By degrees an idea of National Unity began to be formed, lofty and distinct enough to demand an equivalent vehicle of poetical diction; and several experiments in metrical composition were made which proved capable of development. In one direction Spenser embodied his allegory of a Court combining, under the rule of a supreme Sovereign, the opposing principles of Scholasticism, Protestantism, and Chivalry. Since his fundamental ideas were based on Chivalry and the Reformed Religion, he instinctively turned for his vocabulary to the ancient sources of the language; but, for the purposes of Court refinement, he sought to blend these antiquities with fashions of diction imitated from the classical poets. The general effect of his style was romantically beautiful; but as Chivalry was in itself a decaying force, and as Pagan mythology could not be harmonised with the truth of the Christian faith, the artificial character of his workmanship is often too obvious. I have given an example of these incompatibilities in the description of the Angel in Book ii. Canto viii. of The Faery Queen.1 Three-quarters of a century elapsed before the conflicting principles, which struggled for mastery in the imagination of Spenser, were reconciled by the art of Milton; and in the result achieved by that supreme poet we note that the principle of the Renaissance has gained the upper hand: the form of Paradise Lost is imitated from the Æneid.

During the seventeenth century the conflict of opposing constitutional principles operated on the art of English poetry (as I have endeavoured to show in the third volume of this History) not less powerfully than the force of Absolutism operated in France. In England Religion exerted a predominating influence in the political struggle, and, separated as the nation was from the Spiritual Empire of the Papacy, the antagonism of interests was marked by much cross division. ThroughEuripides in his Jocasta. But it has been pointed out by Mr. Förster of Chicago University that Gascoigne's play is a mere translation of Lodovico Dolce's Jocasta. Dolce apparently influenced several English writers towards the end of the eleventh century, and particularly Lodge (Modern Philology, vol. ii. No. 1, June 1904). 1 See vol. ii. pp. 286-287.

out the first half of the century the main opposition lay between the King on the one side, as head alike of the National Church and of the Feudal System, aided by the Episcopacy and the larger part of the nobility and gentry with their dependants, and, on the other, the Parliament, representing the middle classes of the country, whose religious opinions, whether Presbyterian or Independent, were for the most part anti-Episcopal. In this Civil War the victory fell to the Parliament, with the result that, for a time, the old Monarchical and Ecclesiastical constitution of the country was swept away, the House of Lords abolished, and the Episcopal form of Church government replaced by the Presbyterian. Then came the Restoration of the Stuarts, with its strong monarchical reaction, and the purely constitutional conflict changed into one of a more fundamental character, in which the Monarchs sought to make use of their almost absolute powers to bring back the kingdom under Papal supremacy. The attempt produced a second reaction of which the final product was the Revolution of 1688.

When the time came to reckon up the gains and losses on both sides of the quarrel, it was manifest that, without any overthrow of the external fabric of society, the Catholic and Feudal order of things had been transformed into a more completely civic system of government. No attempt was made to define precisely the extent of the King's prerogative, but the danger of Absolutism was effectually guarded against by the Declaration of Right. Feudalism, in its ancient form, already undermined by Cromwell's destruction of the Castles, had been finally extinguished by the Act for abolishing military tenures. At the same time, while this Act retrenched the power of the Crown, the great landed proprietors all over the country retained their traditional power of guiding and influencing the course of affairs in their own neighbourhood. The Declaration of Right, on one side, provided that the nation should no longer be exposed to peril through the attempts of the Monarch to impose his own religious belief on his subjects; on the other side, the Test Acts

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served as a bulwark against the reappearance of the ecclesiastical despotism under which the country had groaned during the supremacy of the Presbyterians. Midway between the two extremes of religious opinion, the doctrines of the Church of England afforded an ample region of spiritual thought, in which the individual might exercise freedom of judgment, and yet keep in touch with the main stream of tradition and authority.

If these political results be considered, much light will be thrown on the resemblances and differences between English and French poetry in the long evolution of the art as practised in each country. Both show a struggle between the same imaginative elements, Scholastic Thought, Chivalrous Sentiment, Civic Tradition, Monarchical Centralisation both may boast of a capacity for reducing these elemental principles to the just balance of expression. In neither country was there ever, as in Italy, a tendency to reproduce, without assimilation, the external forms of classical art poetry in France is always French, in England always English. The great difference is that, under the influence of the Renaissance, the centre of the Classical balance tended in France constantly to move towards Authority, in England towards Liberty.

This difference makes itself apparent as the eighteenth century advances. If we take the year 1688 as the starting-point of comparison, we find that about that period all the rules of French poetry have been very precisely prescribed in Boileau's Art Poétique, while Dryden is only just laying aside his youthful admiration for Cowley from his growing perception of the "correct beauty of Virgil.1 Boileau has founded his style, by right reasoning, on the example of Horace; beyond him, however, there seems to be no road, so that the new generation of French critics fails to appreciate, as he has done, the true meaning of Classical Authority; and Perrault (1628-1703), deprecating reverence for the ancients, maintains that the standard of good writing is to be looked for exclusively in the style of the moderns during the reign of Louis XIV.

1 See vol. iii. pp. 531-532.

With such conditions of taste, the absolute sterility of French poetry in the eighteenth century is not a thing to be wondered at. On English poetry the effect of the Renaissance has up to a certain point been the same as in France. In order to attain the balance of correctness and propriety of expression, aimed at by Dryden in his later years, much of the variety and individuality supplied by the genius of the Middle Ages has been sacrificed: the lyrical impulse has for the time being ceased to agitate the mind of the nation: the ingenious extravagances of Donne, the spiritual conceits of George Herbert, the melodious caprices of Herrick, have been almost forgotten during the riots of the Restoration: Paradise Lost, to be endured, must be transfigured into The State of Innocence. Nevertheless, in England the element of Romance has only been subdued by the spirit of the Classical Renaissance: it has not been destroyed; and in the course of events, with the natural expansion of society, we shall see the medieval element in the latter half of the eighteenth century once more exerting an active influence on the progress of English Poetry. Meantime we have to trace the onward movement of the Classical Revival in modifying the conditions of art and taste brought about by the fall of the Feudal Monarchy.

CHAPTER II

THE WHIG VICTORY

WHIG PANEGYRICAL POETRY AFTER THE REVOLUTION OF 1688: THE EARL OF HALIFAX ; MATTHEW PRIOR; JOSEPH ADDISON; THOMAS TICKELL; JOHN HUGHES.

1

"WHIGGISM," said Johnson, "is the negation of all principle." This is one of those party epigrams which are more specious than true; and old Mr. Langton, who was offended by Johnson's humorous hope that his niece was a Jacobite, might have justly retorted on him that Jacobitism was the negation of all constitutional principle. Both the constitutional English parties contain within themselves certain tendencies which, in their extreme development, lead, on one side, to Absolutism, on the other, to Anarchy. Yet Whig and Tory statesmen were agreed on the necessity of combining to bring about the Revolution of 1688.

That Revolution was, nevertheless, substantially the victory of a Whig principle, the nature of which may be readily understood by comparing the essence of Locke's Treatises on Government with that of The Leviathan of Hobbes, which gave a basis of philosophy to the Court party after the Restoration. Both schools begin with the hypothesis of a State of Nature, from which men deliberately choose to depart, and to submit themselves to the order of civil society. But the new state, into which, according to Hobbes (whose ideas we have seen anticipated by Jean de Meung in the Roman de la Rose2), men volun1 Boswell's Life of Johnson (Croker's Edition), p. 148.

2 Vol. i. pp. 181-182.