped of all good; and it is no doubt incomparably less dangerous to theism. But Calvin was more in tune with the spirit of his age: everyone can see that the difference between Hooker’s God and Calvin’s is very like that between Bracton’s king and Aeneas Sylvius’ emperor. It may even be not too fanciful to connect these changes, theological and political, with a tendency in this period which I noticed above. In the magician and the astrologer we saw a readiness either to exaggerate or to minimize the power and dignity of Man. Calvinism perhaps satisfies both inclinations by plunging the unregenerate man as deep as the astrologers and exalting the elect as highly as the magicians. Similarly the new polities embody limitless power and freedom in the prince, and make the subjects his (as they were the stars’) tennis balls.

Few of those who accepted, or even of those who promoted, this change quite saw what they were about. Men continued to hope that the prince would, of his own virtue, obey the Law of Nature. His rule on earth, reproducing God’s rule in the universe, even seemed a lovely example of that law, of hierarchy imitated from Nature herself. It was, indeed, Henry VII who emphasized the natural hierarchy in a whimsical form by ordering the death of some dogs that had baited a lion, their ‘kindly’ king (Harrison’s Description of England, III. vii). Poets so attached to the new order as Spenser and Shakespeare continue to pour out tranquil, golden poetry about the great chain of concord and the beauty of degree. They did not dream that the concept of the State as something legibus soluta would presently sever all connexion between political life and ‘Nature’ as they understood that word—the divine, anthropomorphic harmony. Hobbes knew better. A Law of Nature such that it furnished, even in foro interno, a court of appeal against the State was inimical to a fully developed theory of sovereignty; he therefore abolished the concept while astutely retaining the name. The new theory makes political power something inventive, creative. Its seat is transferred from the reason which humbly and patiently discerns what is right to the will which decrees what shall be right. And this means that we are already heading, via Rousseau, Hegel, and his twin offspring of the Left and the Right, for the view that each society is totally free to create its own ‘ideology’ and that its members, receiving all their moral standards from it, can of course assert no moral claim against it. The subtle and far-reaching effects of the change, which are still proceeding, may be gauged by the implications of the fact that those who were once called a nation’s rulers are now almost universally called its leaders.

Though Tyndale was an early and vigorous spokesman of the new theory, it must not be supposed that Protestants necessarily agreed with him. Hooker, as we have seen did not: and Poynet’s Shorte Treatise of Politic Power (1556), written in exile and against Mary, is a resounding defence of Natural Law. Aeneas Sylvius, afterwards Pope, is closer to Tyndale. Once again, no neat grouping into ‘old’ and ‘new’ is possible.

It would be unreasonable in this context to pass over in silence the Prince (1513) of Machiavelli, for there the repudiation of medieval principles goes farthest. But for that very reason Machiavelli is not very important. He went too far. Everyone answered him, everyone disagreed with him. The book’s success was a success of scandal. To readers who seriously sought instruction in the art of tyranny he could, after all, reveal only the secrets which all men knew. Not to be, but to seem, virtuous—it is a formula whose utility we all discovered in the nursery. But Machiavelli may have some importance for literature. I will not repeat the time-honoured statement that our Elizabethans mistook him, reading as devilish advice what was in fact coolly objective political science; such a view will hardly survive a rereading of the Prince. It is (implicitly) written in the imperative mood throughout, and Machiavelli had no more notion of the amoral as distinct from the immoral than of the steam-engine. He thought himself immoral: ‘if it be lawful’, he says, ‘to speake wel of euil’ (viii). The Elizabethans, I believe, understood him much better than the subtle moderns. But the question need not concern us. Machiavelli is important to the historian of literature only as a possible father of the ‘Machiavellian villain’.

The new type of villain which we meet in Elizabethan drama is an image of some interest. I say ‘new type’ because we must all deprecate the tendency to use the words ‘Machiavellian villain’ when we mean merely a great or ruthless villain. By a ‘Machiavellian’ villain we ought to mean one who circumvents his victims by cunning and hypocrisy—like Machiavelli’s ideal prince. Thus Kyd’s Lorenzo and Shakespeare’s Iago are Machiavellian; Tamburlaine is not. The cunning villain is so useful to dramatists and has so long been part of their stock-in-trade that we tend to take him for granted. But the typical villains of medieval literature are not often cunning. They are seldom cleverer than the good characters. Herod is not a politician, but something between a buffoon and an ogre. Ganelon is a traitor and Mordred a tale-bearer but neither is particularly subtle. The devil himself is usually ‘an ass’: Marlowe’s and Milton’s are new. The archetype in the medieval mind seems to have been a story like Jack the Giant Killer, in which the good, clever people (with all the odds against them) beat the strong, stupid, ‘outrageous’ ones. The situation between Lancelot and Meliagrance (Malory, XIX, vii), where the hero’s very goodness makes him gullible, is not typical. On the Elizabethan stage it is. Machiavelli may have helped to make it so, but the exigencies of plot may have had more to do with it. Side by side with the new villain a far more disquieting, but temporary, novelty appeared. The older type of villain starts up as hero. Tamburlaine is Grendel, Herod, and Giant Blunderbore all in one, but the author seems to me to be on his side. The play is a hideous moral spoonerism: Giant the Jack Killer.

It is difficult to decide how far the new villain represents a real change in outlook and how far he springs from dramatic convenience. But the theatre reveals another novelty about which I think we can be more certain. In ancient and medieval literature, as in ancient and medieval life, there is no inhibition about tears. Achilles wept, Aeneas wept, the Roman legionaries wept, Hrothgar wept, Roland wept cum chevaler gentil, and Lancelot, to his lasting glory, wept like a beaten child at the healing of Sir Urre (Malory, XIX. xii). In Shakespeare a male character seldom weeps without apologizing for it: ‘his eyes will tell tales of him’, ‘nature her custom holds, let shame say what it will’, he ‘had not so much of man in him’ as to restrain his tears. Something, of course, must be allowed for the needs of the stage: because the actor cannot really weep at will, he must say something to let the audience know that he is supposed to be weeping. But that is not the whole explanation. Puttenham expects ‘high-minded’ persons (the adjective is significant) to turn away their faces when they weep (Art of English Poesy, III. xxxiv). Milton half apologizes for Adam’s tears (P.L. XI. 494 et seq.). And the change about tears is only symptomatic of something larger.

It could hardly be called a philosophy but it was the nearest approach to a philosophy which humanism achieved, for Florentine Platonism, though dependent on the recovery of Greek, was alien to the humanist temper and indeed attacked it (see Pico’s Letter to Hermolaus Barbarus in 1485). The mode of feeling (for it was hardly a mode of thought) which I am referring to was closely connected with the spirit shown in Vives’ praise of the Latin language. It was the humanist response to the moral philosophy of the ancients. In one sense, and that the most profound, it must be admitted that the true subtlety and sagacity of Aristotle’s Ethics, which had been preserved by Aquinas, were now being lost again. But on a more superficial level we may speak of a revival of ancient moral philosophy. The new theology by its insistence on the distinction between faith and works, between the regenerate and the merely virtuous life, helped to disengage the concept of morality as such, morality as something other than religion. Hence Donne (Sermon LXXV) speaks of ‘Philosophy and morall constancy’ as a ‘Meteor that hangs between two worlds’, above the carnal and below the spiritual life. At the same time the humanists, disinclined for prolonged and serious thought, yet anxious for ‘wisdom’ if it could be had at an easier rate, turned naturally to that kind of ‘philosophy’ or ‘moral constancy’ which embodies itself in striking attitudes, anecdotes, and epigrams. In the ancients, and especially in Plutarch and Diogenes Laertius (the Golden Legend of paganism) they found materials for building up their picture of high, antique virtue and the heroically moral man. The word philosopher, without losing its old meanings, comes also to mean one who can ‘endure the toothache patiently’.

The best elements in Aristotle’s ethical thought contributed to this picture comparatively little. The doctrine of the Mean was dully and dutifully allegorized by Spenser in Faerie Queene, II. ii. But what proved far more attractive was Aristotle’s Magnanimous Man: the man who both had, and was entitled to have, a high opinion of his own worth. Hence, I believe, comes that astonishing absence of humility which separates Sidney’s and Spenser’s heroes so widely from those of Malory. ‘This secret assurance of his own worthinesse’, says Sidney, ‘always liues in the worthiest minds’ (Arcadia, 1593, V). ‘Oft times nothing profits more’, says Milton, ‘Then self-esteem grounded on just and right’ (P.L. VIII. 571)—a beautifully exact account of Aristotle’s Magnanimity. The contrast between the medieval and this ‘philosophical’ ideal comes out almost comically if we lay two passages side by side. In Gawain and the Green Knight the hero, travelling alone,

had no fere but his fole bi frithes and downes

And no gome but God bi gate with to karp (695).

Spenser’s Guyon in the same situation

ever more himselfe with comfort feedes

Of his own vertues and praise-worthie deedes (II. vii. 2).

I fear there was no hint of a smile on Spenser’s face as he described this windy diet.

But, for many sixteenth-century men, as for the Stoics, Aristotle’s Magnanimity was not magnanimous enough, ‘for he saith’, complains Vives, ‘that magnanimitie goeth about to seeke honours . . . but Plato, Cicero, Seneca and other place it rather in despising them’ (De Causis, VI). They desired something far loftier, something as highly exalted as the magician, the prince, or the elect, the ‘right prudent and valiant man’, not only above tears (that, of course) but above all dependence on fortune. Thus the Stoic sapiens, far more than the Aristotelian μεγαλόψυχος, is the image really potent in Elizabethan, and in much later, literature. He is (like Chapman’s Clermont) ‘gladly obedient’ to anything ‘the high and general cause’ may lay on him; he regards the world (like more than one Shakespearian character) merely as a stage; he is content (like Guyon) with what Nature needs; a king over himself (like Milton’s Christ and Dryden’s Allmanzor); undazzled by worldly splendours (like Dryden’s Leonidas); indifferent (like Addison’s Cato) to the success or failure of his own actions. Far from desiring fame, he rather prefers obloquy. Coriolanus (II, ii. 53) would prefer the rabble to forget him: Milton’s Christ regards the vulgar as judges ‘of whom to be disprais’d were no small praise’ (P.R. III. 56). He is indifferent to death. He lacks no divine attribute (once more, like Coriolanus) save eternity; and that is one which really does not matter. His mind (like Satan’s) is its own place. He is as free as Nature first made man. He is more an antique Roman than a Dane.

All these attitudes can be paralleled from ancient texts, Stoic or Cynical (Seneca’s Epistles are at least as important to the student of the sixteenth century as his tragedies). They yield an image which influenced the English poetic mind very deeply. This unmoved, unconquerable, ‘mortal god’ (as Henry More calls him), if modified in one direction gives us Milton’s Christ: if in another, his Satan. Let him talk enough, and he is a Chapman hero; coarsen him in the Cynic direction, and he will supply traits both to Wycherley’s Manly and to Pope’s self-portrait in the Epilogue to the Satires. Inflate him without discretion, and he is Almanzor. He was perhaps hardly displaced until, in the eighteenth century, tears became fashionable again and the Man of Feeling succeeded him.

It may or may not have been noticed that the word Renaissance has not yet occurred in this book. I hope that this abstinence, which is forced on me by necessity, will not have been attributed to affectation. The word has sometimes been used merely to mean the ‘revival of learning’, the recovery of Greek, and the ‘classicizing’ of Latin. If it still bore that clear and useful sense, I should of course have employed it. Unfortunately it has, for many years, been widening its meaning, till now ‘the Renaissance’ can hardly be defined except as ‘an imaginary entity responsible for everything the speaker likes in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries’. If it were merely a chronological label, like ‘pre-Dynastic’ or ‘Caroline’ it might be harmless. But words, said Bacon, shoot back upon the understandings of the mightiest. Where we have a noun we tend to imagine a thing. The word Renaissance helps to impose a factitious unity on all the untidy and heterogeneous events which were going on in those centuries as in any others. Thus the ‘imaginary entity’ creeps in. Renaissance becomes the name for some character or quality supposed to be immanent in all the events, and collects very serious emotional overtones in the process. Then, as every attempt to define this mysterious character or quality turns out to cover all sorts of things that were there before the chosen period, a curious procedure is adopted. Instead of admitting that our definition has broken down, we adopt the desperate expedient of saying that ‘the Renaissance’ must have begun earlier than we had thought. Thus Chaucer, Dante, and presently St. Francis of Assisi, became ‘Renaissance’ men. A word of such wide and fluctuating meaning is of no value. Meanwhile, it has been ruined for its proper purpose. No one can now use the word Renaissance to mean the recovery of Greek and the classicizing of Latin with any assurance that his hearers will understand him. Bad money drives out good.

It should also be remembered that the word Renaissance is in a curiously different position from the general run of historical terms. Most of these, when not merely chronological, designate periods in the past by characteristics which we have come, in the course of our historical studies, to think distinctive or at least convenient. The ancients were not ancient, nor the men of the Middle Ages middle, from their own point of view. Gothic architecture was not ‘Gothic’ at the time, it was merely architecture. No one thought of himself as a Bronze Age man. But the humanists were very conscious of living in a renascentia. They claimed vociferously to be restoring all good learning, liberating the world from barbarism, and breaking with the past. Our legend of the Renaissance is a Renaissance legend. We have not arrived at this conception as a result of our studies but simply inherited it from the very people we were studying. If the earlier modern scholars had not themselves been bred in the humanist tradition it may be doubted whether they would ever have chosen so lofty a name as ‘rebirth’ to describe the humanist achievement. The event, objectively seen, would perhaps have appeared not quite so important nor so wholly beneficent. But, once established, this glowing term inevitably linked itself in the minds of English scholars with those two other processes which they highly approved in the sixteenth century—the birth of Protestantism and the birth of the physical sciences. Hence arose, as it seems to me, that strong prejudice, already more than once alluded to, which predisposed our fathers to see in this period almost nothing but liberation and enlightenment: hence, too, by reaction, and among scholars of anti-Protestant sympathies, the opposite tendency to see in it little else than the destruction of a humane and Christian culture by kill-joys and capitalists. Both views perhaps exaggerate the breach with the past; both are too simple and diagrammatic. Both thrust into the background things which were, at the time, important.

Thus far we have been concerned with ideas, and ideas have an effect on literature which can be traced, often with great probability, and sometimes with certainty. When we turn to social, political, and economic conditions, we are in a very different situation. No one doubts that these things affect a man’s writing at least as much as his ideas can do: but the influence is very much harder to identify. Everything looks as if authors of talent had considerable freedom in working up the material which their experience offers to them. Attempts to connect man’s circumstances too closely with their literary productions are usually, I believe, unsuccessful.

In this age the class of middling landowners and greater tenants were becoming richer and the peasantry poorer, but both processes had been going on before the Reformation, or the century, began. The same is true of enclosures, sheep-farming, eviction, depopulation, and distress. These things had been increasing long before More wrote his famous protest. Genuinely feudal relations between peasant and landlord had long since decayed.

The word upstart was noted as a neologism in 1555 by the anonymous author of the Institution of a Gentleman. But the thing itself was not new, save in so far as the novi homines of any period are likely to differ from those of another. Langland had complained of ‘sopers’ who rise to be knights. It is interesting, however, that our anonymous author distinguishes ‘honest’ from dishonest means of rising. Those who have risen by being employed in the public service he approves; but there is another sort who have not fairly earned their promotion, and these, he says, ‘have chefely florished since the puttyng down of Abais’. He means, of course, those who have successfully speculated in land stolen from the Church.

In the spiritual sphere this spoliation was, no doubt, a catastrophic event. While it was being carried out, government amused the public with talk of many fine ecclesiastical and educational projects on which the money was to be employed. But when the time came government threw most of the land on the market and the projects were heard of no more. Skilful buyers profited by the crisis and several new landed families came into existence. But new landed families had often done so before. On that side the Dissolution produced only a temporary acceleration of a normal process.

The individual monks were on the whole fairly liberally provided for. What their disappearance, as landlords and dispensers of hospitality, counted for in the life of the country is a question very hard to answer. Testimonies conflict and come from the most unexpected sources. The Protestant Brinkelow in his Complaint (1545?), while approving the Dissolution on theological grounds, says, ‘it had been more profytable, no dowte, for the comon welth’ to have left the monks alone: they were better landlords than their successors. On the other hand, More in the Utopia expressly chooses an Abbot as his specimen of those bad, sheep-farming landlords who ‘enclose all into pastures, throw down houses, pluck up villages’. (Dr. Rowse in The England of Elizabeth shows us an abbey at just such work in Leicestershire.) Perhaps it is safe to conclude that the monks were neither so bad as they seemed while we had them nor so good as they seemed in retrospect. Our quotations may at least serve as one more warning against too symmetrical alignments. The ‘new’ economics did not necessarily go with the new religion. The keenest diagnosis I have read of that impersonality which is held to have characterized the new order comes in the Puritan Crowley’s Way to Welth (1550), where he speaks of ‘men that haue no name because they are doers in al things’.

It is not always remembered that the bishoprics probably, and the colleges certainly, came near to sharing the fate of the monasteries. For the colleges, as Harrison says (Description, II. iii), ‘greedie gripers did gape wide’. Brinkelow ought to have learned his lesson from the fate of the monastic lands: in his simplicity he had really believed that government would spend its booty on ‘social services’, and had been bitterly disappointed by the event. But experience beats in vain upon a congenital progressive. He urged the spoliation of the colleges in the firm hope that this time—that mystical ‘this time’ which is always going to be so different—government, having sucked in, would give out.

It is tempting to connect the increasing prosperity of the smaller gentry and the greater yeomen with a change which comes over our poetry in the second half of the century. To a medieval poet (unless outlaws are his subject) the typically pleasant place out of doors is a garden, usually a garden well walled or hedged. In Elizabethan poetry the country appears. Philisides lies by a river side in flowery field, sweet woods take on ‘the delight of solitarinesse’, Zephyrus breathes on fairest mountain tops, the shepherd pipes ‘besides a crystal fountain in shadow of a green oak tree’, Lodge invokes ‘fair enriched meads’, ‘sacred woods’, ‘sweet fields’, and ‘rising mountains’. Fairies (no longer august or dreadful) begin to people the woods; a nymph rises from every water. In Shakespeare ‘Alexander Iden, a Kentish gentleman’ paces the ‘quiet walks’ of his ‘small inheritance’, delighting to ‘send the poor well pleased from his gate’, and wonders how anyone could prefer to live ‘turmoiled in the court’. In all this there may be much from Theocritus, Virgil, Sannazaro, Tasso, or Guarini. It is never safe to attribute a man’s imaginations too directly to his experience. Yet it would not be unnatural to suppose that the pleasures of country life now began to be celebrated because they now began to be enjoyed. It is doubtful if the medieval noble or the medieval peasant felt them. The Elizabethan gentleman had every reason to do so. He was a richer man than his father, and counted for more in the scheme of things. He was a Justice of the Peace. His house and household stuff were better: his garden (if we may trust Harrison) incomparably better. Beyond the garden might lie the beautiful, if deleterious, sheep pastures and the even more beautiful, if more deleterious, park. Aesthetically I suspect, the new landscape was a great improvement on the old. Space, neatness, privacy had come in. In such conditions, if not as their result, there arose that rural poetry which, descending from the Elizabethans into Milton, Vaughan, and Herrick and then, through poets like Thomson and Cowper, into the Romantics, was never quenched till the nineteen-thirties. A great deal of English poetry has been read by small squires.

This class—which is not very like even the smallest nobility of other countries—was coming into existence in the late sixteenth century: not without a cost. It is indeed true that the world has often paid, and will pay again, a heavier price for the creation of leisured classes far smaller, coarser, and less humane. During the long period of their happiness, our debt in every department of life to our petty gentry is enormous. But all was not well. Alexander Iden (whom we must take for an Elizabethan, though he is feigned to be living under Henry VI) charms us; but we have an uneasy suspicion that his ‘small inheritance’ includes a ruined abbey and that the very conditions he lives in may have helped to create the poor whom he relieves. The prosperity of his class depended, after all, on rising rents. The larger tenants could pay them and still be richer than their fathers. The small men sank and swelled the ranks of those who were ‘daily consumed with the gallows’, or disappeared, says Harrison (Description, II. X) to ‘Fraunce, Germanie, Barbarie, India, Muscouia and verie Calecut’. Hence the increase of what we call tramps: whose punishment was slavery; whom it was criminal to feed or lodge. The reality behind Autolycus is not a merry one: yet he and his fellow wretches frequent our literature chiefly in a comic capacity. Whole books of roguery are devoted to them. The comedy comes in because the books expose their tricks and knaveries. It is not such genial comedy as some accounts would suggest. These are books written to soothe the consciences of the wealthy: ‘easy speeches that comfort cruel men’. Some of the anecdotes can still win their laugh, but I find in none of them the sympathy of Burns’s Jolly Beggars.

The sixteenth century saw the completion, or almost the completion, of a process whereby education had long been spreading, not down, but up, the social scale. In the high Middle Ages the presumption had been that a layman, and especially a noble layman, would not be a clerk. By Tudor times the idea that an aristocrat should be illiterate has disappeared in England, though Ascham and Castiglione both suggest that it lingered in France. Education, by Elizabeth’s time, had come to include the highest classes but was not yet peculiar to them. The exclusion of the poor was, however, beginning. Harrison, Humphrey Gilbert (in his Queen Elizabethes Achademy) and others complain that in some grammar schools ‘poore mens children are commonlie shut out’, that in some colleges it is hard for a poor man to get a fellowship, that the ‘youth of nobility and gentlemen’ by taking up scholarships and fellowships ‘do disapointe the poore of their liuinges and auauncementes’. In this way also new learning (for one class) meant new ignorance (for another). But the process was far from complete. Boys of many different social classes might still meet at school: a learned sixteenth-century divine was often a yeoman’s son. If some schools were destroyed during this period, some were also founded.

‘Classical’ Latin, taught with a view to conversation as well as to reading, was the staple of education, though many masters used it as a means of teaching ‘copiousness’ and ‘eloquence’ in English as well. There were different degrees of Ciceronianism and a bellum Ciceronianum as fierce as the war of the frogs and mice. Greek long continued to be, as Johnson said, ‘like lace’. Vives reserves it for the better pupils and thought it fortunate that Attic contained most of what really deserved study, the other dialects being mainly used by lyric poets ‘whom it importeth lesse to know’ (De Tradendis, III). Burton cites his Greek authors in Latin translations. Shakespeare’s blundering statement that Aristotle forbade young men to study moral philosophy is endorsed by Bacon and derived from Erasmus. Few sixteenth-century Englishmen—I suspect, none—would have had a chance of a classical scholarship in a nineteenth-century university.

While Tudor education differed by its humanism from that of the Middle Ages, it differed far more widely from ours. Law and rhetoric were the chief sources of the difference. Young men of fortune commonly passed from the university to one of the inns of court. In respect of the students’ ages, the life lived, the temptations, and the intellectual stimulus, the inn of court was to them very much what the university is to their successors: the university was more like one’s public school. Rhetoric is the greatest barrier between us and our ancestors. If the Middle Ages had erred in their devotion to that art, the renascentia, far from curing, confirmed the error. In rhetoric, more than in anything else, the continuity of the old European tradition was embodied. Older than the Church, older than Roman Law, older than all Latin literature, it descends from the age of the Greek Sophists. Like the Church and the law it survives the fall of the empire, rides the renascentia and the Reformation like waves, and penetrates far into the eighteenth century; through all these ages not the tyrant, but the darling of humanity, soavissima, as Dante says, ‘the sweetest of all the other sciences’. Nearly all our older poetry was written and read by men to whom the distinction between poetry and rhetoric, in its modern form, would have been meaningless. The ‘beauties’ which they chiefly regarded in every composition were those which we either dislike or simply do not notice. This change of taste makes an invisible wall between us and them. Probably all our literary histories, certainly that on which I am engaged, are vitiated by our lack of sympathy on this point. If ever the passion for formal rhetoric returns, the whole story will have to be rewritten and many judgements may be reversed. In the meantime we must reconcile ourselves to the fact that of the praise and censure which we allot to medieval and Elizabethan poets only the smallest part would have seemed relevant to those poets themselves.

We must picture them growing up from boyhood in a world of ‘prettie epanorthosis’, paronomasia, isocolon, and similiter cadentia. Nor were these, like many subjects in a modern school, things dear to the masters but mocked or languidly regarded by the parents. Your father, your grown-up brother, your admired elder schoolfellow all loved rhetoric. Therefore you loved it too. You adored sweet Tully and were as concerned about asyndeton and chiasmus as a modern schoolboy is about county cricketers or types of airplane. But against what seems to us this fantastic artificiality in their education we must set the fact that every boy, out of school, without noticing it, then acquired a range of knowledge such as no boy has today; farriery, forestry, archery, hawking, sowing, ditching, thatching, brewing, baking, weaving, and practical astronomy. This concrete knowledge, mixed with their law, rhetoric, theology, and mythology, bred an outlook very different from our own. High abstractions and rarified artifices jostled the earthiest particulars. They would have found it very hard to understand the modern educated man who, though ‘interested in astronomy’, knows neither who the Pleiades were nor where to look for them in the sky. They talked more readily than we about large universals such as death, change, fortune, friendship, or salvation; but also about pigs, loaves, boots, and boats. The mind darted more easily to and fro between that mental heaven and earth: the cloud of middle generalizations, hanging between the two, was then much smaller. Hence, as it seems to us, both the naivety and the energy of their writing. Much of their literary strength (when at the end of the century they became strong) is bound up with this. They talk something like angels and something like sailors and stable-boys; never like civil servants or writers of leading articles.

During this century the professional author in the modern sense, the man who writes for the booksellers, was coming into existence. When printing was invented, government of course wished to control what was printed. In 1557 the Stationers’ Company, whose history can be traced back to 1403, was incorporated by Royal Charter and became the principal organ by which this control was exercised. This concerns literature because copy, duly entered in the company’s register, became the property of the bookseller who entered it. As a result booksellers were now prepared to buy copy from authors. By the end of the century, according to Nashe, they were glad to pay Greene ‘deare’ for the ‘very dregs of his wit’; early in the seventeenth century, forty shillings is mentioned as a poor price for a pamphlet. Authors who wished to be regarded as gentlemen, however, usually disdained, or concealed, such payment. Many looked for reward to the patron rather than to the open market: hence the innumerable dedications to noble persons. These might be rewarded only by ‘hearty thanks with commendations’; by a present; or by employment—a tutorship in the patron’s household, as fell to Daniel, or a permanent post in the Civil Service such as Spenser got. It is not easy to determine how these conditions affected the quality of literature. I have found no evidence that the taste of the Court was particularly good. I am inclined to think that the practice of writing to sell in the open market did more good than harm. The most frankly commercial type of literature, the drama of Marlowe, Shakespeare, and the rest, includes much of the greater work. A commercial success must have some sort of merit, though in certain periods it need only be merit of the lowest kind: a succès d’estime may, now and then, have none at all. The coarse, indifferent public cannot be made to believe that you are entertaining unless you entertain them, but a côterie or a patron can possibly be induced to think you ‘important’ when you have effected nothing.

The picture which I have tried to draw in this introduction is no model of neatness; but we may be sure that, along with all its other faults, it is too neat, too diagrammatic, for the facts. A man who wants to get the feel of that age must not be deceived by the tranquil harmonies of the great Italian painters; the amazing hodge-podge or rag-bag which we find in Montaigne or Burton is far more characteristic. He must beware of schematizing. He must not impose either on the old things that were dying out (not all old things were) nor on the new things that were coming in (not all of them to stay) a spurious unity. He must constantly remind himself that a Protestant may be Thomistic, a humanist may be a Papist, a scientist may be a magician, a skeptic may be an astrologer. He must recognize, side by side with what certainly seems to be a quality of adventurousness and expansion, a growing restriction and loss of liberty: Calvinism and Constellation both threatening free will, sovereignty threatening political freedom, humanism imposing new prohibitions on vocabulary and spontaneous emotion. The tight, starched ruff in an Elizabethan portrait, combined with the heroic or villainous energy of the face that rises above it, is no bad symbol. Some think it the historian’s business to penetrate beyond this apparent confusion and heterogeneity, and to grasp in a single intuition the ‘spirit’ or ‘meaning’ of his period. With some hesitation, and with much respect for the great men who have thought otherwise, I submit that this is exactly what we must refrain from doing. I cannot convince myself that such ‘spirits’ or ‘meanings’ have much more reality than the pictures we see in the fire. Whether the actual content of the past or (less plausibly) of some artificially isolated period in the past has a significance is a question that need not here be raised. The point is that we can never know that content. The greater part of the life actually lived in any century, any week, or any day consists of minute particulars and uncommunicated, even incommunicable, experiences which escape all record. What survives, survives largely by chance. On such a basis it seems to me impossible to reach the sort of knowledge which is implied in the very idea of a ‘philosophy’ of history. There is also this to be said of all the ‘spirits’, ‘meanings’, or ‘qualities’ attributed to historical periods; they are always most visible in the periods we have studied least. The ‘canals’ on Mars vanished when we got stronger lenses.

But though ‘periods’ are a mischievous conception they are a methodological necessity. The mass of literature which I attempt to study in this book must be divided up somehow. I have accordingly divided it into what I call the Late Medieval, the Drab Age, and the ‘Golden’ Age. They overlap and cannot be precisely dated, and the divisions between them do not apply to prose nearly so well as to verse. The Late Medieval extends very roughly to the end of Edward VI’s reign. The most obvious mark of Late Medieval poetry in England is its metrical irregularity; other marks, common to England and Scotland, are allegory and the predominance of rhyme royal. There is some aureation. Prose is usually simple and unartificial. The Drab Age begins before the Late Medieval has ended, towards the end of Henry VIII’s reign, and lasts into the late seventies. Drab is not used as a dyslogistic term. It marks a period in which, for good or ill, poetry has little richness either of sound or images. The good is neat and temperate, the bad flat and dry. There is more bad than good. Tottel’s Miscellany, ‘Sternhold and Hopkins’, and The Mirror for Magistrates are typical Drab Age works. Prose is now more artificial in some writers, more cumbersome in others. The Golden Age is what we usually think of first when ‘the great Elizabethans’ are mentioned: it is largely responsible, in England, for the emotional overtones of the word Renaissance. The epithet golden is not eulogistic. By golden poetry I mean not simply good poetry, but poetry which is, so to speak, innocent or ingenuous. In a Golden Age the right thing to do is obvious: ‘good is as visible as green’. The great age of Greek sculpture was similarly ‘golden’. Men had at last attained the power of making a block of stone look really like a human body, and after that, for a few years, the artists’ task was obvious. He had only to find the most beautiful models, pose them in the most graceful attitudes, and get to work. Only later, when the ingenuous taste has been satisfied, will it become necessary to seek for novelty, to set oneself difficult tasks, to make beauty out of violence. It was the same in the Golden period of Elizabethan poetry. Men have at last learned how to write; for a few years nothing more is needed than to play out again and again the strong, simple music of the uncontorted line and to load one’s poem with all that is naturally delightful—with flowers and swans, with ladies’ hair, hands, lips, breasts, and eyes, with silver and gold, woods and waters, the stars, the moon and the sun. Prose does not become Golden so suddenly as verse; many of its Golden triumphs were in the following century. It is, of course, neither possible nor desirable that a Golden Age should last long. Honey cloys and men seek for drier and more piquant flavours. At the end of the century this is already beginning to happen. The whole process of poetry from its Golden to its more sophisticated condition could be exemplified from Shakespeare’s work alone. The growing difficulty, the decreasing obviousness, of his style is usually (and, of course, rightly) treated in connexion with his dramatic progress. But it also illustrates a movement which is almost dictated by the occurrence of a Golden Age.

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